“What could she possibly tell you? If she knew who killed her father or Strother, she’d have told me already.”
“She knows what happened to her brother and Timothy Scott.”
“Scott was the phone lineman she shot?”
“Yeah, but I’m not sure about it.”
“She says she did it.”
“On purpose? Lying in wait? That doesn’t sound like something a nineteen-year-old girl does no matter what Ridenour says about her. If you’re telling me the truth, she’d already done a stint in juvie and, believe me, she wouldn’t want to go to jail after that, so I can understand her running. But what does a kid that age know? She doesn’t have any perspective on the world. She thinks everything is her fault and she blames herself even if it’s an accident. She probably thinks she’s responsible for her mother’s death, too, one way or another.”
“You talk as though you know.”
“I’ve seen a lot of screwed-up kids. They come in two kinds: the truly hard and the scared shitless. Willow Leung’s crimes aren’t the acts of a bad kid, a hard kid; they’re wild-kid stuff. Except for the murder, which makes no sense at all. A young woman whose rap sheet is trespass, joyriding, petty B and E on abandoned buildings, and smoking dope doesn’t lie in wait and murder a man she’s never met. Not without cause.”
I knew why she’d really done it, but I was sure Faith didn’t; yet he seemed unconvinced of her guilt and that made me curious. “The report she gave was that he raped her and she shot him when he came back to try again.”
“Total bullshit. Her dad wouldn’t have let that slide if there had been such an incident. He’d have come after Scott himself. But Tim Scott had never been on that route before, so there never was a chance for him to have raped her and come back. I would bet you my salary for a year it was a pure accident. She didn’t even know him. I think she cooked up the rape story because she was scared and it’s more sympathetic than ‘I thought he was a bear.’ ”
“You don’t think she did it?”
Faith shook his head and crossed his arms over his chest. “No, I’m pretty sure she shot him. I just don’t think she murdered him. I don’t think she killed her brother, either, but I think she does know what happened to him and it’s made her scared. Look, her mother died, her half brother died, her dad was a little preoccupied with their deaths, and her half sister ain’t exactly Miss Sweetness and Light.”
“Hang on. Half brother and half sister? Willow’s mother wasn’t Jewel and Jonah’s mother?”
“Nope. Kind of surprised you missed that in your background on Leung.”
“It wasn’t a full report—I only spent two hours on it,” I objected, stung.
Faith shrugged and he went on. “Leung’s first wife, Doreen Fife, divorced him and moved down the hill to town when the two kids were in their early teens. Eventually she moved back east and got remarried. She kind of divorced the whole family, really. Stopped having contact with them once she had a new family to occupy her time,” Faith added with a snort of disgust. “Steven married Sula Yu a couple years later and Willow came along a couple of years after that. That house on Lake Sutherland’s been in Sula’s family since they built it back in the settlement days.”
“Sula’s family was Chinese?”
Faith nodded. “You don’t hear much about ’em, but there were a handful of Chinese out here as workers when they were building up the railroads. Mostly they left afterward, but the Yus stayed. Dodged the Exclusion Act by keeping to themselves up on the mountain. Mostly quiet, law-abiding folks far as I can tell. Until this generation. Willow’s been in j-camp, and she’s run a little wild, but—except for shooting Scott—her worst crime appears to have been getting on the wrong side of Brett Ridenour.”
“I thought you liked him.”
“I like him well enough and I’ll give you that he’s dedicated to his job, but he’s bitter and he’s got an inflexible mind. As far as he’s concerned, there’s Ridenour’s way and there’s the wrong way.”
I considered that and I couldn’t disagree. I sighed. “If I can get Willow to talk to you, will you let us . . . borrow that rock?”
“No. But I might misplace it for a couple of days.”
I held out my hand. “I’ll let you know.”
Faith unfolded his arms and shook my hand. “Be careful, Ms. Blaine. You’re walking in some damned tricky territory.”
I just nodded, and Quinton and I left Faith to his desk and the box full of waterlogged evidence.
TWENTY-EIGHT
“What do you think?” I asked as we returned “ to the Rover.
“It’s piezoelectric—most quartz is—but it’s got some other electrical properties as well. It’s a big piece, so I’m not quite sure what the effect would be, but it kind of reminds me of old-fashioned radio crystals. . . .”
“It’s very high-pitched.”
“I didn’t hear anything.”
“I think it was a Grey sound. Faith didn’t hear it, either.”
“Huh . . . I wonder if it’s tuned in some way . . .” Quinton mused.
“Tuned?”
“Yeah. Well, quartz has some interesting properties. Aside from the piezoelectric effect—”
“What is that?”
“It produces electricity if you deform it—that’s how the pilotless ignition on your stove works—or, if you give it electricity, it deforms in response. It’s a useful effect for transducers and—”
I interrupted him. “I’m going to take your word on that. What else does it do?”
“I’m not sure. But given that it seems to be Grey, I’d make a rough guess that it influences the amplitude or direction of magic. When it’s in place. Tuned crystals, like the ones in rudimentary radio sets, resonate to a specific frequency. In this case, it might be a specific frequency in the Grey. I wish I had some of that crystal myself. It might overcome the problems with my Grey detectors. . . .”
His excitement made my own skin buzz, and I could almost see the calculations in Quinton’s eyes as he thought about it and made mental schematics for new devices to track ghosts.
I cleared my throat. “I was actually wondering what you think of Faith and his ideas.”
Quinton blinked. I rarely ask him his opinion of people I’m working with. “He seems . . . pretty reasonable. Which means he hasn’t any idea what’s going on.”
“What about you? I mean, you don’t see ghosts. . . .”
“Sweetheart, we were attacked by walking dead things last night. I may have never seen a ghost, but I’ve heard them and I have met vampires, zombies, witches, and two-headed sea monsters that turn into homicidal canoes. I think I’m allowed to draw some conclusions from that.”
We got into the truck and I started driving up the hill. I kept thinking about the complications around the Leung children and their homes. The Newmans’ house sat nearly on top of the power nexus under the lake. That and money explained why people jumped when Jewel said “frog,” but the big glass-and-wood house hadn’t existed as long as the smaller house at Lake Sutherland with its old, time-etched circle of power and its quiet, old family who kept to themselves, sitting as firmly as Mount Storm King on the deep blue torrent of the east/west leyline. . . .
“What do you think about the
“Well . . . I haven’t met any of the suspects, so I can’t say for sure. Faith did seem pretty convinced that Willow’s not a killer. You seem to agree with him.”
“Not entirely—and that doesn’t mean she’s not a troublemaker, because she is. I know she shot Timothy Scott, but Faith may be right: It was an accident for which she still feels guilty. She told me someone had ‘stolen’ the magic circle beside the house after Jonah died. It was her mother’s circle when she was born and since Willow was her student as well as her child, it should have been
