door, already ajar, opened as she heard a discreet “knock, knock.” She looked up, afraid that the letters under the pillow were burning a hole in the mattress. “So there you are, Shogie. In a lady’s boudoir, no less.” Norman gazed at Holly in assumed innocence. “Are you two good friends now?”
She cast a suspicious glance at the dog, now lying on the carpet and grooming one foot in a meticulous fashion, the little prince. “Whenever I move my legs, he does this Charlie Manson act.”
Her father chuckled, rubbing his chin. “Just a border collie. Ignore him.”
She laughed. “Like you’ve been reading to me from the forums on the net? My dog eats holes in the drywall. Oh, it’s just a border collie. Barks my ears deaf if I stop to talk to someone. Oh, it’s just a border collie. Rolls in dead salmon. Oh, it’s... You get the point. These dogs get forgiven for everything.”
Her father snapped his fingers, and Shogun got up to leave. “Be a realist, Holly. He’s not a GSD. To serve and protect is not his watchword.”
She fluffed her pillow, then sat back. “I wonder what his watchword is?”
“He’ll let us know. Don’t they always?”
She slept fitfully that night. Two geese, identified by their companionable chatter, had put her house on their flight path. Not at all migratory, the local flock flew daily rounds to visit farms and pastureland. Why bother with that north and south nonsense when they could stay in paradise? Where in this unnatural Eden did they nest safe from cougars, in swamps where the skunk cabbage grew? Their honking, at times canine and at others almost human, kept awakening her from the deep REM levels that would refresh her. Pounding the pillow, she remembered a news story about a grandmother killing her family after hearing “commands” from the geese. Now there was a unique excuse. Had it worked?
Nine
Ann came into Holly’s office a few days later, bearing a fax. “This just in.”
A “Thanks.” A smile passed between the women. Mike was in the clear on the condom package prints, but Billy’s prints from the left thumb and forefinger matched in twelve different ways, substantial proof. Disappointing news. The young man had seemed honest. Now he was in serious trouble. After studying the whorled diagrams and the arrows of comparison, she called Whitehouse. “It’s still ambiguous. Maybe there’s another girl involved. Maybe the package was there from an earlier rendezvous.”
“Give me a break.” He snorted. “But how did you get those fingerprints again?”
“Purely voluntary. There had been a car broken into at the park.”
“That’s one thing you did right. My compliments. Get those boys in this afternoon. I’ll be right over. Our problems with this annoying case are nearly over. When they’re faced with hard evidence, they crumble like burnt toast.” He hung up with a perfunctory grunt.
Holly craned her head into the main office. Chipper was at one of the computers. She’d assigned him to looking into the sporadic radio connections on the southern island. In a crisis, communication lines were crucial, especially with only one coastal artery. A killer tsunami, well-documented in native oral history, could leave them as helpless as the Salish woman tossed into a tree. She fell from the branches and became a hunchback, but lived to tell a tale so amazing that it had survived without paper for three hundred years.
A mug of fragrant jasmine tea by his side, he was making notes, biting his lower lip in such concentration that he looked like a schoolboy. “Chipper,” she called. “We need you over at Edward Milne for a pickup. Tell them to send a counsellor if the parents can’t come. Whitehouse wants this done ASAP. And don’t let the boys sit together. Put one in the front.”
Holly gave serious thought to the way she had entrapped Billy, the specious reason for taking prints. But both boys had volunteered. If they had been innocent of that crime, why would they have refused? Did they play a role in Angie’s death? Within legal limitations, bringing out the truth was the goal. An officer without compassion was a danger, but too much empathy was an emotional straitjacket. She thought of Mrs. Jenkins and felt strangely disloyal.
The boys arrived at noon. Whitehouse took Billy first and Holly sat nearby, along with a mousy female counsellor who seemed more attentive to the condition of her cuticles than the unfolding scene. She wore designer jeans, plastic barrettes in her unnaturally russet hair, and a peasant blouse, giving her the appearance of a student who had stayed too long at the fair.
The shabby interview room was silent as Holly began the recording at Whitehouse’s nod. He didn’t open the window but let the heat build. Holly’s tie choked her as she fought the urge to adjust it. Sweating characters in search of an author. Opening with ponderous formalities, the Inspector stared down his long nose and used pauses like whips, watching Billy’s pupils enlarge as an open condom package was taken from a labelled brown paper bag and placed on the desk.
His eyes sought Holly’s, making her uncomfortable. “But I thought...you said—”
“We’re ready to start,” Whitehouse said. He turned to the counsellor, giving her a severe appraisal. “Ms Drew, is it? You understand that everything you hear in this office stays in this office.”
The woman cleared her throat and shifted in her chair. “My profession involves confidentiality.”
“Now, son,” Whitehouse said in a curiously avuncular tone. “You’ve said you were alone on the beach with Mike. This is not consistent with your prints on this piece of evidence.” He moved the package with a pair of tweezers, dangling it like an evil charm. “What were you both doing that night? This is your first and most important chance to tell me your side. We know what happened.” Holly looked at the Rorschach watermarks on the stippled ceiling. He was using such a hackneyed bluff, from Thirties black-and-white films to The First 48. Sometimes it worked. Career criminals “lawyered up”. Billy didn’t stand a chance.
Holly watched the numbers on the recorder roll. A muscle on Billy’s jaw twitched, but he said nothing. His oversized hands seemed frozen on the chair handles, until one finger began to tremble. Whitehouse narrowed his eyes like a veteran eagle toying with a rabbit. “Textbook case, Corporal. Wouldn’t you agree?” he said. “The failure to make eye contact is very suspicious.”
Billy inhaled deeply, flaring his nostrils. A pulse beat a frantic escape at the side of his neck. “I want to tell you the...the truth.”
“It’s about time, isn’t it? You should have done that from the beginning.” Whitehouse’s fist pounded the desk, then he folded his hands as if nothing had happened. Tensions rose and fell with the tides. From somewhere far away, a time-challenged rooster crowed.
Like a beaten dog, Billy shook his head and ran fingers through his heavy black hair. “I know, but it didn’t sound good.”
“We’ll be the judge of that. Go on. You’re making an honest start.”
“Not after the girl drownded...drowned. Who’s going to believe me now? Even if Mike was there.”
“Right, and he’s your buddy. What’s he going to say, other than to make you look as righteous as possible? I thought you said you were telling the truth. Smarten up.”
Righteous. Holly winced at the Ebonics, or was it Mafiaspeak? “He wouldn’t lie for me. Not if I’d hurt someone.” His
