She smiled, a lascivious glint in her eye. "Sorry. Guess you didn't make a big impression. I knew a lot of guys a long time ago."
He shrugged. "That's okay. There was a lot going on back then. Easy to get lost in the shuffle. Is there anyone in your life now?"
She laughed again. "I'd fight 'em off with a stick if I had the energy." Her face settled in upon itself again, revealing the sadness that defined her features. "I've tried it a couple of times. There's not much point. I have to sit down when I brush my teeth. That give you an idea how much fun I am in bed?"
He pressed on, determined to get something from her, as addicted to his elusive goal as she was to her chronic problems. "I remember a few other people from back then," he said. "Didn't you used to hang with Pete Shea? Wow. There's somebody I haven't thought about in a while."
She was giving him another of those strangely vacant stares. "What's your name again?" she finally asked.
He hesitated a split second, fearing she'd finally put the pieces together. "Joe," he answered simply.
She set her head at rest again. "Right. Sorry. Not good with names."
He didn't respond, waiting for her to react to his earlier question, before realizing she had no clue what he'd just said.
"Not a problem," he said. "I was wondering if you'd ever kept up with Pete Shea. You were friends once, right? We all lost track of him."
"No shit you did," she acknowledged. "He got the hell out of Dodge. The cops were after him."
Joe nodded agreeably. "Nothing new there. Why this time?"
"They thought he murdered some guy. He didn't-he said it was a frame-but he took off anyhow."
Despite having heard variations on this before, Joe suddenly saw it in a completely different light. He'd always assumed that Pete had disappeared because they were interested in him from the thumbprint on the knife blade. Now, feeling foolish, he wondered for the first time how Shea could have known of that interest. When they'd set out to question him, he was already long gone.
"What made him think the cops were after him?" Joe asked carefully.
"They weren't," she explained tiredly, as if to a slow child. "Not yet. He just knew they would be. It was the gun that set him off."
"The gun?" Joe prompted after a pause, both puzzled and relieved that they'd finally reached his purpose for being here.
"He found it under our mattress. Had blood on it. The papers said the man had been beaten with a gun, and Pete somehow figured this was probably it. He'd put his fingerprints on it by handling it, so he knew he was screwed. That's why he ran. Good thing, too."
"Why's that?"
"He was right, wasn't he? They did come for him. Funny thing was, they didn't ask about any gun. It was all about that stupid switchblade he played with. Guess they found that, too. Sort of pissed me off at the time-the risk I took with that gun."
She took a rest, pausing to breathe as if she'd just sprinted up a set of stairs.
"What happened to it?" Joe asked quickly, not wanting her to lose this train of thought.
"I cleaned it up and gave it to my brother. He hid it under the floorboards of his house. Made me nervous as hell bringing it to him."
"And you never saw Pete again?"
She looked incredulous. "He lived here with me for a few years. Later on. Nobody had a clue. You'd think they'd put out one of those bulletins or something. Pathetic. Maybe they pinned it on somebody else and stopped looking. I guess that could happen and you'd never know it, right? There's something for you-be on the run your whole life and not know there's nobody after you. Kind of like The Fugitive in reverse."
Joe tried to keep the excitement out of his voice. "He lived here with you?"
She'd had her eyes closed through all this and now merely exhaled wearily. "Not here, here. In Orange. I live here because of the disability thing. This was before. Years ago."
"You guys split up?"
"Yeah. You drift apart. You know how it goes."
That he did. "You keep in touch still?"
"No," she said wearily. Her voice had been steadily losing whatever strength it had. By now she was almost whispering.
"That's too bad," Joe conceded, more truthfully than she could know. "I always liked him. What makes you think that he was innocent? The evidence seems pretty damning."
"You just know a guy," she answered simply.
"Wish I could look him up," Joe lamented.
"Can't help you. By the time we split, he was drinking every day. And then, all of a sudden, he was gone. Left everything behind, even his toothbrush."
Again she seemed to be purposefully tantalizing him with leading inferences. It was like water torture. "Really? That's weird. Must've been a bummer being stuck with all that."
"No. I threw most of it out."
Joe rubbed his forehead. Naturally. He looked at the woman across from him, her eyes shut, her body limp and draped across the chair's pillows as if she'd been poured there from a glass. He tried one more time, pushing a little since he had so little left to lose.
"Most of it?"
But instead of growing suspicious of all the questions, she merely smiled. "Yeah. Stupid, I know, but I kept his shot glass collection. Wherever we'd go-Maine, New York, wherever-he'd buy a souvenir shot glass. Funny, the things some people collect and other people hang on to, always for different reasons."
She opened her eyes then and slowly straightened her head, frowning at the exertion. Joe figured he had less than five minutes left before she passed out right in front of him.
"They're over there," she murmured. "On the wall."
He glanced toward the bathroom door and saw attached to the wall next to it a glass display case, its every shelf filled with small glasses, each one decorated with some image or motto or decoration. He rose from his seat and crossed over to it.
He scanned its contents, tracking the couple's travels all over New England, again struck by the fact that Pete Shea had done all this with an open arrest warrant out on him.
The case had a door. He opened it noiselessly, seeing that Katie had once again settled down, and took a closer look. On one of the glasses directly before him, there was a fat fingerprint visible in the light slanting in through the window.
"You ever use these?" he asked.
In the answering silence, he turned to look at her again. This time it appeared she was fast asleep. He placed the glass gingerly in his handkerchief and slipped it into his pocket.
He crossed back over to her. "Katie?" he asked quietly.
She didn't stir.
He touched the crown of her head with his fingertips, as a parent might a sleeping child's after a long, hard day. "Take care, Katie Clark," he whispered, and showed himself out.
Chapter 11
What good's a print going to do?" Willy Kunkle asked Joe. "We already have his prints on file."
Joe was back in Brattleboro, staring at the shot glass nestled amid a small, ignored stack of pink call-back notes in the middle of his desk. It was his sole trophy so far in what was starting to look like a repeat exercise in futility.
"And didn't you say she'd moved since he split? That means she must've packed all that crap, touching each and every item. The print's probably hers."
Gunther shrugged. "It was something she said. She was impressed we never caught him, even though he was wandering all over New England. Made me think that if we'd missed something as obvious as his living with his old girlfriend, maybe we were missing something just as obvious now." He stood up, preparing to follow Willy out the door. "I'm going to run Shea's old prints through AFIS. We never did anything like that when we were looking for him, you know? Never sent them to the FBI, never circulated them anywhere. We just kept them here, relying on a physical description for the all-points." He scratched his head. "It was so long ago. It never crossed my mind he could've been busted somewhere else and his prints entered into the system. That would've waved a red flag right off the bat."