Indefensible (9 page)

I say, “I've heard that in medical schools, when they dissect cadavers, hands are the hardest. Emotionally, I mean.” I think of Cassandra Randall's slender hands, and quickly, to avoid getting swept back into that mental whirlpool, I say, “So what's the connection?” It comes out loud and aggressive, shouted, really, so I reduce the volume and adjust the tone to something more plaintive and add, “How do you link this guy to Scud Illman and Zander Phippin?”

“It's pretty straightforward,” Chip says, pulling on a rubber glove. “One of Dorsey's men found this note and made the association.” He flips the sheets of a multicolored note cube by the phone, finds the page he wants, and holds it open for me to read: “Rezavore w/Scud, tonite. Meet here.”

“Simple as that.”

“And we know he was an associate of Scud's,” Chip says.

“Phone records?”

“We're working on it,” Dorsey says. “Dollars to doughnuts, he was on the phone with Scud Illman when he wrote that note.”

“Is there any way to date this?” I ask.

“Not sure yet,” Chip says. “The other notes here might give us something to bracket it by.” He flips through the dozen or so other notes on the pad.

“Here's the deal,” I say. “We picked up Zander Phippin on a Tuesday. He spent that night in lockup. We had our little sit-down with him on Wednesday, then we let him go. We became concerned when he hadn't called us back by the next Monday. On Friday we dug him up at the reservoir. So if the phone records show any contact between Scud Illman and this Mr. Coen between Wednesday”—I take out my phone and go to the calendar—“Wednesday, May twenty-fourth, and Friday, June third, then this note, plus phone contact, plus Scud's car being identified at the tollbooth on the day of the body ditching, that makes enough probable cause even for Judge Two Rivers.”

My mention of Two Rivers, the woolly-headed Federal District judge, causes Dorsey to exhale contemptuously. Normally, that would piss me off—Dorsey putting himself above a federal judge. But in a collegial gesture that surprises even me, I put a hand on Dorsey's shoulder and drum my fingers. I've begun to think he isn't quite the knuckle-dragger I had him pegged for. Besides, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, as they say, so right now I'm loving the bloviating Captain Dorsey.

“So we can execute a search warrant at Scud Illman's place as soon as we get phone records.”

“Make sure Illman's stepkid is in school,” I say. “Less trauma.”

Dorsey says, “Nick, I'll call you and Agent d'Villafranca when I have an update from forensics. My crew will keep the scene sterile meanwhile. And I'll give you both a shout when I have phone records.”

He walks around to the stairway and down to his unmarked sedan. He has to maneuver it around the other cop cars, then he almost backs into a boat on a trailer sticking out from among the few residents' cars in the parking area.

Chip and I stand on the balcony watching. “Pompous . . .” Chip mumbles.

“I don't know,” I say. “He's not so bad.”

When Dorsey finally gets free of the other vehicles, his hidden blues and reds come on, and he roars out of the parking lot.

Chip looks right at me. “I'm seeing someone,” he says, fighting a smile for a moment, then he lets go and it spreads across his face.

“Seeing someone?” I say. “Like a woman?”

“Well, I'm not gay.”

“No,” I say. “But you might have meant ‘seeing someone' as in a shrink.”

•  •  •

Chip leaves. I go back inside to see what the forensic team is doing. In the bathroom, some guy in scrubs is spraying luminal and looking for blood residue with a UV light. The room is clean, with no personal effects in sight. I stand in the doorway and watch. The room has a small bathtub with a showerhead but no shower curtain. The bath is walled in cheap ceramic tile. Same with the floor. The vanity is standard stuff from any home supply center. Toilet, too. The only interesting thing I see is that the dangling end of the toilet paper is folded into a point.

“The perp probably took the shower curtain,” the forensic tech says. “They do that a lot. It's easier than cleaning it.”

“Find anything yet?” I ask.

“Only this,” he says. He brings his UV light down close to the floor, and one tiny bit of a shoe print, no bigger than a Ritz cracker, glows green. The tread is a checkerboard pattern, squares only about a quarter inch on a side.

“Is that the only blood you've found?” I ask.

