me feel like I made the right choice. Tara won’t admit it, but she’s going to miss Waggy as much as I will. Or maybe she won’t.
“—though I would be reluctant to give him up until I felt certain he’s no longer a target.”
“Makes sense.”
“But if you ever go on vacation, Waggy doesn’t get boarded; he comes to stay at our house,” Laurie says. I have to admit, I love the way she says “our house.”
Steven smiles. “You got a deal.”
“And I get visitation rights,” Martha says.
Steven nods. “Whenever you want.”
I can tell the evening is coming to an end, because Vince signals for the waiter to bring me the check. Steven grabs it and pays it, bringing the grand total of times I haven’t gotten stuck with the check at Charlie’s to one.
When we get home, Marcus has brought Waggy up to the living room, and he is playing with him and Tara. I think he’s going to miss the Wagster as much as the rest of us.
“You really think he’s still in danger?” Laurie asks.
“To tell you the truth, I have no idea. There’s just too much I don’t know about this whole case. But for now I don’t want to take a chance with him.”
“When he goes to live with Steven, are you going to get Tara another friend? I think she likes the company.”
I shrug. “Maybe; I’ve been thinking about it. But it would be a dog closer to Tara’s age.”
She nods. “Good idea.”
I’m pretty much ready to go upstairs with Laurie, but Marcus doesn’t seem to be planning to leave. “Marcus, can I get you anything?” I ask.
“Nunh.”
“We’re going to go to sleep, okay?”
“Yuh.”
Laurie whispers to me. “Andy, do you think we should? Is it right to just leave him here?”
I nod. “Yuh and yuh.”
MY MEETING WITH RICHARD WALLACE isn’t even necessary. By the time I get there, he already has gotten the police department to prepare the search warrants on Thomas Sykes, which will be presented to a judge and then hopefully executed. They’re for his home, his car, and his office, and basically they’re hunting for trace evidence and incriminating documents and computer records.
It’s an entirely different situation than would have occurred if Steven had been found guilty. Then there would have been almost no way Richard could have convinced his boss to try to pin the crime on Sykes. Once Steven had been convicted, they would not have had the stomach to do something that might have overturned that conviction.
“I buy that he killed Walter Timmerman,” Richard says, “but not the house. It doesn’t feel right. If he was going to do that, why not do it when both of them were home? He could have killed them both with one bomb, and it would have been even easier to place it on Steven.”
“Because I think Sykes wanted a chance to get a look at that lab, without Walter around.”
“How could he have been sure that Diana would be home when he set the bomb off ? She could have been at the goddamn beauty parlor.”
It’s a good point, and one I hadn’t thought of. “That’ll have to go to the bottom of a long list of things I don’t know,” I say.
“Unless he called and she answered the phone; that would have been the key to detonate the bomb.”
I think back to that day. “No, she was having Martha tell people she wasn’t available. And she gardened a lot; even if she was home, she could have left the house at any time.”
“Maybe we’ll learn something with the warrants,” Richard says.
“Or maybe it’ll raise more questions.”
He looks at me strangely. “You seem awfully downbeat for a winner.”
I smile. “I know; I hate unresolved cases, especially when the fact that they’re unresolved means a murderer may walk.”
Richard promises to keep me informed as best he can about the results of the search warrant, but I’m aware that it will be in the hands of the police, and it will only be brought to him if charges seem justified.
On the home front, Laurie and I are making plans for a trip to Findlay. The doctor isn’t quite ready for her to travel yet, but he said he’ll likely retract that restriction in a couple of weeks.
Laurie figures it will take about three weeks to help in the job transition; she has already notified the city manager of her decision to leave, and fortunately her second in command is a likely successor. She also