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Department.”
    Barry Dutton worked fast. “In that case, yes,” I
said. “This is Aaron Tucker. I guess Chief Dutton called you.”
    “Yes,” said Baker. “And he said to tell you he should
have left you in the chair with the duct tape. Does that mean
anything to you?”
    “No,” I answered. “Chief Dutton hallucinates
sometimes.”
    “Is there something I can do for you, Mr.
Tucker?”
    “I’m writing about the murder of Michael Huston. Can
you spare a few minutes?”
    She exhaled, not meaning for me to hear it. While
North Brunswick is a much larger town (with therefore a much larger
police department) than Midland Heights, Baker was probably not
used to dealing with murder investigations, or the publicity they
usually generated. But she knew it was part of her job.
    “I suppose so, but it’ll have to be quick. Where are
you?”
    I gave her my location, and she directed me to the
North Brunswick Municipal Complex on Hermann Road. Because I’m a
trained investigative reporter, this immediately made me wonder
whether the road had been named after Bernard Herrmann, who wrote
so many memorable film scores for Alfred Hitchcock films. There was
no way to know, so I put that out of my mind. But the music from Vertigo kept running through my head.
    It took but a few minutes to get there, and after
twice getting lost in the building, I found myself in Chief Leslie
Baker’s office, which was not only larger than Barry Dutton’s, but
also had carpeting. I made a mental note to inform Barry of these
salient facts at my earliest convenience.
    Chief Baker herself was a tall woman, about five-foot
nine or ten, and in full uniform, she appeared to be roughly the
size of the Empire State Building. She was on the phone when I
walked in, but hung up and stood ramrod straight, shook my hand
with a grip that could have turned my hand into a maraca had she
given it full force, and pointed me toward a chair. She was nothing
if not physically impressive.
    “Lieutenant Rodriguez is working on the Huston case,”
she told me almost immediately. “But since Chief Dutton requested I
speak to you, I’ll tell you whatever I can.”
    I took the reporter’s notebook out of my back
pocket—they are designed specifically to fit on your butt or in an
inside jacket pocket, but I’m not classy enough to wear a sports
jacket—and opened it to a blank page. Baker did not blink.
    “What led to the questioning, and eventually the
arrest, of Justin Fowler?” I asked.
    Baker opened the file on her desk. Behind her, I
noticed, was a picture of her shaking hands with one of the former
presidents I hadn’t voted for. I tried not to hold it against her,
and then saw a picture of her shaking hands with a former president
I had voted for. Apparently, she was a bipartisan
hand-shaker.
    “According to Lt. Rodriguez’s report, once we
discovered the kind of firearm that had killed Mr. Huston, Mr.
Fowler was initially questioned as an expert on antique weaponry.
But after the officers entered Mr. Fowler’s residence—with his
permission—and discovered the weapon in his bedroom, the arrest was
made.”
    “You’re aware that Mr. Fowler has Asperger’s
Syndrome?”
    “Yes,” Baker noted a space on the report, then closed
it to keep it from my gaze. Reporters are notorious for being able
to read documents upside-down. She didn’t know, of course, that
trying to do so usually makes me woozy. “I’m not terribly familiar
with the condition, but Lieutenant Rodriguez did note it, and
explained very briefly what it means.”
    Baker, I could tell, was trying to be fair, but she
didn’t want some wiseguy reporter busting into her office and
screwing up her case, no matter how many police chiefs called her.
But the swiftness of the arrest and the constant references to the
file were making me suspicious. I didn’t think anything sneaky was
going on, but I had a hunch she wasn’t telling me something.
    “Among other things,” I said, “it