Gone, Baby, Gone (Kenzie & Gennaro #4)(99)

Eventually she held up a hand as she turned toward the nightstand for her cigarettes. “You’re right. We never hear things wrong.”

“Not at the same time.”

She lit a cigarette and pulled the sheet up her leg, scratched at her knee just above the cast. “Why would he lie?”

I shrugged. “I’ve been sitting here wondering the same thing.”

“Maybe he had a reason to protect Ray’s identity as his snitch.”

I sipped some coffee. “Possibly, but it seems awful convenient, doesn’t it? Ray is potentially a key witness in the disappearance of Amanda McCready; Broussard lies about knowing him. Seems…”

“Shady.”

I nodded. “A bit. Another thing?”

“What?”

“Broussard’s retiring soon.”

“How soon?”

“Not sure. Sounded like very soon. He said he was closing in on his twenty, and as soon as he reached it he was turning in his shield.”

She took a drag off her cigarette, peered over the bright coal at me. “So he’s retiring. So what?”

“Last year, just before we climbed up to the quarry, you made a joke to him.”

She touched her chest. “I did.”

“Sí. You said something like ‘Maybe it’s time we retired.’”

Her eyes brightened. “I said, ‘Maybe it’s time we hung ’em up.’”

“And he said?”

She leaned forward, elbows on her knees, and thought about it. “He said…” She jabbed the air with her cigarette several times. “He said he couldn’t afford to retire. He said something about medical bills.”

“His wife’s, wasn’t it?”

She nodded. “She’d been in a car accident just before they were married. She wasn’t insured. He owed the hospital big.”

“So what happened to those medical bills? You think the hospital just said, ‘Ah, you’re a nice guy. Forget about it’?”

“Doubtful.”

“In the extreme. So a cop who was poor lies about knowing a key player in the McCready case, and six months later the cop’s got enough money to retire—not on the kind of money a cop gets after thirty years in, but somehow on the kind a cop gets after twenty.”

She chewed her lower lip for a minute. “Toss me a T-shirt, will you?”

I opened my dresser, took a dark green Saw Doctors shirt from the drawer, and handed it to her. She pulled it over her head and kicked away the sheets, looked around the room for her crutches. She looked over at me, saw that I was chuckling under my breath.

“What?”

“You look pretty funny.”

Her face darkened. “How’s that?”

“Sitting there in my T-shirt with a big white cast on your leg.” I shrugged. “Just looks funny is all.”

“Ha,” she said. “Ha-ha. Where are my crutches?”

“Behind the door.”

“Would you be so kind?”

I brought them to her and she struggled onto them, and then I followed her down the dark hall into the kitchen. The digital display on the microwave read 4:04, and I could feel it in my joints and the back of my neck, but not in my mind. When Broussard had mentioned Ray Likanski on the playground, something had snapped to attention in my brain, started marching double time, and talking with Angie had only given it more energy.

While Angie made half a pot of decaf and pulled cream from the fridge and sugar from the cupboard, I went back to that final night in the quarry, when it seemed we’d lost Amanda McCready for good. I knew a lot of the information I was trying to recall and sift through was in my case file, but I didn’t want to rely on those notes just yet. Poring over them would just put me back in the same place I’d been six months ago, while trying to conjure it all back up from this kitchen could bring a fresh perspective.

The kidnapper had demanded four couriers to bring Cheese Olamon’s money in return for Amanda. Why all four of us? Why not just one?

I asked Angie.

She leaned against the oven, crossed her arms, thought about it. “I’ve never even considered that. Christ, could I be that stupid?”

“It’s a judgment call.”

She frowned. “You didn’t question it.”

“I know I’m stupid,” I said. “It’s you we’re trying to decide on.”

“A whole dragnet,” she said, “swept those hills, locked down the roads around it, and they couldn’t find anyone.”

“Maybe the kidnappers had been tipped off to an escape route. Maybe some of the cops had been paid off.”

“Maybe there was no one up there that night besides us.” Her eyes shimmered.

“Holy shit.”

She bit down on her lower lip, raised her eyebrows several times. “You think?”

“Broussard fired those guns from his side.”

“Why not? We couldn’t see anything over there. We saw muzzle flashes. We heard Broussard saying he was under fire. But did we see him at all during that time?”

“Nope.”

“The reason, then, that we were brought up there was to corroborate his story.”

I leaned back in my chair, ran my hands through the hair along my temples. Could it be that simple? Or, maybe, could it be that devious?