Destroying the notes and lying about them might spare Lanny dismissal from the force, but Billy’s situation would be made worse. Lacking evidence, he would find it more difficult to convince the authorities that his story was true and that it might shed light on the killer’s psychology. If he approached them now, he risked looking like a publicity seeker or like a bartender who sampled too much of his wares. Or like a suspect. Riveted by that thought, he stood very still for a minute, exploring it. Suspect.
His mouth had gone dry. His tongue cleaved to his palate.
He went to the kitchen sink and drew a glass of cold water from the tap. At first he could barely choke down a mouthful, but then he drained the glass in three long swallows.
Too cold, drunk too fast, the water wrung a brief sharp pain from his chest, and washed nausea through his gut. He put the glass on the drainboard. He leaned over the sink until the queasiness passed.
He splashed his greasy face with cold water, washed his hands in hot. He paced the kitchen. He sat briefly at the table, then paced some more. At 8:30, he stood by the telephone, staring at it, although he had every reason to believe that it would not ring.
At 8:40, he used his cell phone to call Lanny’s cellular number, leaving the house phone open. He got voice mail again.
The kitchen was too warm. He felt stifled.
At 8:45, Billy stepped outside, onto the back porch. He needed fresh air. With the door wide open behind him, he could hear the telephone if it rang.
Indigo in the east, the sky overhead and to the west trembled faintly with the iridescent vibrations of an orange-and-green sunset.
The encircling woods bristled dark, growing darker. If a hostile observer had taken up position in that timber, crouching in ferns and philodendrons, none but a sharp-nosed dog could have known that he was out there.
52
A hundred toads, all unseen, had begun to sing in the descending gloom, but in the kitchen, past the open door, all was silent.
Perhaps Lanny just needed a little more time to find a way to tweak the truth.
Surely he cared about more than himself. He could not have been reduced so totally, so quickly, to the most base self-interest.
He was still a cop, lazy or not, desperate or not. Sooner than later he would realize that he couldn’t live with himself if, by obstructing the investigation, he contributed to more deaths.
The ink-spill in the east soon saturated the sky overhead, while in the west, all was fire and blood.
At 9:00, Billy left the back porch and went inside. He closed the door and locked it.
In just three hours, a fate would be decided, a death ordained, and if the killer followed a pattern, someone would be murdered before dawn. The key to the SUV lay on the dinette table. Billy picked it up. He considered setting out in search of Lanny Olsen. What he had thought was resentment, earlier, had been mere exasperation. Now he knew real resentment, a dark and bitter brooding. He badly wanted confrontation. Preserve me from the enemy who has something to gain, and from the friend who has something to lose.
Lanny had been on day shift. He was off duty now.
Most likely he would be holed up at home. If he was not at home, there were only a handful of restaurants, bars, and friends’ houses where he might be found.
A sense of responsibility and a strange despairing kind of hope held Billy prisoner in his kitchen, by his telephone. He no longer expected Lanny to call; but the killer might.
53
The mute listener on the line the previous night had been Giselle Winslow’s murderer. Billy had no proof, but no doubt, either. Maybe he would call this evening, too. If Billy could speak to him, something might be accomplished, something learned.
Billy was under no illusion that such a monster could be charmed into chattiness. Neither could a homicidal sociopath be debated, nor persuaded by reason to spare a life.
Hearing the man speak a few words, however, might prove valuable. Ethnicity, region of origin, education, approximate age, and more could be inferred from a voice.
With luck, the killer might also unwittingly reveal some salient fact about himself. One clue, one small bud of information that blossomed under determined analysis, could provide Billy with something credible to take to the police.
Confronting Lanny Olsen might be emotionally satisfying, but it would not get Billy out of the box in which the killer had put him.
He hung the key to the SUV on a pegboard.
The previous evening, in a nervous moment, he had lowered the shades at all the windows. This morning, before breakfast, he had raised those in the kitchen. Now he lowered them again.
He stood in the center of the kitchen.
He glanced at the phone.
Intending to sit at the table, he put his right hand on the back of a chair, but he didn’t move it.
He just stood there, studying the polished black-granite floor at his feet. He kept an immaculate house. The
