Guilty as Sin (4 page)

Ellen had seen this act before and, frankly, he had been more convining. It seemed forced this time, as if he was having trouble working up outrage. He paced along the end of the table, behind an empty chair rather than behind Garrett Wright, which would have been symbolic of his support for his client.

"I didn't kill Josh Kirkwood," Garrett Wright said softly.

Ellen found herself holding her breath, waiting, expectation building inside her. The weight of his silence hinted at an announcement. God, was he going to confess after all? For a heartbeat she had the insane thought he was going to smile; then in a blink the expression was gone and she thought she must have imagined it.

"I'm an innocent man, Ms. North," he said. "I keep telling you that. What would possibly motivate me to kidnap a neighbor's child? I admire Hannah Garrison tremendously. My wife and I consider Hannah and Paul friends. And as for kidnapping Megan O'Malley, that seems more like the work of a madman. Do I strike you as being insane?"

"That's not for me to determine."

"I don't believe this," he muttered. "I'm a professor at one of the most highly respected small colleges in the country. For anyone to believe I could have done any of these things ... It doesn't make sense."

"It makes his kind of sense." In her mind's eye Ellen could see Megan's face, bruised and battered, the fire of hatred burning in her eyes. "It was him, the son of a- bitch . . . We got him dead to fucking rights."

"My job is applying the law to what you did, Dr. Wright, not making sense of it. I leave that unenviable and unproductive task to sociologists."

"I did nothing."

"How strange, then, that Chief Holt apprehended you fleeing the scene."

Wright tipped his head back and blew a sigh at the acoustic tile in the ceiling. "I keep telling you, it was a mistake. I had just got home. I parked my car in the garage and started for the house. I heard what I thought might be gunshots and stepped out the back door to see. I saw a man running toward me from the neighbor's yard. Understandably frightened, I stepped back into the garage with the intent of going into the house to call the police. Then the door flew open and Mitch Holt tackled me."

Cameron leaned forward, his forearms braced on the table, his blue eyes bright. "You thought you heard gunshots in your backyard, so you stepped outside? That seems odd, Dr. Wright. I think that would be the last thing I'd do. Weren't you afraid of being shot?"

"People don't get shot in
Deer
Lake
," Wright scoffed. "I thought it was probably some kids fooling around in
Quarry
Hills
Park
, shooting at rabbits or something."

"At night, during a blizzard?"

The muscles around his mouth tightened ever so slightly as he regarded Cameron Reed.

"The man Mitch Holt chased through the woods was dressed in black," Ellen said. "When apprehended, you were dressed in black, breathing hard, perspiring even."

"If Mitch Holt burst into your garage and tackled you, you'd be breathing hard and sweating, too," Dennis said, jumping back into the fray with halfhearted sarcasm. He dropped back down into his chair and crossed his arms. "Mitch Holt never saw the face of the man he was chasing. Agent O'Malley never saw the face of the man who tortured her. I'm told the suspect was wearing a ski mask. My client was not wearing a ski mask when he was tackled."

"But a ski mask was found in the woods along the trail," Ellen reminded him.

"What about the gun?" Enberg challenged. "The paraffin test taken Saturday night revealed no traces of gunpowder on my client's hands."

"People generally wear gloves in the winter," Cameron offered with his own twist of sarcasm.

Denny shrugged dramatically. "So where are they?"

"Disposed of during the chase, like the hat," Ellen said. "They'll be found."

"Until they are, and until you can prove they were on my client's hands, they don't exist."

"You can pretend they don't exist, Dennis," she said. "The same way you can pretend your client is innocent. Your denial won't change the fact that he's as guilty as sin and, barring new developments, will be going away for the rest of his life with no hope of ever setting foot outside the walls of a prison."

She turned her attention back to Garrett Wright as she gathered her notes. "As for your story, Doctor, I've seen sieves with fewer holes. I suggest you do some hard thinking tonight. Though I won't make promises, I think it's safe to say the county attorney's office would view this situation in a kinder light if you were to tell the truth."

"Is it really the truth you want, Ms. North?" he asked quietly. "Or is it another conviction for your record? It's no secret you're a very ambitious lady."

"It's always news to me." Ellen snapped her briefcase shut and rose, giving him a look as cold as steel. "What I want, Dr. Wright, is justice. And make no mistake—I'll get it."

Denny Enberg watched the pair of prosecutors leave, a sick heaviness resting like a stone in the pit of his stomach. Whether it was the prospect of losing the forthcoming battle or the idea of fighting this fight at all that made him nauseous, he didn't know. He wasn't sure he wanted to know.

He could feel the weight of his client's gaze on him and felt compelled to dredge up some scrap of wit.

"You always know where Ellen stands on a case," he said, busying himself scooping his notes together. "Just to the right of your jugular." "Do you think I'm guilty, Dennis?" Wright asked. Color touched Enberg's cheekbones. "I'm your attorney, Garrett. I told you up front, the only thing T ask is that you don't lie to me. You agreed. If you tell me you're innocent, you're innocent. I'll do everything I can to make the court believe it, too."

The jailer came in then, granite-faced, and led Garrett Wright through the door to the cell block. Denny watched him go, listened to the rattle of the leg irons, that weight in his gut growing heavier and heavier.

