The Fix Is In (Torus Intercession 4)

She began wringing her hands and looked away before turning back to me. “I think Pete knew about Caleb. I was fooling myself, thinking I could hide anything from him, and I’m wondering now, what if… if—” She couldn’t give voice to her fear, and I understood. It was horrible to imagine.

“What if?” was a dangerous question if you were afraid of the answer.

What if I won a million dollars? What if I met my soulmate? What if I lived happily ever after? Those what-ifs allowed people to dream.

What if I never make enough money to get out of debt? What if I never meet the one? What if I die alone? Those are the questions that could haunt.

And it could get worse, like in Suzie’s case. What if he found out about my affair? What if my husband killed the man I was infatuated with? What if my world just imploded?

“Do you think Pete killed Caleb?” Benji posed the question without a drop of sympathy, so completely clinical. He’d changed in the middle of the conversation. One moment he was upset, even angry, and the next, all I saw was the psychiatrist. It was a bit unnerving to see the switch flip so quickly, in a flash, the night-and-day transformation. He turned all his emotions off like a faucet, and I wasn’t sure I liked that. I definitely never wanted to know what his indifference felt like.

“I don’t know,” she whimpered, the tears starting again.

Reaching down into the storage compartment under the armrest, I retrieved the box of tissues there. I passed it to her. She plucked two and returned it to me. Once she had wiped her eyes and blown her nose, she looked back up at me and Benji.

“I’m terrified to think that Pete could have hurt Caleb. It’s easier to think that maybe I was wrong. Maybe Caleb didn’t feel the same way about me as I felt about him.”

“But?” Benji said, staring at her.

“But,” she repeated, “I had no idea I could ever feel that way about anyone, and I swear it wasn’t just me.”

We sat there in the car with the rain hitting the roof in a steady barrage, no one saying a word.

“May I ask,” I began, “who are Pete’s closest friends?”

“Why is that important?”

“Because Caleb’s motorcycle is missing as well.”

She nodded.

“Suzie?”

Clearing her throat, she said, “Stewart and Chuck.”

So his friends were the ranger, who knew everything about the area and terrain, and— “Is Chuck, Chuck Lindstrom?”

She nodded.

And Chuck bought the cabin and the land it sits on from Ruben Navarro, then declared it private property. What would be his motivation for doing that when it had been public land for years?

“Why do you want to know who Pete’s friends are?”

“Why do you think?” I prodded her.

“Your questions make this all sound so sinister.” She bristled, angry now. “I told you this is probably just me being crazy. It wasn’t fair of me to accuse Pete of doing something that there’s absolutely no evidence of, and now you’re trying to drag his friends into it.”

“Be that as it may, you still need to go in and speak to Chief Brasher.”

“No, I won’t do that. Were you even listening to me? I can’t implicate Pete on nothing more than a stupid hunch. Not only would that destroy my marriage, but I’ve seen enough episodes of Law & Order to know a wife can’t testify against her husband.”

“Let’s do this,” Benji began, his voice silvery and smooth. “Tomorrow we’ll all look for Caleb up by the cabin where I saw him that day, and if we find anything that leads us to believe something nefarious happened to him, then you talk to Chief Brasher.”

She was chewing on her bottom lip.

“Are we agreed?” he pressed.

She nodded quickly.

“I need you to understand, Mrs. Belmont, that if you don’t come on the search tomorrow, I will immediately talk to Chief Brasher about what you’ve shared with us. If you don’t, I could only assume the reason for your absence is that your husband did something to keep you from aiding in the search. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“You’re saying that if I mention this to Pete, you think he might hurt me.”

“Not might,” he clarified solemnly. “For months now I’ve been on the receiving end of threats to my life because I took a picture of Caleb and someone didn’t want me asking questions about him. If that can happen to me, an innocent bystander who had no idea why I was being targeted, then you absolutely could be in real danger.”

She shook her head. “Pete would never hurt me.”

They sounded like famous last words to me.

“Then we have nothing to worry about, and we’ll see you tomorrow,” Benji concluded. “Now, where can we drop you?”

It turned out her car was there in the parking lot, and I drove over to it. Before she got out of the SUV, she said that she wished Benji had never taken that picture, but she was thankful at the same time.