Lynch. I might be dead. Hell, Carlo might be dead. I wished I could stop looping; it was getting me nowhere.
Lynch. I went over the interview with Wilbur and Portobello Mike, pausing, backing up, but could not find a motive for their being involved. Rather, they seemed to distance themselves from their son and brother.
Seemed.
Round and round we go.
Before I was totally brooded out, a slash of afternoon sun invaded the dark interior and I saw in the mirror that Coleman had arrived. I gestured for her to come join me at the bar. The conversation in the room dropped a notch while the men pretended not to watch her El Greco body glide across the room. Coleman looked uncomfortable and ran her fingers through her tight curls to disguise that she was passing her hand over that birthmark on her temple the way she did when we first met.
“Is this okay, or would you prefer a table?” I asked.
She shifted a little shift as if she was trying to get more comfortable with either her underwire or her side arm and sat down on the vinyl-padded stool next to mine. “No, this is fine,” she said. “It’s just my parents are Mormons and I’ve never gotten totally used to sitting at a bar.”
She ordered an iced tea from Emery, who was hovering less like a good bartender and more like a man wondering what was underneath the linen blouse. He rested his palms on the surface of the bar and leaned, not quite leering, in her direction. Even Cheri passed by and skewered him on a wide-eyed look, the kind of watch-yourself-buddy warning that confirmed my guess that they were lovers.
Emery put a basket of chips and a bowl of salsa on the bar in front of us. “On the house,” he said with his accent and a courtly flourish of his hand, both comically self-deprecating and elegantly European, before drifting away to serve someone else.
“He must like you,” Coleman said, indicating the chips and sounding a little wistful at the thought of having a bartender of one’s very own.
“He doesn’t know me. He’s flirting with you.”
Emery brought her the iced tea, rested a spoon on top of a cloth napkin, and moved the container of sugar packets closer to her.
Apparently feeling that the tea needed an excuse, “I’m still working,” Coleman said as she squeezed the lemon. She must have had Barky on her mind. “You have a dog?”
“We have Pugs.”
“Are Pugs good?”
I wasn’t sure what that meant, never having had dogs before, but answered, “Sure, they work fine. How about you?”
“We had a miniature schnauzer when I was little. Duncan. He used to sleep with me.” Then the small talk was done. She was too intense to have a knack for it. “That interview was a dead end. None of it is making much sense.”
“Neither does lust killing. These people don’t think the way we do.”
“Like you say, we need more.”
“With interviews sometimes you can’t tell what’s important until later. You just keep as much of it inside your head as you can, and sometimes connections appear. It’s like we’re all garbage scows of information and sometimes your life can depend on the connections.”
When Coleman rested her elbow on the bar and her chin on her hand, was it to cover a smile? She stared at me as if she was soaking up all the instruction I had to offer, but her eyes showed only a kind of bland patience. She may have admired me well enough, but she was no suck-up. So I pulled back on the patronizing. Lord knows Coleman had never played the over-the-hill card with me and she deserved the same respect. “Sorry, you already know all that. Your analysis really impressed Weiss, by the way.”
“I still can’t believe I met David Weiss. He was huge like you, you know, like—”
“Dinosaurs? Just kidding,” I said before she could attempt to shovel the words back into her mouth. But then I noticed she didn’t seem uncomfortable at all, so maybe I spoke too soon about the over-the-hill thing. I ignored it. “We joined the Bureau at the same time. He had already had his PhD in psych and was tapped for the new behavioral science unit. We called him Sigmund because—”
“Freud. That’s so funny.”
I hate when I repeat myself. They say it’s due to stress. I finished my beer, said no to a second when Emery swung by. “What do they call you?” I