“The pauses. First when you asked her if she was Homer Gibbon’s aunt. She lost about half a second answering.”
“So?”
“So … why the hesitation? She knew that you were going to ask that, and yet she still stumbles over her answer. And then again when you asked when she saw him last.”
“She shrugged.”
“Okay, she shrugged. She should have had that answer on the tip of her tongue.”
“Damn, kid, she’s dying of cancer and her only nephew was just executed yesterday. How smooth can a person be after all that?”
Goat spread his hands. “I’m just saying. In film, pauses mean something, they convey meaning. Same thing happens in conversation. Maybe not always as calculated as theater, but people uses pauses to convey a message or allow a person to stall in order to write a script for a specific message.”
“And people call me cynical.”
“You asked.”
“No, keep going. What else?”
Goat played another fragment.
“See? She not only threw ‘alleged’ at you, she got kinda pissed that you didn’t use it.”
“She’s related to him.”
“No doubt,” said Goat. “But I don’t think that’s why she got pissed.”
“Why, then? You think she thinks he’s innocent?”
“No … I don’t think she cares. That’s a family thing. Especially families on the edge like this. Kind of the ‘my country right or wrong’ mentality distilled down to a single family. People can fuck up and do all manner of harm, but at the end of the day if their name and your name are spelled the same, then there’s going to be some kind of … I don’t know … acceptance? Forgiveness? Maybe even allowance?”
“So … what’s your bottom line here?” asked Trout. “Why’s she being so dodgy?”
“How should I know? I read performance; you’re the writer … You build the story.”
Trout grunted. He rounded a turn too fast and his BlackBerry slid out of the little tray below the dash. Goat picked it up.
“You got mail,” said Goat, showing Trout the flashing red light. “You got your ringer turned off?”
“Usually. I have two ex-wives and they have aggressive lawyers. I’ll subject myself to that shit later.”
Goat grunted. “Looks like you have a zillion missed calls and one e-mail.”
“That’ll be from Marcia. Probably the Volker stuff. We’ll be at Volker’s place in ten minutes, so read it for me.”
Goat punched the keys and peered at the lines of text. “This is an hour old. Mmm … looks like a bunch of biographical stuff first. She says that Dr. Herman Volker was born in someplace called Panevezys. No idea how to pronounce it. In Lithuania.”
“That fits. I thought he sounded more Slavic than German.”
“Father was German, but he was raised in Lithuania. Always into medicine. Worked as a lab tech as a teenager, went to medical school. Did residencies in psychiatry and epidemiology. Went into the Soviet army as a doctor. Then he’s off the radar for a while, but get this … he surfaces again as a field surgeon with the Russian forces in Afghanistan, and while he’s there, he defects to U.S. personnel.”
“What kind of personnel?”
“Doesn’t say.”
“But it’s inside Afghanistan?”
“Seems so.”
“CIA,” said Trout. “Has to be.”
“Yeah. That works. Eleven months later he’s working at a good hospital in Virginia. The notes mention that he has a wife and daughter, but Marcia says that she can’t find any records of them after he went into the army. Divorced, maybe?” Goat scrolled through the notes. “A lot of this is dry background stuff. He moved several times. Worked at several hospitals in Virginia, Maryland, and then Pennsylvania, and ten years ago he took a job as a doctor in the corrections system. Federal first, and then a few transfers. Another interesting thing … he got the job as senior medical officer at Rockview ahead of six other doctors with more seniority in the prison system.”
Trout nodded. “So he still has some federal juice. Someone’s making sure he gets what he wants. Wonder why.”
“That’s about it,” said Goat. “The rest is straight employment info, a few tax records Marcia could scrounge, and references to employee evaluations, all of which gave him top marks for everything.”
“More federal juice. If you’re sucking on the CIA’s tit, they watch out for you. I’d hate to be a traffic cop who tried to give him a speeding ticket.”
“Or a professional rival,” suggested Goat as he handed the phone back. Trout stuffed it in his pocket without turning the ringer back on or checking his voice mail. The Volker information was so compelling that he plain forgot.
They chewed on the information as they drove.
“If he has federal juice, then why is afraid of anything?” asked Goat. “I mean, someone fucks with him and he’s one phone call away from calling down the wrath of God.”
“Yep,” agreed Trout “which means that if he was being harassed about having performed the lethal injection, then he could call in ten kinds of support.”
“And here we are,” mused Goat, “driving right to his door to try and bully him into giving us a story. How smart are we?”
Trout didn’t answer. Overhead the storm was darkening the sky to the color of a fresh bruise.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Officer Ken Gunther stood on the porch and sipped coffee from a mug that had HARTNUP’S TRANSITION ESTATE in fancy script on one side and a quote on the other: “Death is Momentary — Life is Eternal.”
“Bullshit,” he said. He sipped the coffee. April, Doc’s sister, was not only smoking hot by Gunther’s finicky standards, she could brew a pot of damn good coffee. No lattes or macchiatos. No hazelnut or Irish-fucking-cream. Good old-fashioned American coffee from Colombia. Black and bitter. Hot, too, which was a blessing because he was freezing his nuts off. He still wore a lightweight summer uniform under a nylon Windbreaker, which was dumb because all he had to do was turn on the TV to see what the temperature was. Even the plastic cover for his hat was in the trunk of his cruiser, and the storm clouds were so thick and black they looked ready to explode.
He sipped and stared out at the trees.
The Hartnup place was called a cottage but it was really a big split-level. Roomy, tidy, and remote. He could see himself living in a place like this. Maybe even with April. She was divorcing that ass pirate Virgil, who, despite having fathered two kids, had finally realized that he was gay. Wow, Gunther thought. What a news flash. Everyone had known that since the fifth grade. He wondered how April didn’t know it. She seemed pretty smart, but then again a lot of people are dumb when it comes to love.
Gunther drank some more coffee and set the cup on the porch rail. He needed to pee but he did not want to go inside. If he did, then he’d get stuck in there while Dana Howard would escape out here. On the upside, he’d get to spend some time with April; but on the downside he’d have to spend time with the kids. Gunther was not a fan of children.
He looked at the front door, which was closed, then cautiously peered in through the window. Dana was standing with her back to him in the doorway between the living room and the playroom. April was changing a diaper.
