How, when we pulled into the parking lot, Earl asked whose car was whose.
And how, once we’d gotten the jump on Greenway and Carpington, Earl insisted that I stay and keep them covered while he left with their keys and moved their cars behind the office.
That would have been when he took the shovel from his pickup and put it in the trunk of Carpington’s car.
The only thing I hadn’t worked out a theory for was why Earl killed Stefanie Knight. But I had enough.
I started running, the grocery bag flopping at my side. I jogged all the way up Chancery Park, was struggling to catch my breath as I inserted my key into the door. I dumped the groceries on the kitchen counter and grabbed the phone.
I got the main police switchboard, then keyed in Lorenzo Penner’s extension. It rang three times before the voicemail cut in.
“This is Detective Lorenzo Penner. Leave a message at the tone.”
“Hi, it’s Zack Walker. Call me back as soon as you get this message.” And I left my number.
I glanced at the clock. After five. Sarah would be home soon. Where were Paul and Angie?
I’d grabbed the receiver off the phone so quickly when I’d come in that I’d failed to see the flashing message light. There were two, one from Paul and one from Angie.
Paul said, “I’m at Hakim’s, hanging out, should be home by six.”
Angie said, “I’m working in the school darkroom. I’m getting a lift, see you around five-thirty.”
Ever since that night, we’d all been very good about letting each other know where we were going to be, and if we were going to be late.
I unpacked the groceries, tore the wrapper off the ground beef and began forming patties. It looked as though Paul and Angie were going to join us for dinner, although with teenagers, you never knew until the last second who was actually hungry or not.
So I made half a dozen. Paul, if he had any appetite at all, could be counted on to eat at least two. I rinsed lettuce leaves, cut up some tomatoes, glancing every few seconds at the phone, willing Penner to call.
“Come on,” I said out loud. “I’m solving your goddamn case for you, asshole.”
Maybe my message hadn’t been detailed enough. Maybe he’d think I wanted him to call back because I had more questions. I should leave another message. Tell him I’d found Devlin Smythe. That Jesse Shuttleworth’s killer was living right across the street from us. And that he’d killed someone else, too. A woman out here in Oakwood, whose murder at the moment was being pinned on somebody else.
But first, I’d fire up the barbecue. While it was heating up, I’d try Penner again, maybe get the switchboard to try to find him.
The phone rang. I had the receiver off the hook before the end of the first ring. “That was fast,” Sarah said.
“Oh, hey,” I said.
“Sorry, expecting someone else?”
“Actually, yeah. I’m waiting on a call.”
“Something going on?”
“Sort of, but let me tell you all about it when you get home. How close are you?”
“Another fifteen minutes, I’ll be there.”
“Great, I was just about to get the barbecue going.”
I opened the sliding glass doors, stepped out onto the deck with a plate of patties. I set the plate on the counter to the left of the barbecue, opened the lid, and turned the valve on the gas tank. I heard the familiar hiss of gas escaping from the jets in the bottom of the barbecue.
I pressed the red ignition button. Click. Nothing.
I pressed it a second time, faster and harder, figuring this would force a spark. Again, nothing.
We were going to have to use the old drop-the-lit-match-in-the-bottom trick again, I figured, and-
“Zack.”
I whirled around, startled. Earl was standing at the step that led up from the backyard to the deck. He was in a pair of dirt-caked jeans, his Blue Jays sweatshirt, and there was the familiar cigarette tucked between his lips. In his right hand, he held his gun. The same one we’d taken with us the other night.
“Earl, Jesus, you scared the shit out of me there,” I said. “You shouldn’t sneak up on people like that.”
Earl took a step toward me, and I backed up, away from the barbecue, toward the door into the kitchen. “Earl, what’s with the gun?”
“You know who I am,” he said. “When you saw the tattoo, you knew.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Earl.” As I took another step back, Earl moved forward. He was standing almost in front of the barbecue now.
“I know you. And I know Sarah works for the paper. You mentioned one time she worked on the Shuttleworth thing. I know you guys follow the news, and that a melted-clock tattoo would mean something to you. Besides, I could see it in your face the moment you saw it.”
I said nothing. I was listening to the almost noiseless hiss of unignited propane.
“I gotta move on,” Earl said. “But not before I take care of a few unfinished matters.”
I swallowed, hard. I took my eyes off the gun and looked into Earl’s. “How could you do it, Earl? Or should I call you Devlin from now on?”
“Do what?”
“How could you murder a five-year-old girl?”
“She saw me.”
“Saw you what?”
“I was breaking into someone’s house, forced the back door open, and there she was in the yard, standing there. Says to me, you’re not supposed to do that. Says she’s going to tell. I tried talking to her, but she started to cry, and I had to stop her from doing that.” Earl shook his head. “Women are always ratting me out. Young, old, doesn’t matter.”
“So you killed her.”
“I had to hold my hand over her face to make her stop making noise. I told her to stop crying but she wouldn’t pay any attention.”
“And Stefanie,” I said. “Why did you kill her?”
Earl’s eyebrows shot up. I guess he didn’t realize that I’d figured that part out as well.
“That didn’t work out with her. We went out a couple times, nobody knew. But I don’t know, I just can’t figure out what it is about women. They don’t connect well with me. I don’t think many women have the capacity to understand, do you know what I mean?”
I said nothing.
“And then I found her looking through some of my stuff, she found these other IDs I had, for Daniel Smithers and Danny Simpson, and she asked about them, said she’d heard those names on the news, that they were other names some guy the cops were looking for had used. Stefanie, she was in no position to judge me. She fucked guys so they could be blackmailed. She was of very low moral character.”
The smell of gas was reaching me, and I was further away from the barbecue than Earl. Couldn’t he smell that?
“But I guess even Stefanie couldn’t abide a child-killer,” I said. “That’s why she was on the run. She was scared of what she’d found out about you. She was scared of what you might do. So she printed herself up some cash, grabbed the ledger with the idea of maybe selling it back to Greenway, and decided to get as far away as possible.”
Smythe reached up with his left hand, took out his cigarette for a moment, exhaled. The tip glowed red as he put it back in his mouth and drew in. And I thought, No, he can’t smell it. He couldn’t smell that rotting food in his refrigerator. He had no sense of smell.
“I broke into her house, waited for her. A long time. She didn’t have her car. And I took her into the garage to try to talk some sense into her.”
“You decided to go back for the shovel.”
Smythe nodded. “I just wasn’t sure I’d wiped down the handle. They got me on file, my prints were all over my room in the city. I hadn’t gotten rid of it yet, when you came over in the middle of the night with Trixie.”