“She’s got an alibi,” Pine said.
“Well, you might want to double-check that alibi,” Elliot replied, setting his coffee cup on Pine’s bookshelf.
He had stopped by Tacoma PD on his way back to the ferry at Steilacoom. He had assured Pine—who hadn’t looked all that thrilled to see him—that he couldn’t stay long, as he had Sheba in the car. Pine had seemed relieved at that, but was less relieved now that he’d heard what Elliot had to say.
“Mills...” Pine stopped himself. He said with obvious restraint, “You can’t go around pretending you’re in some official capacity that allows you to question people.”
“I didn’t and I’m not.” Elliot tried to match Pine’s reasonable tone. “She knew who I was and she wanted to talk to me. There’s something going on worth following up.”
Pine closed his eyes, reminding Elliot for a moment of SAC Montgomery. Pine forwent the deep breathing however.
Elliot said, “I know you think my objectivity and maybe even my judgment is compromised because of my personal involvement. All I’m saying is something about her is off.”
Pine opened his eyes. “Something about her is off,” he said. “She’s still in love with that psychopath, even though she’s aware he is a psychopath. But her alibi is rock solid. She was out of town on a yacht with twelve other people when Lance was taken. She volunteered to allow law enforcement to search her home. He’s not there.”
Elliot was silent.
“I’m sorry,” Pine said. “I know...” He sighed. “No, I don’t know. But we’re doing everything we can. Hell, we’re even doing things that, strictly speaking, we can’t.” He added meaningfully, “Or shouldn’t.”
Elliot remembered the surveillance footage Pine had sent him. He nodded. He couldn’t help saying “Today makes it one week.”
“I know.” There was bleak recognition in Pine’s eyes. He changed the subject. “Look, I do have some good news for you. Marquessi has reviewed the shooting and has declined to press charges against you.”
Elliot nodded.
“You could look a little more relieved,” Pine told him.
“I am relieved.”
“Yeah. Well, just don’t shoot anyone else this year, okay? You’re over your quota as a private citizen.” He returned to the investigation into MacAuley’s homicide. “With the information you gave us, we’ve managed to put together at least a partial guest list for MacAuley’s party...”
The interviews were ongoing. The catering crew and the bartender had all been questioned and cleared.
Elliot half listened to Pine’s update, wrestling with his own thoughts. He remembered the discussion with his father and Nobb, and said, “What about the girl?”
“What girl?”
“The dark-haired girl who was leaving the party last Friday night when I arrived. I know I told you about her. She seemed upset.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t seem to place any special importance on her.” Pine was looking rapidly through his notes. “We’ve tentatively identified her as Jordan Perigee. She’s an art student at PSU.”
“So she hasn’t been interviewed yet?”
“Not yet, no.”
“I think she should be interviewed ASAP.”
Pine’s eyes narrowed, he opened his mouth, but then swallowed it. “Okay, Professor. We’ll make Jordan Perigee a priority.”
“Thanks,” Elliot said. He added, “And, sorry. I know I’m straining our...friendship.”
Pine said with a sour grin, “Luckily, we were never friends, so I expect no less. Are you sure MacAuley didn’t give you more of a hint as to who his source was?”
Elliot shook his head. “You’ve got a better shot of figuring that out than I do.”
They had been over this too. They had been over everything.
Pine told him the car park surveillance footage had been sent to the FBI, but despite efforts to enhance, it remained impossible to see the van’s license number.
Everything that could be done was being done.
It was not enough.
As Elliot rose to go, Pine said, “When MacAuley spoke to you to the last time, he thought that by then you should have guessed who the accomplice was. Right?”
“Right. Yes.”
“So it must be someone obvious?”
“In his opinion. He might not have been right in his suspicions.”
“True.” Pine commented casually, “If that doesn’t look like hell. Three members of our task force at that goddamned party and a couple of days later MacAuley is dead. I’m just waiting for the papers to get hold of that one. Do you think there’s a chance MacAuley invited whoever he thought was MacAuley’s accomplice to this lunch of yours?”
Elliot met Pine’s speculative stare. “I’m guessing he was hoping for a tête-à-tête, but don’t know it for a fact. He liked to hunt big game. He liked the thrill of the chase. So is it possible he thought hosting a lunch for me and this mysterious accomplice would be entertaining? It’s possible.”
“I never liked that guy. I hated his show.”
Elliot shrugged. He had not liked MacAuley either, but he felt MacAuley’s death was partly his own failure.
“Well?” Pine asked abruptly.
“Well what?”
“You know what. Do you think Corian’s accomplice could be Dannon or Woll?”
Elliot had been wondering when this thought would occur to someone else. As little as he liked it, as much as he’d tried to dismiss it, it wouldn’t be the first time a cop had turned out to be a serial killer.
And it might provide an explanation for how Corian had managed to operate with impunity for so many years.
“What do you know about either of them?” Elliot asked. By now he knew quite a bit, but none of it justified accusing fellow LEO.
“Not a lot,” Pine said, seeming to read his mind. “And if word gets out that we’re investigating brother police officers, you know how that’s going to go.”
We’re. Yeah, Pine had gone out on a limb. No question.
“I know,” Elliot said. “It might be better to let me do the actual digging. I’m not a cop or any kind of law enforcement anymore, and I don’t care who hates my guts.”
“If you want to put it that way,” Pine said. “For the record, I’m not the first person to suggest it wouldn’t be easy to overpower a guy like Lance. Unless—”
“Unless you were someone he knew, someone he trusted, considered an ally. Yes, I thought of that too.”
“I figured you would,” Pine said.