“No,” the tech says, shining the light all around the room to
show me numerous glowing spots of residual blood, “but that seems to be the only thing usable. No fingerprints, no other shoe prints. Nothing. Whoever did it was pretty careful.”

“Excuse me, sir,” the photographer says. I move out of the way, and he and the technician go to work documenting the shoe print and the blood spatter.

I leave the apartment and drive back to my office.

I
t is almost winter, and the trees are stark and colorless. From across the field, I see my ex-wife, Flora, standing at the edge of the woods. She has her back to me, but I recognize her figure and her stance and her long hair. She starts walking away, and I'm desperate to reach her before it's too late. I try to shout, but I have no voice. I try to run, but my legs are leaden. If she disappears into the trees, she will be lost to me. No leaves obstruct my vision, so even now, as she walks into the dark depths and I am in a panic of helplessness to save her, even now I can see her as she becomes smaller and smaller in the distance. She is almost gone, far beyond reach and beyond hope, but just as she is about to disappear entirely, she turns and looks at me like she knew I was here all along, and what I see is that I was wrong; it is not Flora. It is Cassandra. And she is gone.

•  •  •

Morning now. I'm driving Lizzy to school. She has just started ninth grade, though she'd be in tenth or eleventh if Flora and I hadn't resisted all the attempts to advance her. She is beside me, wearing goofy pigtails, filling out subject tabs for her new ring binder, and though I know she has a copy of
Jude the Obscure
in her backpack, she also keeps the pictures of horses she drew when she was eight pinned to her bedroom wall, and she still receives mail from the Chincoteague Pony Centre.

Flora and I share Lizzy 50/50. Except Flora lives out in Turner, where the schools are top-notch, and I live close to town, where they're not, so it ends up being more like 60/40 in her favor. I don't mind the drive to Turner in the mornings, when I take Lizzy to school, because I have her company, and on the return, I just mindlessly
embed the Volvo into the glacial flow of traffic and surrender to the Zen of inactivity.

Chip calls on my cell. “I have updates about Seth Coen and Scud Illman,” he says.

“Call you back,” I say, “give me fifteen. But just tell me first, do phone records reveal contact between our two persons of interest?”

“Affirmative.”

“Music to my ears,” I say, and I hang up.

“That was about Cassandra,” Lizzy says.

“It was not. What do you mean?”

“Your posture changes, and your eyes start moving back and forth, and you think you're being all nonchalant.”

“It was something about a freezer.”

“I'm sure.”

I get off the highway at Turner. The Volvo seems to hum more contentedly here among its own kind. I'm edging forward in a line of cars, all waiting to drop kids in front of the middle school. Lizzy could get out and walk from here, but she waits. She puts the ring binder into her backpack, then sits hugging it to her chest. “Seriously,” she says, “it was about Cassandra, wasn't it?”

“Yes.”

“Is there news?”

“I don't know, honey, but I'll tell you if something important happens, okay?”

She stares silently out the windshield. I wonder if this could be one of those moments when her shell cracks open and I can catch a view of the workings.

Since Cassandra's murder, Lizzy has been obsessed with running and reading. While she scarcely spoke to either Flora or me all summer, she preferred hanging with me because she and I both experienced the loss of Cassandra. It was a strange loss that is hard to explain to anyone who wasn't there. We knew Cassandra only half a day, but already we had given her a role in our imaginings of the future.

Lizzy hasn't told me this, but I observe it. I know her pretty
well. I study her. I know there is a longing inside her, the longing she allowed to awaken in the startling crackle of our morning with Cassandra. It is the idea of a two-parent home and something closer to normalcy than what we've had. Flora loves Lizzy as much as I do, but it's not a simple mother/daughter deal; Lizzy is organized and responsible and prudent—more so as time progresses. Flora is scattered and impulsive and befuddled—more so as time progresses. It's not always clear who is mother and who is daughter. Lizzy takes care of Flora, protects her, worries about her, and whether Liz is aware of it or not, she saw in Cassandra one last chance at finding a woman who could move in with me so that she, Lizzy, could have one last chance to be a normal child before it's too late.

