“We are,” Meredith said. “We’ve got someone right now outside her room.”
“And KPD will have someone on her till the day we pick up Dayton,” Marcum added.
“Won’t Dayton get suspicious, though? The cops have an eyewitness and the police don’t even touch him?”
“We have touched him,” Meredith said. “Brought him in for three hours last night. But he’s ‘free’ until the lab work comes back. Dayton’ll buy that.”
“See?” Marcum said reasonably. “We’ve taken care of it, Mr. Ruzak.”
“Right, like you took care of Archie.”
“As I said, we can’t baby-sit him twenty-four/seven.”
“My point,” I said.
Marcum threw up his hands. “Okay, I thought this might settle things down some, but apparently you just don’t get it, Mr. Ruzak. We’re not responsible for your involvement in this. We didn’t set up a meeting between you and Dayton about Quinton Stiles. We didn’t order a hit on you as a result of that boneheaded move. We’re just trying to manage a very tenuous situation—not of our making—before it goes all FUBAR on us. Now my advice to you is lie low for a couple of weeks, maybe even take a nice vacation out of the country until we get all the bad guys behind bars.”
“All except one.”
“Oh, Christ,” Marcum said, shooting an angry look in Meredith’s direction.
“And after you arrest everybody and put Quinton on the plane to Phoenix, what happens to Felicia?” I asked. “You’re not giving her a new identity. You’re not relocating her.” I turned to Meredith. “And you’re not keeping someone on her for the rest of her life. Meanwhile, all of you expect him, for the rest of his life, to do nothing about the one person who can send him back to prison and the loving arms of Richie Rache. You’re trusting a goddamn psychopath to act rationally.”
Marcum shot out of the chair.
“That’s it. I’m done. Mr. Ruzak, you’re upset; I understand. But I don’t want you to misunderstand me. I don’t think you have a grasp of the magnitude of the thing you’ve bumbled your way into here. You do anything to put my investigation at risk and I will arrest you for obstruction of justice. I will personally see you serving fifteen years in federal prison.”
“You’re wrong,” I said. “I think my grasp is pretty damn good.”
Marcum left. Eades left with him. I was alone with Meredith. After a minute, she stood up, came around the desk, and sat down beside me. She hesitated, her hand hovering over mine, then dropping down, her fingertips lightly rubbing.
“He didn’t want to tell you,” she said. “It breaks a couple of federal regulations.”
“Then why did he?”
“I insisted.”
“So I wouldn’t screw it up anymore than I already had?”
“It really is going to be okay, Teddy.”
I shook my head. “You don’t know that.”
“Don’t try to pull that on me, Ruzak. Pessimism just doesn’t suit you.”
“That’s not pessimism,” I said. I was gripping the arms of my chair hard. The ground continued to crumble beneath my feet and I needed something to anchor me. I needed something to cling to. Too many variables. The singular certainty of uncertainty. “To say that Yellowstone is going to blow one day and take out half of North America is not being pessimistic. It’s a statement of fact.”
“Right, but that doesn’t stop millions of people from taking the kids to see Old Faithful.”
“It’s a bad analogy,” I admitted. “Because Yellowstone is one of those things like the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. All you can do is watch it go down. Prepare for the aftermath. Care for the survivors.”
She was nodding like she understood. “With something like this, you play the odds. And in something like this, Teddy, Marcum is the house. And you know who always wins.”
“Not always,” I said.
6:21 p.m.
“Wow,” Dr. Fredericks said. “Rough week.”
“She tried to warn me,” I said. “She told me to back off. There was no reason to push things beyond my trying to fulfill some deep psychological need.”
“What need would that be?”
“Maybe a function of my insecurity? The need to feel efficacious? To win by finding someone who didn’t want to be found? I mean, there wasn’t any clear and present danger to anyone—at least not until I stuck my big fat nose into it. If I had dropped it when she told me to—”
“You beat yourself up for that.”
