Ricochet (5 page)

D
UNCAN DIDN’T NEED THE LIGHTS ON IN ORDER TO PLAY.

In fact, he liked to play in the dark, when it seemed that the darkness produced the music and that it had no connection to him. It was sort of that way even with the lights on. Whenever he touched a piano keyboard, he relinquished control to another entity that lived in his subconscious and emerged only on those occasions.

“It’s a divine gift, Duncan,” his mother had declared when he tried to explain the phenomenon to her with the limited vocabulary of a child. “I don’t know where the music comes from, Mom. It’s weird. I just… I just
know
it.”

He was eight when she had determined it was time to begin his music lessons. When she sat him down on their piano bench, pointed out middle C, and began instructing him on the fundamentals of the instrument, they discovered to their mutual dismay that he already knew how to play.

He hadn’t known that he could. It shocked him even more than it did his astonished parents when he began playing familiar hymns. And not just picking out single-note melodies. He knew how to chord without even knowing what a chord was.

Of course, for as far back as he could remember, he’d heard his mother practicing hymns for Sunday services, which could have explained how he knew them. But he could also play everything else. Rock. Swing. Jazz. Blues. Folk songs. Country and western. Classical. Any tune he had ever heard, he could play.

“You play by ear,” his mother told him as she fondly and proudly stroked his cheek. “It’s a gift, Duncan. Be thankful for it.”

Not even remotely thankful for it, he was embarrassed by his “gift.” He thought of it more like a curse and begged his parents not to boast about it, or even to tell anybody that he had the rare talent.

He certainly didn’t want his friends to know. They’d think he was a sissy, a dork, or a freak of nature. He didn’t want to be gifted. He wanted to be a plain, ordinary kid. He wanted to play sports. Who wanted to play the stupid
piano
?

His parents tried to reason with him, saying it was okay for a person to play sports and also be a musician, and that it would be a shame for him to waste his musical talent.

But he knew better. He went to school every day, not them. He knew he’d be made fun of if anyone ever found out that he could play the piano and had tunes he didn’t even know the names of stored up inside his head.

He held firm against their arguments. When pleading with them didn’t work, he resorted to obstinacy. One night after a supper-long debate over it, he swore that he would never touch a keyboard again, that they could chain him to a piano bench and not let him eat or drink or go to the bathroom until he played, and even then he would refuse. Think how bad they would feel when he shriveled up and died of thirst while chained to the piano bench.

They didn’t cave in to the melodramatic vow, but in the long run, they couldn’t force him to play, so he won. The compromise was that he played only for them and only at home.

Although he would never admit it, he enjoyed these private recitals. Secretly he loved the music that was conducted from his brain to his fingers effortlessly, mindlessly, without any urging from him.

At thirty-eight he still couldn’t read a note. Sheet music looked like so many lines and squiggles to him. But over the years, he had honed and refined his innate talent, which remained his secret. Whenever an acquaintance asked about the piano in his living room, he said it was a legacy from his grandmother, which was true.

He played in order to lose himself in the music. He played for his personal enjoyment or whenever he needed to zone out, empty his mind of the mundane, and allow it to unravel a knotty problem.

Like tonight. There hadn’t been a peep out of Savich since the severed tongue incident. The lab at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation had confirmed that it had indeed belonged to Freddy Morris, but that left them no closer to pinning his murder on Savich.

Savich was free. He was free to continue his lucrative drug trafficking, free to kill anyone who crossed him. And Duncan knew that somewhere on Savich’s agenda, he was an annotation. Probably his name had a large asterisk beside it.

He tried not to dwell on it. He had other cases, other responsibilities, but it gnawed at him constantly that Savich was out there, biding his time, waiting for the right moment to strike. These days Duncan exercised a bit more caution, was a fraction more vigilant, never went anywhere unarmed. But it wasn’t really fear he felt. More like anticipation.

On this night, that supercharged feeling of expectation was keeping him awake. He’d sought refuge from the restlessness by playing his piano. In the darkness of his living room, he was tinkering with a tune of his own composition when his telephone rang.