* * *
Despite his declaration to Pine, when Elliot reached home that afternoon, he did not instantly launch further investigation into Woll and Dannon. He took Sheba for a very long walk and then he came home and sat on the deck Tucker had built and stared out at the autumn trees and blue water.
Something had happened, some of the fight had gone out of him, from the moment Honoria Sallis had offered her condolences in that cool voice with her cool smile.
Not that she had said anything he didn’t already know. The clock had started ticking from the moment Tucker had been taken. In fact, the very idea of a clock was a self-protective fantasy. It was far more likely the clock had stopped when Tucker had disappeared.
What would be the point of keeping him alive?
Not only would it be dangerous and difficult, what would it achieve?
There had been no ransom demand. No demand of any kind.
Maybe one reason Elliot needed to believe that Tucker’s disappearance was somehow connected to the Sculptor was because it gave him the illusion of control. If he could just figure out what Corian’s game was...
Elliot had been over that final note from Corian so many times he had it memorized right down to the punctuation.
It was possible that whatever the original plan had been, it was in disarray now, and that might work to Tucker’s advantage.
But wasn’t it more likely that Corian’s letter had referred to handing over this unknown and maybe imaginary accomplice? The unsub in exchange for taking the death penalty off the table?
In all probability, Tucker’s fate had nothing to do with the Sculptor and was the result of another investigation that had hit too close to home for someone. In all probability, MacAuley had been taken out by someone offended by his politics—or maybe his heavy-handed seduction routine.
Elliot could come up with at least two alternate scenarios for every single thing that had happened over the past week.
Except maybe his shootout with Torin Barro.
That was still troubling. If Barro hadn’t been following Elliot, how had he shown up at MacAuley’s just as MacAuley was about to make his grand reveal? Elven telepathy?
Sheba came and rested her head in his lap, gazing up at him. He stroked her head, fingers carding silky soft fur, smoothing back her pointed ears.
“I don’t think it’s good news,” he said.
He wasn’t sure if he meant Tucker or Todd. In either case, he didn’t think it was good news.
* * *
It was late for phone calls, but maybe that worked to his advantage.
Only family called that time of night. Family or the bearer of bad tidings, and that last probably described Elliot in Ellen Haysbert’s opinion.
The phone rang twice and then picked up. Elliot started speaking into the wary silence.
“Mrs. Haysbert, please don’t hang up. I’m not a reporter. I just need to ask you a couple of questions. Two questions.”
He could hear her breathing on the other end of the line, but she hadn’t slammed down the phone yet and that was something. This was the closest Elliot had come to having an actual conversation with Andrew Corian’s foster mother in the seventeen calls he’d placed to her.
“Two questions,” Elliot repeated quickly into that tense and breathy silence. “That’s it. I know what you’ve been through. What this has cost you. I don’t want to cause you any further pain. Please believe me.”
That was the truth. Elliot had spent the remainder of Friday reading everything he could find on the Haysberts and he now knew that the press had hounded them relentlessly when their relationship to the Sculptor had been made public.
He’d had some experience with that himself, only the media treated a “hero” a lot differently than they did the parents of a serial killer. Plus, he’d had both the Bureau and Roland to run interference for him. The Haysberts had only had each other—and then Mr. Haysbert had suffered a heart attack and died.
Mrs. Haysbert blamed the media, and Elliot—having watched some of the news footage—wasn’t sure she was wrong. Something about the Haysberts, with their ugly clothes and thick glasses and funny, awkward behaviors, had brought out the worst in, well, pretty much everyone. They seemed weird and strange and vulnerable...and it had sparked the killer instinct even in people who had lived beside them peaceably for twenty years.
“Why are you harassing me?” Her voice shook. She sounded old and frail. She was old and frail. “Why won’t you leave me alone? I don’t have anything to say. I don’t know anything. I haven’t seen Andrew in thirty years. Why do you keep calling and calling and calling?”
“I’m sorry,” Elliot said. “I really am—”
“You just want your story. You don’t care about people. You don’t care about the truth.”
“I’m not a reporter. I give you my word. I do want the truth. I need your help. Please help me.”
There was another of those long, shaky silences. He clutched the handset and prayed.
Give me this much. Just this. Give me a starting point. Something.
Maybe she heard the underlying desperation in his voice because she quavered, “Do you promise?”
It caught him off guard. That high, rather childish voice. Because even now, as frightened and hurt as she was, she wanted to trust. He was telling the truth, but he could so easily not be.
“I promise.”
She said plaintively, “Everybody blames us, but it wasn’t our fault. We didn’t do anything different. He was different. From the beginning he was different.”
No question of who “he” was.
“How was he different?” Elliot questioned automatically. He had to let her take the lead, no matter which direction she went.
“He thought he was different. He was like a prince.”
That was the kind of comment that had got the Haysberts into trouble. People had taken it to mean that the Haysberts regarded Andrew Corian as a prince, but Elliot had known Corian and he understood what she meant. Larger than life. To the manner born. Arrogant ass.
However you wanted to describe it, Corian had always had a sense of his own importance, his own destiny.
Elliot said cautiously, “When you say you didn’t do anything different, do you mean you were fostering other children?” This was the million-dollar question, the information he had been hounding every child welfare agency he could think of for the past week: How many children did Ellen and Odell Haysbert foster?
He held his breath waiting for her answer.
There was a fraction of a hesitation before she said, “We had our own boy, Krayle. He died. We treated them both the same.”
The letdown was rough. He had been so sure this was the trail. But it wasn’t. It was another dead end.
Then Elliot considered that pause before she answered. He considered the new note in her voice.
Protective.
Not protective of this Krayle kid because he was dead and past hurting.
He said, “But you fostered other children.”
She hung up.