“You want some company?”
He looked up to see White standing there. She’d changed into jeans, a dark red blouse, and black ballerina flats that made her look very short.
“Free country.”
She slid onto the seat next to him and glanced at his phone. The screen had gone dark.
“Waiting for a call?”
He pocketed the phone. “No.”
She waved to the bartender and ordered a G and T with Bombay Sapphire as the critical ingredient. “We covered a lot of ground today. Crisscrossed the state twice, in fact.”
“But didn’t find out much,” he amended.
“Early days yet. Got to start somewhere. And there are always lots of questions and muddling shit at the beginning.”
“Andat the end, depending on how things turn out.”
Her drink came and she took a sip. “I looked you up, Decker. You have never failed to solve any case the Bureau put you on.”
“My very first case as a rookie detective back in Ohio, I put the wrong man in prison. A bunch of years later he told me so. He challenged me to prove I was wrong and he was right.”
“And did you?”
“Yes. But it was too late to help him. Someone killed him the same day he made his challenge. I found his body.”
“And how did that make you feel?”
He finished his beer and waved for another. He turned to her. “How do you think it made me feel? It made me feel like shit. I carved years off a man’s life because I fucked up. I went into a case with preconceived notions and I never deviated from them.”
“Did you learn from that?”
“Yeah, I did, but too late for him.”
She raised her glass. “Congratulations, you’re not perfect.”
“Is that what you think this is about?”
“What this is about is us trying to do our job to the best of our ability. WhenIwas a rookie, I messed up chain of custody once. Then I wasted time on following dopey leads. Got torched on the witness stand twice by slick defense lawyers because I didn’t prepare hard enough. This is not TV, Decker. We make mistakes. We’re human. We don’t always get it right. We don’t always solve the case in one hour including commercials.”
“Maybe you don’t” was all he said to that. But there was so little energy behind it that White did not seem to take offense.
She said, “So, we got Lancer and Kelly missing. Draymont and Cummins dead. Ex with an alibi.”
“Provided by his son and maybe some business associates on video. We need to confirm he really was on those Zooms. If all that hangs together, he couldn’t have personally done the murders. But he could have hired someone, as I said before.”
“The Slovakian cash in the mouth?”
“Either real and literal or an intentional distraction.”Or maybe both, he suddenly thought.
“Motive for the ex?”
“We need to talk to Cummins’s lawyer, Duncan Trotter. Might depend on where her money goes.”
“Her neighbor thought it was going to Tyler, not Barry Davidson.”
“Still could be a motive, since Barry might manage that money and burn through some of it until Tyler comes of age.”