VC04 - Jury Double (26 page)

9:40
A.M
.

L
IEUTENANT BILL BENTON LIFTED
the receiver and dialed Kyra Talbot’s number in Manhattan. He got the machine again. At the beep, he gave his name and phone number and asked Mrs. Talbot to phone as soon as possible.

He looked at his watch. Nine-forty. Over two hours till anyone would be answering a business phone in Seattle.

He went down the corridor to Lars Fiumefreddo’s office. Lars was off for the day and the shrink had commandeered his space. She’d pushed two chairs together to form a makeshift bed and Toby Talbot, looking blissfully distant from earthly woes, was curled on his side clutching an inflatable pillow.

“He’s asleep,” Sondra van Orden said. Sondra was the county equivalent of a traveling priest: she served four police jurisdictions as psychiatric evaluator, youth counselor, and—if a cop needed it—short-term therapist. “I gave him a mild over-the-counter sedative. Can we talk outside?”

They went to the water cooler. She downed half a cup of Bear Springs’s finest.

“I ran a polygraph,” she said.

“And?”

“Toby’s lying about everything except his name and his age. The needle jumped off the chart.”

“Is that surprising? You said he’s upset.”

“True; he has conflicts with his dad to resolve. But there’s a measurable difference between upset and lying. This is lying.” She dropped her paper cup into the trash. “I also ran a polygraph on Catch Talbot.”

Benton was startled. “When?”

“I finished twenty minutes ago.”

“Why?”

“He said you’d ordered it.”

“I didn’t.”

She shrugged. “Talbot may have lied about that, but he’s telling the truth about his name, his residence, and his relationship to Toby. The polygraph says he’s Toby’s father.”

“What if he knows how to beat the polygraph?”

“Bill, you’ve done your job. The polygraph results are on record. Let the kid go and thrash it out with his dad.”

“It’s the thrashing that worries me.”

An explosion of voices echoed down the corridor. “Hey, Lieutenant! There’s a man in a hurry to see you!”

The man in a hurry was the man who had just convinced a polygraph he was Catch Talbot. Now he was trying to push past the sergeant into Bill Benton’s office.

“You won’t find me in there,” Benton said.

He wheeled around, red-faced and panting like an attack dog. “I passed that lie detector and I want Toby.”

“I understand, and you’ll get your son.” Bill Benton was wondering how the hell he was going to stall Talbot till someone answered the phone in Seattle. “But I’m going to have to ask you to wait just a little longer.”

“I’ve been waiting since eight o’clock last night.”

“Your son can’t be moved right now.”

“Why not?”

Benton waited for Sondra van Orden to speak up. She didn’t.

“Toby’s asleep,” Benton said.

“Asleep at a quarter to ten in the morning?” Disdain rippled. “What the hell did you people do, drug him?”

Benton shot Sondra a beseeching glance:
Help me out of this
.

She was no help at all. “Bill, we have no legal right to hold the boy.”

Shrinks
, Bill Benton reflected,
should not be allowed to get night school law degrees.

“If you’ll come this way, Mr. Talbot.” She led Talbot around the bend in the corridor. Benton followed.

The frosted glass door of Lars Fiumefreddo’s office was shut. Sondra rapped. “Toby?” She opened the door.

The two chairs were still pushed together. The inflatable pillow still lay on one of them.

The boy was gone.

The sound of the organ was like a patient breathing on a respirator—it seemed to accentuate the hush around it. The church was full, a blue sea of uniforms. Faces were grim.

Churches are always full for cops’ funerals
, Cardozo thought.
Faces are always grim.

Candles glowed upon flowers and wreaths banked either side of the marble altar. Cardozo’s gaze drifted up to the crucifix. It was a large dark mahogany cross with the crucified Savior carved in ivory. The crown of thorns was an intricately chiseled band of mahogany.

He tried to empty his heart of rage and focus instead on eternity and God’s merciful justice. Rage kept blanking out eternity.

Detective Ellie Siegel, somber in navy blue, slid into the pew beside him. “Edie Vasquez is clean,” she whispered. “The morning of Thursday the nineteenth, after her shift, she went down to Pandora’s Box. The bartender vouches for her.”

“What’s Pandora’s Box?”

