“Be careful who you say that to,” Letty said.
“Yeah, well . . .”
“You really didn’t have to worry too much about consequences, so you didn’t have to hide what you were doing,” Letty said. “That’s what you’re telling me.”
“That’s part of it. You had to be careful about what you did—it is possible to get charged with murder even in a war zone—but as long as you were clean, you were good. The people who judged you were on your side. Here in Texas, you kill somebody, you’re on your own.”
* * *
They drove along in silence, until Letty asked, “What’d you study at the community college?”
“Don’t ask.”
“C’mon, John.”
She waited and he finally sighed and said, “Ceramics.”
Letty: “Ceramics? Like . . . making pots?”
“？‘Throwing pots’ would be the correct terminology, but yeah, that’s what I did,” Kaiser said. “I threw pots.”
“Wow.”
“What does that mean?” Kaiser asked.
“It means I’m impressed,” Letty said.
“Really?”
“Yeah, really. Were you any good at it?”
“Well, yeah. I spent like nine months in Iraq, with Delta, and started this little school there, taught some Kurdish kids how to clean clay and throw and fire pots,” Kaiser said. “By the time I left, they were selling them.”
“Wow.”
Letty tried to imagine a pottery school in a war zone, until Kaiser asked, “Have you figured anything out?”
“Do you expect me to?”
“Yeah, as a matter of fact,” he said. “You’re already about a week and a half ahead of those cops back there.”
Letty looked out her window, at the lines of brick ramblers going by. She said, “Yes, I figured something out. What I figured out is, Blackburn figured something out. He might not have known that he figured it out, because if he knew he had, he would have told somebody. What we need to do is figure out what Blackburn figured out. What could it be?”
“Gimme a clue?”
“Okay. It’s not in all that paper back at the office. It has to be something else. Something he thought up but wasn’t sure about. He didn’t want to embarrass anyone, in case he was wrong. He called somebody, to check on himself, and that got them killed.”
“Or maybe there’s some connection between him and this militia guy. Maybe they were working together, him and Rand . . .”
“Rand Low,” Letty said. “If they were connected, if Blackburn was working with him, why would they kill him?”
“Cover their tracks?”
“What tracks? Nobody has found any tracks,” Letty said. “Nobody even seems to know what the tracks might be. If Blackburn hadn’t disappeared, we wouldn’t have talked to Vermilion Wright, we wouldn’t be here, the bodies wouldn’t have been found for God-only-knows how long.”
“You’re getting cantankerous,” Kaiser said.
“Cantankerous—pretty big word for a humble potter.”
“Fuck you.”
“I gotta think, John,” Letty said. “Okay? Drop me at the hotel, find a way to amuse yourself. I gotta think.”
EIGHT