tissues, and papers. It would open the front door of their clubhouse, no doubt about that. He picked it up, started to turn away—
“Wait, ” ze bool said. It went to Norman’s ear and whispered, flower-decked horns bobbing.
Norman listened, then nodded. He stripped the mask off his sweaty hand again, stuffed it back into his pocket, and bent over Pam’s purse-litter. He sifted carefully this time, much as he would have if he had been investigating what was called “an event scene” in the current jargon ... only then he would have used the tip of a pen or pencil instead of the tips of his fingers.
Fingerprints certainly aren’t a problem here, he thought, and laughed. Not anymore.
He pushed her billfold aside and picked up a small red book with TELEPHONE ADDRESS on the front. He looked under D, found an entry for Daughters and Sisters, but it wasn’t what he was looking for. He turned to the front page of the book, where a great many numbers had been written over and around Pam’s doodles—eyes and cartoon bowties, mostly. The numbers all looked like phone numbers, though.
He turned to the back page, the other likely spot. More phone numbers, more eyes, more bowties ... and in the middle, neatly boxed and marked with asterisks, this:
“Oh boy, ” he said. “Hold your cards, folks, but I think we have a Bingo. We do, don’t we, Pammy?”
Norman tore the back page out of Pam’s book, stuffed it in his front pocket, and tiptoed back to the door. He listened. No one out there. He let out a breath and touched the corner of the paper he’d just stuck in his pocket. His mind lifted off in another one of those skips as he did so, and for a little while there was nothing at all.
4
Hale and Gustafson led Rosie and Gert to a corner of the squadroom that was almost like a conversation-pit; the furniture was old but fairly comfortable, and there were no desks for the detectives to sit behind. They dropped instead onto a faded green sofa parked between the soft-drink machine and the table with the Bunn-O-Matic on it. Instead of a grim picture of drug addicts or AIDS victims, there was a travel-agency poster of the Swiss Alps over the coffee-maker. The detectives were calm and sympathetic, the interview was low-key and respectful, but neither their attitude nor the informal surroundings helped Rosie much. She was still angry, more furious than she had ever been in her life, but she was also terrified. It was being in this place.
Several times as the Q-and-A went on, she came close to losing control of her emotions, and each time this happened she would look across the room to where Bill was sitting patiently outside the waist-high railing with its sign reading POLICE BUSINESS ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT, PLEASE.
She knew she should get up, go over to him, and tell him not to wait any longer—to just take himself on home and call her tomorrow. She couldn’t bring herself to do it. She needed him to be there the way she’d needed him to be behind her on the Harley when the detectives had been driving them here, needed him as an overimaginative child needs a nightlight when she wakes up in the middle of the night.
The thing was, she kept having crazy ideas. She knew they were crazy, but knowing didn’t help. For awhile they would go away, she would simply answer their questions and not have the crazy ideas, and then she would catch herself thinking that they had Norman down in the basement, that they were hiding him down there, sure they were, because law enforcement was a family, cops were brothers, and cops’ wives weren’t allowed to run away and have lives of their own no matter what. Norman was safely tucked away in some tiny sub-basement room where no one could hear you even if you screamed at the top of your lungs, a room with sweaty concrete walls and a single bare bulb hanging down from a cord, and when this meaningless charade was over, they would take her to him. They would take her to Norman.
Crazy. But she only fully knew it was crazy when she looked up and saw Bill on the other side of the low railing, watching her and waiting for her to be done so he could take her home on the back of his iron pony.