The Storm King(52)
“Lucy didn’t like Tom,” Nate said. “They never got along, so I’m not surprised she made him look bad. You can’t trust a single thing that’s written in there. It’s fiction. Besides, you know who Tom really is. How can a teenage girl’s scribblings change that?”
The chief looked at him with a new expression, one that lifted Nate’s own spirits. Because the look on the man’s face was hope. Distrust was hard and suspicion was tough, but hope was something Nate could work with.
Chief Buck’s private line rang three times before he answered it.
“Be right there,” he told the person on the other end. He returned the receiver to its cradle. “They need me out front.” He got up and walked toward the door. “Stay here.”
Nate pulled out his phone. The display failed to light up, though it didn’t seem to be completely inert. Somehow its digital assistant still worked and was able to tell Nate it was almost eight A.M. Its stilted voice sounded as if it was being filtered through Auto-Tune then broadcast from a distant star system.
Lucy’s funeral would be starting in a few hours, but with the chief out of sight, Grams returned to the forefront of Nate’s mind.
Through the office’s glass partition, Nate saw the hall was empty. He walked around to the computer, and was unsurprised to find it password protected. From the chief’s landline, he dialed nine for an outside line then 4-1-1 for directory assistance.
He was quickly connected to the hospital in Gracefield, where they said that Grams’s condition was unchanged. He asked again about transport to a burn center, and he was again told that the weather was too poor to move anyone anywhere.
Nate ended the call, feeling worse than before he’d made it. He thought he was finally close to learning something useful from the chief, but Grams needed him, too. Without a car, he didn’t even know how he’d return to her side. He realized he was lucky the chief hadn’t called his earlier bluff about walking out of the interrogation room. One of the perils of being a good liar was the threat of outsmarting yourself along with everyone else.
The rancid coffee had left him restless.
With an eye on the hallway, he started paging through the papers on the desk and checking its drawers. Most of them were locked, and the ones that weren’t held nothing of interest. No matter what the chief claimed, the discovery of Lucy’s body must have revealed something. But of course, he wouldn’t have left Nate alone in his office if there’d been anything here worth finding.
Nate had been avoiding them, but when he ran out of places to snoop, he turned to the pile of battered Moleskine notebooks. He picked up the one on top, handling it as he might an egg from which any manner of creature might hatch.
He opened it to the bookmarked page and immediately confirmed that it was filled with Lucy’s handwriting. His gaze was naturally drawn to his own name penned in her slanting script.
…regret telling Nate about Sarah Hernandez laughing at me because of that newspaper column. He thinks he’s being protective, but he takes things too far. Always too far. I wish he could see his own face when it goes blank with anger.
Nate shut the journal and dropped it back with the others. He hadn’t talked to Lucy in fourteen years, and now this had become the last thing she’d said about him.
He scanned the room, desperate to distract himself from her words.
That’s when he noticed something that shouldn’t have been there. A security keypad was attached to the handle of the closet that the chief said had been added as part of the station’s renovations. An odd precaution for a coat closet, even in a police station.
The chief had already been gone for a few minutes, but the hall beyond the office was still empty. Nate quickly went through the desk drawers again, searching for any scrap of paper that might contain the pass code. Employing a sophisticated security system while storing the key to its deactivation nearby was a classic mistake. He checked the bottoms, tops, and sides of the drawers. When he didn’t find anything, he checked under the desk’s blotter, the monthly calendar, and the computer’s tower and keyboard.
Nate turned back to the keypad. There was no way to tell how many digits it wanted from him. On the upside, it looked willing to give him an unlimited number of attempts.
Using significant dates as a password was another error people regularly made. He pulled the monthly calendar from under the desk blotter and scoured its pages. He plugged in the four digits that represented Mrs. Buck’s birthday, their anniversary, and Tom’s birthday with no luck.
He’d really been counting on Tom’s birthday. His friend’s checkered smile grinned at him from the photo framed on the wall.
I love Tom more than anything, the chief had said.
Nate again plugged Tom’s birthday and month into the keypad but this time followed them with all four digits of the year he’d been born—the same year of Nate’s own birth.
The lock disengaged with a click, and Nate pulled the door open to reveal a space larger that he’d expected. A walk-in storage area about eight feet deep.
In a crime thriller or police procedural, he would have flicked the light switch to be confronted with a mosaic of horrors. Crime scene photos. Stern mugs shots of suspects. Collages of video footage stills and blood splatter diagrams and grisly autopsy photos.
Instead, all that greeted Nate were clothes. Winter gear, hunting jackets, and extra uniforms hung from flanking rods. Above these, a miscellany of hats and sweaters were stacked to the ceiling. Male shoes of every variety lined the floor space two by two.