Before she had finished her testimony, I leaned over to Beth and whispered, “Why don’t you take this one.”

Beth was lovely on cross, strong, clear, making it obvious that from the conversation the woman could have no real idea whether the relationship had any future or whether or not the man on the other side of that line might have turned murderous when rejected. In fact, the only thing we could really glean from the conversation was the strong link between the two, a link that could easily have turned wrong. Jefferson had thought the testimony would defuse my theory, when all it did was make the missing lover more mysterious, more threatening, a disembodied voice able to wreak any havoc.

I concentrated as much as I could on the testimony, but as the vision of the specter grew stronger, my mind wandered. It was Hailey, of course, conjured by my alchemy from some strange place to remind me. I had been struggling so hard to save Guy and protect my secret that I had forgotten what had driven me from the start, but here she was, Hailey Prouix, come to keep me to the decision that had been made.

Over the dead body of my lover I had pledged that I would discover the truth behind her murder and that the truth I discovered would be served, whatever the price to be later paid. And what was I doing to learn what had really happened, to learn who had really pulled the trigger and bring that killer to justice? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. That realization made me sick to my stomach as the testimony continued and the specter shimmered.

But just then a note was dropped in front of me as if out of the air. Without looking up, I opened it.

WE NEED TO TALK.

We need to talk. Are there four more frightening words in the English language? For a moment I suspected the message had come from my personal specter, but when I looked up from the note, the spell had been broken and she was gone.

So who was it, who needed to talk with me? I searched around until I found him, looking at me with that strange, bent gaze of his, and I knew without doubt that I was in serious trouble.

Detective Breger, back from Vegas and now in search of the missing lover, wanted to have a chat.

40

IF THIS had been a first date, there wouldn’t have been a second.

Breger sat next to me at the bar, but he wouldn’t look at me. He seemed uncomfortable, almost embarrassed to be meeting me without his partner, as if he were cheating. We talked a bit about the Eagles, we passed platitudes about politics. It was the kind of conversation bored strangers with real interest in nothing other than their booze suffer through. We were at the bar of a pizza chain out near the big suburban mall, a place that felt as empty of context as the huge shopping park in whose shadow it sat, a place that could have been anywhere in this great land, on the side of any highway, sandwiched between any two fast-food joints, a fine enough place to go only when there’s no place else to be. Breger had suggested this place with its yawning emptiness, a place where no one knew us or cared about what we had to say to one another. Both of us were drinking out of politeness, but neither of us was really paying attention to the beers in our frosted franchise mugs. I was waiting for him to get down to business, he was waiting for something else, though I couldn’t quite tell what.

“What’s up, Detective?” I said finally, when we had talked of the weather about as much as I could stand.

“I’m just trying to figure out what’s going on inside your head.”

“Not too much.”

“So it seems, but still I’m wondering,” he said. “Why do you keep fighting our attempts to examine your phone logs?”

“Attorney-client privilege.”

“I know how you keep us from looking, and the judge has backed you each time we’ve made the request, but I’m asking why.”

“Privilege is like a muscle, Detective. If you don’t exercise it, next time you turn around, it has become withered and weak.”

He gave a quick and dismissive glance at my biceps. “We’re still trying to figure out how Guy called you after he found his fiancée dead.”

“Let’s hope you get to the bottom of that mystery once and for all, save everybody a bit of worry.”

He shook his head, took a sip of his beer. He didn’t like my answer. I didn’t like that he was still asking the question.

“Did you win in Vegas?” he said.

“Vegas?”

“Yeah, Vegas. Did you win or did you leave your money on the craps table?”

I waited a moment, tried to figure how to play it, and then decided to play it straight. Sooner or later the fact of our little trip was bound to come out, and sooner had just stepped through the door. “Some guy I was with thought he had a system.”

“Did he?”

“Yes, but not a good system.”

“Find anything of interest in the safe-deposit box?”

“Safe-deposit box?”

“Hailey Prouix’s box at the Nevada One Bank, Paradise Road branch.”

“Who exactly are you investigating, Detective?”

“And tell me, how did you find West Virginia?”

“Wild and wonderful, just as the ads say.”

“Our office received a call that you were down there asking questions.”

“Yes, well, that’s what lawyers do. We ask questions.”

“But why there?”

“I was getting a little history.”

“And the man you were with down there, this Skink. It seems he also was in Las Vegas.”

“Just an investigator I have working for me.”

“We’d like to speak to him.”

“That wouldn’t be proper, considering he’s covered by the attorney-client privilege, too.”

“I am struggling here, Carl, struggling to figure out your side in all this. Stone doesn’t like you. She thinks you want to ask her out but are afraid, and she’s glad you’re afraid. Saves her from breaking your heart. She says you’re smarmy.”

“Me?”

“Smarmy and weak and definitely hiding something. I don’t like you much either, I’ve decided. I think you’re whiny and manipulative and not half as clever as you think you are, but I don’t really care about all that.”

“Does that mean you’d go out with me?”

“Somehow I have the strange sense that you’re looking for the right kind of outcome here. I have a sense, maybe, that you’re as interested as me in finding out what the hell really happened to Hailey Prouix.”

“You don’t think Guy Forrest did it?”

“The evidence points right in his face. But I have to admit that some of what you said in your opening had been on my mind from the start. Like he really was in love with her. Like he never was in it for the money. Like he doesn’t seem the type to end a fight with a bullet. But I’ve already told this to Jefferson, which is as far as my legal obligation goes. It is his decision whether or how to proceed. So it’s not the doubts I’m struggling with. What I’m struggling with is you.”

“You have unresolved feelings and you find them threatening. I understand. It’s perfectly natural, really.”

“You are in this deeper than you let on. You are in this up to your neck, though I can’t quite figure out how. You are in this in ways that give me serious pause and leave me struggling to figure out what to do with something I found.”

“Something exculpatory? If it’s exculpatory, you have to turn it over. Brady v. Maryland.”

“Now who’s the jerk throwing out cites? But what I have is nothing right now, though I have a sense you might be able to tell me enough to make it more interesting.”

“Tell you what?”

“Let’s start with why you turned over the gun.”

I paused for a moment, wondering what he had found, where he was going, whether or not I could trust him, even with a little bit of the truth. “I thought your possessing the gun,” I said slowly, “might further the ends of justice.”