item. “Down here, he stops by Costigan’s place. Then he stops a few minutes later at the Newmans’. That’s not too strange since they lie along the same route. But then he goes back and stops at the Log Cabin Resort—isn’t that a strange coincidence—about four hours before you called us from there. Then he turns it around and drives out to Lake Sutherland and goes around the back side of it and stops at three different houses, including Steven Leung’s. All of them are unoccupied. He goes to Fairholm, around to Camp David Jr. and back, then heads to Lake Sutherland again. He was out of the car for about thirty minutes at that point, and he didn’t log what he was doing, so I assumed he was eating or having a piss, but the car wasn’t near any facility because all of them are still closed and there’s no one resident at the small lake who’d have let him.”
“So where’d he go and what did he do?” I asked, as expected.
“I don’t know. Nothing else on the list or the log points to anyone specific,” Faith replied, rubbing the scar under his hair.
I frowned and started to push my hair back, mirroring his movement until I caught myself. Faith gave me another of his crooked cat-smiles. “It points to no one,” I said, disappointed. “I was sure it led to something.”
A wry quirk twisted his mouth. “It does. We just don’t know what. And that’s why I’m giving it to you. I don’t want you getting into trouble, but putting the extra brainpower on the problem won’t hurt. You been up here most of a week, so I figure you might see something I’m missing.”
I gave him a suspicious glance. “How do you know how long I’ve been in town?”
“I like to be thorough. I checked with the hotels and guesthouses,’cause you don’t look like the camping type.”
I snorted. It wasn’t that I wouldn’t or couldn’t go camping; I’d just never had much cause or chance to. Though I suppose surveillance details were kind of like camping, in a homeless-guy-living-in-his-car kind of way. And thinking about cars made me ask, “Hey, do you have a list of the items found in Leung’s car? I’d like to take it to my client and see if anything stands out.”
Faith glanced down, thinking. “I believe I do. Hang on a second.” He banged around on the nearest computer keyboard for a moment and coaxed a page from a cranky laser printer that made grinding and coughing noises and shook as if the page were being generated by a hidden Gutenberg press tended by asthmatic souls of the damned. Faith handed the still-warm paper to me. “Good luck with that. And if you come up with any ideas, don’t act on ’em. Call me first.”
I agreed, knowing I was probably lying. “Oh, one more thing,” I said as he shooed me toward the door.
Faith cocked me a look with raised brows. “Yeah?”
“What happened at the lake in 1989?”
“’Eighty-nine?” He gave it some thought. “Nothing. Nothing I know about at least. Ridenour’d be the one to ask. He would have been pretty new back then, but I imagine if anything significant happened, he’s the one who would know.”
I plunged back out into the rain in Faith’s wake and watched him head deeper into the parking lot until the rain hid him from sight, reflecting light from the sodium vapor lamps into scrims and rippling swags of liquid gold streaked black in the fallen night.
The rain was no heavier by the water, but the wind off the Strait of Juan de Fuca blew it in at a cutting angle that filled the windshield with blurry white lines. I had to concentrate on the road just to be sure I was on it, and not wandering into some ghostly pocket of the Grey, but I found the Black Ball Ferry Line’s passenger pickup zone without having to circle around more than once.
There was only one passenger at the dock at that time of night, since the last boat from Victoria hadn’t arrived yet. The size and shape were right, but in the downpour it was hard to tell if it really was Quinton. After what had happened to Strother, I was a touch more paranoid than usual and moved my pistol into the center console. I kept my hand on it as I unlocked the doors.
He bounded into the front seat and shut the door, sweeping off his hat and dropping it onto his boots along with his backpack. Then he pushed back the hood of the sweatshirt he had on underneath the coat, and as the light fell on his face I almost shot him.
“Whoa!” he shouted, putting up his hands as he saw my hand on the gun. “Next time I’ll say something first.”
I let my breath out in a relieved puff at the familiar sound of his voice and drew my hand away from the pistol. I peered at him for a second, just in case it wasn’t really Quinton but some kind of Grey trick. “What the hell happened to your hair?” I asked as I started to pull the truck back onto the road.
He made an embarrassed chuckling sound and ran one hand over his head. His long ponytail was gone and his hair was clipped into a neat, short style that probably looked boringly corporate when it wasn’t damp and mussed. He’d shaved off his beard as well, and his face seemed too large and a little too hard around the jaw without it. He looked more like the old ID photo I’d seen of him when the NSA had come calling a couple of years earlier than like my beloved, shaggy anarchist. I recognized him from other details as well, but it took some restraint not to stare at his broad cheekbones and naked chin.
“Well . . . um . . . I had a need to change my look.”
“Are you running from someone? Is that why you’ve been so jumpy? Is that why you’re here?”
“Not as such.”
“How ’bout you get to that ‘such’ and tell me what’s going on?”
“Could we go somewhere drier and quieter for that? And private?” he added, reaching into his pocket for his pager. Then he popped off the back and removed the batteries, eyeing me with an unspoken suggestion that I do the same.
I pointed at my phone where it sat in one of the cup holders. Quinton took it and removed its battery also, putting the two parts in separate holes in the console. He seemed to breathe easier once it was done.
“What’s the problem?” I asked.
“It’s a long story. I’d rather tell it all at once. Where are you staying?”
“I was at a hotel a few blocks away, but I wasn’t planning on going back there. One of the local cops —”
“Was killed in your previous hotel room. Yeah. I got that story out of the desk clerk. So you were going to take a different room tonight?”
“It sounded like a good idea to me.”
“Is there some other place, not a hotel, we could go? Someplace a bit . . . off the grid?”
I thought about the key Geoff Newman had given me. The Leung place wasn’t perfectly safe, but it wasn’t likely anyone would come there by chance. It also was guaranteed to have no phone or Internet connections, and probably no cable, either, so if Quinton was being paranoid about electronic surveillance, it was the best choice we had, short of staying in the Rover. We’d done that before and I hadn’t cared for it.
“I have a place. . . .”
TWENTY-FIVE
Leung’s house was shuttered tight and silent as ever, and a strange luminescence swirled around the eaves like a flock of ghostly swallows, though the energy playing on the rise nearby had shifted lower and darker since I’d last been there. I hoped that was caused by Jin’s having cleaned up the magic circle there and not by something more sinister. I’d had quite enough of sinister for the day and even though I knew there was something unpleasant behind Quinton’s appearance in Port Angeles, I was hoping it wouldn’t wreck all chance of a quiet night snuggled together under the pile of cheap blankets we’d bought in town. I was counting on Geoff Newman’s wariness to have sealed his lips about lending me the house key, so no one would turn up to disturb us.
The hike in from where I’d left the Rover at a discreet distance from the cabin had left us more than damp around the edges, but the lakefront building with its big decks and upper-floor entry was sound and dry inside even after it had been closed up for five years. Most of the houses around the lakes were summer homes, but this one had been meant for year-round residence, so even though there was no water or electricity, it had everything else
