Her pale eyes went stony. “For him? Don’t be. He was evil,” she said. “It will just be a chore managing his estate, otherwise known as his last chance to hurt his nearest and dearest. Good luck with the case, Deputy. Try not to have more work for me when I come back.”
He nodded. “I’ll try.”
Galloway turned and left, and her luggage bounced over the tiles behind her as she walked.
“MY SONisn’t missing.” Ben Scanlon leaned forward and stabbed his finger against the table for emphasis as Cloister let himself into the interview room. “My son is dead. So I don’t see what the hell this has to do with me.”
Instead of answering him, Tancredi turned to Cloister. “Deputy Witte, can I help you?” Her voice was even and pleasant, but there was annoyance in the tightness around her eyes.
“Hettie Spence.” Cloister put the report down on the table in front of her. “She died of hyperthermia in Mallard Park fifteen years ago.”
Tancredi’s eyebrows shot up and she looked down at the page. She traced her finger over the ink as she read and stopped in the same places that had caught Cloister’s attention. On his side of the table, Scanlon sat back and crossed his arms.
“What’s that got to do with me?” he said.
Tancredi glanced up at him. “I think my question would have been ‘What does that have to do with my son?’” She rested her fingers on the paper and turned it around so Scanlon could see it. “You were a serving firefighter at this time, weren’t you, Mr. Scanlon? Do you remember this call?”
He glared at her sullenly, heavy lids hooded over brown eyes and the tendons in his neck tight under his loose, weathered skin. He worked his jaw from one side to the other, and the hinge clicked as it shifted back into place.
“It’s a big city.” He enunciated each word carefully and stripped them of emotion. “I don’t remember every call.”
“That’s not what I asked you.” Tancredi tapped her finger against the paper. “Do you remember this call? Do you remember Hettie Spence?”
He shrugged his wiry shoulders and looked away from the paper. There was a nerve just under his eye, and it fluttered in a steady pulse that would have been a gift to a poker player. “I was a firefighter for twenty years. I—”
Tancredi slapped the flat of her hand on the table. The hard jolt of noise made Scanlon jump, but despite the violent action, Tancredi’s voice was calm as she asked, “How many times in those twenty years did you pull a cooked baby out of a car, Mr. Scanlon? I mean, I have a child myself. I’d remember that. It’s the sort of thing that would stick with me.”
He cleared his throat. “Maybe I did? So what? There’s some cases I try not to think about. I still don’t see what it’s got to do with me now.” He glared at Tancredi and added, “Or my kid.”
Cloister pulled up a spare chair and sat down. He was too angry to pull off “approachable,” no matter what Javi thought, but aggressively neutral came naturally.
“Mr. Scanlon, we found Birdie Utkin’s body in Mallard Park yesterday,” he said. Under the ruddy outdoor tan, Scanlon blanched. “If we’re right, and we are, then Mr. Utkin is going to tell us everything we ask him. Believe me, once he sees what is left of his daughter, he’ll tell us exactly what you did. By then it might be too late to rescue Drew Hartley. We’ll just find him. And your old firefighting buddies aren’t going to stand you a round then, are they? So answer the fucking question.”
Scanlon blustered in his chair. “You can’t talk to me like that. I’m not under arrest. I can leave if I want.”
“You can,” Tancredi said. “Like Deputy Witte says, though, when my cousin—he’s an alderman—when he asks me why we didn’t find Drew Hartley in time, do you really want me to name you? Especially when we’re going to find out what you did anyhow.” She tapped her finger pointedly against the paper and repeated her question. “Do you remember Hettie Spence?”
Suddenly he did.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
SCANLON GULPEDdown a cone of water from the cooler. He crumpled it up in his hand when he was done, and then he unfolded it.
“It was an accident.” He watched his hands as though they were doing something interesting while he tore a chunk off the cup. “That’s the only reason I did it. The only reason I went along with it. It was an accident.”
“A little girl died,” Cloister pointed out. “A six-year-old boy was left with permanent damage.”
“Nobody wanted that to happen.” Scanlon looked up sharply. “Nobody had any reason to think that would happen. “Look, I wasn’t involved. I didn’t do anything. Okay? I just… moved the car in my report.”
“Why?”
Scanlon wiped his nose on the heel of his hand and looked down. He folded his lower lip between his teeth and chewed on it for a second.
“I don’t know the full story,” he said. “I didn’t need to know it to do my bit.”
Tancredi leaned forward and tilted her head until he had to meet her eyes. “Tell us what you do know.”
“Plenty was different back then,” he said. “The place was dying. The farms were derelict, the only job with any prospects was dealing drugs, and people who could afford it were just leaving. A couple more years and the town would have just dried up and blown away, but then people started moving in, and houses started going up. So when it started to slow down, when people wouldn’t sell… sometimes it got a bit nasty.”