“An after-hours gay girls’ club in Chelsea.” Ellie looked down at the printed memorial program:
Church of St. Mary, Martyr: Sanford Avenue, Flushing; requiem mass for Britta Maureen Bailey
. “The bartender also happens to be Edie’s lover, and she says there’s no way Edie would be seeing another woman.”

The mayor made a late, noisy entrance with a flying wedge of Armani-suited gofers and media reps and bodyguards. There was a sound of oak doors slamming. The congregation rose to their feet. Six pallbearers, cops from the Twenty-second Precinct in full-dress uniform, slowly wheeled Britta’s coffin up the aisle. It was draped in lilies and a New York City flag.

“What makes the bartender so sure of Edie?”

“They’re together every moment Edie’s not on the job. And have been since they met three months ago.”

“Honeymoon. It won’t last.”

“Cynic.”

Three priests vested in white came out from behind the altar. Cardozo opened the hymnal to look for the first hymn.

What about the bus to
New York
?” the man groaned.

“There’s none direct.” Lieutenant Bill Benton studied the bus schedules. It gave him a headache to focus on the small print in the vibrating, dancing wash of fluorescent light. “Toby could just about have made the bus to Elizabeth. If he missed that, there’s the bus to Kearney. At Kearney he could make a connection to New York.”

“The Kearney bus goes on to Union City,” Sondra van Orden said. “He could take the PATH train.”

“Let me see those schedules.” The man grabbed them from Benton’s hand. Bus stops. Train stops. Arrival times. Departure times. Angry eyes narrowed into brown slits. “Toby will arrive at the Port Authority terminal in New York at one-oh-seven. We have to head him off.”

“We’re only a twelve-man force. At the moment we only have a four-man capability.”

“You Nazis owe me this! I’ll sue!” A fist slammed down on the desk. There was a scream of wood splitting. A blizzard of glass shards gusted over the floor.

Benton held out a paper napkin. “Your hand.”

The photograph of Bill Benton’s wife and daughter lay on the linoleum, blood dripping down on it from the heel of Talbot’s ripped palm. Benton knelt and picked the photograph up and gently wiped it off.

Lucy-Anne Westervelt fixed her eyes carefully on the lines of
Healing Words
, a doctor’s research into the medical effects of prayer. The book kept bucking in her hand as the bus rumbled its way across the New Jersey marshland toward Manhattan. She turned the page and glanced at the boy in the seat beside her.

His head was tipped back against the leatherette. His eyes were shut and, judging by the rise and fall of his shirt, he was asleep. It seemed odd to Lucy-Anne: a boy traveling alone into the city, wearing only a striped green Ralph Lauren polo shirt on a day when temperatures were in the low fifties and the weather bureau was predicting rain.

A shadow brushed her thoughts. Today wasn’t a holiday. Why wasn’t the boy in school?

She studied the sleeping form. He didn’t look like a runaway—on the other hand, it was obvious no mother had been near him in the last twelve hours: his face needed washing, and his hair could use a combing, and his shirt was badly rumpled, causing Lucy-Anne to suspect he’d slept in it.

He stretched his arms and opened his eyes. He turned to look out the window at an empty brown meadow.

“Did you have yourself a good sleep, young man?” As a former third-grade teacher, Lucy-Anne knew you can’t teach children respect without showing it, and that was why she called him
young man
. “You were dead to the world.”

The boy forced a brief little effort of a smile.

Lucy-Anne closed
Healing Words
. “Do you live in Kearney?”

“No, ma’am.” His voice had a numb, quiet quality.

“Then you must live in New York?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Whereabouts?”
I’m six times your age
, she thought,
but it’s not so long since I played hooky and fibbed to my elders, too
.

“Downtown.”

“Whereabouts downtown?”

“The Village.”

“That’s a lovely part of town.”

Breasting a chattering tide of young students, Mark Wells climbed the curving flight of marble stairs and searched for room 103.

The door was ajar; a bespectacled woman with steeply piled gray hair sat at a carved desk, marking the pages of blue examination booklets.

He knocked. “Mademoiselle de Gramont? One of the teachers suggested I speak with you.”

She rose, motioning him into the room. A curious sweet scent hovered in the air. “How may I help you?”

“I’m looking for Toby Talbot. I’m his uncle—Mark Wells.” The lie came quite naturally now.

She quickly shut the door. “Toby did not come to school today. I phoned his home and nobody answered.”

