“I may need to turn myself in. If I do, all this is a moot point, you can do anything you want with it. But I’d at least like to be talking to my kind of cop, not one of those tight-asses who thinks the first mistake I made happened way back in Denver, when I quit the brotherhood.”
She didn’t say anything.
“The Rigby girl’s gone. I have good reason to believe that the killer may have taken her. I want to be out looking for her: I
I took a deep breath, which became a sigh. “But I’m far from home, I’m being slowly driven crazy by this rain, and I know nobody here but you. The cop in me wants to tear up this town looking for her, but I’m not even sure yet where the doors are. And if that kid winds up dead and the real cops could’ve prevented it while I’m out playing policeman…”
We looked at each other.
“I’ll tell ya, Trish, I’d find that damn near impossible to live with.”
She answered my sigh with one of her own, but it was a long time coming. “You want it both ways. It can’t be done.”
“If it can’t be done, I go in—no arguments, no questions. Her welfare is the first priority.”
“Maybe you should go in. Can you really do her any good out here by yourself?”
“I might surprise you. I really was a decent cop. With me looking too, her chances would have to go up. I don’t know, I’ve got to try. But there isn’t much time.”
I droned on, summarizing the immediate problem. The cops had to be told about Rigby now, this morning, before they closed down the scene. In a homicide investigation, every minute wasted on the front end is critical. I looked at my watch: I had already blown three hours.
“Let’s make it very clear, then, what you want from me and what kind of restraints I’m under,” she said. “As it stands now, I can’t even ask the cops an intelligent question.”
“That’s why I was hoping you knew somebody.”
“That I was sleeping with the chief of police, you mean. Sorry, Janeway, no such luck. I don’t drink with them or eat lunch with them, I don’t backslap or schmooze or let them tell me dirty jokes. My relationship with these guys is respectable but distant. It’s extremely professional and I’ve taken some pains to keep it that way.”
“Do you know anybody on the paper who does schmooze with them?”
“Nobody I’d trust, and I’d be wary of any cop such a guy might bring me. I don’t like reporters who party with people they write about.”
We thought it through another stretch of quiet.
She said, “I feel like I’m playing pin the tail on the donkey, or a card game with half a deck.”
“You want to hear the story, I’ll tell you the story.”
“Sure I want to hear it, isn’t that why we’re here? I’ll take it any way you want to tell it, on the record or off.”
I told it to her with no more clarification than that. I took her from Slater’s arrival in my bookstore through my hasty retreat from Pruitt’s house three hours ago. She asked nothing and made no judgments until it was finished. Her eyes darted back and forth as if she’d been replaying parts of it in her head.
“God, I’ve got more questions now than I had at the beginning. I know who Slater is, but who is Pruitt? Is this really about a Grayson book or is something else at the bottom of it? What happened to the kid who was tagging along with the fat man? And you…oh, Janeway, what on earth possessed you and what’re you thinking now? Do you think Pruitt lost his mind, killed his friends, and took off with Rigby? Does that make sense to you?”
“All I know for sure is there were five people, counting Eleanor. Only two are accounted for and they’re dead.”
“And what about that record playing? What do you make of that?”
“She was being stalked and harassed on the phone. It had to’ve been Pruitt, that’s obvious now. He was her darkman, her worst nightmare.”
“But why leave the record playing, at home, with a dead man there?”
The check came. I made a stab at it but she was quicker. She looked through her purse and fished out a twenty.
“I’m going on up to the scene,” she said. “At least then we’ll know what cops are working it. Maybe I can take them off the record and get them to tell me something.”
We walked out in the rain. I stood beside her car, getting wet again, and talked to her through the narrow crack at the top of her window.
“I’ll be holed up in my room at the Hilton. You call me.”
“As soon as I can.”
