First Lady (41 page)

Bunty thought as she dutifully swallowed the pills Rhonda held out to her. “Kristin Stiller was a Swedish national. We go to a f
ederal
judge. If she was a crime victim, the FBI, maybe INS, are involved. Rhonda and I don't even talk to local judges, we don't bother with local police.”

I smiled. “You hot shots don't even know we exist.”

There was a sharp knock at the door to 105. Zeke Caleb stepped inside, or rather was pulled inside by a large, dark short-haired dog.

“Hey there, Geronimo,” Rhonda called to Zeke. “See you finally got your dog. You going K-9 then?” He nodded happily. “What is that, a Malinois Shepherd? I heard about them.”

“That's right,” he said, pulling the big animal back beside him by the short thick leash. “This is what they call an aggressive indicator.”

“He looks it,” Bunty agreed.

“She. Name's Heidi. Speaks Dutch, this dog. Trained in Holland. She knows seventeen commands—I'm starting to learn them.” Zeke yanked the dog back toward him, patted her head. He said something that was presumably “Sit” in Dutch. At any rate, the dog did so. “Justin, you wanted me to tell you if a match came over the dispatch. They just picked up a black Ford Explorer abandoned with its lights on. Registered to a…” He looked at the pad he carried. “Guy named Ferraro. No answer at the residence. Dumfries Court.”

“Where'd they find the SUV?”

“Parking lot of the Rib House Bar on the byways. Kids, huh? What's wrong with them?”

The SUV had been dutifully impounded by the Hillston police and was now in the HPD garage. I phoned the forensics lab down the hall and spoke with Etham Foster. “Doctor D, you can thank young Griffin Pope. I've got your car for you. Place Tyler in it and I'll never call you Doctor Dunkit again.”

“Hang on,” he growled.

It was nearly nine. I was watching Etham Foster's teamwork on the Ford Explorer under the high-intensity lights. They'd already cut out a small square of the gray carpet fibers from under the seat. They'd already photographed the car interior and filmed the removal of the small piece of boxwood that Nancy had seen caught in the wheel frame when she'd looked at the car in the Ferraro garage. Now Etham was removing the evidence that—the minute we saw it—showed us not only that we were right about Tyler Norris but that we'd be able to prove that we were right. We saw cat hairs. Four separate white cat hairs. In their translucent latex gloves, Etham's large hands patiently tweezered each of the short straight hairs from the gray velour seat fabric. He placed them in small round metal evidence boxes.

“You're sure?” Etham asked me again. “You saw a white cat in Margy Turbot's kitchen?”

“I'm sure. It was a big white Persian. It was staying close to the body. It rubbed against my legs just the way it must have done to Tyler's. I bet I got the same hairs on the cuffs of my pants as he did.”

“Bring me your pants tomorrow.”

I said I would.

“And find that cat. What happened, a neighbor took it?”

I admitted I didn't know.

“So find it.” Etham unhooked the accelerator footpad in order to study it under a magnifier. Embedded in one of the treads he found a miniscule speck of blood that might belong to Margy Turbot. I left him with it. He looked as happy as anyone was likely ever to see our dour criminologist.

• • •

It was karaoke night at the Tinwhistle Pub that everybody still called the Tucson Lounge. A skinny man with long yellow sideburns was trying to hold onto a Mavis song (“The Tooth of Time”) that was galloping away from him. A dozen young motorcyclists (complaining loudly about being turned away from the sold-out, standing-room-only Mavis concert tonight) were not only booing the hapless singer for defiling their idol by his poor imitation, but were also throwing onion rings and plastic cups at him. The air-conditioning couldn't compete with the crowd and the place smelled like sweat, beer, and urine. I'd gone to the bar for a quick dinner and, admittedly, for a drink. Now I lit a cigarette, one from the opened pack Brenda Moore had given me. A young woman drinking next to me screamed as the cigarette exploded in my mouth with a loud pop when I lit it. The bartender actually ducked under the edge of the bar, and I had a jolt of adrenaline that may have aged me. “A friend of mine,” I explained. “She's a practical joker. Very anti-smoking.”

“She could get somebody killed, somebody could have a heart attack,” the bartender protested.

“Don't talk about killing,” the young woman beside me said. “I'm waiting for my girlfriend because I'm scared to go out in the streets with Guess Who loose. I think they ought to fire that whole police department, what good are they?”

