“Get away from me,” he spat as he swung the blade at Marlow. The tip of it sliced in front of Marlow’s face, close enough it blurred as it nicked the tip of his nose. “Son of a bitch.”
Marlow jerked back and rolled easily to his feet. He stepped backward, his body between the suspect and the car, and waited.
The suspect slashed the knife at him, wild, wide swings of his arm, to try and bully Marlow backward. It didn’t work. Marlow just swayed back onto his heels and waited for panic to set in.
“I’ve got a knife!” The blade trembled in a too-tight clutch as the suspect jabbed it at Marlow’s torso. “Just get out of my way, and no one gets hurt.”
He thrust again, and Marlow grabbed his arm. He dug his fingers into the suspect’s wrist until he ground tendons against bone, then twisted. The knife dropped to the dirt track with a thud as it slipped out of suddenly boneless fingers.
“Be happy you don’t know how to use it,” Marlow said as he used the suspect’s arm like a lever to force him down onto his knees, “or I’d have had to shoot you.”
Cade, slowed to a lope now the chase was over, joined them. He held up one hand, a set of keys dangled from his finger for the suspect to see.
“You weren’t going to get far without these anyhow,” he said.
Not any sort of professional, then. They’d have left the keys in the car. Who was going to steal it way out here? A raccoon?
The suspect lunged forward in an attempt to wrench free that ended in a howl of pain as his arm bent entirely the wrong way. He subsided with a groan, and his head hung forward between his shoulders as he shuddered.
Marlow reached down and pulled the snug, now grubby, gray hood back off the man’s head. It folded up around his neck, revealing sandy-ginger hair and a mole off-center on the back of his neck.
“I know him,” Cade said. He frowned and tilted his head to the side. “Where do I know him from?”
Good question. Marlow slammed the man against the door of his 4x4 as he dragged a spare zip tie out of his pocket. He looped it around the man’s bony wrists—a moderately expensive watch cool under his fingers as they brushed the links—and pulled it to secure them. Once he was happy the tie was secure, he yanked the suspect off the car, turned him around, and slammed him back into it.
Recognition caught him flat-footed. The man looked a lot different from the last time Marlow had seen him, with bruises on his bony well-bred face and leaves tangled in previously gelled-flat hair, but there was no question it was him. It had only been a couple of hours ago that they met, after all, so his face was fresh in Marlow’s memory.
“Parker,” Marlow said, his voice inflected with surprise as he stared at Ms. Farnham’s secretary. “What the hell are you doing here?”
In the gray box of the interrogation room, Parker, hunched over meekly in his gray sweats, faded into the background. He twisted his hands together, which made the cuffs that shackled him to the table rattle, and fidgeted in the chair.
Marlow couldn’t blame him for the last part. The metal seats were uncomfortable, like that had been the plan when they were made.
“Are the cuffs necessary?” Elliot Grayson asked as he clicked his pen. “My client is cooperating, he’s not a violent felon, and he’s hardly a threat to anyone here—”
His clientwas an interesting way to phrase it. Grayson had been hired by Farnham, sent over when Parker had used his one call to contact the office. It probably wasn’t in his best interests, but he’d accepted the representation.
“He might not be a felon, but he did pull a knife on me,” Marlow pointed out. “So violent is back on the table.”
Grayson raised his eyebrows and looked Marlow over. “You seem fine,” he said, “so he’s obviously not taken to assault and battery like a duck to water.”
“All he needs is practice,” O’Hara said as he sat down. “Let’s not give him the opportunity. So, Mr. Parker is ready to speak to us now?”
“This was all a misunderstanding,” Grayson said in a smooth, pleasant voice. He was better at his job than most of the overworked, under-motivated court-appointed attorneys that ended up in here. It sounded like he actually believed his client. “A well-intentioned good deed that somehow, without Mr. Parker’s involvement, went terribly wrong.”
O’Hara sat back. “Go on, then,” he said. “For the record. What happened?”
Parker glanced at Grayson, got the nod to go on, and took a deep breath as he straightened up out of his slouch.
“We were friends,” he said. His voice was a bit too loud against the raw concrete walls, and he stopped for a second to recalibrate before he tried again. “Haley and me, we were friends. Had been sinceHaley’s Cometwas on air.”
“A coincidence that you ended up working for her producer, then,” O’Hara noted.
Parker shook his head. “She was the main character, not the only actor,” he said. “I played Patton Black on the show. My first job and my last. I’d rather be like Mr. Macroy, make the shows, not just star in them. But that’s how I met Haley. We weren’t besties or anything, but we stayed in touch after the show ended. A couple of weeks ago, she got in touch with me and asked for help.”
“With some handiwork?” Marlow asked.
Parker looked at him blankly for a second. “No?” he said eventually, after another glance at Grayson for reassurance. “Um. No. She needed somewhere to dry out, and she couldn’t go back into rehab. She’d landed her first gig in ages, and part of the contract was that she stayed sober. They’d have bounced her if they found she’d toasted someone with champagne, never mind gone on a bender.”
