The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (30)

“Don’t ask.”

“C’mon, John.”

She waited and he finally sighed and said, “Ceramics.”

Letty: “Ceramics? Like . . . making pots?”

“?‘Throwing pots’ would be the correct terminology, but yeah, that’s what I did,” Kaiser said. “I threw pots.”

“Wow.”

“What does that mean?” Kaiser asked.

“It means I’m impressed,” Letty said.

“Really?”

“Yeah, really. Were you any good at it?”

“Well, yeah. I spent like nine months in Iraq, with Delta, and started this little school there, taught some Kurdish kids how to clean clay and throw and fire pots,” Kaiser said. “By the time I left, they were selling them.”

“Wow.”

Letty tried to imagine a pottery school in a war zone, until Kaiser asked, “Have you figured anything out?”

“Do you expect me to?”

“Yeah, as a matter of fact,” he said. “You’re already about a week and a half ahead of those cops back there.”

Letty looked out her window, at the lines of brick ramblers going by. She said, “Yes, I figured something out. What I figured out is, Blackburn figured something out. He might not have known that he figured it out, because if he knew he had, he would have told somebody. What we need to do is figure out what Blackburn figured out. What could it be?”

“Gimme a clue?”

“Okay. It’s not in all that paper back at the office. It has to be something else. Something he thought up but wasn’t sure about. He didn’t want to embarrass anyone, in case he was wrong. He called somebody, to check on himself, and that got them killed.”

“Or maybe there’s some connection between him and this militia guy. Maybe they were working together, him and Rand . . .”

“Rand Low,” Letty said. “If they were connected, if Blackburn was working with him, why would they kill him?”

“Cover their tracks?”

“What tracks? Nobody has found any tracks,” Letty said. “Nobody even seems to know what the tracks might be. If Blackburn hadn’t disappeared, we wouldn’t have talked to Vermilion Wright, we wouldn’t be here, the bodies wouldn’t have been found for God-only-knows how long.”

“You’re getting cantankerous,” Kaiser said.

“Cantankerous—pretty big word for a humble potter.”

“Fuck you.”

“I gotta think, John,” Letty said. “Okay? Drop me at the hotel, find a way to amuse yourself. I gotta think.”





EIGHT




The Homewood Suites was in a barren hotel zone of the kind common in the Plains states, not much within walking distance except other hotels and a Sam’s Club. Letty did her best thinking while running or walking, but Midland wasn’t helping, so she wound up buying a couple of Cokes and kicking back in her room, the TV tuned to CNN with the volume turned down.

With her back against a pile of pillows, she watched the silent talking head while doodling on a Rhodia legal pad.

She thought briefly about the Blackburns. The discovery of their bodies hadn’t particularly upset her—she didn’t know them and they’d been hardly visible under the beds. She’d seen dead bodies, bodies still leaking blood, of people she’d actually known. She’d dismissed the Blackburn killings, as such: there was nothing for her in their murders. If there was anything at all, the crime scene people would find it. Or not.

The operative fact about the Blackburns was quite simple: they had been murdered.

The operative question was: Why? What had Boxie Blackburn done to get him killed? Then she mentally corrected herself: there were two dead, not one. Had Marcia been the cause of their deaths? That seemed unlikely, but the possibility had to be considered.

She considered it for one minute, then dismissed the idea. Marcia was collateral damage.



* * *





Collateral damage: nothing more.

Letty had never doubted the love of her adoptive parents, but her relationship with them was not the same. She and her father, Lucas Davenport, had bonded almost instantly, within hours of their meeting, he in his forties, she at age twelve. Her relationship with her mother, Weather, had taken time. When they’d eventually become intimate, Weather had told Letty that she’d worried about Letty’s early years and how that dark time might have shaped her.

“You can be very harsh,” Weather said. “You’re almost exactly like your father that way. You even look like him. When people see you together, they assume you’re his natural daughter. Your eyes are exactly the same, ice crystals. You shot those two people, you saved my life, I went into shock . . . but you didn’t even seem to be affected. Had to be done, so you did it. When Lucas got back and saw what had happened . . . he was happy. You were happy. I was absolutely freaked out. I felt like I was going crazy for a while, I was afraid to be in the house alone. I still have nightmares, sometimes. But you . . .”

“You think I’m a psychopath?” Letty asked.

“No, of course not. You’re exactly like Lucas, and I know he’s not a psychopath,” Weather said. “And I know you’re not. You’re just . . .”