Trout chewed on it for a bit, then sighed. “We’ve been seeing each other off and on for a while. A long while. We mostly kept it off the radar—you know, cop and reporter. That sort of thing always looks hinky. But … things keep getting more serious, and we kind of hit a wall. You know how it is—one person wants to commit and the other wants to keep things ‘open.’ After a while all we were doing was fighting.”
“Let me guess,” Goat said with a grin, “you were the asshole who didn’t want to commit. All those wild oats to sow.”
Trout looked through the windshield as if it were a window into the past. He sighed again … deep and long. “No,” he said, “I was the asshole who wanted to marry her.”
That shut Goat up. He stared at Trout’s profile for a while and then shook his head. He fished out his iPhone and began trolling Twitter.
Trout didn’t bother filling in any details about the breakup. He didn’t want to go any farther down that road. The breakup with Dez was six months old and it felt like yesterday. From what he’d heard, Dez had soothed her shattered heart by screwing anything that had two legs, testosterone, and a tolerance for boilermakers. And every one of them was probably the same type, too. Tall, blond or sandy hair, blue eyes, an outdoorsy face with laugh lines and a tan. That was Dez’s type. It had been ever since high school and that sizzling junior year when they were dating for the first time. They’d broken into the school at night and lost their virginity together on the couch in the vice principal’s office. The detention couch, no less.
On his good days, Trout believed that he was the template for Dez’s subsequent conquests. Trout had blue eyes, blond hair, and a passable version of a weathered smile. On his bad days, he wondered if he simply fit the bill that had coalesced in her head during puberty. He knew that some people were like that; they fixate on a type and go hunting for it. Years ago, before he and Dez had become an item for the third time, a reporter friend had once remarked that “Dez would blow the captain of the Titanic all the way to the bottom of the Atlantic if he had blue eyes and a cowboy smile.”
So far they had been an item five times, and between some of those times Trout had gotten married and divorced. It did not help his peace of mind any when that same reporter friend pointed out how much each of those women looked like Dez.
The last time they’d been involved, Trout had given Dez an ultimatum. He couldn’t take the roller-coaster ride anymore. He wanted to make it permanent with Dez, despite the therapy bills and probable mutual murder that would almost certainly go along with that. Dez had told him she wanted to think about it.
The next day he went to her trailer with a ring, flowers, and plane tickets to Aruba. He let himself in with the key she’d given him, smiling like a kid and ready to put it all on the line—his heart, his career, his actual hopes and dreams. Dez was sprawled naked in the arms of a biker with jailhouse tats and long blond hair.
Trout lost it. He threw the flowers at Dez, dragged the biker out of bed by his hair, kicked him in the nuts, and threw him naked into the dirt outside. Then he called Dez a lot of names that he normally reserved for the lawyers who had represented his ex-wives.
Dez chased him out of the trailer and halfway down the road with a shotgun.
She was naked, and the shotgun, it turned out, was unloaded. It took JT Hammond and two pairs of handcuffs to quiet things down, but the magic seemed to have gone out of their relationship.
Ain’t love grand? Trout mused as he drove.
“I posted another teaser on Twitter,” Goat said, breaking into Trout’s dismal reverie. “So, what’s next?”
“Let’s listen to the call again.” Trout had recorded the call on his digital unit and played it back with the speakers on high. Even with the mild distortion, Volker’s voice and inflection had been clear. “Okay, O mighty Goat … you’re supposed to be the great filmmaker and director.… Give me notes on Volker’s performance.”
Goat stared up at the roof of the car, considering. “Well … he was upset.”
Trout twirled his finger in a “keep going” gesture.
“Volker was either trying to keep his voice in neutral, and fucking it up,” Goat said slowly, “or he was scared.”
“Scared? I didn’t get that.”
“Sure, scared and maybe paranoid. His voice was stiff. He vacillated between guarded defensiveness and trying to figure out what you knew.”
Trout was fascinated. “Explain.”
“Well, think about it. You called this guy at his house. When you were dialing, you told me that he was probably going to hang up on you. Which he did, but not at the right time. He’s a prison’s senior medical guy and he just performed a lethal injection on a mass murderer. He’s probably been dogged by everyone from the media to the Christian right. If his home number was public knowledge, then he’d be letting it go right to voice mail, or he’d yank the cord because he’d be getting a million calls, right?”
