was wearing gloves when you looked in?”
“Gloves . . . gloves,” he said, as if he was trying to prompt an answer from his memory banks. After another long pause he said, “I don’t know. I’m not getting a picture in my mind. What do the police say?”
“Well, I’m just trying to see if you remember.”
“Well, I’m not getting anything, sorry.”
“If the police wanted to, would you let them hypnotize you? To see if they could bring it out that way?”
“Hypnotize me? They do that sort of stuff?”
“Sometimes. If it’s important.”
“Well, if it was important, I guess I’d do it.”
We were standing in front of the shack now. I was looking at the Tempo parked in the same place my brother had parked.
“The other thing I wanted to ask about was the timing. The police reports say that you had the car in sight within five seconds of hearing the shot. And with only five seconds there is no way anybody could make it from the car and into the woods without being seen.”
“Right. No way. Would’ve seen ’em.”
“Okay, then what about after?”
“After what?”
“After you ran to the car and saw the man was shot. You told me the other day you ran back to the shack here and made two calls. That right?”
“Yes, nine one one and my supe.”
“So you were inside the shack here and couldn’t see the car, right?”
“Right.”
“How long?”
Pena nodded, seeing what I was getting at.
“But that doesn’t matter because he was alone in the car.”
“I know but humor me. How long?”
He shrugged his shoulders as if to say what the hell and fell silent again. He walked into the shack and made a motion with his hand like lifting up the phone.
“I got through on nine one one right away. That was pretty quick. They took my name and stuff and that took some time. Then I called in and asked for Doug Paquin, that’s my boss. I said it was an emergency and they put me through right away. He got on and I told him what happened and he told me to go out and watch the vehicle until the police came. That was it. I went back out.”
I considered all of that and figured that he had probably been out of sight of the Caprice for at least thirty seconds.
“On the car, when you first ran out, did you check all the doors to see if any were unlocked?”
“Just on the driver’s side. But they were all locked.”
“How do you know?”
“When the cops got out here they tried them all and they were locked. They had to use one of those slim jim things to pop the lock.”
I nodded and said, “What about the backseat? You said yesterday that the windows were fogged. Did you put your face up to the glass and look directly into the backseat? Down at the floor?”
Pena understood now what I was asking about. He thought for a moment and shook his head in the negative.
“No, I didn’t look directly into the back. I just thought it was the one guy, is all.”
“Did the cops ask you these questions?”
“No, not really. I see what you’re driving at, though.”
I nodded.
“One last thing. When you called it in, did you say it was a suicide or just that it was a shooting?”
“I . . . Yeah, I said somebody up here went and shot hisself. Just like that. They got a tape, I ’spect.”
“Probably. Thanks a lot.”
I started back to my car as the first flurries started floating down. Pena called after me.
“What about the hypnotizing?”
“They’ll call if they want to do it.”
Before getting in the car I checked the trunk. There were no chains.
On my way back through Boulder I stopped at a bookstore called, appropriately enough, The Rue Morgue and picked up a thick volume containing the complete stories and poems of Edgar Allan Poe. My intention was to start reading it that night. As I drove back to Denver I worked on trying to put Pena’s answers into the theory I was working on. And no matter how I moved his answers around, there was nothing that derailed my new belief.
When I got to the DPD, I was told up in the SIU office that Scalari was out of the building, so I went to homicide and found Wexler behind his desk. I didn’t see St. Louis around.
“Shit,” Wexler said. “You here to bust my chops again?”
“No,” I said. “You going to bust mine?”
“Depends on what