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“You know all that money that sits in your stupid trust fund, and we don’t get to use it for anything, not even buying groceries?”
“Well, it’s not my money; it’s family money—”
“Why don’t you use it to buy me a house like that?”
“Why would you want a house like that?”
“Because.” North gestured. “It’s fucking enormous.”
“It’s too big.”
“There’s no such thing.”
“Who would do all the cleaning?”
“Not you, that’s for fucking certain.”
“You see? You’re mean to me. This is why I never bought you a mansion. Plus it really is too big. You’d get lost. Or I’d get lost. Or we’d both get lost, and I’d never be able to find you.”
“Jeez,” North said as he started forward again. “Imagine that.”
The fence wasn’t topped by anything substantial—no C-wire, not even any decorative broken glass—so North made a saddle of his hands and gave Shaw a lift. Shaw dropped to the other side, reached between the wrought-iron spindles, and repeated North’s movements. He added in a lot of grunting, a lot of noises like he was straining.
“I am going to kick your ass,” North said when he fell-landed on the other side. “You know how long it’s been since I kicked your ass? You are on a fucking tear tonight, you know that? You are seriously asking for it.”
“When you keep repeating yourself like that, you start to sound a little excited.”
North gave him a glare.
“Plus, it might be the carriage house lights, but I’m pretty sure you have a semi.”
North took one threatening step, and Shaw danced backward, laughing.
“We’re working, you jackass,” North said. “Could you try to be a professional? Could you try for one night to be a professional fucking detective?”
“Do you hear it? You say the same thing over and over again, and your voice gets a little higher, you talk a little faster—”
North stalked off because it was either that or beat Shaw up, right then, right there, and North had professional standards to uphold. Plus, he’d kind of jinked up his foot when he’d come down hard on the landing, and he wondered if maybe some of Shaw’s grunting and straining noises hadn’t been entirely made up.
There were a lot of ways to go about approaching people you wanted to interview. Sometimes, it was helpful to have a story prepared. Sometimes, it was essential to get them talking before they realized who you were. Sometimes, in a way that left North mildly but perpetually astonished, telling the truth was the best way to get people to help you. But always, forever, exclusively, the absolute best thing to do was catch people by surprise.
He started toward the front of the house. He thought tonight, he’d start by knocking and announcing himself. He needed one of those wallets for his PI license so he could flip it open, right in their faces, so close maybe they had to take a step back. Then he thought of what Shaw would say about that—something about seeing it in a movie—and, of course, as with everything Shaw touched, it blackened and curdled and was absolutely ruined even before North could consider going on Amazon to buy one of those flip-openable wallets.
He was working on a way to order the wallet but have it delivered to their neighbors, then tell the neighbors it must have been a mistake, and no, nobody had to tell Shaw, when his brain caught up with what his eyes were seeing, and North stopped. Shaw was still walking, so he put his arm out, and Shaw bumped into him.
“What—”
North pointed to the bloody shoe print on the pavement in front of them. It hadn’t dried, not completely, and the pavement was light-colored, which meant the shoe print was crisp even in the glow from the carriage house lanterns. North had seen Dalton Weber’s cell. He remembered the pools of blood on the floor. He thought of the canvas slip-ons that were part of the inmate uniform. The blood would have dried, his brain said. But then he thought about the wet grass, the long walk across the lawn. By the time Philip Welch had reached this house, the blood could have been liquid enough to leave a print like this one.
Shaw drew in his breath like he might say something, but another sound registered at the periphery of North’s consciousness, and he spun around.
The man was close to North’s height but stockier, and he was dressed in what North thought of as church clothes—not nice stuff, but growing up in Lindenwood Park, North had seen a lot of working-class families in shirts and trousers from the Walmart collection. This guy had a round face and thinning blond hair so fair that at first, in the unsteady glimmer of the carriage house lanterns, North thought he was bald, and something about him looked familiar.
He was also holding a gun.
7
“Show me your hands,” the man said, the gun pointed at Shaw.
