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I kind of lost track of time and ended up cutting and chopping for forty-five minutes before I realized how long I’d been in there.
“I wondered where you’d gone off to,” he adds, throwing a pointed look over my shoulder at the minty green SUV parked next to the back door.
“My bad. I got sidetracked.”
“Clearly,” he deadpans.
I resist the urge to explain myself. It’s no use, anything I say will be turned into fodder for KC to try and get under my skin. He’s like everyone’s pesky little brother, razzing and teasing his favorite pastime. I haven’t been a target yet, but I figured it was only a matter of time.
The only siblings I have are two sisters—both older—who may not have been much into teasing but subjected me to other varieties of torture over the years. Mostly in their attempts to set me up with their single friends, not that I needed much help in that department. I was quite capable of finding my own dates, even though they didn’t always like my choices.
It started up again after my rather ugly divorce from Chelsea—another choice they had not been happy with, as they reminded me many times when the shit hit the fan in our marriage—but I quickly shut them down. That had been a dark period in my life, and I made it crystal clear I would not be interested in any kind of romantic entanglement ever again. I don’t know if they believed it or not, but it definitely got them off my back.
That, and moving away from Coeur d’Alene.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my sisters, but they can be a bit much.
“Any luck?” I redirect the conversation back to the reason we were here to begin with.
I’d just gotten my perp booked and processed back at the station, when KC called with the information the briefcase was not all the punk had taken from the Mercedes. Merrick discovered during KC’s interview he was also missing a small recorder from his car. One of those palm-sized things used for dictation. I didn’t know people still used them, but apparently our mayor does and he was mighty upset to have found it missing.
Nothing like that had been collected from my suspect’s pockets during processing, but I went back to check the envelope holding his belongings to be sure. When KC conveyed the same to Merrick, I could hear his heated reaction in the background. To diffuse the situation, I offered to come back and help KC check the route the chase had taken to see if he perhaps ditched it somewhere along the way.
“Nothing.”
“Yeah, I didn’t have any luck either,” I share before adding, “Why don’t you head back to the station? I’ll do one last walk-through to be sure.”
I wonder if someone came through the alley and found the recorder before we got a chance to search for it, or maybe—hopefully—Merrick simply misplaced it. Luckily, he’d already taken off when I returned, apparently late for a meeting.
I return to the office half an hour later, empty-handed, and go in search of our suspect. I head for the rear of the building where the holding cells are, when Tessa Androtti, my partner, steps out of one of the interview rooms.
“Looking for your catch of the day?” she asks.
“I am, actually.”
She tilts her head to the door she just stepped through. “I’ve got him in there. The boss asked me to start working on him to see if he could tell us where he tossed the mayor’s property. Apparently, Merrick called, going straight to the top to voice his displeasure.”
“Asswipe,” I mumble under my breath, irritated with the pompous bastard.
“Without a doubt, but one who, unfortunately, has some power in this community. Anyway, we ran his prints through AFIS and they came back identifying him as one Samuel Chastain of no fixed address, a frequent flyer in the Seattle area. Drug possession, petty theft, vagrancy, a couple of car thefts, public indecency, and a few muggings. Mostly small-time stuff but his most recent arrest was last month. Charged with violent assault.”
Surprised, I jerk my head. “What? How the hell is he back on the streets?”
She shrugs. “Spoke with the arresting officer, he’s pretty pissed himself. Apparently, Samuel was released by mistake. They’re having a real issue with overcrowded jails, releasing some minor offenders to make room for violent ones, and he somehow slipped through the cracks, while his victim is still recovering.”
“Christ. How’d he get here?”
“The officer I spoke to tried to track him down but only got as far as the Amtrak station. He found a brief glimpse of him on a security camera outside the station near the tracks, and figures the guy headed straight out of Dodge and hopped a train. Likely Spokane,” she adds.
“Still a hell of a walk from Spokane to Silence,” I offer.
“He may have hitched a ride, authorized or not.”
I guess it’s possible. For all we know, he hid in the back of one of the trucks belonging to those guys from the road crew working on the highway south of Silence who were in The Kerrigan last week. I checked out the company they work for after that incident with Dana, just in case there was more trouble, and know it’s located in Spokane. It wouldn’t have been too hard for our suspect to have hidden among the equipment and junk they cart around in the back of those trucks.
Perhaps I should pay those guys a visit, one of them may have seen something.
“Samuel stays mum though,” Tessa continues. “Won’t talk. Not even to confirm his name. Mind you, I think he’s still under the influence of something. Maybe we should try again when whatever he’s on wears off.”
