“Because I got a text from … Oh! Gemma!”
I dug my phone out of my bag, which Reyes was nice enough to leave on the nightstand, and called hers. Still off. So I tried her home phone.
“Gemma Davidson,” she answered, her voice as groggy as I felt.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“Who is this?”
“Elvis.”
“What time is it?”
“Hammer time?”
“Charley.”
“Did you text me? Did your car break down?”
“No and no. Why are you doing this to me?” She was funny.
“Check your cell.”
I heard a loud, sleepy sigh, some rustling of sheets, then, “It won’t come on.”
“Not at all?”
“No. What did you do to it?”
“I ate it for breakfast. Check the battery compartment.”
“Where the hell is that?”
“Um, behind the battery door.”
“Are you punking me?” I heard her fumbling with the phone.
“Gem, if I was going to punk you, I wouldn’t simply turn off your phone. I would pour honey in your hair while you slept. Or, you know, something like that.”
“That was you?” she asked, appalled.
She’d totally fallen for the open-window technique of throwing the victim off the trail of the true assailant. She thought Cindy Verdean did it for years. I was going to tell her the truth eventually, but after what she did to Cindy in retaliation, I changed my mind. Cindy’s eyelashes were never the same.
“Wait,” she said, “my battery’s gone. Did you take it?”
“Yes. Did you go out this evening?”
After another loud sigh, she said, “No. Yes. I went out for drinks with a colleague.”
“Did anyone bump into you? Drop something in front of—”
“Yes! Oh, my gosh, this man bumped into me, apologized, then about five minutes later, personally brought over a bottle of wine to make up for it. It was nothing. I mean, he barely touched me.”
“He took your phone, texted me from it, stole the battery, then put it back when he brought the wine over.” With Reyes’s circle of friends, I was hardly surprised a pickpocket was among them.
“I feel so violated.”
“About the phone or the honey?”
“You know that whole payback’s-a-bitch thing. Hey, you never called me back after your meeting with Reyes. How’d it go?”
“Oh, it went super.” I looked over at Uncle Bob, who sat waiting for a report. “Well, that explains that,” I said as I closed my phone midsentence.
“Charley, I’ve said this before, but I’m going to say it again. The man is a convicted murderer. If you’d seen what he did to his father…” He trailed off, shaking his bed head.
I decided to confide in him despite the state of his hair. “Uncle Bob, is it possible that the man in that trunk wasn’t Earl Walker?”
His brows slid together. “Is that what Farrow told you?”
“Is it possible?” I asked again.
Ubie lowered his head and turned the engine off to his SUV. “He’s like you, isn’t he?”
His question surprised me, and I wasn’t sure what to say, but I should have been expecting it. He’d seen Reyes’s body after the demons got a hold of him. He’d seen how fast he healed. The doctors were calling the fact that Reyes survived at all a miracle. And two weeks later, he’s walking around in gen-pop at the prison like nothing happened. I would have bet a large mocha Frappuccino Ubie was keeping tabs on Reyes. I would’ve been after what I saw.
“You have this uncanny ability to live through the most impossible situations,” he continued. “You heal faster than anyone I’ve ever seen. You move differently sometimes, almost like you’re not human.”
He’d been keeping track.
“I have to ask you something, and I want you to be totally honest.”
“Okay,” I said, a little worried. I was not at my best. I hadn’t had caffeine in like three hours. And he was definitely putting two and two together.
“Are you an angel?”
And coming up with twelve. “No,” I said with a chuckle. “Let’s just say, if I ended up in the lost-and-found bin at the airport, I don’t think the Big Guy upstairs would come down to claim me.”
“But you are different,” he said, his tone matter-of-fact.
“I am. And … yes, so is Reyes.”
A long sigh slipped through his lips. “He didn’t kill his father, did he?”
“First, Earl Walker is not his real father.”
Ubie acknowledged that with a nod. That fact had come out in the trial.
“Second, I’m beginning to believe the man isn’t even dead.”
After staring out the window for a long moment, he said, “It’s possible. Not likely, certainly not probable, but possible. There are ways.”
“Like switching the dental records?” I asked.
He nodded.
“And the fact that Earl Walker’s girlfriend at the time was a dental assistant at the very office the authorities obtained those records from didn’t strike anyone as odd?”
I knew Ubie had been the lead detective on the case, so to say I was skating on thin ice would have been more than appropriate. And I sucked at ice skating.
His lips thinned under his thick mustache. “Are you helping him?”
“Yes.” There was no reason to lie. Uncle Bob wasn’t an idiot.
I felt a spike of adrenaline emanate from him when I answered, the surprise he felt, but I think he was more surprised that I was being honest. So he tried again. “Do you know where he is?”
“No.” When his brows slid together with a hint of doubt, I added, “That’s why he handcuffed me, to get a head start. He didn’t want to put me in that position.”
“And he hit you because?”
“I called his sister a doody head.”
He fixed an exasperated gaze on me.
“He’s very sensitive.”
“Charley—”
“He wanted it to look good, you know, for the cops.”
“Aw. Did you have anything to do with his escape?”
“Besides getting carjacked? No.”