“Oh, I should mention”—Rhyme couldn’t resist a faint smile; modesty was never a quality that he wore well—“I’ve got some hard evidence. I found the bodies of Garrett’s family.”

… chapter forty-one

At the Albemarle Manor Hotel, a block away from the Paquenoke County lockup, Mason Germain didn’t wait for the elevator but climbed the stairs, covered with threadbare tan carpet.

He found Room 201 and knocked.

“S’open,” came the voice.

Mason pushed the door open slowly, revealing a pink room bathed in orange, afternoon sunlight. It was painfully hot inside. He couldn’t imagine that the occupant of the room liked it this way so he assumed that the man sitting at the table was either too lazy to turn on the air conditioner or too stupid to figure out how it worked. Which made Mason all the more suspicious of him.

The African American, lean and with particularly dark skin, wore a wrinkled black suit, which looked completely out of place in Tanner’s Corner. Draw attention to yourself, why don’t you? Mason thought contemptuously. Malcolm Goddamn X.

“You’d be Germain?” the man asked.

“Yeah.”

The man’s feet were on the chair across from him and when he withdrew his hand from under a copy of the Charlotte Observer his long fingers were holding a long automatic pistol.

“That answers one of my questions,” Mason said. “Whether you got a gun or not.”

“What’s the other?” the man in the suit asked.

“Whether you know how to use it.”

The man said nothing but carefully marked his place in a newspaper story with a stubby pencil. He looked like a third-grader struggling with the alphabet.

Mason studied him again, not saying a word, then felt an infuriating trickle of sweat running down his face. Without asking the man if it was all right Mason walked to the bathroom, snagged a towel and wiped his face with it, dropped it on the bathroom floor.

The man gave a laugh, as irritating as the bead of sweat had been, and said, “I’m gettin’ the distinct impression you don’t much like my kind.”

“No, I guess I don’t,” Mason answered. “But if you know what you’re doing, what I like and what I don’t aren’t important.”

“That’s completely right,” the black man said coolly. “So, talk to me. I don’t want to be here any longer than I have to.”

Mason said, “Here’s the way it’s shaking out. Rhyme’s talking to Jim Bell right now over in the County Building. And that Amelia Sachs, she’s in the lockup up the street.”

“Where should we go first?”

Without hesitating Mason said, “The woman.”