Diehl, William - Show of Evil (3 page)

She was early this morning. In forty-five minutes she would be
face-to-face with James Wayne Darby, and while it wasn't a courtroom,
the interrogation was the next best thing, a chance to match wits with
the flabby, smart-alec chauvinist. She would take a few last minutes to
prepare herself mentally for the meeting.

Naomi Chance had beat her there as usual. The coffee was made in
Vail's giant urn, and she was at her desk ready to do battle when
Parver burst in at eight-fifteen. Naomi was always the first to arrive,
walking through the sprawling office, flicking on lights before making
Vail's coffee. Her look was regal and intimidating. She was a stunning
ramrod-straight woman, the colour of milk chocolate, almost
Egyptian-looking with high cheekbones and wide brown eyes, her black
hair cut fashionably short and just beginning to show a little grey. A
widow at fifty, she had the wisdom of an eighty-year-old with the body
of a thirty-year-old. She was a quick learner and a voracious digger.
Give her a name and she'd come back with a biography. Ask for a date
and she'd produce a calendar. Ask for a report and she'd generate a
file. She could type 80 words a minute, take shorthand, and had earned
her law degree at the age of forty-six. Her devotion to Vail superceded
any notion of practising law. She had taken care of him from the
beginning, knew his every whim; his taste in clothes, movies, food,
women, and wine; and was, without title, his partner rather than his
associate prosecutor, a title he had invented for her because it was
nebulous enough to cover everything and sounded a lot more important
than executive secretary. Naomi gnawed through red tape as voraciously
as a beaver gnaws through a tree bole, had no use for bureaucratic
dawdling, knew where to find every public record in the city, and acted
as surrogate mother and a friendly crying shoulder for the youthful
staff Vail has assembled. If Vail was the chief of staff, Naomi Chance
was the commanding general of this army.

Parver was the youngest and newest member of what Vail called the
Special Incident Staff - better known around town as the Wild Bunch -
all of whom were in their late twenties and early thirties, all of whom
had been 'discovered' by Naomi, whose vast authority included acting as
a legal talent scout for the man they all called boss.

Shana Parver was the perfect compliment to Naomi Chance. She was not
quite five-two but had a breathtaking figure, jet-black hair that hung
well below her shoulders, and skin the colour of sand. Her brown eyes
seemed misty under hooded lids that gave her an almost oriental look.
She wore little makeup - she didn't need it - and she had perfect legs,
having been brought up near the beaches of Rhode Island and
Connecticut, where she had been a championship swimmer and basketball
player in high school. She was wearing a black suit with a skirt just
above the knee, a white blouse, and a string of matched pink pearls.
Her hair was pulled back and tied with a white bow. Dressed as
conservatively as she could get, she was still a distracting presence
in any gathering, a real traffic stopper, which had almost prevented
Vail from hiring her until Naomi pointed out that he was practising a
kind of reverse discrimination. She had graduated
summa cum laude
from Columbia Law School and had made a name for herself as assistant
prosecutor for a small Rhode Island county DA when she applied for a
job on the SIS. Naomi had done the background check.

A rebellious kid who had made straight A's without cracking a book,
Parver had raised almighty hell and flunked out of the upscale New
England prep school her parents sent her to. Accepted in a tough,
strict institution for problem kids, she had made straight A's and from
then on had been an honour student all the way through college and law
school.

'What happened?' Naomi had asked in their first face-to-face
interview.

'I decided I wanted to be a lawyer instead of a big pain in the
ass,' Parver had answered.

'Why did you apply for this job?'

'Because I wrote a graduate piece on Martin Vail. I know all his
cases, from back when he was a defence advocate. He's the best
prosecutor alive. Why wouldn't I want to work for him?'

She had had all the right answers. Naomi's reaction had been
immediate.

'Dynamite.'

Vail had expected anything but the diminutive, smart, sophisticated,
and aggressive legal wunderkind.

'I want a lawyer, I don't want to give some old man on the jury a
heart attack,' he had said when he saw her picture.

'You want her to get a face drop?' Naomi had snapped.

When Parver stepped out of the lift and walked resolutely towards
his office for her first interview, Vail had groaned.

'I was hoping the pictures flattered her.'

'There's no way to unflatter her,' Naomi had offered. 'Are you still
going to hold her looks against her?'

