“Right, that would explain it. And the stuff he stole never turned up.”
“I don’t know anything about that. You didn’t find it in our house.”
“No, we didn’t. And we looked for it.”
“Okay.” She made a show of looking at her watch again.
“He had five hundred dollars in his pocket. Any idea where that came from?”
“I assumed from him selling the stuff he stole.”
“Right, well, thanks for your time.”
She showed him out. At the door Gardiner said, “I’m not really sure why you’re putting yourself through this, Detective Decker.”
“That thought had crossed my mind.”
Decker walked down the drive and the gates automatically opened as he approached them. When he got to his car, he suddenly looked back at the house in time to see a curtain on one of the front windows flutter closed.
He got into the car thinking that people were interesting. Sometimes they just couldn’t distinguish the truth from bullshit. Sometimes they didn’t want to. It was often easier just to believe a lie.
He drove off with more questions than he’d started the trip with.
And for some reason, that made him happy.
Amos Decker actually smiled as he drove back to Burlington.
He stopped smiling when something rammed into his car on a back road in the middle of nowhere.