“Closing ranks.”
“More like, I don’t know.”
And if Vance Moodey’s visit to the site yesterday has business implications for my mother, the detective can find that out on his own.
“Okay,” Gilcrest says, “back to the timeline. You and the chief were on the shore with her mother, then Hadley arrived. Who came next?”
“The fireboat.”
“After Hadley?”
I work through the events in my mind. “Before,” I say. “It went Seton, the fireboat, Hadley, then the EMTs and a fire truck. After that came Reid. He blocked in the ambulance.”
“And what about Paul Burke? Or your mother?”
“I told you, my mother had already left for Finstock. Paul must have come later, after Hadley drove me to the hospital.”
“Paul’s farmhouse is about a mile from here,” Gilcrest says. “The smoke was thick. I saw it from my cabin on the other side of the lake in Kingston. I was getting ready to respond when the call came in. I could smell the smoke, too.”
Like with Hadley, he’s turning Paul, my mother, and Reid into suspects. Where was Paul when his own property was in flames? Could my mother have set the fire before she left? And where had my brother been all night?
A text beeps into Gilcrest’s phone. “The arson team’s about to arrive,” he says.
We retrace our steps along the shore, where two cars pull into the parking lot alongside Gilcrest’s SUV. “That’s Detective Cornell Stamoran,” Gilcrest says as a tall man emerges from one car. “He’s helping me out on this case. Give us a minute.”
He crosses to where the other detective waits. The two men talk in hushed voices, while another group unloads equipment. A moment later, Gilcrest waves me over. “Charlie’s working on a podcast,” he says to Stamoran. “True crime.”
“Duncan here is your man,” Stamoran says. “He’ll talk to anyone.”
“Thanks a lot,” Gilcrest says.
“I call it as I see it, pretty boy,” Stamoran says.
A few minutes later, Gilcrest stops his car in front of the Landing and turns to where I sit beside him in the passenger’s seat. “Send me the recording you just made.”
I flick it to his phone.
“Don’t think I forgot our conversation earlier about your father,” Gilcrest says. “Let’s say he’s been alive all this time, hiding out. Could he have survived on his own? Or would he have needed help?”
It’s a good question, one I should have asked myself. My father wasn’t the back-to-the-land type, though who knows what he learned in the years since he disappeared. If someone did help him, I doubt it was my mother, after what he did to her, and Andrea Haviland seems unlikely, too—unless she was having an affair with him. That leaves Paul Burke. Or Hadley. “My father doesn’t have a lot of allies,” I say.
“Your father grew up here. Maybe someone we haven’t thought of helped him out. Someone with resources. Or maybe—” Gilcrest stops himself. “If you’re looking to explain who gave you that head wound, your father could be a suspect.”
“Maybe,” I say.
“Charlie,” Gilcrest says, “if there’s something you’re not telling me, now’s the time.”
I take a deep breath. “My father was at the Landing last night,” I say, and it’s such a relief to say it out loud I wonder why I haven’t done it earlier.
Gilcrest doesn’t attempt to mask his shock this time. “Your father, Mark Kilgore, was at the Landing last night? Who else saw him?”
“The bartender. He served him a beer.”
“Blancy’s too young to recognize your father, and so are you. He’s twenty-five years older.”
“Some things don’t change,” I say.
“You should have told me about this the moment I showed up at Freya’s condo,” Gilcrest says. “In fact, you should have called me last night. If you see your father, call me, no matter the time of day. I have kids of my own. Three of them. The oldest is fourteen, and I can’t imagine putting them through what your father did to you and your brother.”