“When did you last see him?”

“I haven’t seen Toby since his father picked him up last—”

“His
father
?”

“Last Saturday. He gave me a note from Toby’s mother.”

No way
, Mark thought. “Could I trouble you to show me that note?”

Annoyance flared across her face. She took a sheet of paper from her desk, laid it over the window of a Xerox machine, and pushed a button. Greenish light flashed. She handed him the copy.

Dear Mademoiselle: This is to inform you that Toby’s father, Catch Talbot, has my authorization to pick up Toby after today’s school excursion and bring him home. With many thanks, Kyra Talbot.

The handwriting was undeniably Kyra’s—large and extroverted, with extravagantly looped
b
’s and
h
’s and
k
’s. But when she handed him a copy of the envelope, he saw that the printed address—118 East 81st—was Anne Bingham’s.

“And you haven’t seen the boy since?”

She shook her head. “There’s been no call, no explanation.”

Mark ran the information through his mind, trying to make some sense of it. “Mademoiselle, could you describe the man who gave you this note?”

“The people call Jeptha Randolf.”

With six enormous strides, a lanky, suntanned man in his early sixties crossed to the stand and took the oath.

Tess diAngeli asked the witness to describe his work.

“For the last thirty-seven years I’ve been with the BATF—the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.” His dark suit and striped tie were Wall Street, but his accent was Alabama. “At present I’m assistant deputy director of security operations for the eastern United States.”

“Have you been monitoring the activities of Corey Lyle and his cult?”

“Yes, I have, for eight and a half years.”

“Why is the BATF concerned with their activities?”

“We’d heard reports of mail fraud, charge card fraud, income tax fraud, drug and gun dealing, child abuse, and involvement in domestic bombings.”

“Objection.” Dotson Elihu pushed himself to standing. “Those allegations are irrelevant and are raised solely to prejudice these proceedings.”

“Your Honor,” diAngeli said, “the People intend to demonstrate relevance.”

“I’ll give you a little leeway here,” Judge Bernheim said. “We’ll allow the witness to testify to crimes mentioned in his agents’ reports.”

“Mr. Randolf,” diAngeli asked, “were your agents able to document legal irregularities in the cult’s activities?”

“Yes, indeed. Enough gray-zone activity to warrant sending in an undercover agent.”

“And did you send in an agent?”

“Not exactly. We recruited a cult member. Her name’s Yolanda Lopez. Her nine-year-old daughter, Lisa, was also a member. Mrs. Lopez came to us with a complaint that Corey Lyle had used her little girl as a human bomb in an attempt to blow up—”

Elihu sprang up. “Objection!”

“Overruled.”

Randolf continued. “To blow up the IRS building in Manhattan. The bomb malfunctioned and the explosive leaked. The little girl was badly injured and required eighteen separate skin grafts. We arranged for the operations and sent Mrs. Lopez back in to surveil the cult.”

“And did Mrs. Lopez uncover proof of illegal activity?”

“In less than a month, she was sending back reports of tax fraud, crooked fund-raising, illegal import of Czech plastic explosives—”

“Objection.” Dotson Elihu rose. “How is alleged felony by parties unnamed relevant to the charge against Dr. Lyle?”

“Overruled.”

DiAngeli smiled. “Did Mrs. Lopez send back reports mentioning John and Amalia Briar?”

“Five months after she went back in, she told me Corey had something real dirty cooking with John and Amalia Briar.”

“Objection!” Elihu leaped up. “Hearsay!”

“Mr. Randolf,” the judge said, “are you referring to a written report by Agent Lopez?”

“No, ma’am, this instance was a phone talk.”

“Was this phone talk recorded?”

“No, ma’am.”

“I’m going to have to sustain the objection.”

DiAngeli stood, frowning. “Mr. Randolf—five months after you sent Mrs. Lopez back into the cult, did you instruct her to tape her discussions with Corey Lyle?”

“Yes, ma’am, I did. Soon as the Briar murder plot came up.”

“Objection.” Elihu was on his feet again. “We’re smack back to hearsay.”

“If it please Your Honor,” diAngeli said, “it’s a simple matter to clear this up. I ask permission to play the court one of Yolanda Lopez’s tapes—which we are prepared to offer in evidence as People’s Exhibit fifty-two.”