“Hell yes, I beat myself up for that. And I know what you’re going to say. Nothing I can do about that now, the past is the past, blah, blah, blah, but isn’t there a slim possibility that the world would be just a wee bit better place to live if more people beat themselves up for their boners?”
“I see,” she said. “You’ve reached another turning point, and this time you want to avoid making the wrong decision.”
I waved my hand in the air. “It’s come down to odds, probabilities, risk assessment. There’s a reason I’m not a gambler or an actuary. And I can’t dither. Dithering could get someone killed.”
“Maybe it’s more a matter of trust, Teddy.”
“Trust in general or in someone in particular?”
“Both. That’s the essence of hope: trusting that the future won’t be nearly as bad as you fear. And the basic assumption that most people are good and will try to do the right thing.”
“I should trust the FBI. I should trust the cops. I should trust the psychopath to act rationally.”
She looked at me over her half-glasses and tapped the end of her pen on her pad.
I went on. “I should trust him to weigh the uncertainties and decide taking out a witness who could send him back to prison for thirty years is an unacceptable risk. The FBI will stomach dog killing and throat slashing, but they draw the line at premeditated murder.”
“How did you get to your appointment today, Teddy?” she asked.
I sighed. I knew where she was going. “I drove. Why?”
“Thousands of people die every year in car accidents. But you got behind the wheel.”
“That’s stupid,” I said. My face was warm. I felt like I was talking back to the teacher. “Those odds are acceptable, because, Christ, you have to live. I’m talking about the bomb in Times Square. I’m talking about responses equaling stimuli. I’m talking about the difference between the will and the might. Imperative and option. I’m talking about the difference between responsibility and guilt.”
She was leaning forward in her chair. I was jiggling in mine. We’d come to the crux of it, the heart of the matter.
“What is the difference?” she asked.
“What if protecting what you love means betraying who you are? I know this makes no sense, and I’m probably agonizing over a decision that deep down I’ve already made, but the object is the obstacle now. The risk of doing nothing is greater than the alternative.”
She was nodding like it did make sense. Of course, it was probably an old psychologist trick.
“Maybe it’s a false choice,” she offered. “Assuming facts not in evidence.”
“It isn’t about facts,” I said. “The future never is. It’s about probabilities.”
“Okay. What about the probability of punishment?”
“Very slim, and that’s the weirdly scary thing.”
“But didn’t you mention”—she flipped through her notes—“the one percent doctrine? Even a one percent chance is unacceptable?”
I was out of my chair by this point. I honestly wasn’t sure which of us wasn’t getting it, her or me. In a way, I felt like I was already in the barrel, heading for the falls. It was too late. The time to weigh the odds, consider the options, minimize the risk—that time, my time onshore, had passed. I had climbed into the cask and was rocketing down in the convergence of an overwhelming current.
“I put her there!” I shouted. “I’m responsible now, no matter what happens! It isn�
��t the acceptable risk of punishment; it’s the acceptability of the punishment itself. I can do nothing—that’s unacceptable. Or I can do something—and there’s only one something I can do now.”
“That’s all I was trying to point out,” she said quietly. She had grown calmer as I’d grown more excited. “Maybe you’re presenting to yourself a false choice.”
“Then you tell me,” I yelled across the room at her. “You tell me!”
She started to say something; I cut her off. “Save it, Doc. I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say the choice isn’t between life and death; it’s between trust and distrust, hope and despair. That I don’t know what he’ll do now. The odds of that are terrific, about a hundred percent. No, I don’t know what he will do, but I goddamn know for a certainty what he might do. That is the button, and now that the button is within my grasp, what kind of fool would I be not to press it?”
FRIDAY
4:44 p.m.
