The Four-Night Run (2 page)

2

M
ORTIS
E
X
M
ACHINA

On his rush out of the courtroom in search of the nearest camera, Scrbacek ran smack into Thomas Surwin. The prosecutor’s expression was understandably darker and more pinched than usual.

“I hope you’re proud of your fine work in there,” said Surwin.

“Very.”

“Take my advice, Scrbacek, and watch your ass.”

“Oh, I will,” said Scrbacek, with a wink. “On the evening news.”

The lovely glow of Casinoland was just infiltrating the darkening sky to the east when J.D. Scrbacek stood on the courthouse steps with the cameras on and the heavy white lights picking up his rugged features. His tie was tight; the collar of his raincoat was turned rakishly up. His intern had already been dispatched to drive the Explorer from the parking lot behind the courthouse to the front steps, so as to provide the cameras a view of Scrbacek’s dramatic exit with his client. All was as it should have been, except that his client wasn’t by his side. Surwin had unexpectedly kept Caleb Breest locked up one more night, pending a probation revocation hearing scheduled for the next morning. But still the scene was as near perfect as Scrbacek could have wished when he began to crow to the crowd of reporters.

“The jury’s verdict wasn’t just a victory for Mr. Breest, it was a victory for us all. This was a case without motive or evidence, a case that should never have been brought, a case hatched in the mind of First Assistant County Prosecutor Thomas Sour-Wine simply because he doesn’t like my client. Well, I’m not sure I like my client either, but if that’s enough to put a man in jail and kill him dead, then we all have much to fear.”

He gave good press, Scrbacek, especially on the courthouse steps after a high-profile win.

“Now that Mr. Breest has been found innocent of Mr. Malloy’s murder, I hope the police redouble their efforts to find exactly who committed this horrible crime. My sympathies and the sympathies of Mr. Breest remain, as they have all through this ordeal, with the Malloy family. Nothing that happened in this courtroom can disguise the fact that a man is dead and his murderer still at large. There might be celebrating tonight by Mr. Breest’s friends and associates, there might be fireworks in the night sky over this fine city, but our thoughts will also be with the brave—”

A loud pop, followed by a deafening explosion from behind the courthouse.

The crowd ducked. Some reporters dived to the ground, others threw their arms over their heads as if mortars were incoming. Scrbacek alone remained standing tall, his anger rising at the goons who had started the celebration before he had finished his speechifying. He raised his voice and began again.

“As I was saying, there may be fireworks in the night sky over this fine city, but our . . .”

It was no good. The cameras were off him now. The reporters were running in a pack down the steps, circling the building. TV crews lugged their equipment, straining to keep up. There were calls, yelps, the poundings of hard-soled shoes on cement.

“What I’m trying to say,” Scrbacek shouted to the retreating backs of the media, “what is important to remember . . .” But no one anymore was listening.

Standing alone on the steps of the courthouse, Scrbacek cocked his head at the commotion before following the mob down the steps. People were now running away from the explosion, running madly, with terror etched on their faces, as they passed the reporters. The two groups were shouting back and forth, the reporters heading to the rear of the courthouse and the sane civilians running away.

“What was it?”

“A car, I think.”

“A car?”

“I think. Oh God, it’s a mess.”

“Whose car?”

“Who knows?”

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

Scrbacek stopped and looked up and down the street. He was searching for his Explorer, high and shiny black, with chrome enough to blind on a sunny day, wondering what was keeping his intern.

There was another explosion, soft, muffled, along with a crescendo of shouts. Scrbacek turned. Behind the courthouse the glow of a great spitting bonfire broke through the twilight and, from out of that glow, thick black smoke rose in tortuous billows, even as a horrible thought began to rise within him.

Scrbacek spun around and again searched up and down the street, up and down the street, looking for his SUV, his head twisting ever more desperately. He pulled his phone out of his raincoat pocket and pressed his finger on the reader to unlock the screen when he heard:

“Scrbacek.”

His name, being called by a woman, her voice sharp enough to cut through the shouts, the crackles of fire, the sirens racing their way to the courthouse. Scrbacek turned with a lurch.

Coming at him was one of the State Bureau of Investigation special agents who had worked the Malloy murder with Surwin. The agent was running at Scrbacek full bore, her jacket flapping, her knees driving beneath her gray skirt, her heavy black shoes slapping the pavement. She was a thickly built blonde woman with a pocked face and the muscled hands of a longshoreman. Her name was Dyer, Stephanie Dyer, and she was rushing at Scrbacek like a linebacker on the blitz.

Scrbacek grabbed his phone tight and braced for the blow. But instead of slamming him to the ground, Dyer took hold of his biceps and started yanking him up the stairs.

Scrbacek pulled his arm away.

“Scrbacek,” Dyer said, “we have to get inside.” She gasped for air. “Right away.”

