never once displayed hesitation or confusion. His timing was perfect, his movements precise, his presence undetected by anyone.
Hayes had done this many times before.
Chapter 18
I left Alan Hayes, my mind troubled by what I had learned about him. Following a young girl didn’t prove he’d killed Alissa, but I had felt what he was capable of and it scared me. How could I let Maggie know that there was something off-kilter about Hayes, regardless of what Danny thought of him? He was no grieving father. He was a predator who needed to be stopped. Not rehabilitated. Just stopped. I had met his kind before, though rarely. Men like him were dispassionate enough about their crimes to evade capture for decades. But they always went back to the well. They had to. They could not survive without tasting the humiliation of others.
I thought back to the case files from the investigation that Danny and I bungled so thoroughly. Would anything in there put Maggie on to Hayes? Would his behavior last night be enough to alarm her? Could Danny somehow be persuaded to raise the issue himself?
Would Danny be of any use at all? He’d been stupid enough to interfere with Maggie’s investigation. What else might he try? And why was he trying to block a new investigation? I had to find out.
Maggie had not told Gonzales about Danny’s appearance the night before. If she had, he’d be gone. You did not defy Gonzales directly like that. Ever. Instead, I found Danny at work, where he had been relegated, sitting at a desk in the Found Property section—a department where his surliness would be tempered by the public’s joy that their stolen possessions had, miraculously, been recovered. Plus, there was very little work, as virtually nothing of value was ever reported as found. Gonzales was smart. It was the perfect place for Danny to wait out the five months until he retired. There would be little asked of him and even less that he could screw up.
But Danny, being Danny, did not intend to make things easy on himself. As always, he loved to invite disappointment. He sat at his desk, in full view of others, reading skin magazines and sneaking sips from a flask in his top drawer, occasionally begrudgingly taking a message from some hopeful victim wanting to know if his bike or lawn mower had been recovered. Few people noticed Danny’s blatantly antagonistic behavior as coworkers had long since learned the best way to endure Danny was to ignore him. Perhaps that was why he had escalated his apathy in recent years, flaunting his disregard for what others thought. He had a deep need for attention, and he did not care if it was positive or negative attention. Ever since his life had failed to measure up to his dreams, he’d been driven by a compulsion to provoke and spread his unhappiness. I knew because I had seen that compulsion take root and grow.
But something else was tormenting him that morning, something beyond being reassigned by Gonzales. Was it the night before, the scene with Hayes, or the barely disguised accusation of cowardice Gonzales had thrown at him? I did not blame Danny for my death. I had died of my own incompetence and no one else’s. That didn’t mean Danny saw it the same way.
I sat and watched my old partner for a while, wondering how well he had investigated Alan Hayes and whether he would ever be willing to admit that he had blown it. Danny’s agitation grew steadily as he sat at the desk, finally becoming so severe I wondered if he was taking something. I‘d known him to rely on speed—or worse—before. He began to flip more rapidly through the pages of his magazine, not even bothering to glance down. Finally, he gave up entirely and threw the porn in a bottom drawer before booting up the department’s computer network. This act alone astonished me. Danny had treated anything related to the computer with contempt, maintaining that all it did was add to his workload. Yet there he sat, searching through computerized records, checking out who in the department was online, following some unknown cyber trail with a determination I had not seen from him in years.
He was tracking Maggie. As he pulled up our old case files, at least the ones that had been computerized, I realized he was checking the dates to see the last time they had been accessed, trying to