Guilty as Sin (17 page)

"Good night, Mr. Brooks," she said, pulling the door open.

He shoved his hands into his coat pockets and hunched his shoulders against the mere idea of cold, casting a longing look back toward the fire. The retriever lumbered down the stairs and sauntered past him, wagging his tail but not pausing on his way to a warm spot in front of the hearth. The homeyness of the scene gave him a little unexpected kick in a spot he would have sworn was tougher.

"Well," he drawled, moving toward the open door, "at least the dog likes me."

"Don't make too much of it," Ellen advised. "He drinks out of the toilet, too."

He stopped in front of her. Close enough that when she looked into his eyes, she thought she saw something old and sad, like regret. Foolish, she told herself. He wasn't the kind of man to have regrets. He went after what he wanted and he got it, and she doubted he ever looked back.

"Good night, Ellen," he murmured, his tone as intimate as if they had known each other for a lifetime. "Get some rest. You've earned it."

With his eyes on hers, he leaned down and kissed her cheek. Not a quick, impersonal peck, but a soft, warm, intimate pressing of his lips against her skin, seducing her to turn toward him and invite the kiss to her lips. The idea sent quicksilver tremors through her and triggered a flood of forbidden questions. What would it be like to feel that incredible mouth of his—

She slammed the mental door on the vision, bringing herself back to the moment, embarrassed that a simple kiss on the cheek could quicken her pulse and send her common sense spinning off its axis. The knowing look on Brooks's face was enough to make her want to slam the door on him.

"Sweet dreams, Ellen," he whispered, and sauntered out into the night.

Ellen stood in the open doorway, hugging herself against the cold as she watched him cross the street and climb into a dark Jeep Cherokee. The engine roared to life and he was gone, though the uneasy restlessness he had awakened in her lingered.

He kept her off balance—charming one minute, concerned the next, then seductive, then mercenary. Even the article she had read about him had alluded to "contradictions within him that were not easily reconciled." She thought of Phoebe's assessment of his turbulent aura hinting at inner turmoil and raw sexuality. She wondered who he really was, and told herself she didn't need to know. All she needed to know was not to trust him.

Who can you trust?

Trust no one.

Trust no one. The idea made her feel hollow and ill. By nature she wanted to trust. She wanted to feel safe. She wanted to believe those things were still possible, but the evidence didn't back her up. Another child was missing, and she was suddenly surrounded by people she didn't dare turn her back on—Brooks, Rudy, Glendenning, Garrett Wright.

Judge Franken's death suddenly took on symbolic proportions. He was the last honorable man. He was justice, and his death was the death of an era.

"Good Lord, Ellen." She chastised herself for being melodramatic, but the fear remained within her that her world had changed and there ould be no going back.

To distract herself, she stepped out onto the porch in her stocking feet to dig her mail out of the box that hung beside the door. Bills, sweepstakes, a month-late Christmas card from her sister, Jill, more sweepstakes. Junk.

She reached in once more, her fingertips brushing something that had got jammed down into the bottom of the box. Making a face, she twisted her hand in the narrow confines, just catching hold of the corner of the paper. She pulled it out, expecting yet another sale flyer. What she got stopped her heart cold.

A crumpled slip of white paper with bold black print.

                  
it ain't over till it's over

CHAPTER
 
10

He quotes Oliver Wendell Holmes, Robert Browning, William Blake, Thomas Campbell, and Yogi Berra?" Cameron said, settling into a chair at the long table with a raisin bagel in one hand and a cup of Phoebe's Kona blend in the other. "It doesn't follow. Has to be a copycat."

At eight in the morning the conference room was as cold as a meat locker. In a move of fiscal responsibility, the county commissioners had determined it unnecessary to keep the heat in the courthouse above fifty degrees at night. It took the building half the day to warm up. Everyone in the room had hands wrapped around a coffee mug.

"Or one of Wright's supporters," Rudy offered. He had claimed the head of the table for his own. After spending two days in the wake of Bill Glendenning's powerful aura, he felt a rise in his own sense of power. He was in Glendenning's good graces, relatively safe on the sidelines of this case, and Victor Franken had finally croaked, obligingly vacating his seat on the bench. All may not have been right with the world, but Rudy Stovich didn't personally have a lot to complain about.

"It could have been one of Wright's students," Mitch said, his lack of inflection subtly giving away his doubts. He had declined the offer of a chair, opting instead to slowly pace the length of the table. Operating on too little sleep and too much stress, he was fueling his system with high-test caffeine and sugar doughnuts. "Ellen, you said you had a run-in yesterday with the Sci-Fi Cowboys. What's your feeling?"

"I don't know," she said, picking at a blueberry muffin. She was exhausted. Two nights with a total of eight hours' sleep left her feeling heavy and slow, as if the air around her was as dense as water. "Yesterday's mail was on top of it in the box, so I'd say the note had to be there before two o'clock yesterday afternoon." She was repeating the theory she had told last night to one cop and then another and another. "If it was one of the Cowboys, they had to have run straight to my house after I saw them."

"My guys will be canvassing your neighbors this morning asking if they saw anyone around your house yesterday."

And they would probably learn nothing. Her neighbors were professional people, with daytime jobs downtown or at Harris or in Minneapolis. There was always the chance someone had been home with the flu that was going around and had glanced out the window at the right moment, but she felt no hope for that. What she felt was a sense of disquiet that had been lingering since Monday.

