My car was across downtown outside the house where Bob rented rooms from the Donalds. After pressing me for some more details about Diane’s disappearance in Las Vegas, Sam headed toward Pine Street to drop me off.
“So what do you know about the owner of the house with the water park?” I asked.
He killed the volume on the radio, squelching some country lament that I didn’t really want to hear. While I waited-rating the odds at three out of ten that he’d actually answer my question about Doyle-I was thinking, and not for the first time, that most of Sam’s favorite country artists could use a few sessions of psychotherapy.
“Owner’s been out of the house for a while; it’s vacant now, was vacant over Christmas, too, if that’s what you’re wondering. And yes, we’ve talked to him-the owner-got in touch with him right away through the real estate lady who’s listing the house.”
Sam paused poignantly. Okay, provocatively. I thought he was waiting to see if my sense of self-preservation was so impaired that I would choose that moment to remind him of something he had once confessed to me about the last time-the Christmas when the little blond beauty queen was murdered three blocks away. That time, Sam admitted one night over beers, eleven long months passed before any cop, any DA’s investigator, any FBI agent-anyone in law enforcement-got around to interviewing one of the dead girl’s family’s nearest neighbors.
For eleven months after a child was viciously murdered, the cops had failed to interview the residents of a house with a perfect view of the crime scene.
To me, unbelievable.
But I didn’t remind him. He didn’t need reminding.
He went on. “The owner gave us permission to search. No hesitation, no bullshit, totally cooperative. Agent unlocked the place and we searched it. Nothing. And all this happened in the first few hours after Mallory’s father reported her missing.”
“Is the owner in town?”
Doyle. I wanted to use his name out loud, but I couldn’t. I wanted to know if Doyle was in town.
“No.”
“You guys thought Mallory might have been in there after she disappeared?”
“Vacant house right next door? It’s one of the first places we look.”
“But nothing?”
“Just a vacant house. Kitchen’s hardly bigger than mine. Terrific yard, sure, but no place to toss a football. Definitely overpriced. Hey, what isn’t in this town?”
Sam pondered the inflation of Boulder’s housing stock more than I did, but taking that detour didn’t seem productive to me. I asked, “Was the Camaro in the garage when you searched the house at Christmas?”
“Now there’s a good question. I don’t recall that it was. If it had been, somebody would’ve run the tags and talked to your guy. I’m sure of that. And I don’t think we’ve ever talked to your guy.”
I could tell that I had only about half of Sam’s attention. He was considering some angle I couldn’t see. His answer to my last question was probably in the vicinity of honest but he wasn’t telling me all that he could. But then I wasn’t telling him all that I could, either. “Something else is spinning in that big head of yours. What is it?”
He startled a bit at my question as he pulled from Ninth onto Pine. “I’m connecting dots, looking for a damn crime. I need a rationalization I can use.”
“What do you mean?”
He didn’t answer right away, not until we were almost on the Donalds’ block. My car was just ahead. The lights were still off in Bob’s rooms; I would have been truly surprised if they weren’t.
Sam flashed the Cherokee’s headlights at a van coming at us from the other direction. The driver of the van responded by flashing to his low beams for half a second before he went right back to his brights. He beeped his horn to underline his aggravation that another motorist would deign to question his choice of headlamp settings. I couldn’t see the van driver through the high-intensity glare but I would have bet he was flipping Sam off, too.
I said, “Asshole’s tugging on Superman’s cape.”
“He’s lucky I’m in a good mood.”
I smiled out loud.
“There’s nothing here for me, Alan. Your guy’s been gone, what? A day or two maybe? There’s half a thimble’s worth of blood near his door-and some clothes on the floor. No sign of forced entry. No witnesses. Guy’s gone. His car’s gone. Ergo: He split. People do it all the time without warning anybody, without telling anybody. Even their therapists. I have nothing I can give my bosses that they’ll find the least bit interesting. I take this in, I know what I’m going to hear: So far this isn’t a police matter. So that’s what I tell you: So far this isn’t a police matter.”
“Okay,” I said.
