Chapter 6

We walked in silence and cold to the parking lot where we'd put the Blazer. Probably we could have used the parking lot under Civic Plaza, and maybe even got someone to validate the ticket, but we'd decided not to bother with it. It was easier to find a place a little bit away, pay our money, and walk to and from.

Cecelia's steps clomped like mine on the sidewalk, and on the pavement whenever we crossed a street. That day she was wearing a white blouse that – as usual – was about three sizes too big for her, a pair of jeans worn enough to be comfortable, her black trench coat which she'd belted tightly around her, and her brown scuffed cowboy boots. I was in my standard clothes – the first cowboy shirt in the closet that morning, jeans, my heavy denim jacket with the wool lining, and my boots, which were even more scuffed and worn than Cecelia's, and black. Normally we hold hands as we walk, but it was cold and windy, so both of us had our hands in our pockets.

I got the Blazer out of the lot, and maneuvered through downtown until I was on Central heading east. One of these days someone will design a downtown you can drive in without going stark staring bonkers, but it hasn't happened yet.

We were passing under the railroad bridge – which until they refurbished it for the Railrunner still had the old AT&SF emblem on it – when Cecelia said, "I have a query."

"Fire away," I told her.

"You said nothing in the meeting about billing the police department for our time and expenses. Do you intend to handle our part of this case out of your own pocket?"

I chuckled – for I have more than once over the years pulled money out of my private finances and put it into the detective agency. "No, though I could do it. What's going to happen is Cris is gonna get Stubblefield's official address from Rudy, and then she's gonna send him an official letter over my signature advising him that we'll be billing for time and expenses. Now whether we'll ever be able to collect is a question, but we're gonna bill 'em."

"It may require, if not an act of Congress, then an act of the city council to extract anything from the city's bursary."

"I like the way you just fork out them fancy words," I said. "I've heard people who have to fumble around for a minute to come up with a word they can impress someone with, but you never do – you just spit 'em out the way I say 'ain't' or 'boogie.' As to the question – I'm forestallin' a reprimand here – you may be right, but we'll burn that bridge when we come to it."

"It is good that you forestalled me, for I most certainly would have castigated you for speaking beside the point had you not corrected yourself." I wasn't about to look, not the way traffic is on Central, but I could tell from her voice that she was smiling.

"Meanwhile," I said, "I got a question for you. How'd you know that Rudy's on the task force?"

"I was entirely incognizant of the fact until I called him; he had mentioned the fact during his call yesterday, but my mind had forgotten it. I merely meant to obtain from him, if he possessed the information, a way to contact Lt. Stubblefield and berate him for leaving us to molder in the hallway. But that leads me to another question – why is Rudy on the task force?"

"I'd guess it's 'cause he's got experience with missing people, though if anyone ever reports a street person missing it'll surprise the pants off me." Even though some of those who live on the street are there because they prefer not to work, or would rather drink or drug themselves to death than live in a civilized fashion, you can't call 'em bums – even if only one street person out of a million is there due to hard luck, you've got to use euphemistic PC terms to refer to 'em all. "Certainly stolen cars don't seem to have any connection with this thing."

"This thing, as you term it, promises to mangle our lives. I think especially of our schedule, and the effect that will have on Darlia, but there are other aspects as well."

"Well, she's on the rez just now – an' gettin' extra credit at school, especially if she writes a good report on the winter ceremonies – but yeah, that could be a problem if this goes on for a while, and it just might. An' there'll be other problems too, you're right about that."

"How long may we anticipate this case taking, beloved?"

I blew out some air. "I don't have a clue, C. Sometimes these serial murder cases take years. Look how long it took to nail Gary Ridgeway, or Dennis Rader. As a rule, either these characters catch themselves early on, or they get away with it for a long time. That fact that this guy's doing his thing fairly frequently is, in a horrible way, a good thing. It means he'll decompensate quicker and sooner, and that may be what enables us to nail him."

"Decompensate? It may be seldom that I stump you with a word, but you have never topped me before."

I chuckled, for she was exactly right. "It's a cop term, which probably came from the headshrinkers. A serial murderer is, as you know, a psychopath, which means he's about as much a normal human being as a wolf is – though a wolf is a more civilized character all around. A psychopath's got no conscience, he has no emotions that don't have to do with him, he sees every other person on earth as literally a thing, and so he just isn't like everyone else. Psychopaths learn early on to pretend to be like us – though they think we're just like them, and pretending too – but serial murderers get so deeply into the rush of what they're doing that sooner or later the façade starts to crumble. From compensating for their missing parts, they begin to decompensate." I shrugged. I hate lecturing and I hate talking in jargon, but sometimes that's the only way to usefully answer a question.

Cecelia was quiet for a little bit, long enough for me to turn north on Carlisle. Then she said, "You are of course the – as you put it – sole owner and proprietor of the agency, returning to a previous item of discussion, but I do not intend to spend years of my life interviewing people on Central Avenue, in the darkness, while Darlia grows up and forgets that I'm her mother."

"I don't intend for you to do that either. We'll do what we can, but when it gets to the point of pouring money down a dry hole, we'll pack it in. I ain't a-gonna neglect Darlia either."

"Then we are agreed, which indeed I never doubted."

"We agree on a whole lot, C, which is good, 'cause whenever I argue with you I lose."

"We both lose when we argue, my husband – but it is quite true that when we spar amicably, you have a tendency to lose ground at a frightful rate."

"Yeah, and then I quit before I get any further behind," I said with a grin.