Red Light (41 page)

"Thanks
anyway."

"But
you still want my video of Dad?"

She
nodded.

O'Brien smiled wryly,
shaking his head. "Know what I think? I think I've been had. But being had
by you isn't really so bad."

On their way back out
of the canyon, he was silent. She glanced at him twice, and each time she found
him gazing out the windshield at nothing, or maybe at everything. When he
finally spoke, his voice was quiet and he still didn't look at her.

"You're not
supposed to know this yet, but the chukka boots matched the prints in
Whittaker's kitchen. The blood on them was Whittaker's blood. The toolmarks
from the casing in the flower vase matched ones fired from the forty-five
Wheeler and Teague brought in. And that thing wrapped up in female underwear
was a homemade sound suppressor that fit nicely onto the Colt. It all lined up
just right. It's a made case. Gilliam wanted to celebrate it tonight. He never
liked McNally. He always liked you. I think he feels bad, pushing you out of
the lab like he did."

• • •

Zamorra was the only one
in the detective pen when Merci came back that night after dropping off
O'Brien. It was almost eight.

He was cleanly shaven
as always, dressed in a dark suit as always. He sat upright in his chair, both
hands on the armrests, staring straight ahead. Merci could feel the emotion
steaming off him, but she couldn’t tell what it was: sadness, hatred, ecstasy,
joy?

He said hello without
looking at her, without even moving his lips, it seemed.

She
sat down. "Janine?"

Zamorra said nothing,
so Merci spun in her chair to face her desk, checked her routing bin to make
sure the Records Section slip had be picked up, started to push the message
button on her answering machine, then pulled her finger away and turned again
to Zamorra.

"Paul,
what is it?"

He seemed to snap out
of his reverie. Then he looked at Merci like he'd just that moment become aware
of her.

"I'm
sorry," he said. "The uh . . . yes, Janine. The implants got
infected. They're taking them out right now. Dangerous, because of the
swelling."

"Go.
Go be with her when she wakes up."

"She was in a coma
when they took her away. They don't know she'll come out or not."

"Go
anyway."

He looked at her,
dark eyes hungry and haunted and somehow hopeless. Oh, I am. I just came here
to see you. And to tell you I won't around tomorrow."

"You
could have called, Paul."

"I'm sorry. I
want you to know that. I want you to know you've got a partner."

"I've
got a partner who shouldn't be here right now."

"Look, San Diego
still hasn't finished the CAL-ID run on the kitchen prints from Whittaker's. My
man down there said he'd work all night if he has to. I didn't give them any
exclusionary parameters they're looking male and female, every race and age,
law-enforcement, the works. So it's—"

"It's
going to take time, Paul. Let it take time."

He sighed, closed his
eyes. "Last thing she said to me before she
went
into the coma? 'I
wish this was over, Paul. I wish this was all just over.”

Mike was sitting on
his cot, an uneaten tray of food in front of him. He looked up at Merci and
held her gaze, then he lowered his stare back to the tray.

He
hadn't shaved. His hair was dirty. The orange jail jumpsuit was a size too
small, and his big muscled arms looked wrong in it.

"How are the
girls?"

"Just fine. They
know you're gone."

"I'd
expect that. Dad's going to feed them starting tomorrow. You're done."

"Okay
then."

He
looked at her again, then stood. "Arraignment tomorrow. Bob Rule said
expect Brenkus to ask two million bail. I think I'll be here a while."

"What do you
need?"

Shaking
his head he walked toward her, then stopped a yard away and crossed his arms.
"Well, ten percent of two mil is two hundred grand. I need a father for
Danny, someone to work my dogs, someone to keep the fire going at home. Which
do you want?"

"I'm not your
enemy."

"In
that case, just stand there and look at me. Look at me right in the face, so I
can look at you."

She did. Mike stared
at her for at least a minute.

"Okay," he
said. "I'm satisfied."

She said nothing.

"I
couldn't decide if you were evil or not," he said. "And now I think I
know. I had an interesting conversation with Mrs. Heath. And I found out you'd
been in my home on Monday. Bob Rule spent two hours with her today."

She felt the blood
rush to her face. "I was picking up my jacket."

"You didn't
leave a jacket."

"I realized that
when I couldn't find it."

Merci,
an unpracticed liar, was surprised how convincing she sounded. Even to herself.

He
smiled again, then walked back and sat on the thin mattress. "Sounds to me
like a search without a warrant. You had no permission for entry. No legal right.
I had every expectation of privacy there, and that's the legal issue. An
illegal search voids the one they did yesterday. Everything they found can be
suppressed."

"I
didn't search. They found what they found, Mike. I'd spent time there with you.
I was looking for a jacket. Come on."

"How'd
they find that stuff so fast? I didn't even know where it was, so how did they?
How did Wheeler and fat boy know where to look?

Merci said nothing.

"No,"
he said. "I don't think you're evil.. I think I've been framed and you've
been used to do it."

"Who?"

Mike
shook his head and exhaled sharply. "You're the crack investigator. You
tell me."

A
t home,
Merci checked on her sleeping son, put his cap back on, tucked the blankets
around him and stood there for a minute looking down at his face. She said a
prayer for his well-being. Even though she believed that God only listened once
in a while, it was worth a try. Clark was in the shower.

I didn't search.

There
it was, a lie to the man she'd once loved and respected. But what was worse:
following the evidence, as she had done, or washing her hands too early and
turning the investigation over to Wheeler and Teague? Didn't she
owe
Mike that search?

