He left before it was light. He stripped the bed, folded the cover, and wrote Thank you, Art on the back of a gas bill envelope on the kitchen table, because it was true and because he could not think of what else was.
The van started first time. It always did. Ray had seen to that.
He drove to Union Station with the windows down and the city coming up grey around him, and he parked on Alameda fifty yards from where a bus had let him off two days before.
The ticket hall was the same as ever, high and brown and church-quiet, leather chairs in rows under the painted ceiling. A man was buffing the floor with a machine. The departures board ticked over.
There was a six-forty to Flagstaff. He knew a bar there. He stood at the counter and paid forty-four dollars and the woman slid the ticket under the glass without looking up.
He sat down in one of the leather chairs with it in his hand.
It made sense. That was the difficulty. He had spent a night looking for the place where it did not, and Delgado had built it too well.
Ray signed. Take that as the foundation and everything stood up on it. The silence in the squad room. The coat. Six years of no letters, which Thorsen had put down to pride and which could just as well have been shame. A son dead. A retirement with nothing in it but a pegboard. A man goes back to the one thing he did wrong, and stands on a staircase with his hat off, and finds out that sorry does not buy anything. So he mows the lawn, and goes into the garage.
A policeman could close that. A policeman had.
And if it was true, there was nothing here for Daniel Thorsen. He had been right about the case and wrong about the man, and neither one needed him. He could leave the van on Denise’s street with the key in an envelope. He could be in Arizona by dark.
He turned the ticket over. He made himself do it properly, the way he would have for a stranger.
What does the story not account for?
One. The bus ticket in his own pocket was the second one this week. The first had his name printed on it. By ten at night on the day of the funeral, somebody had known what he was called, where he was sleeping, and which key he had been given on the church steps. A security guard who thinks a widow needs protecting from a drifter calls the police. He does not buy the drifter a seat to Phoenix. That costs money, and it takes a decision, and somebody senior enough to make it.
Two. They had wanted the van. Not him out of town. Him out of town and the van back. Nobody protecting Denise Okafor cared about a twenty-year-old Ford with a pair of muddy boots in it.
Three. He said he would tell me when he could prove it.
Thorsen sat with that one longest.
A man eaten up by his own guilt does not need proof. He knows what he did. He was there. You prove things about other people. And Ray had said something else on those stairs, something Rosa had repeated without knowing what she was carrying. He said I had been told enough things that were not true. Told by whom? By the department. By the two detectives at her table. By the four typed pages that said Hector Ochoa. Ray was not apologising for a weak case. He was telling her the answer was false, and a man only says that about his own report when he has found out what was.
So Ray signed. All right. Thorsen could not make that go away and would not try. But Ray had signed because of something he had been told. And six years later he had learned that it was false, and had gone out at night with a pry bar to prove it.
That was not a man getting square. That was a detective working a case.
And four. The pen.
He had told nobody about the pen. Not Brooks, not Delgado. He was not sure why. It was the smallest thing he had and the only one that nobody had offered him an explanation for, and he found he wanted to keep it that way a while longer.
Gun in the left hand, where it belonged. Pen on the right, where it never was. Whoever killed Ray knew him. Whoever moved the pen knew him too.
He did not understand it. But a suicide does not leave you things you do not understand. A suicide is the one death where the only person in the room has stopped arranging anything.
The board ticked. Flagstaff moved up a line.
There was a fifth thing, and it was not on any list. It was a shelf bolted to a cinder-block wall, with marigolds in clean water.
Whatever Ray had done, whatever he had signed or not signed, he had not been the one lying in the road. Thorsen had told an eleven-year-old boy we are going to find who did this. The boy had told his friends at school.
He tore the ticket in half, and then in half again, and dropped it in the brass bin by the door on his way out.
There was a surplus store on Main that opened at seven for the men who needed boots before a shift. He was the second customer.
He bought two pairs of canvas work trousers, three grey T-shirts, a dark blue chore jacket with deep pockets, and a pack of socks. He changed in the back of the van. The suit he put on a wire hanger, and he hooked the hanger over the top rail of Ray’s racking, where it swung a little and looked like a man who had been let down gently.
Then he went back in, because he had seen something by the door.
A roll of four-inch foam, olive green, army issue, three feet wide. He had the man cut him seven feet of it. He bought a wool blanket that smelled of mothballs, a five-gallon water can, a tin mug, and a small brass padlock.
The foam fitted the van floor along the right side as if Ray had measured for it. With the duffel at one end it was a bed. A better bed than the motel’s. He stood the water can behind the driver’s seat and wedged it with the tow strap. He clipped the padlock through the hasp on the inside of the rear doors, which Ray had fitted, of course, and never needed.
He stood back and looked.
A bunk. A wall of labelled bins. A suit on a hanger. Water. It was not much. It was more than he had owned on Wednesday, and it locked from the inside, and it could be somewhere else in the time it took to turn a key.
He had a cheap telephone with nineteen minutes left on it. He had a second telephone in a peppermint tin that he had not yet dared to switch on.
And he had a grey plastic card on a reel, with six small numbers along one edge, and an address on Brand Boulevard to try it in.
He got in and drove north.