8. Radio Silence
Radio Silence
Monday: a text at six-fifty. Something's come up. I'll call when I can. Lock the actual door.
Tuesday: nothing.
Wednesday: I called him at eight in the morning and it rang out.
I called at noon and it rang out. I called at nine at night and it went straight to voicemail, which meant the phone was off, which he does not do; he has not turned that phone off in eleven months, it is the entire architecture of his job.
Thursday: the Independent ran the story, and at four in the afternoon my phone buzzed and it was him and I had it to my ear before the second ring.
"Nate—"
"I can't talk." He sounded terrible. He sounded like a man in a stairwell. "I have about forty seconds. I need you to hear the words and I need you to not ask me anything, because if you ask me I'll answer you and I can't answer you. Okay?"
"Okay."
"I'm not able to have contact with you. Not don't want to. Not am choosing to. Not able." Something echoed behind him. "This isn't about the newspaper and it isn't about anything you've done and it isn't — Lila, it isn't about us. Do you understand what I'm telling you?"
"No," I said. "No, I genuinely don't, I—"
"Then hold onto the shape of it. Please. Hold onto the shape until I can hand you the rest." A door somewhere, and voices. "I have to go. Keep the dog with you."
And he hung up.
I sat on the floor of my own kitchen for a while after that. Floss came and put herself against my back, which is what she does. Around six I got up and went downstairs and Tess was still there, closing the cart, an hour after she normally leaves, which is not an accident and never was.
So then I did the arithmetic on that, too, because arithmetic is what I have.
Here's what it looked like from where I was standing, and I want to be exact about it, because the shape you make out of missing information is the most revealing thing about you.
It looked like this: I got named in a newspaper on Thursday.
He'd gone quiet on Monday. A federal agent in a small resident agency, four months into being seen everywhere in this town with a woman who had just become a person of interest in a homicide — a woman with debt, a motive, a public grievance and no alibi.
He'd been told I was a liability. Or he'd decided it himself. And either way he'd done what careful men do, which was go quiet and wait for it to resolve, and either way what it meant was that the first time my life got difficult, Nate Corrigan had gone still and silent and simply stopped.
Which is what they do. That was the sentence in my head all that week, in Grant's voice, in my father's voice, in the voice of a bank in Ventura: this is what they do.
You let someone put their name next to yours and then something goes wrong and you find out that the whole time there was an exit and only one of you knew where it was.
I was wrong about every part of that. I want to say that here rather than let it sit.
I was completely, catastrophically wrong, and the only thing I got right in those five weeks is that I never once said any of it to Tess out loud, because if I'd said it out loud Tess would have said the true thing to me and I would have had to hear it a month earlier than I did.
I read, that week. That's what I did with the nights.
There is a used bookshop on Anacapa that keeps a wire rack of cozy mysteries by the door for a dollar each, and I went in on the Tuesday and came out with eleven of them, and I read them in bed with the dog against my spine at a rate of roughly one a night, and they were all about dentists.
That is not a coincidence. The rack had a handwritten card on it that said FOR DR. BENNETT — WE THOUGHT OF YOU, which Tess had almost certainly arranged.
They were called things like *Plaque Suspicion* and *The Molar Motive* and *Fatal Floss*, and they were written by a woman in Ohio who has done thirty-one of them, and the heroine is a dentist in a small coastal town who solves murders with her cat.
They got the dentistry wrong in every single book.
I want to be clear that this did not stop me.
I read all eleven and I have since read the other twenty and I preordered the thirty-second.
But in *Fatal Floss* a woman is strangled with unwaxed dental tape, which would break; in *The Molar Motive* a villain is identified by a bite mark on an apple, which no forensic odontologist in this country will testify to anymore and hasn't for fifteen years; and in *Plaque Suspicion* the heroine determines a man's exact age from a single X-ray in eleven seconds while standing up.
And every night that week I lay in bed correcting a woman in Ohio out loud to a golden retriever, which was, I understand now, the only way I had of being a dentist who knew something while the entire town was deciding I was a dentist who had done something.
Bear showed up on Saturday morning.
I came down at seven and there was a hundred pounds of Bernese mountain dog lying against the courtyard gate with a trailing lead and a great deal of hillside on him, and when he saw me he did the felled-tree groan and got up and put his entire head against my stomach and would not move.
Floss came down the stairs behind me and lost her mind, and the two of them did the thing they do, and I stood in the courtyard at seven in the morning with my hand on that enormous stupid gentle head and I cried, properly, for the first time since Monday, into the ruff of a dog who had come four miles down off the Mesa on his own with a lead dragging.
I texted the number. Bear's here. He's fine. He's had water.
The reply took two hours. Thank you. I'll send someone.
Someone. He sent someone. A young agent I'd never met named Ruiz who was very polite and could not look me in the face and put Bear in a government car with real difficulty, because Bear had, by then, positioned himself under the iron table with Floss, and had to be persuaded.
He came back Wednesday. Same thing — the lead, the hillside, the gate.
Ruiz came again. And the third time Ruiz said, apologetically, at the car door, "Ma'am, he's not getting out.
We've checked the fence twice. We think somebody's — " and then stopped, hard, and got in the car and drove away, and I stood in my courtyard and worked out the end of that sentence, which is: we think somebody's leaving the gate open.
So for about four days I believed something that made it all much worse, which was that Nate Corrigan was letting his dog out.
He wasn't. I got that later too. Bear was going over a five-foot fence, at five years old, having never jumped anything in his life, twice a week, to lie against the gate of a courtyard where his person was — because dogs do not have an order, and dogs do not have a chain of command, and dogs do not have a Supervisory Senior Resident Agent explaining that contact with a person of interest could collapse an eighteen-month federal investigation.
Dogs just know where everybody is supposed to be.