“Please, ma’am,” said Diana, “can you answer the question?”
“Do I have all morning to sit and stare out my window?” she asked, her eyes wide with indignation. “Sure, I saw Kristin take her boy over to the Smith place, which I told her not to do because I don’t trust the Smith family. Look at their yard! And Mr. Smith was already gone by then, of course, because he works in an office downtown, though I figure he can’t make much money from it or they’d fix up their house a little.”
“Did you see anything else?” asked Diana.
“The Mexican man in 2107 left to go to his job at eight, but then he came back at nine, or maybe a little after nine, so he may have gotten fired. He left again by 9:30: I know because my show hadn’t gone to commercial yet, and it always goes on the half hour.”
“Kristin Mercer took her son to Margaret Smith at 10:15,” I said, reading from my notes. “That’s the house across the street from you, correct?”
“And just look at it,” said the woman, waving toward it disdainfully.
“Did you see anyone near her car while she was inside?” I asked.
“Should I have?” asked the woman. “Has something happened to Kristin? It was that Mexican man, wasn’t it?”
“Please answer the question,” said Diana.
“No, I didn’t see anyone near her car,” said the woman. “What am I, some kind of a spy with nothing better to do than watch my neighbors all day?”
“Thank you,” said Diana. “We’ll get back to you if we need any more information.” She closed the door, and we walked to the next house. Potash met us coming the other way.
“They don’t know anything,” he said. “Nobody does.”
My phone rang; I hadn’t put any contact numbers in it yet, so I was surprised to hear Trujillo on the other end.
“John,” he said, “any luck at the Mercer house?”
“Nothing yet,” I said. “Ask Elijah if Kristin stopped anywhere else before getting on the freeway.”
“He already said she didn’t.”
“Ask again,” I said. “His memory’s terrible.”
“I want to talk about your theory,” he said. “It’s interesting, but it doesn’t hold water.”
Yes it does. “You think we’re chasing a ten-thousand-year-old veterinarian park ranger cannibal scholar who’s well-spoken and careful except for when he’s not?”
Trujillo sighed. “Is that really any more ridiculous than a ten-thousand-year-old plague goddess who packs a gun she never uses and makes sick kids sicker so she can hide in a hospital?”
“Yes,” I said. “Mary Gardner had solid reasons for everything she did. We don’t have that for The Hunter.”
“We don’t have it yet,” said Trujillo. “That doesn’t mean we never will.”
“So how does he not pass out from the sedative?” I asked. “He can’t inject it into their bodies and then eat them. Especially not Kristin Mercer—we found her hours after she died, but if he ate a sedative in her shoulder he’d have been too asleep to finish the attack, let alone dump the body.”
“We know he injected her,” said Trujillo, “and we know he ate her. We have clear evidence of both.”
“You don’t know it was him,” I said, and began to grow excited as I thought more about it. “That would actually explain a lot: what if he has an accomplice? Or a pet, I don’t know what you’d call it—someone he brings bodies back to, and then they eat them. That gives us the meticulous mastermind and the feral cannibal, in a way that makes sense.”
“And then the pet falls asleep instead of the mastermind,” said Trujillo, as if mulling the idea over in his head. “Still doesn’t work: whoever eats the body will fall asleep before they’re finished, unless they’re immune to the sedative, in which case we don’t need two people, we’re back to just one. Simpler is better. And the bite wounds are still too … deliberately random. They don’t follow a normal eating pattern, the way you’d expect from a feral accomplice like you’re suggesting. The best theory is still Nathan’s: that this killer somehow fetishizes the sedative—possibly because he’s immune to it—and then takes weird bites out of the corpse.”
“The best theory is mine,” I insisted. “That the reason this doesn’t make sense is because it’s intended to confuse us.”
“But that theory doesn’t solve any problems,” said Trujillo. “It denies all of our other answers without positing any of its own: it doesn’t solve the sedative eating, it doesn’t tell us how he slashed the tires without being seen, it doesn’t give us anything new we can work with.”
“It tells us our other answers are wrong,” I said. “We have to give them up and start over.”
“I have to go,” he said. “Ostler needs something.”