“Sykes! Thank God!”
The mayor sounded winded and on the verge of losing control, which wasn’t good at all.
“Listen, we’re in trouble. We have to get our stories straight, back each other up. All we have to do is lie low for a while and I think it’ll blow over.”
“Trouble? How?” Sykes kept his voice mild.
“Jennifer overheard me talking to Mr. Phillips this morning, and the drunk bitch called the library, asking for Daisy. She wasn’t there, so Jennifer told Kendra Owens that I was plotting to have Daisy Minor killed.”
Jesus. Sykes pinched the bridge of his nose between his eyes. If the mayor had just used an ounce of caution in his telephone conversation—
“What did Kendra Owens do?” His question was just a matter of form. He knew damn well what Kendra Owens had done.
“She called the police department. It’s a good thing Jennifer’s a drunk, because I don’t think anyone believed her, but if you’d grabbed Daisy today, it would have raised all sorts of questions.”
Great. Now the Hillsboro cops were alerted.
“There’s one other thing.”
With an effort, Sykes remained calm. “What else?”
“Chief Russo and Daisy are romantically involved.”
“And this interests me, how?”
“Russo is the one I called to run the tag number for you yesterday. I told him I’d seen the car parked in a fire lane at a doctor’s office. He knows I lied, because he knew she wasn’t sick. And when he gave me the information, he pretended not to know her.”
Okay, so now we had a suspicious chief of police. It was those damn details again; Nolan had added too many, and they’d tripped him up. If he’d just asked the chief to run the license plate, without explanation, then the chief would want to know why the mayor was running his girlfriend’s tag number, but he wouldn’t know Nolan had lied. For that matter, why did Nolan have to get the damn chief of police to run a simple tag number? But, no, Nolan couldn’t use a lowly peon; he had to get the head man, just to show his power.
“I came home to find Jennifer, shut her up, but the bitch isn’t here.”
“That’s good. Her turning up dead after making a call like that wouldn’t look good.”
“She’s a drunk,” said Nolan dismissively. “Drunks have wrecks all the time.”
“Maybe they do, but the timing would still be suspicious. Just lay low.”
Nolan didn’t seem to hear him. “Maybe I’ll take her for another visit to Mr. Phillips. He’d like that, but she wouldn’t.” The thought pleased him, because he laughed.
He was dealing with idiots. Sykes closed his eyes. “The police might be keeping an eye on her, so Phillips wouldn’t like it if you led them straight to him.”
“No. You’re right. I have to find her, anyway. She said something about having her hair done, and she’s just stupid enough to make a call like that, then toddle off to the beauty salon.”
Or the police had brought her in to make a statement, which was the most likely thing. Didn’t Nolan know a damn thing about police procedure? They didn’t just blow off a call like that, especially when the subject was the chief’s squeeze. Miss Minor had conveniently disappeared, Mrs. Nolan was also missing and probably at the police department, and the next step was to pick up the mayor for questioning.
This wasn’t good at all. After Nolan’s performance yesterday and today, Sykes had drastically revised downward his opinion of the mayor. He was cold-blooded, but he didn’t hold up under pressure, and he let his ego get in the way of clear thinking. What would happen when the cops started asking him questions? Nolan might hold the line, but if he got rattled, Sykes figured he’d try to cut a deal and roll over on everyone else.
Well, he couldn’t let that happen.
“How good a cop is the chief?” he asked.
“Damn good. He was a SWAT team member in Chicago, then in New York. I was lucky to get him for a small town like Hillsboro.”
Yeah, lucky the way a turtle crossing a busy highway was lucky: it took a miracle to get him across unsquashed. Sykes didn’t figure Nolan had any miracles coming. He’d picked a chief who was at home on the front lines, one who would act aggressively in dealing with a threat to his woman. The only thing working in their favor at this point, as far as he could see, was that Mitchell’s death and the discovery of his body hadn’t happened in Russo’s jurisdiction.
Then a thought occurred to him. “Did you mention Mitchell this morning when you were talking to Mr. Phillips?”
“That was why Mr. Phillips called. He wasn’t happy that the body had been found so fast, and I explained to him that it was because you hadn’t handled it yourself.”
So Nolan had mentioned not only Mitchell, but Sykes’s name as well. Mrs. Nolan didn’t know them, but now she had their names. This whole thing was unraveling so fast Sykes couldn’t even begin to catch the threads.
“Tell you what,” said Sykes. “Just sit tight, pretend nothing unusual is going on, and they can’t touch us.” Yeah, right. “Nothing has happened, no attempts have been made against Miss Minor, so no crime has been committed. Russo might wonder why you lied about her tag number, but so what? Stick to your story. Maybe you wrote the number down wrong, transposed some numbers or something.”
“Good idea.”
“If they question you about Mrs. Nolan’s telephone call, tell them you have no idea what she’s talking about. Was she drinking this morning?”