'It's not just looks. This child has

The office where prosecutors conducted interrogations and
depositions was on the third floor of the courthouse, a floor below the
DA's headquarters. It was sparsely furnished: a table, six wooden
chairs, an old leather sofa and a chair in one corner with a coffee
table separating them. There was a small refrigerator near a window. A
Mr Coffee, packets of sugar and dry cream, and a half-dozen mugs were
neatly arranged on its top. The view was nothing special. No telephone.
It was a pleasant room without being too comfortable. The room was also
bugged and had a video camera in one corner that was focused on the
table.

Vail and Parver were waiting when Paul Rainey and James Wayne Darby
arrived. Rainey was a deceptively pleasant man. Tall, slender, his dark
hair streaked with grey, he wore gold-rimmed glasses and an expensive
dark blue suit and could have passed for a rich, Texas businessman.
Darby was his antithesis, an ex-high school baseball player gone to
seed: six feet tall, thirty pounds overweight, and sloppily dressed in
jeans, heavy hiking boots, a flannel shirt, and a camouflage hunting
jacket. Cheap aviator sunglasses hid his dull brown eyes. His
dishwater-blonde hair was cropped too close and he had a beer drinker's
complexion, a beer drinker's stomach, and a beer drinker's attitude. He
was thirty-eight but could easily have passed for a man in his late
forties. A farmer from Sandytown, a small farming community of four
thousand people on the north end of the county, he had shot his wife to
death with a shotgun after claiming she first tried to kill him.

Everyone on the team believed he had murdered his wife, but they
could not prove his story was phony. There were some damaging
circumstances, but that was all they were: circumstances. He was having
a fling with a stripper named Poppy Palmer. He had insured both himself
and his wife for $250,000 six months before the shooting. And the
previous two years had been a disaster. Darby, on the verge of
bankruptcy, was about to lose his farm.

But there were no witnesses, so there was no way to challenge him.
His story, supported by the bovine Miss Palmer, was that a hysterical
Ramona Darby had called Palmer an hour or so before the shooting and
threatened to kill both Darby and Palmer. A slip of paper with Palmer's
number had been found near the Darbys' phone.

Vail did the introductions, which were cordial enough. Vail and
Parver sat with their backs to the camcorder and Darby sat across from
them, slouching down in his chair and crossing his arms over his chest.
He kept the hunting jacket on. Rainey laid a slender briefcase on the
table and stood behind his client, leaning on the back of his chair.

'Okay,' he said. 'Let's get this over with.'

Vail smiled. 'What's the rush, Paul? Plenty of coffee. You can
smoke. Nice view.'

'Martin, I've advised my client to cooperate with you people this
one, last time. He's been interrogated twice by the police - once for
six hours - and previously by your department for three. He's not
accused of a thing. This is beginning to feel a little like harassment.
I want an agreement that this is a voluntary interrogation and that all
formal requirements in connection with such are waived. Also this
statement, or series of statements, by my client does not constitute a
formal deposition or a sworn statement.'

'Are you implying that he can lie to us with complete immunity?'
Parver asked.

'I am saying that Mr Darby has agreed to cooperate with you in this
matter. You can take his statement at face value.'

'Do you have any objections if we videotape the inquiry?'

Rainey thought for a moment. 'Only if we get a complete copy of the
tape and you agree that it will not be used as evidence in a court case
and will not be released to the public.'

Parver nodded. 'Acceptable.'

'Then it's acceptable to my client. We haven't got a thing to hide.'

Vail pressed a button under the table and started the camcorder.

John Wayne Darby said nothing. He stared across the table at Vail
and Parver, his lips curled in a smirk.

Parver opened a file folder and took out a pencil. 'Are we ready?'
she asked, trying to smile.

'Any time, little lady.'

She glared at him but did not respond. 'Please state your full name
and address.'

'Sheee

Harvey St Claire was on to something.

Vail could tell the minute he and Parver got off the lift. The
heavyset man was sitting on the edge of a chair beside the main
computer, leaning forward with his forearms on his thighs. And his left
leg was jiggling. That was the tipoff, that nervous leg.

