“Okay, I told her I wasn’t interested.”
“Fine. You told her you weren’t interested. And…?”
“And she tried to claw my eyes out.”
“Well, that certainly fits with the girl’s history.”
“I did find out something interesting from her, though. While she was still in full cuddle mode, I mean.” Mitch filled the lieutenant in on what Mandy had said about Bud being elsewhere, and wet, the night Tuck Weems was murdered-taking care to point out how this meant Mandy had no one to vouch for her own whereabouts either.
“Interesting,” she concluded. “Sounds like you’ve had yourself quite a day.”
Mitch allowed as how he had. And then she was yawning again. And the cats were yowling. So he said, “I’ll let you get back to sleep. Sorry I woke you. What does it say anyway?”
“What does what say?”
“The T-shirt you’re wearing.”
“Man, how do you know I’m wearing a T-shirt?”
“I just do. Why, have you got a problem with it?”
“With what, the way you keep acting like you’re up inside my head?”
“I guess this means yes.”
“No… Just trying to understand you, that’s all.”
“Well, that’s it right there, Lieutenant. I’m trying to understand you, too.”
“Why?”
“Why not?”
“Man, that’s a riddle, not an answer!”
“I don’t know why, okay? Only that nothing in my life makes any sense right now. And it seems important to understand something. Or someone.”
She was silent a long moment. “It doesn’t say anything.”
“What doesn’t?”
“My T-shirt. It’s blank. No message. None. Good night, Mitch.” She hung up the phone before he could get out one more word.
He threw the dead bolt on his front door and climbed into bed. It wasn’t until he’d turned off his bedside lamp, punched his pillow two times and closed his eyes that he realized she’d finally stopped calling him Mr. Berger.
CHAPTER 12
DES LAY THERE STARING at the ceiling while the four Spice Girls chased each other blissfully around the bed, scampering over her, rumbling, tumbling. Their energy was boundless. So was their ability to amuse themselves. Their whole universe was right here inside this house. And, within its carpeted confines, they were totally content.
Damn, she envied them sometimes.
She had not been asleep when Mitch Berger called, even though she’d been awake nearly forty-eight hours straight and her body was exhausted. But she could not shut down her mind. It had kept right on searching and rewinding. Sorting through Big Sister’s residents, one by one. Reviewing what she knew about them. Focusing on what she didn’t know. And now she had a new fact to throw into the mix: Someone had tried to take out Mitch Berger.
Why? How did eliminating him link up to the three murders? Was Mandy responsible for it? If so, why had she let him leave her place alive tonight? How did that make any sense?
Des lay there, wondering. Same as she wondered how that man knew what she was wearing at this very moment.
Sighing, she reached for the phone again and dialed the number she knew so well. It rang twice before she heard the familiar rumbling voice at the other end.
“I need to see you,” she said, instead of hello.
“I’ll put the coffee on,” he said, instead of good-bye.
There had never been any wasted words between the two of them.
Des dressed hurriedly. Every cat in the house assumed it was happy meal fun time-if she was up, then that spelled food. Not knowing when she’d be back again, she gave in to them. Working her way from room to room, bowl to bowl, stepping her way patiently through her furry entourage. Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, her mud room resident, was in particularly cheery form at two A.M.-he merely glowered at her, a low, baleful moan coming from deep down in his throat.
Des had half a mind to stuff him in a carrier and drop him on Mandy Havenhurst’s doorstep with a short, sweet message taped to his chest: “From me to you, bitch.”
She paused in her studio to examine the sketch she’d started working on before she went to bed. It was a sketch of Mitch Berger. She’d cut his grainy black-and-white photograph out of the Hartford Courant, pinned it to the easel and studied it long and hard. Then she’d drawn what she had seen. Reducing him to shadows and shapes. Abstracting him, deconstructing him, finding him. Now she unclipped the portrait and slid it into her portfolio.
Then she grabbed her keys and jumped in her slicktop, steering it down Hemlock Hollow in the silent darkness to Amity Road, which took her to the Wilbur Cross Parkway. She headed in the direction of New Britain, the home of Stanley Tools and the Pontiac Trans Am capital of Southern New England. Des didn’t know if there was any connection between these two facts. Probably. There were a few overnight truckers out on the road, flying. Her presence there slowed them right on down, since absolutely nobody in the state of Connecticut drove an unmarked Ford Crown Victoria sedan except for a trooper. When somebody spotted her, they eased right off the gas. If she slowed to 30 in a 65 mph zone, they would, too. No one dared pass her. No one.
Kensington, her destination, was a working-class suburb of the Hardware City. The small, neat house was located in a neighborhood of small, neat houses belonging to school teachers, nurses, postal workers and other hardworking people.
Strivers Row, Brandon used to call it mockingly.
Des knew it simply as the place where she had been raised.
The porch light was on. And Buck Mitry was seated at the kitchen table in his flannel bathrobe, patiently drinking his coffee. He was good for ten or twelve cups a day. Used to be a heavy smoker as well, but gave that up as a twenty-fifth anniversary present to Des’s mother, who had then proceeded to leave him for her high school sweetheart, an Allstate claims adjustor down in Augusta, Georgia. “I am reborn,” she had told Des at the wedding. “I have rediscovered laughter and joy.” Buck remained behind in the house alone-like father, like daughter. He was a big, rangy man with a furrowed brow, graying hair and wire-rimmed glasses. His hands were immense and blunt- fingered. He had been a fine athlete as a young man, even played first base in the Cleveland Indians organization for two years out of high school until he met Des’s mother and decided to get serious. He took the state police exam in 1968, when they happened to be looking for a few good, black troopers. He had risen slowly but steadily through the ranks. And now, at age fifty-six, he was the deputy superintendent-the highest-ranking black man in the history of the state. He got there by being honest, steady and careful. He got there by getting along. No flash, no dash. Buck Mitry believed in proper procedure. He believed in saying please and thank you. He believed in shined shoes, muted ties and dignified charcoal-gray suits. He owned eight such suits, all identical. Always, he had been guarded with his emotions. Des, who was his only child, had never once seen her father lose control of his temper. To the best of her knowledge, no one else had either.
That was why they called him the Deacon.
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” she said to him, hands on her hips, “but isn’t that the same robe I gave you for Christmas back when I was twelve?”
“Quality never wears out,” he said, smiling at her faintly. “You got a cold?”
“Allergy.”
“Sounds like a cold.”
“It’s an allergy.”