“I’m waiting for my Explorer.”

“It’s gone. We have to get inside.” Dyer tugged at Scrbacek’s arm. “Hurry. You’ll be safer inside.”

“What about my Explorer? What happened to my Explorer?”

“We have to get inside. Now.”

She yanked again at his arm, and this time Scrbacek let Dyer drag him up the stairs and into the courthouse.

In the brutal nights to come, J.D. Scrbacek would wonder if it was a mark of how very far he had traveled in his legal career and in his life that after the explosion he had asked first about his sport-utility vehicle and only later, much later, about his intern, who had been sitting inside.

3

S
TEPHANIE
D
YER

Agent Dyer sat with Scrbacek in a windowless witness room on the third floor of the courthouse. A low-hanging fixture cast a funnel of light upon the Formica tabletop, strewn with ashes, but left the edges of the room in shadow. Two uniformed police officers stood guard outside. It was hot in that room, stuffy, but even in his raincoat and suit jacket Scrbacek was shivering. He had tried to convince Dyer to tell him exactly what had happened behind the courthouse, but instead of information, Dyer offered Scrbacek a cigarette and a light.

Scrbacek put the cigarette in his mouth with a shaking hand and leaned toward the flame. Dyer gently removed the cigarette from Scrbacek’s lips and flipped it around so that the filter was facing away from the fire.

When the cigarette was lit, Scrbacek took too deep a drag before coughing out a fit of smoke.

“Easy there, Tenderfoot,” said Dyer. “Can I get you something else? Coffee?”

“I think I’m jittery enough, don’t you?”

“Don’t know if it’s any consolation, but if what happened to your car just happened to my car, I’d be shaking, too.”

“It wasn’t a car. It was an SUV.”

“My mistake,” said Dyer. “You get off-road much?”

“No, not really.”

“But it gets pretty rugged, doesn’t it, in the parking lot of the Super Fresh.”

They sat quietly for a long moment as the cigarette burned to a nub and the thickening smoke twisted slowly within the funnel of light. When the cigarette died of its own accord, Scrbacek tossed it into the pinched foil ashtray and pulled out his phone, still in silent mode from court. He had scores of texts, mostly from reporters he now had no desire to deal with, and a slew of voice messages, which he ignored. He called Dirty Dirk’s, but the line was busy. A quick check of the local newspaper’s website informed him the police were giving no information beyond that a vehicle had exploded into flames behind the courthouse. He checked the Phillies score and then tried Dirty Dirk’s again, and again the line was busy. Finally, Scrbacek wondered who might be worried about his welfare and, coming up with no one locally, called his mother, ensconced behind the gates of The Villages, billed as Florida’s friendliest retirement hometown. His mother was pleased to hear from her son, and happy that he had won his big important case, but somewhat baffled at his repeated assurances that he was okay when, from behind the gates of Florida’s friendliest retirement hometown, she had no concerns whatsoever about his safety. His mother off the line, he turned off the phone, slipped it back into his raincoat, and accepted another cigarette.

“Thanks,” he said. “Mine are in the Explorer.”

He had just lit the cigarette when the door opened and a big-bellied agent from the State Bureau of Investigation stuck his head in the opening.

“What was the name of the kid in the vehicle?” he asked Dyer.

Dyer looked at Scrbacek.

“Brummel,” Scrbacek said. “Ethan Brummel.”

Addressing Dyer only, as if he couldn’t see Scrbacek through the smoke, the man said, “Any idea where he lived?”

Dyer again turned to Scrbacek and arched an eyebrow.

“His family lives on an inlet about twenty miles south.” Scrbacek told him the name of the beach town. “How is he?”

For the first time, the man looked at Scrbacek, his face filled with a bitter incredulity. “Your car blew up with him inside. The blast destroyed the cars parked on either side and shattered half the windows on the rear wall of the courthouse. How the hell do you think he is?”

“I was just . . .”

The agent turned back to Dyer. “Don’t let him leave until we talk to him.”

“Are you holding me here?” Scrbacek said in a lawyerly reflex. “Am I under arrest?”

The man looked at Scrbacek again, the incredulity replaced now with disgust. “Shut up,” he said, and then he closed the door behind him.

Scrbacek stared at the now closed door. “I didn’t realize about Ethan,” he said. “I can’t believe this. I didn’t think . . .”

Dyer didn’t say anything, just looked at the back wall of the room as if there were a window there.

