Page 90 of Murder Road

Are we lost?” I asked.

Eddie had taken over the driving for the trip home, but we hadn’t left Coldlake Falls yet. Instead of taking the turn for the road back to the interstate, we were driving through a neighborhood I didn’t recognize.

“We’re not lost,” Eddie replied. “Not this time. There’s something I want to see first.”

The houses were larger on this street, newer, the lawns trim and green. This was a well-to-do neighborhood for Coldlake Falls, removed from the strip malls and corner hair salons of downtown. It wasn’t far, I thought, from the Snell house. “What are we looking for?” I asked.

“An address I got. We won’t go in. I just want to see it once before we go.”

I frowned at him, but Eddie didn’t look troubled. He looked sure and confident as he drove, as if he knew exactly where he was going.

“All right, keep your mysteries,” I said. “I’ll follow along.”

“You’ll find it interesting. I promise.”

I had no idea who we knew, besides the Snell sisters, who would live in one of these houses. Then I saw a man standing in his front yard, and I understood.

Detective Quentin had a Saturday off. He wore dark blue jeans and a white tee with a blue button-down over it, unbuttoned. He even wore sneakers, which were brand-new and blindingly clean. There was a line of tied-up leaf bags along the edge of his lawn, and he was unlooping a garden hose to start watering.

“I just wanted to see where he lived,” Eddie said as we slowed the car. “I’m curious about him. Now I know.”

Quentin caught sight of us almost instantly, his blue eyes fixing on Eddie and me. He put down the hose and motioned to us to pull the car in. We’d been busted. Eddie pulled up to the curb and rolled his window down, putting the car in park but not turning it off.

“Nice day, isn’t it?” Quentin said as he walked toward us. Behind him, I saw children’s toys lined up against the garage, a basketball and a bike. I had never pictured Detective Quentin with children.

“Very nice,” Eddie said easily, as if he hadn’t just been caught scoping out the man’s house like a potential burglar.

“It’s good to see you, Mr.Carter.” Quentin also spoke like we were neighbors passing the time of day. “I trust your arm is healing nicely.”

“It is, thanks,” Eddie said.

“Have you satisfied your curiosity? My wife took the children grocery shopping. I’m to have the yard done by the time they get back. It’s my assignment.”

“You have a very nice home,” I said politely, trying to smooth over the awkwardness.

Quentin blinked at me. “It’s nice to see you, too, Mrs.Carter, and you needn’t feel strange. I always thought you two would come back at least once. There’s still unfinished business between us.”

He was right. There were questions that had never been answered, things I still didn’t understand about what had happened. I leaned toward Eddie’s window and looked into those icy blue eyes, which were so much more relaxed than I’d ever seen them. Was it an act? Or was the chilly, heartless way he’d treated us before an act? Neither? Both?

“Are you ever going to tell us the truth?” I asked him.

“About what?” Quentin asked.

“About why you were so focused on us in your murder investigation, even after you knew we didn’t kill anyone.”

I expected the cold rudeness he’d shown us before, but Quentin stepped forward and leaned a forearm on Eddie’s open window. “I’ll tell you a story,” he said.

My breath paused. Eddie went still.

“Once upon a time, a man was dying,” Quentin said. “I won’t tell you the year, the location, or the man’s name. The man had brain cancer, and he was in hospice care. In the last hours of his life, he confessed to a murder.”

We were silent, listening.

“The man told the attending nurse that he’d picked up a hitchhiker outside of Coldlake Falls one night—a young man. The dying man had been to a family barbecue out of town, and he had a cooler in the back of his car that had had ice in it. It also had an ice pick in it, brought with him so that he could break up the ice at the barbecue. The man told the hitchhiker that he needed to pull over for a moment. Then he took the ice pick from the cooler. When the hitchhiker got out of the car and tried to run, the man killed him with it.”

I fixated on Quentin’s strangely handsome face, his words hitting me like bricks. “Tom Monahan,” I breathed. “Killed in 1982.”

“The dying man told the nurse that he had forgotten about the murder until that very moment, when he was dying,” Quentin said, ignoring me. “As his life ended, he suddenly had a rush of memories. In my opinion, deathbed confessions are a gift to law enforcement—a case gets closed, there’s no expense of a trial, and the guilty party leaves this world without our having to decide his punishment. The problem with this particular confession was that the dying man also spoke of a lot of memories he could not possibly have had—memories that simply could not be real, like recalling being pregnant and giving birth to a son. So the obvious lies colored the truth of the murder confession.”

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