The Big Kahuna (Fox and O'Hare #6)(61)

“Well, you made an arrest in that hit-and-run. Vasco’s happy about that.”

“Stroke of luck,” I said, and immediately regretted the modesty in my voice. Humility had been drilled in me, as it was in most of the women I knew, and I found it hard to get rid of it, even though it was frequently mistaken for inability.

“That’s not how Vasco made it sound,” Gorecki said. “He called it good old-fashioned police work. Held you up as an example and said that’s how you get shit done.”

“It was the old man who owns the bowling alley. Not some hard-ass guy or anything.”

“And you think it was just an accident?”

“Accidents are common on that highway,” I said. The victim’s daughter kept insisting that it was more than that, and it was true that the three-foot dent on the Crown Vic made Baker’s coyote story less believable, but it was a huge leap from hit-and-run to murder. Vasco wasn’t thrilled about the daughter’s allegations—it meant he couldn’t close the case—but I had a professional duty to investigate her claims, and I tried to look into them whenever I had some time.

My first stop had been to the Pantry, where the workers essentially confirmed the story that the Guerraoui family had told me: frictions that started out over dust and dirt from remodeling a few years ago had recently boiled over into arguments. But neither the restaurant manager nor the waitresses could recall specific criminal threats that Anderson Baker might have made against the victim. There was no I’m gonna kill you or You better watch your back or even a measly I’ll make you regret it, any of which could have been used to establish intent. “They just griped a lot,” Marty Holtz, the manager, told me as he stood at the front desk, spraying Windex on plastic-covered menus and wiping them down with a paper towel. “They griped constantly, and about everything.”

Meanwhile, at the bowling alley, the cashier, Betty Sanders, claimed that the problem hadn’t started with the mess from remodeling, but a few months before that. “Thing is,” she said, rubbing out excess lipstick with a tissue, “Mr. Baker had already talked to the dry cleaner next door about buying his shop when he retired. Then the Muslim guy comes in last minute and offers him a little more. Bought it from right under him. So.”

“So Mr. Baker was angry.”

“I wouldn’t say angry,” she said, suddenly aware of what the word might imply. “Just—disappointed, I guess.”

I had the nagging feeling that I was missing something about the Guerraoui case, something I couldn’t see because I wasn’t familiar with this town and its people. At the end of my visit to the Pantry and Desert Arcade, I didn’t know which version of the past I could trust, which story was supported by the facts and which had been reshaped to fit them, whether out of grief or out of malice.

Gorecki topped off his coffee and took a long sip. “You don’t think it’s odd that Mr. Baker didn’t come forward before?”

“Not particularly.” When given the choice between claiming responsibility for what they had done or avoiding it as long as possible, most people chose Door Number Two. At least, that had been my experience. The problem was that I had no witnesses to the crime and nothing that could be used to prove intent. Besides, from the beginning, Baker had been fully cooperative, even if his wife had been a little strange. When I went to interview him at home, she’d opened the door and stared at me with her mouth agape. Having a police investigator show up on your doorstep is an unsettling experience, maybe even frightening for some people, but with her it was more like a visceral fear. I had to wait outside in the heat while she went to get her husband.

Somewhere in the office a phone rang, and a door slammed shut. “You know,” Gorecki said, “I went to school with the victim’s daughter.”

“Which one? The dentist?”

“The musician.”

“You never mentioned it,” I said. God, I hated small towns. I missed being at home, in D.C. “Does everyone know everyone else around here?”

“Pretty much.”

When I worked for Metro P.D., my morning routine was so different. I would go into a little café next to my train stop and sit at the window with my coffee, just watching people come and go, all of them strangers to me, as I was to them. I never thought it was anything special, or that I’d miss it someday, but I did. Now I couldn’t get to work without hearing town gossip.

Gorecki cleared his throat. “And Nora and I—we’re also seeing each other.”

“You what?” I didn’t need this, not with the dispute with Baker, and not with the daughter insisting it was murder. The more I tried to keep this case neat and clean, the messier it got. “For how long?”

“It just happened.”

“You have to disclose this to the sergeant.”

“I know,” he said, draining the last of his coffee. “That’s gonna be a fun conversation.”

“And quit asking me questions about the case. Did she tell you to ask me?”

“No.” A second too late.

“Then why are you asking?”

“I was just curious, that’s all.”

“You know I can’t say anything while the investigation is still open.”

“And you didn’t. So there’s no harm.” Then he tapped the folded newspaper on the counter, where images from the Bowden incident were splashed across the front page. “I better go. I have appearances to worry about, right?”