Somebody Else's Music(102)

“Gregor? Are you coming on out? Because if you are, I’m going upstairs for some coffee and you might as well meet me up there.”

“I probably won’t be home for hours,” Gregor said. “Have you called Russ for me?”

“Yes. Already did it. You asked Tibor to check, too. Russ said to tell you that he’ll check, but he isn’t very hopeful. He said it would be easier for him if you knew exactly what you were looking for. Do you?”

“Yes. But if I tell him, he’ll go looking for that in particular, and I might miss something I’m not expecting. There’s always a chance that there’s something I’m not expecting. Although I don’t believe there will be, in this case. Go up and have coffee with Liz Toliver. Say hello to Mark for me.”

“All right. Where are you? How do we get in touch with you?”

“I’m at a store on Grandview Avenue called Country Crafts, but I won’t be here for long. Your best bet is to call the police department, but I’d feel much better if you don’t have to. There’s more going on here than I can tell you about yet. Take care of yourself.”

“You take care of yourself. You sound funny.”

“I feel fine. I’ll talk to you later, Bennis.”

Gregor put the phone down in the cradle and looked up to see that Kyle Borden was hovering over him, glowering.

“We can’t go back out to the Toliver house now,” he said. “We’ve got to go back to the station. We’ve got reports to file. We’ve got the Staties to worry about. We’ve—”

“I’ll go back by myself if you want me to. Maris Coleman seems to be missing.”

“Missing from where?”

Gregor gave Kyle a rundown of the events of the night before and this morning, and Kyle kicked the side of the counter.

“Shit damn,” he said. “She must still be out there, right? She’s probably wandering around in that house drinking coffee spiked with whatever she spikes it with and pretending nobody ever notices. Shit damn. We’ll have to go get her. Or send somebody else to.”

“Oh, I don’t think she’s still out there. There were a hundred people who could have given her a ride, if she was willing to pay for it by talking a blue streak, and I think she’d have been willing to do that. Don’t you?”

“She’d have paid them to let her. If we’re not rescuing Maris, what are we doing? Why are we going out there?”

“I want to make sure something isn’t there.”

“What?”

“Just something,” Gregor said. “Listen, what about here? What’s left to do? Did the state police bring in some decent forensics this time? What about the linoleum cutter?”

“One of the Staties picked it up with a handkerchief and put it in a plastic bag. It’s probably got my fingerprints on it. I took it away from Peggy and it didn’t occur to me to use a handkerchief. It’s been coming home to me, lately, just how well I was trained for this job. Meaning not at all. You have no idea how much I feel like a jerk.”

“It’s a waste of time,” Gregor told him. “Right now, the real issue is that that linoleum cutter is almost certainly going to turn out to be the murder weapon in the death of Chris Inglerod Barr. It would be a good thing if we didn’t lose it. Go back and tell the state policemen that. Whatever. Then let’s pack up and go on out to Liz Toliver’s house. With any luck, there won’t be much of anybody left there to bother us.”

“Right,” Kyle said. He gave Gregor a long, puzzled, and faintly resentful look and then went on back to the curtained space, where more state police officers were crowded than it seemed that the building could hold.

Gregor sat down in the heavy chair Emma Bligh kept behind the counter and took his notepad out of his inside jacket pocket. He flipped to the front and found the list that Jimmy Card had given him when he first agreed to look into the death of Michael Houseman. The list was not complete. Jimmy had been working off the things Liz Toliver had told him, not as part of a coherent story but as pieces in an ongoing conversation. The list did not include Stuart Kennedy’s name, or Kyle Borden’s. Gregor checked off the names of Chris Inglerod and Emma Kenyon, and then wrote Stuart Kennedy’s and Kyle Borden’s at the bottom of the list.

Kyle came up from the back of the store. “That’s done,” he said. “They think it’s going to turn out to be the murder weapon, too. Where would you get something like that?”

“In a hardware store,” Gregor said. “At Home Depot. A lot of people who do odd jobs around the house have them.”