Chapter 20

I hate the phone. I hate having to wake up before I'm ready. And I really, really hate the phone waking me up before I'm ready. I almost fell out of the bed getting up to silence the thing, only to hear Cecelia's voice as my feet hit the floor.

"Carpenter residence," she said, the greeting she uses when she's not terribly happy herself.

"Sir, if you wish to berate me, I suggest you call again in several thousand years. I am weary; your call awoke me after a difficult night; I am not in the mood for your bellicosity." And she removed the phone from her ear, as though to hang up.

I could hear the squawking from where I was, still over by the bed. Whoever was on the other end was getting forceful, though I couldn't make out any words.

"Excuse me?" Cecelia said into the phone.

"Very well – we shall investigate, and then call you back. Do not dial this number until further notice."

And that time she did hang up, slapping the receiver onto its charger with an angry snap of her wrist. She turned to me, her face in a scowl but still the most beautiful face I've ever seen. Her features, narrow as the blade of an axe, are suited to angry beauty, only the flatness of her African nose marring the image. She had on a sleeveless nightgown, one of the few sleeveless things she wears and the only one she wears on a regular basis, and the white of the fabric contrasted nicely with her milk chocolate skin. Her hair, unloosed for the night from its ponytail, frizzed out around her hair in the mini-Afro that I love, and right then – as tired as I was, and as irritated due to the phone waking me up – I could cheerfully have married her all over again. At that, there's never a time when I wouldn't do that.

"Darvin," she said, "that was Lt. Stubblefield. He accused us of leaking our involvement, and the nature of the case, to the media."

"How anyone so clearly intelligent can be so stupid is beyond me," I told her, shambling over to the chair where I always toss my around-the-house clothes, and pulling on my jeans. "This is twice now he's been a blithering idiot."

"Yes," Cecelia said, and reached for her robe, a terrycloth job that swaddles her like a blanket and trails on the floor when she walks. With it on she always looks about 12 years old, until you look at the laugh lines around her eyes and faintly at the corners of her mouth, and the gray that's slowly but surely increasing in her hair. I knew she was biting her tongue – mad or calm, happy or sad, Cecelia never satisfies herself with one-word answers.

I led the way out to the living room, where I grabbed the remote and turned on the TV. I jumped from station to station until I caught a report just as it was beginning. A perky little kid reporter – she looked and sounded like she was barely in high school – chirped about the presence of a serial murderer in Albuquerque, with the West Mesa case still unsolved, and breathlessly talked about my involvement. She described me as a "well-known Albuquerque private detective" who "spent HOURS at the scene," her media habit of emphasizing perfectly ordinary words as though they're the most important in the world making her sound like a pretentious twit.

Or maybe that was just my mood, though I've never cared for the stilted, self-important way talking heads speak English on camera. I certainly was in a bad mood, after the phone dragging me out of sleep. "What's wrong with Stubblefield," I growled at Cecelia, as video of the scene – clearly shot from a distance – played on the screen. As I peered at the footage I could see my distinctive cowboy hat moving in the floodlights, though Cecelia was indistinguishable in her POLICE jacket and nondescript hairstyle. "Anyone with a brain knows that reporters have scanners and cameras and sources, and would have got hold of this mess sooner or later."

"Do not snarl at me," she said in a cold voice. "I have had enough temper from Stubblefield; I do not require it from my husband." And she stomped off to the kitchen, her bare feet slapping on the tiles as she left the carpet that covers the living room floor.

I was rational enough in spite of everything to know that we were both wrong, that she was withdrawing in order to prevent a full scale argument, and my best decision would be to stay where I was. So I stayed, flipping from channel to channel, seeing much the same footage though from slightly different angles, depending on where the truck had parked or the cameraman had stood. Channel 7, the ABC affiliate, had launched its chopper and gotten some long aerial shots – I hadn't heard it, though the station and its helicopter pad is just down Carlisle at Comanche. The sound of the news chopper had merged with the noise of the police copter, which had been overhead and had periodically added its Night Sun light to the glare of the floodlights on the ground.

Finally I turned the TV off, hunted around through the cards I had stuffed into my wallet, and found the task force number. I dialed it, asked for Stubblefield, and when he came on launched into him. "Here's the deal, Loo – I ain't talked to no reporters, nor has my wife, an' if you'll turn your brain on you'll know we didn't."