Beside Jay, Neal’s left leg is pumping up and down underneath the wooden table, as he sits hunched over his mobile phone, scrolling through what must be dozens of phone numbers he’s dialed in the last few days. The restless, rat-tat-tat motion rattles the one chair leg that’s shorter than the others, not to mention what it’s beginning to do to Jay’s nerves. He remembers the heat that soon gathers in these little rooms, breath souring by the hour without food or water. He’s been on this side of the table before, both as a lawyer and as a suspect. From his pocket, he pulls a folded copy of the same bayou development flyer, comparing it with the one on the table. “This, right here, this is evidence the girl was working for Mr. Acton or Ms. Wolcott, right before the general election. She was leaving these on front steps, in mailboxes, all around Pleasantville.”
Moore wears a thin mustache, blacker than the hair on his head, and Jay tries to understand the kind of vanity that would make a man dye his mustache and not bother with the rest of it. The detective pinches his mouth into a tight line, pondering something. The heat’s on him too. Jay notices sweat rings under his arms. Neal leans back in his chair. He seems to newly consider the chain of events that led him to this interrogation room, and he whispers a single word under his breath, the name of Wolcott’s highly paid campaign consultant. “Parker.” It’s the first moment since Jay walked in that Neal appears to grasp that he might actually be in some trouble here, that there might be forces working against him that he can’t see, let alone control; the mere thought of Reese Parker’s hand in this stirs more fear than the detective ever did. “I swear to god, if this is some kind of a stunt.”
Then it worked, Jay thinks.
Wolcott is walking the streets, on camera, making a public show of looking for the missing girl, while Hathorne’s right hand is holed up in here. Neal flips open his cell phone again and starts dialing.
“Not here,” Jay says.
Moore doesn’t touch the flyer. He seems wholly unimpressed. Jay tries to explain. “If Alicia was handing these out, she wasn’t working for Hathorne.”
“She wasn’t. How many times do I have to say it?” Neal says.
“You spoke at her high school,” Moore says. “You remember that?”
“What?”
“Alicia Nowell, she went to Jones High School.”
“So?”
“So you visited the school in the spring, before she graduated.”
“No, I didn’t.”
He shakes his head, marveling at how crazy this all sounds. Then he leans back in his chair again. A moment passes before he realizes his mistake.
“Jesus, I did,” he says, looking at Jay and then Detective Moore, as if he wants to apologize for having said the wrong thing. “They held a candidate forum, for the students, a government class or something like that. Acton was the only one who came in person. I was there for Axe. Wolcott sent some low-level staffer.”
“We have reports that you spent some time talking to Ms. Nowell.”
Neal shakes his head. “I don’t know what to say. I don’t remember her.”
“Neal.” Jay holds out a hand, again to stop him from talking. He wants to steer the conversation back to Acton and Wolcott, the fact that members of one of their campaigns might have sent Alicia into Pleasantville, may have, for all they know, arranged to pick her up after her shift ended. Maybe that’s who she was waiting for, standing alone at the corner of Ledwicke and Guinevere.
“There were reports that you slid her your business card.”
“I pass out a lot of cards. We’re always looking for volunteers.”
“Right, and between that and your phone number in her pager–”
Neal sighs. “I could have called her–”
“Don’t,” Jay says.
“There are some numbers in here I don’t recognize,” he says, holding up his cell phone. He seems nervous now, aware of his previous mistake, and yet here he is again, changing his story on a dime. He tries to lay it all out now, talking too much. Neal graduated from law school, twenty years after Jay, so he’s technically a lawyer, but one without a bar card or an animal instinct for avoiding traps. “It’s possible one of them belonged to Alicia Nowell,” he says. “But it doesn’t mean I knew it was her pager. I’ve called a lot of people during the campaign. And I still carry a pager too. If someone pages me, I call back, leaving my cell number. To be honest, I might have thought it was Acton’s people. Since the primary, I have a list of people a mile long, from Acton’s communications director to his second cousin, all with their hands out, wanting money in exchange for his endorsement. It’s possible I called her back, put my number in her pager, not even knowing who I was calling.”
“Just as it’s possible that someone else paged Alicia and punched in Neal’s number,” Jay says to Detective Moore. To Neal, he says, “Stop talking.”
“Can we take a look at that phone?”
“Not at this time,” Jay says.
“Might point us in a right direction.”
“You seem pointed in a direction already.”
“Where were you Tuesday night, Mr. Hathorne?”
“You don’t have to answer that,” Jay says.
“You’re not serious?” Neal says to the cop. He asks Jay, “Is he serious?”
“I got a girl out there in the streets somewhere. I’m damned serious.”
“Alonzo Hollis,” Jay says. “Any idea where he was Tuesday night?”
The cop stares at Jay, as he runs a finger along the edge of the table, exercising his own right to remain silent, mocking Jay’s earnestness, his arrogance at thinking he knows more than a seasoned detective. But Jay doesn’t give a shit what Moore thinks of him. “Be interesting,” he says, “for Alicia Nowell’s parents, let alone the Chronicle and the city as a whole, to find out that HPD had a suspect in two nearly identical abductions and didn’t pursue him, all the while wasting time questioning Neal Hathorne, nephew of the former police chief, who, other than trying to get Axel elected, appears to have been minding his own business.”
“We’re working on Hollis’s alibi,” Moore concedes.
“So are we,” Jay says. It comes out stronger than he intended, as if he’s already building a defense, when one hasn’t been required, when the breadth of his investigation is an ex-con skulking around Hollis’s place in a rusty El Camino.
Moore leans back in his chair, resting his hands on a tiny roll of gut that’s spilling over his belt. “You knew a girl named Tina Wells, didn’t you, Neal?”
“What?”
“Tina Wells, you knew her.”
Jay turns to look at Neal.