Deception (17 page)

“You tell me,” I said. “And here’s one. Talked to his brother, who’s a doctor. Palatine wore a medical chain identifying him as an insulin-dependent diabetic. Insulin bottle in the fridge. Needles in the drawer. But the professor wasn’t a diabetic.”

“Plus the only needle marks were in his shoulder,” Clarence said. “Diabetics don’t take injections there.”

The silence was deafening. Outsiders never came to these meetings. That an outsider would speak was unthinkable. That the speaking outsider was a journalist was strike three.

“Why don’t you take over the investigation?” Manny mumbled. “We’ll write your useless columns.”

“I didn’t know you could write,” Clarence said.

Manny’s usual scowl cranked up a notch.

“People leave evidence because they’re hurried,” I said, “or careless, or want to be caught. Doesn’t seem like he was in a hurry. But why the noose? Injection? Fountain pen ink? Insulin bottle? Needle? What does it all mean?”

“The noose suggests suicide,” Karl Baylor said.

“Or execution,” Cimmatoni said.

Until then, that thought hadn’t crossed my mind. Two miles to the north of us, in Washington, they still hang people. Only by the condemned prisoner’s request, so it’s rare, but it happens. This fit the note on the computer screen and other indications that the professor had been brought to justice. But what had he done to warrant execution? If we knew, it would point to the killer.

“It doesn’t have to make sense,” Cimmatoni said. “Killers aren’t brainiacs.”

“Even when it doesn’t appear to make sense, it does,” I said, “if you’re in the head of the killer.”

“Yeah, and to be in his head it helps if you
are
the killer.”

I stared at Cimmatoni. Why had he said that?

“Okay,” Sarge said, “we’ve had more murders in the last four weeks than in the previous three months. Everybody has an open case, so we’ve got lots of ground to cover. Suda and Doyle, you’re next. Mr. Abernathy, you’re excused.”

Clarence put his notepad in his briefcase and snuck out. I waved bye-bye to him, kissing the air, feeling a little smug that at least we weren’t letting the
Trib
in on everything.

It seemed a long wait between breakfast with Clarence at Lou’s and lunch at New York Burrito by the Federal Building, across from the Justice Center.

The only downside was that Manny was with me, and he’s not a happy eater. He made a face at his burrito. I don’t mean he showed displeasure by raising his eyebrow. I mean he made an actual face. Manny’s eating skills are remarkably similar to his people skills.

My partner doesn’t just have a lot of issues; he’s got the whole subscription.

Personality aside, however, in most respects Manny’s a good partner. He’s efficient, hard-nosed, and lock-jawed determined. If he catches a scent, that dog’ll hunt. And he knows how to turn the thumbscrews, especially with the young and cocky. He’d make Jack Bauer proud. The world’s full of personality—I don’t need that in a partner.

Right now I was contemplating how to tell Manny what I was thinking about the killer being a detective.

“I don’t like Abernathy coming to our meeting,” he said, turning his displeasure from the burrito to me. “And I don’t like him working on our case.”

“Neither do I. But he’s a decent guy. Almost a friend.”

Manny stopped chewing and stared me down.

“Speaking loosely. In the broadest sense of
friend
. But he’s a journalist. Now, if he were his father, it’d be a pleasure to have him around.”

“His father was his only good feature,” Manny said. “Too bad he’s gone for good.”

“Gone for good?”

“Yeah. Dead. You know what dead means, right?”

“It comes up now and then in this business.”

“Dead is dead.”

“Some say people still live after they die,” I said. “That they just go somewhere else.”

“Yeah, and some say we were made by aliens and at night they take us up on their ships and perform experiments.”

“And that proves there’s no life after death?”

“You turning religious on me?”

“No.” I said it too quickly, hearing my defensiveness and wondering how I’d suddenly fallen on the other side of the argument. “You sound like Nietzsche.”

“You looked up Nietzsche, didn’t you?” Manny asked. “You didn’t know jack about Nietzsche, and you looked him up.”

“Nietzsche schmietzsche,” I said, as Manny swallowed his last bite, leaving half a dead burrito, and headed out the door.

This was the deepest philosophical discussion Manny and I’ve ever had. It bothered me to hear him say what I’d thought myself, that Obadiah Abernathy no longer existed. Something inside, buried deep, told me this couldn’t be true. And if it were, the universe was just a cruel joke.

I consoled myself with the remnants of Manny’s burrito.

