Eyes of the Innocent: A Mystery (21 page)

“Well, let’s just slow down for a second,” I said. “First of all, I haven’t had lunch yet. I’m going to grab something from up front. You want anything?”

I could have held off. But I needed to start loosening things up a bit. I needed to establish we weren’t a cop and a reporter. We were just two guys. And some guys require diet soda and pizza to get them through the afternoon. Hell, I might even spill the soda, because that’s what guys do.

“No, thank you,” he said.

“Some water? Anything?”

“I’m fine.”

“Okay, I’ll be right back.”

I went back into the main room and ordered my slice, which came quickly. Then I went to the refrigerator and selected a Coke Zero for myself and a bottle of water for him. Another important thing to establish: he wasn’t making all the decisions here.

I paid and returned to our table.

“I just felt it would be rude to eat this in front of you and not get you anything,” I said, sliding the water in front of him.

He didn’t touch it. He barely looked at it.

“We are clear that I am not meeting with you because you’re a reporter,” he said. “Officer Pritchard tells me you have information that may be vital to my case and vouches that your information is probably good. That’s all that matters.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “So I take it you’ve never dealt with a reporter before?”

“It’s against department policy to comment to the media without approval,” he said.

“Okay, no big deal,” I said as I opened my Coke Zero and took a long pull, making a big show out of savoring its artificially sweetened goodness. Then I picked up my slice and bit off a big hunk, chewing loudly.

Raines looked at the bottle in front of him. It was ice-cold and just starting to get a thin haze of perspiration on it. And to a cop who had probably been going for the last twenty-four hours on excitement and adrenaline—but not much hydration—I bet it was looking pretty good.

He cracked it open and took a sip. I was already starting to wear him down.

*   *   *

I put my pizza back down on the table.

“Okay. Well, just a quick user’s guide to dealing with reporters, or at least this reporter,” I said, wiping pizza sauce from my chin with a napkin. “First key phrase is, ‘off the record.’ That means you can tell me anything you want, but I won’t put it in the newspaper—unless I get it from somewhere else, of course. As far as I’m concerned, this conversation and every other one we have is off the record unless we explicitly agree otherwise. Okay?”

He nodded.

“Second key phrase is ‘not for attribution.’ That means I
can
use the information you give me in the newspaper, but I can’t attach it to your name as a source. And when I say you’re an unnamed source, I mean that in the most sincere way possible. Reporters have gone to jail to protect the identity of their sources and I would do the same.”

I had never been tested on that front. And I hoped I never would be. But I also hoped, if some judge ordered me to reveal my source, I’d have the stones to tell him to shove it, then take the contempt-of-court charge and spend some time as a ward of the state. Short of dying for a story—which I certainly
didn’t
plan to do—going to prison to protect a source was as balls-out a thing as a reporter could do. And I fancied myself the kind of guy who would do it.

“Finally, I want to make it clear that I’ll tell you everything I can to help your case,” I said. “But information is a two-way street in my town. And so is trust. You have to trust me that I’m not going to put anything in the paper that will get you in trouble with your bosses. And I have to trust you that I’m not going to get blindsided by some press release announcing an arrest—or, worse, by a story in one of the New York papers that we didn’t have first.”

His back straightened a little.

“I’m not here to make deals,” he said.

“Well, in that case I guess I’m wasting my time,” I said, rising from the booth and grabbing my lunch.

I turned to leave like I was going to storm out—though, as storms go, mine was hardly a raging nor’easter. It was more like light, spitting rain on a balmy June day when the sun is still shining and there’s only one stray cloud in the sky. I practically had my hand cupped to my ear so I wouldn’t miss the sound of him asking me to stay. It was, all in all, a pretty horrible bluff.

Thankfully, he didn’t call me on it.

“Hang on,” he said. “Just hang on. All I’m saying is, I don’t have the authority to make any deals on behalf of the
department
.”

I stopped but remained standing.

“Sergeant Raines,” I said. “I can tell you’re a man of honor and I’m telling you I’m one, too. I don’t need a deal with your department. I just need your word that if I help you now, you’ll remember me down the road. Is that fair?”

He held out his hand. I shook it, then sat back down.

“Damn,” he said, cracking a half-smile for the first time. “You’re tough.”

