Harry Dolan by Bad Things Happen Page B

instrument.”
    “Lovely.”
    “That’s what Eakins wrote in her report,” Elizabeth said, “but when I talked to her she ventured a guess. She thought it might have been a book. In fact, it might have been the book on Kristoll’s desk—Shakespeare’s Collected Works. That one was hefty enough to do some damage. And the dust jacket was missing. The killer might have taken it with him. It might have been easier to take it than to wipe it for prints.”
    “And if he took it, he’s had time to get rid of it,” McCaleb said. “So where does that leave us? Tully lied. You want to talk to him again?”
    “That’s what we were thinking,” Shan said. “We tell him we’ve got a witness who saw him on Friday evening. We don’t say where the witness saw him. Let him wonder. The point is, we know he lied to us. See if he changes his story.”
    “Elizabeth?”
    “It’s worth a try. I’d like to see what he says.”
    McCaleb nodded. “All right. Do it.”
     
     
     
    On the sidewalk across the street from Adrian Tully’s apartment building, two pigeons danced around a scrap of bread. One of them caught it up whole in his beak and then the other hopped in, wings fluttering, and made him drop it.
    Elizabeth watched them from the car, with Shan in the driver’s seat beside her. They had gone up and knocked on Tully’s door, but there had been no answer.
    Shan had his cell phone out. His thumbs moved rapidly over the keys. He had an ex-wife and a son who lived in a suburb of Detroit, and he kept in touch with them frequently through text messages. Elizabeth had met the boy, a twelve-year-old with his father’s slim build. The child’s mother taught voice lessons, and there was a rumor in the department that she and Shan had once been in a band—she had been the lead singer, he had been the drummer. It was a rumor that Shan would neither confirm nor deny.
    Elizabeth watched him grin at something on the cell phone’s screen. Then he typed a final message, put the phone away, and tuned the car radio to an all-news station. She turned her attention back to the pigeons on the sidewalk. The pair of them skipped along the concrete, trading the scrap of bread off between them. A dog appeared at the corner, an Irish terrier straining at its leash. The pigeons scattered. The terrier snapped up the bread as it passed. Elizabeth kept an eye out for the pigeons, but they didn’t return.
    “It’s the third way,” she said.
    Shan turned down the radio. “What’s that?”
    “That’s how this is going to go,” Elizabeth said. “The third way.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “It’s just something I’ve noticed,” she said. “You’re waiting for something to happen, and you expect it to go one of two ways. But you’re wrong, because there’s always a third way.”
    The air in the car felt stale. She pressed a button at her side and lowered the window.
    “Say you’ve applied for a job,” she said, “and you’re waiting to find out if you got it. Then the call comes, and you’re expecting a yes or a no, but it turns out the person you interviewed with is in a coma, and the board of directors resigned, and the new management wants you to come in and interview again for an entirely different job that you didn’t even know about before. That’s the third way.”
    Shan lowered the window on his side. “And you think that’s going to happen with Tully?” he said. “We tell him we know he’s lying, and we expect he’ll either come up with a new story or he’ll break down and confess to murdering Tom Kristoll—”
    “And it’s not going to be either of those.”
    “What’s the third way, then?”
    “That’s just it. You never know.” She nodded in the direction of a car coming down the street. “But we’re going to find out. Isn’t that him?”
    “That’s him,” Shan said. “That’s his crappy little car. There he goes, turning into the lot of his crappy apartment building. Shall we let him go