He glanced at the clock. Work. Nobody called at 1:34 in the morning to report that there
hadn’t
been a killing. He answered on the second ring. “Yeah?”

Early in their partnership, he and DeeDee had made a deal. She would be the first one called if they were needed at the scene of a homicide. Between the two of them, he was the one more likely to sleep through a ringing telephone. She was the caffeine junkie and a light sleeper by nature.

He expected the caller to be her and it was. “Were you asleep?” she asked cheerfully.

“Sort of.”

“Playing the piano?”

“I don’t play the piano.”

“Right. Well, stop whatever it is you’re doing. We’re on.”

“Who iced whom?”

“You won’t believe it. Pick me up in ten.”

“Where—” But he was talking to air. She’d hung up.

He went upstairs, dressed, and slipped on his holster. Within two minutes of his partner’s call, he was in his car.

He lived in a town house in the historic district of downtown, only blocks from the police station — the venerable redbrick building known to everyone in Savannah as “the Barracks.”

At this hour, the narrow, tree-shrouded streets were deserted. He eased through a couple of red lights on his way out Abercorn Street. DeeDee lived on a side street off that main thoroughfare in a neat duplex with a tidy patch of yard. She was pacing it when he pulled up to the curb.

She got in quickly and buckled her seat belt. Then she cupped her armpits in turn. “I’m already sweating like a hoss. How can it be this hot and sticky at this time of night?”

“Lots of things are hot and sticky at this time of night.”

“You’ve been hanging around with Worley too much.”

He grinned. “Where to?”

“Get back on Abercorn.”

“What’s on the menu tonight?”

“A shooting.”

“Convenience store?”

“Brace yourself.” She took a deep breath and expelled it. “The home of Judge Cato Laird.”

Duncan whipped his head toward her, and only then remembered to brake. The car came to an abrupt halt, pitching them both forward before their seat belts restrained them.

“That’s the sum total of what I know,” she said in response to his incredulity. “I swear. Somebody at the Laird house was shot and killed.”

“Did they say—”

“No. I don’t know who.”

Facing forward again, he dragged his hand down his face, then took his foot off the brake and applied it heavily to the accelerator. Tires screeched, rubber burned as he sped along the empty streets.

It had been two weeks since the awards dinner, but in quiet moments, and sometimes even during hectic ones, he would experience a flashback to his encounter with Elise Laird. Brief as it had been, tipsy as he’d been, he recalled it vividly: the features of her face, the scent of her perfume, the catch in her throat when he’d said what he had. What a jerk. She was a beautiful woman who had done nothing to deserve the insult. To think she might be dead…

He cleared his throat. “I don’t know where I’m going.”

“Ardsley Park. Washington Street.” DeeDee gave him the address. “Very ritzy.”

He nodded.

“You okay, Duncan?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“I mean, do you feel funny about this?”

“Funny?”

“Come on,” she said with asperity. “The judge isn’t one of your favorite people.”

“Doesn’t mean I hope he’s dead.”

“I know that. I’m just saying.”

He shot her a hard look. “Saying
what
?”

“See? That’s what I’m talking about. You overreact every time his name comes up. He’s a raw nerve with you.”

“He gave Savich a free pass and put me in jail.”

“And you made an ass of yourself with his wife,” she said, matching his tone. “You still haven’t told me what you said to her. Was it that bad?”

“What makes you think I said something bad?”

“Because otherwise you would have told me.”

He took a corner too fast, ran a stop sign.

“Look, Duncan, if you can’t treat this like any other investigation, I need to know.”

“It
is
any other investigation.”

But when he turned onto Washington and saw in the next block the emergency vehicles, his mouth went dry. The street was divided by a wide median of sprawling oak trees and camellia and azalea bushes. On both sides were stately homes built decades earlier by old money.

He honked his way through the pajama-clad neighbors clustered in the street, and leaned on the horn to move a video cameraman and a reporter who were setting up their shot of the immaculately maintained lawn and the impressive Colonial house with the four fluted columns supporting the second-story balcony. People out for a Sunday drive might slow down to admire the home. Now it was the scene of a fatal shooting.