Monday night kept coming back to her—waking suddenly, Harry growling, the silent phone call, then the call that Josh was home.

She recited it all for Mitch, step by step, half-embarrassed to be saying it at all. From an objective, rational perspective, nothing had happened. There had been no intruder in her home. The call had probably been a wrong number. But the timing of all that "nothing" made her uneasy.

Mitch stopped his pacing and faced her, pressing his palms flat on the table. "Is your home number listed?"

"Under my initials—E. E. North."

"I got a call myself last night," he confessed. "On my cellular phone—a number only a few people have access to. The caller whispered, 'Ignorance is not innocence, but sin.' Right after he hung up, I got the word about the abduction in Campion."

Rudy looked alarmed. "Are you saying this lunatic is someone you know?"

"No." Mitch shook his head, his mouth twisting. "Our boy had the balls to call my mother-in-law and weasel the number out of her. I was just thinking, if he had to finagle Ellen's number out of someone, we'd have two people who might possibly be able to identify his voice."

Cameron looked at Ellen with concern. "Why didn't you say anything about this call yesterday?"

"I dismissed it as nerves. Josh came home. I've been busy with the case; I didn't think about it again—until I found the note. Even now I'm not sure it was anything. I mean, you're probably right—Yogi Berra is Hardly Wright's style."

"But it might be his partner's style," Mitch argued. "Or it might be his idea of a joke. I'm no expert, but that note sure looked like the others."

"But the press made public the fact that the kidnapper's notes were on common twenty-pound bond and came out of a laser printer," Cameron said, automatically playing devil's advocate. "Any nut with access to a laser printer could have done it."

"True, but the press didn't actually see the notes, the type font, the preference for lower-case letters." He straightened away from the table, pulling his parka off the back of the chair where he had abandoned it earlier. "We'll see what the lab boys have to say. In the meantime, we'll check with your neighbors," he said to Ellen. "One of them might have seen a kidnapper."

He didn't look as if he believed that any more than she did, Ellen thought. Hope had become a scarce commodity. "What's the latest word from Campion?"

" 'Help,' " he answered, shrugging into his coat. "They don't have a damn thing to go on. We've set up a multijurisdictional team of my people, guys from Steiger's office, and the BCA to work on connections. So far, there aren't any. The Hollomans don't know the Kirkwoods, Hannah isn't their doctor, Paul isn't their accountant, the boys have never met. Dustin and Josh share some physical traits—light hair, blue eyes, same age. That would be more significant if this were a sexual-predator thing, but it doesn't appear to be. It's some kind of goddamn chess game."

Rudy pushed his chair back and rose, hiking up his baggy suit pants by the belt. "Be sure to keep us abreast of the developments, Mitch," he said importantly.

"Yeah, I'll do that. If there are any. Ellen, I want you to call the department if you have any more odd happenings. It may be our boy or not. Wright has a lot of supporters. They may not all confine their anger to the picket line in front of the courthouse. You're a likely target."

"Thanks for reminding me," Ellen said sardonically, then remembered Megan. Megan, who was lying in a hospital bed because of this case. She could have as easily been dead. If the note had come from Wright's accomplice, then that could mean she had been singled out for inclusion in the game, as Megan had been singled out.

"Did anyone tell you Karen Wright went home yesterday?" Mitch asked, backing toward the door.

"Home—as in down the block from the Kirkwoods'?" Cameron said, appalled.

"It's the only home she's got," Mitch said. "The BCA was through with the place, and the city council was making noise about the cost of putting her up at the Fontaine, so we took her home."

"What about the accomplice?" Cameron asked. "If Karen knows something, she could be in danger."

"The BCA has a man on her. We should be so lucky that this creep is stupid enough to come calling."

"I'm concerned with her mental health," Ellen said. "Is she staying alone?"

"She has friends looking in on her, and Teresa McGuire, the victim-witness coordinator, is checking on her and reporting back to my office. Still hoping she'll turn on Wright?"

"She might have an attack of conscience."

"I wouldn't count on it, counselor. Denial is pretty tough armor."

Cameron turned to Rudy as Mitch made his exit and Ellen stuck her head out the door to call for more coffee. "Any word on who'll get the case with Franken gone?"

"None yet. They may delay the whole thing until a replacement is named," Rudy said, then frowned, worrying suddenly that his connection to this case, as much as he had tried to minimize it, would somehow jeopardize his chances for appointment to Franken's seat.

"If that happens, we can count on Wright's lawyer raising a stink," Ellen said.

She walked back along the length of the table slowly, her eyes scanning the mountains of paperwork the case had already generated—piles of statements, search warrants, arrest warrants, police reports. She and Cameron had commandeered this conference room for their own war room, where they could lay everything out and study it. A replica of the time line in the law-enforcement center was taped to one peeling dark-salmon wall.

Lying across a stack of news clippings was the morning Star Tribune opened to a photo of Jay Butler Brooks scowling at the camera. The headline read " 'Crime Boss' Fights to Save Judge." Ellen tossed it onto the credenza. Behind it dusty, hot air from the vents blew straight up along the old window, where eighty percent of the heat escaped through the glass.

"By law Wright is entitled to that hearing without delay," she said. "I bet they'll divvy up Judge Franken's caseload between Witt and Grabko and float another judge in here to catch the overflow until the governor names a replacement."

Rudy breathed a sigh of relief. "Who is Wright's attorney now?"

Cameron shrugged.

Ellen shook her head. "I'm going to see Dennis later. Maybe he'll know something we don't."