Jackson took a deep breath, then shook his head. “No, I’m up already. Bring it in. It’s not your fault.”
“Yes, sir,” Sunday said, acting the deferential servant as he wheeled the cart into the room, one of those executive affairs with a king-size bed, a sofa, and a desk for the traveling businessman.
Jackson walked behind him, letting the door shut. The writer parked the cart by the sofa, said, “This good?”
“Yeah, sure, whatever,” the attorney replied, and yawned. Sunday knelt as if to lock the cart’s wheels while swiping the exterior and interior of Preston Elliot’s used condom on the leg of Jackson’s suit pants, which were lying on a chair. Pocketing the condom, the writer stood, picked up the coffee carafe.
“That’s not decaf, is it?” Jackson asked.
“French roast, sir,” Sunday said.
“Good, that’s what I—” The attorney had lifted the cover over the omelet. “What the fuck? I asked for three eggs sunny side up, bacon, and wheat toast.”
Sunday did his best to grovel. “I am so sorry, sir. I take and get you right away the right breakfast.”
“What?” the attorney groused. “Yes, please do that. This isn’t what I ordered at all.”
“I leave you coffee, though, and be right back.”
“Sugar and milk, too. And get me a copy of the Washington Post.”
Sunday bowed and set the cup, saucer, carafe, milk, and sugar bowl on the table. “I apologize again, sir. There will be no charge for breakfast.”
“Well,” Jackson said as Sunday wheeled the cart away. “That’s good.”
“It’s the least the Mandarin Oriental could do,” the writer replied, and let the door shut behind him.
Chapter
31
Bree and I left the old factory building shaken and depressed, with Everett Prough following us in a slow homeless-person shuffle.
“I can’t believe it,” Bree said in a low pained voice.
“His story’s plausible,” I replied, not liking the sour taste of it any better.
“But convincing?”
I struggled to answer. We’d shown the homeless man a photograph of Ava, and he’d fingered her as a killer and a mutilator. Prough said Ava was one of six or seven runaway girls he’d encountered squatting and using drugs in the old factory over the past few months. He moved his nest often, rotating among several places so as not to attract attention. When he returned to the factory around dusk the night of the murder, it had been a month since he’d last slept in the basement.
Approaching the abandoned building, Prough claimed he heard girls arguing over money and meth. They were high on something for sure. Prough said he snuck in and watched from the shadows as Ava and another girl with Goth black hair got into a screaming match that became a hair-pulling catfight.
“She tripped the other girl and then hit her like this with her elbow,” Prough told us, holding his wrist and driving the elbow of that same arm sharply to the side and behind him in a move I sadly recognized.
I’d taught it to Ava. I’d taught it to all my kids.
Prough said the Goth girl had fallen hard at the blow. Her head had struck a post. She never moved again.
“The one who hit her started crying once she realized what she’d done,” Prough said. “Then she got a can of gasoline and poured it over the Goth girl, and lit a cigarette and threw it on the gas.”
Prough said Ava had a blue backpack when she ran from the factory. Not wanting to be around when the body was found, he said he followed Ava several minutes later and found the sweater lying in her escape path.
Several things had bothered me about the story. “Where’d the gas c
ome from?” I asked.
Prough shrugged. “She had it in there for some reason.”