“Right.”
“But it wasn’t public knowledge. You had to call in favors to get that number. Volker isn’t getting calls on that line, so yours must have been a genuine surprise.”
Trout nodded, seeing the shape of it now. “So he should have been outraged at my call. He should have read me the riot act, threatened repercussions, yada yada.”
“And he didn’t. He didn’t even press you to find out how you got the number. He wanted to know why you called. Anyone else in his position would already know why you were calling—an insider’s view on Gibbon or the protests, or the issue of execution. That stuff. The sort of stuff you usually do. But Volker didn’t do that. I think he was not only trying to figure out why you called but was afraid of what you’d say.”
Trout grunted. “You’re building a case for guilty knowledge.”
“Hey,” said Goat, tapping his own chest with a crooked french fry, “if I was building a guilty knowledge scene in a movie, this would be cookie-cutter.”
Trout settled back and stared into the middle distance. Goat held out the cardboard sleeve of fries; Trout took one and munched it slowly, biting his way along its length with tiny, contemplative nips.
“What’d you get out of it?” asked Goat.
“Not that much. You’re good, kid,” said Trout. He picked up his cell and punched a speed dial number.
“Regional Satellite News,” answered a voice that was as bright and flowery as a spring meadow.
“Dear Marcia,” said Trout, “how would you like to earn some overtime cash?”
“As long as it doesn’t involve a stripper’s pole or popping out of a cake, I’m your girl.”
Trout grinned. Marcia Sloane had the voice that promised the smile and curves of a twenty-something California blonde. Everyone who called the bureau fell in love with her. She was actually just north of forty and far north of two hundred pounds. Curvy to be sure, with a heart-shaped face, masses of curly black hair, and—she claimed—nineteen separate piercings. Billy Trout had seen eight of them and, despite the fact that she outweighed him by at least fifty pounds, was intrigued to one day discover the rest.
“Sadly, not this time,” Trout said.
“Murray approve it?” she asked. Their editor, Murray Klein, was notorious for denying overtime for anything, expecting his staff to finish their work on their personal time. Trout didn’t hate him for it, though. Regional Satellite News worked with a budget surplus that could barely finance two cups of diner coffee.
“Yes,” Trout said, fudging the truth. Although Klein hadn’t approved this, given the nature of the story, he would. “I need some of your research magic. You could find Jimmy Hoffa if there were any legs left to that story.”
“Probably. What can I do for you, Billy?”
“I need everything you can dig up on two people. Deep background. I need what’s on the Net and anything you can find from other sources. First is Selma Conroy. Don’t know if that’s her maiden or married name.”
“Sexy Selma? God—don’t tell me she’s back in business. She went to school with my mom, and I’m pretty sure she was at least some part of my dear parents’ complicated divorce.”
“Look … this is for something really important. Major. You can’t tell anyone. An-nee-one.”
“Lips are sealed.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
“Okay … this is tied to the Homer Gibbon case. And there is a strong possibility that Selma Conroy is Gibbon’s aunt, and she filed to have his body brought here to Stebbins.”
Marcia grunted.
Trout said, “That’s it? I thought you’d be surprised.”
“Actually … I’m not,” she said, “’cause now that you say it I can see a little resemblance.”
“To Selma?”
“No … to her sister.”
“There’s a sister?”
“There was. She died a while back. Look, I’ll put that stuff together. I know where to look for everything on the Conroys. Who’s the other target?”
“Prison doctor from Rockview. Herman Volker. When I did a background on him for my story I got as far as him being from Europe. The name’s German, but the accent isn’t. Sounds Polish or something. Lived here a long time. Medical degree from Jefferson in Philly.”
“Okay. I’ll get what I can get. Anything else?”
“No, sweetie, but I need this ASAP.”
“Is this tied with what’s happening at Doc’s?”
“I don’t know. We stopped there and ran into Dez, and that could have gone better. She ran us off.”
“Ouch,” she said. “I’ll see if I can find out what’s going on out there. Lots of cops on that one and more coming in, and they just made a second call for ambulances.”