“Eh, once you get to know me, I’m easy like Sunday morning,” I said, smiling back.

“Oh, now you’re talking Lionel Richie,” he said, with a sudden burst of enthusiasm. “Now you’re talking my kind of music.”

Ah, the magic of Lionel: Raines had gone from stony to practically glowing with the mere mention of the former Commodores’ front man. I had finally penetrated the outer defenses of Sergeant Raines. It was just me and ol’ Kev now, gabbing away. Even his voice had changed—you could actually tell you were talking to a black man.

“Well, hello, it’s me you’re looking for,” I said.

He laughed out loud.

“All right, all right,” he said, still chuckling. “You’re pretty good. You’re pretty good.”

We guffawed a little bit more, but I didn’t want to push it too far with my newfound buddy. And before he had us booking tickets to see Lionel’s next tour, I got back to business.

“So, you got yourself a hell of a case with Windy Byers,” I said.

“Tell me about it,” he said, shaking his head.

“You’ve heard about his girlfriend by now, yes?” I asked.

“I heard some rumors, but nothing I really put stock in. He must have kept it pretty quiet.”

“Well, she’s not a rumor. Her name is Akilah Harris,” I said as he pulled out one of those small cop notepads and wrote down the name. “And she’s not just a girlfriend. She’s practically his second wife. She’s had two kids by him.”

“Whoah!” Raines said.

“That’s not even the best part. Windy bought her a house.”

“A what?”

“A house,” I said. “It was a little more than two years ago.”

“I’ll be damned,” he said.

“But there’s more,” I said. “The house he bought her was the one on Littleton Avenue, the one that burned down with two kids inside.”

“Yeah, I heard about that.”

“I’m pretty sure it wasn’t an accident,” I said.

He nodded and asked, “When did it happen?”

“Sunday night, around nine
P.M.
”

“Which is also around the last time anyone saw Windy Byers alive,” Raines said, shaking his head. “I’ll be damned.”

“So what do you think,” I said. “Sound like jealous wife gone nuts to you?”

He leaned back and took a swig of his water.

“I certainly haven’t heard a better theory,” he said.

“Okay, so I’m going to go ahead and write that Rhonda Byers is the Newark Police Department’s chief suspect in Windy’s disappearance,” I said, winking.

“Oh, hell no,” he said. “But, strictly, strictly off the record, I like her for this. I really like her. I’ve been going all through Windy Byers’s council career and there’s not a single red flag. And nothing else has jumped out at me. Now maybe there’s a big political conspiracy out there, but I don’t see it.”

“Me, neither,” I said. “What do you make of the blood in his house?”

He flashed a look that was somewhere between chagrined and, well, just a grin.

“You heard about that, huh?”

“I got my sources,” I said, smiling back. “Is the blood his?”

“Don’t know yet. This isn’t
CSI
. Our lab doesn’t turn stuff around during commercial breaks.”

“Fair enough. So where do we go from here?”

“Let me think about it for a second,” he said.

He leaned back in the booth and finished the rest of his water in one long swallow while I chewed my pizza. He crushed the bottle between his hands, screwed and unscrewed the cap once or twice, keeping his attention focused downward. Then he looked up.

“I think I got something you can do for me,” he said, then added, “if you’re up for it.”

“Shoot,” I said.

And that’s how I found myself heading back to Fairmount Avenue to interview Rhonda Byers.

*   *   *

My deal with Raines was that I would approach Rhonda Byers with questions about the last few days, so I could assemble a timeline of the hours leading up to her husband’s disappearance. I’d take careful notes, of course—that’s sort of what I do—and then I’d call Raines and we’d compare the story she gave me to the one she had already given Raines, searching for the kind of inconsistencies you usually find when someone is pulling a story off the fiction shelves of their brain.

For Raines, it was a way to grill a suspect without her realizing she was being grilled—or that she was a suspect. It also allowed him to sidestep or at least delay the rather prickly task of accusing a councilman’s wife of a felony.

For me? It was a good way to make sure the lead investigator on the biggest crime of the year kept taking my phone calls. And it might even give me something useful for the paper.