I decided I didn't like this young woman, finished my scotch (it was at least the right color for scotch), and walked out to the alley to answer my ringing cell phone. It was Lisa Grecco, who wanted me to know she'd be at the Computer Services Office of Haver University at eight in the morning with the subpoena she'd managed to acquire. She'd impound any emails they had on file to or from Tyler Norris. By the way, could Lisa ask me something personal? I said of course and she asked if I knew whether Bubba Percy was seeing anybody seriously? I told her my impression was that Bubba did nothing in his life seriously except comb his hair. Lisa just wondered because she was going out with him later tonight, and she hated to start back up with him if in fact she was just something on the side. Again, I suggested that everything in Bubba's life was on the side.

Lisa's question made me remember that Bubba had, for some reason, wanted me to phone him at eight. It was now after nine and the long lazy summer dusk was finally darkening to night. He answered the phone on the first ring. “Bubba, you wanted me to call?”

“Justin?” Instead of blasting me for being late as I expected, he sounded suddenly shocked and distressed. “Yeah?… Yeah… Oh Jesus, Justin, that's unbelievable.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh, Justin, man, I'm so sorry….It's a big shock.” He appeared to be carrying on an intense conversation with me that I was no part of. He said, “Okay, I'll get right over there…”

“What are you up to, Bubba?” As I asked, I heard someone else, someone very close to his phone, asking the same question, “What's going on?” It was Shelly Bloom. And Bubba was, I suspected, in her bed and trying to avoid hanging around for the afterglow so he could make his date with Lisa Grecco.

Ironically, I'd been thinking of calling Shelly Bloom myself; she'd impressed me with her reportage this morning in the
Star
. She could not only get the story (which few reporters bothered to do anymore), she could write it. I wanted to tell her, and this time it would even be true, that we had a prime suspect—although claiming we were close to an arrest might be problematic. But if we did find a way to collar Tyler Norris, why not let Shelly hand a big coup to her new paper the
Star
? If she was falling in love with Bubba, she was going to need some other ego boost to rely on.

The press secretary was still commiserating with me about whatever he was talking about. “Thanks for letting me know, Justin.… This is real bad news. You hang on. I'll be there as fast as I can.”

I said, “Tell Shelly to call me right away.”

“What? Who?”

But I hung up. I tried to imagine what this fictional “unbelievable bad news” was that I had ostensibly just told him. Maybe that my mother had died. I wouldn't put it past him.

My phone rang again. This time it was Brenda at the dispatch desk. Before I could chastise her for the exploding cigarette joke, she said Dermott Quinn was trying to reach me about something “important.” The Irishman was on one of her lines right now. She transferred me.

I could scarcely hear him. “Where are you, Dermott?”

“Feckin' zoo,” Mavis's dresser said. “Backstage. Haver Field. The eejits let a few thousand too many in and they're hangin' off the bloody lights. Ah, shite! Okay, okay, she's on now.”

Just then I heard the loud long roar of forty thousand human throats, cheering together on a summer's night in an open stadium. Then a wild Celtic burst of drums, fiddles, and flutes.

“Lieutenant,” he shouted, “we can't talk on the phone.” That was certainly unarguable. “Can you come to the stadium then? Ask in security for Bernadette Davey, she'll bring you backstage.”

“What about?” I asked. “Shout. Tell me now.” I didn't have time to hear any more about how I was the type of man he wanted Mavis to marry.

But it wasn't that, or only that by inference. He said, “Somebody got in her feckin' room at the Sheraton. Paul and I came up to her suite after dinner. He's a bodyguard. Since the murder, we make her stay at the bar 'til we check everything out and call her. So we're walking into her sitting room and all of sudden we hear these noises in the bedroom. We run in, door slams, we run to the hall, a feckin' man's running down it.”

“What did he look like?”

“Middle-size. Thirty or so. White man. Had on a cap. Tight black running-like outfit. Her bedroom's a bloody mess. Tore up her covers and left this feckin' chess piece on her pillow. You know, the game chess?”

“Is it the queen? Is the chess piece the queen?” Nothing about the two Costa Rican chess queens had been released to the press.

“Yeah, that's right, the queen. Black queen, from one of those cheap wood sets. Mavis thinks it's a fan goo-gooing about this song she did a while back called ‘Midnight Queen,' but I don't know, I don't mind saying it, I nearly soiled meself.”

I asked if they'd called the police or notified hotel security. But they'd done neither. Mavis had told them not to. “She had a bloody fit. And Mavis in a temper's something you don't feckin' argue with.” She'd said they had a performance to do tomorrow night that was being filmed for a documentary. As soon as it was over, they were flying to Tokyo for another concert. She'd said they didn't have time to get mixed up with the police.

I told Dermott I'd get over to Haver Field before the end of the concert. “If she comes off the stage, stay with her.”

“I'm never not, Lieutenant.” I heard a screaming rumble of cheers and applause, presumably as a song ended. “Oh Jaasuz, got to go.” He hung up.

