“Did he have a gun?”
“What?” She looked up at me.
“In his hand. You said you thought he had a gun. Did he?”
“No,” she said. “It was a flower. A lilac. That’s what he was holding. It’s supposed to mean something, isn’t it? When you give somebody a lilac? Something about the innocence of youth. If it did mean something, he never got the chance to tell me.”
I looked down at the stones. There were no lilac petals there now. There was no blood, no trace of what had happened.
“He was the first man I ever loved,” she said. “And I shot him.”
She didn’t cry. I didn’t know if she wanted me to hold her or if she wanted me to go away and never come back. I just stood there.
“You have to tell them, don’t you,” she said.
“Tell them what?”
“That I shot him. You have to tell the chief, and I’ll go to jail.”
I thought about it for exactly two seconds. “Not necessarily,” I said. “It was an accident. You panicked. What did you do with the shotgun, anyway?”
“I threw it in the woods.”
“Where?”
“Down the highway,” she said. “A couple miles outside of town.”
“Probably not the best place,” I said. “But there’s no sense trying to move it now.”
“Will you help me, Alex?”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Find out why he came here. If he found out I had money, or if Harwood was using him somehow. And then help me find Harwood. Somehow, I have to make him stop. Will you help me?”
“I don’t know if I can, Maria. How are we going to find him? What do we have to go on?”
“We have this man,” she said. “The man in the white Cadillac. I’m sure Harwood hired him.”
“We can’t prove he broke into your house,” I said. “Aside from that, he’s just following you around. The police can give him a warning, but I doubt they could charge him with anything. And they certainly can’t make him talk about who hired him. There are laws that protect that information.”
“Like a doctor and a patient,” she said. “Or a lawyer and a client.”
“Exactly.”
“Or a private investigator,” she said. “If I hire you, you don’t have to say anything, either. About any of this.”
I could see where she was going. I guess I didn’t blame her for wanting to protect herself, now that she had made her confession to me. And I didn’t blame her for wanting to find Harwood so she could put an end to it. I didn’t blame her for anything, not even for the shooting itself.
I was the man who’d helped Randy find her. If I was going to blame anybody, I would start with myself.
“Maria, I’ll talk to my partner. Maybe he’ll have some ideas. He’s good at this stuff.”
“And what are you good at?” she said.
“Well, the police can’t make that PI tell them who his client is, or where he is. But maybe I can. That’s the advantage of not being a police officer anymore. I don’t always have to follow the rules.”
“Do you think you can catch him?”
“I may not have to,” I said. “I’ll try calling him, see if he’ll meet me. One private eye to another.”
“Does that mean you’re on the case?”
“If I can help you, I will,” I said. “But you should know that I’m not really a private eye. It just sort of happened. I was a cop once, but-”
“Does that mean you’re on the case, Alex?”
I looked at her. I couldn’t think of a good reason to say no.
We went back inside the house, our faces red from the cold air. She told me more about Harwood, about the ways he had tried to find her in the past. After her husband’s death, she had moved to Florida, had her baby there. She’d spent four years in Tampa, without the slightest contact from him. She let herself believe that he had given up, until the day she went home and stopped to talk to her neighbor before going inside. The neighbor told her that two men had come that day to repair her refrigerator. The landlord had given them the key, or so they said. Maria knew better. She called her brother, Leopold, who was living in Seattle with their mother, and then drove right to the airport. She left everything behind.
She spent three years in Seattle with Leopold and their mother. Leopold was married. His son, Anthony, was a couple years older than Delilah. Harwood found them. They moved to Cincinnati. Leopold’s wife left him, moved back to Seattle. She couldn’t take it anymore. Harwood found them in Cincinnati, so they all went back to Seattle. Leopold tried to reunite with his ex-wife. It didn’t work. Harwood found them again. They finally moved back here to Michigan, where it had all started. As Leopold put it, they were making their stand, once and for all.
It was late afternoon by the time I left. I told her I needed to make some calls. She offered me her phone, but I told her I wanted to check for messages back at the motel in Whitehall, and that I had left my list of numbers there anyway. The truth was, I wanted to be by myself for a while, to think about what I was doing and why I was doing it. I gave her the number for my cell phone and made her promise to call me if she saw the white Cadillac.
“You’re on the case,” I said out loud, just to hear how it sounded. “You are on the case.” I shook my head and kept driving.
As soon as I made my right turn onto the main road, I saw the flashers in my rearview mirror. I pulled over to the side of the road, closed my eyes, and waited for Chief Rudiger to stick his face in my window.
The door opened. “Out of the truck,” he said.
I looked at him.
“I said out of the truck, McKnight.”
As soon as my feet hit the ground, he spun me around and pushed me against the side of the truck.
“Chief, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Hands on the top of the vehicle,” he said.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Hands on top, McKnight.”
I put my hands up. He kicked my legs apart and patted me down. Then he pulled my arms behind me and put the handcuffs on.
“Rudiger, are you going to tell me what the hell is going on here?”
He pushed me toward his patrol car. When he opened the back door, he tried to push my head down. It was an old cop trick. You push the perp’s head down like you’re trying to help him clear the top edge of the door. Accidents will happen, though, and if you happen to misjudge the clearance, you end up bashing his face right against the door frame. Which is a damned shame, especially if the man whose nose you just broke happens to be a rapist or child molester.
I thought about kicking him right in the cojones, then thought better of it. No sense making the situation any worse. I just sat there in the back of the patrol car and counted to ten. I had been doing a lot of counting to ten in the last few days, not to mention all the time I had spent in handcuffs. Along with the number of shotgun barrels I had looked into, it had been quite a week.
“You need to tell me what’s going on, Chief,” I said as he got in and closed the door. “You can’t cuff me without telling me why.”
He swung the car around, did a U-turn, and headed north.
“We’re going to the station,” I said. “Am I under arrest?”
He didn’t say anything.
I sat back, getting as comfortable as I could on the hard plastic seat. There was nothing I could do except play out the hand.
Two minutes later, he pulled in behind the town hall. He got out, his boots crunching on the gravel in the parking lot, and opened my door. “Out,” he said.
