Did she have a hat, or was she bare headed? We... we were closer than I let on. Interspersed with the minute-by-minute excitement of waiting for the sirens to arrive, Skully went back through the mistakes hed made by giving Grimes a cabin at all. The car that had turned in was a new Mercedes 450 SEL sedan that had that rented or leased look to it. You can always tell. The driver was negotiating the lane cautiously now but I couldnt see who it was because the afternoon sun bounced off the windshield creating a glare. Still, I kept on watching until the car disappeared beneath the pines in front of the house. She looked back at him, her manner unapologetic and her eyes wide and seeing... everything.So youre trying to tell me, in a painfully roundabout way, that youve checked me out? I had transferred the recording to my computer and gone to work on it. A good deal of it was Daves rambling about the New America he and his cohorts were going to found. It was only toward the end that he spent a drunken, rambling eight minutes talking about Showalter and his group. The chief had indeed run his old scam. His group — and Dave named all the men involved — had robbedfour banks for him out of state and turned the funds over to him for safekeeping. There was plenty on the tape to convict the cops whod been in the group. His remorse for being part of the staged shooting came at the very end. And then he revealed who’d helped him with the staged shooting. I just sat there, stunned. At first I tried to reject the name on the tape, but why would Dave have lied? This was a name that would destroy a number of people. It was there that I went all Rose Mary Woods. I edited it out entirely and permanently. Mason turned on a light in the closet.There you are, Paul, he said. “Theres the disappearing junk. Apparently it was me, not them. This was the way you treated your daughters these days. A full moon outlined it, doing it no favors. Tom, its Stone Barrington. Our intruder took a shot at two of us, and hes dead outside. Are you saying hes innocent? Weve also posted a one-hundred-thousand-dollar reward for any information that leads to the discovery of what really has happened to President Mix, Tutor said and frowned. So far weve heard from no one but cranks. Devine thought this over.Youre right about that. But the message did mention that a custodian had found her body. That led me to believe that the person was there that morning, because how else would they know aboutwho found the body and when? Ill stay, and you can go— Audrey looked at me strangely.He talked about you a lot. It wasnt about you exactly, but it was about you and the union back in sixty-four. Murfin told him and when he was through Koontz looked at me and said,How come they picked you?.