“With McTavish gone,” Mark was saying, “it could be months before they replace him, and whoever they send would have to try to catch up on what he’d already done. They might never make the same connections.”
At the very least, it would delay things long enough for the ringleader to cover all his tracks and slip away.
The idea that he’d slink away like that grated on my mind a bit, like it didn’t fit with how meticulous and determined he’d shown himself to be. It seemed like he was much more inclined to find a way to keep and expand what he’d put in place than to give it up and flee. He liked the situation he’d created for himself, and he’d spent years cultivating it.
Maybe he felt that this time he had no choice.
If we were going to prove who was behind all of this, we needed that file. And the only place to get a copy was the Fair Haven police station.
17
Mark put the car into drive. “Let’s make sure the police didn’t take the file before we do anything rash.”
Mrs. McTavish’s warning still burned in my ears every time there was a moment of silence. This was a good time to be methodical rather than rash. We didn’t need to be drawing the killer’s attention by poking around if it wasn’t going to help us identify him. “How do you plan to do that?”
“Ask.”
At first, I thought he meant he wanted me to ask him again. Then it clicked that he planned to simply ask the police if they took the file from his house. While we’d eventually have access to a list of the evidence they’d taken from his house that the prosecution planned to use in their case against him, that list wouldn’t include an unrelated file that’d been taken because it was police property.
“Detective Dillion isn’t going to tell you that. He thinks you killed someone.”
Mark gave me a trust me smile that made his dimples pop out. “I’m going to tell him that I have to be sure everything is accounted for when my temporary replacement takes over. If they didn’t collect that file already, I want to be sure to take it to my office and leave it with whoever is filling in.”
Sneaky. And brilliant. And much too much like something I would have come up with. “I think I’m a bad influence on you.”
“Let’s wait to see whether I succeed or not before we call it good or bad.”
He parallel parked in front of the police station like parallel parking was easy and he wasn’t about to try to get evidence that could clear his name from the very man who thought he was guilty. He should have been a surgeon on live people instead of dead ones. I bet his hands never shook.
“If we’re really lucky,” I said, “he’ll have it and he’ll let you take it with you now to bring to your replacement.”
His smile didn’t quite make it deep enough to create dimples this time though. “Keep the getaway car warm.”
For the second time today, Mark came back to the car with empty hands.
He had the same look to him as someone who hadn’t eaten in twenty-four hours, kind of pale and shaky. He didn’t have to tell me what had happened. The police hadn’t taken the file. Whoever killed Troy had.
I still needed to hear it. “I guess we still need the file.”
“We still need the file.” Mark scrubbed his hands over the steering wheel like he didn’t know what to do with them otherwise. “We can’t walk into a station full of detectives who think I’m a murderer and nab the file.”
I held in a snort at his use of the word nab, like we were playing cops and robbers. It was the kind of word Elise would think was perfectly normal to use.
The fact that I still found it humorous given the circumstances showed how much I was feeling the stress. I’d be crazy-laughing soon if we weren’t careful.
He was right despite his odd word choice. Not only was trying to get a file from the police station ourselves impractical, but it came a bit too close to theft. Mark still technically had a right to that file. He’d been assigned it by Chief McTavish, and it dealt with an independent case. Detective Dillion wouldn’t see it that way, though.
On the upside, if he caught us trying to take the file, he might at least look at it and investigate why we wanted it so badly.
Then he’d throw us both in jail for tampering with an active investigation.
“We need someone else to get us a copy of the file,” I said before I’d thought it through.
Mark put the car in drive and pulled out onto the road. If I hadn’t known him as well, I might have thought he was planning to take us to someone who could help. I did know him. We’d be driving in circles as soon as he could get out onto the main roads. It was his version of pacing. Hopefully it worked better for him that it had for me. I’d driven around for nearly an hour, and I still ended up breaking into Isabel’s food truck.
“Who?” Mark asked. “Everyone who’s been taken off active duty has also had their access restricted. They can’t get to the files any more than we can. They’re not even supposed to go to the station.”
We passed by the police station. I almost wished Mark would have chosen a different road. All we needed was for someone to realize they’d seen our car one too many times and think we were up to something.
Which we, of course, were.
“Who’s still allowed to work?”
Mark shot me a you’re-not-going-to-believe-me look.
I leaned my temple against the window. Perfect. “Don’t tell me. Rigman, Grady Scherwin, and Quincey.”
“Lawrence is still there, too, but he and Quincey have been put on traffic. If they’re caught accessing files, it’ll mean their jobs. Erik said the only reason they kept Lawrence and Quincey on at all was because they wouldn’t have been able to cover all the shifts otherwise.”
This had to be some kind of a twisted joke. Of the fourteen officers who weren’t dead or missing, ten had been removed from duty because of their connections to Mark. In a way, that spoke more highly of Mark than almost anything else.
But it left us with two bad options.
We either couldn’t get the file that looked like it held the key to all of this. Or we had to play Russian roulette with who to trust.
Mark made another right turn. We drove past Quantum Mechanics.
