“Right.” He glanced at his watch. “I’ve just got a second. Sit, sit.” He waved them into a chair as Lorna slipped out of the office and closed the door behind her. “I don’t have time for an update now, but tomorrow morning,” he said, “I’ll want a full report.”
Johnson was nodding. “You got it.”
Gleason cracked open the water bottle and got down to business. “I talked to Randy Isley this morning. Cut through a lot of red tape but was actually able to get through on the phone.” He shook his head, bald head shining under the overhead lights. “Poor guy. I don’t know if he’ll make it.” Gleason’s forehead wrinkled and his mouth pulled into a frown. “Anyway, he reminded me about something, something you should have seen in the old reports.”
“Something missed?” Johnson asked.
“Just not paid a lot of attention to at the time. Isley and I were deputies at the time when the massacre happened up at the McIntyre place, and we were there when Edmund Tate was pulled out of the lake. He was about gone.” Gleason took a deep drink from the water bottle, then rotated it in his hands. “They’d pried the kid who was screaming her lungs out away from him. I’m talking about the girl, Kara McIntyre.”
“Yes,” Johnson said, on the edge of her seat.
“And Tate he was coughing and sputtering, making no sense at all.”
Thomas had seen as much in the old statements.
“None of us could make out anything intelligible, but the word he kept muttering and gurgling that was in anyway intelligible was ‘Simplify. ’ He kept saying it over and over.” Archer chewed on his lower lip as he thought, obviously carried back in time. “He was just so determined to spit it out. He actually grabbed one of the EMT’s jackets and raised himself up from the stretcher to say it.” Clearing his throat, he snapped back, checked his watch again and pushed back his chair. “That’s it. What Isley told me. That and reminding me that we screwed up the evidence chain on the murder weapon, which I’m all too aware of. The only other thing I learned from Isley other than he wants to buy me a drink when we meet again. Now, I’ll expect that report in the morning.”
And with that, they were ushered out of the office.
As they walked through the corridor to door to the parking area, Johnson repeated, “ ‘Simplify.’ That’s our big clue, the thing we were called into the office for?” He pushed the door open, held it for her.
“You don’t have to do that,” she said as she stepped outside.
He followed. “Sure I do. I’m old-school.” They crossed the parking lot, their boots crunching through a layer of ice that had formed on the snow.
“Amen to that.” She slid into the passenger side. “And by the way, next time I’m driving.”
“Then who would be checking messages and the Internet? Running down clues while we’re on the road and keeping her nose deep into her phone?”
“We all have our strengths.”
“And mine is behind the wheel,” he said, causing her to roll her black eyes.
“Fine, Ace, so tell me. What’s with ‘Simplify’？”
“Probably nothing,” he said. “Gleason just wants to put his mark on the case and talk to an old colleague before he passes. This way he feels involved. Y’know, on a personal level because he was there that night.”
“Yeah, I know.” She was thinking, her teeth worrying her lower lip. “But what if the guy wasn’t saying ‘Simplify’？”
“What do you mean?” He eased out of the lot, merging with late-afternoon traffic, headlights glowing as nightfall came early this time of year.
“I don’t know, maybe he was saying, ‘Send her to Fai.’ ”
“Send her?”
“He could’ve been talking about the little girl. Kara. Isn’t her aunt Faiza Donner? Hadn’t Edmund Tate seen that Kara McIntyre’s entire family had been killed? Hadn’t he just rescued her from the lake? So obviously he cared what happened to her. Maybe, in his last dying breaths, he was still trying to save her, so he said, ‘Send her to Fai,’ or even ‘Send her Fai’ rather than ‘Simplify.’ ” She cast him a glance as they slowed a strip mall on the edge of town.
“Then again,” she was saying, “it all could be nothing. Just the mutterings of a dying, delusional man.”
“Possibly,” he agreed, considering flipping on his lights as traffic had snarled, barely crawling past a strip mall.