Sitting beside St Claire was Ben Meyer, who was as tall and lean as
St Claire was short and stubby. Meyer had a long, intense face and a
shock of black hair, and he was dressed, as was his custom, in a
pinstriped suit, white shirt, and sombre tie. St Claire, as was
his
custom, wore a blue and yellow flannel shirt, red suspenders, sloppy
blue jeans, heavy shoes, and a White Sox windbreaker.

Meyer, at thirty-two, was the resident computer expert and had
designed the elabourate system that hooked the DA's office with HITS,
the Homicide Investigation and Tracking System that linked police
departments all over the country. St Claire, who was fifty-two, had,
during his twenty-eight years in law enforcement, tracked moonshiners
in Georgia and Tennessee, wetbacks along the Texican border, illegal
gun smugglers out of Canada, illegal aliens in the barrios of Los
Angeles and San Diego, and some of the meanest wanted crooks in the
country when he was with the US Marshal's Service.

Meyer was a specialist in fraud. It was Meyer who had first detected
discrepancies that had brought down two city councilmen for
misappropriating funds and accepting kickbacks. Later, in his dramatic
closing argument, Meyer had won the case with an impassioned plea for
the rights of the taxpayers. St Claire was a hunch player, a man who
had a natural instinct for link analysis - putting together seemingly
disparate facts and projecting them into
a single conclusion. Most criminal investigators plotted the links on
paper and in computers, connecting bits and pieces of information until
they began to form patterns or relationships. St Claire did it in his
head, as if he could close his eyes and see the entire graph plotted
out on the backs of his eyelids. He also had a phenomenal memory for
crime facts. Once he heard, read, or saw a crime item he never forgot
it.

When Meyer and St Claire got together, it meant trouble. Vail
ignored Naomi, who was motioning for him to come to his office, and
stood behind Meyer and St Claire.

'Here's what I got in mind,' St Claire said. 'I wanna cross-match
missing people and unsolved homicides, then see if we have any overlap
in dates. Can we do that?'

'State level?'

'Yeah, to start with. Exclude this county for the time being.'

'Nothing to it,' Meyer said, his fingers clicking on the computer
keyboard.

'What the hell're you two up to?' Vail asked.

Hunch,' St Claire
said, still watching the screen. His blue eyes glittered behind
wire-rimmed glasses that kept sliding down to the end of his nose.

'Everybody's got a hunch. I had to listen to Abel's hunches all the
way through breakfast. A hunch about what?'

'About this new thing,' St Claire said.

'What new thing?'

St Claire's upper lip bulged with a wad of snuff. Without taking his
eyes off the big screen of the computer, he spat delicately into a
silver baby cup he carried at all times for just that purpose.

'The landfill murders,' he said. 'We're trying to get a leg up on
it.'

'Well, Eckling's got seven days before we officially enter the case.'

'Cold trail by then.'

'Let's wait until Okimoto tells us something,' Vail said.

'That could be a couple days,' St Claire said. 'I just wanna run
some ideas through the computer network. No big thing.'

'Who says they were murdered, anyway?' Meyer said.

'Hell,' said St Claire, dropping another dollop of snuff into his
baby cup and smiling, 'it's too good not to be murder.'

'What's your caseload, Ben?' asked Vail.

'Four.'

'And you're playing with this thing?'

'I don't know how to run this gadget,' St Claire complained.

Vail decided to humour him. 'You can have the whiz kid here until
after lunch,' he said. 'Then Meyer's back on his cases.'

'Can't do much in three hours,' St Claire groaned.

'Then you better hurry.'

Naomi finally walked across the office and grabbed Vail by the arm.
She pointed across the room to Yancey's office.

'He called ten minutes ago. I told him

In the lobby of the Ritz Hotel, the city's three hundred
most-powerful men preened like gamecocks as they headed for the dining
room. They strutted into the room, pompous, jaws set, warily eyeing
their peers and enforcing their standing in the power structure by
flaunting condescending demeanours The State Lawyers Association Board
of Directors luncheon was the city's most prestigious assembly of the
year and it was - for the most powerful - a contest of attitudes. Three
hundred invitations went out; invitations harder to acquire than
tickets to the final game of a World Series because they could not be
bought, traded, or used by anyone else. The most exclusive - and
snobbish - ex officio 'club' in town established who the most powerful
men in the city were. To be on the invitation list connoted acceptance
by the city's self-appointed leaders. To be dropped was construed as a
devastating insult.