Collateral Damage (14 page)

“Their case didn't depend on evidence, Mister Jones,” Roberts said. “And it could hardly fail with Dean as an eyewitness.

Hannibal's office was dim with only the corner lamp lit. Anna was perched in Hannibal's desk chair, her toes dangling just above the floor. To her right and a little behind her Hannibal sat with his legs stretched out in front of him, looking over Anna's shoulder at his computer screen. He had surrendered his jacket, gloves and shades and even rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt, but in his mind he was still at work.

“Is it a rule you can't relax while we do this?” Cindy asked, handing him a glass of wine. She had already placed one in front of Anna and held one for herself. When Hannibal shook his head, she turned to drop onto his lap.

Anna turned just enough to smile a thank you toward Cindy as she sipped her wine. “Here's the site I was looking for,” she said. Hannibal saw the words “License Plates of the World” and checked the URL:
http://danshiki.oit.gatech.edu/~iadt3mk/index.html
. Way too complex to try to remember.

“Bookmark that, will you Anna?”

“Will do,” she said. “Now, we're assuming the car you're after is registered in the U.S. right?”

“Yeah,” Hannibal said, sipping his wine. Cindy had chosen a fruity white wine that he knew would lighten his spirits. “So let's start looking. There's only fifty of them.”

Anna tapped a few keys and a group of plates came into view. “I guess alphabetically is as good a way to approach it as any, eh?” she said. “Here's Alabama.”

“Nope, way too light,” Hannibal said. “The plate we're looking for is dark, maybe a real dark blue, with white letters.”

“And the first three characters are numbers, right?” Anna added, tapping more keys. “Alabama always has a letter in the first three. Alaska's next.”

Cindy squirmed down comfortably into Hannibal's lap. “So did Doc Roberts say what got Dean into the hospital?”

“Oh yeah,” Hannibal said, kissing her forehead just because it was within reach. “Dean discovered his father's mutilated body.”

“Oh God,” Cindy moaned.

“He and his dad had been alone in the house. His mother came over but Dean didn't go to greet her I guess. From another room he heard them arguing, apparently about finalizing their divorce.”

Anna skipped Alaska, which starts with three letters, and Arizona, which has a light blue plate. “Kids don't go near when that's going on,” she said.

“Roberts says he heard her leave,” Hannibal said, hugging Cindy to his chest. “Then the door opens again, in Dean's words, like she forgot something.”

Anna skipped past Arkansas, California and Colorado for color or number combination mismatches. “Maybe she was just getting up her courage.”

Hannibal wondered if she was projecting her own feelings. “For whatever reasons, the next thing Dean heard was a grunt, then something heavy falling to the floor. Then the door slams again.”

Cindy emptied her wine glass, even while watching the monitor. “Hey what about Connecticut?”

Hannibal leaned forward. “Dark blue, light letters, three numbers a dot then three letters. That could be it!”

“I'll bookmark this page too, and move on,” Anna said. “So then this kid walks out and finds his father dead, right?”

Hannibal nodded grimly. “I'm afraid so. Terrible thing for a boy that age.”

“You lost your dad when you were even younger,” Cindy commented. She refilled glasses while Anna flipped past Delaware and the District of Columbia, plates they were all familiar with, and glanced at Florida and Georgia plates which were the wrong colors.

“That was different,” Hannibal said. “I lost my dad to a faceless enemy a thousand miles away. And I didn't have to see him dead.”

Anna never turned from the monitor. Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana and Iowa all failed to match Hannibal's description. “That's a terrible thing, but does it make him an eyewitness?”

“That's kind of where the story gets muddy,” Hannibal said. “Bea told me he never actually saw his mother in the house. But he testified she was there to please his aunt. That probably explains some of his guilt.”

Cindy resumed her seat. “Sure. He thinks he's the reason his mother's in jail.”

Hannibal watched license plates flash across the computer screen over her hair: Kansas was a loser.

“What about Kentucky?” Anna asked. “The numbers. Fairly dark at the top.”

Hannibal leaned in close. “No, I don't think so. I seem to remember a dot. A dot after the first three numbers. And Doctor Roberts admitted Dean thinks he's responsible for a lot, including his father's death and Oscar Peters'.

Cindy kissed his neck. “You think the two murders are connected somehow, don't you?”

Louisiana, Maine, Maryland and Massachusetts were the wrong color. Michigan could have been it, but the plate started with three letters instead of numbers. “Connected? Well let's see. Stabbings both times. In the victim's living room at night both times. Knife gone both times. Men in Dean Edwards' life both times. Dean finds the body both times. Yeah, I'd say they might be connected.”

Anna fanned past the next five states. Hannibal was momentarily distracted because Cindy pressed her mouth against his and he was enjoying the sweetness of the wine mingled with her kiss.

“Hey cut that out you two,” Anna said with a grin. “How about this one, Hannibal?”

Hannibal pulled himself free of Cindy's embrace and stared hard at the monitor. The license plate was cobalt blue with three numbers and three letters separated by a dot. The raised characters were silver, with a reflective quality Hannibal recognized. That and a number of subtle visual cues he couldn't name made his heart quicken beyond what the wine and Cindy's kiss could do.

“That's it,” he said softly. “Now we know what state the real killer drove in from.”

Silver Spring was a community in search of an identity. Like its sister communities Bethesda and Chevy Chase, Hannibal thought of it as a growth on the northern skin of Washington, growing up into Maryland, technically independent but too close to call a suburb. Coming in off the capitol Beltway, a driver slid into these cities and could never know he had crossed over into The District if not for signs indicating a change.

