Brunswick.”
“Cool.”
Barry’s voice showed concern. “Is this about that guy shot with the old gun?”
“Yeah. The kid they picked up for it has AS. He’s into guns, but his mom swears he doesn’t own any.”
“The fact that they found the gun in his room might indicate otherwise. Did you tell your mother everything you were doing when you were twenty-two?”
“I don’t have Asperger’s. They’re not incapable of lying, but most of them are really bad at it.”
“You probably did tell your mother everything you were doing when you were twenty-two.” Barry is a nice man, but he can be a real pain when he puts his mind to it.
“Anyway,” I sighed, “I’m guessing you don’t know Chief Baker well enough to call her and put in a good word for me.”
“Which word would that be? ‘Irritant?’ ‘Problem?’ ‘Obstruction?’”
“You’re a nice man,” I told him, “but you can be a real pain when you put your mind to it.”
“That’s exactly what I could tell her about you,” Dutton said, his chuckle rumbling again. “If you want me to.”
I hung up on him. It gives me a certain feeling of power to do that to my local chief of police, no matter how much he’ll make me pay for it later.
The cell phone rang a minute or two later. I checked the incoming number, but didn’t recognize it, so I opened my phone.
“Hello?”
The voice was female, but authoritative. “Aaron Tucker?” “Depends. Who’s calling?”
“This is Chief Leslie Baker of the North Brunswick Police Department.”
Barry Dutton worked fast. “In that case, yes,” I said. “This is Aaron Tucker. I guess Chief Dutton called you.”
“Yes,” said Baker. “And he said to tell you he should have left you in the chair with the duct tape. Does that mean anything to you?”
“No,” I answered. “Chief Dutton hallucinates sometimes.”
“Is there something I can do for you, Mr. Tucker?”
“I’m writing about the murder of Michael Huston. Can you spare a few minutes?”
She exhaled, not meaning for me to hear it. While North Brunswick is a much larger town (with therefore a much larger police department) than Midland Heights, Baker was probably not used to dealing with murder investigations, or the publicity they usually generated. But she knew it was part of her job.
“I suppose so, but it’ll have to be quick. Where are you?”
I gave her my location, and she directed me to the North Brunswick Municipal Complex on Hermann Road. Because I’m a trained investigative reporter, this immediately made me wonder whether the road had been named after Bernard Herrmann, who wrote so many memorable film scores for Alfred Hitchcock films. There was no way to know, so I put that out of my mind. But the music from Vertigo kept running through my head.
It took but a few minutes to get there, and after twice getting lost in the building, I found myself in Chief Leslie Baker’s office, which was not only larger than Barry Dutton’s, but also had carpeting. I made a mental note to inform Barry of these salient facts at my earliest convenience.
Chief Baker herself was a tall woman, about five-foot nine or ten, and in full uniform, she appeared to be roughly the size of the Empire State Building. She was on the phone when I walked in, but hung up and stood ramrod straight, shook my hand with a grip that could have turned my hand into a maraca had she given it full force, and pointed me toward a chair. She was nothing if not physically impressive.
“Lieutenant Rodriguez is working on the Huston case,” she told me almost immediately. “But since Chief Dutton requested I speak to you, I’ll tell you whatever I can.”
I took the reporter’s notebook out of my back pocket—they are designed specifically to fit on your butt or in an inside jacket pocket, but I’m not classy enough to wear a sports jacket—and opened it to a blank page. Baker did not blink.
“What led to the questioning, and eventually the arrest, of Justin Fowler?” I asked.
Baker opened the file on her desk. Behind her, I noticed, was a picture of her shaking hands with one of the former presidents I hadn’t voted for. I tried not to hold it against her, and then saw a picture of her shaking hands with a former president I had voted for. Apparently, she was a bipartisan hand-shaker.
“According to Lt. Rodriguez’s report, once we discovered the kind of firearm that had killed Mr. Huston, Mr. Fowler was initially questioned as an