Innocence (26 page)

Worst of all, he smelled. Bad. Bad enough that he could smell himself, and he knew that if he was ripe enough to self-offend, people around him must be fighting back their gag reflexes.

Still, there was little he could do at this point. The downward spiral had picked up too much speed, and it seemed all he could do now was watch the world spin wildly out of control around him on his descent. He’d hoped, briefly, that he might be able to climb out of the hole he’d dug for himself, but when he’d heard that Salazar had survived the events of yesterday morning, he realized he was in too deep to be saved.

All he could do was avoid the concerned and disturbed stares of his colleagues as he passed them in the squad room.
Fuck them all, anyway
, he thought. They’d never really cared about him in the first place. He’d been on top for such a long time, and all of them had just been waiting for him to stumble. Now their prayers had been answered, but he wasn’t about to give them the satisfaction of acknowledging their pity.

He got to his desk, having survived his walk of shame, and looked down at the stack of case files and unanswered phone messages piled high. He pushed the messages around, looking to see whether it was there. He knew it would be, but he had to make sure.

It was the third one from the top: no name, just a number. It was a number he knew well; a number he’d grown to dread. He sat down and placed the call.

“Hello?” Carlos’s voice was familiar and yet somehow different.

“It’s Mac.”

“I’ve been calling.”

“I’ve been busy.” Mac tried to infuse his voice with steel, but it sounded more like tinfoil.

“Our problem has not been solved.”

“Yeah, I know. I’ll take another run at it shortly.” In reality, Mac wasn’t sure he had the juice to even organize another attempt on Salazar’s life. It didn’t matter; they would never take him up on his offer. This was all for show.

“We’ve decided to handle this ourselves.”

“The lawyer?”

“That’s no longer your concern, is it?”

“Right.” Mac swallowed the air in his lungs.

“Cheer up,
amigo
. All is not lost, and our problem can still be solved.” The voice was understanding.

“I tried,” Mac said. Could he get more pathetic?

“We know. We should talk early next week. We have another security issue in one of our operations. It may be the sort of thing you would be useful in taking care of.”

“Sure,” Mac said, grasping at the thin reed. “Sure. That sounds good. No problem.”

“We have worked together for a long time.”

“We have.”

“Get some rest, and don’t worry about this other matter.”

“Okay, I will. Thanks.” The line went dead.

It was the tone of Carlos’s voice that was the tell. He’d been friendly. He’d been kind. He’d been reassuring. That was how Mac knew he was a dead man. They wouldn’t wait until next week, either. They might be lying in wait for him already, down in the parking lot, or standing silently in a closet at his home. Ready to jump from any dark corner. They were waiting with their long blades aching to slide into his soft, round belly, underneath his rib cage, taking his breath away and silencing him quickly, but allowing him to survive for a few minutes as they put the blade to further, terrifying use. He thought about the pictures of Mark Dobson and felt dizzy.

“Mac? You okay?” It was Koontz. He tried to smile, but it was pointless. “You look really awful,” she said.

Mac opened his mouth to respond, but he couldn’t speak. His jaw floated up and down, his bubbly lips wagging, but no sound came out. He tried to force the air out of his lungs without success. Suddenly, he felt the panic fully take hold, and before he knew what was happening, he vomited onto his desk.

z

Jimmy Alvarez had watched the lawyer, Scott Finn, for a day and a half. It wasn’t enough time. Not really. Not to do it right. He’d been told that endlessly by the ruthless men he’d hired in the past to take care of messes such as this—you had to plan carefully and make sure you knew your target’s patterns so you could pick a place with no crowds around. Someplace where escape was guaranteed.

He’d been told that on the other side of the border, in Mexico, it was easy. Murder and kidnapping were practically part of the economy, and even the police could be convinced to turn a blind eye if the payment was large enough. Here in the States, it was different. Here you couldn’t count on people looking the other way. Here you needed to pick the right spot.

Not that he had any firsthand knowledge of such things. He was a businessman. At least that was how he thought of himself; he had never needed to take a life personally. The thought of it made him sweat. Killing carried with it a permanence and a threat of divine retribution that he was still unable to fully comprehend.

