“Sonofabitch.”
Not only his favorite word, but rhetorical, too. I didn’t think it warranted a comment, so I sat there and waited.
“But now Shanna’s gone,” he said.
“She took off. A good look at Xenon hanging there against the back wall of the garage and she ran. I tried to catch her, but . . .” I shrugged. “She’s half my age, built like a freakin’ deer. Thing is, she did it in sandals, which I think means Air Nikes and the Swoosh aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.”
“Hell. But, what you say—it sounds as if she didn’t have any idea he was in there, strung up in the garage.”
“Didn’t seem like it. If she knew, I don’t think she would’ve stuck around while I went to get the key. And she didn’t know the lock was busted.”
Silence.
I said, “You probably ought to know that when I got back after not catching Shanna, that Celebrity News guy—Ignacio—was coming out of the garage with a camera.”
“Oh, jeez. Oh, Jesus Christ, no.”
“He got pictures of Jo-X and a picture of me coming at him, then went over the back fence like a wharf rat.”
He stared at me. “A wharf rat?”
I shrugged again. “Fast, nimble. It’s an image. I didn’t see fur or a tail, but he was wearing clothes.”
“Sonofabitch.”
“Right. I went after him, but everyone I go after is faster than me these days, although I’m pretty sure I could keep up with Rush Limbaugh. Fact is, I put my foot through the roof of that old doghouse, trying to go over the fence after Ignacio. I saw him run through a yard, pop over another fence, and that was that.”
Big sigh from Fairchild. “Then what?”
At this point, what I needed was some slack in the story line, a little time gap for the contraband I’d crammed up the drainpipe, so I improvised. “I went out to the street and looked for Shanna. You can see a quarter mile before the street takes a bend. She was gone. I went down a side street behind the girls’ house, tried to spot Ignacio since he went over a fence that way, but he was gone, too. So I went around the block, still didn’t see Ignacio or Shanna, came back, phoned it in, and your guys came and cuffed me so I couldn’t go crazy and put four or five of them in the hospital.”
Another little grin from Day.
Russell was silent for two full minutes, thinking. Then he said, “Okay, we’re gonna have to do this again, record it this time. What I did here was, you know . . .” He glanced up at the camera.
“Illegal.”
“As a sonofabitch. But Danya’s my kid, Angel. I don’t know what the fuck’s goin’ on, but she’s my kid. I don’t figure she’s any part of this, I mean Xenon bein’ killed, murdered, strung up in that garage, but . . . fuck.”
“I get it, Russ. I’ve got a daughter, too.”
For a moment he was silent, thinking. Then: “Can’t think of anything you told me that isn’t gonna be on the record one way or another, so let’s go through it with the recorder on. Same as we just did.”
“PG rating on Shanna in the shower?”
“Tell it the way it was.” Then he gave me an extra hard look. “But no surprises, Angel. This’ll be on the record. A jury might end up seeing it. If you screw it up, we’ll have to do it again.”
Two fifteen p.m. My car hadn’t been disassembled. In fact, it was in the back lot behind the police station, right where it had been after last year’s Q&A sessions when I was finding decapitated heads. It had been vacuumed, which was thoughtful of them. I was ambivalent about the fingerprint dust on the steering wheel, dashboard, door handles, but I didn’t say anything about it to Fairchild, who had escorted me out the back door.
“She’s not answering her phone,” he said. “Danya. I tried to ping her phone’s GPS, but she must’ve pulled the battery.”
“You can ping GPS? I mean you, the police?”
“What d’you think?”
Kids these days knew all about GPS, knew how to pull the battery. Things were a lot easier in the Middle Ages. Back then, kids didn’t pull the batteries out of their cell phones. Ever. And you could run that comment past a bunch of today’s teenagers and get a lot of blank looks.
“Walk with me, Angel.” Russ nodded toward the Cyclone fence at the back of the lot.
I gave him a questioning look. He gave me another nod and kept going. The fence bordered the River Walk, a meandering asphalt pedestrian and bike path that rambled along the south side of the Truckee River as it passed behind the police station.
Russ opened a gate in the fence, and we went through, then headed east, away from downtown. It was a nice day. Gentle breeze, blue sky, cottonwoods providing shade. The river flowed around big granite boulders, water eddying and sparkling in the sun. Russ didn’t say a word until we were a quarter mile out.
“We still haven’t got the guy who killed Senator Reinhart and those others last year,” he said. “FBI’s got nothing.”
“I would’ve heard if they had, Russ, but the update puts a high note on the afternoon.”
He glanced at me. “The guy killed your woman, too.”
“Thanks for reminding me. That was and still is the worst day of my life.” And it was a she who killed Jeri, not a he, but I couldn’t tell him that.
“Sorry about that. Really.” He was silent for a minute.
