Injustice (23 page)

We talked about lawyering and about the investigation of Lydia's murder. She ordered more wine. She looked at her watch. “We could get a table,” she said. “Have some dinner.”

It sounded nice, having dinner with Sabin. There was nobody waiting for me. Even ZZ was away. It was lonely at home, and I felt good here in the lively atmosphere of the Rain Tree. There were couples all around us clinking glasses and holding hands and reaching their forks across the table to try a taste from each other's plates. Sabin was attractive and exotic, and I liked how she could flip between being a shrewd detective and being an engaging dinner date.

We got a table. Sabin went to the ladies room. My cell rang. It was Isler.

“I think we've located Tony Smeltzer,” he said. “The guy is in San Francisco. He's been using an alias. He isn't in custody yet, but I expect we'll catch up with him pretty soon.”

“Are you sure he's physically there?”

“No,” Isler said. “Until we have cuffs on him, we can't be sure.”

I stood up and put some bills down on the table for the wine and the dinner that I wouldn't be eating. I wanted to call Tina on her satellite phone to tell her it was almost over. And I didn't want to be having dinner with Sabin when I talked to her. I liked Sabin okay. But I was a married man and didn't want to send any false signals.

“Critical developments,” I said when Sabin got back to the table. “I'll explain when I can.”

She was gracious. Cops understand things like this. I walked toward the exit and turned around to wave before stepping through the door.

I called Tina. “The Bureau wants you to stay put until they actually have their hands on Smeltzer,” I said, “but that will probably be before morning.”

“Come get us,” she said. “We'll stay a few extra days. It's so nice here.” I agreed to leave the next day to go pick them up. I'd swing by the office midmorning, drop a few things off, and be on the road by noon. Tina put Barnaby on the phone before I hung up.

“I miss you, Daddy.”

“I miss you, too, Barn. I'll see you tomorrow night, okay?”

“Can we go canoeing, Daddy?”

“Of course.”

“I want to be in Henry's canoe.”

“We'll see, Barn. I love you.”

“And Henry's car. I want to ride home in Henry's car.”

Isler called in the morning: “We've had Smeltzer all night. We're releasing him.”

“Releasing him!” I yelled.

“It wasn't him, Nick. The guy was an open book. He hasn't left Frisco since he arrived there in April.”

“Maybe he hired someone to kill Lydia.”

“Yeah, the guys out there thought of that. It's hard to rule out, of course, but there are no indicators. He seems more like a derelict than someone who's hiring contract killers. Believe me, the team in San Fran is good. The best. They sweated him hard. They assured me it wasn't him. So I'm assuring you, it wasn't him.”

Isler convinced me. He told me they'd get back to work figuring out who killed Lydia. They'd go through all of Tina's prosecution cases, looking for anybody who might have a vendetta to settle. For now, without the specter of an enraged Tony Smeltzer on the loose, it was probably okay to bring Tina and Barnaby home.

I packed what I needed for the drive, then headed over to my office. I kept the car radio off. I needed to think. If Isler was right about Tony Smeltzer—that he wasn't involved—then we were back where we started; and where we started was that Henry was the main suspect in Lydia's murder. We'd gotten so fixated on the idea of the murder as an act of mistaken identity that we'd forgotten about the possibility of somebody intending to kill Lydia as Lydia. And in that version of reality, Henry was still the only
identified
suspect.

I thought of Philbin's five fingers waving at me: the five points of his certainty that Henry was the perp.

Maybe I'd been too quick to dismiss it all. I hadn't been able to see Henry as an enraged killer even though, in my business, you learn that anybody can fool you. Henry was quiet, brooding, and seemed contemplative. If somebody had claimed that he was a quiet psychopath with dark secrets, maybe I could have believed it. But that he was a time bomb of violent rage—it didn't fit him.

On the other hand, who knew what indignities Henry had suffered? Who knew the psychological component of his physical scars? Who knew the accumulated bitterness of all the rejection and humiliation he must have endured in his life? First was the rejection by his natural parents, then by the girl in high school (whatever the actual facts of that fiasco), and then maybe every day of his life by schoolmates and pretty girls and professional colleagues. Who knew the emotional toll of being gawked at, feared, reviled? I had no idea what it would be like to live in Henry's body. But for a second, as I drove to the office and happily anticipated going to pick up Tina and Barn, I thought of Lydia stepping out on Henry. And I asked myself the question that Henry must have asked himself a million times: If he looked normal, would it all be different? I thought about how it might have felt to Henry, thinking he'd finally found, in Lydia's arms, a safe haven from the inevitable cruelty of life. And then to discover that her supposed love was not the deliverance he had thought but, rather, the cruelest ruse of all. It must have felt like a repeat of his high school humiliation, played out on a grander scale: to be sucked in by a desirable woman only to find he was merely the ridiculed victim of a hoax. For that second, as I pulled into the parking garage beside my office, all these thoughts swirled in my imagining—the trauma, the rejection, the humiliation, followed by the relief, the surrender to love, and then full circle back to betrayal and rejection.

