Homicide My Own - Anne Argula [12]
“I better call Spokane.”
“Like I told you, I already did. Your lieutenant says to spend the night and bring him back tomorrow.”
“Did he say where we’re supposed to sleep?”
“You can have the cell there.”
I took another look at the blood splatters. “I don’t think so.”
“There’s the davenport in here,” said the chief.
Child rapist gets the spare bedroom, cop gets the flea-bitten davvy.
“And Odd?”
“What’s odd?”
“I’m Odd,” he said. “It’s a Scandinavian name.”
“Sorry. Does sound a little funny, though.”
“Not like Shining Pony,” I put in.
“I can sleep in the car,” Odd said, “but I’m not tired. In fact, if you’re up, Chief, I wouldn’t mind talking to you.”
“Leave it,” I said, and I realized how bad it sounded. It is, after all, a recommended command in training your dog to avoid distractions. But I was pissed off and exhausted and I didn’t want to take on any more than we had, which was already enough to get us into trouble.
“Go to sleep, Quinn. I’m on my own time here.”
“Just stay out of what don’t concern us, is all I’m saying.”
“I don’t mind talking,” said the chief. “I’ll just get a blanket and a pillow for your boss here.”
I think that Indian was rubbing it in. “I’m not his boss,” I said, before Odd could. “We’re partners.”
He gave me a blanket and pillow, nothing you’d want to put on your own bed, but in a pinch would be willing to use for a few hours on a borrowed davvy. They went outside together.
6.
I slept for about four hours and could have slept longer but for the smell of the coffee Odd was holding under my nose. I pulled my legs off the davvy and took the coffee.
“You don’t look the worse for wear,” I said. In fact, he looked rested, bright, and clear eyed. I didn’t know whether he found a way of shaving or just didn’t need to every day. He was fair and his beard was soft and light. Anyway, he didn’t look like a man who had been on the road and up all night.
“What have you been up to?”
“Talking to the chief.”
“That guy hates me.”
“He didn’t say. I went with him up to the crime scene.”
“There’s been a crime?”
“Their old murder case. It happened at a lover’s lane. Two shots, out of a shotgun. Two kids. That’s where we were, up there, me and the chief.”
“In the middle of the night? When you could have been sleeping?”
“I was curious.”
“You see, I’m not. It was long ago, in another place.”
“It was in this place.”
“Long ago.”
“And nobody knows what happened.”
“So you’re at the scene of the crime, you and Chief Shining Pony.”
“The hairs stood up on the back of my neck. I got a little dizzy.”
“We all get dizzy. It passes.”
“The place was spooky, I’m saying.”
“It was late at night. The wind was blowing.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
“So what was so spooky?”
“A feeling…a sense in the air. There wasn’t much to see, but you could feel it, that something terrible had happened there.”
“Would you have felt it if nobody had told you somebody was murdered there?”
“How the hell do I know? All I know is I felt it then. I walked around with the chief and you could feel it in the air. Quinn, I have an idea why those two kids were killed.”
“Oh, yeah? I think I do too.” I pressed my finger to my temple, as though I were the swami, conjuring hard. “The Mighty Quinn says…one of them was an Indian, and one of them was white, and that’s why they were murdered.”
“Right! Absolutely right! That’s exactly what I was thinking.”
The kid was adorable. You could say he was animated, but anyone who knew Odd wouldn’t believe you.
“I think they’ve probably figured that much out for themselves,” I said. “The racial thing.”
“Yeah, maybe, but the whole case was so badly managed. The night was rainy, no good for prints in the mud, and no spent shells on the ground, but from the sound of it they didn’t do much with the vehicle or even go after the racial end of it. This thing’s been on my mind all night.”
“Then it’s time to think of something else. Like why we are here. Like our prisoner. What