Guilty as Sin (21 page)

Hannah glanced into the family room. Ellen's gaze followed, searching. Josh was nowhere to be seen.

"No," Hannah answered at last. "He hasn't said a word about it. Come in. I've got coffee if you'd like."

They followed her through the comfortable family room with its sturdy country-colonial furnishings and scattering of toddler's toys, and up the three steps into the spacious kitchen.

"I heard about that boy in Campion," Hannah said as she went through the ritual of setting out mugs and pouring the coffee. "I wouldn't have wished that hell on anyone. My heart goes out to the family."

"It's all the more incentive for us to build a strong case," Cameron explained. "The more pressure we can bring to bear against our man, the more likely he may be willing to give us his accomplice."

Hannah's eyes widened. Her hands were trembling as she set their coffee mugs down. "You're not going to make a deal with him? After everything he's done?"

"No," Ellen assured. "No deals. He's going down for all of it. We're hoping Josh will be able to help us nail him. As I explained to you over the phone, Hannah, we want to have Josh take a look at what we call a photo lineup- If he picks our man out of that, we'll want to proceed with an actual lineup at the police station. We felt it would be less traumatic for him to start with the photographs. We don't want to upset Josh, but his ability to identify his abductor would certainly be key to our prosecution."

"Will he have to testify in court?"

"That will depend on how much he remembers or is willing to tell," Cameron said.

"If Josh is able to testify, we'll do everything we can to prepare him so he won't be frightened," Ellen explained.

Hannah reached up to toy nervously with an earring. "Couldn't he testify on videotape? I've seen that on television."

"Possibly," Ellen said. "There is precedent. I'll talk with the judge when the time comes, but for now all we want is to have Josh look at photographs. Could you bring him in?"

As Hannah left the kitchen, Cameron opened his briefcase, pulled out a sheet of plastic pockets from a photo album, and placed it on the table.

"She's not holding up well," he murmured.

"I'm sure we can't even imagine what it's been like," Ellen said, keeping an eye peeled for Hannah's return. "I heard their marriage is all but over."

"Garrett Wright has a lot to answer for."

Hannah herded Josh into the kitchen. Josh eyed them warily. He seemed like an impostor of the boy in the "missing" posters, with his gap-toothed smile and Cub Scout uniform. The physical resemblance to that boy was there, but none of the sparkle, none of the joy. His eyes looked a hundred years old.

"Hi, Josh, my name is Ellen." She leaned down to eye level with him. "And this is my friend, Cameron. He likes to play soccer in the summer. Do you go out for soccer?"

Josh stared at her, silent. His mother ruffled his curly hair. "Josh plays baseball in the summer. Don't you, honey?"

He looked from Ellen to Cameron, then turned and faced the refrigerator, losing himself in the photographs and school artwork stuck to it with magnets. Hannah knelt down beside him.

"Josh, Ellen and Cameron want you to take a look at some pictures they brought with them. They want to see if the man who took you away from us is one of the men in the photographs. Can you do that?"

He gave no answer, no reaction of any kind. She turned him gently by the shoulders toward the table.

"Just take a look at these, Josh," Ellen instructed, sliding the sheet of photos toward him. "Take your time and look at all the men. If you see the man who took you, all you have to do is point at him."

Ellen held her breath as he bent his head over the pictures, looking at one face, then another. All were mug shots, some of criminals, some of Deer Lake police officers. Garrett Wright's occupied the upper right-hand pocket. Josh looked at them all, his gaze lingering on Wright's face, then moving on.

"All you have to do is point at him, Josh," Ellen murmured. "He's not going to hurt you. We'll make sure he'll never hurt you or any other kids ever again."

His gaze slowly skated back up across the faces; then he turned away and went to the refrigerator to stare at a construction-paper snowman.

"Josh, are you sure you didn't see the man?" Hannah asked, a desperate edge to her voice. "Maybe you should come back and look again. Come on—"

Ellen rose and gently caught hold of her arm before she could drag Josh back to the table.

"It's okay, Hannah. Maybe he just isn't ready to look yet. We'll try it again another day."

"But—" Hannah's gaze darted from her son to the mug shot of Wright.

"It's all right," Ellen said, wishing she felt as nonchalant as she sounded. "When he's ready, he'll talk about it. He's just not ready yet."

"What if he's never ready?" she whispered.

