Heads You Lose - Lisa Lutz [77]
Then he heard the front door open. A voice called his name. It was Deputy Doug.
“In here,” said Paul. “The kitchen.”
Doug looked a little shaken up himself. He told Paul to wait while he checked out the crime scene. When he came back to the kitchen, he questioned Paul about his day. Paul told him about the phone call from Harry, as well as their meeting the previous day. He described both as social calls, leaving out the business partnership they’d informally launched, as well as the mysterious item Harry had mentioned. “Reminiscing about Terry, that kind of stuff,” Paul said.
As Doug filled out his report, Paul noticed that the deputy didn’t seem like himself. A confident glint in his eye made for a striking change from his usual look, which fluctuated between confused determination and determined confusion.
“So how’s the investigation going?” Paul asked.
“That’s official business.”
“Come on, man,” said Paul, “I just want to help out. What’s going on?”
Doug thought for a moment, then looked around as though making sure no one was listening. He stared Paul down and announced, “With all due respect to Mr. Lakes, we just got a whole lot closer to our killer.”
“What, you think I did it?” said Paul.
“Not necessarily, although the general vicinity of you and your sister does seem to be a dangerous place to be as of late. What it means is that we finally have what we in the investigative field call a fi-nite window.”
“Help me out with the argot,” said Paul.
“Argot?” said Doug.
“The lingo.”
Doug rolled his eyes. “Let me put it in layperson terms. Unless you’re lying about the phone call—which the phone records will show—we now have a murder that we know was done at a definite time and place,” said Doug.
Paul gave him a confused look.
“Allow me to review,” said Doug. “Crime number one, the killing of Hart Drexel. Without the head we can’t pin down the event. We don’t know when or where it happened, which significantly impairs our ability to narrow down the pool of suspects. Which, I might add, you and your sister are still in the deep end of.” He smiled at his turn of phrase.
Paul nodded solemnly.
“Crime number two,” said Doug, making the peace sign, “Terry Jakes and the tower collapse. I am not at liberty to divulge the latest findings of the . . . crime-scene guy, but let’s say for the sake of argument that we know somebody rigged the thing to collapse. Once again, no clear time frame. Could have happened anytime before Terry went up there.”
Paul raised an eyebrow as Doug continued.
“What we have here with Mr. Lakes is quite simply a different animal. We know that the crime happened right here in this house and that it happened between the times of approximately one-fifteen p.m. and one forty-five p.m. Bang. Finite window.”37 Doug snapped his hands into a rectangular shape to illustrate the window.
When Paul’s expression didn’t change, Doug sighed. “Think about it. Most people will have alibis for such a specific time of day. Anyone who doesn’t moves to the top of the suspect list. And I don’t think I have to tell you that whoever killed Harry must have killed Hart and Terry, too. Unless you believe that three murders in two weeks, after zero murders in twenty years, is just a coincidence.”
Paul held his tongue. In a way, he envied people who viewed the world so simply.38 It wasn’t an optimal trait for police work, however. Finite window or not, Harry Lakes was a wild card. No one knew the kind of connections he had, or the enemies he’d accumulated over the course of a wide-ranging life, or even why, if he and Terry had been so close, Paul had never met him.
While the murders were almost surely connected in some way, Paul thought, to assume