Show of Evil

'Why is he bugging you?'

'Because he's a liar. Because he's amoral and he knows it and he's comfortable with it. Because he's a psychopathic schemer and a killer and he's about to be set free on our turf and he already knows who he's going to kill and how and when. And he knows I know he's going to do it and there's not a goddamn thing I can do to stop him.'

Her eyebrows arched higher and higher as he spoke, and when he finished, she said, 'Ooo-kaaay.'

'Nobody else knows this yet,' he said. 'Keep it to yourself until I go public with it.'

'Is that what the tape recorder was for? I mean, is that legal?'

He stared down at it and then back to her. 'It's for reference,' he said, and ended that part of the conversation.

'What are you going to do about him?' she asked.

'If I knew the answer to that, I wouldn't be sitting here in the dark, I'd be over at Janie's scarfing down homemade spaghetti and thinking about what a lovely evening it's going to get to be later on.'

'Can I help?'

'Shana, you may have a short fuse and you may be hell on wheels in court, but this is not something you want to get involved in. This is not like looking at pictures of murder victims or going eyeball to eyeball with some drive-by shooter. This is devil's play and whatever innocence you still harbour will surely be destroyed if you come too close.'

She did not answer and a silence fell on the room. After a while she squirmed in her chair and cleared her throat and started to get up, and he suddenly sat straight up in the chair and snapped his fingers so loudly it startled her.

'Okay,' he said. 'Thanks for listening to that. I'm going over to Jane Venable's now and try to forget all of this for a few hours. As for Edith Stoddard, you're right. As Jane says, there's something wrong with the picture. Figure out what it is. I'd like to know, too.'

'Thanks,' she said, rather flatly.

'It's your case, Parver. Was there anything substantial you wanted to discuss?'

'No, just needed to talk, I guess, and here you were.'

'You want to talk some more?'

She smiled and shook her head. 'Nope, and I'm sure you don't, either.'

Vail stood up and stretched his arms. 'Absolutely right,' he said. 'Come on, we'll share a cab. I'll buy.'

'I'll pay my share,' she said, somewhat defensively.

'Hey,' Vail said, 'you want to be that way about it, you can pay the whole damn tab.'

Harvey St Claire watched the day dying through the farmhouse window. Near the edge of a pine thicket half a mile away he saw the beams of flashlights begin to dance in the dusk. They had been at the search for Poppy Palmer six hours.

'They're not gonna find her, Abel.'

'I know.'

'So why're we wasting time out here?'

'I could be wrong.'

Stenner had been seated at Darby's desk for two hours, painstakingly going through bills, mail, notebooks, everything he could find.

St Claire swung a wooden chair around and sat backward on it. 'No airline reservation. No cab ride. Her car's parked at the apartment -'

Stenner said, 'He could've driven her down to O'Hare.'

'No airline reservation,' St Claire repeated. 'And no sister in Texarkana.'

'To wherever she went.'

'No airline reservation -'

'Paid cash, gave a phoney name.'

'Her photo's been flashed at every ticket counter at the airport. Nobody recognized her.'

'Maybe she wore a wig.'

'You're a very strange guy, Abel.'