“As it happens,” Brian said, “I thought you might want to lie low for a while?” He turned to me and raised his eyebrows. “Yes? So I took the liberty of getting you a small, quiet hotel room.”
I blinked. “That’s very kind of you, brother.”
“Oh, no trouble at all,” he said happily. “I put it on a nice, anonymous credit card.”
I thought about it for a
moment. Brian was absolutely right that I needed to stay out of sight until I knew which way the wind was blowing. But oddly enough, although I would not go so far as to say that I was actually homesick, I felt the need to see a few familiar places and things, just to wipe away the memory of my cell and feel truly free again.
“Can you take me to my house?” I said. “I’d like to shower, change clothes. And maybe just sit on a real couch for a little while.”
“Of course,” he said. “And after that?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know,” I said. “There’s too much I don’t know.”
“About?” he prompted.
I sighed heavily, feeling the full weight of freedom settle onto my shoulders. It had seemed so simple when the world was made up of no more than my cell and the yard and guessing what that stuff was in the sandwich. Now…“I guess everything,” I said. “All I really know is that Detective Anderson hates me, and he’ll do anything to make all this stick to me. And apparently,” I said, turning away to look ruefully out the window, “Deborah hates me just as much.”
“So I have gathered,” he said neutrally. He avoided Deborah with great care, which was really the only smart thing to do, since the one time she had ever seen him was that night a few years back when he had grabbed her, taped her up inside a storage box, and encouraged me to kill her. That type of encounter can make a relationship a bit awkward going forward. Deborah thought Brian was dead, if she thought about him at all. As a sensible monster, Brian preferred not to shatter that illusion.
“Anyway,” I said, “I’m not sure of my status at work, but I need to talk to my friend Vince and see what the evidence against me looks like.”
“Vince is the Asian fellow?” Brian asked, and I nodded. “Yes, you had mentioned him before.” He drove us up the ramp and onto the Palmetto Expressway, headed east.
“Even if I’m suspended or fired, I think Vince will help,” I said.
“Ahem,” Brian said. It sounded very phony, just the way you’d write it. “As it happens, I have been to visit dear Vince.”
I looked at him with surprise. For Brian to go anywhere near so much as a patrol car was a risk. To go down to headquarters was near-toxic insanity. “Really?” I said. “You went inside? To the lab?”
He showed his teeth again. “I did not,” he said. “I waited for Vince to leave for lunch. I followed him to a little bistro near Eighth Street, Chez Octavio’s?”
I nodded. I knew Octavio’s; it was hardly a Chez. It was more like a basura, and it served quite possibly the worst Cuban food in the city. But it was extremely cheap, and so was Vince. “What did you learn?” I asked.
“Some very interesting things,” Brian said, waving happily to a large tanker truck that swerved in front of him for no reason. “To begin with, Vincent Masuoka really is your friend.” He flashed me his terrible fake smile. “Up to a point.”
“Everyone has a point, I think,” I said.
“Quite true. Vince’s point, however, is well past what you might imagine.” He paused to lean on the horn as a pickup truck with three large hounds in the bed meandered across two lanes, apparently for the sole purpose of getting in front of us and slowing down. Brian swerved into the right lane and passed. The hounds watched us with mournful apathy as we went by.
“In any case,” Brian went on, “Vince withstood a great deal of pressure from Detective Anderson.”
“Pressure to do what?”
Brian smiled at me again. “Oh, practically nothing at all,” he said merrily. “A few tiny trifles, like suppressing evidence, falsifying reports, lying under oath—the kind of everyday chore you and I wouldn’t even blink at.”
“And Vince refused?” I said, marveling a little. Vince was not large, and to call him timid is something of an understatement.
“He refused,” Brian said, nodding. “Up to and including a visit from Anderson in the large and angry flesh. He even told your supervisor, who offered to remove Vince from the case if he didn’t want to play along. And then,” he said, rather dramatically, I thought, “he did the truly unthinkable.”
“Really,” I said. I tried to think of what might constitute unthinkable behavior for Vince, and failed. “What?”
“He went to the state attorney’s office and Told All,” Brian said solemnly. “With documentary evidence, reports and so on, all crudely doctored in Anderson’s hand.”
“Well,” I said. “That is unthinkable.” And it was—not that Anderson crudely doctored the documents, of course. I had already assumed as much. But first of all, for anyone in the department to report anyone else in the department to the state attorney was completely outside the Code. Second, for that person to be Vince, a known mouse—it nearly defied imagination. “What happened? Is that why Kraunauer got me out so quickly?”
“Oh, no, dear brother,” Brian chirped. “Disabuse yourself of such naive notions. The world is not nearly so simple.”