Guilty as Sin (70 page)

Their candidates for Accomplice of the Year would be there—Christopher Priest and Todd Childs. The Sci-Fi Cowboys would be there—would Tyrell Mann risk an appearance? Garrett Wright would be center stage with his wife beside him. Karen, drugged and distant, the secrets of her marriage locked inside her seemingly vacant mind.

Ellen would have bet Karen's affair with Paul was what had set the game in motion. It was Wright's motive for choosing Josh, for framing Paul. And Dustin Holloman had been nothing more than a pawn to make Wright look innocent.

But who had orchestrated the second half of the match? And why was Paul Kirkwood suddenly missing if he was guilty of nothing more than adultery?

The questions swarmed around Ellen's brain. She allowed herself a little groan as she rose from her chair and went to the window. Supper-time had come and gone without supper. The lack of fuel was dragging her mood down when she thought it couldn't sink any lower.

She was alone in the office. Beaten, hungry, freezing, old, and alone.

"Don't forget feeling sorry for yourself, Ellen," she muttered as she stretched, then rubbed her hands together to ward off frostbite.

For once she wished Brooks would show up uninvited. But for all she knew, he had jumped sides now that Wright was off. The story of a "good" man triumphing over a prosecutor out to get him would make a much better book than the tale of said prosecutor's failure to get a vicious monster to trial.

"I go after what I want, Ellen North. And I get it."

Then in her mind's eye she saw his face the night before the hearing began, right here in her office.

"I've never been anyone's hero. . . ." Eyes shadowed with old pain, old uncertainty. "Will you try to redeem me, Ellen?"

That look lingered in her mind, until the practical side of her reared up. She was wasting time. She had a whole table of notes and statements to go over. Again. That was what she had wanted this quiet time for. Not for feeling old and alone and sorry for herself. Not for romanticizing about tarnished knights and wounded souls.

The phone rang and she flinched. She let it ring as she ticked off possible callers. It was her mother. It was Megan with the much-needed clue. It was Jay. It was some damned reporter who had wheedled her direct-line number out of Rudy. It was—

"Ellen North," she said, grabbing up the receiver, forcing herself past the apprehension.

"Ellen, Darrell Munson. Sorry it took me so long to get back to you. I just got home from a dive trip off Key West."

Munson. That name clicked slowly into place. Probation officer turned beach bum.

"Thanks for calling back," she said without enthusiasm. The Sci-Fi Cowboys trail had led nowhere but to the Garrett Wright alumni fan club. She couldn't find much hope that this call would be any different from the rest, but she went through the motions, explaining to Munson the situation.

"That's pretty hard to believe," he said, his voice going cold over the line. "I knew Dr. Wright fairly well. Had nothing but respect for the man. I'm not happy to hear you're looking to discredit him."

"I'm doing my job, Mr. Munson," Ellen explained. "The evidence is compelling or we wouldn't be proceeding. If Dr. Wright is innocent, then he has nothing to worry about. He certainly wasn't anyone's first choice as a suspect."

"Yeah, well . . . ," he said grudgingly. "What was it you wanted from me?"

"I wanted to know if you kept track of the kids you had in the Sci-Fi Cowboys program. We're contacting past members as part of Wright's background check."

"I had two the first year the program started; then I got out of Dodge and came down here."

"Tim Dutton and Erik Evans."

"Yeah. Sure, I know where Tim is. He sends me Christmas cards. He's an apprentice electrician up in New Hope. Erik, I lost track of. Last I knew he was at the U studying computers. Really bright kid. Very personable. A minister's son."

"Doesn't sound like your average juvenile offender."

"I don't suppose he was. He had some emotional problems, some problems at home. His mother was in and out of institutions. It all dated back to that business with the neighbor kid when Erik was ten. That kind of trauma would screw up anybody."

"What trauma?"

"He saw a playmate hang himself."

"Oh, no."

"Yeah. It was a bad deal. The kid's mother blamed Erik. She was pretty vocal about it. It was all over the news at the time. I'm surprised you don't remember it. Slater was the kid's name."

Ellen jerked her head up. "Excuse me?"

"Slater. Adam Slater."

A chill washed over her. Adam Slater. Oh, my God.

"Uh—uh—could you describe Erik Evans for me?"

"Last time I saw him, he was five four, five five, slim, blond."

Blond. The part of her brain that specialized in denial grabbed hold of the detail.

"Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Munson," she stammered. "You've been very helpful."

She dropped the receiver before she could recradle it. Erik Evans. The id in the newspaper photo standing beside Wright. Blond, smallish.

Kids grew. People dyed their hair.

She hurried to the conference room and homed in on the file lying among all the others. Her hands were shaking so badly, she could hardly pick through the reports and clippings. She dug front to back, back to front. The article was gone.

Adam Slater.

Reporter for an inconsequential paper. No one had bothered to check press credentials. There were too damned many reporters to sort through, besides, all they were after was news. They were nuisances, irritations, nothing more.

Perhaps it was just coincidence that Adam Slater the reporter from Grand Forks shared a name with a child dead eleven years. A child who ad been playmates with a future Sci-Fi Cowboy.

"You don't believe in coincidence, Ellen," she muttered.

Adam Slater was romancing Phoebe, charming her, winning her over, Ellen had warned her he had an ulterior motive. God, she had never reamed it could be this.

In her mind's eye she saw the note that marked the very page she needed in the book of Minnesota case law in the third-floor library, it is a SIN to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake

Sin. So many of the notes had included references to sin.