I'd have killed her, too.

I wouldn't tell Tina that Smeltzer had been cleared of suspicion until she and Barnaby were well away from Henry. I'd let her go on thinking
Smeltzer was the killer and everything would be fine. I wanted to get to them as fast as I could. I'd drop off some things at the office, and then I'd get right back in the car and drive. I wouldn't stop until I could position myself between Henry and my family. Because if he
was
the killer, and if, on hearing that Smeltzer had been cleared, Henry figured the gig was up and we were closing in, who knew what desperate measures he'd resort to.

When I stepped out of the elevator, the criminal division felt different. Down the hallway by my office, I saw Chip standing with Pleasant Holly and Upton. Without saying a word, Chip tipped his head toward my office door. Something was very wrong. Something terrible had happened up at the lake. Upton and Pleasant and Chip stood like mourners as I walked past them into my office. They followed. Upton closed the door.

“We've got DNA results in the Kyle Runion case,” Chip said. “The lab tested both the hair and the semen stains. They're from one individual, and that person is not Daryl Devaney. My guess is Devaney will be cleared of Kyle Runion's murder, as well as involvement in two similar disappearances.”

This was good news. Tina would be excited. I'd been sure they were about to tell me that Henry had gone on a rampage, or maybe that a canoe had tipped over. I made my way to the desk and tried to look like I was sitting down in the chair as opposed to falling into it. But the three of them, Upton, Pleasant, and Chip, were still staring at me, as somber as undertakers. It didn't take the three of them and a closed door to tell me Daryl Devaney had been vindicated.

“What is it?” I said.

“The lab ran the DNA results through the national database of violent offenders,” Chip said. “They got a match.”

“And?”

“They were clean samples. At my request, they ran the test a second and third time. It's conclusive.”

I waited.

“The hair and semen from Kyle Runion's clothing and remains matched a DNA sample from a date rape case twenty years ago down in Renfield. The offender's name was—”

“Henry Tatlock,” I said.

T
he second most important thing was to make sure Barnaby didn't witness anything. I didn't want him seeing Henry handcuffed and thrown in the back of a cruiser, didn't want him watching SWATs tackling Henry from behind, didn't want him watching a dozen gun barrels appearing from nowhere. I didn't want him seeing agents tackling Tina to get her out of the way. I didn't want Barn himself being scooped from the ground, terrified to find himself in the arms of an artillery-clad commando, and I especially didn't want him seeing his uncle Henry getting gunned down if things got nasty. Barn had to be taken out of there before we moved against Henry.

Henry was an unpredictable psycho. He had not only perpetrated unspeakable crimes against Kyle Runion and, in all probability, several other disappeared juveniles, he'd also wantonly shot his fiancée in the head, probably when she stumbled upon the truth about him. So the first, most important thing was to make sure Henry never felt threatened until Tina and Barn were far away.

We went in two helicopters and were met at the other end by local law enforcement. I was given a car. It was decided that instead of our driving multiple cars to the cabin, and instead of my bringing officers or agents in the car with me, two SWAT-trained agents would crouch under a blanket on the backseat floor.

It was early afternoon. I turned onto the windy road that dead-ended at Tina's wilderness hideout. The escort vehicles hung back out of sight. Most of the leaves had fallen; we could see the cabin from far off. The car lent to Tina by the FBI was parked outside.

“Almost there,” I said to the blanket behind me.

“Signs of activity?”

“Not yet.”

I pulled up beside Tina's car.

“Be careful,” the blanket said. I had my Glock in my jacket pocket. We had discussed many versions of how this might play out, and how I should respond in different scenarios. If I could get Tina and Barn out of the house with Henry inside, I'd pick Barn up and tell Tina “Run!” and get back to the car as quickly as possible. The agents would have climbed into the front, and we'd go spinning out the driveway. If Tina and Barn were in the house and I could get Henry out, I'd slam and bolt the door, and agents would come from the car and take him.