Hannibal had a couple of errands to attend to in Silver Spring, which is tucked into that three or four mile space between the Beltway and the District. In that narrow space it graded rather quickly from affluent suburb to inner city business district as it merged with the narrow dirty streets of Washington. So almost as soon as he was off the highway Hannibal was turning right into an older neighborhood, older but still proud and, to the extent it could be, exclusive. In many ways the neighborhood reminded him of the woman he was here to see, Ursula Voss.

Anna Ingersoll had verified that this year's Nevada license plates held three numbers followed by three letters, not counting vanity plates and special plates of course. She promised to check the Nevada motor vehicle database today and give him a printout showing which of the seventeen thousand possible combinations starting with 902 were currently issued in Nevada. In the meantime, he had little to go on to help solve Oscar's murder. So he decided that he would try to find out more about the death of Dean's father. Ursula was the most likely source of information there.

On the telephone, Ursula told him her office was in her home and that she could give him a few minutes if he came fairly early. Less than an hour after that call, Hannibal pulled up in front of Ursula's house and set his parking brake. The large brick structure was probably forty years old. He'd bet Ursula bought it new at a time when the idea that it would one day be worth a quarter million dollars would have raised a laugh. And he was sure she had lived there ever since. Despite the bay window, the porch was reminiscent of the one on the front of Oscar's house.

Hannibal tightened his gloves before he rang the bell. When Ursula opened the door she was wearing a blue flowered dress that could have come off the same rack as the one she had on the day before. A pair of reading glasses hung from a chain around her neck.

“I'm quite busy Mister Jones,” she said after they exchanged good mornings. “Believe it or not, the tax season's already underway for us accountants.”

“I won't take up too much of your time,” Hannibal said. He took one step over the threshold and stopped. A wave of deja vu struck him and it took him a moment to sort it out. The room was more broad than deep, with a fireplace in the far wall which looked as if it had not been used in decades. Vaulted ceilings kept the room cool and imparted the slightest echo. But it was the decor that struck him. Oscar Peters might just as likely have picked this flowered wallpaper, only different from his in color. The sparse furniture was placed in analogous positions. The standing lamp in the corner, even the drapes at the windows were similar in style to what Oscar had in his house. Hannibal's eyes dropped to a particular point on the floor. It was a hardwood floor, just like the floor in that other house where Oscar Peters stretched out in front of the door at that exact place and let the blood out of his body.

“That's the spot,” Ursula said with ancient hatred. “That's where Dean found Grant. Is that what you came to see?”

“No ma'am,” Hannibal said, backing toward the living room sofa. “But it does help me understand what happened to Dean.”

“And just what does that mean?” Ursula asked in a sharp tone, settling into the love seat, positioned kitty corner to the sofa.

He meant he saw Dean as a man standing just one step over the knife-edge line separating sanity from madness. He imagined Dean opening the door to that house decorated so much like the house he grew up in and looking down and seeing a dead man lying, for all practical purposes, where his father was that night, his body positioned as his father had been, with all the blood spilled in the same pattern on the hardwood floor.

“Nothing, Miss Voss,” Hannibal said, forcing the image out of his mind. “I just let my imagination run away with me there for a minute.”

“Well let's get down to business,” Ursula said, pulling a silver cigarette case from her purse. “What did you need to see me about?”

“Actually I came to ask you for a favor, something I didn't want to broach on the telephone.” Hannibal had expected the offer of coffee or tea but clearly this woman did not intend to make his visit any longer than necessary.

“I see,” Ursula said, touching the flame from a silver lighter to her cigarette and inhaling deeply. “Unless it will help my nephew somehow, I hardly see why I would be doing you a favor.”

Hannibal had little motivation to play softball with this hardened woman. “I've been hired to try to help him, and I wouldn't ask anything of you outside that context. But after you told Thompson where he was, I couldn't be sure how much you cared about Dean yourself.”

Ursula leaned back as if he had hit her. “What? What makes you think I told him?”

“Please Miss Voss. Only a handful of people knew Dean was hospitalized, and none of us had any motivation to
inform the police of his whereabouts. But then, Thompson didn't tell you it was his case, did he?”

“Stan Thompson and I go back a long way, Mister Jones,” Ursula said. “Since he's working in Virginia now, I figured he could tell me just what kind of trouble my nephew was in. I needed to know what that murdering whore had gotten my poor Dean into. And no, he didn't tell me he was involved with the case.” She forced the last sentence through clenched teeth.

“Ahh, Bea must have told you his mother had visited him. I take it you didn't like her very much, even before Dean's father died.”

“That woman was white trash from the beginning. The kind of white trash you find in the hills in West Virginia.” Ursula spoke through a cloud of smoke and Hannibal could almost see the venom dripping off this black widow's fangs. “Poor Grant was seduced by her wanton body, but we could all see through her. He married her against our will.”

“Our will?”

“The whole family was against it,” Ursula said, filling her lungs with smoke again. When she pulled the cigarette away from her mouth, lipstick clung to the filter like a bloodstain. “Wasn't long before they were arguing violently. Grant, he was too gentle a soul for that and she just ran over him. When he finally came to his senses he and little Dean moved in here. He was the spitting image of the little brother I helped raise, not a drop of his mother's violent blood in him. That cold-blooded murderess.”

She had no way of knowing Hannibal had looked into Francis Edwards' china blue eyes himself, and failed to find a murderess there. “Odd for a cold-blooded murderess to be on the street in ten years, eh?”