McGovern said, “Do you believe she saw anything at all? The van?”
“Yeah, she might’ve seen the van there some time, but exactly what time...”
“Well, what other day would have one of those vans been parked in front of Gina Hemming’s house at nine-thirty at night?”
Virgil said, “Uhh... I’ve got no answer for that.”
“Maybe you ought to get one.”
“I’ll try. This number—will it be good for you?”
“No,” she said. “This is a borrowed phone, and I’ll be giving it back, so you won’t be able to track me with it. I’ll borrow another one and call you tomorrow afternoon, see what Griffin has to say.”
“I’ll be talking to you,” Virgil said.
—
Virgil lay in bed in the dark but spent no time at all consulting with God. He spent it, instead, in contemplation. He’d never formulated exactly what he thought about contemplation except that it was superficially like meditation. You found a quiet, dark place—a bed would do fine—and worked with your brain. Instead of attempting to empty your brain, as you did with meditation, you filled it with a particular subject matter and stirred it around, making new connections, as ridiculous as those connections might be.
Lucas Davenport, Virgil’s old boss, had a friend named Kidd who sometimes worked with tarot cards. Kidd argued that there was no supernatural aspect to the cards, but when you selected one at random, and used the tarot “meaning” as an angle with which to examine a problem, you often achieved a new clarity. The tarot forced you out of the worn ruts of your thinking. Sometimes, he said, it even worked.
And that was, Virgil believed, another form of contemplation.
Lying on the bed, near sleep, opening his eyes every once in a while to peer up into the rafters, he came to a realization: Rob Knox, Justin Rhodes’s boyfriend, had told him who the killer was.
Something he’d said had given the whole game away—but not about himself. Knox and Rhodes were both innocent, Virgil realized, but he didn’t know why he was so sure of that.
Having solved that part of the crime, Virgil went to sleep.
—
At nine the next morning, Johnson Johnson called and woke him up.
“You’re still in bed? I wish I had a job that let me sleep that late.”
“I was up late last night, contemplating,” Virgil told him.
“Did it do any good?”
“Yeah. I know who knows who the killer is. Rob Knox knows. He just doesn’t know he knows.”
“He doesn’t know he knows and you don’t know—do I got this right?”
“More or less,” Virgil said. “I’m gonna go see him. You think Clarice could come along?”
“I guess... Why Clarice?”
“I wanted another unfogged mind to hear what Knox has to say,” Virgil said.
“Wiseass. Okay, I’ll come with you.”
“I was hoping you’d offer. I gotta get cleaned up, get some breakfast, and think about it some more. The restaurant serves lunch, so I’ll see you there at eleven. We’ll catch him before they get busy.”
—
Virgil took his time getting ready now that the end of the hunt was in sight. After shaving and showering, he dressed and called Margaret Griffin and said, “Jesse McGovern called me last night, on a borrowed phone. She was upset when she heard about the truck getting shot up, and more upset when I told her about you getting burned. The woman who attacked you will be the second of her people to go to court, so she’s calling it all off. She says she’s shutting down the operation.”
After a moment of silence, Griffin asked, “Do you believe her?”
