“I assure you, that’s not the case. Now, in the matter of William Novak—”
“Who filed the missing person report?” I cut in.
Solis blinked. “Mr. Novak’s doctor.”
“Which Mr. Novak and which doctor?”
“William’s attending physician, Dr. Booth, at Harbor View. According to his report, he became alarmed when his patient missed several appointments in a row. Mr. Novak was considered psychologically fragile. Is that all you want to know?”
“It’ll do.”
“Tell me all of your interactions with William Novak from the time you returned from England, please.”
“I’ve already gone over them with you once.”
“I am aware of that, but I want to hear it again. Please include as many particulars as you can remember.” He took a notebook out of his jacket pocket and flipped it open to a marked page. I assumed he wanted to check my new statements against the old, and that irritated me for an instant, until I thought what a good opportunity it really was to color in some persuasive bits of truth....
We fenced back and forth for a while, him picking at details, me filling in petty information that revealed little. Finally, he sat back, giving me a long, considering stare. “We should give up this pretense. I do not want to know what Michael Novak told you earlier today. What I
So he knew I’d seen Michael. I wondered which of us he was having watched.... “Do you really believe Michael Novak is responsible for his brother’s disappearance?” I asked.
“Like you with your interest in Steven Leung’s case, I find myself plucking at threads, looking for a pattern. There are more pressing cases that should occupy me, which is why I asked you here. I can spare very little time for this, but I cannot put it aside. There is a shape of a crime, but no clear picture. It is so much smoke and mirrors without substance,” he spat. Frustrated whips of orange energy around him punctuated his unhappy words.
“I honestly don’t remember some of the details,” I said. Some things
“I believe you. But what more can you bring to mind? If there’s a fact that will cement the cause of William Novak’s disappearance, I want it, whether it implicates Michael Novak or not. I do not wish to lay a charge on an innocent man. But I must know who is innocent, even if I cannot prove who is guilty.” I’d rarely seen Solis so annoyed by a case. He took them all seriously and did his best, but this puzzle seemed to bother him at a personal level.
“I don’t know what else will help you. I saw Will only twice after I returned from London. Once at Rice House Antiques, and I told you he came to see me before the incident at the gym. At that meeting I asked him to go home and stop trying to get in touch with me. He seemed less agitated and I thought he was going to take my advice, but the next evening, when things went to hell up on the hill, it was actually Will who called and got me to go up there.”
“Why did you conceal that from me before?”
“To be frank, I was in no condition to tell you at the time. I thought I’d explained everything when the FBI questioned me, but I guess I didn’t. Later, I didn’t mention it because I thought you’d blame me for Will’s disappearance. You came very close to accusing me of being involved in Kammerling’s kidnapping and Todd Simondson’s death, so why not an apparent-stalker ex-boyfriend, too? And I wasn’t thinking quite straight after getting shot. Most people don’t. As you know.”
Solis pressed his lips together and kept silent while he thought and drew his frustration back down. In a minute he asked, “Why did Novak call you?”
“Maybe because Goodall had called him.”
“Why?”
“To make sure I showed up so Goodall could frame me for what happened. Goodall was a power-hungry monster, but he wasn’t stupid. It wouldn’t have been hard for him to spot Will following me, find out who he was, and get his number. Beyond that, I’m just guessing that he must have fed Will some story about me that convinced him to sneak away from Michael and go up to Queen Anne. After that, Goodall just had to wait for Will to turn up, and then force him to call me with a cry for help. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“Did you see William at the gymnasium?”
“Yes. Fleetingly. Then I lost him in the confusion. I did try to find him, but that was about when things went to hell. I will tell you this and it’s the truth whether you believe it or not: Will was alive when I saw him last.”
“It might still be possible that he left the gymnasium and was found by Michael.”
I gave it only a moment’s thought to calculate the times before I said, “No, it isn’t. The timing doesn’t work. Unless Michael lied about when he picked up the car and when he left it at the park. The car rental company might be able to tell you where the car was at what time by looking up the tracking device information, but even without that, I saw Will later than Michael claims to have picked up the car. So unless he found Will totally by luck, wandering around
Solis sighed heavily and leaned back into his chair. “I’ll check the records. I do not
“Some things never get solved, Solis. There are more than a hundred thousand missing persons cases that have never been closed in the U.S.”
“There are as many where I came from, in a country a tenth the size. And this is no better than any of those.”
“Except that you aren’t going to put an innocent man in jail. Isn’t that worth something?”
His brow furrowed, but he didn’t reply. He wrote something on a page of his notebook and tore it out, handing it to me. Then he stood up suddenly, tucking the notebook under his arm. “You can go, Ms. Blaine.”
“Thank you,” I said, picking up the paper and rising to my feet to follow him to the door.
He showed me out and watched me go, and I had no idea what he was thinking as I walked away.
FOURTEEN
I did some more work at the office—the sort of mindless mechanical grind that isn’t hard if you have the tools to do it. It wasn’t much, but it generated billable hours and I spent the end of the day making up those bills and their accompanying reports. But my mind wasn’t on the paperwork. I worried a little about Michael, but not that either of us would find ourselves in jail. I worried more that he was now alone in a haunted world and I could offer him no more comfort. I had to admit, guiltily, that I was glad he wouldn’t want any such thing from me. I am not a good family person. I don’t have much and I’m not particularly fond of what family I have, for the most part, but I don’t wish to build another one from the wreck of someone else’s. Michael didn’t need me and I hoped he was right about finding his own life again in England. We’d both be better off without the other nearby.
More than Michael’s problem, though, I thought about Blood Lake and wondered what I was going to do about it. The paper Solis had given me bore the name of the Clallam County investigator, Deputy Alan Strother. I didn’t have a lot of confidence in Strother’s ability to get to the truth—not even a normal-world facsimile of it. He seemed like a nice guy; however, no one I’d met around the lakes was likely to take the young deputy and his questions seriously and he was not equipped to deal with the magical world at all.
The differences I’d seen in the Grey as I’d walked up to the police station had sparked a lot of new questions in my mind. Their unknown answers left me at their mercy and could do me harm if I returned to the area—and I was still trying to decide if I would. I knew the Grey and its grid of magical energy responded to the pressure of human belief and desire in strange ways, making way for the manifestation of monsters and ghosts that matched the concepts of the local people, but rogue elements could also exist—after all, I’d seen Native American monsters coexisting with pure thought-constructions and ghosts displaced through time and space to places they never