Due process is what I
owe him, she thought, same as anyone else.

He'd
confessed to killing her. It was a sarcastic, angry, insincere confession, but
he'd made it with no evidence against him. Nothing against him but the woman he
was falling in love with found dead, and a betrayed lover asking him questions.

Because he knew I'd
never believe it, she thought.

She
got the Whittaker and Bailey files from the locked trunk of her car, set them
on her bed. She turned up Tim's monitor all the way, so she could hear him
breathing. She listened to the shower turn off in her father's bathroom, the
clunk of the valve shutting and the grumble of the old pipes.

She
sat crossed-legged on the floor, bowed her head into her hands and listened to
the noisy collisions going on inside her brain: the evidence in Mike's home,
his betrayal and her own. His claim that he being framed and that she was being
used. The unexplained struggle the Whittaker kitchen. The violated crime scene,
the distrust in crime lab, the evidence lost or misplaced there. The letters
sent to Gary Brice, the article that Brice would write.

She
listened to Tim breathing in, Tim breathing out. Then, there the Bailey case:
Jim O'Brien meeting with Patti Bailey the night died, him quitting the force a
few months later, his eventual suicide, note and key to the storage room, home
to evidence damning Bill Owen, Ralph Meeks and Jim O'Brien. Evan, a colleague,
protective of a father he might not have known very well at all. And the
strange way that the cases had become connected through her, by a secret sender
of keys copied love letters.

Noise,
noise, noise.

The phone in Clark's
room rang. She listened to the murmur of his answer. Tim, Jr.'s breathing came
through the amplifier, rhythmic slow.

One thing at a time,
she thought: one foot in front of the other. What
if
Mike had been
framed? If that was true, then someone else entered Aubrey Whittaker's
apartment after Mike left, killed her, began setting up the evidence—the bullet
casing, the bloody prints made the chukka boots. The other evidence Mike had left
himself, as dinner guest and admirer of Aubrey. And later—or maybe earlier—this
framer would have to plant the silencer in the workshop. Where could you get a
casing fired through Mike's Colt? How would you get his boots in order to
bloody them?

Someone who knows his home.

Someone who
shadowed him at the Sheriff's Firing Range, maybe and picked up a casing after
he'd shot?

She thought of Lynda
Coiner. Had she visited Mike at home? How many times? Certainly a CSI was in a
good position to frame a suspect, but
why
? Coiner liked him, she was
doing little favors for him in jail. Cover for him, maybe—but not frame him.
She could even believe Lynda Coiner having a secret passion for Mike. Merci
could imagine them pursuing it together, without her knowledge. But was shy,
professional Lynda Coiner capable of murdering Aubrey Whittaker?

Merci stood and
walked to the window, looked out at the driveway bathed in the harsh glow of
the security lights.

Evan O'Brien had
almost as much opportunity as Lynda Coiner did, but what reason would he have
to frame Mike?

Gilliam himself? What
possible reason for ruining Mike and encouraging Merci to do the dirty work?
Aside from his own longtime crush on her, none that she could see. Would he
kill for that, frame for that? No.

Then, this: Aubrey
Whittaker would not have opened her door for just anyone. There was no place to
hide on the porch. The killer had stood there, bathed in the yellow porch
light, easily visible through the peephole.

It was preposterous.
Coiner and O'Brien were the CSIs. They had been at the crime scene with her,
not long after Aubrey Whittaker had been murdered. Both of them had been at
home when they got the call; both had shown up without hesitation. Gilliam was
venerable, respected, professional.

Preposterous.

A framer would
have to know that they were going to have dinner. A framer would have to know
that they had written letters to each other; have to know where to find them. A
framer would have to know when they were gone, when they were home, what they
were planning, what they were doing. How could a framer know all that? He'd
have to know them both very well. Watched them. Waited. Read their letters,
listened in on their calls ...

Merci heard Tim
whimper, then say something in his sleep. Impressive, how sensitive the baby
monitor was.

If you had a monitor
for Mike and Aubrey you could learn everything you'd need to know to build a
frame.

If you had a monitor for Mike and Aubrey . . .

She found the
telephone company printout of calls made to and from Whittaker's apartment the
last month. She added up the calls made to Mike's work and home numbers, and
the calls received from them. Thirty-two in all. The total elapsed time was
almost 330 minutes. Plenty of time to listen, she thought. To hear them make
their small talk and hatch their plans.

The idea hit her that
Mike's team might have authorized a wireless but she could find nothing about
one in the file she'd copied from vice. She called Kathy Hulet to confirm it:
Mike himself had withdrawn request for a Title 3 wiretap shortly after
Whittaker had agreed to help them. So Whittaker's phone was clean—or was
supposed to be.

Tim,
Jr., sighed. So much louder than the actual sound, she thought.

Merci shook her head
and went to her closet and felt the sudden cold dread wash down over her—the
dread of darkness and cars, the dread being alone and surprised, the dread of
being
wrong about everything, just as she'd been wrong about the Purse
Snatcher. And that had cost Hess his life.

She dressed. Taking
the baby monitor, she went into her father’s room and gently shook him awake.

"I'm going out
for a couple hours. Tim's asleep. I'm setting up monitor in here."

"Where
are you—?"

"Later.
I'll be back, Dad."

She set the monitor
on the floor beside his bed, the volume still on high.

She checked the back
of her car with a flashlight before opening door. She had to get up close to
the glass to see anything but reflect and it gave her the usual fright to get
this close to the glass. Okay, right. She cranked the engine and pulled on the
lights.