‘You got something you want to say?’ said Griffin, in a tone that made clear his total absence of any desire to listen should this be the case.
‘No, sir.’
‘Then go home. And Kevin?’
‘Chief?’
‘Don’t smoke in the goddamned parking lot.’
Naylor put the cigarette out against the sole of his shoe, and almost flicked the butt into the night before thinking better of it. Instead, he dropped it into one of his pockets and kept his eyes fixed on the ground as Griffin got in his car. He knew what had been done to Patricia Hartley. They all did.
And still, they’d abandoned her to her fate.
They’d left her to be forgotten.
5
Kel Knight looked in on the prisoner. Parker’s eyes were now open, but otherwise he remained in the same position as before.
‘You need anything?’ said Knight.
‘Something to read, if you have it.’
‘We got the Yellow Pages.’
‘I hear it starts strong, but tails off toward the end.’
‘I’ll see what else I can find.’ Knight began to move away, then paused. ‘You know, Chief Griffin is okay.’
‘Is he?’
‘I wouldn’t have said so otherwise. You could have saved yourself a lot of trouble by answering his questions.’
Parker shifted position to lie down on his bunk.
‘This?’ He took in the cell and – by extension – the station house, Cargill, and the rest of the county, if not the world entire. ‘This isn’t trouble, and I’ll be gone by morning.’
‘You seem very sure of that.’
‘I am, because I’m not your problem.’ He turned his face to the wall. ‘Your problem is dead girls.’
Evan Griffin didn’t head straight home, despite the lure of it, but first stopped off at the Lakeside Inn. The Lakeside wasn’t actually located near the Karagol, which represented a sensible planning decision on the part of the original owners, because in summer the mosquitoes swarmed over the black water, and it exuded a stink of vegetal decay. If a person stood on the roof of the motel, it might have been possible to glimpse the lake in the distance, although only after someone had cut a swath through a plenitude of evergreens, and it wouldn’t have been worth the effort. The Lakeside was run by the Ures, Thomas and Mary, but the bank held the paper on it, and the bank, like most everything else in the area, owed its existence and continued survival to the Cade family. The Cades had been in Arkansas, and more particularly Burdon County, for a long, long time. Their history was embedded in its earth, like the roots of the oldest trees, like the Karagol itself.
Thomas Ure appeared from the office as Griffin pulled into the lot. Ure wasn’t usually on duty so late, and was dressed for an evening on the town, as long as the town wasn’t Cargill. Here, people dressed up only for baptisms, weddings, funerals, and court appearances.
‘Is there a problem, Evan?’ he asked.
‘There might be, unless you forget you saw me here.’
‘I never did have a good memory for faces,’ said Ure, ‘or names.’
‘I always liked that about you,’ said Griffin. ‘Room twenty: single or double occupancy?’
‘Just one guy.’
‘Thanks. You can go back to being forgetful now.’
He waited for Ure to return to the office before removing the motel room key from his pocket. He’d found it among the possessions of the man named Parker, although it wasn’t exactly a surprise: Cargill had just two motels, and the Lakeside was the more salubrious. The other, the Burdon Inn, was as damp and cheerless as it looked, and it was said that the bedbugs were as big as a man’s fingernail. Griffin didn’t know what they were subsisting on, because it sure as hell wasn’t guests. The Burdon Inn only stayed open to give Bill Gorce a project on which to waste his time and retirement money. When Gorce eventually died, the Burdon Inn would expire with him, or vice versa; if the Burdon Inn collapsed to the ground tomorrow, Griffin was sure that Bill Gorce would founder at precisely the same moment. But Gorce didn’t appear likely to depart this world anytime soon. He was holding on for better days, like just about everyone else in the county. They’d been holding on like that for a long while, but now they had hope.
As long as they stayed quiet and pretended that nothing bad was happening.
As long as nobody asked questions about dead girls.
A quarter of the rooms at the Lakeside were currently occupied, judging by the lights behind the windows and the vehicles in the lot. The majority of the cars and trucks bore out-of-state plates, and looked like they had heavy miles on them, except for one newer Ford Taurus sitting alone at the end of the building to the right of the office. Griffin would have made the Ford for a rental even without the company sticker in the corner of the windshield.
Griffin stopped outside Parker’s room. Technically, he should have gone to a sympathetic judge, such as old Lew Hawkins over in Boscombe, and asked for a search warrant, but even a soak like Hawkins might have balked at signing off on a warrant based on nothing more than a man’s intransigence. Griffin wasn’t overly concerned, though; he could justify the search as incident to the arrest, which gave him the authority to scrutinize areas within the arrestee’s immediate control. A man could throw a stone from the door of Boyd’s and hit the Lakeside Inn, which Griffin chose to interpret as falling under ‘immediate control’. Anyway, it wouldn’t make much difference unless the examination of Parker’s motel room turned up evidence of the commission of a crime, in which case Griffin would work back and set about bolstering the reasons for the arrest before securing a warrant. But that wasn’t the main purpose of entering the motel room. He was curious about Parker, and his interest in Patricia Hartley. An inspection of the contents of his room, and perhaps also his rental car, might provide Griffin with some answers.
Despite Ure’s assurance that Parker had checked in alone, Griffin took the time to knock hard and identify himself before inserting the key in the lock. He heard the mechanism click, and shifted his right hand to the butt of his gun before turning the knob and opening the door.
‘Hello?’ he called again. ‘This is the police. Anyone in here?’
No one answered. He saw a single lamp burning between the twin beds, but that was all. The TV was off, and the clock radio was unplugged. Griffin closed the door behind him, locked it, and secured the dead bolt. Like all motel rooms, this one smelled of stale cigarette smoke and cheap air freshener, and the décor and bedclothes hadn’t been renewed in a decade. The two beds didn’t look as though they had even been sat on, never mind slept in. A single black case, small enough to be carried on a plane as hand baggage, stood on the metal rack, and the bathroom contained a black leather toiletry bag. Otherwise, the room showed no signs of occupancy.
The Lakeside Inn did not offer safes, which meant that anything valuable or incriminating would be contained in the suitcase. Griffin tested it, but it was locked. He took out his pocketknife and used it to bust the catches. If Parker turned out to be the Zodiac Killer, or was keeping his victims’ fingers as souvenirs, well, Griffin would have a lot of favors to call in from Lew Hawkins.