“Okay. I get it.”
He drove out of the parking lot and headed for I-95, then turned north and into the city.
Olivia cleared her throat. “Thanks for not saying any more about what happened at the cabin.”
“I understand why you don’t want anyone to know about it—besides whoever already knows. And it looks like there are fewer of them than there used to be.”
She winced.
“I don’t think Brian was at the cabin,” he said, and she knew he was trying to reassure her. “But I get the feeling that if he heard stuff about what happened in Baltimore after the party, he might also have heard about the cabin.”
“And that really could put him in danger, which means we did him a favor.”
“If he takes our advice.”
“You said the killer is deteriorating,” she said.
“Until recently he’s been very cagey. He never killed in the same way. He made sure it would be hard to connect the dots on the murders.”
“I connected them.”
“You’re smart. And you were on the edge of the action. You probably had a feeling there was something going on, but you couldn’t quite put it together—partly because it involved incidents you wanted to forget about.”
“Yes,” she murmured.
“Back to the killer. For ten years, he was very clever. Now he’s doing stuff that’s going to get him caught.”
“Maybe he doesn’t see it that way.”
“If not, I’d say his judgment is going. Did he really need to kill Claire?”
“I don’t know what she knew about him—if anything. But she was at the party. And maybe she was up at the cabin, too,” she added in a low voice.
Max reached across the console and laid his hand over hers. They both knew “up at the cabin” was shorthand for what had happened to Olivia up there. Had Claire also been raped?
Olivia turned her palm up, knitting her fingers with Max’s, and he drove with one hand on the wheel for a few moments.
“Or it could be she had nothing to do with any of it,” Olivia said. “He could have looked around for someone who he could drive crazy—then used her to get to me. Either way, she’s dead.”
“And it’s not your fault,” Max added.
“I know, but I can’t help feeling like I could have saved her.”
“How? Knocked her out cold and dragged her out of the house? And then what? The guy still had his gun.”
They rode in silence into the city. Olivia hadn’t been in downtown Baltimore in a long time, and she looked around at some of the new office buildings and condos. Then after a while, she began to notice that they were in a rundown neighborhood. The streets were pocked with potholes. The sidewalks were cracked and littered with trash.
And the housing was all narrow Baltimore row houses, some with redbrick fronts, some with vinyl siding, and some with the ugly formstone that had become popular in the fifties. Most of them also had the famous marble steps that were a hallmark of the city. And a few sported the window screens painted with outdoor scenes, the likes of which Olivia had never seen anywhere else.
There were people on the streets. She saw a few children playing and a few moms watching them. But there were more residents that didn’t fit the family mold. Young men in baggy jeans and T-shirts were huddled on some of the corners, and women strolled around wearing revealing costumes like low-cut tops and skirts up to their crotches.
Olivia turned to Max. “Am I seeing drug deals go down—and prostitutes strutting their stuff?”
“Yeah.”
She clasped her hands together as she watched the depressing scenery roll past. She’d lived in the Baltimore area until she graduated from high school, and she’d never seen this part of the city. Probably farmer Winters and his wife had never seen it, either. It was as removed from rural Howard County as the Middle East was from Switzerland. “And you spent a lot of time down here?” she asked Max.
“Yeah.”
“Is that how you got shot?”
“Uh-huh. But it’s more dangerous at night. We should be okay now.”
He had slowed, and she saw him look toward a townhouse where the first floor had been converted into a bar called Down and Dirty.
“Some of my contacts used to hang out there.” He turned toward her. “And now I’m wishing I’d insisted that you stay home.”
“I’ll be fine.”
He looked like he wanted to say more, but he must have decided there was no point in arguing about something that they couldn’t change. Instead he turned the corner and drove slowly down the block. When he found a parking space between a pickup truck and a motorcycle, he pulled in and turned to her.