CHAPTER
28
TWO HOURS LATER, WE walked into the lobby of Fitzwater’s Gracious Living, a nursing facility in Fairmont, West Virginia. We’d passed the exit for Buckhannon on the way, but if the trooper was right, I had to make this visit first.
“Atticus Jones?” I said to the receptionist.
She gave Ava and me a critical gaze before saying, “You family?”
“No,” I said, pushing one of my cards across the counter. “This is a business call. Mr. Jones used to be a—”
“Detective,” she sniffed. “We hear about it all the time.”
“Can we talk to him?” I asked.
She looked at Ava incredulously. “You a cop too?”
Ava, without missing a beat, said, “I get that all the time. Ever seen Twenty-One Jump Street?”
The receptionist giggled. “You could pass for high school, Detective …?”
“Bryce. Ava Bryce.”
“You go on back then, Detectives,” the receptionist said, buzzing us through a door. “He’s down the hall there in the hospice lounge, but don’t get the poor thing all riled up.”
We heard Atticus Jones before we saw him, and he didn’t sound weak to me at all.
“You complete frickin’ idiot,” he yelled. “Who is Genghis Khan? For Christ’s sake, who is Genghis Khan?”
Then he fell into a hacking fit.
A frail black man with short silver hair and a boxer’s nose, a former state homicide investigator, was sitting on a couch wearing a Pittsburgh Steelers sweatshirt and pants. He was watching Jeopardy! on the television and drinking a bottle of Yuengling bock beer. There was an empty beer bottle on the table beside him. An oxygen line ran from his nose to a tank on wheels.
“Detective Jones?” I said when he stopped coughing.
Jones took us in sidelong at first, swigging his beer before setting it down and putting the TV on mute. Turning slowly, he waved a bony finger at us.
“I am pushing eighty,” he said. “And in my entire life I’ve never forgotten a face.”
“Really?” Ava said, warming to him. “I’m like that too.”
“Super-recognizer?” he said, studying her.
“Uh, guess that’s what you’d call it.”
“It is exactly what you’d call it, young lady,” Jones said in a no-nonsense tone. “Saw a whole to-do on it couple months back on Sixty Minutes. You ever watch that show, Dr. Cross?”
I decided that if this guy was dying, I was going to live a hundred years.
I smiled. “You recognized me?”
“Told you,” he said. “Saw you speak once.”
“Where was that?” I asked.
“Seminar I took at Quantico ’bout ten years back. You guest-lectured one day. Criminal psychology.”
“I make an impression?” I asked, taking a seat opposite him.