And so he waited, telling himself that the delay was all about the logistics. That was a rationalization, he knew. The reality was that he wasn’t sure whether he could go through with it. He had little choice though. Carlos was not a patient man, and if the job was not done and done quickly, Alvarez would be dealt with severely, no matter how valuable he was to VDS’s operations.

And so he sat outside Scott Finn’s offices. Waiting and watching and building up his courage.

z

Lissa Krantz stared at Finn from across the office. She had never seen him so down before. There seemed little for them to do at this point. Their own fingerprint expert had come back with a damning report, and getting Steele to change her story had been a nonstarter. The trip to the fingerprint unit had been an interesting look into the laxity with which the BPD approached fingerprint evidence, but without more, it seemed a dead end. There was little left to follow up on, so the three of them had spent the morning inventing tasks for themselves. Finn was doing additional online research on DNA testing. Lissa was checking over the legal research she’d done earlier, which she already knew to be complete and accurate. Kozlowski had disappeared into his office as soon as he’d arrived and hadn’t so much as poked his head out.

Just thinking about Kozlowski brought a secret smile to her lips. They made an odd pair, there was no question of that. And yet everything seemed so natural with him, so easy and comfortable. He was everything she had expected and more. Quiet, funny, strong, taciturn, and above all else, trustworthy. He was a rock, and she was falling in love.

She shook her head in wonder, then turned her attention back to Finn. “Whatcha doin’ over there, boss?”

He didn’t look up. “Going over the research on DNA testing.”

“Again?”

“Yes, again.” The frustration was evident in his voice.

“Just fuckin’ asking.”

“Ask all you want; the answer’s the same. I’m going to keep going over and over every aspect of this case until I find whatever it is that we’re missing here.”

She stood up and walked over to him, standing in front of his desk. He kept his head buried in his work.

“We’re going to lunch,” she said.

He grunted. “Fine. Have a good time.”

“Not me and Koz, me and you.”

He looked up at her finally. “I need to keep working. So do you, for that matter.”

“You need to take a break, and so do I.”

“Our client is in jail.”

“Hey, no shit, thanks for the update. You think I don’t know that our client is in fuckin’ jail? You think all three of us in this office aren’t doing everything we can to get him out? But here’s a fuckin’ news flash for you: Salazar’s gonna be in jail tomorrow, too. And the next day and the next day. Chances are, he’s gonna be in jail for the rest of his fuckin’ life, no matter what you do. You, on the other hand, are not in jail. And you’re not gonna be in jail tomorrow or the next day. You’ll probably never be in jail for the rest of your sad, sorry life—a life, by the way, that may be cut short by one of your angry employees if you don’t stop being such a moody shit. Now get up off your bony little ass, get your coat and hat, and join me for some fuckin’ lunch, okay?”

He stared at her. “I don’t have a hat.”

“You really want to fuck with me? I’ll give you two seconds.”

Finn stood up, walked over, and pulled his coat off the hook near the hole Charlie O’Malley had punched through the wall. Putting his coat on, he went to the door and opened it. “You coming?” he asked. “I want to get back quickly; I’ve got a lot of work to do.”

She put on her own coat and walked past him. “You’re pushing your fuckin’ luck with me, you know that, right?”

z

Deep down, Finn was relieved to get out of the office. The hopelessness of the Salazar case had seeped into his blood like sepsis, paralyzing him. All he could do was keep covering the same ground over and over again, and that was getting him nowhere. As guilty as he felt unchaining himself from the case even for a moment, it was nice to clear his head.

They walked over to O’Doul’s and took a booth in the back corner, and by the time the waitress set his plate of scrod on the table in front of him, enough of the stress had fled his shoulders that he could roll his neck normally for the first time in days.

“So?” Lissa asked as he dug into his fish. She picked at her Cobb salad.

“So what?” he replied with his mouth full.

“So what the fuck is going on with you?”

“Nothing.” He could feel his shoulders tightening again, just slightly.

