Guilty as Sin (46 page)

That part wouldn't change. It couldn't. It all had to work out for him, Paul thought. He deserved it.

CHAPTER 25

The courthouse was officially closed Saturdays, which meant that not only would they have the office to themselves, but the press would be locked out of the building. Thank heaven for small favors, Ellen thought. They had been rabid last night, descending first on the Lakeside neighborhood after the discovery of Dustin Holloman's stocking cap, and then on the hospital after Brooks's wild chase. She hadn't thought they would let her out of the hospital intact, tearing at her verbally, sending up a racket more suited for a soccer stadium than for a hospital waiting room. And waiting for her out in the cold of the parking lot like a junkyard dog was Adam Slater.

"Willing to freeze my cojones for a comment," he said with a grin, dancing from one battered Nike to the other.

"I have no comment." Ellen barely broke stride as she stepped around him.

"Aw, come on, Ellen," he whined. "Just a sound bite for the folks back in Grand Forks. Just a quick line about the deviant brilliance of evil."

"How about the twisted deviance of the media masquerading in the guise of public service?" she said. "I have a job to do, Mr. Slater, and I'm sick to death of having to trip over you people every time I turn around. I don't owe you a comment, and you may not call me Ellen.'

He hadn't liked that. No comment and she had chased him away from her secretary. He would no doubt make her look like the Bitch Queen of the North in the Grand Forks Herald. Big deal. She had been called worse things and survived. The personal opinions of reporters were the least of her worries.

She went into her office and spent an hour cleaning, wiping the fingerprint grime away and setting things back the way she wanted them, trying without success to erase the feeling of having been invaded.

How the hell had he got in here without her knowing it?

How could Dustin Holloman's stocking cap have ended up in Josh Grkwood's backpack?

Phoebe arrived, her natural ebullience apparently still weighted down by Friday's incidents. Dark circles ringed her eyes. Even her springy mane seemed to be drooping, hanging down her back like a limp rope, bound midway by a strip of black ribbon. She dropped her black leather backpack into her chair and made a beeline to the coffeemaker.

Cameron showed last, bearing a container of chocolate-chip cookies in apology for being late.

"I swung by the law-enforcement center," he said, depositing his briefcase on the conference table and shrugging out of his ski jacket. "The stocking cap definitely belongs to Dustin Holloman. His parents identified it."

"I know. I've already spoken with Steiger."

Phoebe frowned down into her steaming mug of Irish-cream blend. 'It's just too creepy that Josh had it."

"The cops are fuming," Cameron said. "They're going to look like total stooges in the press. The bad guy waltzed right past them into the Kirkwood house and planted that thing. Unbelievable."

"We're not going to look so brilliant ourselves," Ellen reminded him. "Unless he has a tunnel running beneath the Lakeside neighborhood, Garrett Wright can't be the one who planted it."

"The shell game continues." He pulled three files out of his briefcase and laid them on the table. Pointing to each, he said, "Wright's house phone, office phone, cellular phone. Let's see if we can find a winner in one of these."

None of the records showed the strange, taunting calls that had been made to Hannah, to Mitch, to Ellen. There was no unusual recurring lumber. They found nothing, which, to Ellen's way of thinking, was something. None of the records showed a call to Tony Costello's office, which meant Karen Wright hadn't called him in. And if Karen Wright hadn't called him in, then that left one obvious choice.

Ellen knew Costello was capable of ruthless selfishness. What he had done on the Fitzpatrick case had proved the point well enough. But this was a step beyond. A child was still missing. It sickened her to think he might have knowledge of the crime and the criminal and not do anything

about it.

Beyond appealing to him as a human being, she had no recourse. He had technically done nothing illegal. He would make the blanket of confidentiality stretch to cover his ass. Charges of aiding and abetting would be turned inside out and jumped through like circus hoops. If she brought the issue to the attention of the press, she had no doubt he would fight dirty to discredit her.

"But what if someone else brought it up?" she mused aloud, tapping her pen against her lower lip. "What if we could get Wilhelm to turn the heat up on Costello?"

Cameron snickered, a nasty gleam coming into his eyes at the idea of duping Wilhelm into something. "Yeah, ask Marty. He'll say anything—as long as he thinks it's his idea."

"All he has to do is make some noise, talk about trying to get a warrant for Costello's phone records. It's about time Costello had the press snapping at his heels instead of wrapped around his little finger." She turned to Phoebe. "See if you can get hold of Agent Wilhelm. Ask him to stop in later."

Phoebe nodded and slipped out of the room, a silent wraith in coffeehouse black.

Cameron arched a brow. "Is she in mourning or something?"

"Death of a budding romance. One of the lesser vultures had her in his sights. I cut him off at the knees and sent him crawling."

"Wow. What a mom you'd make, Ellen."

Ellen gave him a wry look. "Is that a proposal?"

"Observation. You're lovely, but you frighten me."

She managed a chuckle at his teasing. "Thank you, Cameron. You're the little brother I never wanted."

"Hey, my sisters all say the same thing!"

"Go figure."

He sobered then, looking at her with concern. "How are you doing after last night? Jeez, Ellen, you could have called me to go to Kirkwoods'. After what happened here—"

"I wasn't sleeping anyway," she said. "Every time I closed my eyes, I saw that photograph of Josh."

