Free Fidelity by Thomas Perry

probably why I won’t lie to you.”
    She looked up the block, then behind her. “Have you got anything at all yet?”
    “I talked to Gruenthal, the lead homicide detective, a little while ago. He had the autopsy report and the crime-scene stuff.”
    “I don’t want to stand around in the middle of the street while we do this. Why don’t you take me for a ride?”
    “Okay.” He pressed the button on his key chain to unlock the doors, then hesitated. “I’ve been drinking.”
    “I’m aware of that. You want me to drive?”
    “No. I just thought I should say it.”
    “Thank you.” She slid into the passenger seat and closed the door.
    He got in and drove north up Van Nuys Boulevard. “It pretty much agrees with what we heard before. It was after one A.M. Phil was walking up the sidewalk on Shoshone Street two blocks north of Victory. His car was parked on a dark, quiet stretch. He opened the door of his car, the dome light came on, and he got behind the wheel. There was a van parked across the street. Knowing Phil, I think he probably noticed the van parked in that spot when he arrived, and nothing about it looked different, so he figured it was harmless. But the shooter had broken into the van, hidden inside, and waited for him. The only shot hit Phil through the head, so he never felt it.”
    “You don’t need to do that,” she said.
    “Do what?”
    “Tell me things to make me feel better about how he died. I need to know what he was doing there when he was shot.”
    CCUy?”
    “A million reasons. I’m Phil’s wife-his widow. I loved him. And I owe him that. Everybody has a right to have somebody care at least that much when he dies. He has a right to have somebody ask questions-who did this to him and why they would want to.”
    “What else?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “You said there were a million reasons.”
    “I didn’t say I was going to tell you all of them.”
    Hall drove a block in silence. “He was up there north of Victory around one, but so far nobody knows what he was working on. It’s a residential street, but there are big apartment buildings on Victory. There’s also a golf course, a couple of good-sized schoolyards, and Balboa Park, all good places to meet somebody at night.”
    “You don’t think he was out meeting an informant. You think it was a woman, don’t you?”
    He took a deep breath, then blew it out slowly. “I haven’t said that. Is that what this is about?”
    “Come on, Ray. How can it not be about that? My husband was shot to death in an ambush on a residential street at one A.M. I’ve looked at every case file I could find, and I don’t see a current case that had anything to do with Shoshone Street. I don’t see anything in anybody’s Rolodex or on anybody’s computer that would send him up there. Do you?”
    “Not so far.”
    “Have you found anything that would tell you that he was working on a case at all?”
    “Not yet. How about you? Have you searched your house?”
    “Of course I have. Knowing Phil, I thought he would have left something where I would be sure to find it-maybe with the papers you have to look at when a person dies. I looked everywhere, but there’s nothing so far-no addresses near where they found him, no mysterious phone numbers, nothing. Now I’m looking for hiding places.”
    “What about the cars?”
    “I checked mine. The reason the police still have Phil’s is that they’re checking it.”
    “I still haven’t figured out why Phil was keeping this a secret,” Ray said.
    “Because he had something big to hide. Now take me back to my car. We both have work to do.”

8
    Jerry Hobart climbed the slope toward the plateau above the trailer park with Valerie. He looked back down toward the freeway. From up here he could see the long sprawl of modern buildings that made up the outlet malls, and beside the freeway entrance, the small greenand-white box of the Hadley Date Farms store that had been here when Hobart was