In the smoky quiet, Scrbacek thought of Ethan Brummel, tall and gawky and blond, anxious to learn and eager to please. He had come to Scrbacek’s office looking to satisfy his senior internship requirement, excited at the opportunity to slave for no pay so as to learn about the criminal law. Ethan Brummel told Scrbacek he had been a hero to him ever since Scrbacek had proven Amber Grace, seven years on death row, innocent of murder. It had been Scrbacek’s big break, the Amber Grace case, had made his name, such as it was, but Scrbacek didn’t smile and warmly offer Brummel the job after Ethan mentioned his great victory. “Go to med school,” he said instead. “Go to journalism school, save the whales, become a game show host. Do anything other than this.” But Ethan knew what he wanted with the certainty of innocence, and Scrbacek, with a sad shake of his head, had given way. And Ethan Brummel had in fact proved to be a likable young man, sharp, hardworking, sincere. So Scrbacek was surprised that he couldn’t summon a tear for his now-dead intern. He wiped at his eyes for Dyer’s benefit.

“He was a good kid,” Scrbacek said. “He was just a . . . a good kid. He didn’t deserve that.”

“Who does?” said Dyer, still facing the wall.

“What do you mean?”

Dyer turned to Scrbacek, her pocked cheeks rising in a smile. “Someone was trying kill somebody, and the best guess here is that the somebody this someone was trying to kill was you.”

“Huh?”

Dyer just stared at him as the meaning of the sentence came clear in Scrbacek’s head.

“Who would want to kill me?” said Scrbacek.

“That’s the question, isn’t it?”

“No one hates me that much.”

“Maybe not,” said Dyer, “but in my experience, vehicles aren’t rock-and-roll drummers, they don’t spontaneously combust.”

Shaken by the thought, Scrbacek began to sort through his enemies like trading cards, moving forward from his childhood, searching for anyone who might have a motive to kill. There were scores of possibilities: kids from the schoolyard, women from the dating wars, opponents in the courtroom. A parade of names from his past flitted across his mind like words on the news ticker in Times Square. It was as sobering as a funeral, raising up the list of his potential enemies, a crude and nasty self-portrait. Still, he had only come up with one name that caused him to shudder, when the door of the stuffy little room suddenly opened.

Dyer stood quickly.

Into the room strode a uniformed police officer, and then the big-bellied special agent, and then two prosecutors, and then a plainclothes detective with a badge hanging from his jacket pocket. All of these, including Dyer, stood stiffly up against the wall, facing Scrbacek from the shadows as, through the door, sweeping in like Elliot Ness at a beer bash, came First Assistant County Prosecutor Thomas Surwin.

4

T
HOMAS
S
URWIN

Surwin sat across the table from Scrbacek, laid his hands flat on the Formica, tilted his flattop forward so that his narrow, pinched features were cut deep by shadow from the overhead light.

“From what we can tell,” said Surwin, getting right to it without even the semblance of pleasantry, “there were two explosive charges set on the bottom of your chassis, one underneath the front seat, one attached to your gas tank. We have to wait for confirmation from the lab, but it appears to have been a plastic explosive. Semtex or the like.”

“What about Ethan?” said Scrbacek.

“I notified his parents already. I advised them not to look at the body, as it was burned beyond recognition. If dental records don’t help, we’ll need to do a DNA analysis to prove it was Mr. Brummel in the Explorer. Some might find that definitive.”

Surwin pursed his lips, and Scrbacek knew enough to say not a word.

“Did you have any accelerants in your vehicle?” asked Surwin.

“Gasoline.”

“In containers?”

“In the tank. I filled it up this morning.”

“How much did the car hold?”

“It wasn’t a car,” said Dyer, dryly, from the back wall. “It was an SUV.”

Scrbacek glanced with annoyance at Special Agent Dyer and then said, “I think maybe twenty gallons.”

Surwin nodded. “A clerk entering the courthouse noted someone working on the underside of an Explorer in the parking lot at about four in the afternoon. A guy in jeans and work boots. She didn’t see his face. She figured it was simply car trouble and didn’t think to mention it until after an Explorer in the lot blew to smithereens. Were you having car trouble?”

“No.”

“Any idea who it might have been beneath the car?”

“None.”

“Had Mr. Brummel received any threats in the past weeks?”

“Not that I know of. He was a good kid. He wasn’t the type to have gotten in any trouble.”

“Well, it found him, didn’t it,” said Surwin. “How about you? Have you received any threats?”

“Just one.”

Surwin leaned forward. “From whom?”

“You. Today. After the verdict came down.”

Surwin let a smile slip across his lips and then stifled it. “That wasn’t a threat. That was a warning, for your own benefit.”

“It warms my heart to know the prosecutor’s office is so concerned with my benefit.”

Surwin pursed his lips again, bowed his head, and scratched his chin with his folded hands. “You beat me today, Scrbacek,” he said.

“For the second time,” said Scrbacek.

