Inherit the Dead

back to bite you on the ass,” Henry said. “Okay. In my copious spare time.”
    They chatted for a minute more, Perry asking after Henry’s new kid and new wife, Henry admitting they were all doing great and trying not to sound as proud as he was of his wife’s career and his kid’s being gifted. Just as the conversation was winding down, Henry said, “Wait a minute! I know a local out there, on the force. We were together at a gunshot-wound seminar. His name’s Arthur Gawain, and he’s a strange bird. But I think he’s a good cop. Give him a call. He should definitely know where the bodies are buried in East Hampton.”
    “Thanks,” Perry said. Some local insight could be a big help. The area cops always knew plenty of stories that never made it into a courtroom. Perry had gotten tight with a couple of cops in Southampton when he was on the Derace McDonald case, but Southampton was not East Hampton, and that case had been two years ago. He was thankful for the new contact. “Got his number?”
    He scribbled it down as Henry read it off. “Thanks, Henry, and give my love to Maria,” he said.
    When he’d hung up, he sat in the car for a moment. Through the small windows in the doors of the service bay, he could see movement, and he knew Randy and Dirk were back at work. As he himself should be. With a sigh, he raised his phone and dialed Detective Arthur Gawain.

6
SARAH WEINMAN
    P erry Cristo mentally kicked himself as he got back onto Route 27. Here he’d just spent the past thirty minutes at an auto shop and it had slipped his mind to check the needle on the gas gauge. It was at the three-quarter line, enough to get him to the motel, and maybe fifty miles after that, but not much more. Normally he wouldn’t care where he filled up the car, but February in Montauk was more damp and bone chilling than in the city, which was saying something. And the light disappeared early enough to make the prospect of freezing his ass off to fill the gas tank that much more unpleasant.
    But this was the Hamptons, and there wouldn’t be another gas station for ten miles. Fuck it, Perry thought, might as well get to the motel and figure things out from there. That strategy had worked for him in the past, as a cop, and it worked still as a detective without the badge. He’d only had a vague sense of what to ask Randy Hyde at the auto shop, and the kid had still told him something important. They almost always did, no matter how hard they tried to hide things. Sometimes it took a little extra cajoling, a longer beat of silence they couldn’t bear to leave unfilled, but inevitably something spilled out. Even the smallest nuggets paid off in the most unexpected ways.
    Now, thanks to Randy, Perry was on his way to a place he’d nevervisited but had certainly heard of before. The Memory Motel. He wondered if Angel was a Stones fan, too, if their song had lodged in the back of her memory, or if she and Randy had shacked up in a room there because it was convenient. There was no point in asking Randy about it; the kid, once he’d spilled the info to Perry, had nothing else to give. It had been the same, even more so, with Lilith, the artist. Now there was a piece of work. He still heard her smooth-talking seduction in his head. For someone who chose to live the artist’s isolated life, Lilith had gone out of her way to be memorable. Plus, she’d lied to his face about not knowing Randy Hyde when she knew him in the way that counted most. Then again, maybe Randy had been lying about fucking her. Everyone lied. Why did it always come down to that?
    Perry looked down at the GPS he’d installed to make sure he hadn’t missed the turnoff. He didn’t like to rely on the device’s artificial voice. Too prim, too proper, too grating, and since he liked long drives to work through the thorny knots that cases always presented him, hearing words with a robotic sound pissed him off even more. And more often than not, the voice was wrong, and “recalculating” was really code for “where the fuck are we.”
    Perry saw he had another three miles to go. But as he looked down, he felt something whisper up his spine. He glanced in the rearview mirror, but there was nothing behind him. No cars ahead, either. He’d had that feeling before, and it was never good. The case was already starting to move away from simple math to more complicated algebra, but he wasn’t ready to admit there might be a darker force lurking. And if