• • •

Moving through the alley back toward the Cadmean Building garage, I used my cell phone to call John Emory. Roid swore that Norris had never once gotten out of his car the whole time he was tailing him but had just driven aimlessly around Hillston and then returned to his house at four P.M. He checked with the officer who replaced him and called back to say Norris hadn't left the house. His car was still in the garage. As soon as Roid said it, I had an image of Tyler in his doorway in his professional-looking black Lycra sports pants with the thin Italian racing bike leaning against his foyer hall.

“Roid, get over there. Norris went out through the back woods. He's not driving, he's on a bike. A couple of hours ago he broke into Mavis Mahar's suite in the Sheraton.”

Emory paused awkwardly. “Justin, listen. We got a problem. We all just got phone calls from the A.G.'s office telling us the investigation had been shut down and we can't touch Tyler Norris.”

“Roid, he's the killer. Believe me. Call Nancy, tell her what I just told you.” I disconnected, phoned Room 105. When Bunty answered, I told her to get some FBI out to Tartan Drive as fast as she could. She said Rhonda and another agent were already on their way out there with a warrant to search the Norris house. I asked her, “You already got a warrant?”

“We're Feds,” she told me in her soft wry twang. “We don't care about mayors and D.A.s and city councils.”

• • •

I found Cuddy standing under the gaudy yellow awning, looking worried. He wore his khaki suit and Carolina blue tie—his uniform for city council meetings. His new white Taurus was parked beside him at the curb. I yelled at him to drive me to Balmoral Heights, that Norris had tried something else, that the FBI had a federal warrant to search and seize.

As he wheeled us onto Main Street, Cuddy slapped the flasher light from under the seat onto the roof of his car by its suction cup. Quickly as I could, I explained that Norris had broken into Mavis Mahar's hotel suite.

“Why the hell would he mess around with her now?” Cuddy looked at me. “Unless he saw you two together and it's just to get at you. In which case, thank you, Elvis, for keeping Alice in the mountains. And that's all I'm saying on that subject.”

I had another idea as to why Tyler Norris would wish to extinguish Mavis Mahar, but I didn't want to discuss it, or even believe it was true. But it had occurred to me that Mavis had actually seen Norris on the grounds of The Fifth Season at some point in that drunken night when she'd brought Lucy Griggs back to the bungalow, that there'd been if not a brief encounter with Norris at the resort, then at least a glimpse of him. That would make Mavis a witness that Tyler was in the area at the time of a homicide. He may have just realized that she was a witness—perhaps because of Shelly's reporting yesterday in the
Star
that the police had a prime suspect and an arrest was imminent. Mavis had returned to Hillston just before the article's appearance, and maybe he assumed that she'd talked to the police.

If I was right, Mavis had lied to me when I'd first questioned her, and she'd done so in order to protect herself from any involvement in the case. Being a witness in a homicide meant depositions and court appearances and other tiresome responsibilities for which the fast-moving star had no time. I didn't want to think there was a ruthlessness in her as cold and dark as space. A careless self-interest that had helped to cost Margy Turbot her life.

I said none of this aloud, but explained to Cuddy what we'd now set in motion: a search of Norris's house to check for evidence that he'd kept Kristin Stiller's body in a deep freeze. A search to learn whether he and Lucy Griggs had used the Haver email system to correspond. A search to prove that cat hairs found on the seat of the Explorer that he had driven matched hairs of the Persian cat we'd seen in Margy Turbot's kitchen.

Cuddy told me he had gone to see Isaac. Reaching in his jacket he pulled out a rectangular box. “He said Tyler came over to his place the night after they won and smiled the scariest smile he'd ever seen and handed him this box as a thank-you present. He said he now thinks Tyler just couldn't resist boasting about how he'd gotten away with murder and had used Isaac to do it. I'm telling you, the old man was pretty shaken up. Could be he suspected Tyler killed Linsley, but he was totally blindsided by this Guess Who stuff.”

I opened the box. It was full of ribboned marksmanship medals from a place called Stillhurst Academy, most of them first prize medals. Rifle, pistol, trap shooting—there must have been a dozen of them.

Cuddy said, “Right. Tyler Norris testified he never shot a gun in his life. That he had no idea how to load a shotgun. And we didn't catch it.”

I said, “There was no record of his being at Stillhurst Academy. The family must have buried it. Like I told you yesterday, my mom just happened to mention how they sent him somewhere after the fire (which I bet you anything little Tyler started), but she thought it was a Georgia boarding school, not all the way to—this place is in Mississippi! There was no way we could have known.”

Cuddy frowned. “There's always a way if you work hard enough.” We sped off the bypass at the North Hillston exit. “Learned Hand,” he said sadly.