The Silent Hour

“Then who got the call?” I said, thinking Harrison or Ruzity. “Who carried out the orders?”

“That one, I cannot answer. Only one person alive can. Sanabria himself—and good luck getting him to tell you.”

“Two people,” I said.

“Pardon?”

“Sanabria could answer it, and so could the person he used. That’s who we’re looking for.”

“I’m not going to be much more help with that,” Dunbar said. “You should talk to the detective who got the Cantrell case in Pennsylvania. Graham.”

I raised my eyebrows. “You know Graham?”

“Not well. I’ve had this same conversation with him, that’s all.” Then, seeing the rise of anger in my face, he said, “Surely you didn’t think you were the first people to make these connections?”

“Not anymore,” I said. Part of me was embarrassed for being naive enough to believe just that, but more of me was pissed off at Graham. I’d told him I’d help provided I was given the real score, understood the situation as well as he did. The lying prick had promised me that was the case.

“You’re sure Sanabria killed Joshua Cantrell, or had him killed,” Ken said to Dunbar.

“That’s right.”

“Well, what about Alexandra?” I said. “Do you really think he murdered his own sister, or do you think she’s still alive somewhere?”

“That,” John Dunbar said, “is the one question I’ve been wondering about for the past twelve years.”

19

__________

I never knew my mother, but I know plenty of her expressions. She died when I was three, hit by a drunk driver at noon on a Sunday. She’d just left church; he’d just left a tip for the waitress who delivered his fifth Bloody Mary. Ordinarily, we’d have all been in the car together, but my sister and I were sick, sharing some sort of virus, and my father stayed home to watch us. Mom decided to go by herself. Every now and then, generally when my mind’s immersed in something, I’ll have a sudden sense that I can remember her voice, that I can hear the way she spoke. Then my conscious brain shifts over to try to trap it and it’s gone. Just that quick. I’ll hear her cadence perfectly in some secret lobe of memory, try to focus on it, and scare it off. She’s in there somewhere, though. I know that she is.

While the voice eludes me, the expressions do not. My father recalled them often when I was growing up, and in a way that’s how she came to exist for me: Your mother always said . . .

One favorite phrase, evidently, was head-spinner. As in, How was your day? Well, it was a head-spinner. It was how she referred to those days when things came too fast, too unexpected, too complicated.

My day? One hell of a head-spinner.

We’d gone out that morning thinking that Mark Ruzity might be able to give us some insight into the Cantrells. Instead, he’d given us John Dunbar, which at the time had felt like a significant breakthrough. Felt even more like that when Dunbar poured himself a Scotch and settled in to explain how he’d gotten Joshua Cantrell killed. Then he’d delivered the capstone: Talk to Detective Graham; of course he already knows this.

A head-spinner.

Had we gained anything? As I sat on the roof watching the sun fade and streetlamps come on and waiting for Amy to arrive, I tried to determine that, and couldn’t. A hell of a lot of information had come our way, and that felt like progress. The realization that Graham already had the information, though . . . yeah, that pretty well killed the sense of progress.

A head-spinner. You bet your ass.

I’d dropped Ken at his hotel and left him on his own for the night. Inhospitable, maybe, but I felt a strong need to be away from him and Graham and Dunbar and anyone else who’d ever heard of the Cantrells. We’d meet again in the morning, and then we’d see where it stood. Graham was the one who could tell us that. He hadn’t answered when I called him, so I left a message informing him we’d made a major break and he needed to drive up the next morning to discuss it. Since then, he’d called five times and I hadn’t answered or called him back. He probably wanted to avoid the trip, and I wanted him to make it. The son of a bitch could explain his lies in person.

Couldn’t be mad at him for lying, though. That’s what Joe would tell me. I was a civilian, Graham was a cop. Why would he tell me everything he knew? When had I ever done that for a civilian? It was a game, all of it was, and Graham was playing one version with me while I played another with Harrison. I wondered who in the hell kept track of the big board, though.

It was full night when Amy finally arrived, and we sat together as the temperature dropped. No radio tonight, no baseball game. Just talk, lots of it, the two of us tossing questions but no answers.

“You know who I feel sorry for?” Amy said after one long lull. She was curled up tight in her chair, sleeves pulled down over her hands, clearly freezing but not willing to speak of going inside until I did.

“Lincoln Perry, for getting sucked into this nightmare?”

“No, you’re doing a good enough job of feeling sorry for Lincoln Perry tonight.”

“This is why I gave up being single. Support like that.”

“Stop. You know it’s true. I’ve never seen anyone get as melodramatic over anything as you do when you’ve been lied to.”

I smiled. “It’s my subtle way of ensuring you always tell me the truth.”

“Subtle, sure. Now, can I say who I feel sorry for? Alexandra. I mean, step back and think about it. This woman comes from a family that should have its own HBO series, she somehow emerges sane and motivated to help people, and when she tries to do that her husband turns against her, tries to betray her brother, and gets himself killed. All of this just to hurt her.”

“Her brother talked about her as if she’s alive,” I said. “If that’s true, how does he know it? And if that’s true, how much does she understand?”

Amy tried to nod but lost it in midshiver as the wind picked up. I got to my feet, pulled her up and toward me, and wrapped my arms around her and rubbed her back. She was shaking against me.

“You look like you’re ready to go in,” I said.

“Only if you are.”

I laughed. “Okay, that’s support.”

I turned, ready to move for the stairs, but she stopped me.

“Imagine what that would feel like,” she said, her voice muffled against my chest.

“Imagine what?”

“If she is alive, and she does understand. If she knows that her brother killed her husband, and if she knows why it happened.”

I didn’t answer, just took her hand and guided her toward the steps. The wind was blowing harder now, and I was feeling the cold, too.

Graham rose to the bait. When I finally played his messages the next morning, he cursed me for not returning his calls, then said he’d be up, though not until afternoon. He sounded curious, and I was glad. We didn’t have a damn thing that was new to him, but if he wanted to jerk me around, I was happy to return the favor.

Ken came into the office ten minutes after I did, with a cup of coffee in each hand and a stack of papers held between his chin and his chest. He swung the door shut with his foot, set one cup down in front of me, and then lifted his chin, spilling the papers across my desk.

“Thanks.”

“No problem.”

I took a drink of the coffee and waved at the papers he’d dumped on the desk. “So what’s all this?”