Page 149 of South of Nowhere

Shaw continued, “Waylon was the general in charge. You’re, well, a sergeant. Or captain, if you like.”

“And you want the commander in chief.”

“Of course we do.”

“As I told Barbie out there—”

He frowned.

“The officer.”

“Officer Starr’s name is Debi.”

She sighed. “Barbie’s a doll.”

He shook his head.

“A toy?…Where did you grow up, Mars?”

Might as well have.

“As I toldher, Waylon believed in insulation. I never met the person who hired us. Him or her. I never heard a name. A location, a make of car. A size of shoe. A preference of food or wine. Nothing. It was for everybody’s safety. His—or hers. And ours.You’renot going to torture me, but there’re people who would. When they know the ground rules, that I’m completely ignorant, they’ll realize that there’s no reason to proceed with the pliers or blowtorch. We go our separate ways. Or they shoot me in the head. Either way, painless.”

Encouraging that she was talking. Getting the first word out of a suspect’s mouth was often the hardest part.

“No dead drops?”

A shake of her head. “Not that I heard of.”

He’d seen her behavior when she was being deceptive—which had been nearly every minute they’d been in each other’s company. That was her untruthful kinesic—body language—baseline, how she behaved when lying. The tilt of her head, the pauses when selecting a response, the tap of foot, the squint of eye, a gesture, a verbal tic—or the absence of a verbal tic.

Now the behavior was different. Not drastically so, but evidenceto Shaw. He believed it was ninety percent the case that she was being honest.

“How did they communicate?”

“Like everybody else in this business. Burners.”

“What did Waylon do with them?”

“I repeat my comment. He broke them in half and threw them out. You didn’t see theBarbiemovie. I suppose you haven’t seenBreaking Badeither?”

No clue.

“Where did he toss them?”

“Sewers, lakes, dumpsters, garbage cans. Half the world’s cold cases could be solved with enough people to go through every inch of the local sewage systems and trash dumps.”

He gave no reaction, but he’d had the same thought on more than one occasion.

“The most recent phone Waylon used? Where did it end up?”

Her eyes were now back to flint. “There’s nothing in it for me, Colter. The sentence’s mandatory. Conspiracy to commit murder, special circumstances. I may not get the death penalty. But I’m definitely never getting out. I tell you anything at all, whoever the client is, I’m dead. They’ll have unlimited funds. And that means a long reach—even into Q.”

San Quentin, one of the most secure prisons in the country.

“Point us in the right direction. We could recover a phone on our own. Crime scene. Nobody’d know the lead came from you.”

“Again, why? Nothing’s in it for me.”

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