“He’s trying to do what he thinks is right.”
“If I didn’t think that, he’d already be fired. But he’s got me in a potentially terrible bind with Devin and Sarah, just when we’re getting back in their reasonably good graces, and also not so good a place in my own home. I really don’t like feeling that I could open my door and be looking down the barrel of one of my own guns.”
“Wyatt. Come on. She’s not going to do that.”
“Well, as I said to Mickey when he said the same thing, I hope you’re right. But I won’t know for sure, though, will I, until it happens or not?”
“It won’t.”
Hunt shrugged. It either would or it wouldn’t, and talking about it wasn’t going to make any difference. “So listen,” he said, “I was supposed to call Gloria White twenty minutes ago and then Turner showed up. So I need to touch base with her now or sooner. Meanwhile, can I bother you to call Devin, set up a time we can get together? I don’t think they know yet about the Monday- night meeting before Neshek got killed, and it wouldn’t hurt if they were following up on that too.”
“Plus, that gets them off Alicia for a while.”
“Secondarily. I thought you might notice that.”
“Softie,” she said, with an approving smile.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” he told her. “It’s probably temporary. Anyway, see if Devin can run some kind of a sheet on a Keydrion Mugisa? He’ll have to guess on the spelling, but that’s why they pay him the big bucks. He’ll do it. In any event, the kid said exactly one word that whole time, you realize that? Which makes me think he wasn’t really there to add to the meeting.”
“Why, then?”
“To let me know Turner could do more than just fire me if I got too far out of line.”
29
Aside from his physical pains, which remained substantial, Mickey felt sick to his stomach at Hunt’s response to what he’d done. Driving out through the rain once again to the Ortega campus, shifting the Volkswagen, an inordinately difficult task with his steering arm in the cast, he kept revisiting his decision-making process from the time Alicia had appeared at his bedside. Maybe the Vicodin had played a role and affected his judgment, he told himself. Nevertheless, he wished he’d brought some of them with him from the hospital. His head pounded with every beat of his pulse, every bump in the road.
And then there was the psychic pain as well. Mickey knew that Hunt was an experienced and intelligent guy, not given to extremes of emotion or flights of fancy, and Hunt didn’t think much of Alicia’s basic story. Clearly, Hunt had read Alicia’s admission of her lie to the police completely differently than Mickey had. To Mickey, it had been the baring of a burdened soul, utterly believable. To Hunt, on the other hand, this confession had pretty much sealed the deal that she should be considered the prime suspect in Como’s death. And in Neshek’s.
Although every fiber in his being rebelled at that thought, Mickey couldn’t get it out of his mind. What if she was just playing him for a lovesick dope?
He kept hearing himself explaining to Hunt, replaying the words in his head, that he could tell when someone was a good person. If anyone else had said them, Mickey knew what his response would be because it was the same one he had to his own words-what a tool.
Of course you couldn’t tell when someone was a good person. Or a bad person. Or anything. You just saw enough of someone that over time you came to trust what appeared to be their essential character.
And even Mickey would not argue that once you had the essential-character thing down, anomalies could occur. Good people did bad things all the time, sometimes by mistake, sometimes because they’d lost track of themselves in an altered chemical or alcoholic state, sometimes because smart, good people do foolish, wrong things. So to say that you could tell if someone was a good person was not only inherently idiotic, it was irrelevant to anything. It certainly couldn’t explain or predict guilt or innocence.
That said, though, he could intellectually give his assent to a slightly different, though related, proposition: Alicia Thorpe might be a good or a bad person (and she’d at least told one big whopper of a lie in a crucial setting), but there was no way in the world he could imagine her brutally killing not just one but two people.
And with that, he kept returning to another fundamental question: Why would she have come back to him, instead of just simply blowing Dodge? What, he asked himself, would be in it for her? Mickey’s involvement with her could not keep her from getting arrested if the cops came to that. If anything, he reasoned, the fact that she had come back to Mickey argued that she desperately wanted the killer to be found. Otherwise, why wouldn’t she have fled after her last interview with Juhle and Russo? Instead, she’d found out he was in the hospital and she’d come running to him.
Why would she have done that if she didn’t believe he could save her? She was truly innocent and she would put her trust in the one person who absolutely believed in her, that’s why.
Of course, there were other, more disturbing, possible answers. But let Wyatt Hunt agonize over them, Mickey wasn’t going to.
Even if it meant infuriating his boss, and it did.
Even if it meant his job, and it might.
The bottom line was that it was a matter of faith. And for good or ill, Mickey believed her. He believed in her. If she were lying and betrayed him…
But he shook his head. That wasn’t happening. He wasn’t going to go there.
Russo and Juhle were parked outside of Alicia’s house again.
“I’ve got this amazing sense of deja vu,” Juhle said. “Wasn’t she not home yesterday at this time too?”
“It was later, but yes.”
“Where does she go?”
“This is probably mostly when she kills her victims. Except those days she’s surfing.”
“She kills people before she goes to work?”
“Right. Usually. If she’s not too busy surfing, or if the waves suck. And then, remember, she’s got to get cleaned up afterward, either from the killings or the surfing, or both, if she’s got to be dressed up to greet the carnivores.”
Juhle, nodding sagely, looked at his watch. “How long you want to give it?”
They’d already been parked here for nearly a half hour. They had been on their way out to Nancy Neshek’s to canvass the neighborhood, but the idea of slogging to mostly empty houses through the rain to try to talk to rich people who didn’t look out their windows had persuaded them both to take another stab at interviewing Alicia Thorpe. After the scarf identification yesterday, both of them thought she was close to breaking, and now Russo was of the opinion that even though they didn’t know definitely whose semen it was, they could drop the news, which they’d held back yesterday, about its presence on the scarf and see if they could break her at last.
Yesterday, she’d remained strong in her insistence that she’d lost the scarf a few week ago, but that, too, was something they had on tape that she could possibly contradict, and once that happened, their leverage would increase exponentially. Neither of them had much doubt about her factual guilt, and they felt that they needed just one small break to have an excuse to put on the handcuffs and take her downtown, and once that happened, the confession was pretty much just going to be a matter of time.
“Ten more minutes,” Russo said. “Then we get something to eat and come back one time on our way out to Seacliff.”
“The quality of decisiveness,” Juhle said, “is not strained.”
“What?” Russo asked.
At that moment, the cell phone on Juhle’s belt went off with a ringtone from an old-fashioned telephone that was so loud it made them both jump.
“You gotta change that,” Russo said.
But Juhle, already on the call, didn’t even hear her. “Yeah,” he said, and then again. “Yeah, but we’ll be in the field most of the day. Nothing so far, but if he’s interested, he can catch us down at the Hall when we get back in.
