“I would think, Mr. Turner, that it would be in the interests of those who put up the reward to have us ensure not only that information is appropriately transmitted to the police, but that also they are not personally at risk because of their inadvertent connection to these terrible events. But of course, if it is your instruction that we not consider that possibility, then naturally we’ll do as we are instructed. Do you think it would be better if I explain the situation personally to the people who’ve put up the largest parts of the reward?”
Turner gave it a minute before responding. “I don’t think so, no. I can take care of that. If you come upon anything that concerns you in this regard, you communicate it to me first and I’ll make the decision on who, if anyone, we need to contact. How’s that sound?”
Sounds like a stalemate, Hunt thought to himself. He couldn’t do anything Turner told him not to do. But Turner couldn’t very well tell him to ignore any possible threat to the people who had put up the reward. In other words, he could keep doing what he’d been doing all along and remain on the payroll. “It sounds like it ought to work,” he said. And then, losing his stomach for this circumlocution, Hunt cut back to his point. “So did Como and Neshek have a personal relationship I don’t know about?”
“Not that I’m aware of. They were professional colleagues, no more.”
“So the two of them being killed within a week of one another, and she on the day she called our reward line about his murder, that was a coincidence?”
“Possibly, though you’re right, it doesn’t seem likely. But looking for an answer among the professional community I work with is not going to get you anywhere, I can guarantee you.”
“What I’m doing is looking for an answer anywhere and everywhere. And to that end, here’s one I’d like now, if you can give it to me: What did you do last Monday night after your COO meeting?”
Turner’s eyes flared briefly. He glanced over at Mugisa, who, during this entire discussion, might as well have been a block of stone. Finally, back at Hunt, he shook his head in apparent disappointment. “I don’t think you’ve heard a word I’ve said, Mr. Hunt, but for the record, I stayed on at City Hall with some members of my staff, including Keydrion here.” He turned to the young man. “We left at about what time, Key, nine?”
“Nine.”
“So nine. I live with my wife and two children on Seventeenth Avenue near California. I got home at nine-fifteen, nine-twenty at the latest. My oldest, Ben, had five friends over making a float for their homecoming parade in my living room and all of them greeted me when I got home. How’s that?”
“That’s good,” Hunt said. Then he looked to Turner’s companion. “How about you, Keydrion? You go straight home after you dropped him off?”
Turner shook his head again in apparent disgust. “Let’s go, Key,” he said.
Hunt brought the visitor’s chair out of his office after they’d gone. He put it in its normal place across from Tamara by the window. “Any word about Jim?” he asked.
Mute, she shook her head.
“He’ll turn up.”
“This isn’t normal, this late.”
Hunt sighed, scratched at his cheek. “What do you want to do? You want to go home and wait?”
“No. What good would that do?”
“Probably none. But if you want, it’s an option.”
“No. I’ll just wait here. Maybe if Mickey checks in, I can send him out looking at the usual haunts. After he’s done with your stuff, I mean.”
“That’s okay, Tam. You could call him now if you’re that worried.”
“No, I can’t. He doesn’t have his cell phone. He’s got to call in.”
“Well, if he does.” Hunt looked down at her. “So you know, I mostly just sent him out on these errands to get him out of my sight.”
“You’re really that mad at him?”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
“He’s trying to do what he thinks is right.”
“If I didn’t think that, he’d already be fired. But he’s got me in a potentially terrible bind with Devin and Sarah, just when we’re getting back in their reasonably good graces, and also not so good a place in my own home. I really don’t like feeling that I could open my door and be looking down the barrel of one of my own guns.”
“Wyatt. Come on. She’s not going to do that.”
“Well, as I said to Mickey when he said the same thing, I hope you’re right. But I won’t know for sure, though, will I, until it happens or not?”
“It won’t.”
Hunt shrugged. It either would or it wouldn’t, and talking about it wasn’t going to make any difference. “So listen,” he said, “I was supposed to call Gloria White twenty minutes ago and then Turner showed up. So I need to touch base with her now or sooner. Meanwhile, can I bother you to call Devin, set up a time we can get together? I don’t think they know yet about the Monday- night meeting before Neshek got killed, and it wouldn’t hurt if they were following up on that too.”
“Plus, that gets them off Alicia for a while.”
“Secondarily. I thought you might notice that.”
“Softie,” she said, with an approving smile.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” he told her. “It’s probably temporary. Anyway, see if Devin can run some kind of a sheet on a Keydrion Mugisa? He’ll have to guess on the spelling, but that’s why they pay him the big bucks. He’ll do it. In any event, the kid said exactly one word that whole time, you realize that? Which makes me think he wasn’t really there to add to the meeting.”
“Why, then?”
“To let me know Turner could do more than just fire me if I got too far out of line.”
29
Aside from his physical pains, which remained substantial, Mickey felt sick to his stomach at Hunt’s response to what he’d done. Driving out through the rain once again to the Ortega campus, shifting the Volkswagen, an inordinately difficult task with his steering arm in the cast, he kept revisiting his decision-making process from the time Alicia had appeared at his bedside. Maybe the Vicodin had played a role and affected his judgment, he told himself. Nevertheless, he wished he’d brought some of them with him from the hospital. His head pounded with every beat of his pulse, every bump in the road.
And then there was the psychic pain as well. Mickey knew that Hunt was an experienced and intelligent guy, not given to extremes of emotion or flights of fancy, and Hunt didn’t think much of Alicia’s basic story. Clearly, Hunt had read Alicia’s admission of her lie to the police completely differently than Mickey had. To Mickey, it had been the baring of a burdened soul, utterly believable. To Hunt, on the other hand, this confession had pretty much sealed the deal that she should be considered the prime suspect in Como’s death. And in Neshek’s.
Although every fiber in his being rebelled at that thought, Mickey couldn’t get it out of his mind. What if she was just playing him for a lovesick dope?
He kept hearing himself explaining to Hunt, replaying the words in his head, that he could tell when someone was a good person. If anyone else had said them, Mickey knew what his response would be because it was the same one he had to his own words-what a tool.
Of course you couldn’t tell when someone was a good person. Or a bad person. Or anything. You just saw enough of someone that over time you came to trust what appeared to be their essential character.
And even Mickey would not argue that once you had the essential-character thing down, anomalies could occur. Good people did bad things all the time, sometimes by mistake, sometimes because they’d lost track of themselves in an altered chemical or alcoholic state, sometimes because smart, good people do foolish, wrong things. So to say that you could tell if someone was a good person was not only inherently idiotic, it was irrelevant to anything. It certainly couldn’t explain or predict guilt or innocence.
That said, though, he could intellectually give his assent to a slightly different, though related, proposition: Alicia Thorpe might be a good or a bad person (and she’d at least told one big whopper of a lie in a crucial setting), but there was no way in the world he could imagine her brutally killing not just one but two people.