The Homewood Suites was in a barren hotel zone of the kind common in the Plains states, not much within walking distance except other hotels and a Sam’s Club. Letty did her best thinking while running or walking, but Midland wasn’t helping, so she wound up buying a couple of Cokes and kicking back in her room, the TV tuned to CNN with the volume turned down.
With her back against a pile of pillows, she watched the silent talking head while doodling on a Rhodia legal pad.
She thought briefly about the Blackburns. The discovery of their bodies hadn’t particularly upset her—she didn’t know them and they’d been hardly visible under the beds. She’d seen dead bodies, bodies still leaking blood, of people she’d actually known. She’d dismissed the Blackburn killings, as such: there was nothing for her in their murders. If there was anything at all, the crime scene people would find it. Or not.
The operative fact about the Blackburns was quite simple: they had been murdered.
The operative question was: Why? What had Boxie Blackburn done to get him killed? Then she mentally corrected herself: there were two dead, not one. Had Marcia been the cause of their deaths? That seemed unlikely, but the possibility had to be considered.
She considered it for one minute, then dismissed the idea. Marcia was collateral damage.
* * *
Collateral damage: nothing more.
Letty had never doubted the love of her adoptive parents, but her relationship with them was not the same. She and her father, Lucas Davenport, had bonded almost instantly, within hours of their meeting, he in his forties, she at age twelve. Her relationship with her mother, Weather, had taken time. When they’d eventually become intimate, Weather had told Letty that she’d worried about Letty’s early years and how that dark time might have shaped her.
“You can be very harsh,” Weather said. “You’re almost exactly like your father that way. You even look like him. When people see you together, they assume you’re his natural daughter. Your eyes are exactly the same, ice crystals. You shot those two people, you saved my life, I went into shock . . . but you didn’t even seem to be affected. Had to be done, so you did it. When Lucas got back and saw what had happened . . . he was happy. You were happy. I was absolutely freaked out. I felt like I was going crazy for a while, I was afraid to be in the house alone. I still have nightmares, sometimes. But you . . .”
“You think I’m a psychopath?” Letty asked.
“No, of course not. You’re exactly like Lucas, and I know he’s not a psychopath,” Weather said. “And I know you’re not. You’re just . . .”
Letty grinned at her: “A high-functioning sociopath, maybe?”
“I’m trying to be serious, here,” Weather said. “I’m saying that you make very cold judgments about people, about their worth. You don’t cut them any slack for being . . . human.”
Letty had shrugged. “People are what they are. Most people, honestly, don’t interest me. Some do, of course. You’re interesting. Dad’s interesting—a lot of cops are interesting. Virgil Flowers is interesting. Social workers are interesting. Really bad people are interesting, and so are really good people. A guy who gets up, goes to the store, works, comes home and sits on the couch and drinks beer and watches football or reruns . . . not interesting. Some studies are interesting. Logic is interesting. Facts are interesting. Bullshit isn’t, and people who peddle bullshit usually aren’t. Unless they’re criminals.”
“Some people would say bullshit is the grease that gets people through life,” Weather said.
“Other people,” Letty said. “Not me.”
Weather talked to Lucas about the conversation and Lucas snuck back around to Letty and told her, on a nighttime five-mile jog/walk, “I’ve been through all that self-questioning, the shit you’re going through. I used to chase a lot of women . . .”