Chapter 30

The next morning I woke up to the alarm, a sensation which both relieved and upset me. The relief was from the fact that Cecelia hadn't thought I was so tired or mentally worn out that I needed more sleep, and the upset was from the fact that I hate mornings. I'm not as bad as I'd been when I met Cecelia – she's civilized me into going to bed at a reasonable hour, which makes getting up easier – but I'll never be a real morning person. I'm not as much of a night owl as I was in my 20s or even 30s – at going on 43 I'm less prepared to stay up till all hours and get up at noon.

In any event I got up and got dressed, and headed out into the kitchen. I'd set the alarm early enough that Cecelia was still gone on her take-Darlia-to-school trip, but I found a note on the counter: There are bagels cut and covered on the table, and cream cheese in the refrigerator. This will, I presume, satisfy any early pangs of hunger without violating your prejudice against breakfast. And she'd signed it with her spiky signature.

I got the cream cheese out of the refrigerator, and lifted the ceramic bowl that rested upside down on the table. They were Cecelia's homemade bagels – I saw a couple of onion, and a couple with her version of the "everything" seed and spice mixture that's become popular sometime when I wasn't noticing. She uses more onion and garlic than you'll find in the store, and just a slight touch of black pepper – you don't want to burn your tongue when you're eating a bagel with cream cheese.

I dropped two halves of an onion bagel in the toaster, got a plate out of the cabinet, and a knife out of the drawer. When the bagels popped up I smeared cheese on 'em – smeared, for I'm not from New York City and I don't do "schmear" – and began eating, standing at the counter.

Today was interview day – or the beginning of interviews anyway. If I were the police department I could send an army of detectives into the shopping center, one per business, and sit back and compare reports and dig out of them whatever might be useful. At that I could afford to hire that many operatives out of my pocket change. But I couldn't justify billing the client for that, not yet anyway, and I wasn't ready to eat that size expense.

That was a bit of a delicate balancing act. I didn't want to do too little, but I didn't want to waste money either. If I were going to phrase it in English a lá Cecelia, I'd put it something like this: What is the optimum amount of expense and effort to put forth in order to obtain the optimum result? In other words, where's the middle ground between doing so little that the bad guy does what he's planning before I can catch him, and throwing gobs of money at the problem far in excess of what's necessary to stop the guy?

And answering that question is usually guesswork. It's educated guesswork, based on my 22 years in some sort of law enforcement work, but it's guesswork nonetheless. Usually I guess right. Sometimes I guess wrong – I remembered September of 2006, when in trying to get a stalker to back off I'd instead sent him into a psychopathic attack on his ex-wife, which led to him getting killed by a woman in my employ.

I hate guessing wrong. I was guessing, in this case, that Kim and I could do the interviews well enough and quickly enough to get the information I needed – assuming that anyone we talked to had that information – in order to prevent any disastrous attack on the abortion mill. I knew my capabilities and hers, and figured that we could do it. I just hoped I was guessing right. And as I stuck one of the everything bagels in the toaster, I prayed to that effect, knowing that God is a whole lot better able to control such things than I'll ever be.

There aren't a lot of businesses open before 9 in the morning, so that's when I got to the shopping center. I'd told Kim I'd start at the western end of the place, and so that's where I parked. The abortion mill was on that end, just a couple of doors down from the end of the big long building, but I'd skip that – I'd already interviewed the people there who could help me. Actually it was one person – Davey McCullough, for no one else had seen the paint thrower and of course hadn't seen his vehicle either.

The question was whether anyone in any of the other businesses in the shopping center had seen anything, and if so whether they remembered it. When you don't know you need to remember what you see as a vehicle passes by, those few seconds aren't likely to stick in your memory, and if they do how accurately they stick is another question. Shoot, even if you know you need to remember, you might get it wrong. Eyewitness testimony is important, but it's not always reliable. When I was still a cop I'd worked a theft where there were two eyewitnesses. One said that the man was short and stocky, and the other said he was tall and thin. In actual fact the guy who'd done it was average height and build, but in the fear and excitement the witnesses had gotten it all wrong. They had, though, been able to easily identify him when they looked at a photo lineup, and again in court when the guy was on trial. And they didn't have any problems accurately describing the theft itself.

I was hoping for people who could get enough right to help me out. I didn't necessarily need a detailed description of the man, his vehicle, and its license plate, though I wouldn't reject such a description. If it came my way, I'd run with it – it was a lot more than I had right now. But if I could get a tidbit here and there, enough to put together some sort of picture of who we were dealing with, that would be as much as I could reasonably expect.

One reason I've stayed in law enforcement – though as a private citizen rather than a cop – is that I like the challenge of it. I like solving crimes, or preventing 'em. I like rounding up bad guys and putting 'em in jail. And of course I'm an idealist – I believe that there is a definite right and wrong, that there are good guys and bad guys, and that it's right and proper to protect the former and prosecute the latter. I know I can't change the world, but I can try to have some impact on my little corner of it. I don't mess around with thinking globally – that's just a waste of time. I can only act locally, and that's what I think about. If I fret and worry over every injustice in the world, the vast majority of which I can't even get to, much less correct, I'll go nuts. What I can do is find missing husbands, recover stolen TVs, protect scared ex-wives from psychopathic ex-husbands ... and try to catch a wannabe murderer before he becomes the real thing. My sphere of action is Albuquerque, and that's about as big a sphere as I can handle, so I confine myself to that. And while I can't say that my efforts have cleaned the city up, I do know that there are a few crooks in jail, and a few citizens who sleep more peacefully, because of my efforts. And that ain't chopped liver.