Hot Rocks

remembering how sweet he was to me. Then we lost contact, you know how it is? My family moved away, and that was that.”
    Composing herself, she got to her feet again. “I’m fine. I’m sorry, I’ll be fine.” She took the manila envelope, dropped the keys back into it and slipped it back into the carton herself. “Can you just tell me the rest? I promise, that won’t happen again.”
    “Don’t you worry about it. You sure you want to deal with this now?”
    “I do. Yes, thank you.”
    “There’s a toiletry kit—razor, toothbrush, the usual. He was carrying four hundred twenty-six dollars and twelve cents. Had a rental car—a Taurus from Avis out of New York, road maps.”
    She was looking through the items as McCoy detailed them from his list.
    “Cell phone—nothing programmed in the phone book for us to contact. Looks like there’s a couple of voice messages. We’ll see if we can track those.”
    They’d be from her father, she imagined, but only nodded.
    “Watch is engraved,” he added when Laine turned it over in her hand. “ ‘One for every minute.’ I don’t get it.”
    She gave McCoy a baffled smile. “Neither do I. Maybe it was something romantic, from a woman he loved once. That would be nice. I’d like to think that. This was all?”
    “Well, he was traveling.” He took the watch from her. “Man doesn’t take a lot of personal items with him when he’s traveling. Vince’ll be tracking down his home address. Don’t worry about that. We haven’t found any next of kin so far, and if we don’t, seems like they’ll release him to you. It’s nice of you to want to bury an old friend of your father’s.”
    “It’s the least I can do. Thank you very much, Sergeant. You’ve been very kind and patient. If you or Vince would let me know if and when I can make the funeral arrangements, I’d appreciate it.”
    “We’ll be in touch.”
    She took Max’s hand as they walked out, and he felt the key press his palm. “That was slick,” he commented. “I barely caught it.”
    “If I wasn’t a little rusty, you wouldn’t have caught it. It looks like a locker key. One of those rental lockers. You can’t rent lockers at airports or train stations, bus stations, that sort of thing anymore, can you?”
    “No. Too small for one of those garage-type storage lockers, and most of those are combination locks or key cards anyway. It might be from one of those mailbox places.”
    “We should be able to track it down. No dog though.”
    “No, no dog. We’ll check the motel room, but I don’t think it’s there, either.”
    She stepped outside with him, took a fond look at the town she’d made her own. From this vantage point, high on the sloped street, she could see a slice of the river, and the houses carved into the rising hill on the other bank. The mountains climbed up behind, ringing their way around the sprawl of streets and buildings, the parks and bridges. They formed a scenic wall covered with the green haze of trees beginning to leaf, and the white flash of blooming wild dogwoods.
    The everydayers, as her father had dubbed normal people with normal lives, were about their business. Selling cars, buying groceries, vacuuming the rug, teaching history.
    Gardens were planted, or being prepared for planting. She could see a couple of houses where the Easter decorations had yet to be dispatched, though it was nearly three weeks past. Colorful plastic eggs danced in low tree limbs, and inflatable rabbits squatted on spring-green grass.
    She had rugs to vacuum and groceries to buy, a garden to tend. Despite the key in her hand, she supposed that made her an everydayer, too.
    “I’m not going to pretend some of that didn’t stir the juices. But when this is over, I’ll be happy to retire again. Willy never could, my father never will.”
    She smiled as they walked to Max’s car. “My father gave him that watch. The key ring was just a ploy, but my dad gave Willy that watch for his birthday one year. I think he might have actually bought it, but I can’t be sure. But I was with him when he had it engraved. ‘One for every minute.’ ”
    “Meaning?”
    “There’s a sucker born every minute,” she said, and slipped into the car.

CHAPTER 11
    It was the same clerk at the desk of the Red Roof, but Max could see the lack of recognition in his eyes. The simplest, quickest way into Willy’s last room was to pay the standard freight.
    “We want one-fifteen,” Max told