through the woods before anyone was the wiser.”
“Lieutenant, you could not be more wrong,” Takai spoke up in a measured voice. “There was absolutely, positively nothing between my sister and Jim.”
“I appreciate your input, Miss Frye,” Soave said to her, all but tugging at his forelock. “But it’s looking real bad for you, Jim. Worse and worse, you want to know the truth.”
Des knew exactly where her ex-sergeant’s mind was going. He was thinking: I am going to have this buttoned up by lunchtime. She could see him liking Jim for it. There was definitely a circumstantial thread. But if Jim had shot Moose, why was he still hanging around? He’d be halfway across Canada by now, wouldn’t he? Not sitting here in front of the old man’s fire, waiting to get nailed.
“You’re the man,” Jim said to him once again. “You’ll throw down if you want to, and there ain’t nothing I can say or do will change that.”
“You’re going to the School House, Jim,” Soave informed him coldly. The Central District Major Crime Squad headquarters in Meriden had previously been a state-run reform school for boys. Everyone on the job called it the School House. “There’ll be more questions, and a blood test. Have him held until I get there,” he ordered the uniformed trooper.
Hangtown sat up in his chair for the first time since they’d arrived. “Must you take him away, Lieutenant? Must you take my friend?”
“It’s strictly routine questioning, Hangtown,” Des said to him gently.
“Yes, but can’t you do that sort of thing mm-rr-here?” Hangtown pleaded. “Jim is my hands. I can’t work without him. And if I can’t work right now, I-I’ll just… I won’t get through this agony, this
…”
Soave softened in the face of the great artist’s pain. Plus he was anxious to show Takai his caring side. “Give me a good reason why I should trust you, Jim.”
“I’ll never leave the property, sir,” Jim vowed. “Not with all of them reporters trying to jump our fence. I got to watch out for the boss. That’s what I do. So you got no cause to worry. Word of honor.”
“I don’t want to have to come looking for you,” Soave warned him.
“He just gave you his word, Lieutenant,” Hangtown said balefully. “That may not mean much to you, but around here it means everything.”
Soave struck his thoughtful, smoothing-the-mustache pose. “Okay, Mr. Frye. We’ll do it your way. As for you, Miss Frye, rest assured that a state trooper will be on the front gate twenty-four hours a day. Also a man stationed right here in the house. You have no reason to be frightened. But if anything does bother you, anything at all
…” He handed her his card. “You can reach me day or night. Don’t hesitate to call.”
Takai accepted the card, but said nothing in response, which left Soave thrown for words. Hastily, he turned to Des and said, “Did you try starting the victim’s car?”
“No, I didn’t,” Des replied. “Key’s in the ignition.”
“You ever drive that Land Rover, Jim?” Soave asked him.
“We all drive it. Only car we got that can make it down to the plowed road when it snows.” Jim’s eyes narrowed at him. “My prints are all over it, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
Soave told the uniformed trooper to give it a go. The trooper fetched a pair of protective latex gloves from the trunk of his cruiser and hopped in, Des and Soave watching him from the front doorway of the house.
Moose’s Land Rover kicked over and started without a hitch, clouds of exhaust billowing from its tailpipe.
“I thought she told her sister it was dead,” Soave said, astonished.
“She did,” Des said, the trooper getting out to raise the hood for a look.
“So what do you make of that?”
“I take it you’ve never owned a vintage British automobile, Lieutenant,” Takai said rather archly from the entry hall behind them.
Soave drew back slightly, sensing he was being dissed. “No, I never have, miss. Why does that matter?”
“I’m terrible at jokes, but there’s an old one about the reason why the Brits drink their beer warm. The punch line is that the same outfit that does the wiring on their cars also makes refrigerators. They’re famously unreliable, in other words. Especially when the weather turns cold. You say a prayer that it will start. You tap the dashboard three times for luck. You stroke it. And, above all, you make sure you park it where the morning sunlight will hit its hood.”
Which Moose had done. The Land Rover was sitting directly in the morning sun.
“Doesn’t appear to have been tampered with,” the trooper called to Soave, slamming the hood shut.
“May I drive it, Lieutenant?” Takai asked him. “I’ve lost my own car.”
“I don’t see why not. But you ought to get yourself something you can really count on. If I lived around here I’d buy me a Grand Cherokee.”
“Yes, but you don’t live around here, do you,” she pointed out.
Soave stiffened. Now he knew he was being dissed.
The phone rang in the kitchen. Takai went to answer it.
“Yo, I’m beginning to see what you meant about her,” he muttered at Des.
“Rico, I had me a feeling you would.”
Takai wasn’t gone long. She looked somewhat pale on her return.
“Who was it, girl?” Hangtown asked her, limping his way heavily from the living room toward them.
“No one, Father,” she answered shortly.
“Don’t be coy, damn it!” he thundered at her. “Who was it?”
“It was just the school calling,” Takai said, her voice fading. “About why Moose didn’t come to work this morning. They… they wanted to know whether she’d be back tomorrow.”
The old man let out a sob of pure anguish. “I’m not going to make it,” he cried out. “I will die. Oh, Lord, I will die!”
C HAPTER 7
Scareeee… reeee… yeeeeowww…
Mitch was working his way through the chord changes in Hendrix’s lead-in to “Hey, Joe,” an achievement that for him ranked right up there with scaling Everest’s south summit, when the bad news came down.
Scareeee… dee-dowwww…
Playing his Stratocaster had been Mitch’s third choice for how to keep sane after Des went tearing off toward Winston Farms in the pre-dawn darkness. First, he had tried going back to sleep. An entirely logical thing to do. Clemmie certainly had no problem. But Clemmie also had a brain the size of a garbanzo bean. So Mitch got up and tried to channel his nervous energy into his reference book on Westerns-a sidebar on Quirt’s namesake, Quirt Evans, the wounded gunfighter played by John Wayne in The Angel and the Badman, a tidy little 1947 release with Gail Russell and Harry Carey that Witness ripped off some forty years later. But Mitch found he had about as much luck working as he did sleeping. The words on his computer screen were just meaningless squiggles. So he played.
Skchssschaheee… chaheeee…
Mitch had no ear for music. He knew this. But he had the love and he had the power. And, in the immortal words of Meat Loaf, two out of three ain’t bad. So he played, his pair of Fender twin reverb amps cranked up high, one set of toes curled around his wa-wa pedal, the other around his Ibanez tube screamer. He played, his eyes shut, tongue stuck out of the side of his mouth.
Scareeeeeee… reeee…
Until Des finally phoned to tell him it wasn’t Takai who was dead.
“It’s Moose, baby,” she reported grimly. “At least we think it is. Her body’s burned beyond recognition.”
Mitch was so stunned he could barely speak. “Any chance it’s not her?”
“Slim to none.” Des explained to him how Moose had borrowed Takai’s Porsche to go see a beau and never returned. “She’d have to be pulling one of the most elaborate disappearing acts in history. Look, I don’t know if I’ll