“Bullshit, nothing. There’s something going on with you and this case, and I don’t understand it. You’ve had a dozen criminal cases since I started here, and some of those were guys who, near as I could tell, you actually were friends with at some point in your life. Some of those guys went to jail, and you didn’t seem to give a shit. I mean, you clearly hated losing, but it wasn’t like you took it personally. Now this guy you don’t know, who has already been in jail for fifteen years, shows up and turns you into a basket case. What the fuck is that?”

He pushed the brussels sprouts that had been served with the fish to the side of the plate. “I can’t explain it, so I’m not even going to try.”

She kept looking at him, clearly waiting for him to say more. She would make a good lawyer once she passed the bar, but he’d been playing the game a little too long to be drawn out by her silence. She finally gave up.

“So what’s the deal with your personal life?” she asked, changing focus.

“Not sure what you mean,” he lied.

“Oh, sure you do. You still seeing this woman down in D.C.? You seeing anyone else? What’s going on with that whole part of your life?”

“Are you hitting on me again?” He chased the last piece of fish around the obstacle course of brussels sprouts.

“Fuck you.”

“Sounds like a yes to me.”

“That’s definitely not a yes. Has it ever occurred to you that maybe you wouldn’t be so caught up in this case if you had something—anything—else in your life? A good woman has been known to do wonders for a man’s attitude. A bad woman can do even more. You should think about it.”

“Don’t go getting maternal on me or anything, okay? It doesn’t suit you.”

“Fuck you,” she said. “I can be just as maternal as the next woman. Eat your fuckin’ vegetables. See?”

He tipped his hand back and forth in a skeptical gesture. “Needs a little work, to be honest.”

“Fine. You can make fun of me all you want, but I can spot a guy who’s in desperate need of getting laid from a mile away.”

“Ah, yes. The true sign of a solid maternal instinct.”

“Like you’d know, asshole.”

He gave a conceding look. “Fair enough. My experience with mothers is at least one shy of most people. Growing up in orphanages and foster care might have skewed my point of view.”

“Is that why you keep fucking up this thing with what’s-her-name in our nation’s capital?”

“I’d like to think I haven’t actually fucked it up. Hope springs eternal.”

“Sounds like the mantra of a truly lonely man.”

“Touché, but in this case, there isn’t a whole lot I could do. She left. She got a job offer she couldn’t turn down, and now we live four hundred miles apart. That seems like an easier concept to grasp than some Freudian psychobabble bullshit about my never having had a mother, don’t you think?”

“Not really. Seems to me you could have gone with her.”

Finn frowned. “What do you mean? My life is here.”

“What life?”

“That’s just mean.”

“I’m not trying to be mean, I’m trying to be serious. You’ve got no family. Near as I can tell, other than Koz, you’ve got no friends. All you’ve got is your job.”

“I like my job.”

“Finn, it’s a fucking job. And to be honest, lots of times it’s a really shitty job. Plus, you could actually do it in D.C. My understanding is they use lawyers down there, too. So what the fuck is your problem?”

His head was beginning to hurt, and his shoulders were back up around his ears. “Can we talk about something else?”

“No, we can’t. I’m really worried about you. How much have you slept in the past four days?”

“I told you before, sleep is overrated,” he replied.

She rolled her eyes.

“Look,” he tried again, “one way or another, this Salazar thing is going to be over in less than a week. All I’ve got to do is make it until then, and things will go back to normal, right?”

“Will they?”

“They will,” he assured her. “But for the next five days, this case is all I’m thinking about. I have to give it everything I’ve got, even if it comes close to killing me.”

She nodded grimly. “If you say so. Do you have any idea where to go with the case from here?”

He considered the question. Their conversation was the longest he’d gone without thinking about the substance of the case since Dobson had been killed. Now, as he came back to it, his perspective seemed to have shifted slightly, as though he were looking at it from a new angle. Something seemed misaligned. “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “Something bothers me about the night Steele was attacked.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. I can’t put my finger on it.”

“That’s it? That’s all you’ve got? Something bothers you about a night when a woman was shot and sexually assaulted? That’s the key to the case?” Lissa sounded disappointed in him.