Erik Evans was the son of a Methodist minister.

They had been turning over every rock they could find, hunting for Garrett Wright's accomplice, and he had been standing there the whole time, right beside them, taking it all in. He had been along the roadside in the predawn gray the morning Dustin Holloman's body had been found. If she was right, he was the one who had strangled the boy and propped him up against that signpost with a note pinned to his chest, some rise by SIN, and some by virtue fall

Erik Evans. Adam Slater. Garrett Wright's protege.

She had to call Mitch. Slater was likely at the victory celebration, privately gloating. Probably with Phoebe. Oh, God, Phoebe. What if the party was over? What if she was with him? What if Adam Slater decided she wasn't useful anymore?

Dropping the papers she held, Ellen reached for the phone and stopped cold.

Lying across the base of the telephone was a single red rose, its stem entwined with the cord that should have been plugged into the wall jack.

"My sources tell me you've been asking too many questions, Ms.North." He stood in the doorway to the conference room, his dyed hair drooping over one eye. "I think it's time you stopped. Forever."

CHAPTER 35

Light that and you're a dead man," Megan said. Jay paused, lighter halfway to the cigarette dangling from his mouth.

"Haven't I been abused enough?" she said. "Did I survive that beating only to die of lung cancer contracted through secondhand smoke while trying to crack the case?"

Jay pulled the cigarette and set it on the table beside the pack. "Do you realize tobacco is a substantial part of the southern economy?"

"Uh-huh," Megan said without sympathy. "Ya'll might try joining the age of enlightenment sometime in this century. Until that magic moment, you can take your filthy little death stick outside and kill yourself with it."

They had already had this argument three times. Jay had lost each round. He knew he could have pulled rank on her—it was his house, after all—but every time he had ended up taking himself out onto the deck in the frigid fucking cold to stand at the front window glaring in at her. He blamed his ingrained southern manners but knew the truth was that he liked Megan, and she sure as hell had suffered enough.

"You could let me have my way just once," he pouted.

"Quit your whining. I could hit you in the head with a hammer just once, too," she said. Her eyes focused on the file spread out before her. "Have you got any answers back yet on that AOL bulletin board?"

He hit a series of keys, calling up the proper screen on the computer. It had been his suggestion to go into America Online and hit the bulletin boards of alumni groups from the colleges where Garrett Wright had taught. They were hoping a former student might come forward with a nasty long-dead rumor or a memory of some peculiar incident that would give them a starting point.

"Only good stuff from UVA," he said, scanning the replies to his innocuous question—Were you ever a student of Dr. Garrett Wright (psych) and how did you like him? "Salt of the earth. Prince of a guy."

"He's a fucking madman," Megan snapped, throwing down her highlighter. "Can't anybody see that?"

Embarrassed at losing her cool yet again, she glanced at Brooks sideways and tried for humor. "Gee, honey, maybe I need an Excedrin."

He didn't smile. The look in his eyes was too astute for comfort. "Maybe you need a break," he said. "You've been going hard for hours, Megan, and you know you're not up to it."

The tenderness in his voice slipped around her guard. She'd never had any defense against tenderness. Looking away from him, she gathered together the threadbare scraps of her composure.

"I see him slipping away," she said quietly. "He said he would win, and I can't stand the thought of that happening. Don't tell me I need rest. I don't need anything more than I need that bastard's head on a pike."

Jay heaved a sigh and ignored the craving for nicotine. He could see the pressure of this case squeezing Megan like a vise. She was a perfectionist, proud, a control freak like half the cops he'd known. Garrett Wright had broken her physically, and the posttraumatic stress was breaking her mentally.

Garrett Wright, who was a free man tonight.

Ellen was likely taking the news only slightly better than Megan. Ellen, too conscientious, too focused on what she perceived as her responsibility—justice for all. She would take this defeat as a personal affront and dive back into the fight with single-minded determination.

He had wanted to be there for her after the news of the dismissal had come. But it had seemed even more important to stay here with O'Malley, to think harder, dig deeper.

He who skated across the surface of life, never getting involved, always standing back to observe from a distance.

Unbidden, his gaze strayed to the rug in front of the fireplace where he and Ellen had made such sweet, hot love Saturday night.

"I need a drink," he growled, pushing himself up from his lawn chair. "Want one?"

"As well as that would go with the narcotics I'm taking, I'll have to settle for a Coke," Megan said. "With ice, please," she called as he disappeared into the kitchen.

She looked at the sea of paper she had spread out across the long table. Notes, faxes from the colleges Wright had taught for, faxes from half a dozen law-enforcement agencies local to those colleges, faxes from NCIC. And in it all, she had found nothing.

"We can't lose," he whispered. "You can't defeat us. We're very good at this game."

An involuntary shiver rattled through her. The will it took to shut that black box of fear left her feeling weak.

Focus. She needed to focus. Concentration kept her on an almost even keel. She dug out her list of calls and ran down the names, awkwardly marking the ones she would call back in the morning. Contacts she'd made at law-enforcement conferences and in the agents' program at Quantico. Not for the first time since all this had begun, she wondered what kind of life she would be living if she had accepted the FBI field post in Memphis all those years ago. Memphis was a long way from Garrett Wright. But it was also a long way from Mitch and Jessie, and she wouldn't have given them up for anything. Not even for a climate without the word "windchill" in it.