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“Give me the fucking address!”
After a put-out sigh, Glenda rattled it off to him.
“Thanks.”
“Wait!”
But he didn’t. He hung up and repeated the address to his car’s navigation system. The map appeared on his touch screen. “Fuck fuck fuck!” He was traveling in the opposite direction, and the estimated time to get there from his current location was twenty-two minutes.
He whipped the Jag back onto the freeway. As he took the next exit so he could turn around, he called Compton. “I’ve got the address for Dawn’s mother.”
The traffic light at the bottom of the ramp turned red. He looked both ways, saw a narrow opening, then hooked a sharp left turn. On the other side of the underpass was another red light. There were cars in front of him waiting to turn left onto the access road.
“We already have her address,” Compton said. “We’re on our way, just leaving the hospital now.”
“Well, step on it. Have you sent a SWAT unit?”
“SWAT unit? Calder, we haven’t even questioned Dawn yet. We can’t send a—”
“Why the fucking hell not?” The traffic light turned green. He waited impatiently for the cars ahead of him to go. “Move already!” he shouted at them, and then to Compton, “This is the Fairground shooter, for chrissake.”
“We don’t know that.Youdon’t know that.”
“It feels right.” He reentered the freeway, dodged his way between several slow movers until he found a reasonably clear lane, and floor-boarded the accelerator.
Compton was saying, “We don’t have any evidence on which to base an arrest. We’ll talk to her, then—”
“Talk? What is the matter with you? You’re the one who advanced the idea that somebody had a vendetta against me. Now we have a likely somebody. Take her into custody first, then talk.”
“You saw the individual who tipped over the stroller. You identified him as male. It wasn’t Dawn.”
“It could have been. She’s tall. Easily attainable cap, remember? Never mind all that now. We’ll talk details later. Just—”
“Dawn was avictim.She dropped where she was shot, and the bullet removed from her leg was fired from the same gun that wounded and killed the others, including you.”
“Look, I don’t know how she did it. But I know that she was somehow involved. I feel it. And Elle’s with her. So send the fucking badasses to that house. Make fools of them, yourselves, make a fool ofme. But if I’m right—”
“We can’t barge into someone’s house only because it feels right to you. We have civil rights laws in this country.”
“Yeah, while you’re clinging to that, I’ll violate more than the rights of anybody who harms Elle.”
“Calder, listen to me. You need to calm down. You’re overreacting.” After a beat, she added, “Remember what happened to Charlie Portman when you acted on impulse.”
As though he’d been slapped, Calder blinked to clear the red haze of fury from his vision. “Fuck you.”
Realizing Calder had hung up on her again, Compton cursed him. She looked over at Perkins. “You heard him. What do you think?”
He pondered it for all of one heartbeat. “Send in the badasses.”
Calder made the twenty-two-minute trip in twelve.
The street address was in a neighborhood barely hanging on to a middle-class designation. All the houses were constructed of brick, but their wood trims needed fresh paint, the shrubbery was scraggly, and the roofs sported curled shingles.
He located the house number, and the name printed on the dented metal mailbox at the curb confirmed that Marjorie Smithson lived there. A Ford compact was parked in the driveway.
He drove the length of the block and around the corner and parked in front of a run-down playground. He felt conspicuous as he alighted from his car, but the houses he walked past were shuttered. He got the impression that this was a neighborhood where minding one’s own business was probably the best policy.
He wasn’t as impulsive as Compton had accused him of being. He wasn’t going to “barge” in until he had some idea of what was going on inside the Smithson home. If anything.
