And with that, he kept returning to another fundamental question: Why would she have come back to him, instead of just simply blowing Dodge? What, he asked himself, would be in it for her? Mickey’s involvement with her could not keep her from getting arrested if the cops came to that. If anything, he reasoned, the fact that she had come back to Mickey argued that she desperately wanted the killer to be found. Otherwise, why wouldn’t she have fled after her last interview with Juhle and Russo? Instead, she’d found out he was in the hospital and she’d come running to him.
Why would she have done that if she didn’t believe he could save her? She was truly innocent and she would put her trust in the one person who absolutely believed in her, that’s why.
Of course, there were other, more disturbing, possible answers. But let Wyatt Hunt agonize over them, Mickey wasn’t going to.
Even if it meant infuriating his boss, and it did.
Even if it meant his job, and it might.
The bottom line was that it was a matter of faith. And for good or ill, Mickey believed her. He believed in her. If she were lying and betrayed him…
But he shook his head. That wasn’t happening. He wasn’t going to go there.
Russo and Juhle were parked outside of Alicia’s house again.
“I’ve got this amazing sense of déjà vu,” Juhle said. “Wasn’t she not home yesterday at this time too?”
“It was later, but yes.”
“Where does she go?”
“This is probably mostly when she kills her victims. Except those days she’s surfing.”
“She kills people before she goes to work?”
“Right. Usually. If she’s not too busy surfing, or if the waves suck. And then, remember, she’s got to get cleaned up afterward, either from the killings or the surfing, or both, if she’s got to be dressed up to greet the carnivores.”
Juhle, nodding sagely, looked at his watch. “How long you want to give it?”
They’d already been parked here for nearly a half hour. They had been on their way out to Nancy Neshek’s to canvass the neighborhood, but the idea of slogging to mostly empty houses through the rain to try to talk to rich people who didn’t look out their windows had persuaded them both to take another stab at interviewing Alicia Thorpe. After the scarf identification yesterday, both of them thought she was close to breaking, and now Russo was of the opinion that even though they didn’t know definitely whose semen it was, they could drop the news, which they’d held back yesterday, about its presence on the scarf and see if they could break her at last.
Yesterday, she’d remained strong in her insistence that she’d lost the scarf a few week ago, but that, too, was something they had on tape that she could possibly contradict, and once that happened, their leverage would increase exponentially. Neither of them had much doubt about her factual guilt, and they felt that they needed just one small break to have an excuse to put on the handcuffs and take her downtown, and once that happened, the confession was pretty much just going to be a matter of time.
“Ten more minutes,” Russo said. “Then we get something to eat and come back one time on our way out to Seacliff.”
“The quality of decisiveness,” Juhle said, “is not strained.”
“What?” Russo asked.
At that moment, the cell phone on Juhle’s belt went off with a ringtone from an old-fashioned telephone that was so loud it made them both jump.
“You gotta change that,” Russo said.
But Juhle, already on the call, didn’t even hear her. “Yeah,” he said, and then again. “Yeah, but we’ll be in the field most of the day. Nothing so far, but if he’s interested, he can catch us down at the Hall when we get back in. I’ll be on this phone. Right.” He listened for another few seconds, then said, “You could tell him that maybe he ought to be checking those himself, but I wouldn’t waste too much time on it if I were him.” He rolled his eyes over at Russo. “Because we’ve already got a person of interest with no alibi for that night, as he knows… no… no… no, we like thorough, that’s fine. All right. Just a sec, I need something to write with.” Resting the phone against his ear, he pulled out his little notebook and the pen from his pocket. “Okay, shoot. You want to spell that? All right, you’re not sure, it’s phonetic. Got it. We’ll try. Okay. Fine. Later.”
Hitting the disconnect button, he said to Russo, “That was Hunt’s girl, and-”
“You mean his secretary?”
“Yes, of course. What could have gotten into me that I said ‘girl’? You’d think that after all those weeks of sensitivity training… what I meant to say was that was Hunt’s executive assistant, is what I was saying. He wanted us to know that Turner’s Communities of Opportunity, including Neshek, had a meeting at City Hall on Monday night before she was killed.”
“Okay.”
“And he wanted us to check everybody’s alibi. I told her to tell him we already had Alicia’s lack of one and liked it a lot, but if he got a better one, he should let us know.”
“I heard you. So what’d she have you write down?”
“A guy’s name.” Juhle looked down at his pad. “Keydrion Mugisa or something like that. He’ll have a sheet somewhere. We’ll find him. One of Len Turner’s people. I’m thinking probably not Irish.”
“What about him?”
“I don’t know. That’s what Hunt’s asked me to find out.”
“We gonna do it?”
“Might as well. I don’t see how it could hurt.”
Al Carter was sitting in the lobby at a fold-up lunch-style table among a large group of what Mickey had come to recognize as Battalion members-mostly young men, but some young women as well, all reasonably well-dressed and well-groomed. A hum of comfortable, loose banter floated out across the lobby all the way to the door where Mickey entered.
He was here mostly to see Lorraine Hess about her whereabouts and activities on Monday night, but when he saw Carter, Mickey thought of a question he wanted to ask him and headed over that way first. They were working from boxes filled with perforated forms-pledge cards-that they were tearing into thirds, organizing in some way, and then sending the oblong mailing through a Pitney Bowes automatic postage machine. When they’d gone through that, another few of the Battalion kids packed them into a growing pile of open-topped white cardboard boxes that Mickey guessed would soon be on their way to the nearest post office, or possibly even all the way down to the main station at Rincon Annex, if the mass mailing was big enough.
Mickey got about two-thirds of the way there when Carter saw him. After an infinitesimally brief look of confusion or maybe impatience, the older man rearranged his face into its natural and neutral expression and pushed himself back from his folding chair. Closing the now-small distance between them, he extended his hand. “Al Carter,” he said, reintroducing himself.
“Yes, sir. I remember. Mickey Dade.”
“Well, Mickey Dade, what happened to you?”
“I got hit by a car. Or rather, my car got hit by a car. It looks worse than it is.”
“I’m glad to hear that. ’Cause if it was as bad as it looks, you’d be dead at least twice. You want to sit down a minute?”
“That’d be good.”
They got over to the wall by the administrative offices and sat down where a few extra fold-up chairs had been set up. “I met your boss yesterday at Mr. Como’s memorial,” Carter began. “Hunt. So what brings you down here to these environs again?”
“I’ve got a few more questions for Ms. Hess, but then I saw you and I thought I’d ask-”
Carter stopped him by replying, “I already told your Mr. Hunt about Mr. Como firing Alicia that last morning. I don’t know what I can add to that.”