Bad celebrity imitations aside, Chatty Cathy wouldn’t even look up at me. Nor did he respond when lunch arrived a few minutes later — two peanut butter sandwiches on white bread and a disposable paper cup of cherry Kool-Aid. Not having eaten anything since the day before, I wolfed down both sandwiches in short order, then asked if he was planning to eat his.

“You touch my food,” Chatty Cathy said, still refusing to look at me, “and I’ll gut you.”

I had considered asking him to sign my cast, but that offer was definitely off the table.

A jowly, sad-eyed deputy who reminded me a little of Huckleberry Hound escorted me into an interview room where Detective Alicia Rosario sat behind a gray steel metal desk, text messaging on her cell phone. The room was Modern Inquisition. Soundproof cork tiles lined the walls and ceilings. Two large eye screws were bolted to the floor beneath an unpadded metal chair opposite the desk. Deputy Hound directed me to sit, then strung my ankle chains through the eye screws while Rosario waited for him to finish locking me down. He gave my chains a good tug to make sure they were secure, then left, pulling the door closed behind him.

“Long night?” Rosario said.

“You have no idea.”

She yawned. “I’ve been up since two this morning, no thanks to you.”

“What are friends for?”

Behind her, facing me, was a large mirror. I knew it was one-way glass, and that there was probably a video camera recording us on the other side.

“For the record, you’ve been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder. You’ve already been advised by the arresting deputies of your legal right to counsel and you’ve waived those rights. Is that correct?”

“Yup.”

“I need you to say it a little more formally.”

“Yes, I’ve been advised of my rights to legal counsel and I waive those rights.”

Rosario sat forward in her chair, her ballpoint pen poised over a legal pad. “OK, how about we take it from the top?”

“From the top, and for the record, I didn’t try to kill Ray Sheen. He tried to kill me.”

I laid it all out for her. How Sheen’s company was designing weaponized, hummingbird-size drones for the government. How I’d gone to Castle Robotics looking for the mysterious C.W. Lazarus, whose truck had been spotted near my airplane, how the plane’s engine had been tampered with, and how I’d wound up in a self-storage unit with Sheen and Frank Jervis, before Jervis keeled over with The Big One.

“Hold up a minute.” Rosario looked up at me from her notes with her eyes narrowed. “The engine on your airplane? What’re you talking about?”

I told her about the FAA’s preliminary findings, and about the pickup truck registered to Lazarus that had been spotted suspiciously close to the Ruptured Duck the night before I’d crashed. I told her that a man wearing a baseball cap and coveralls was seen from a distance climbing out of that truck, opening up the engine compartment, and doing evil things to the Duck.

“Why didn’t you tell me about all this before?”

“I was sort of busy.”

She gave me a knowing look and asked if I had a witness.

“His name’s Al Demaerschalk.”

“Spell it.”

I spelled it.

“What’s Mr. Demaerschalk do?”

“He used to be a pilot. He had a stroke. He’s in the hospital. They don’t think he’s gonna make it.”

Rosario tossed down her pen and glared at me. “And you were going to tell me all this when?”

“I’d hoped to track down Lazarus myself.”

“To do what? Have a friendly little chat with him?”

I shrugged.

“This isn’t the Old West, Logan. We have laws. And you just broke one: willfully withholding evidence in a felony investigation.”

“If you were a pilot, you’d understand.”

“Understand what? Wanting to tee up some guy because he jacked up your ugly old airplane?”

“Hey, let’s not get personal here.”

She folded her arms and sat back. “Look, if somebody did sabotage your plane with the intent of committing great bodily injury, that’s a crime. I’m a sworn peace officer, Logan. I get paid to investigate crimes. You don’t.”

“You can get mad at me all you want, Alicia. I’m just trying to help you out here.”

“Help me out? How is this helping me out? Tell me, please. I’d really like to know.”

I told her how Ray Sheen had taken a paternity test posing as Greg Castle so that Castle could deny having impregnated Ruth Walker.

“How does that help me?” Rosario said.

“Dorian Munz was right about Greg Castle fathering Ruth Walker’s baby. If he was right about that, could be he was right that Castle was upset because Ruth wouldn’t get an abortion. Could be he was also right about Ruth having dirt on Castle’s company. Either way, it would’ve given Castle the motive to murder her.”

“Sheen told you he took a paternity test for Castle?”

“Basically.”

“You told the arresting deputies you hit him and that’s why you crashed.”

I nodded.

“And that’s when he started shooting at you?”

Another nod.

“Any idea what he was shooting at you with?”

“A .45, firing ACP ammo.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because Automatic Colt Pistol rounds make a very distinctive sound when they’re coming at you.”

“What sort of sound?”

“Like fabric tearing.”

“I take it you’ve been shot at before?”

I shrugged. Maybe yes, maybe no.

Rosario sighed in frustration, not sure how to read me, and jotted a few notes.

“Why not bring Sheen in here and compare everybody’s versions of events?” I said. “We can see who’s telling the truth.”

“We’re not sure where Mr. Sheen is right now. He called in a complaint against you, then said he’d be unavailable until he had confirmation you were safely in custody. He said he feared for his life.”

“The guy tunes me up with a Louisville Slugger, kidnaps me, drives me out toward the desert intending to put a slug behind my ear, and he’s in fear of his life? Go interview Greg Castle. He knew what Sheen was up to last night. So did Frank Jervis, Castle’s security chief.”

“Mr. Sheen said you shot at him.”

“With what?”

“State records show you have a .357 Colt Python registered in your name.”

“Which is currently up in Rancho Bonita, under my bed. Search my apartment. You have my permission.”

Rosario wrote some more notes. Her poker face gave away nothing.

“Look, if I were a ‘sworn peace officer,’ I’d start by connecting the dots between what happened to Janet Bollinger and what happened with my airplane.”

Rosario’s cell phone played the refrain from that icon of bad ’80’s rock, Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’.” She picked it up and read a text message that prompted her eyebrows to arch. She got up abruptly and headed for the door.

“Don’t go anywhere.”

“Oh, I’ll be here.”

If I were further along the path of enlightenment, I would’ve tried meditating. Jail, after all, is the ideal environment for contemplative introspection. But all I could think about was my ex-wife, and her snide reaction had she seen me decked out in chains and county-issued overalls.

It’s said that most men think about sex every seven seconds and are virtually incapable of distinguishing love from lust. I won’t argue with that. Sitting there, though, I found myself yearning for nothing more than Savannah’s smile. If that’s not love, I don’t know what is. But I couldn’t think about any of that now, not if I was going to figure a way out of my predicament.

Why had Sheen kidnapped me? Why had he shot at me? I replayed the DVD in my head from the night before.

It began and ended with C.W. Lazarus.

Sheen lied about not knowing who Lazarus was. Things had taken a definite turn toward Crazy Town after I’d intimated a connection between the slaying of Janet Bollinger, Lazarus’s truck, and the sabotaging of my airplane. Lazarus was the Holy Grail. He had to be. Find him, I told myself, and all things would be illuminated.