"Maybe the lab wizards will be able to pick something up from it. Find something in the background that might give us a clue to where he was held."

The image was too clear in Ellen's mind. Josh in striped pajamas, his face as blank as the background. His skin color washed sickly white by the flash; a stark contrast to the darkness behind him. He appeared to be standing in a black void.

"Maybe," she murmured without hope.

"So is Grabko going to find anything in those medical records?"

Ellen shook her head, grateful for the change in subject. They had business to do. Better to focus on what they had to do rather than on what they couldn't change or had no control over.

"Costello's blowing smoke," she said, "hoping the press will yell fire."

"But he's planting doubt in Grabko's mind while he's at it."

"Grabko has to rule on the evidence. This ought to tip the scales in our favor." She tapped the copy of the fax with the preliminary lab analysis. "Josh's blood was on that sheet. Josh's hair was on that sheet. Garrett Wright's hair was on that sheet. That's our first concrete piece of physical evidence that ties Wright to Josh."

"Makes you wonder what the hell Wright was thinking, wrapping that sheet around O'Malley that night."

"He was thinking he would escape. He was thinking he was invincible, that even if he gave us that evidence, it wouldn't make any difference because we wouldn't have him."

It was a taunt, the same as that photograph of Josh. Had that file been in her cabinet a day or a week? When had she last opened that particular drawer?

She slid her reading glasses down her nose and peered at her colleague over the rims. "How's that brief coming? We will have Garrett Wright, won't we?"

He shot her a cocky grin as he pulled a document from his open briefcase. "Anthony Costello should wish his high-priced associates could write a brief this good. He doesn't have a leg to stand on when it comes to arguing this arrest away on the basis of Fourth Amendment rights."

Ellen plucked the brief from his fingers and looked it over. She felt as much confidence as she could that Grabko would rule in their favor. Cameron's arguments were dead-on, but beyond that the case was too big to throw out the arrest on a dubious technicality.

Costello had to know that as well. This was just another example of what Ellen called a "kitchen sink" defense, where the lawyer threw in everything he could find—including the proverbial kitchen sink—in the attempt to muddy the waters and cloud the issues. And to divert the energies of the prosecution. Cameron had spent hours on this brief, constructing an argument against what was essentially a bluff on Costello's part. He could have been using that precious time helping to strengthen the case against Wright.

"Did you hear the toxicology reports came back on Josh's blood?" she asked. "Traces of Triazolam, aka Halcion."

"If we can put Wright at a pharmacy filling that prescription . . ."

"We'll be too lucky for words," Ellen finished.

"Bet Todd Childs could get us some Halcion if we asked nice."

"If we could find him."

"Or someone who buys pharmaceutical goodies from him."

"We need more manpower. Our resources are spread too thin as it is without sending guys out hunting for Childs's buyers. We don't even know that he deals drugs, just that he indulges. Have you got anything from Wilhelm's guy regarding Wright's background?"

Cameron rolled his eyes. "Yeah, a lot of lame excuses. They faxed me the same information two days in a row."

"Oh, great."

"Mitch put in a request to NCIC for cases with a similar MO perpetrated in any of the areas Wright has lived since 1979, but nothing has come back yet. He requested info on unsolved murders in the same geographical areas as well."

"Building a haystack to find our needle," Ellen grumbled, thumbing through the thin file folder Cameron handed across to her.

"And the thing is, of course, we don't have time for it. Even if NCIC gets back to us before the hearing, all we'd have is conjecture and supposition. There won't be any time to investigate. We won't have anything admissible."

"No, but we have to think beyond the hearing. Have you found anything on your own?"

"It's all in there, such as it is. I started at Harris and worked backward. Before coming here Wright taught briefly at the University of Virginia; before that, Penn State—where Christopher Priest also taught during the same period." He bobbed his eyebrows. "Neat coincidence, huh?"

Nerves prickled along Ellen's spine. "I don't believe in coincidence,
 
did you get that information?"

He looked sheepish. "I read it in the Pioneer Press."

"God," she groaned, "the press has better access to information on our suspect than we do."

"They had a head start. A lot of what they've written on Wright is coming out of old pieces they did on the Sci-Fi Cowboys a couple of years ago. I looked them all up at the library and made copies. They're in there, too."

Ellen flipped through the pages of typed notes to the clippings. One featured a photo of Christopher Priest and one of the Cowboys bent over a small robot that was supposed to scoop up balls and deposit them in a casket. Wright and three more boys stood in the background, their faces distorted by the poor quality of the copy.

"Priest sent over his list of Sci-Fi Cowboys past and present," she said. 'Grudgingly, I might add."

"You think there might be something there?"

"I don't know. I think he doesn't want the scrutiny. He may talk those kids up like they're National Honor Society material, but he knows darn well any one of them could have taken a knife to my car." She stared it the article titled "Juvenile Hall Meets Hallowed Halls." "Anyway, I called a couple of people I know in the Hennepin County system to see if they might be able to help us track down some of the former members to jet their take on Wright. And I got my hands on rap sheets on the present members. I want to know who we're dealing with."

"Priest could make some big noise if he thinks we're stepping over right-to-privacy boundaries," Cameron warned. "He's connected, you know. The Sci-Fi Cowboys is a popular tax-deductible contribution with some major political players."