I filled out the registration card, paid for the room with my credit card, and the Indian clerk handed me the key to number 38, the one I’d requested, at the end of the row closest to the highway. The room was tiny, smelled faintly of mold and tobacco smoke. The furniture was worn and the TV remote didn’t work, but the mattress was relatively new and the bed was one of those older models, the kind that vibrated—you dropped a couple quarters into a box mounted on the wall for a twenty-minute massage guaranteed to soothe the day’s cares away. The window unit shook and roared when I turned it on, like it contained an enraged animal, but the air blasting out was arctic cold; it felt good.
I pulled back the dusty curtains. Across the street was a self-service car wash. A college-aged girl in jean cutoffs was sponging her Mazda. A middle-aged man in a cowboy hat was vacuuming out the cab of his Dodge Ram. A Labrador mix was sniffing around the garbage cans near the vacuum machine. It may have been a stray; it may have belonged to the owner of the truck. The dog ignored the man, though, and the man ignored the dog.
I waited till five past the hour, then stepped outside, walked across the parking lot to the other side of the horseshoe-shaped building, and knocked on the door of room 10. The door opened and I stepped inside.
Benton locked the door behind me. Dayton reclined on the twin bed farthest from the door, shoeless, legs stretched out, his face turned toward the old TV. It was tuned to CNN. Benton tapped me on the shoulder, motioned for me to raise my arms. Dayton kept his eyes on the set while Benton frisked me. Then Benton stepped back to a position by the door and Dayton waved me to the empty bed beside him.
I sat down. There was no little black box beside the headboard. These were no Vibrabeds; the clerk had given me the deluxe room.
“Heard about your dog,” Dayton said. “Sick. If somebody did something like that to one of my dogs, I’d cut off his balls and stuff them down his throat.”
“Did you hear about my secretary?”
His eyes stayed glued to Wolf Blitzer.
“I read the papers,” he said.
“My guardian angel’s putting in some serious overtime,” I said.
“Do the police have a suspect?” he asked.
“You bet.”
He turned slightly in my direction, one eyebrow coming up. “You?”
“I don’t have an alibi and I flunked the polygraph.”
“Never take a polygraph.”
“It was my first experience as a suspect. Rookie mistake.”
“Motive?”
“Unrequited love.”
“True?”
“Guilty as charged. Not the assault, though.”
“Of course not. You don’t strike me as the violent type.”
“I’m usually on the receiving end. Her boyfriend kicked my ass.”
“Ah. Boyfriend. Maybe he’s responsible.”
“I think we both know who’s responsible, Mr. Dayton.”
“Of course. The niggers.”
Behind me, Benton made a sound. It might have been a stifled guffaw or he could have simply been clearing his throat.
“Sorry,” Dayton said. “White-power humor. Obviously, you are responsible, Mr. Ruzak. You picked the wrong fight.”
I nodded. “That’s the irony. I wasn’t trying to pick a fight with anybody. I’m of the live-and-let-live school. I was just trying to help out a friend.”
“No good deed, et cetera?”
“Something along those lines. In this situation, though, it doesn’t seem to me that the punishment fits the crime. All I was trying to do was provide my friend some peace of mind by finding a dangerous psychopath who’d gone missing. I wasn’t trying to get anyone in trouble or exact revenge for a crime that cried to heaven for justice. Now my dog is dead, the woman I love is lying in the ICU, and I’m walking around with a big red X in the middle of my back.”
“Maybe the fault lies not with your choice of action,” Dayton ventured, “but in your choice of friends.”
I didn’t hear anything. Nothing like a bullet sliding into a chamber or the old mattress upon which I sat squeaking as Benton leaned across it to put the muzzle of the .44 against the base of my skull. I didn’t hear anything, but I felt the hair on my neck stand up and the mattress give a little as Benton leaned on it.
“She lied,” I said.
Dayton shot a look over my shoulder. The bullet remained in the chamber. For now. His eyes slid back to me.
“Felicia,” I went on. “She gave the cops a phony ID. She never saw him.”
Dayton pursed his lips as if he tasted something sour.
