Friction (11 page)

They glared at each other with such intensity, they didn’t see the man’s approach and nearly jumped out of their skins when he knocked loudly on the driver’s window.

Holly slapped her hand over her chest as though to keep her heart from leaping out. She reached for the button to lower the foggy window, but then realized she had to start the car engine first.

When the window went down and Neal Lester’s face appeared, Crawford swore viciously.

Neal, wearing his sternest expression, looked at Holly first, then across at Crawford. “Well, this is interesting.”

T
hey caravanned to an all-night café on the outskirts of town. Crawford was in the lead, Holly behind him, Neal bringing up the rear. Neal had dictated the order so they couldn’t peel off and avoid the meeting, although neither had any intention of doing so.

Customers consisted mostly of long-haul truckers, seated on counter stools, hunched over platters of deep-fried food. Crawford, still in the lead when they filed in, claimed a booth, motioned Holly into one side of it, slid in beside her, and tried not to look peeved when she put the maximum amount of space between them.

Neal sat across from them and, after ordering three coffees from the indifferent waitress, said, “I’ll listen to your explanation for the tête-à-tête, then decide if I need to bring Nugent in and relocate us to an interrogation room at headquarters.”

Holly took umbrage. “It wasn’t a tête-à-tête.”

“I’m the lead investigator of a murder investigation. You’re material witnesses. What were you doing together in the park?”

“I get the feeling you didn’t come upon us by accident,” Crawford said.

“No. I saw the two of you talking on the courthouse parking lot.”

“Hmm. Refresh my memory. What’s the maximum sentence if convicted of talking on a public parking lot?”

Crawford’s taunt had an effect. Neal had to unclench his jaw to speak. “When you left one behind the other, I followed.”

“Why didn’t you just flag us down?” Holly asked.

“Because, judge, your conversation had looked covert, and I wanted to know why.”

He was forestalled from saying more when the waitress returned with their coffees. They declined menus. She ambled away. The coffee mugs went untouched as Neal began speaking low and angrily, now addressing Crawford.

“I followed you as far as the entrance to the park. But just as I got there, I had a series of calls that I had to take and respond—” He stopped suddenly. “I don’t need to explain myself to you. But you need to explain yourselves. You slipped away under cover of darkness and—”

Crawford laughed. “Sorry. It’s just that I’ve never heard anyone actually say ‘under cover of darkness’ with a straight face.”

Neal went on doggedly. “Yesterday you two were adversaries. Tonight you were fogging up car windows. For thirty-three minutes, to be exact.” He shot a glance at Holly. “It’s unethical for you to be discussing his custody petition, and the only other thing you have in common is the shooting.” Back to Crawford, he said, “If your clandestine meeting pertained to that, I need to know.” He sneered. “Or were you just trying to get under her skirt?”

Holly’s body jerked as though he’d shot her. “How dare—”

“Your dead guy in the morgue wasn’t the shooter in the courtroom.”

Crawford’s blunt statement overrode Holly’s outrage, and, as he’d intended, it completely defused Neal. It robbed him of wind and left him looking like a guy who’d just realized that his solid footing was in fact a trapdoor.

Crawford kept his expression implacable, doing or saying nothing to ease Neal’s shock or to help him absorb it. The detective looked over at Holly. “What’s he talking about?”

“Precisely what he said,” she replied tightly, “and I’m afraid he’s right.”

Neal brought his attention back to Crawford. “When did you make that determination?”

“The instant I saw him in the morgue.”

“How?”

Crawford told him.

Neal appeared moderately relieved. “A pierced ear?” he guffawed. “That was your big
voilà
?”

“Small detail. Big
voilà
.”

Neal began to look more concerned and, as Crawford and Holly had done, began trying to construct an explanation. “Amid all the confusion, you just didn’t notice the hole in his ear before.”

Crawford explained how he could have missed seeing it when on the roof. “But I’m as sure as I can be that the man in the courtroom did not have a piercing. Your cadaver does. They’re two different men.” Remembering kicking the gunman, he said, “Look at Rodriguez’s left kneecap. If it has a bruise, I’ll admit to being wrong. If there’s no bruise…” He raised his hands palms up. “It wasn’t Rodriguez who had a bead on me.”

Neal wet his lips, cut his eyes back and forth between Crawford and Holly and ended on her. “You said you’re ‘afraid he’s right.’ That means you’re not sure.”

