“Three, four hours,” he said. Seeing my disappointment, he explained, “I gotta turn in this bird and get one from the sheriff’s fleet. Plus I’ll need to brief the sheriff.” Now my disappointed expression turned to a look of alarm, but Skidder gave a don’t-worry wave of his hand. “The sheriff had a lot of respect for Richard. Plus he’s a master of the interagency-cooperation game. Trust me—he’ll find a way to spin this thing so Prescott can’t possibly bitch. Hell, Prescott’ll probably end up having to give the sheriff a public pat on the back, for being such a great team player and all.”
A moment later we climbed back into the helicopter for the quick flight down to Brown Field. I had reserved a rental car there, and—despite their protests that I should stay someplace nicer—I’d booked a room in the Otay Mesa Quality Inn: a cruddy but convenient base from which to do the exploring I’d planned for the following day. Besides, in a twisted sort of way, it felt like my home away from home.
As the engine throttled up and Skidder raised the stick, the helicopter practically leapt upward. I was pleasantly surprised by its newfound nimbleness—until I remembered what Skidder had said earlier about the aircraft getting “zippy” just before the tank ran dry. I shot a quick, panicky look at the instrument panel, trying to spot the fuel gauge. Skidder must have noticed. “No worries,” he said. “It’s all downhill from here. We can coast in, if we have to.”
“Skidder,” I said, “how come every time you try to reassure me, it scares the crap out of me?”
THE OTAY MESA QUALITY INN WAS SHABBIER THAN I remembered—and I had remembered it as damn shabby. “Memory is a trickster,” as one of my UT colleagues, a pompous English professor, was fond of saying.
I asked the desk clerk for a room on the hotel’s quiet side. “Define ‘quiet,’” said the clerk, a sallow young man with greasy black hair and cynical eyes. “No traffic, or no gunshots?”
He didn’t appear to be kidding. “Tough choice,” I said, “but I’m gonna go for no gunshots.”
He handed me a key. “All the way at the end,” he said, nodding toward the freeway. I thanked him, moved the car, and carried my bag to the room.
As I turned the key in the lock, a truck roared past on the freeway, rattling my door and window. Home sweet home, I thought, echoing Prescott’s description of the hotel when he’d brought us here our first night. But the truth was, I didn’t much mind the shabbiness. I’d be sleeping in an empty bed; that was the worst part—far worse than the torn carpet and stained bedspread. Just don’t let me get bedbugs, I prayed. Like the desk clerk, I was dead serious.
MAYBE KATHLEEN REALLY WAS HAUNTING ME—NOT about the Janus case, as she’d threatened, but about the backlog of old voice mails on my phone. Throughout our teaching careers, our offices had been a study in contrast: hers always neat and tidy, mine always . . . less so. As with our desktops, so with our voice mails. I tended to procrastinate, avoiding messages I knew would be unpleasant (a category that nowadays seemed to encompass virtually all of them). “Okay, Kath,” I announced over the rumble of traffic, “I’m clearing my decks. You’d be proud.”
Mercifully, most of the messages were so old that they had become utterly irrelevant, and I found myself hitting the “delete” key many times in swift succession. Muckraking talk-radio host badgering me about disrespecting veterans? Delete. Obituary-stalking strangers who’d read about my wife’s passing in the newspaper? Delete. Neighborhood widows offering a soft shoulder and a warm casserole? Delete delete delete.
The message I most dreaded hearing—the one I saved for last—was the voice mail I’d received from Captain Brian Decker shortly before his throat had been cut in a prison interview room by Nick Satterfield. Decker was still at Vanderbilt Hospital, still barely alive—still in a coma, in fact—and merely seeing his number on my phone’s display was enough to make me feel bad all over again: guilty, somehow, even though I’d urged him not to go rattle Satterfield’s cage. The TBI agent investigating the incident—if investigating was the right word for an inquiry that gave any weight at all to Satterfield’s version of events—had said that the call had lasted five minutes. As I punched the series of keys that would play the message, I braced myself for bad tidings: a grim reminder of Satterfield’s virally infectious venom, at the very least, and possibly even a self-incriminating revelation from Deck about what he’d intended to do to Satterfield. I considered erasing it without listening—what was the point, besides pain?—but decided I owed it to Decker to hear him out.