“How’d the television vans get here so fast? They always beat us,” DeeDee complained.

Duncan brought his car to a stop beside the ambulance and got out. Immediately he was assailed with questions from onlookers and reporters. Turning a deaf ear to them, he started toward the house. “You got gloves?” he asked DeeDee over his shoulder. “I forgot gloves.”

“You always do. I’ve got spares.”

DeeDee had to take two steps for every one of his as he strode up the front walkway, lined on both sides with carefully tended beds of begonias. Crime scene tape had already been placed around the house. The beat cop at the door recognized them and lifted the tape high enough for them to duck under. “Inside to the left,” he said.

“Don’t let anyone set foot on the lawn,” Duncan instructed the officer. “In fact, keep everybody on the other side of the median.”

“Another unit is on the way to help contain the area.”

“Good. Forensics?”

“Got here quick.”

“Who called the press?”

The cop shrugged in reply.

Duncan entered the massive foyer. The floor was white marble with tiny black squares placed here and there. A staircase hugged a curving wall up to the second floor. Overhead was a crystal chandelier turned up full. There was an enormous arrangement of fresh flowers on a table with carved gilded legs that matched the tall mirror above it.

“Niiiiice,” DeeDee said under her breath.

Another uniformed policeman greeted them by name, then motioned with his head toward a wide arched opening to the left. They entered what appeared to be the formal living room. The fireplace was pink marble. Above the mantel was an ugly oil still life of a bowl of fresh vegetables and a dead rabbit. A long sofa with a half dozen fringed pillows faced a pair of matching chairs. Between them was another table with gold legs. A pastel carpet covered the polished hardwood floor, and all of it was lighted by a second chandelier.

Judge Laird, his back to them, was sitting in one of the chairs.

Realizing the logical implication of seeing the judge alive, Duncan felt his stomach drop.

The judge’s elbows were braced on his knees, his head down. He was speaking softly to a cop named Crofton, who was balanced tentatively on the edge of the sofa cushion, as though afraid he might get it dirty.

“Elise went downstairs, but that wasn’t unusual,” Duncan heard the judge say in a voice that was ragged with emotion. He glanced up at the policeman and added, “Chronic insomnia.”

Crofton looked sympathetic. “What time was this? That she went downstairs.”

“I woke up, partially, when she left the bed. Out of habit, I glanced at the clock on the night table. It was twelve thirty-something. I think.” He rubbed his forehead. “I think that’s right. Anyway, I dozed off again. The… the shots woke me up.”

He was saying that someone other than he had shot and killed his wife. Who else was in this house tonight? Duncan wondered.

“I raced downstairs,” he continued. “Ran from room to room. I was… frantic, a madman. I called her name. Over and over. When I got to the study…” His head dropped forward again. “I saw her there, slumped behind the desk.”

Duncan felt as though a fist had closed around his throat. He was finding it hard to breathe.

DeeDee nudged him. “Dothan’s here.”

Dr. Dothan Brooks, medical examiner for Chatham County, was a fat man and made no apology for it. He knew better than anyone that fatty foods could kill you, but he defiantly ate the worst diet possible. He said that he’d seen far worse ways to die than complications from obesity. Considering the horrific manners of death he’d seen over the course of his own career, Duncan thought he might have a point.

As the ME approached them, he removed the latex gloves from his hands and used a large white handkerchief to mop his sweating forehead, which had taken on the hue of a raw steak. “Detectives.” He always sounded out of breath and probably was.

“You beat us here,” DeeDee said.

“I don’t live far.” Looking around, he added with a trace of bitterness, “Definitely at the poorer edge of the neighborhood. This is some place, huh?”

“What have we got?”

“A thirty-eight straight through the heart. Frontal entry. Exit wound in the back. Death was instantaneous. Lots of blood, but, as shootings go, it was fairly neat.”

To cover his discomposure, Duncan took the pair of latex gloves DeeDee passed him.

“Can we have a look-see?” she asked.

Brooks stepped aside and motioned them toward the end of the long foyer. “In the study.” As they walked, he glanced overhead. “I could send one of my kids to an Ivy League college for what that chandelier cost.”