Free Hard Road by Barbara D'Amato Page A

book."
     
     
"I never said you shouldn't. But Barry is not a killer."
     
     
"Whether he is or not, I believe Jeremy is safe with him, if he wants to take him home. You and Jeremy have told us what you saw, and he knows you have, so there's no reason for Barry, if he's the killer, to go after either of you."
     
     
"Barry would never hurt Jeremy."
     
     
"Not even to cover up two murders?"
     
     
Oh, lord. I didn't think so, but how could anybody claim to be a hundred percent sure of such a thing?
     
     
"Look, McCoo, he didn't have time. After Plumly was stabbed, Barry went to talk with security and then the cops."
     
     
"I know that."
     
     
"Then Jennifer came back to talk with me. She said the cops had temporarily finished with Barry, I admit that, and then she was shot. Immediately after that, Jeremy and I ran. And we were being chased almost from that minute to the time we came up out of the manhole. Lots of people must have seen Barry by then."
     
     
McCoo rubbed his face. He looked sad, but he was far too honest to fob me off with "Wait and see" or "We'll look into it."
     
     
He said, "From your description of your run through the tunnels, the person who chased you followed you until you headed out of the Grant Park Underground Garage. Maybe he followed you for another five minutes, but you have no evidence that he did, and if he did, you eluded him by taking random tunnels. You crept along for at least another thirty minutes after you left the garage, and in that time you never saw your pursuer. As far as you know, maybe he realized right away in the parking garage that he would never find you, so he simply turned back. Right?"
     
     
"I don't see why— Oh, all right. Maybe."
     
     
"You were on the run, so to speak, for an hour and ten minutes altogether. You can only be sure your pursuer followed you for the first twenty minutes. I'm sorry to tell you this, but nobody went back to the Emerald City castle to reinterview Barry for at least an hour."
     
     
"An hour! Why not?"
     
     
"Come on, Cat. We had a fatal stabbing and a fatal shooting at a big city festival. And more shots fired after that. And a paramedic wounded. The first thing we had to do was to button up the scene and try to find the shooter. Just doing the basics took far more than an hour. We had to get the addresses of all the witnesses to the two murders. We called in three evidence techs to do the site search. There was potential evidence all over the place if you count cups and gum wrappers and cigarette butts and footprints in dirt. We finally went back to reinterview the first witnesses about the same time you were coming out of the manhole."
     
     
"Somebody must have seen him in the Emerald City."
     
     
"He doesn't think so, and nobody reported being with him or seeing him there. He says he collapsed into a chair in the office after the first questioning. His impression was that pretty much everybody else had rushed out into the central area to see what was going on. At that point, he says, he thought you had taken Jeremy home and he didn't even know that Jennifer had been shot. He spent the time trying to figure out why anybody would be killing anybody else at the festival, and especially Plumly. He says Plumly was a really nice guy."
     
     
"He was. Very nice."
     
     
"And it's perfectly believable that Barry just sat there. He'd had a shock. That is, if he isn't guilty. For that matter, he might have sat there even if he had killed Plumly and let his confederate chase Jennifer and you and Jeremy."
     
     
"A confederate! That's very far-fetched."
     
     
"I wish. People have partners in crime all the time."
     
     
"If he wanted an alibi, and he had a partner, Barry would make sure somebody would see him at least at some point."
     
     
"Maybe. Assuming he wasn't flustered."
     
     
"What about the three guys who were with Plumly just before he was killed? E. T. Taubman, Edmond Pottle, and Larry