like he was following the wire with his eyes, tracing its path as if my shirt were transparent.
“He’s a favorite,” Harrison echoed. “Well, who are the others?”
“Mr. Harrison, do you want me to work for you or not?” Ken said, and I was glad he hadn’t answered the question, that he seemed to want to bring this to an end, probably sensing the same dangers I had.
“There are some people who would tell you that I was a suspect,” Harrison said.
Ken didn’t answer.
“You said you’re from Pennsylvania?”
“That’s right.”
“Have you talked with Detective Graham?”
Again Ken was quiet.
“Of course you have,” Harrison said. “That would be a formality. A requirement. Who is his
“I’m not working with him, or for him.”
“Are you not?” Harrison said, and then he turned and looked at me, as if the question applied to us both.
“You told me you didn’t kill Cantrell,” I said.
“That’s right.”
“So why are you worried, Harrison?”
His eyes seemed darker now than when we’d walked in. He said, “The evidence can always be twisted, can’t it, Lincoln?”
“There something specific on your mind when you say that?”
Harrison looked at me for a long time, and then he let go of the chair and stepped back and turned to Ken. “I’ll think about this.”
“Well, I’d ask you to think fast,” Ken said. “I’ll leave a card, and if you could decide by—”
“When I decide, I’ll let Lincoln know. You keep your card.”
I shook my head. “I’m out, Harrison. If you—”
“No. When I decide, I’ll let you know. You brought him to me, Lincoln.”
His eyes were hard on me, still searching, distrustful. I felt a tingle at my collarbone, where the microphone rested, and I wanted to cover it with my hands.
Ken got to his feet and offered a hand to Harrison, who shook it after a moment’s pause. I stood then, and we moved for the door together. Ken opened it, and I followed him outside, then turned back to face Harrison before closing the door.
“Hey, Harrison. One last question.”
He waited.
“Everybody else came and went from the Cantrells’ in six months. Everybody else worked alone. Why were you there for a year, and why’d you stick when they hired Bertoli?”
He stood in the doorway, framed by the lighted room behind him.
“Because she asked me to,” he said eventually.
“Alexandra?”
A nod.
“Why?”
He stepped out of the apartment, reaching for the door, his hand passing close to my face as he grasped the edge.
“Because she trusted me, and she was afraid.”
“Of who? Bertoli? Her brother?”
He pulled away, and my hand fell from the knob as the door swung shut. A second later the lock turned.
15
__________
It was quiet in the truck as I drove away from Parker Harrison’s apartment. A disconcerted feeling hung in the air between us, and not just from Harrison’s final statement but from the way Ken had handled the interview. He was older than me by several years, but it didn’t feel that way, because he was so damn green. Anytime I’d done an interview with Joe, I could afford to worry about my own end of it, assured that Joe, with thirty years of experience and one hell of an intellect, wasn’t going to say anything that jeopardized us. Ken was a bright guy, certainly, but he didn’t have those thirty years of experience. Didn’t have one, even, not in the way that counted. Working divorce cases and insurance fraud and accident reconstructions didn’t prepare you for a homicide investigation, didn’t prepare you for a back-and-forth with someone like Parker Harrison.
It wasn’t just Ken’s end of that exchange that left me ill at ease, though. Harrison had taken a different tone than in either of my previous meetings with him, somehow both more guarded and aggressive. He’d seemed . . . cunning. Like he knew not to trust us from the moment we walked through his door, but he also didn’t want to throw us out. Wanted us there, instead, so he could find some things out for himself. I remembered the way he’d looked at me when he asked if we were working for Graham, and once again, even in the truck, miles from him, I felt exposed.
“You think anything good was accomplished back there?” Ken said at length.
“We did what Graham asked of us.”
“I don’t think this was what he had in mind.” Ken’s voice was low, his face turned away from me, to the window. “I screwed it up, didn’t I?”
“Tough to say.”
He shook his head. “No, it’s not. You were sitting there, you know how it went. He didn’t believe a word I was saying.”
“Didn’t seem to believe much of it,” I conceded, “but maybe we were reading too much into it, too. That’s how it goes on undercover stuff, you’re more sensitive than the target ninety percent of the time.”
“Maybe,” Ken said, “but that’s sure not how I wanted it to play. Doubt it’s how Graham wanted it to play, either.”
“No.”
He was quiet for a while again, then said, “Maybe we could run a few days of surveillance on him. Think that would help?”
“We’re not going to do that without Graham signing off on it,” I said, “and my guess is he’s not going to.”
“I might suggest it anyhow.”
He was playing back to his strengths, to what he knew—surveillance. The conversation with Harrison had rattled him more than it had me, even, and that was a bad sign. If he wanted to keep moving on an investigation of this magnitude, he was going to need to come up with some confidence fast.
“Lincoln?” Ken said, and I realized I’d tuned him out, fallen away into my own thoughts.
“Sorry,” I said. “What was that last bit?”
“Asking if we have to sit around and wait for Harrison to contact us again, or if we can move forward on this in some way. I was thinking if we pursued the Bertoli angle, it’d match up with what we told Harrison.”
“Maybe.”
“Well, what do you want to do? That’s what I’m asking. What’s next?”
“I’ve got to talk to Graham.”
He fell silent for the first time as I turned off the interstate at the exit for his hotel. We were waiting at a red light just across from the parking lot when he turned to me and said, “Thank you, Lincoln.”
“For?”
“For getting me up here, man. For agreeing to take it on. I needed this. I mean, I
He spoke with intensity, but his eyes were sad. I thought his mind was probably on his daughter again, his
