meant that the only hope in hell I had of getting Tommy back alive was to stick to the original deal, and to pray that Brian meant to do the same thing.
Beyond the Ford, descending on the shack, were deputies in khaki, gesturing to one another, talking earnestly to Hoffman and Marcus. They gestured to me, to my Jeep, to me again. They gestured to the shack. A couple of deputies ran off into the woods. They seemed very busy.
Fugitive. The word resonated, sounded true. Brian had to keep our deal, he had nothing left, I realized. He was wanted now, known now. He could run poor, or he could run rich, and with a million dollars, he’d get a lot farther. He had to keep our deal.
And I needed him to, more than ever before.
Because I’d been wrong.
Tommy hadn’t killed my mother.
CHAPTER 34
A deputy drove me in the back of his car into Eugene, to the sheriff’s station near city hall. When I asked about my car, he told me it was part of a crime scene, and that it would be towed into town as soon as they were done with it. I didn’t ask what that meant. At the station, he escorted me inside, and another deputy met us, this one female. She swabbed my hands, the same GSR test I was becoming way too familiar with, and I couldn’t read her reaction when she saw the results. When that was over, the first deputy left, and the second one took my statement.
She asked why I’d gone to see Christopher and Brian Quick, and I gave her the story I’d given Anne, that I was trying to track down my old foster family, to pay them back for the kindness they’d done me.
The deputy recorded it without editorializing, and if she didn’t believe me, she didn’t act like she cared either way. When we were finished, she told me to get comfortable, that there’d be more people who wanted to talk to me. I asked her if I could get cleaned up first, and she told me that would have to wait.
“Can we keep this out of the papers?” I asked. “I mean, my part?”
“Your part?”
“I’m kind of well-known.”
“Yeah, you kind of are. We’ll see.”
She went out, leaving me in the interview room by myself.
Nobody came to talk to me for another two hours, by which time I had just about gone crazy with the waiting. I’d started pacing the room, but that had very little entertainment value, and I was quickly exhausted. I sat at the table again, drumming my fingers, tapping my toes, and fighting the nagging that had begun in the car as I’d rode in from Junction City.
I don’t have perfect pitch, but I have a brilliant memory for sound. I can pick up a melody fast, normally after only hearing it once if it’s simple, two or three times if it’s complex. It doesn’t work for words, it doesn’t work for speech, but for tone, for melody, for notes, I trust it.
Trying to conjure Brian’s voice again, trying to see if it matched the one in my head, playing the two lines against one another, and they weren’t fitting. I imagined Brian’s curse spoken in a house, muffled behind a mask, softer, and all I got was that the octave was similar, if not the same, but that was it.
Which made me very nervous. Because it meant that Brian had someone else, someone besides his brother, that he was working with.
I’d begun to believe they’d forgotten about me when the door opened and Hoffman came in with a short Latino man, about her age, wearing a suit. He had a clipped mustache, and a thick neck, and the thickness seemed to run throughout him, along the shoulders and even down his arms to his hands. He had a stack of papers, and he pulled a chair and sat down, and Hoffman took another, on the end of the table, so she was almost between us.
“Miss Bracca, I’m Detective Munez. Thanks for your patience.”
“Have you found him?”
Munez shook his head. “We will.”
“You don’t think he’s going to go back to his place?”
“Not unless he’s exceptionally stupid. Right now Brian Quick is the prime suspect in the murder of his brother, and he’s wanted for the mass of charges he brought down upon himself when he opened fire on Detective Hoffman here and her partner. But it could happen. A lot of criminals are exceptionally stupid. This one seems a little brighter than most. Or at least more computer literate.”
“I saw the computer.”
He pressed his mustache down, as if it was in danger of coming loose. “It’ll go to the State lab, they’ll check the contents.”
“The Quicks were the ones spying on me,” I said. “They were the ones selling the pictures of me.”
“It’ll go to the State, like I said. They’ll let us know for certain. Could you tell me why you’d gone out to see those two?”
“I told the deputy already.”
“Yeah, I got that, but I’d like to hear it from you. Sometimes things get lost in these statements.”
I put on my helpful face, and told him pretty much the same thing I’d told the deputy.
“You were bringing those two money?”
“Not cash,” I said, as if the suggestion was ludicrous. “I was going to offer to help them out. I didn’t know what they were up to at all, I mean, if I had known they were the ones spying on me, I’d have called you guys or Detective Hoffman or someone. I just . . . I just thought they’d had a run of bad luck, you know? When I talked to their mother she didn’t say what they’d done, just that they’d been down on their luck.”
“Were they blackmailing you? About the pictures?”
“No, honest to God,” I said. “Or if they were planning to, they hadn’t started yet. They’d just been selling the pictures, I think. The only reason I came to see them was that I’d talked to Anne—their mother—earlier today. I found out that their father’s got Alzheimer’s. It’s been really hard on the family, I just wanted to see if there was anything I could do to help out.”
“Detective Hoffman here tells me that she advised you that both of the Quicks had a record, and that they were considered potentially dangerous individuals.”
“She did, yeah, but . . . they were my foster brothers. I never thought they’d be like . . .
“He was dead when you got there?”
I nodded.
“I imagine that was a surprise.”
“What was that smell?” I asked. “There was this awful stink, what was that?”
Munez glanced at Hoffman, who kept her gaze planted on me. “The Quick boys were entrepreneurs, it seems,” Munez said. “Aside from their cottage industry marketing dirty pictures of you, they were cooking crystal meth. Normally it gets brewed up in the high desert because the process stinks so bad. Setting up in a peppermint field, that’s almost clever.”
“If you say so. Next you’ll tell me they were forging bonds or something like that.”
Munez shook his head, chuckling, and made some notes. I risked a second glance at Hoffman. She was still watching me, no smile. She looked like she wanted to belt me, actually.
“Is there anything else?” I asked. “I’d kind of like to get home.”
“A couple more things, but we can get through them pretty quickly if you’re willing to cooperate.”
“Of course,” I said.
Hoffman snorted.