I’d left my notebook in the office, but I jotted down my thoughts on a New York Burrito sack. It wasn’t the Gettysburg Address, but it was a piece of work:

1. The killer planned the murder methodically, including the bizarre elements with the noose and the ink injections. He may have stayed forty-five minutes at the crime scene.
   
2. The killer knew how long it would take the cops to get there. He might have had a police monitor.
   
3. The killer took unnecessary measures that might make him vulnerable, like he was daring a detective to catch him. He took the time and trouble to put on the noose, inject the ink, and remove items, at least a photo and a wine bottle.
   
4. The killer—almost certainly—knew the private number of a homicide detective and called him from the scene.
   
5. The killer believes he knows investigative procedures well enough to get around them. He may take pride in his ability to outwit homicide detectives.
   

Seeing it in black and white was disturbing. I wanted to add a sixth point, but I wasn’t sure I could. “The killer—possibly—planted incriminating evidence at the scene, including a Black Jack wrapper and a rope belonging to me. And he may have planted a donut in my car.”

But if he used my rope and planted my wrapper and Wally’s donut and called me from the scene, he was setting me up. Did he believe I was going to investigate the case? Or was he expecting it to be someone else, knowing that whoever did would find the evidence against me and I might be tagged with a homicide?

But something bothered me more. I couldn’t remember the night of the murder. It was just … not there in my mind. Had I come home from Rosie’s? Or had I gone to the professor’s house?

Strange how anxiety over a blackout due to drinking can make you want to drink more.

13

“The plot thickens.”

S
HERLOCK
H
OLMES
,
A S
TUDY IN
S
CARLET

W
EDNESDAY
, N
OVEMBER
27, 1:30
P.M
.

A JOURNEY OF A THOUSAND MILES
begins with a single step.

Falling down a flight of stairs begins the same way.

The step my little gray cells had taken—that the murderer was one of our own detectives—was that kind of step.

As I walked slowly back to the Justice Center, under a thick cloud cover, I marveled at how that awful thought, on its face inconceivable, had walked right in the back door of my mind, taken off its shoes, and thrown itself on my cerebral couch. And like my cousin from South Carolina who showed up twenty years ago with a backpack and a pet boa, it showed no signs of leaving.

We’re the fraternity of detectives. It’s a brotherhood, including Tommi and Kim, who are brothers with different shapes and higher voices. Comrades in arms, for crying out loud. Even Cimma.

Like my platoon in Nam. We didn’t all like each other, but we’d die for each other. We watched each others’ backs. That’s what cops do. That’s what the brotherhood does.

And I was going after one of them?

“I wish you were here, Sharon,” I said aloud, looking up but seeing no crack in the clouds. “I need you. I need to talk with you.”

“I know, Ollie. I know. But there’s someone you need a lot more than me. He can do for you far more than I ever could. Talk to Him. Turn to Him. I love you. More importantly, He loves you.”

In the conference room near our work area, I walked Manny through my written points on the burrito sack.

“That’s ridiculous. Your prime suspect is one of
us?”

“Why is it ridiculous? Because you know them? Killers are always known by people. They always work with somebody. Everybody goes on TV when it all comes out and says he was a nice guy and washed their car and made them cookies and they had no clue.”

“There’s no way.”

“Okay,” I said. “If you were going to kill somebody, how would you do it?”

“I have to fight for time to go to my son’s T-ball games,” Manny said. “I don’t have time to stage a murder.”

“But if you
did
stage a murder, you’d be successful, wouldn’t you?”

“You tryin’ to say somethin’ to me?” He stood, fists clenched tight, as if he were a gang member again and I was calling him out.

“My point is, if anybody’s going to know how to pull off a murder and not get caught, it’s a homicide detective, right? Any of us could do it.”

He went to the door. “I’m going back to the professor’s hood. I say somebody saw something. And about your theory?”

“Yeah?”

“You’re losin’ it.”

Was I?

A homicide detective would know what
not
to do—all the things we catch people on. If I were going to kill somebody, I’d plan it so nobody would catch me.

If I was sober, that is.

I headed to Sergeant Jim Seymour’s office. I took a breath and walked in. His office is well-organized, and he must have a dozen pictures of his wife and four kids, in everything from baseball to band.

“What’s with that?” he asked, pointing at the sack in my hand.

I read him the burrito bag. After I’d made my case for the murderer being a detective, Sarge kept blinking at me like maybe I’d disappear after one more blink.

“I don’t know what else to think,” I said. “It’s a hunch, but it’s based on evidence. I have to consider it.”

