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cookie.”
    “Whatever. And this lady drives up on you, all in disguise, and says, ‘Get in the car’?”
    “Basically, yes.”
    We were back in the motel room. Two uniforms were standing by the door, looking awkward but amused at the tension between Warren and me.
    I was sitting on the chair, because I got there first. Warren was sitting on the bed, because I hadn’t warned him not to. I smiled.
    “You think this shit is funny?” Warren scowled. “You had the prime suspect in a murder in custody and you let her escape.”
    “She didn’t escape from me, dumbass. She escaped from the guys who were sent to kill her. Probably the same guys who actually killed her husband.”
    “Oh, right, I forgot.” He hooked his thumb at the empty handcuffs lying on the floor in the hallway next to a folded cardboard evidence marker. “The invisible bad guys who disappeared when she escaped.”
    “Yeah, that’s right, the guys who left the imaginary slugs in the wall outside and the sound system in the lobby. Maybe the kid at the desk got it on sale because it already had a bullet hole in it.”
    He scribbled in his notebook like he’d thought of something important. Probably a doodle of him shooting me. “So she brought you here to tell you something, right? What did she tell you?”
    And there it was. I had a decision to make. If I was walking away from the case, that meant I was hoping Warren would solve it. It meant giving him every bit of information I had. Including what Miriam had told me.
    I stalled. “So these two guys come after her, and what, you still think she killed her husband in a domestic dispute?”
    He shrugged. “I don’t know, man. I figure it’s probably the corporate spy angle Bourden was talking about. But who knows, maybe they were coming after you. Someone you locked up—although Lord knows there ain’t many of them, am I right? More likely just someone you pissed off.”
    The uniforms laughed. I did, too. It was a good line, even if it was bullshit—plenty of flaws in my job performance, but none of them was about not locking up enough bad guys. I was too distracted to come back at him. I had to figure out what I was doing here.
    If Ron’s murder was about something he’d discovered, then Miriam’s attempted murder was about the same thing. Probably by the same guys. I’d seen how far these companies could go to protect their interests, their secrets. This stuff was dangerous, and Mike Warren was careless, not just in a case-botching way but in a getting-people-killed way.
    I didn’t know what to do with what Miriam Hartwell had told me, but I knew what not to do, and that was just put it out there without knowing what it meant. So if I was keeping it to myself, I had to figure out what was going on. I had to find Miriam again and find out what else she knew.
    Warren was staring at me while I was thinking things through. “Then again, maybe it’s about you in a different way.” He shrugged again, looking at me sideways. “Like I said before, maybe you’re banging the Hartwell woman, her husband comes to confront you about it, maybe tell your girlfriend, and you shoot him. Now she freaks out, she’s going to testify against you, you kill her too.”
    The two uniforms stopped smiling.

 
    20
    I laughed, but he’d made it sound plausible. “You think that’s how it went down?” I said. “He starts banging on my door while I’m in bed with my girlfriend, then what, maybe I climb out the window and run around the block so I can shoot him from the street, then somehow get back inside in time to close the door so I can open it in front of my girlfriend? I knew you were an idiot, but I didn’t know you had this creative side to you. You’re like one of these idiot savants. Do you do anything else? Play the piano or math tricks or anything?”
    “Fuck you, Carrick. You know it makes more sense than any of the bullshit you’re talking about. You can joke all you want, but you’d