Howtown by Michael Nava Page B

looked at me as if I were telepathic. “How did you know?”
    “Wild guess,” I replied, then felt guilty at making fun of him. “You look like a weightlifter.”
    He preened. “I’m okay now, you know, but the department don’t want me back on patrol until the union doctor says its okay.” He made a face. “And he don’t care. He figures I like being cooped up in an office. It drives me nuts, you know? The first thing I do when I get off is go for a long run.”
    “You run?”
    “I lettered in track in high school.”
    I smiled. “Me, too. Before you were born, probably.”
    “You ain’t that old,” he replied, finishing off his doughnut. “What’s your event?”
    “I was a distance runner. You?”
    “Speed,” he replied. “I used to be a lot smaller. Where’d you go to high school?”
    “Right here,” I replied. “Los Robles High. You?”
    “Nueces,” he said, smile broadening. Nueces was a small town about fifteen miles away. “We compete with Los Robles.”
    “Yeah, I know. We used to beat you like clockwork.”
    “Maybe in your day,” he retorted.
    I sipped my coffee, enjoying the first friendly conversation I’d had in Los Robles since returning to the town. Cop or not, Vega was a nice kid. Not a genius, but nice.
    “You still run?” he was asking.
    “Not for a while.”
    “We should go sometime.”
    “In this weather?”
    He shook his head. “It cools off at night. You look like you still got some distance in you.”
    “Thanks, I think.”
    “Where you staying?”
    “The Hyatt. You’d run me ragged.”
    He glanced at his watch. “Gotta go. See you later, Mr. Rios.” He stood up, brushing crumbs from his uniform. “Maybe I’ll come by sometime, take you running.”
    “See you, Ben,” I said, and watched him walk away, swaggering a little for no better reason than that he was young and healthy. I went back to my reading. A few minutes later I looked up at where he’d sat, thinking perhaps I’d underestimated him. His name appeared in the prosecution’s witness list—he had been one of the officers who searched Paul’s house and it looked like he’d struck gold.
    Paul watched me warily as I sat down across from him. I opened my briefcase and took out a legal pad. His weeks of incarceration had given him a jailhouse pallor and his face seemed a little bloated today.
    “I talked to Mark last night,” I said, uncapping a black felt pen. “He had an interesting theory as to why you may have killed McKay.”
    “For Christ’s sake, you believe him over me.”
    “Let me just run it by you,” I replied. “Mark goes along with the blackmail angle. I didn’t think it was very plausible because, as Sara pointed out to me when I first talked to her, after all the publicity over your first arrest it didn’t seem likely that you could be blackmailed over being a pedophile. What Mark said was that, except for that incident, you don’t have any other record. He suggested that McKay had something on you of—more recent vintage.”
    Paul made a dismissive noise.
    “The reason I bring it up,” I went on, “is that it sounds a whole lot more believable than your story about going off to see McKay to buy a child from him.”
    “It’s a lie.”
    “What’s a lie?”
    “What Mark told you is a lie. Look, I don’t know if there was a girl or not, but that’s why I went there.”
    I persisted. “What did McKay have on you?”
    “I just told you …” His face was red.
    “I heard you,” I replied calmly. “I spent most of the morning reviewing documents I got from the cops. One of those documents is a list of evidence taken from their search of your house and your car. One of the things they recovered from the car was a roll of film. What’s on it, Paul?”
    He turned his face from me.
    “Something you got from McKay?”
    “It doesn’t have anything to do with McKay,” he said in a subdued voice.
    “Then what is it?”
    He faced me. “Pictures of