He sat. She did not. She stood by the window with her arms crossed, a tall woman in her fifties with reading glasses pushed up into short gray hair, and she looked out at the boats for a while before she said anything. Wade had known her since he was nine years old and she had come to his elementary school to teach them about stranger danger and had let him wear her hat. That had been a long time ago. She did not seem inclined to let him wear anything now.
"Roxanne tells me," the chief said, "that you were about to put Hieu Tran's name out on the county channel as the man who stole Garrett Vance's boat."
"I didn't, Chief."
"Because he stopped you."
"Because I checked."
"Because he made you check." She turned around. "I said look, Wade. I said that's all. What did you look at?"
He thought about it, and the honest answer came up slowly, like something heavy from the bottom. "Hull size. Motor. Stripe."
"The stripe was green."
"It looked navy under the lamp."
"So you looked at a lamp." She sat down finally, across the desk from him, and took her glasses off her head and set them on the blotter, and that small motion was somehow worse than her standing. "The call said 'the old Chinese guy at the ramp.' Hieu Tran is not Chinese. He's from Rạch Giá. He came here in 1979 on a boat that took on water for six days, and he's been putting his skiff in at that ramp at five in the morning for forty years. Anybody in this town who'd been paying attention could have told you exactly what was going to be on that trailer. Whoever made that call knew precisely who'd be there, at precisely what time, and they knew how they'd describe him to make you stop thinking. And it worked."
"I'd have figured it out."
"Would you?" She waited. "On what? On a laminated card you couldn't read? Wade, I have been doing this job for twenty-six years in this parish and the one next door, and I'll tell you something that took me a long time to learn and that nobody teaches you at the academy. The tip that feels the best is the one you need to check the hardest. Because it feels good for a reason, and the reason's usually inside you, not out there." She tapped the desk. "Where'd the call come from?"
"Prepaid number. I already asked the carrier. They'll get back to us. Probably bought with cash at a gas station."
"Probably." The chief rubbed her eyes. "Okay. You're going to go find out which gas station. And you're going to listen to that call recording until you can hum it. And when Garrett Vance calls me in about"—she looked at the clock on the wall—"four minutes, I'm going to tell him we're following leads, which will be true, because you're going to follow some."