“Because she’s a whore, and he should either leave her or live with it.”
“Exactly.”
“So you told her yes, go ahead and tell him that.” She looked at him. “Except you didn’t, did you?”
“I probably should have,” he admitted.
“But you didn’t.”
“I didn’t, no.”
“You’re going back,” she said.
“Not right away. I want to spend the rest of this week right here, and come Sunday I want to take Jenny to the zoo.”
“To make sure the alligator is still dead. And Monday you go back to Chicago?”
“Monday or Tuesday. There’s no big rush.”
“And you’ll go through all that again? Waiting for the new Marlboro Man to show up so you can follow him?” Her eyes narrowed. “No,” she said. “You won’t have to do that, will you?”
“Not this time.”
“So you can leave the fedora home. That’s good, I wouldn’t want anything to happen to it. I don’t suppose you’ll need the jar, either. What happened to the jar?”
“I left it in the rental car.”
“Well, if the next person they give it to is a detective, I’m sure he’ll appreciate it. You don’t have to do a stakeout this time because you know who it is, don’t you? But how can you know?”
“From the husband’s description,” he said.
“Big, broad-shouldered, and muscular.”
“Plus a detail Dot almost didn’t mention, because she didn’t realize the significance. He was wearing boots.”
“So?”
“Western-style boots,” he said. “And a cowboy hat.”
It was Tuesday afternoon when he boarded the City of New Orleans, and no great surprise when Ainslie greeted him by name and gratefully accepted the customary twenty dollars. This time Keller had remembered to check his bag, but had held onto both his iPhone and the Pablo phone, along with something to read. He’d thought it might feel strange to be back on the train again, but all it felt was familiar, as if this was something he did all the time. Which, in a sense, it was.
He drank a cup of coffee, he looked out the window, he read for a while. He went to the diner and found something to order on the menu he’d long since memorized; back in his roomette, he had brief conversations with Julia and Jenny on the iPhone, and with Dot on the Pablo phone, and around ten he summoned Ainslie to make up the bed.
He slept deeply, and when he came back from breakfast Ainslie told him they were running late. “We were right on schedule,” he reported. “Got into Homewood at twenty minutes of eight, which made us a couple of minutes early, and then they held us there with no explanation, and now it looks like we’ll be an hour late getting to Chicago. I just hope you don’t have an early appointment.”
“No, I’m in no rush,” he said.
“Well, I’m glad to hear that, Mr. Edwards. I can now tell you the delay had nothing to do with this train. There was a southbound freight train way up ahead of us, not even on our track as it was heading south and we were heading north—”
“So it’s good it was on the other track.”
“Yes sir, you’re right about that. But don’t you know a fool in a white van went around the barrier? Now he’s dead, and the man driving that freight train’s got a few bad weeks in front of him, plus the nightmares he’s sure to be having. And all of us in another train entirely are an hour late getting to Chicago.”
“He wasn’t wearing a cowboy hat, was he?”
“How’s that, Mr. Edwards?”
“Oh, it’s nothing, Ainslie. Just thinking out loud.”
He picked up his suitcase at Baggage Claim, caught a cab to O’Hare. Hertz had a car ready for him, and it was a Subaru like the one he’d had before. That did make it easier, it saved the hour or so you spent flicking on the lights when you were trying to signal a left turn. And he knew how to adjust the seat to his liking, and cope with the GPS.
Not that he really needed the GPS. He’d driven the route too recently to have forgotten it. Still, he set the thing, and let the woman’s voice give him a heads-up half a mile before each turn. It was reassuring to know that, should his mind wander, she was there to keep him on the right track.
He drove straight to the Super 8, where they had a room for Mr. Miller. It was a different room from last time, still on the ground floor but at the opposite end of the building, but it ceased being different when he opened the door to a unit that was identical to the one he’d had before. Which was inevitable, he supposed, because it was a Super 8 Motel, and the units were pretty much identical all over the country. It certainly stood to reason that two rooms in a particular motel would be indistinguishable one from the other. The same layout, the same furnishings, the same configuration in the bathroom, the same notice about throwing the towels on the floor to save water, or whatever their reason was for wanting you to do it. He was fairly certain global warming came into the picture somewhere.
Still, it gave him a turn.
If you didn’t mind getting your picture taken, you could buy just about anything at Walmart.
They had security cameras all over the place, both inside and outside the enormous store, and that was almost reason enough for Keller to go someplace else. But where could you go without leaving a photographic record? There were security cameras in his motel, and in its parking lot. More Americans had starring roles on closed-circuit TV than appeared in YouTube videos, and from what he’d read it was even worse in England, where an unrecorded moment outside one’s own home had become a rare thing indeed.
But an unsolved crime, here or in the UK, was less of a rarity, so Keller wasn’t sure the cameras made all that much of a difference. And the footage — did you even call it that when it was digital? — well, whatever you called it, they’d need a reason to look at it, wouldn’t they? Something that lingered in a clerk’s memory, something recorded that triggered suspicions.
Say you wheeled your cart to the checkout counter, and the only item in it was a wicked-looking Bowie knife with a nine-inch blade. Say the clerk pointed out that they had whetstones in Aisle Fourteen, and you said you figured it was sharp enough as it was, and you were only planning to use it once.
“A gun would be better,” you could add, “if it weren’t for that darned waiting period.”
Keller, wheeling his cart, chose a print, matted and framed, of two kittens worrying a ball of yarn. Two aisles over he found picture hooks, and a three-foot coil of picture-hanging wire.
Next stop, hammers. The one he picked struck him as identical to the one he’d found in the Marlboro Man’s van, and felt very much the same in his hand. The same weight, the same good balance, the same black rubber easy-grip handle.
“That’s so sweet!” the checkout clerk said, holding the print at arm’s length. “For your daughter’s room?”
“My niece,” Keller said.
“Well, I know she’ll love it.”
She gave him two shopping bags — the framed print got one all to itself — and he carried them to the car. Half a mile away he parked at a strip mall, and added the picture hooks and the wire to the bag with the print, depositing the lot in a trash can.
He drove off with the hammer on the seat beside him.
Why had he bothered to correct the woman? Why insist the picture was for his niece and not his daughter?