“Never saw who?”
“The person who jumped her. She made it up.”
“Why would she do something like that?”
“To protect me.”
“Because you’re the chief suspect.”
I nodded. Dayton turned back to the TV. I could still feel Benton right behind me. I imagined I could feel his breath stirring my hair as he loomed over me, but I didn’t turn around. Benton held the gun, but he wasn’t the threat. I stayed focused on Dayton.
“I thought you said the love was unrequited,” he said.
“Her feelings are more complicated than that.”
“More complicated than love?”
I tried to stay on topic. Normally, not the easiest thing in the world for me. “And the next thing I know, the FBI is trying to recruit me.”
“Why would the government try to recruit the chief suspect in an attempted murder?”
“The cops confiscated my computer. Found our e-mails. Confronted me. I told them the same thing I told you. Then I told them that I’d told you. Then they told me about the indictments.”
“Indictments?”
“The indictments-in-waiting.”
Dayton stared at me for a long moment, then gave a little wave of his hand, and Benton backed off the bed. I closed my eyes briefly, and when I opened them again, the television was off and Dayton was sitting on the edge of the bed, facing me. Half his face was in shadow because the TV had been the sole source of light inside and barely any was leaching through the crack in the curtains behind me. We were sitting so close, our knees were almost touching. He bowed his head and I bowed mine, and we spoke.
“Here’s my take on it,” I said. “Why I thought we should get together today: There’re gaps.”
“Gaps?”
“Gaps in our collective understanding. I have gaps. You have gaps. I figured if we got together, we could fill in each other’s gaps.”
“What in the hell are you talking about, Mr. Ruzak?” Dayton said.
“It’s my understanding they aren’t a fait accompli just yet.”
“What isn’t what?”
“The indictments. There’s still time to avert disaster, cap off Yellowstone, if you will. See, you and I aren’t the only ones with gaps. The feds have gaps, too.”
“And these gaps, they decided to share them with you?”
“I’m pretty sure that wasn’t their intent, but it’s not ha
rd to fill them in.”
“ ‘Fill them in’?”
“The gaps.”
“Mr. Ruzak, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Okay,” I said.
9:11 p.m.
A thunderstorm came and went while I waited in my room, and the wet streets shone like quicksilver in the streetlights as I pulled out of the hotel parking lot. I drove straight to the bar. Parked. Got out. A group of young women was standing just outside the door, smoking and fooling with their cell phones, like Isabella had not so long ago. Inside, the music pounded, the lights pulsed, and a headache immediately set in above my right eye.
Nancy was parked on her usual stool. To her left sat a large woman in a leather vest. On her right was a twenty-something cowpoke with a big gap between his front teeth and a fashionable clump of stubble on his chin. Nancy’s face lit up when she saw me.
“Hey, it’s Rusty!”
“Hi, Nancy,” I said. I turned to her companion. “That seat’s taken, hoss.”
“ ‘Hoss’?” he said. He spoke with a Boston accent. “Buzz off, asshole.”
“Rusty, this is my good friend Ian,” Nancy said.
“Nice to meet you,” I said. Then I reached between his legs and grabbed his privates and squeezed as hard as I could. His legs jerked. The stool wobbled. He slid off the stool and I held on, squeezing. He was at least six inches shorter than I was, and he lifted his face, growing bright red now, toward mine.
“When I let go,” I whispered, “you go.”
I let go. Ian went, cursing, shoving his way through the milling crowd, one hand pressed against his pelvis.
I plopped myself onto the empty stool and ordered a Bud Light. I could feel Nancy’s eyes on the side of my face.
“I’m a little disappointed,” she said.
“With what?”
“The casting. You’re all wrong for hard-boiled.”
“Sometimes I like to play against type.”
She laughed. My grabbing Ian’s crotch had brought high color to her cheeks. “Buy me a drink, Rusty.”
The Highly Effective Detective Crosses the Line Page 15