He couldn’t do that.
Now that he knew what it was like to not have that on his conscience, he couldn’t go back.
“Spit it out first, come to terms with it later,” Kincaid suggested.He tapped his wrist.“Your minute’s almost up.”
“If Gardner’s not in your pocket,” he said, “why did he cut Fowler loose?”
Kincaid shrugged.“Local cops are incompetent,” he said.“No one ever suspected.Not exactly going to blow up on X, is it?”
“He said that the sister called to plead his case,” Javi said.“There is one, but she didn’t.”
Something in Kincaid’s gaze sharpened as he took that in.He glanced back at the one-way glass to watch Fowler lose his patience with the malfunctioning call button and toss it aside.The cheap bit of plastic rattled against the side of the stretcher as it fell.
“Maybe Fowler spun him a story about a needy sibling?”he said.
“He said that Fowler’s house had been foreclosed on,” Javi said.“That wasn’t true, but Fowler was briefly on our radar.”
“Fuck me,” Kincaid sighed resignedly as he pinched the bridge of his nose.“That’s all I need.”
“He was on there because of protesting the bank foreclosing on local properties,” Javi went on, ignoring Kincaid’s brief vision of oversight panels to come.“But hedidn’tget arrested, so how would Gardner have known?”
He waited.
Kincaid’s eyes squinted as he thought about it.He tapped the chewed pencil against the side of his mouth as he reluctantly made the reach.
“If you could find that info,” he said.“Joel could.It would explain why she was there.”
Javi pulled his phone out of his pocket and swiped the lock screen off.The call log that Sue had pulled for him was already open.He handed the phone to Kincaid and tapped the relevant line.
“That’s Eric’s number.Miles?He called Joel,” he said.“And that wasafterFowler had been taken away.”
Kincaid slid off the table.The soles of his shoes thumped against the floor as he landed.
“How did you get this?”he demanded.
“I did my job,” Javi said.He’d already texted Sue to make sure the phone records were logged with other evidence.With luck, Kincaid wouldn’t find out the shuffle to keep them from under his notice had been deliberate.“It’s a UC number of Joel’s.The same one she was using in Phoenix.It’s the one she’d have given him to call if he needed to go under the radar.It’s the one he’d reach out to now that Saul’s dead.”
“He could have called you?”Kincaid parried, without much passion.“Why not?”
“Eric wasn’t stupid,” Javi said.“As much as what we had…what he thought we had…mattered to him, he knew I was your creature.I guess he doesn’t much trust you.”
People said a lot of things about Kincaid.Most of them were true, all of them were deserved.No one said he wasn’t adaptable.As the wheels began to almost visibly move behind his eyes, Kincaid tossed the phone to Javi.
“So you think Gardner is in the Horvats’ pocket, that they fed him the orders to cut Fowler loose?”he said and then nodded slowly in agreement.“Could be.What does that change?”
Javi stepped up to stand next to Kincaid.He nodded at Fowler.“Because if Gardner is, then maybeheisn’t?”he asked.“Not willingly, at least.He’s smart, but other than that, his background reads more like a patsy than an operator.Maybe all you have there is the dog, not the handler.”
Chapter Twenty
Aftertwoattemptsbythe GPS in Javi’s borrowed car had left him standing at a locked gate with a rusted padlock, Javi had stopped at a gas station to ask directions.There had been a free basket of chicks peeping by the till as the owner had rung up Javi’s purchase of gas and an air freshener.
Whoever had driven the car before him had not thought to pack deodorant in their go-bag.
The woman behind the counter had called it “the nut farm” as she handed Javi a candy-scented, plastic-wrapped cardboard dinosaur.She’d told him to drive until he saw the berry, then just head in that direction.
The twelve-foot metal strawberry sat back from the road, in front of a dilapidated wooden stand offering people the chance to “pick their own” for $5.
“We keep meaning to start it up again,” Alice Montgomery, the head administrator, said as she looked up at the sun-blistered landmark.Despite her title, she looked like she spent as much time in the fields as anyone else, with muddy boots and a dark farmer’s tan.“It’s just hard to navigate liability and…you don’t care, that’s not why you’re here, is it.You want to talk about Brian?”
