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your car?”
    Again Hern seemed dumbfounded, staring at Tom for a moment without speaking. When he found his voice, he said, “You think I had something to do with this, don’t you? You’re looking for a murder weapon?”
    “I’m just gathering information at this point.”
    “Well, gather away, Captain.” Hern waved a hand at the Jaguar. “You won’t find anything.”
    “Thank you.” Tom motioned for Brandon to join them. To Hern’s annoyance, he asked Hern to state in Brandon’s presence that they had permission for the search.
    They did a thorough job, taking ten minutes, but they found nothing. Tom wasn’t surprised. He didn’t believe Hern was stupid enough to come back with the gun still in his possession. If he’d killed Taylor.
    Hern had stood aside during the search, his arms crossed, hostility stewing in his face. “Satisfied?” he said when they slammed the doors closed.
    Hern was an arrogant son of a bitch, Tom thought, the kind of person Rachel wouldn’t waste time on. Why did she count him as a friend? But then, Tom doubted Hern behaved this way around her. “I understand you had an argument with Taylor this morning,” Tom said.
    “Who told you that?”
    “Is it true?”
    “Yes, all right, we had an argument, which he provoked.”
    “You’ve only lived in Mason County for three months. How did you develop such a bad relationship with him so fast?”
    “We didn’t have a relationship . He wanted money to save his newspaper.”
    “Why did he come to you? What made him think you might help him?”
    Hern’s gaze slid away from Tom’s, and he took a moment to answer. “He seemed to believe we had a connection because he knew my mother when they were young, but he didn’t mean anything to me and I wasn’t going to give him money to throw away.”
    Hern’s hesitation before replying made Tom suspect he was holding something back. “Taylor and his wife were friends of your mother from way back, weren’t they? When they were all here working in the poverty program?”
    Hern seemed startled that Tom knew this. “I wouldn’t say they were friends. My mother was a V ISTA volunteer the same time they were, in the late sixties. They all came to Mason County together, but my mother had the good sense to leave when her year was up. They didn’t stay in touch.”
    “Your mother’s visiting you now, isn’t she?”
    “She was. She left this morning.”
    “Before or after Taylor showed up at your house?”
    “What does that mean? You think my mother had something to do with this?”
    “Just wondering if she knows anything that might be helpful,” Tom said. “Did Taylor ask her for money too?”
    “Yeah, he did, as a matter of fact, earlier in the week. But he didn’t see her today. She was on her way back to D.C. by the time he showed up.”
    Tom pulled a notebook and pen from his breast pocket. “Would you give me her home and business addresses and phone numbers, please?”
    “Aw, come on. You can’t be serious.”
    Tom poised the pen above the paper. “And her cell phone number, so I can reach her on the road.”
    Hands on hips, arms akimbo, Hern shook his head as if trying to cope with a barely tolerable irritation. At last he rattled off the information Tom wanted. His mother, Karen Richardson Hernandez, was an immigration and civil liberties attorney with an office and an apartment in Washington.
    “What kind of car is she driving?” Tom asked.
    “Why do you need to know that?”
    “What kind of car?” Tom repeated.
    Hern muttered something, scrubbed a hand over his mouth and chin, and answered, “A Jaguar, an older one, like mine. But hers is dark blue. Don’t ask me what the plate number is, because I couldn’t tell you. I have trouble remembering my own.”
    Tom wrote down everything and stuck the notebook back in his pocket. “I have a lot more questions, so you’ll have to come by the Sheriff’s Department this afternoon.”
    Hern’s eyes narrowed. “You