As for me, I had Cassandra confused with Flora from the moment I saw her. And not to put too fine a point on it, I thought I saw a second chance for love. Before it's too late.

Admittedly, it was foolish of us both to be so daring so quickly, to willy-nilly unlock the psychological vault where we've relegated those rambunctious longings. But there was chemistry.
Chemistry!
I felt it with Cassandra; I saw it between Lizzy and Cassandra, and I even felt it surge across the third side of that triangle, something shifting in my relationship with Lizzy.

One of Lizzy's friends raps on the window of the Volvo. The spell is broken. “Goodbye, Daddy,” she says. She kisses my cheek and is gone. I pull back into traffic, pick up my cell phone, and dial Chip.

I
t turns out there were several calls between Scud Illman and Seth Coen during the week in question. That's all we have so far this morning. Body parts haven't thawed enough for an autopsy, and the technicians at the crime lab are just now getting to work. I decide to hold off on the search warrant because it will be some hours, maybe even days, before we know what treasures lie in the bags of evidence gathered in Seth Coen's lonely apartment.

Of particular interest to us—to me—is the muck taken from his boots. If he's been dead all summer, then the sand and mud on the bottom of the boots is most likely a match to the soil at the reservoir eighty miles west of here. If that's the case, and if we can nail down the connection between Coen and Scud, we're almost home. Our other major bit of evidence is the partial shoe print found on the bathroom floor in Seth's apartment. It's a good imprint, and we'll probably be able to match it to some suspect's shoe.

I'm taking more than usual interest in the evidence because I'm going to try this case myself. I don't try many cases anymore; the truth is, I wasn't all that great a trial lawyer to begin with. I just got lucky a time or two. But I want to be the one to get Scud Illman. It can be a capital crime, killing a federal witness. I'll keep Upton Cruthers close at hand, because this would normally be his case, but I want to be the one to avenge Zander and Cassandra.

This morning, as always, my office smells of fresh coffee and of the barely detectable citrus spray they use on the dust rags. The voices of lawyers and support staff, newly arrived and not yet cocooned into brow-furrowing isolation, sound lively and emphatic. Shoes squeak down carpeted hallways, printers hum to life, terminals make their beeping wake-up sounds. I unlock my office, put my briefcase on
the desk, and plunk into my chair. On the bookcase, I have pictures of Lizzy, including one in which she and Flora stand arm in arm, smiling the same smile, identical but for the thirty-eight-year age difference. And there is the picture of my son Toby at nine months, taken just a few days before he died. On the wall are my diplomas and bar membership certificates and plaques of appreciation for serving on boards and panels. There are photos of my cabin and some framed yellowed newspaper articles about a well-publicized case I tried when I was the DA up north. And in an elongated frame is a bumper sticker, blue letters on a red background:
DAVIS
, it says. The “i” is lowercase, dotted with a star; the hollow of the “D” is in the shape of a star. Underneath, in much smaller print, it says,
for congress
, and it has the year, which is now twenty-three years past. I paid for the printing myself, but before even registering for the race, I decided not to run.

This office is home. I feel good here.

My intercom buzzes, and Janice's voice says, “Mr. Schnair wants to see you.”

Harold Schnair is TMU: The Man Upstairs. I go up.

“News, Nick, I've got news!” Harold Schnair says before I'm fully through the door, and he has me by the bicep, steering me to one of two mauve wing chairs in his office. He lets go and pushes me into the seat. He sits opposite, but he springs back up and yells to someone outside the door to bring two coffees. “Oh, and some of those cashews and pretzels,” in his Brooklyn accent, which, to my prejudiced ear, always sounds working-class.

Harold's assistant brings two cups of coffee and puts them on a side table. “Black, right?” Harold says. He hands me mine, then sashays back and forth in front of me. I am eye level with his gathering slough of body mass, which, over the decades, has quit his chest and shoulders. From my present view, I'd say it would have fallen clear to his feet except for being stopped at hip level by the hidden belt. His fly is pleated beneath the overhang, and from this unfortunate angle, it reveals a triangle of something that might be shirttail and might be boxers. I'm doing my best not to determine which.