“And spoke to someone,” she said.
I nodded. “I don’t know who it was. And of course there was no such person when I went out there.”
“Yes, I know,” Jennings said. She seemed to be working up to something. “Kate Wood, she was at your home when you received the first email correspondence from the Mills woman, is that right?”
I said yes.
“And then she was on your computer when the second email came in from her, is that right?”
I said yes again.
“Where were you at that moment?”
“What do you mean?” I said. “I was right there.”
“In the same room with Ms. Wood?”
I thought back to that night. “I was downstairs, in the kitchen.”
“And what were you doing?” Marjorie asked.
“I was phoning shelters, drop-in places for runaways in Seattle,” I said. “I was using my cell while Kate was making calls upstairs.”
“And where were you getting the phone numbers from?” Jennings asked.
“I’d grabbed Syd’s laptop and taken it downstairs.”
The two detectives glanced at each other, then looked back at me.
“So it was while you were downstairs on the laptop that Ms. Wood shouted down to you that you’d received another email from Yolanda Mills.”
“Yes,” I said. Where the hell were they going with this?
“And then what happened?” Jennings asked.
“I ran back upstairs, read the email, and there was a phone number, so I called it and talked to that woman.”
Jennings nodded. “Was Ms. Wood in the room at the time?”
“Yes.”
“And did she listen in to the phone call at all? Was she on an extension?”
“No. She wasn’t.”
“Would you say she was able to listen to both sides of the conversation?”
“I don’t understand the point of these questions,” I said.
“Could you just please answer them?” Jennings said.
“Should I have a lawyer? You said the other night I might want to give my lawyer a call.”
Marjorie cut in. “You think you need a lawyer?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why would a guy with nothing to hide need a lawyer? I mean, if you’ve got something to hide, we can shut this down right now and you can get your lawyer in here if that’s the way you want it.”
“I don’t have anything to hide,” I said, knowing as the words came out of my mouth that I was a moron if I let this go on much longer.
“You want to answer that last question?” he asked.
“I’m afraid I don’t-What was it?”
“Could Ms. Wood hear both sides of the conversation you claimed to be having on the phone with Yolanda Mills?”
Claimed?
“Um, I don’t know. Probably not.”
Now it was Jennings’s turn. “Tell me about the phone,” she said.
“What phone?”
“The phone you had in your pocket when I dropped by your house the other morning.”
“That’s the phone that was used to call me from Seattle. Or at least, it had a Seattle number.”
“That’s right,” Jennings said.
“If you know this, why are you asking me?”
“How long had you had that phone?”
“I hadn’t had it any time at all. I found it just before you showed up. I found it in the dirt. That man who was going to kill me, he even mentioned it, said they forgot it there.”
“I’ll just bet,” Detective Marjorie said.
“Look, if you’d given me a second, I’d have handed it over to you,” I said.
“We weren’t able to find any fingerprints on it, other than yours,” Jennings said casually.
Marjorie had moved away from me and was slowly pacing the room, which suddenly seemed very small, as though the walls were closing in.
He asked, “Did Ms. Wood just drop by, or were you expecting her?”
We were back to her now?
“When are we talking about now?” I asked.
“Same as a minute ago,” he said, shaking his head, like I was an idiot who couldn’t follow a simple conversation. “The night you were getting all this news from Seattle.”
“We’d talked on the phone earlier,” I said. “She was going to bring Chinese food.”
“Did you tell her to come right away?” Jennings asked.
Again, I tried to think back. “I asked her to give me an hour.” I let out a long sigh. “I went out for a drive. I do that a lot, looking for Sydney.” I remembered what I had done on that drive. “I stopped by Richard Fletcher’s house.”
“Who’s that?” he asked.
I glanced at Jennings, who already knew this story. “He took a truck for a test drive, but he really just wanted it to deliver a load of manure.”
“You sure he wasn’t delivering this story of yours?” Marjorie asked. “Because it amounts to the same thing.”
“We spoke to him,” Jennings said. “About the shooting at your house.”
“Yes?” I said hopefully.
“It was just like you said,” Jennings said. “He denies dropping by. Says he doesn’t know anything about it. He says he was home all evening with his daughter, and she says the same thing.”
“She’s a kid,” I said. “Of course she’s going to say what her father wants her to say.”
“All we have at the moment is your word against his,” Jennings said.
I was about to say something in protest, but Marjorie cut me off. “You own a gun, Mr. Blake?”
“A gun? No. I don’t own a gun.”
“I’m not talking about a licensed gun. Any gun.”
“I don’t own a gun,” I said. “I never have.”
“Never even went hunting with your dad as a kid?”
“No.”
Marjorie looked unconvinced.
“I’d really appreciate it if you’d tell me what this is all about,” I said. “I don’t understand the point of all this.”
“There never really was a Yolanda Mills, was there?” Marjorie said.
“No,” I said. “I thought we’d pretty much established that. She’s an invention. She was made up by these people, the ones working with that guy who wanted to kill me, who probably shot up my car. They wanted me out of town so they could plant that cocaine in my house. They tore the place apart so it would look like someone had been searching the place for it, but missed it. Their whole plan was for the cops to find it, and arrest me. Then I’d be out of the way.”
“And just who is it who wants you out of the way?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Detective Marjorie grinned and shook his head.
“My daughter’s missing and you think the whole thing is a fucking joke,” I said.
“Do I?” Marjorie said. “I think it’s a joke? You give me a story that’s straight out of The Twilight Zone and I’m the one making a joke? Okay, let me ask you something very serious, then, Mr. Blake. Did you make up Yolanda Mills?”
It was like getting hit in the side of the head with a two-by-four.
“I’m sorry?” I said.
“You heard me.”
I looked at Detective Jennings. “Is he fucking kidding?”
Jennings held my gaze. “Answer his question, Mr. Blake.”
I said to her, leaning closer to her, “From him, I can accept this kind of horseshit. But you? From the beginning, I’ve always thought you were in my corner.”
“This will all go a lot better, and be over a lot quicker, if you just answer the questions,” she said.
“No,” I said, sitting upright. “I did not make up Yolanda Mills.”
Marjorie said, “You sure? You sure you didn’t make her up, and use Kate Wood to back up your story? Use her as a witness?”
“What the hell did she tell you?” I asked. “There’s something you need to know about Kate Wood. No, two things. First, she’s got it in for me because I didn’t want to see her anymore. And second, she’s a nutcase.”
“Isn’t it possible,” Marjorie said, “that you waited until she came over to discover that first email, then later when you took the laptop downstairs, you sent yourself an email from a bogus Hotmail account in Yolanda Mills’s name, which Ms. Wood discovered upstairs? And then you placed your call to her, but you didn’t really place a call to anyone? That you faked it, all for Ms. Wood’s benefit?”