Probably nothing had seemed out of the ordinary when Gary Harper had driven home from the tavern, either.
My breakfast appointment with the attorney general was in less than an hour. I was going to be late if I didn’t muster up the courage to step outside my own front door and negotiate the thirty feet of sidewalk that would lead me to my car. I studied the shrubbery and small dogwoods bordering my front lawn, scrutinizing their quiet silhouettes as the sky lightened by degrees. The moon was roundly iridescent like a white morning glory, grass silver with frost.
How had he gotten to their houses, to my house? He had to have some means of transportation.
There had been little speculation about the killer’s ability to move around. Type of vehicle is as much a part of criminal profiling as age and race are, and yet no one was commenting, not even Wesley. I wondered why as I stared at the vacant street. And Wesley’s grim demeanor in Quantico still bothered me.
I voiced my concern as Ethridge and I were eating breakfast.
“It may be, simply, that there are things Wesley chooses not to tell you,” he suggested.
“He’s always been very open with me in the past.”
“The Bureau tends to be very closemouthed, Kay.”
“Wesley is a profiler,” I replied. “He’s always been generous with his theories and opinions. But in this instance he’s not talking. He’s barely profiling these cases at all. His personality has changed.
He’s humorless, and he scarcely looks me in the eyes. It’s weird and incredibly unnerving.”
I took a deep breath.
Then Ethridge said, “You’re still feeling isolated, aren’t you, Kay?”
“Yes, Tom.”
“And just a little paranoid.”
“That, too,” I said.
“Do you trust me, Kay? Do you believe I’m on your side and have your best interests in mind?” he asked.
I nodded and took another deep breath. We were talking in quiet voices inside the dining room of the Capitol Hotel, a favorite watering hole for politicians and plutocrats. Three tables away sat Senator Par-tin, his well-known face more wrinkled than I remembered as he talked seriously to a young man I had seen somewhere before.
“Most of us feel isolated and paranoid during stressful times. We feel alone in the wilderness.”
Ethridge’s eyes were kind on me, his face troubled.
“I am alone in the wilderness,” I replied. “I feel that way because it’s true.”
“I can see why Wesley is worried.”
“Of course.”
“What worries me about you, Kay, is you’re basing your theories on intuition, going on instinct.
Sometimes that can be very dangerous.”
“Sometimes it can be. But it can also be very dangerous when people begin to make things too complicated. Murder is usually depressingly simple.”
“Not always, though.”
“Almost always, Tom.”
“You don’t think Sparacino’s machinations are related to these deaths?”
the attorney general queried.
“I think it would be all too easy to be distracted by his machinations. What he’s doing and what the killer is doing could be trains running on parallel tracks. Both of them dangerous, even deadly. But not the same. Not connected. Not driven by the same forces.”
“You don’t think the missing manuscript is connected?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re no closer to knowing?”
The interrogation made me feel as if I hadn’t done my homework. I wished he hadn’t asked.
“No, Tom,” I admitted. “I have no idea where it is.”
“Is it possible it could be what Sterling Harper burned in her fireplace right before she died?”
“I don’t think so. The documents examiner looked at charred bits of paper, identified them as twenty-pound, high-quality rag. They’re consistent with fine stationery or the paper lawyers use for legal documents. It’s very unlikely someone would write a book draft on paper like that. It’s more likely Miss Harper burned letters, personal papers.”
“Letters from Beryl Madison?”
“We can’t rule it out,” I replied, even though I had pretty much ruled it out.
“Or perhaps Gary Harper’s letters?”
“There was quite a collection of his private papers found inside the house,” I said. “There’s no evidence that any of it had been disturbed or recently gone through.”