Weeks sullenly let Tarley go through his spiel. When the detective finished, the room was silent apart from the rush of air through the vents. She peered at Weeks for a long intense moment and remembered when her own son had been held for questioning. She felt some empathy for this kid, whatever he was wrapped up in.
“Tell me about Michael Drake, and what he’s doing up there in the woods.”
Weeks’s Adam’s apple bobbed a couple of times. He brushed his long hair back from his eyes and shrugged. “He comes up and fishes.”
“You know that’s not what I’m talking about.”
A muscle worked in the boy’s jaw. He looked at Tarley and said, “My old man paid the money back. You heard that. Can I go now?”
Tarley said, “If you burglarize a place, you don’t get a free pass for giving the money back. And then there’s the murder.”
Weeks’s mouth dropped open. He blinked and stared at Regan again. “Who was murdered?”
“A completely innocent fisherman from North Dakota,” she said. “We believe whoever did it shot the wrong guy. The man they were trying to shoot saw a nearly naked girl in that RV at Drake’s, and whoever was behind it decided they had to get rid of him.”
Weeks stared at the table. “Oh, God. Shit.”
“What do you know, Phillip? Who are those people?”
He glanced wildly around the room, as if searching for a way out. “They’ll kill me, too. If I talk. They said it. That they’d kill me if they ever saw me talking to a cop.”
Tears welled in his eyes.
She said, “It’ll be hard for them to kill anyone, when they’re doing life without parole.”
“You can’t keep me safe.”
“I can.”
He looked to Tarley who nodded his assessment.
“Okay,” he finally said. “Okay.”
A moment of silence passed.
“What happened to them kids?” Weeks asked. “The girl that the guy saw. The one who was almost naked. What happened to her? Is she there? Is she okay? Are the other ones okay?” He was frantic now, both legs bouncing crazily under the table. “Carla and Al are mean people. Are the kids still up there?”
“I thought the woman’s name was Cheryl,” she said. “Or maybe Delores.”
“Not if they were in that RV. That was Carla and Al,” he said urgently.
All his arguments about not talking seemed to have vanished.
“Do Carla and Al have a last name?”
“I think Al’s is Dickens or, no, Dicker. That’s it. I don’t know Carla’s. I never heard. I don’t know much about them.” He squeezed his eyes closed in concentration. “Except maybe they’re from Nevada. I think I heard that once, but I’m not sure.”
“How often have you seen them at Drake’s?”
“A bunch. They come up four, maybe five times a year, in the RV.”
“And what do they do?”
He looked at Regan as if she were slow on the uptake. “They make movies, ya know, and take pictures either in the cabin, Drake’s house, or out in the woods around there.”
“You’ve seen them?”
He nodded.