I nod. “Can we hit the fast-forward?”
Hal does so. It speeds up old-school, so you can see everything happening faster. He releases the button when two people exit. Their backs are toward us. They are at a distance, shot from behind, blurry with the camera set too far away.
But then I see the woman walk.
Time stops. There is a slow, steady tick-tick-ticking in my chest. Then I can feel the ka-boom right as my heart explodes into a million pieces.
I remember the first time I saw that walk. There was a song Dad loved by Alejandro Escovedo called “Castanets.” Do you remember it, Leo? Of course you do. There’s that line where he sings about this impossibly sexy woman: “I like her better when she walks away.” I never concurred—I preferred when Maura walked right toward me, shoulders back, eyes boring into me—but boy, did I get it.
Senior year, the Dumas twins both fell in love. I introduced you to Diana Styles, Augie and Audrey’s daughter, and a week later, you hooked me up with Maura Wells. Even in this—dating, girls, falling in love—we had to be in sync, right, Leo? Maura was the beautiful outsider who hung with your geek squad. Diana was the good-girl cheerleader and student council vice president. Her father, Augie, was captain of the police and my football coach. I remember him making a joke at practice about his daughter dating the “better Dumas.”
At least, I think it was a joke.
Dumb, I know, but I still wonder about the what-ifs. We never talked specifics about life after high school, did we? Would you and I have gone to the same college? Would I have stayed with Maura? Would you and Diana . . . ?
Dumb.
Reynolds says, “Well?”
“That’s Maura,” I say.
“You sure?”
I don’t bother replying. I’m still watching the tape. The gray-haired guy opens the car door, and Maura slips into the passenger seat. I watch him circle back around and get into the driver’s seat. The car reverses out of the spot and starts cruising toward the exit. I watch carefully until the car is gone from view.
“How much did they drink?” I ask Hal.
Hal is wary again.
Reynolds reminds him of the severity in the same way: “We don’t give a crap about overserving, Hal. This is a cop killing.”
“Yeah, they were drinking pretty good.”
I think about it, try to get it to make sense.
“Oh, one other thing,” Hal says. “Her name wasn’t Maura. I mean, that’s not the name she used.”
“What name did she use?” Reynolds asks.
“Daisy.”
Reynolds looks at me with a concern I find oddly touching. “You okay?”
I know what she’s thinking. My great love, whom I’ve spent the past fifteen years obsessing over, was hanging out in this toilet, using a fake name, leaving with strange men. The stench of this place is starting to get to me. I stand, thank Hal, and hurry to the front door. I open it and step into the same lot I just saw on the video. I gulp some fresh air. But that’s not why I’m here.
I look toward where the rental car had been parked.
Reynolds comes up behind me. “Thoughts?”
“The guy opened the car door for her.”
“So?”
“He didn’t stagger. Didn’t fumble with his keys. Didn’t forget his manners.”
“And again I say: So?”
“Did you watch him drive out of here?”
“I did.”
“No swerving, no quick stops or starts.”
“Meaningless.”
I start walking down the road.
“Where are you going?” she asks.
I keep walking. Reynolds follows. “How far is the turn?”
She hesitates because I think she now sees where I’m going with this. “Second right.”
That’s about what I’d figured. The entire walk from the bar to the murder scene takes us less than five minutes. When I get to it, I look back at the bar and then down to the spot where Rex fell.
It isn’t making sense. Not yet. But I’m getting closer.
“Rex pulled them over awfully fast,” I say.
“He was probably staking out the bar.”
“I bet if we watch that video we’ll see a lot of drunker guys stumbling out,” I say. “So why them?”
Reynolds shrugs. “Maybe the rest were local. This guy had a rental plate.”
“Nail the out-of-towner?”
“Sure.”
“Who happens to be driving in a car with a girl Rex knew in high school?”
The wind has picked up. A few strands of hair get in Reynolds’s face. She pushes them away. “I’ve seen bigger coincidences.”
“So have I,” I say.
But this isn’t one of them. I try to picture it. I start with what I know—Maura and the old man in the bar, coming out, he holds the door for her, they drive off, Rex pulls them over.
“Nap?”
“I need you to look something up for me,” I say.
Chapter Six
The security feed at Sal’s Rent-A-Vehicle is of better quality. I watch the video in silence. As is too often the case with security footage, this camera is also set up high. Every bad guy knows about this, and so they do the simple things to beat it. Here, the guy with the stolen ID in the name of Dale Miller is wearing a baseball cap pulled low. He keeps his head down so that it’s impossible to see his features with any sort of clarity. I can maybe make out the start of a beard. He limps.
“A pro,” I tell Reynolds.
“Meaning?”
“Cap pulled low, head down, fake limp.”
“How do you know the limp is fake?”
“The same way I knew Maura’s walk. A walk can be distinctive. What’s the best way to hide that and get you to focus on something meaningless?”
“Fake a limp,” Reynolds says.
We head outside Sal’s shack of a rental office and into the cool night air. In the distance, I see a man light up a cigarette. He lifts his head and breathes out a long smoke plume, just like Dad used to do. I took up smoking after Dad died and kept at it for more than a year. I know how nuts that is. Dad died of lung cancer after a lifetime of smoking, and yet my reaction to his horrible death was to smoke. I liked stepping outside alone with a cigarette like this guy is doing. Maybe that was the appeal for me—when I lit up, people stayed away from me.
“We can’t rely on the age thing either,” I say. “The long hair, the beard—he could be wearing a disguise. Lots of times a guy will pretend to be old so you underestimate him. Rex pulls over an old man for a DUI, he may let his guard down.”
Reynolds nods. “I’ll still have an expert comb through the surveillance tape frame by frame. Maybe they’ll get something more distinct.”
“Sure.”
“You have a theory, Nap?”
“Not really.”
“But?”
I watch the guy take a deep drag and let it out through his nose. I’m a Francophile now—wine, cheese, fluency in the language, the whole kit ’n’ caboodle, which may also explain my short-lived smoking. The French smoke. A lot. Of course, I came by my Francophilism, to invent a word, honestly, what with being born in Marseilles and spending the first eight years of my life in Lyon. It isn’t a show thing for me like it is with those pretentious twat waffles who know nothing about wine but suddenly need a special carrying case and treat the pulled cork like a lover’s tongue.
“Nap?”
“Do you believe in hunches, Reynolds? Do you believe in cop intuition?”
“Fuck no,” Reynolds says. “Every stupid mistake I’ve seen a cop make stems from their reliance on”—she makes quote marks with her fingers—“‘hunches’ and ‘intuition.’”
I like Reynolds. I like her a lot. “Exactly my point.”
It’s been a long day. It feels like I whacked Trey with the bat a month ago. I’ve been working off adrenaline, and now I’m tapped out. But like I said before, I like Reynolds. Maybe I owe her too. So I figure, why not?
“I had a twin brother. His name was Leo.”
She waits.
“You know anything about this?” I ask.
“No; should I?”
I shake my head. “Leo had this girlfriend named Diana Styles. We all grew up in Westbridge, where you picked me up.”