Chapter 36 The Pattern — Ii
“You should have told me,” I agreed, from the wall, in a voice I couldn’t get all the way back up to Birdie yet, and then I made myself peel off it and sit down and pour a third cup, because Detective Lorna Pike was about to walk into a room with a hand-drawn conspiracy map and a hardware clerk, and one of those things was going to have to be explained.
Pike came in out of the cold with the flat, tired suspicion of a person who has been lied to by every witness she’s ever had.
She’d spent two months not-quite-believing Wes about the arson and openly not-believing me about anything, and she looked at the map, and looked at me, and I watched her do the arithmetic that I’d been dreading somebody in law enforcement would eventually do, and it wasn’t the arithmetic I feared. That one came later.
“Marshal says you see things,” Pike said to me, without sitting.
“I notice things,” I said, the Birdie hedge, reflexive, and Wes said, quiet, “Lorna,” just her name, a whole argument in it, and Pike’s eyes went from him to me and back, and I watched her recalibrate, quick and grudging, a detective updating a file she’d thought was closed.
“Show me the map,” she said, and sat.
I showed her the map. I didn’t tell her what I was.
Wes and I had agreed on that in about four seconds the night before, the story we’d hold: the marshal had a sharp consultant with a knack for patterns, and the knack was going to have to be enough for now.
I walked Pike up the escalation curve and across the gap between the schedule and the harm, and I laid out the two hands and the diverging intentions, and I watched a professional skeptic stop being skeptical, not because I was charming, God knows, but because the evidence was clean and it was on paper in front of her in a child’s colored pencils and it explained six things her own gut had already flagged and couldn’t square.
Pike had a particular way of not-believing you that I recognized, because I’d worn a version of it my whole first career: she made you prove every single step and gave you nothing back, no nod, no encouragement, so that whatever survived to the end of the walk had earned its own way there.
I liked her instantly and completely, which surprised me, because I’d spent two months genuinely afraid of her.
It’s easy to be afraid of the person whose job is to find the exact thing you’re hiding.
It’s harder once you’re both bent over the same map wanting the same man caught.
Halfway through she stopped me. “Back up. The rec center one. You’ve got it circled twice.”
“Because it breaks the pattern,” I said.
“It’s the first one that’s near kids. If he’s running Holloway’s schedule, the rec center makes no sense, there’s no parcel in it, Holloway doesn’t want the rec center, nobody wants to buy a rec center.
So either it’s a mistake, or it’s the first place the man did something for himself instead of for the money.
I circled it twice because I think it’s the hinge.
I think that’s where he started to turn. ”
Pike looked at the double circle for a long moment. “You think like a cop,” she said, and it was not entirely a compliment, and I understood that too.
“The insurance filings,” Pike said, half to herself, pulling a notebook. “The Holloway LLC claims. If your schedule’s right, the payouts are going to lag the fires on the same curve. That’s subpoenable. That’s a thing I can actually pull.”
“That’s the daylight case,” Wes said. “That’s how you get Holloway. Records, in the open, no drama.”
“And the other one,” Pike said, tapping the harm line, Cody’s line, the widening river.
“This one I don’t get in daylight. This one I get before he does something I can’t take back.
” She looked up at me, and there was the arithmetic I feared, but it stayed behind her eyes for now, just a flicker, filed for later. “You’ve got a name for me?”
“Rourke,” Wes said. “Cody Rourke. Subcontractor. Record. I’ll walk you through it.”
Pike wrote it down. Then she looked around Wes’s kitchen — the map, the paint-stripping coffee, the marshal, the jumpy clerk who’d gone flat and precise over a conspiracy, the three of us bent over Theo’s colored pencils — and she said, dry as Wes on his best day, “Well. Aren’t we a task force,” and I laughed, and she almost did, and outside the window the Flats went dark blue toward night, and for the first time in three years I was in a room full of people who were going to help me carry something, and I didn’t hate it, and hating that I didn’t hate it was going to be tomorrow’s problem.