He always stated his Big Rule to his clients with a bluff sense of worldly wisdom, as if to tell them they might as well not even try to keep the truth from him because he could smell a lie like stink on shit. Most of them fell for it. Most of them were doofus losers who wouldn't have needed his help if they'd had two brain cells to rub together. But the Big Rule had a big catch-22, and he knew it.

If Garrett Wright was guilty, then he was guilty of horrible things, and lying would surely be the least of them.

"That's a pretty lame story," Cameron said as he and Ellen walked toward the security door at the end of the hall. "You might think a professor could come up with something more compelling."

"Maybe that's his angle. It's so weak we're supposed to believe it couldn't be anything but the truth."

The door swung open. Nodding to the officer, they took a right and started down the stairs. Cameron glanced at his watch and grimaced. "Oh, man, I'm late. I've got to run," he said. "I told Fred Nelson I'd meet with him at four-thirty. He wants to talk dispo on that trucker from
Canada. Will you need me later?"

"I don't think so. Phoebe is typing up the complaint even as we speak."

Ellen watched him bolt down the stairs two at a time with the grace of Baryshnikov. She followed, all but dragging her feet, the weight of the day bearing down on her.

Rudy had handed the case to her—or dumped it on her. She still wasn't sure which, still wasn't sure who had manipulated whom in that meeting. The self-preservationist in her told her she didn't want within five miles of this case. It had the smell of bad meat, looked to be rife with booby traps, and the media would scrutinize her every move.
Harris
College
students with picket signs had already begun protesting Wright's arrest on the sidewalk in front of the courthouse. But her sense of justice told her that if Josh Kirkwood and his parents and Megan O'Malley were to get any justice at all, she would have to be the one to prosecute the case. That was a fact that had nothing to do with ego. She was, flat out, the best of the five prosecutors in the
Park
County
attorney's office.

And so, she would clean up the tag-end stuff she had on her schedule, shift newer cases to Quentin Adler, and hope he could bungle his way through them without completely screwing up. And she would concentrate on putting Dr. Garrett Wright in prison.

No reporters were waiting to ambush her in the lobby of the law-enforcement center. Mitch Holt had banished them from his wing of
Deer
Lake
's
City
Center
. The lovely new brick building housed the city jail and police department in one-half of its two-story V-shape and the city government offices in the other.

The atrium at the apex of the V would be lousy with reporters. That was the scene of their last great spectacle related to the case: a live interview with an outraged Paul Kirkwood. Josh's father had been livid at Mitch's request that he come in to be fingerprinted, even though the request had been more than reasonable. It would have been within Mitch's power to haul
Kirkwood in as a suspect at that point. Paul had failed to inform the police that he had once owned the van belonging to suspect and convicted pedophile Olie Swain, had in fact denied knowledge of any such van after a witness had come forward to say she may have seen Josh getting into a vehicle of that description on the night of his disappearance.

That still bothered Ellen, like a sliver she couldn't quite get at just beneath her skin. Why lie about the van? Why deny he had sold it to Olie Swain when the proof was right there in the DMV records?

Unfortunately, Olie wasn't around to help solve the mystery. Facing certain prison time on parole violations, to say nothing of the possible charges regarding Josh's disappearance, Swain had committed suicide while in custody. The BCA had gone over his van with every tool they had and had found nothing. Not a hair, not a thread from a mitten, not a thing belonging to Josh. Olie had sworn his innocence to the very end, scrawling it on the wall of his cell in blood.

Cutting through the squad room of the police department, where desks were piled with paperwork and phones rang without cease, Ellen headed for Holt's office. The door to his outer office stood open, but Ellen still paused in the hall and rapped her knuckles on the door frame before sticking her head in. Mitch's administrative assistant, Natalie Bryant, swung around from her filing cabinets with a scowl on her round mahogany face and thunder in the dark eyes behind her red-framed glasses, ready to take a bite out of the interloper. The look relaxed upon recognition to show the same kind of weariness Ellen was feeling.

"Girl, tell me you're going to crack that man like the cockroach he is. I'd pay money to see it," she said, propping a fist on one well-rounded hip.

"I'll do my best," Ellen promised.

"I'd like to do my best all over his head."

"Is Mitch in?"

"He figured you'd drop by. Go on in." "Thanks."

Deer
Lake
's police chief sat behind his desk looking the way Ellen imagined Harrison Ford would look after a week-long bender: brown eyes bloodshot and underlined with dark circles, lean cheeks shadowed with stubble. He had jerked loose the knot in his tie and combed his hair with his fingers, leaving tufts standing up here and there.

"Well, it's official," she said. "I have been duly appointed to slay the dragon."

"Good."

His response held more confidence than she could muster at the moment. Ellen glanced around the office. There was no ego wall laden with the plaques and commendations he had garnered in his years as a cop, though she knew there were many. He had been a top detective with the
Miami force for a dozen years, coming to
Deer
Lake
after the death of his wife and young son in a convenience-store holdup. He had chosen
Deer
Lake
as a sanctuary in a truer sense than she had.

"I've had my little tete-a-tete with Wright and his lawyer. Basically told him to confess or else. For all the good that will do."

"Oh, for the days of rubber truncheons . . ."

"Yeah," she drawled. "Human rights can be such a drag."

"He doesn't qualify as human in my book." He brightened with sarcastic false hope. "Hey, a loophole! That might be all the defense I'd need."

"I'm going to try to talk to Wright's wife tonight," Ellen said. "She's still at the Fontaine?"