“Can I ask you a question?” Zig interrupted.
“You do that a lot, Mr. Zigarowski. You ask a question before you ask the question.”
Zig took a breath, put the car in park. “Finding my address isn’t hard, but to be waiting for me at my house—how’d you know that’s where I was going?”
For once, Roddy was silent.
“You tracked my phone, didn’t you?”
“That would be illegal,” Roddy said, sitting there in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead. Taking a breath, he finally said, “I followed you from the funeral.”
Zig replayed his ride home. He’d checked over his own shoulder half a dozen times. Apparently, Roddy was there—right behind him—the entire way.
“I’d like to go inside, Mr. Zigarowski,” Roddy added, reaching for his holster and pulling his gun, a tactical-looking .45. Yet what unnerved Zig far more was when he noticed that the pistol had a threaded barrel—the kind you screw a silencer onto. Definitely not department issue.
“Roddy, wait . . . !”
Too late. He was already gone, darting toward the open back entrance of the restaurant.
Zig was two steps behind him, reaching for the knife in his pocket, and praying this wasn’t a mistake.
16
Nola was gone, of course.
“But you saw her?” Roddy asked the manager of the steak house. In one hand, Roddy held his police badge, in the other, a photo of Nola, from her old military ID.
“Yup, yup. That’s her, though the pic doesn’t do her justice,” the manager, Merante, replied, flicking the photo with his middle finger. “She’s hotter in real life. Angrier, too.”
“Did you talk to her?” Zig asked.
“I told her what I told the others.”
“Others?”
Merante took a long sip of his coffee, his eyes filled with a forced, cocky smirk that showed how much he liked being in charge. “Last year, one of my busboys got arrested for buying Sudafed in bulk, then grinding it up and selling it to meth heads. Cops came out once, maybe twice to ask me questions. But in the past two days? The entire law enforcement carnival came to town.” From his jacket, Merante pulled out a short stack of business cards, fanning them across the table, each with a different government logo. “State police, Military Intelligence, Army criminal investigators, two FBI guys that were actually wearing black suits, and this one local detective, a Muslim girl, in full burqa—”
“It’s not a burqa,” Roddy said.
“Whatever they call it.”
“Headscarf,” Roddy insisted, flipping through the business cards, not making eye contact. “The preferred term is ‘headscarf.’”
“Whatever,” Merante said, making a face and taking another sip of coffee. Roddy pulled out his phone and took a photo of each of the business cards. Ka—klik. “Did you know that your valet was using your customers’ cars to break into their houses?”
“Y’sure I can’t offer you some coffee?” Merante asked Zig. “It’s something special. We put cinnamon in it.”
“Mr. Merante, I asked you a ques—”
“Wojo was thirty-two years old and still parking cars. So every few months did I get a complaint that sunglasses or an iPhone charger might be missing from a BMW? That goes with the job. But did I think he was driving to people’s homes and treating it like some Ocean’s Eleven sequel?”
“Dover Air Force Base,” Roddy interrupted, holding up a business card for Zig to see. Zig didn’t recognize the name, but it was clearly one of Dover’s newest homicide investigators, hired by Colonel O. J. Whatley. The man who, according to Wil, specifically asked for Zig to be put on this case.