“Did you ever go out on a date?”
He laughs. “Man, she wears one of them rings – what’s it called? A promise ring?” He shakes his head. “Shawty’s saving herself, you know? Why would I take a girl like that out? Nothing in it for me.”
“You’re a class act,” Cavallo says.
He smiles her way. I liked him better when he was crying.
“So you told her to back off,” I say, “and suddenly some dope turns up in her locker. She assumes you put it there to get her in trouble, so she trashes your car?”
“Her and that other one. The Katrina girl.”
“Katrina who?” Cavallo asks, making a note.
He scrunches his face up in contempt. “No, not Katrina who. That New Orleans girl that was Hannah’s friend.” He edges toward me, man to man. “Talk about messed up. It’s that girl you need to be talking to, if you wanna know what happened. She was the instigator.”
Cavallo’s pen is still poised. “This girl have a name?”
He shrugs. “She got one. Don’t mean I remember it.”
“Evey?” I ask.
His eyes light up. “That’s the one. Talk to her. She’s one of those people seems normal, then all the sudden they just freak out on you. I told Hannah she needed to get clear of that one, but the girl don’t listen to me.”
Cavallo stands. “Let’s take a break.”
When it came to ratting out his friends, Fontaine seemed only too helpful, but on the subject of Hannah Mayhew, his answers strike me as evasive and confused. Not that I think he strangled her and buried her in his backyard, or has her locked up in his bedroom closet. Now more than ever, I’m convinced she ended up in that West Bellfort house, bleeding out on the dirty bed. Only I don’t know how she got there. If Fontaine had picked up his brick from some Crips, we’d have a direct link, but he went to the wrong neighborhood, Latin King territory if it was anyone’s at all.
And what was really between them? He speaks so cavalierly about her, denying any attraction on his part, but then he turns around and warns her about the people she hangs with? I can’t help thinking there was more to their relationship than he wants to let on. Out of pride, maybe, assuming it’s not plain fear. Not wanting to get mixed up any deeper than he already is.
In the monitoring room, Wanda Mosser sits watching him on the screen. She looks up at us, clearly disappointed. Villanueva’s corner now stands empty.
“We need to call the question,” she says. “Ask him point-blank where Hannah Mayhew is.”
I shake my head. “It’s not him. He wouldn’t be talking if it was.”
“Do it anyway.”
Cavallo gives her the nod, then turns to me. “Who’s the Katrina girl he’s talking about?”
“Someone Robb mentioned. Evey something, short for Evangeline, like in the poem.” She looks at me blankly, but I decide now’s not the time to astonish her with my knowledge of Longfellow. “We’ll need to follow that up.”
She hands me some printouts on the vandalism. Sure enough, the incident was reported. Fontaine’s father, a Hewlett-Packard employee, even retained a lawyer and managed to get a restraining order against Hannah Mayhew, preventing her from approaching either the family home or James personally.
“So not only have we failed to recover our victim,” Cavallo says, “or seize her kidnapper for that matter, but we’ve turned up a little dirt to tarnish her name.”
“You think this might be why Donna’s reluctant to go on television? The drug suspension, the restraining order, that’s a lot of dirty laundry to put out there.”
Wanda interrupts with a long sigh. “Mama’s tired, boys and girls. And if that kid walks out of here without giving us our missing girl, that means our only real lead isn’t a lead anymore. Then I’ll be real tired, and when I’m tired I get irritable.”
“Should we beat him with a hose until he talks?”
“Don’t put ideas in my head, March. Just go in there and ride him until he either coughs something up or has a nervous breakdown.”
“He’s just a kid,” I say.
“A kid who slings dope. I couldn’t care less about his feelings.”
“It’s not his feelings I’m worried about. It’s his rights.”
“Look, he’s not going to jail for dealing, so he’s in no position to complain. If he knew he was walking on that one, I’m sure he’d thank us. I just want to find this girl and get the chief off my back, okay?”
“Where is Hannah Mayhew?”
“You gonna keep asking, and I’m gonna keep telling you I don’t know where she is. How many times I gotta say it? I. Don’t. Know.”
“James,” Cavallo says. “Where is she?”
His eyes roll for the hundredth time. I feel like rolling mine, too.
“Did you kill her?”
“No.” All trace of shock or indignation long since gone.
“Did you have someone kill her?”
He smiles wearily. “One of my posse?” He makes air quotes with his fingers. “No.”
“Is she still alive, James?”
“How. Should. I. Know?”
The door opens and Wanda signals for us to come outside. As soon as it shuts, she starts shaking her head.
“What?” Cavallo asks.
“It’s on the news.”
“What is?”
“That we have him,” Wanda says. “They’re reporting right now that we have a juvenile suspect in custody.”
“You gotta be kidding me.”
“No,” she says. “I just got off the phone with Villanueva, who’s been trying to get them to stall the story. Too late. They’re talking about it right now on TruTV.”
I shake my head. “Beautiful. So we haven’t fixed our leak.”
“What’s the plan?” Cavallo asks.
“The plan?” Wanda presses her fingertips to her temples. “I’m gonna start by shooting myself, and if that doesn’t work, I’m gonna shoot myself again.”
The two women head down the hallway, conferring on strategy, leaving me to wander back into the monitoring room. On the screen, Fontaine wipes his palms on his jeans, then scrutinizes his fingers, peeling at some loose skin around the nails.
I need to talk to Carter Robb again so I can track down this girl Evey and see what she has to say. And it’s time to call Bridger, too. I’ve waited long enough for my dna results.
Fontaine looks up at the camera. He shakes his head, then rests it on the table again, settling in for another long wait.
CHAPTER 12
As the elder sister, Charlotte grew up with competing and possibly counterbalancing senses of both entitlement and obligation, feeling she had a place in the world but also a set of duties, often unpleasant, to go along with it. Her younger sister, Ann, inherited a finely tuned sense of proportional justice, probably stemming from a childhood concern that everyone, herself in particular, receive a fair share. It’s probably too simplistic to trace their many differences in temperament and politics back to birth order, but I find myself doing it anyway.
Both sisters went into law, but Charlotte gravitated toward high-paying corporate work, scratching her civic itch with occasional involvement in the Harris County Republican Party. Ann, on the other hand, works mainly on death-row appeals, believing that while there might be guilty people behind bars, it’s a safe bet none of them received fair trials.
Even over dinner, the types persist. Charlotte, the gracious hostess, reigns over a plentiful table, while Ann subtly annoys her, double-checking that each of us gets the same amount of food and drink. Afterward, when Charlotte takes charge of clearing the dishes, Ann tries to press all of us into duty. Failing that, she insists on helping her sister in the kitchen, leaving Bridger with me.
“So I hear you got pulled into that task force,” he says. “How’s that going?”
“It would be better if you expedited those test results I’ve been waiting on.”
His eyebrows rise. “What results?”
“You said I’d need a sample to compare, so I found one – Hannah Mayhew’s mother. I think she’s the girl missing from the Morales scene. Now we’re waiting on you guys to say whether I’m right. Sheryl Green has the samples in her lab apparently.”