“We’ve got ten homicide detectives. You going to check their alibis? Let’s say five of them were home alone or with their wives, then what? You’ll suspect that their wives, or Tommi’s husband, may be lying. Where’s this going to take us? Who’re you going to eliminate? Manny?”

“How can I?”

“Did you say that to his face?”

“No.”

“I wouldn’t recommend it. What about Jack? You going after him?”

“Sure. Everybody. Jack’ll understand.”

“Right. I’m sure the whole team will be dripping with sympathy.”

“Look, means and opportunity come easily for us, don’t they? It’s all about motive. So can’t homicide detectives have a motive to kill someone?”

“Sure, but … not this crew. Don’t you know them better than that, Ollie? You still read your murder mysteries, don’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“Me too. What if you read that the prime suspects in a murder mystery were a bunch of homicide detectives?”

“Well, in a book I might think it was … lame.”

“That’s what I think.”

“Okay, in a novel I’d never make ten homicide detectives the murder suspects. The author would be an idiot to even try it. But this is the real world.”

“You said ten suspects. You mean
nine
, right? Unless you’re suspecting yourself.”

“Hey, it could be eleven. You have access to everything. If the evidence leads me to you, what should I do?”

“Investigate me,” Sarge said. “Clear me or keep me on the suspect list.”

“Then that’s what I have to do with everybody.”

I took the elevator down two floors to criminalist detail. The receptionist confirmed Phil Oref was there. I signed in, and she buzzed me through the security door.

As I went down the hall I saw a technician making tool marks on wood to see what they looked like, then glanced into ballistics, where they were testing guns. While the state crime lab has lots of scientists, criminalists are sworn officers, so you get to know them cop-to-cop. Sometimes you can ask a favor.

I shook Phil’s hand, and we talked about the case for a few minutes.

“Know when we’ll get the fingerprints on the Dumpster gun, the murder weapon? We need them pronto.”

“You need everything pronto. Bates is on those. He’s way behind.”

“It’s urgent!”

“Like always. Something else on your mind, Detective?”

“I have a confession to make,” I said. “Keep it confidential?”

“Long as it’s not murder.”

“Last week, at the professor’s house, the murder scene … you remember?”

“Be a while before I forget that one.”

“Anyway, I got this terrible itch on my palm.”

Phil held up his hands like stopping traffic. “You’re not going to tell me you took off a glove?”

“Just for a second. Right then I saw something on the floor, by the couch, and instinct kicked in … I picked it up.”

He whistled. “You contaminated evidence.”

I produced the sealed bag.

“Gum wrapper?
Black Jack?
I didn’t know they still made this stuff.”

“They didn’t for a long time.”

“What was that other one, you know, um …?”

“Beemans?”

“No.”

“Clove?”

“Yeah. They still make Clove?”

“You’re talking to an expert. Every three years they produce Clove and Black Jack and Beemans too. I stock up on Black Jack.”

“You’re chewing it right now, aren’t you? I can smell it. You sure it didn’t just fall out of your pocket at the professor’s?”

“That’s what I’ve been wondering.”

The truth is, I knew I had no gum that night. No way it fell out of my pocket. But this isn’t something you tell the criminalist.

“What you want?”

“I know these wrappers can hold a print.” I nodded toward the bag.

“Usually inside the wrapper, the white part. You want me to run it for you outside the system, that it? Don’t want it officially entered as evidence?”

“As long as it just shows my print, either I contaminated it or just dropped it. But if someone else’s print comes up …”

“Okay, Detective, I won’t tell on you. We all make mistakes. Even Mr. Have-you-checked-the-keyboard-for-prints? I probably won’t even tell anyone you ate the corpse’s Snickers bar.”

“You said you checked it for prints. It was unopened, so no saliva. Why waste it?”

“There’ve got to be rules against eating evidence. I should ask the chief. You not only contaminated evidence; you removed it from the crime scene. You’re a piece of work, Chandler.”

“You remember that journalist, Abernathy? If I’d told people what happened, it’d be in the paper, and we’d all look bad.”

“You’d look bad.”

“Not just me. CSI team had been all over the part of the room where I found the wrapper. I shouldn’t have picked it up, but that never would’ve been an issue if you guys had done your job.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“If I dropped it, okay, you’re clear. But if it was already there, you guys should have seen it. While we’re at it, I could mention how on the Danny Stump case you forgot to take prints from the orange juice glass, and on the Eric Wood case you knocked the houseplant on the bloodstained carpet.”

“It was 3:00 a.m. I was tired!”