Surwin’s eyes tightened in annoyance and then eased as he regained control. “You beat me today for the second time. And I won’t pretend it didn’t hurt. Caleb Breest is an animal, and he needs to be put away. But as far as I know, you beat me fair and square under the law. As much as I despise Caleb Breest, I love the law, so you can go about your day knowing I bear you no ill will. All you are to me is a misguided punk with a flair in court. Now if someone succeeds in killing you, I won’t mourn, true, but you can rest assured I will still prosecute the son of a bitch to the fullest extent of the law.”

“Comforting,” said Scrbacek.

“Now I have a murder case to investigate and I need your help. Who wants you dead?”

“I’ve been considering it.”

“And?” said Surwin, one eyebrow arching.

“I keep coming back to the last time we matched up,” said Scrbacek.

“You’re thinking of Bozant,” said Surwin, nodding. “Any word from him?”

“Not since you put him in prison. But in the middle of the Amber Grace case, when they pulled his badge, he promised to twist me into some very unpleasant positions.”

“Well, you’ll be gratified to know I already checked with Remi Bozant’s parole officer. He’s in Las Vegas, doing private security at one of the hotels. Apparently, he’s made a new life for himself.”

“Isn’t that sweet?”

“We have someone there right now checking up on him. But if not Bozant, then who?”

“No one else I can think of. It must have been some kind of mistake.”

“The Semtex slipped under your car by accident, is that the theory?” Surwin leaned back, smiled. “You know, I’ve been wondering for years. What kind of name is Scrbacek?”

“Dutch.”

“Dutch? I never would have guessed. Dutch. How about that? Anything else that might be of some use?”

“My mother was Ukrainian, if that helps.”

“Do you ever worry that the families of the victims of the guys you get off might be out for payback?”

“I’m just a lawyer. All I do is my job. I’m sure they understand that. I would guess they’d have more of a beef with the prosecutors that didn’t do their jobs as well as I did mine.”

“What were your plans for the evening?”

“There was going to be a party if Breest was acquitted.”

“Where?”

“Dirty Dirk’s.”

“Who was going with you in the Explorer other than Mr. Brummel?”

“My client.”

Surwin’s eyes suddenly snapped into focus. “Breest was supposed to leave the courthouse in your Explorer?”

“That was the plan, until you kept him in the lockup for tomorrow’s hearing.”

Surwin closed his eyes for a moment. “Who else knew of Breest’s travel plans?”

“Joey Torresdale.”

“The turkey man?”

“Mr. Torresdale gives out his Thanksgiving turkeys to the poor as a goodwill gesture to the entire community.”

“Bleed the city all year as Breest’s number two, sure, but dump a pile of frozen turkeys onto the street in November for the television cameras and suddenly you’re a saint. Anyone else?”

“Other people Breest or Torresdale might have told, and, of course, Dirty Dirk himself.”

“That means everybody in the damn city.”

“So you think it was Breest they were after?”

“Don’t you?”

“That actually makes sense,” said Scrbacek, the edge of his fear sanded smooth by the switch in targets. “Ironic, if it’s true, isn’t it? By keeping him in lockup, you saved his life.”

“Had your client received any threats? Anyone let it be known he was ready to step to the top over Breest’s corpse?”

“Besides you?”

“Besides me.”

“Not that I know of.”

“The turkey man, Torresdale. Do you think he was stepping up?”

“He’s Breest’s oldest friend.”

“Since when does that matter?” Surwin paused. “Ever hear of a gang called the Furies?”

“The Furies?” said Scrbacek, shaking his head. “Sounds like a Roller Derby team.”

“The C-Town Furies. Did Breest or Torresdale ever mention them to you?”

“Torresdale never did. Anything Breest said or didn’t say to me is privileged. You’ll have to ask him. I’m sure he’ll be cooperative.”

“He’ll be as cooperative as always,” said Surwin. “I’ll ask him a question, he’ll spit on the floor. I’ll ask him another question, he’ll spit on my shoe.”

“His heart medicine acts as an expectorant.”

“I just thought he didn’t approve of my footwear,” said Surwin before slapping the table as he stood. “I’ll have Dyer drive you to your building, make sure you get in safe and sound. Wouldn’t want anything to happen to you on your way home from our courthouse.”

“I appreciate it,” said Scrbacek, “but I’m not worried.”

Surwin headed off toward the door but then stopped, turned around. “It must be wonderful, Scrbacek, to be so universally well loved.”

“I told you, other than Remi Bozant, who you say is fat and happy in Vegas, I have no enemies.”

“Maybe not. But the secretary saw the killer set the bomb at four in the afternoon. The jury had informed the judge it had reached a verdict by then, true, but the actual verdict wasn’t announced until six.”

“So?”

“So Caleb Breest could only have been in that car with an acquittal, but the plan, I’m sure, was for you to have turned the ignition key, win or lose.”

Scrbacek’s eye twitched.

“Sweet dreams, baby,” said Surwin before striding out of the room.