Bowen sighed audibly. “Our history together will carry you only so far. You need to understand that.”
DeMarco smiled. “History used to be my favorite subject. Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Or something like that. George Santayana.”
“Santayana the guitar player said that? The guy who wrote that devil woman song?”
“The song is ‘Black Magic Woman’ and the guitar player is Carlos Santana. And he didn’t write the song. In fact, it was recorded by Fleetwood Mac two years before Santana covered it. You really suck at just about everything, don’t you?”
Bowen smiled in spite of himself, then was startled by the buzzing of his cell phone. He looked at the number. “Channel Four,” he said before silencing the phone. “So back to the matter at hand. You make it outside just in time to see your car leaving. But instead of picking up the phone and calling for assistance, you go running after the car.”
“Staggering is more like it. I wrote staggering, didn’t I?”
“You go staggering away in pursuit.”
“I wasn’t in pursuit so much as I was hoping to ascertain the perp’s probable flight path. So that I could then call for assistance.”
“You didn’t say that in here,” Bowen said and tapped a finger to the report.
“I just now thought of it. I mean that was probably my intent.”
“Probably.”
“Listen, you’re the guy who forced the pills on me. Threatened me, in fact, with something awful—I forget what exactly—if I didn’t take them. So if there are some holes in my memory, you put them there.”
“It was twenty milligrams of Valium, for Chrissakes. A mild relaxant.”
DeMarco shrugged. “Maybe it was the right to the jaw. I think Inman might have banged my head on the floor a couple times while he was at it.”
“Are you making this up as you go along?”
“Certain details are coming back to me. I wasn’t fucking chasing the car. Do I look like a Labrador retriever to you? I wanted to see which way it turned at the corner.”
“But you also saw and recognized Bonnie’s vehicle parked along the street.”
“I did.”
“So you approached that vehicle with your weapon drawn.”
“As I recall.”
“So you were wearing your weapon when Inman coldcocked you in the kitchen.”
“That doesn’t seem likely,” DeMarco said.
“Yet you had it when you went outside.”
“Now there’s another hole in my memory. At some point I must have retrieved it from the bedroom. Then I staggered outside.”
“Is that how you now recall it?”
“I’m just trying to fill in the gaps. Not much is certain.”
“So it would seem.”
“Seeing Bonnie with her throat slit kind of slapped me awake though. You know what I mean?”
“Except that you still failed to call in for assistance.”
“I thought you read my report carefully.”
“Okay, you attempted to make the call once you were in pursuit in Bonnie’s vehicle. But your cell phone battery was dead.”
“You ever notice how technology always lets you down when you need it most?”
“You’re fucking driving me nuts. I’m trying to make some sense of this…this…”
“Report?”
“This assemblage of inconsistencies. And if I didn’t know you better, I would say that you’re making every effort to subvert my understanding.”
DeMarco chuckled.
“What’s so damn funny?”
“Sorry, I just thought of this line from Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. ‘I test very high on insubordination.’ Not that it has any application here, you understand.”
“We’re talking about a multiple homicide, Ryan.”
“Which I’ve been beating out my brains over ever since day one. Look, I’m not attempting to subvert your understanding in any way, shape, or form. I’m just feeling a little giddy, I guess, because it’s over. At long fucking last, this ugly, horrendous episode is finally over. And yes, I am also more than a little bit testy about how it went down. It cost us a good man. A very good man.”
Several moments passed. “All right,” Bowen said. “You can’t make a call because your cell phone’s dead. You continue in pursuit. Where did you catch up with them?”
“I never really caught up. I would see a pair of taillights every now and then, enough that I could stay with them. Where I really lost some time was after Inman abandoned the car in the clearing.”
“Right,” Bowen said. “It’s what, maybe six in the morning by then? Still fairly dark. Yet somehow you managed to track them to a campsite you didn’t even know existed.”
“I followed my ears. After the first gunshot, it wasn’t all that difficult.”
“And what you saw there strikes me as very bizarre indeed.”
“Indeed,” DeMarco said.
“Why would Inman use birdshot?”
DeMarco shrugged. “He’s a sadist. If anything should be clear by now, it’s that.”
“He shot Huston three times with birdshot just to make him suffer?”
“That’s all I can figure.”
“Then he finishes him off with three .22 longs to the chest. Using a fifty-year-old revolver.”