“Arne, I’m going to deck you after class.”
He just grinned. Gwyn leaned forward from the seat behind him. “I don’t know, Ash. Do you have a truckload of hidden parking tickets or something? You’re right. Brennan was staring earlier, and now they’re both watching you.”
She tried hard to pay attention during the rest of the class. To keep her fingers off her pencil and sketch no more that day.
At last the afternoon drew to an end. Part of her wanted to stay after and ask if they’d gotten any information about the accident, but mostly she just wanted to get out.
She didn’t have to decide, however. As soon as she stood, Murray spoke to her.
“Montague?”
“Yes, sir?”
“I need to speak with you. Now, please.”
Carnegie was a decent sort, more than willing to meet Jake at a coffeehouse on the Miami-Dade county line at four and talk about his investigation.
Driving straight through, Jake just made it.
Carnegie was in his fifties, probably close to retirement. Despite the time they’d both spent on the force, they’d never met. From the start, though, the meeting went well. There was something of a brotherhood between them, since they were both somewhat jaded and yet were survivors.
“You know, though,” he told Jake right off, “the parents have been hounding me all along, insisting I have to find out something because their boy just didn’t do drugs.”
“I’ve met them,” Jake said.
“No parents want to find out their kid went bad. I’ve investigated fatalities where there’s evidence, an eyewitness proving a kid was driving recklessly, and the parents still don’t want to believe it ‘Not my son—he aced driver’s ed. Not my daughter, she would never exceed the limit.’”
“I understand that,” Jake said. “But I know one of this kid’s old friends, and she says he wasn’t the type, either.”
Carnegie had bright blue eyes, snow-white hair and a face crinkled by years in the sun. He was a big man, not given to fat, but with an appearance as solid as a wall. Yet he didn’t look like a hard-ass. There was compassion in his features when he winced.
“I’d like to give them something, honest-to-God, I would. I’d be more than willing to see it their way. It’s just that, hell, I haven’t got a damned thing to go on. The kid was in the middle of the highway, dressed in his damn underwear. God knows what he was seeing as he walked into traffic, because he was lucky he was alive to begin with, there was so much shit in his bloodstream. The fellow who hit him is a basket case, swears he didn’t see him until he was right in front of him. Two more cars cracked up because they couldn’t stop fast enough, but neither of them saw a thing. The driver of the first car checks out completely. He owns a furniture gallery in North Dade, has three kids, coaches soccer and goes to church every Sunday. Ex-Navy man, saw action in the Middle East. Never even got a parking ticket. He didn’t see anything until the kid crossed the median and was right in his lane. Too late for him to stop, though he tried. He didn’t know if the kid walked across from the other side, or fell out of the sky or jumped out of a car. We’ve had every cop in the area asking questions at nearby houses and businesses. We took out an ad, asking for anyone who knows anything to call us with any information whatsoever. We’ve asked the parents, but they don’t know what their son was up to. He’d more or less dropped off the face of the earth a few months ago, decided to take up writing. He wanted to go around incognito or something. So far, he’d sold a few things to a rag called In Depth. I’ve been to the office. The managing editor liked Fresia and was sick to hear what had happened. He thought the kid was excited about something he was writing but had said he wasn’t going to tell anyone what he was doing until he had more information. Sure could have gotten into something doing research, I suppose. Believe me, it’s not that we haven’t worked this case, worked it hard. We’re just at one of those dead ends. We’ve got nowhere to go.”
“I understand. The thing that’s true, though, is this—the kid had to come from somewhere.”
“Right. He had to come from somewhere. We just don’t know where. We’ve tried the records from the local hotels and motels. Nothing. If he were in a private residence in the area, no one is admitting it. If he came out of a car, no one saw him. We’re praying for some kind of a lead. We haven’t given up.”
“There’s still the hope the kid will come out of the coma, too,” Jake said.
“Oh, yeah, now that’s a hope. A desperate hope,” Carnegie said. Then he was ready to change the subject. “How are you doing? I read about the body that was just discovered. Heard you never really closed the old task force down or accepted that deranged boy’s confession as final proof that the murders were solved, what was it…four, five years ago?”
“Five. Almost five.”
Carnegie was staring at him hard.