“Mr. Hunt tested my memory of the shooting from the time the gunman barged through the door.” She gave him a brief rundown. “I was spot-on regarding every other detail. When he mentioned a pierced ear, it prompted an immediate response, which substantiates what Mr. Hunt had discovered.”

“It was a trick question,” Neal argued. “You can’t back him up with one hundred percent certainty?”

She maintained her chilly tone. “This I am one hundred percent certain of. If I didn’t believe he was right, I wouldn’t be sitting here.”

Even if Neal was unwilling to take Crawford’s word for it, he seemed to regard the judge as unimpeachable. His face paled under the fluorescent lighting that hummed from the water-stained ceiling. He pulled a paper napkin from the table dispenser, blotted a sheen of perspiration from his upper lip, then wadded up the damp napkin and tossed it aside. “Why didn’t you tell me when we were in the morgue?” he asked Crawford.

“On the outside chance that I was wrong, I wanted Judge Spencer’s confirmation. I contacted her by phone, but she hung up on me. I had no choice except to ambush her tonight on the courthouse parking lot and insist that she listen to what I had to tell her. That was the reason for our secret meeting.” He paused, then said, “You owe her an apology.”

Looking a bit sickly, Neal said, “I apologize, Your Honor. The insult was aimed at Crawford, not you.”

“Then you also owe Mr. Hunt an apology.”

He knew Neal would rather have his tongue cut out, but the judge had pulled rank and given him little choice.

His eyes not quite meeting Crawford’s, he said, “The remark was uncalled for.”

“Your sincerity is overwhelming, Neal. Not that I give a damn about winning your approval. The only thing I’m after is Chet’s murderer. And it wasn’t Jorge Rodriguez.”

“When I inform the chief that our SWAT team fatally shot the wrong guy, he’ll demand to know why. Can you give me any kind of reasonable explanation for your screwup?”

“Hold on, detective,” Holly said before Crawford could speak. “The man we know as Rodriguez threatened Mr. Hunt with a loaded pistol. He opened fire on a deputy sheriff. Whether or not he was the gunman in the courtroom, he had to be stopped.”

“Thanks, judge, but I don’t need you to defend me,” Crawford said, his eyes fixed on Neal. “I don’t know what happened between the courtroom and the roof, but you saw the videos from the security cameras up there. Rodriguez was acting squirrely. He paid for bad choices with his life, and that’s a goddamn shame. But it’s history. Can’t be undone. Your job now is to figure out—”

“Kindly don’t tell me what my job is.”

“—where the switch was made, why it was made, and how. Was Rodriguez a dupe set up to take the fall? Or did he just pick a bad time to lift a pistol that didn’t belong to him, and then panic when confronted? And the really looming question is, since he wasn’t the shooter, who was?

“Until you have answers to all those questions, Neal, you’re gonna have an outraged public, plus every cop in the long chain of command straight up to the chief gnawing on your ass. Now, throw me under the bus if it makes you feel better. Have at it. I’ve survived worse. But until you solve this thing, it’s
your
butt that’s going to be dog chow. How’s it feel to be lead investigator now, asshole?” He hooked his hand around Holly’s elbow. “Let’s go.”

“Wait.”

Crawford paused in the act of sliding from the booth and dragging Holly with him.

Neal’s pride was wrestling with his better judgment, and the latter won out. “What do you know?”

“Not a damn thing.”

“Then what do you think?”

Crawford hesitated, then scooted back into the booth. When he and Holly were resettled—not as far apart, he noticed—Neal gestured to him that he had the floor.

“I
think
the shooter had the painter’s outfit stashed inside the closet across the hall from the courtroom. He put it on in there and waited until court convened. How long he waited, I don’t know. We figured he slipped in undetected among all those jurors, but he could have been hunkered down in there for hours. CSU has gone over that closet?”

“It’s a custodial closet. Dust cloths, push brooms, mop buckets.”

“In other words, trace evidence out the wazoo.”

“Bags full.”

“We might not be able to put him in the closet, not conclusively enough to satisfy a jury. But we won’t have to. His DNA will be all over the painter’s outfit. Of course, we need a suspect before that does us any good,” he added grimly. “Have you tracked down the supplier?”

“Of the painter’s clothes? Didn’t seem necessary. We thought we had our perp. I’ll put Nugent on that.”