“And your friend, Diane? She’s so far out of my jurisdiction it isn’t funny. I put myself in the Vegas casino’s shoes and I’m not going to give a crap about her welfare until another few days pass and the hotel needs her room for the next convention. I put myself in a Vegas cop’s shoes, I feel basically the same way. Grown-ups do what grown-ups do. But say she’s really missing? By the time people get worried enough to look for her, it will probably be way too late to do anything to help her. I pray she’s okay, but just disappearing off a casino floor like that? I don’t like what you’re telling me. That’s just the truth. I wish it were different.”
Sam pulled the Cherokee to a stop nose-to-nose with my wagon and doused the headlights. The glow from a streetlight washed into the car from the driver’s side, silhouetting Sam against the glass.
“The dots I’m connecting are actually way more interesting to me,” he said. “See, if I put on my decoder glasses I see your footprints just about everywhere I look, which shouldn’t be too surprising considering your history with this kind of thing.”
I opened my mouth to disagree. Closed it. What was the point?
Sam went on. “First? I think maybe you and your partner, Diane, have some connection to the Millers-I’m guessing Mrs. Miller, Rachel-that I don’t know about. Want me to guess? Okay, I suspect it goes back a few years, maybe more. Could I guess what it is? Yes, I could.” He paused, allowing me to digest his conclusion.
“Next? I think that the Camaro man has some connection to the guy who owns the water-park house and for some reason that connection makes you much more nervous than a simple rented garage should make you. So it’s something else entirely. I’d like to know exactly what that connection is, but experience tells me I’m not going to get shit from you tonight, so I’m trying not to give myself a headache about it. My assumption at the moment is that you think it has something to do with Mallory Miller. Frankly, that worries me. It worries me that you’re playing detective again, and it worries me just the slightest little bit that you might be on to something that we don’t know.”
The sound of Sam’s stomach complaining that it hadn’t seen a meal in a while filled the car. The growl made me realize that I was hungry, too. I wondered if Lauren had saved me some dinner.
“More? We already know that you and Diane were the ones who found that vic on Broadway. And-”
“Sam, you just called Hannah Grant a ‘vic.’ ”
“I shouldn’t have said that. She was your friend. My apologies. Habit, I’m sorry.”
“That’s not what I meant. You think Hannah’s a victim? You think her death was a homicide? The coroner called it ‘undetermined.’ Has that changed?”
“It’s Slocum’s and Olson’s, not mine. I’m not the authority on that case. Manner was undetermined yesterday. Manner is undetermined today. End of story, sorry.”
In almost any other circumstance I would have pushed him. But I needed Sam to stay interested in Diane and Bob. We could get back to Hannah later. I couldn’t help but wonder, though: What do the cops have?
“What else?” I asked. “You were going to say something else.”
“Reese Miller,” Sam said. He’d forgotten which finger he’d used to keep track of his last point. By default, he chose his thick thumb to represent Reese Miller. “Why are you so interested in him? Where the heck does he fit into this puzzle?” He turned his head toward me and looked right at me. “Do you even know?”
I opened my mouth, closed it, and emitted some sound that was closer to a sigh than anything else. Reese was an unknown to me. I said, “No, I don’t really know anything about him.”
“Good,” he said. “Listen, I have to get the babysitter home and I promised to help Simon with a poem he’s writing. Did you have to write poems at his age? It’s a good thing. Getting kids to write a lot. Keep me up to speed on Diane.”
I opened the Jeep’s door and was freshly surprised by the bitter chill of the January night. “Thanks, Sam.”
“Yeah,” he said. Then: “Wait.”
I leaned back into the car. Sam looked away from me for a couple of seconds before he turned back. “I know you expect me to find a way to help you. But I can’t. There’s no hook for me. There has to be something I can grab on to.”
“I don’t especially want anything to do with this either, Sam. Since the day that Mallory fell off the face of the earth I’ve tried like hell to make this leave me alone. But it keeps tracking me down. From my point of view, you get close enough to this thing and you’ll find it has as many hooks as a square foot of Velcro.”
I slammed the door shut and he drove off.