“It’s
always
3:00 a.m., Phil. We’re always tired. Anyway, check out the gum wrapper for me. And get it back to me directly. ASAP.”

“You guys always want it yesterday.”

“Today would be fine.”

“Tomorrow’s Thanksgiving. After that, we’ll see.”

“Remember, this is just between us, okay?”

When I returned at three, Clarence was at my workstation, looking over the crime scene notes and lab reports.

“Insulin bottles have an expiration date on them,” he said without saying hello. “What’s the date on that bottle you found in the professor’s fridge?”

I called the evidence room, and five minutes later Wanda had the bag and said, “Let’s see, expiration date is … wow.”

“What?”

“It expired in June … nine and a half years ago.”

When I told Clarence he said, “You can use it a few months after expiration. A year’s pushing it. Nearly ten years? Nobody’d keep it that long.”

“Nice catch, Abernathy. There has to be a reason somebody held on to it. Could’ve been found in a drawer that hadn’t been cleared out for years. But once you find it, why keep it? Why not toss it?”

“You know how I said that big syringe reminded me of the ones I used to have? I’ll bet it’s as old as the insulin.”

“We figure out where that insulin and needle came from,” I said, “and why someone held on to them ten years … and why they’d bring them to the murder scene and leave them there … we’re in business!”

“Guess what,” Sergeant Seymour said, leaning down over my desk, where I could see the hairs climbing out his ears. “The chief wants to meet with you, me, the lieutenant, and the captain.”

“I talked to you, what, two hours ago? Word travels quickly.”

“You know the drill. If it affects the larger police force, I have to take it to the lieutenant. He took it to the captain, and you know who he took it to. Now the four of us get to have a meeting. Thanks for messing up everybody’s day before Thanksgiving!”

“Chief’s office?”

“He’s coming here. Fifteen minutes.”

“But I was supposed to—”

“Doesn’t matter. Drop it. You think the rest of us were doing crossword puzzles?”

Fifteen minutes later, Sarge called me into a conference room. Immediately in front of me sat Lieutenant Taylor Nicks, a bead of sweat on his forehead, which gravity was toying with. To my right was Captain Justin Swiridoff, expressionless. To my left was Chief Edward Lennox, in a suit worth more than the combined value of all clothing I’d bought in the last five years.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Lennox asked.

Sergeant Seymour gestured for me to sit. I examined the chair. It didn’t have straps and electrical wiring, so I sat.

“I’m doing what I always do. I’m going where the evidence points. I don’t know how to do detective work any other way.”

“You’d better learn another way,” Lennox said. “You realize what you’d do to this department if you send the message that
one of our own
killed a popular college professor?”

“What difference would it make if he was a college professor or a plumber or a homeless guy? And why does it matter if he was popular?”

“You’re trying to goad me. My point is you can’t just go off, head over heels, like a chicken with its head cut off. We just can’t afford more bad publicity. And the worst publicity I can imagine is acting as if one of our own murdered someone!”

“Nobody’s
acting as if
. It’s a working hypothesis. If it turns out to be wrong, I’ll be thrilled. I’m just saying that’s where the evidence seems to point.” I stood up, stretched my torso, then sat back down when I saw the looks. “Doctors, lawyers, accountants, teachers, and grocery clerks have all killed people. Why not a homicide detective? Who’d be better at it? The more murders you’ve worked on, the more you know about murder. And how you can get away with it.”

“Inconceivable,” Lennox said. Captain Swiridoff nodded vigorously. Lieutenant Nicks nodded moderately. Sarge nodded slightly. The higher in the chain of command, the greater the head movement.

“Why is it inconceivable?”

“How can you even ask that question?” Lennox rubbed his moist gray forehead, swirling his makeup. “Captain? Lieutenant? Sergeant? Can you tell this man why it’s just
unthinkable
?”

“We have good people here,” Swiridoff said. “Our detectives solve murders; they don’t commit them. Chief’s right. The public would eat us alive if we tagged a detective.”

“Wouldn’t they eat us alive,” I asked, “if we looked the other way because we knew he was one of us?”

“Lieutenant?” Lennox’s voice sounded whiny.

“The evidence can be interpreted different ways,” Nicks said. “There’s no proof it’s one of the detectives. We should operate on the assumption it’s not. Trace down all the other leads first. Naturally, everything’s complicated by your friend Abernathy working with you.”

“It wasn’t my idea.” I stared at Lennox, whose lower teeth were moving out and back against his upper lip.

“If the newspaper gets an inkling of what you’re thinking,” Swiridoff said, “it could tear apart the department.”