The Silent Hour

38

__________

I walked up the drive with her, and neither of us spoke. When she reached her rental car, she turned and faced me.

“I’ll call tomorrow,” she said, “and we’ll figure out how to move forward. You may not believe me, but it is the truth. If I don’t call, keep your word. Start the chase.”

“That might seem like a joke to you,” I said, “but it is not to me. I don’t care where you are, Alexandra, I’ll find you eventually. Anyone can be found.”

“Ken Merriman already taught me that.” She took my hand again, squeezed it once, and then turned and opened the driver’s door and climbed inside. I waited until she’d started the engine before I left and walked back up the road to my truck. I got inside, started it up, and drove to the highway. I stared at every vehicle that passed and thought, He said all they needed to do was pay attention to a car.

There was only one possibility coming to my mind, and Mike London had checked it out. The day Ken and I had lunch with him, he told us about a vehicle he’d seen near Bertoli’s murder scene that had belonged to a chop shop affiliated with Dominic Sanabria. What had the owner’s name been? Neloms. Darius Neloms. His alibi checked out solid, though, and the lead dried up. So what could Ken have possibly seen that Mike did not?

Unless it was a different car entirely. If that was the case, then I was as utterly clueless as I had been before talking to Alexandra.

I was halfway back to the city when my cell phone rang, and I saw the call was coming from the office. Joe.

“You’re out there again, aren’t you,” he said when I answered, and then, before I could respond, “LP, you’ve got to let it go. You’ve got to stop.”

“She came to the house this morning.”

For a moment I didn’t hear a thing.

“Tell me it is the truth,” he said, “and that I don’t need to begin searching for the proper institution for you.”

I told him what had happened. By the time I was done, I was a mile from the office, and he hadn’t spoken for a long time.

“I let her go,” I said, “and I know you’ll tell me what a terrible mistake that was, but I don’t care. I’ll find her again if I have to.”

“If you believe what she told you, that’s not the issue of the day,” he said, and something inside me sagged with relief. He agreed with me. Alexandra was no longer the focus.

“I believe it,” I said, “because I saw her lie today, and, Joseph, she is not good at it.”

“And the car?” he said. “Do you have any idea what that means?”

“Maybe. If I’m wrong, then I’ve got nothing. We’ll have to wait and see.”

I hung up with him, and five minutes later I was behind my desk. I told Joe what I remembered from Mike London’s investigation, then leaned back with my hands spread.

“That’s the best I’ve got. Darius Neloms was an associate of Sanabria, but he was far from the inner circle. The guy painted stolen cars and sent them back out the door. It’s not like he was Sanabria’s right-hand man. Even if he was, Ken apparently was questioning whether Sanabria had anything to do with the murder.”

“He said the car was important. So maybe he found out who else had access to it.”

“Maybe. If it doesn’t go back to that chop shop, though, then I have no idea what he was talking about. We talked to Mike the day before Ken was killed, so it would have been fresh in his mind, and if he was giving me credit for getting him to the solution, well, that’s the only thing I got him to. Only London mentioned a car.”

“Well,” Joe said, “I’d say now’s the time to call him.”

So I called him. Put him on speaker while Joe sat with his chin resting on steepled fingertips and listened. I had not spoken to Mike London since Ken was killed. He’d called after he heard the news, more curious then distressed, and I had never called back.

I’d already decided I didn’t want anyone but Joe to know that the new information had come from Alexandra, so I skirted that, told Mike only that Ken had evidently mentioned his belief that a car was the key to the case shortly before he was killed.

“The only car I ever heard mentioned,” I said, “was the one you told us about. It belonged to a guy named Darius Neloms, right?”

“Right.”

“Who had an alibi that was—”

“Airtight. Yes.”

“There’s no way you could have been wrong on that.”

Silence. Then, “Brother, you want to check up on me, by all means go ahead. Hell, we probably still have the security tapes buried in some evidence locker. But I’m giving you my word that Darius Neloms was nowhere near Bertoli’s death scene. A car belonging to him was. I did not find out who was driving the car. I tried, and I did not find out.”

His voice was terse and biting, and Joe raised his eyebrows and gave me a little smile. I was stepping into dangerous turf now, with even a suggestion that Mike might have missed something.

“That’s good enough for me,” I said, trying to soothe, thinking that while I was still going to need to verify, there was no reason to call him out on it now. “I just don’t know what the hell to do with this, Mike. If Ken was excited about a car, I think it had to be the one you told us about, but where that took him . . .”

“Like I told you back in the spring, Darius was connected to Sanabria.”

“Evidently Ken wasn’t sure the murder had anything to do with Sanabria.”

“Then I quite simply don’t know what to tell you, Lincoln.”

I rubbed my forehead and squeezed my eyes shut, trying to think of the right question—hell, of any question. What could Ken have seen in that car that neither Mike nor I could?

“You traced the plate, and it ran back to Neloms directly,” I said. “Right?”

“Right. Wait, no. It was registered to his shop, which doesn’t really make a damn bit of difference. Ultimately still his vehicle. He claimed no idea of who could have driven it, said the keys were inside the shop and maybe somebody took them, then told us the car must have been stolen.”

“But it had been returned.”

“Uh-huh. I checked out every employee—most of whom were family or friends of his, cousins or nephews or whatever—and didn’t get anything, but I don’t think whoever was behind the wheel really had much to do with Neloms.”

“You think they worked for Sananbria.”

“Right. They had a history together.”

All of this was recycled, the same damn conversation we’d had six months ago, and all of it pointed back to Sanabria, when Ken’s final words pointed in another direction entirely.

“Look, Lincoln, I don’t know what else to tell you . . .”

“It’s fine, Mike. Don’t worry about it. If I think of something else, I’ll call.”

I thanked him and hung up.

“Mike thinks one of Sanabria’s guys drove the car,” Joe said.

“Yeah.”

We sat in silence and thought.

“This is going to sound crazy,” I said, “but what if Bertoli drove himself there?”

He frowned. “His ghost got up off the pavement and drove it back? The car was gone after he died, right? That’s why Mike was looking at it as a suspect vehicle.”

“Right,” I said, “but he had to get there somehow, and whoever killed him would have known that. The guy had just gotten out of prison; it’s unlikely he had his own car. So maybe he borrowed one from this Neloms guy. He drove that car to meet somebody, he got killed, and then someone else—maybe the guy who killed him, maybe not—drove the car back. Having the car gone from the scene is one less thing for the cops to look at, which is what they’d want, and they couldn’t have known . . .”

My voice trailed off, and Joe said, “Keep going,” but I didn’t answer. The notion of Bertoli as the driver had tripped something in my brain, and I got up and went to the file cabinet and pulled out the sheaf of papers Ken had given me on the case. Copies of everything he’d had, or so he’d told me.

It took me a while, but I located the paperwork he’d brought into the office on the morning after our first encounter, the morning after my wild drunken dream about Parker Harrison watching me on the roof. Profiles of all the convicts who’d stayed at Whisper Ridge. I flipped through until I found Bertoli. Read the report once again, the details of his arrest for beating the truck stop manager and stealing his heroin. The police had arrested him within hours. Due to his car.