29

Dry east-county landscape rolled past outside the windows of Joel’s car, and I watched it with a placid feeling, as if it were something on film, a peaceful interlude in an otherwise chaotic movie. I didn’t know where we were headed and didn’t care.

I leaned forward. “Joel?”

“Mmm?”

“Are you allowed to talk about the case at all?”

“What do you want to know?”

“Was Brittany’s student-ID picture on the news? Is that what made her run?”

“The photo was on the news, yeah,” he said. “Whether that was the reason she ran, I don’t know. You’d know better than me—you were obviously watching the house. Where were you, by the way? I didn’t have any sense you were around.”

“I was up the tree in the front yard.”

“Jesus.” I saw his head move slightly, as if he were about to turn and look at me, but then he didn’t. He said, “That’s crazy. You were fifteen feet from the front door, maybe less? That’s a dangerous place to survey from.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You saw me, then?”

“Yeah.”

“I was going to come back after I took the flyer to the lab. I was supposed to stake out the house, not just to watch her but to look out for you,” he said. “When I heard on the radio about a couple of women in a high-speed chase, I didn’t automatically think of you, until they were running footage on KTLA. I remembered the motorcycle parked on Brittany’s street. Plus, it looked like you, with the new brown hair.” Then he changed the subject. “It wasn’t too smart for Brittany to have that picture taken and her real face linked with your name.”

“You have to look at it from her point of view. She expected to bilk Eastman and disappear. She never planned to commit two murders and get her stolen identity onto the front page of newspapers. There wasn’t supposed to be anything near that level of scrutiny.”

“I guess not,” Joel said.

His cell phone buzzed, and he picked it up. “Kelleher.” He listened briefly. “Yeah, we’re about five minutes or so out from the substation, everything’s fine.”

Ford, obviously.

“That might not be the last phone call you get,” Joel said. “I made some friends today.” He slowed for an isolated intersection where the signal light hung from a cable over the road. Then he said, “Interesting. Can I tell her? … No, I’m not.… Okay. See you soon.”

When he’d disconnected, I said, “Tell me what?”

“The thumbprint off the flyer, it got a hit,” he said. “It was in several places in the Eastman home. That’s not in itself enough to exculpate you. We can’t just let you walk.” He paused. “The good thing is, Magnus thinks we can hold you on the charges related to the chase—the speed violation and reckless endangerment—and not anything connected to Stepakoff and Eastman. San Francisco hasn’t charged you yet.”

“Really?”

“Prosecutors work a little slower than cops. You were the only suspect, yeah, and everyone was hung up on finding you, but the lawyers were still preparing their case. Anyway, it’s useful to have the other charges against you—I know it doesn’t seem like a good thing to you, probably, but it’s better than being charged with two homicides, which someone might’ve had to do if we didn’t have anything else to hold you on.”

“Mmm,” I said, noncommittal. He was right, I wasn’t exactly feeling grateful about that. I moved on to something else. “So am I ever going to meet Ford?”

“That’s hard to say. The man does keep to himself.”

“What is it with this guy? Is he just a brain floating in a vat of preservative fluids, with some kind of voice-simulator box?”

Joel laughed. “No, he’s a real guy.”

“Is he horribly disfigured?”

“Nope, not disfigured. If you passed him on the street, he wouldn’t really stand out.” Then he said, “I never heard of him until my lieutenant told me I was being taken off my regular detail, in Special Weapons and Tactics, to work with the guy, at his request. When I found out the work was a lot of covert investigative organized-crime stuff, I asked him, ‘What made you want to pull someone off the adrenaline-cowboy squad to do this?’ He says, ‘You don’t think you’re up for it? I can get someone else.’ I never talked myself down in front of him again.”

“Harsh.”

“Straightforward,” Joel corrected. “Anyway, I don’t ask Magnus a lot of questions about himself. He asked me about my background and all, but he’s not the kind of guy who makes you feel like it’s a two-way street.”

The sheriff’s substation was a one-story building of pinkish gray stucco with a Joshua tree out front. I could hear the firecracker-like pops of a firing range somewhere beyond the building. Joel parked and killed the engine. At that moment his cell rang again.

“Ford’s a demanding boss,” I commented.

He was looking at the screen. “It’s not Magnus, it’s my girlfriend.”

“Girlfriend?”

“Fiancée, actually,” Joel said. “I’ll call her back later. Come on, let’s get you processed in, so I can get going.”

“Sorry,” I said, “I’m making you late for supper, is that it?”

“Yup,” he said, “and two cold bottles of Stella Artois.”

He put his hand on the door handle, but I leaned forward. “Wait a minute,” I said. “I’ve been wanting to tell you something.”

“If this is something about Eastman and Stepakoff, it should wait until—”

“No,” I said. “It’s not that.”

“Yeah?” He waited.

I’d figured out what it was I should have told him about fear, back in the Eastman house, and this was maybe my last chance to say it. I wanted to say that fear isn’t a barrier to courage, it’s a source material. The brave people I knew—and I couldn’t include myself among them, not honestly—created their courage out of fear.

“Hailey?” Joel prompted.

“Yeah, sorry,” I said. “I wanted to say, you remember in San Francisco, when you told me about how you had to repress a lot of fear to do your job?”

He said, “No.”

That stopped me short. The question hadn’t really been a question, just a reminder. I tried again. “In the Eastman house,” I prompted him. “You were going under from the Ambien, and you said you had to swallow a lot of fear to do what you do, and no one else on the job talked about that kind of thing. Remember?”

He shook his head and studied me with his hazel-green eyes. “Sorry, no,” he said. “It must have been the drug talking. That just doesn’t sound like me. I really don’t have a problem in that area.”

After a moment I said, “Sorry. I must have misunderstood.”