“Hell, I’d been thirty years on the job by that time, but yes, sir, you did teach me a thing or two. I will admit that.”
“Nice to hear,” I said, smiling. “I’m hoping you can pay me back the favor.”
“That right?” Jones said, perking up. “How’s that?”
“You can tell me about Thierry Mulch.”
The old man’s eyes narrowed, and his jaw set hard before he wagged that bony finger at me again and said in an emotional whisper, “I knew it. That evil, calculating, pig-farming daddy-killer. I knew it all along!”
CHAPTER
29
THE OLD DETECTIVE FELL back against the couch hacking so hard I thought he’d break a rib. But after thirty or forty seconds of this, he stopped, grabbed a plastic cup, and spit in it. He looked in the cup, then up at me.
“Good news,” Jones said. “Blood, but no lung tissue.”
I was still spinning from his remark about Mulch. Pig-farming daddy-killer?
“I’m sorry, sir,” I said. “What did you know all along?”
“That Thierry Mulch is alive,” the old detective croaked. “That’s what you came to tell me, wasn’t it?”
Alive?
I said, “But I read his obituary.”
“Course you did. Don’t mean a damn thing.”
“Back up a minute. What makes you think he’s alive?”
The old man reached up and thumped on his chest. “Always felt that way, in here. Never could shake the feeling. Why? What’s he done?”
“If it’s the same man, he killed my wife and son,” I said. “And he’s holding my grandmother and my two other children hostage. He’s threatening to kill them too if I don’t do what he wants.”
Jones looked appalled. “I knew that boy had gotten a taste for it.”
“Taste for what?” Ava asked.
“Murder,” the old detective said. “Thierry killed his father, and then another guy, probably a transient. I couldn’t prove it, though.”
“Time out,” I said, waving my hands. “Could you start at the be
ginning?”
The detective hesitated before saying, “Be better if I could also show you, so you’d understand the lay of the land.”
“You up for a ride down to Buckhannon?”
Jones laughed. “You’d have to sneak me out the back door. Otherwise that nosy gal at the front desk will be calling my daughter, Gloria, up in Pittsburgh ’bout it, and she’ll have what my granddaughter Lizzie calls ‘a cow.’”
I smiled again. “If you’re up to it?”
“What else am I gonna do? Wheel of Fortune? I’m too far gone for that Vanna White.”
“All right,” I said. “We’ll sneak you out the back.”
The old man seemed to lose ten years then. He grabbed a walker and struggled to his feet. “Just have me back by seven. Gloria’s coming down to pay a visit, have dinner. You got room for an oxygen tank?”