I was glad I didn’t have Sweet Thang in tow, because I didn’t feel like explaining that, once again, I was walking a very fine ethical line. Should I be doing a cop’s work for him? Of course not. But it’s not like he asked me to slap cuffs on Rhonda Byers. He just wanted me to talk to her, which is what I do for a living anyway. So what’s the harm in sharing a little information with my newfound source when it might lead to greater understanding of a story?

Besides, Sweet Thang was a bad fit for this particular task in at least one other way. For as good as she was at getting people to talk, I don’t think Rhonda Byers was going to be in the mood to spill her heart to an attractive younger woman, i.e., the kind of woman who stole her husband. There had been enough bodies dropped in Newark already.

As I drove back toward Fairmount Avenue, I called Tommy. It was mostly a courtesy. This was his beat, after all, and he deserved to know what was happening.

“Hey, what’s up,” he said, without the usual Tommy zip in his tone.

“That’s all you got? ‘What’s up?’ ” I asked. “No snappy rejoinders about how my clothes make you think of Alex P. Keaton from
Family Ties
? No catty comments about how my family ought to organize a hairstyle intervention?”

“No. I just don’t have the energy to point out the obvious right now,” he said, heaving a melodramatic sigh.

“Oh, come on, what’s wrong? Boy troubles?”

“I wish. I’m going over ELEC documents.”

ELEC was the New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Center. Every candidate and political group in the state has to file reports stating where they get their money and what they do with it. Most politicians give the bare minimum of information—you’ll see line items like “$28,350 … Miscellaneous expenses”—while staying (pretty much) within the law. Usually, the only worthwhile thing we get from ELEC reports are donor lists filled with names of individuals and businesses that are getting rich off government contracts. And, this being New Jersey, bribery of this sort is not only prevalent but legal.

Still, wading through the reports takes time, concentration, and the ability to resist butting your head into your computer while you wait for another PDF document to load.

“ELEC reports,” I said. “What’s the matter, you having trouble sleeping?”

“No, I’ve just been looking into everything about big, fat old Windy I could find and I wanted to make sure I was thorough.”

“Tina said you were on the streets, running down some rumor?”

“Yeah, that’s what I told her,” he said. “I just knew if she saw me in the office she’d keep bothering me. So I’m sitting in a coffee shop, doing it on my laptop. Don’t tell her.”

I felt a surge of paternal pride: my little intern Tommy had already learned the virtue of lying to his editor. Sniff. They grow up so fast.

“Oh, your secret is safe,” I assured him. “I was just calling to give you a heads-up. I’m going over to Rhonda Byers’s place.”

“Oh, okay,” he said. “What’s happening there?”

I told him what I had learned about Windy’s extracurricular activities and their unintended consequences.

“And you think Rhonda Byers did all that?” Tommy asked when I was all done.

“Yep,” I said.

“Really? Rhonda Byers?”

“You don’t buy it?”

“Well, I don’t know. I mean, I’m sure you’re right. It’s just … I just—”

“Spit it out!”

“She seems so nice.”

I laughed at him. Apparently, grasshopper still had much to learn.

“No, I’m serious!” he protested. “I met her a bunch of times at council meetings. I think she’s the only one besides me who goes to all of them. She’s not over-the-top friendly or anything, but she’s always very kind to me. She explains things to me all the time when I don’t get them. She probably has a better idea than her husband what’s actually going on in this city.”

“Yeah, I already figured she was hogging most of the IQ allotted to the Byers household,” I said. “But to me that makes it fit even better. A smart, with-it woman like her learns that her idiot husband is two-timing her in the biggest way possible. Can’t you just see her losing it?”

The line was quiet for a moment as Tommy considered it.

“No,” he said at last. “Not really.”

“Well, you got a better idea for what happened?”

Another pause.

“No. Not really.”

“Well, there you go,” I said as I pulled up in front of the Byers residence. “I’m off to the black widow’s web. Wish me luck.”

*   *   *

The TV trucks had all departed the Byers’s neighborhood—off to find Shocking Things You Might Not Know About Your Deodorant, no doubt—and the crime scene tape that had been stretched across their front gate was now flapping in the late afternoon breeze. It was only four o’clock, but the sun was already getting low. The wind rustled some dead leaves as I opened the gate, which creaked as I swung it shut behind me. I was starting to feel like a character in a slasher flick—and not the wily brunette who survives to the end. I was the bubble-boobed blonde who somehow ended up getting killed in her underwear.