I glanced back again, expecting to see a police car in pursuit, but no one was coming after us. At least not yet.

“Let me ask you something,” I said.

“Shoot,” Merker said.

“Martin Benson.”

“Who?”

“Benson. The man in the basement of Trixie’s house.”

“Oh yeah, yeah, I remember him.” Like he was an old acquaintance, someone from his school days. Not someone whose throat he’d slit.

“What happened there?”

“Well, after I got word from one of my old buddies that our friend Trixie had been spotted, Leo and I tracked down her house and we find this guy there, snooping around, peeking in the windows. We thought maybe he was her boyfriend or new husband or something, didn’t know at first that he was the guy what wrote about her in the paper. So we zapped him, got into the house. That little basement business Trixie has going, it had all the equipment we needed to conduct an interrogation, if you know what I mean.”

“Sure,” I said.

“So we tried to find out from him where Trixie was, when she was coming back, where she had my money. That kind of thing.”

“But he didn’t know, did he? All Benson knew was that she was running a little S&M parlor.”

“Yeah, so it seems. He was actually pretty useless.”

“So why’d you kill him?”

Merker shrugged. “I dunno.” He pointed. “This where I turn?”

I was so dumbfounded by his response that it took me a moment to register where we were. “Yeah,” I said. “Turn here.” There were no other motorists blocking our way, so Merker didn’t have to bulldoze any cars out of the way. He even signaled.

“Benson’s death was a warning, wasn’t it?” I asked. “A way to let Trixie know you were serious about getting your money back.”

“Well, yeah. Now that I think about it, that is why I did it. Do you ever find, as you get older, you start forgetting little things?”

“But killing Benson, that backfired, didn’t it? Because you killed him in Trixie’s house, left him there in her mock dungeon, that made Trixie an instant suspect with the police, and she took off. She disappeared. Made it a bit difficult to get the money from her.”

Merker shrugged again. “Okay, so maybe it wasn’t a perfect plan. I generally know what I’m doing, you know, but even Einstein made the odd slip-up.” He brightened. “Shit, there it is. This is it, right?”

The Clayton Correctional Facility. It looked like a community college behind high barbed-wire fencing.

“Yeah,” I said. “This is it.”

CHAPTER 36

36

OF COURSE, some of this I’ve already told you. We’re back to where we started.