Crawford wondered if Nugent was competent to handle the assignment. He didn’t believe he was clever enough to qualify as a suspect. “Wherever our shooter is tonight, he’s second-guessing leaving all that stuff behind.”

“Why did he?” Holly asked.

Crawford thought it through. “Maybe he heard me in the stairwell and realized I was making my way up. Better to leave the disguise and hope for the best than to be caught with it. Same with the pistol. He risked being apprehended unarmed, but he knew there would be a shakedown of everyone evacuated from the building.” Looking at Neal, he said, “I’m betting there were no fingerprints on the gun.”

Neal shook his head. “Clean. Serial number filed off. We’re waiting on ballistics.”

“I doubt you’ll get a link to any other crime.”

Neal nodded glumly. “Anybody who’d file off the serial number…”

“What about Jorge Rodriguez?” Holly addressed the question to Crawford. “Do you think he was somehow involved?”

“My gut tells me no. You?”

Neal, to whom he’d address the question, looked back at him with perplexity. “I thought we’d determined that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and made a fatal error in judgment, but had nothing to do with it.”

“That’s one possibility, but we haven’t determined a damn thing. Maybe you should start thinking outside the box, Neal. Like maybe the poor son of a bitch was set up as a dupe, a decoy.”

“There’s absolutely nothing to support that theory.”

“There’s nothing that nullifies it, either. We should at least test every theory, don’t you think?”

“
We
?
I thought you couldn’t wait to get away from this investigation.”

“I’ve got Mrs. Barker to answer to,” Crawford said. “As well as your chief. Remember? You want to complain about my participation, take it up with him.”

Neal squirmed with dislike over the reminder, but he couldn’t dispute it.

Crawford said, “You still need to ID Rodriguez ASAP so you can either eliminate a connection to the perp or establish one. And something else—”

“You’re telling me how to do my job?”

“I wouldn’t dream of it. But you need to put everyone who was in the building at the time of the shooting under a microscope. Thoroughly question every person who was evacuated. And you can’t use Prentiss PD or sheriff’s office personnel to conduct the questioning.”

“That’s disqualifying over a hundred officers.”

“Plus one.”

“Who?”

“Where were you at the time of the shooting?”

Neal glared at him.

“Only kidding. But in addition to visitors and people who work in the courthouse, you have to question every law officer and public official. Every-damn-body.”

“Do you have any idea the fallout this is going to create?”

“That’s the least of my concerns. It should be the least of yours.”

“Well, unlike you, I don’t like the hot seat and do everything I can to protect my reputation.”

“That’s one point you don’t have to sell me on, Neal. Ordinarily I wouldn’t give a rat’s ass what your priorities are. But Chet’s killer is at large. To say nothing of the threat our unsub poses to Judge Spencer. I’d say that’s more important than fallout. But that’s just me.”

That sank in. The detective no doubt had more words for Crawford, but he pulled himself together and addressed Holly. “You’ll be under police protection until the perp is captured.”

“As I’ve told Mr. Hunt, I won’t go into hiding. First because of the message it would send to my opponent and constituents. But primarily because I don’t want to give my attempted assassin the satisfaction of seeing me afraid.”

Neal heard her out, then said, “I’m sorry, judge, but I know the chief, mayor, all your colleagues, and especially the governor will agree that you should keep a low profile and have ’round-the-clock bodyguards. I’ll get Matt Nugent on that immediately.”

“I’ve handled it.”

“What?”

Neal and Holly had responded in unison, but Crawford directed his explanation to Neal. “I called our Houston office on the drive between the park and here. Two Rangers have already been dispatched.”

Neal looked like he could have bit a nail in two. “On whose authority?”

“Mine. Which is the only one required. But, figuring you’d get your back up about my interference, I got clearance from my major lieutenant, who, along with the lieutenant in Tyler, happily agreed to your chief’s request that I work the case. We’re back to that, Neal. Sorry you got me out of bed this morning?” He continued before Neal could form a comeback. “Anyway, it’s done. Rangers will be posted to guard her house.”

“What about inside?”

“Forget it,” she said succinctly.

“Nowadays, public officials in major cities, including judges, have guards with them constantly,” Crawford said.

“This isn’t a major city.”

“We’re not arguing about this, judge.”

She backed down, but only to an extent. “All right. But I draw the line at having officers in the house. I made a call on the way here, too. A friend is coming to spend a few days with me.”

“What friend?”

She replied coolly to Crawford’s brusque question. “Someone I trust implicitly.”