She turned her head and looked at me. “Unless you’re the one who put it there.”
“For Christ’s sake,” I said.
“Do you have a lawyer, Mr. Blake?” Detective Jennings asked.
“I don’t need a lawyer,” I said.
“I think maybe you do.”
“What I need is for you to believe me. What I need is for you to help me figure out what’s going on. What I need is for you to help me find my daughter.”
That stopped her for a moment. “Your daughter,” she said. “She certainly wouldn’t have to break through a basement window to get in.”
“What are you getting at?”
“She could get in here anytime she wants. She has a key.”
“What? You think Sydney was here? You think my daughter’s been back? That she’d come back, and not let us know she’s okay? That she’d hide cocaine in my pillow?”
Kip Jennings closed the distance between us. And even though she was considerably shorter, she managed to get right in my face. “Now let’s talk about that scarf.”
“I can’t explain it.”
“Take a shot at it,” she said. “That scarf, the one she’s wearing in a picture supposedly taken in Seattle, is here, in this house.”
I shook my head. “Maybe Syd was out there and came back.”
“Just how well do you know your daughter, Mr. Blake?”
“Very well. We’re very close. I love her.” I paused. “How well do you know yours?”
She ignored that. “Do you know all of Sydney’s friends? When she goes out late at night, do you always know where she is? Do you know who she talks to on the Internet? Do you know if she’s ever tried drugs? Do you know whether she’s sexually active? Do you know the answer to any of those questions with any certainty?”
“No parent would,” I said.
“No parent would,” she repeated, nodding. “So when I ask you how well you know your daughter, I’m not asking you how close you are to her or how much you love her. I’m asking whether it’s possible she could be involved in things, involved with people, you might not approve of.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Do you think Sydney could have been involved in drugs?”
“I can’t believe that.”
“Your daughter’s missing. Her car was abandoned. And there was blood on it. You need to start waking up to the fact that something’s going on.”
“You think I’m not-”
“You need to wake up to the fact that it’s possible, just possible, that Sydney may have been mixed up in some nasty things. She may have been hanging out with some nasty people. She told you she was working at that hotel. If she was lying to you about that, what else was she lying about?”
I walked out of the room.
“Get out,” I said to a cop standing at the bottom of the stairs as I headed for the kitchen.
“What?”
“Get out,” I said. “Get the fuck out of my house.”
“You’re not going anywhere, Talbott,” Kip Jennings told the cop from behind me. “Mr. Blake, you can’t order these officers out of here. Your house is a crime scene.”
“I have to start cleaning up, put this place in order,” I snapped at her.
“No, not yet,” she said. “You won’t be doing anything around here until I say so. And you’re going to have to make arrangements to sleep someplace else tonight.”
“You’re not kicking me out of my own house,” I said, turning and pointing a finger at her.
“That’s exactly what I’m doing. This house is a crime scene, and that includes your bedroom. Especially now.”
I shook my head in frustration. “I thought you were trying to help me.”
“I’m trying to figure out what happened, Mr. Blake. I hope that ends up helping you. Because my gut’s been telling me, up to now, that you’ve been playing straight with me, that you’ve been telling me what you know, that you haven’t been holding out on me. But things are a bit cloudy now. That’s why I think it would be in your interest to talk to a lawyer.”
“You’re not seriously thinking of charging me with drug possession or something?”
She looked me right in the eye. “I’m giving you good advice here, and I think you should take it.”
I held her gaze.
She continued, “Has it crossed your mind, if you really were conned into going to Seattle so someone could go through your house, that it was your daughter who sent you out there?”
“That’s crazy,” I said. “The woman I spoke to on the phone was not my daughter.”
Jennings shrugged. “She wouldn’t have to be working alone.”
Of all the things Jennings had suggested or intimated, this struck me as the most ridiculous.
But instead of reacting angrily, I held up my hands in a defensive, let’s-cool-this-down gesture, because there was something else on my mind I needed to discuss with her.
“Regardless of what you may think of me, or what you may think is going on here, there’s something else you need to be aware of,” I said.
“Okay,” she said.
“It’s about my ex-wife. Someone’s watching her house.”
Jennings’s brow furrowed. “Go on.”
“Susanne’s noticed someone parked down the street a few times. She says you can see a little light, like he’s smoking.” I paused, a thought just occurring to me. “It’s not the police, is it?”
“Not that I’m aware of. She got a plate number?”
“No,” I said.
“Tell her, next time, get it,” Jennings said. “And I’ll see whether we can have someone take a run by there every once in a while.”
I muttered a thank-you, turned, and my eye caught the open kitchen drawer that had, until recently, held some cash.
And a name came to mind. Evan. We needed to have a word.
ON THE WAY TO BOB’S MOTORS, I got held up where they were merging two lanes down to one for roadwork. Feeling briefly charitable, I let a Toyota Sienna that was trying to get into my lane go ahead. Through tinted glass I saw the driver’s hand wave thank you.
As the Sienna straightened itself out in front of me, I noticed it was the delivery truck for Shaw Flowers, the florist shop next to XXX Delights. I was guessing it was Ian, the young man who’d been with Mrs. Shaw the other day when she was closing up the place, behind the wheel.
I thought maybe I should give him another chance to look at Syd’s picture.
Ian put his right turn signal on. I did the same.
I followed him into an old residential area with trees so mature they formed a canopy over the street. As he came to a stop in front of a two-story colonial, I drove on past and turned into a driveway half a dozen houses up.
Ian got out, white wires running down from his ears and into his shirt pocket. I was guessing he had a mini iPod like Syd’s. He went around the passenger side of the van, slid open the door to get a large bouquet of flowers, and walked it up to the house.
I backed out of the drive and pulled up across the street. I waited by the van while Ian rang
