Silent Victim - C. E. Lawrence [129]
Lee groaned. He had forgotten to call Butts to tell him about giving his cell phone to Charlotte. He quickly explained the situation, then used Butts’s cell to call his own. Again it bounced straight to his voice mail.
“My car’s outside,” Butts said.
“Let’s go.”
“I’m coming with you,” Diesel said. “That’s not—” Butts began, but Diesel interrupted. “I’m coming with you.” The detective looked at Lee, who shrugged. “The more the merrier,” Butts said, opening the apartment door.
Within ten minutes they were barreling down Varick Street, and within twenty had cleared the Holland Tunnel. Butts’s car was a massive blue Ford, a rattling old gas guzzler the size of a small boat.
They used Butts’s phone to call the Jersey police in Lambertville, the nearest station to Stockton. A patrol car was dispatched to the Perkins place. Repeated calls to Lee’s cell had gone straight to voice mail—it was possible the battery had run down. He wished he had thought to give Charlotte the phone charger. Numerous calls to Perkins’s office number were picked up by his voice mail recording.
“Nice wheels,” Lee remarked as they swung onto Route 78. He was doing his best to keep his mind off what they might find when they reached Stockton.
“Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it,” Butts muttered, gnawing on a thumbnail. He always seemed to have something in his mouth—cigars, doughnuts, candy. Failing that, his finger would do. “I wanted to get a smaller car, but the wife was attached to old Blue Bertha, so we kept it. Now I’ve gotten kinda attached, you know?”
“Doesn’t it eat up gas?” Diesel asked from the backseat.
“Not as much as you’d think,” Butts said. “It does okay on the highway. The trick is to keep it tuned up and all. One of my sons works for a mechanic, so we get a family rate.”
“Hey,” Lee said suddenly. “Why did both of you show up at my place?” He craned his neck to look at Diesel in the backseat. He was so enormous that even in this roomy old car he looked cramped. “Have you added law enforcement to your other gigs?”
“No—I was on my way to see you when I ran into Detective Butts.”
“What for?”
“I just thought you might need my help.”
This wasn’t the first time Diesel had turned up at an opportune moment—he seemed to have a nose for trouble.
“One thing surprises me,” Butts remarked as they reached the turnoff for Route 202 South. “I wouldn’t think that—uh, Charlotte—would know how to do a text message, y’know?”
“That’s true,” Lee said. “She did tell me she used a cell phone at the hospital where she works. She must have learned how to do it there.”
“What do you think the chances are Krieger’s still alive?” Butts asked as he steered the big car onto the exit ramp.
“Based on how quickly he’s killed the others, not very good,” Lee said grimly.
At that moment Butts’s own cell phone rang. It was the patrol cop calling from the Perkins house to report that he was sitting in his car outside the place, but it all was quiet inside the house. There had been no answer when he knocked on the door, and no sign of life in the house. There was a car parked outside, however, and when he ran a check on the plates it came up as belonging to Martin Perkins.
Lee didn’t know if that was good news or bad, but he asked the officer if he could possibly wait until they arrived to go in, and he said he would try.
Butts didn’t need any help finding the way to Stockton—they’d traveled it enough times by now. As they zigzagged down the winding road that led to the town’s main street, Lee’s stomach twisted with anticipation. He had zoomed down this road so many times on his bike, flying along with the wind rushing in his ears—and now he was driving down it in search of a murderer.
The big car rattled down the modest main street, past Errico’s Market, the gas station and liquor store, and the little clump of restaurants around the Stockton Inn. The rain had stopped, and the street was quiet. A couple of kids were playing Hula-hoop on their front lawn, and a young mother was pushing her baby in a stroller on the way to