A Song of Shadows by John Connolly

bag.
    ‘Did you take a look in here?’ he asked.
    ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s just clothes and toiletries.’
    ‘You mind?’
    ‘Sure,’ she said resignedly. ‘Go ahead.’
    He unzipped the bag carefully, and went through its contents piece by piece, searching inside T-shirts, underwear, and jeans. He even examined the cans of deodorant and shaving cream. Finally, he zipped the bag, closed the trunk and the two doors, and stepped away from the car. He removed the gloves and handed them back to her.
    ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I’ll treasure them always. Are you done?’
    ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘For now. Was I keeping you from something?’
    ‘A husband. A dog. A bath. Dinner.’
    ‘Nothing urgent, then.’
    ‘Seriously, do you have any friends?’
    ‘Enough. I’m not recruiting more.’
    ‘I wasn’t offering. Anything you want to share with me from your examination of the vehicle?’
    ‘Suppose I sleep on it and we talk in the morning,’ he said. ‘After all, you have a husband waiting, and a dog, and a bath, and dinner. There’s nothing here that can’t hold, and Bruno Perlman won’t be any more dead tomorrow. He’s long beyond waiting on us to figure out his final moments.’
    They stepped out of the garage into the cool evening air.
    ‘I have one last request,’ he said.
    Bloom sighed. Ron was cooking lasagna tonight. She’d told him that she’d be home well before six, and he would have aimed to have food on the table by seven. It was long past that now. She had a vision of a blackened meal and a sulking husband.
    ‘Go on,’ she said.
    ‘Did somebody compile a list of what was found on the body and in the car?’
    ‘You think we’re complete rubes? Yes, I had Stynes type it up and include it in the report.’
    ‘Could I have a copy?’
    ‘No,’ she said, and realized as soon as she said it that she sounded snippier than she would have liked. ‘But I’ll let you look,’ she relented, ‘just as long as you don’t spend all night with it.’
    He followed her into the town office, and waited at her door. The report-in-progress on Bruno Perlman lay on her desk. She found the item list and handed it to him.
    ‘You know,’ she said, ‘if it turns out to be murder, I may just have handed that list to a suspect.’
    ‘If I’d killed him, I’d have made sure to check the tides before I put him in the water.’
    She tried to figure out if he was kidding, but couldn’t. He worked his way quickly through the list, then returned it to her.
    ‘Are you free for a cup of coffee tomorrow?’
    ‘Only if you’re buying.’
    ‘How about Olesens, around ten?’
    ‘Do you have shares in that place?’
    Now he raised an eyebrow at her, but said nothing. Hey, she thought, what did you expect: that I wouldn’t be keeping tabs on you?
    ‘Ten is fine,’ she told him.
    They walked out together.
    ‘Thank you,’ he said.
    ‘For what? For letting you look at a dead man’s car?’
    ‘For not telling me to mind my own business.’
    ‘If you do turn out to have killed him, I’m going to be real upset with you.’
    ‘If you pin it on me, I’m going to be real upset too.’
    Suddenly she wanted to go back to the office and look at that list again. She wanted to reexamine the car, just as he had done. She had the sense that she was missing something, something that he had spotted.
    But she had a husband waiting, and a dog, and dinner. And maybe that bath too. Yes, almost certainly a bath. She did some of her best thinking in the tub. She watched him walk away and thought:
    What have we allowed into our town?

12
    T he Hurricane Hatch stood at the end of a strip of land midway between Jacksonville and St Augustine on the Florida coast, far enough away from the real tourist traps to ensure that it retained a degree of local custom while still attracting enough business of any stripe to sustain it. A man named Skettle owned ninety percent of the Hurricane Hatch, but he rarely frequented it,