She just wasn’t sure where Ivy Wilde’s lies were threaded into her truth.
Tanaka was taking notes on her spiral pad even though the session was being recorded. She sat on one side of the table, Sarina Marsh and her niece on the other. Ivy, wide-eyed and ashen-faced, had seemed almost demure throughout and had answered all the questions posed to her. But Tanaka wasn’t buying it. At least not all of it. Ivy had told the same story she’d spun to Pescoli: She’d come home from a friend’s, found her parents slain in their separate bedrooms, thought she’d heard someone upstairs, freaked out, and picked up a kitchen knife, which she’d subsequently dropped onto the street. After running through a nearby park, she’d taken BART, then because she was afraid for her own safety, she’d decided to leave the area. She’d taken a bus to Albuquerque where she’d run into Wynn P. Ellis, gotten the better of him, and again hopped a Greyhound that had the bad luck of breaking down and causing another nerve-wracking delay. She’d eventually landed in Missoula and, after catching a ride into Grizzly Falls, she’d ended up on dear old Aunt Regan’s doorstep.
Most of Ivy’s tale was true, Tanaka supposed; it lined up with the facts, but some of the story just seemed a little too pat, though Tanaka couldn’t say why.
But she would.
It was Tanaka’s job to sort fact from fiction.
And she was good at her job.
“So you went to Albuquerque just to throw off anyone who might have been following you, so they wouldn’t track you down here. Did I get that right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“No other reason.”
“No.” Now Ivy shook her head, her uneven haircut even more ragged in the harsh light.
“Do you know anyone in New Mexico?”
“No! That was the whole point! Geez, didn’t you hear me? I was trying to throw off anyone who was looking for me.”
“So you could come to Grizzly Falls.”
“My mom always said if I was in trouble and couldn’t get to her to . . . to call my aunt, the cop.” She stared at Tanaka as if the detective was being intentionally thickheaded.
Tanaka changed tactics. “Tell me about the man who attacked you. Did you know him?”
“I never saw him before that night. But he was on the bus from LA. Watching me.”
“Why?”
A lift of the shoulder. “I don’t know.”
“Did he follow you onto the bus?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. I didn’t notice when he got on or if he was on before me, just partway on the trip I saw that he was watching me. He wore sunglasses the whole trip, even in the dark.”
“Are you sure you hadn’t met or seen him before?”
“I told you: no.” Her chin angled upward a little indignantly.
“Okay, let’s go back to the night you found your parents. You said you heard someone in the house.”
“Yes.”
“But you didn’t see anyone?”
“I told you, I ran.”
“But you think it was more than one person.”
“It sounded like that. Multiple footsteps at the same time, you know?”
“From how many people?”
Ivy sighed through her nose. “I don’t know. Maybe two people, maybe more.” She bit her lip and looked away, thinking.