“I don’t have one because there are too many possibilities,” Ogawa said.
“Something happened to this girl fifteen months ago. There’s been a distinct personality and life change. But I can’t find a connection with Laurie Hernandez.”
“Ms. Sutton is far too interested in throwing herself into our investigation for my liking.”
“OK, but why is she interested in our investigation? If she killed Holli Buckner and wanted to stay off our radar, she simply had to keep her mouth shut. We wouldn’t have made any connections between Laurie Hernandez and her, or any other potential victims.”
“And that’s what I don’t like. We’ve been led on a merry dance since this woman busted into our crime scene. You are only where you are because of her.”
Ogawa had a point.
“When do you think you’ll be back?”
“I’ll check in with the sheriff in the morning and then head out.”
“How are the mountain boys in blue treating you?”
“Like a distant cousin.”
“Another reason for you to get your ass back here. Look, I don’t have anything against this Sutton woman, per se. At this point, I can’t implicate her and I can’t dismiss her, so she’s a problem that needs cleaning up. Now, to do that, I suggest you go through the case and her accounts and look for inconsistencies.”
Greening hung up on his partner. Ogawa was a son of a bitch. A healthy mistrust of people was a handy weapon for every cop, but Ogawa took it another step. Greening wasn’t quite sure of Zo?, but he’d been pretty sure she was the victim and not the perpetrator. Now Ogawa had him thinking his way. Plenty of things pointed toward her innocence, but Zo?’s situation was so vague in places, he didn’t really know what he had.
He threw out the rest of the fast food and brought out his maps. He marked the location of the Tally Man site with a Sharpie, then traced with a green highlighter the roads from the Smokehouse in Bishop to the site. Lastly, he indicated in orange highlights Zo?’s escape route, to where she’d crashed. He sat back, trying to make sense of what he’d charted.
Zo? had followed the winding track back to US 95, driven north to Mammoth Lakes, and somewhere along the way, had pulled a U-turn in order to crash in the southbound lane of the highway. Yes, Zo? had been in no condition to drive, and it wasn’t surprising she’d ended up turning around and running off the road. However, it was odd that after she’d escaped the Tally Man, she’d crashed less than five miles from his lair. If Greening squinted at this picture through Ogawa’s jaded eye, it looked as if she’d been driving back to the scene of the crime.
Crossing the Bay Bridge into San Francisco, Zo? was reminded of how overpopulated and impatient the Bay Area was. Even at this late hour, everyone was driving too close and going too fast. In the two days she’d been away, she’d adjusted to the isolation outside California’s big cities and had been able to be alone with her thoughts. Squeezed onto the bridge with hundreds of others, all she could think of was not being hit by cars weaving in and out in front of her.
The drive back had been good for her. The solitude had helped her decompress and lose the resentment she’d felt when Greening had kicked her to the curb. He was right. It was out of her hands. She’d done her part. She’d been the sniffer dog and rooted out a clue. It was down to the cops to do something with it. She’d hold Greening to his word and pressure him for updates.
The solitude had also given her an opportunity to mourn for herself and Holli. That night had always straddled the line between reality and nightmare. Had she really been abducted? Had she actually seen Holli dangling from a hook? Had she really escaped a killer? She’d known how the Mono Sheriff’s Department felt about her—that she’d made the whole thing up while in a drunken stupor. Finding those outbuildings meant it was real. It had happened. It also meant she truly had abandoned Holli.
That single thought preoccupied her through most of her drive and took the urgency and aggression out of her driving. She let the other cars swarm around her. They could have their extra foot of real estate. She would get home when she got home.