"We'll make the case," Ellen promised. But as they drove away from the Kirkwood house, she wondered if it was a promise she would be able to keep.

Josh was the only witness who could identify Wright and his accomplice. Josh had seen the person who'd picked him up at the hockey rink. The witness, Helen Black, had glanced out her window that night and seen a boy who could only have been Josh willingly climbing into a van. He had to have seen who was driving it.

"Maybe the accomplice picked him up," Cameron offered. "Maybe he never saw Wright."

"Maybe."

He was silent for half a block as they drove past a Kwik Trip and a Vietnamese grocery. "And if we don't have Josh take the stand, Costello will say he couldn't identify Wright because Wright didn't do it."

"Then we jump all over Costello for being a heartless bastard," Ellen countered. "We say we're not putting Josh on the stand, because he's been traumatized and victimized enough. We don't want to put him through the ordeal of cross-examination, to say nothing of having to face Wright in the courtroom."

He nodded as they turned onto Oslo and headed up the hill toward the courthouse. They passed the knot of protestors on the sidewalk and turned in at the entrance to the sheriffs-department lot, swinging around behind the building.

"Poor kid," Cameron said. "It's up to us to get him some justice."

Ellen found a ghost of a smile for him as she palmed her keys. "That's why they pay us the big bucks, Mr. Reed."

Judge Rudy Stovich." Rudy spoke the title aloud to test the sound of it. Sounded good.

He had occupied this corner office on the second floor of the Park County courthouse for a dozen years. The oak credenza was piled with file folders and law books he never consulted. His desk was awash with debris, the decorative scales of justice that sat on one corner tipped heavily with golf tees. A set of Ping clubs leaned into one dark corner of the room, resting up for the annual February trip to Phoenix. A trip he would gladly postpone in order to move himself into old Franken's chambers.

"Judge Rudy Stovich," Manley Vanloon echoed. He plucked a filbert from the nut dish on the desk and cracked it with a tool disguised to look like an angry mallard. Fine slivers of shell rained down like flecks of tobacco onto the front of his tan wool sweater. He was built like a Buddha, all belly and a round, smiling face. His eyebrows tilted up above his tiny eyes. "Maybe you should go by Rudolph. Sounds more dignified."

Rudy swiveled his chair back and forth as if the motion would act as a centrifuge and separate the good decisions from the bad. "Sounds pretentious. Folks like my country-lawyer image."

"Good point." Manley nibbled his filbert, his gaze speculative as he imagined his pal in judge's robes. He and Rudy had been buddies since snow was cold, backing each other in business ventures and political campaigns. "How long before the governor makes up his mind?"

"Oh, he'll have to wait a decent interval after they bury old Franken. A week or so, I should think. By the way, the viewing is tomorrow at Oglethorpe's. Funeral Friday, three-thirty at Grace Lutheran."

"Grace Lutheran? All this time I thought he was Methodist. He struck me as a Methodist." He dusted the filbert-shell shrapnel off his cardigan and reached for a pecan. "Dinner after the funeral? Friday's all-you-can-eat fish at the Scandia House."

"Yeah, sure," Rudy mumbled dreamily, imagining himself delivering a stirring eulogy before a congregation that would include judges and lawyers and politicians from all over the state. Franken had lived a long time, accumulating a long list of powerful friends and colleagues. The funeral seemed a fitting time for Rudy to impress them all with his eloquence and sincerity.

The intercom buzzed, and Alice Zymanski's voice snapped out of it like a bolt of lightning. "Ellen is here to see you. I'm leaving."

"Send her in." Rudy forced himself to his feet, though it seemed too late in the day for manners. Once he was firmly ensconced in his judge-ship, he was going to give up manners.

Ellen let herself in, manufacturing a smile for Manley Vanloon. Manley had amassed a small fortune in real estate during the agriculture depression of the seventies, buying out farms on the fringe of Deer Lake and developing the land into pricey subdivisions for the influx of yuppies from the Cities. He had then bought a trio of car dealerships and had made himself another fortune luring car buyers out of the Cities with his hayseed image, then cleaning their pockets for them.

"Hey, there, Ellen." Manley lifted himself out of his chair no more than he would to fart and settled back down to the business of digging his pecan out of the shell. "How's that Bonneville running? Heck of a nice car."

"Just fine, Manley." She turned her attention to her boss. "I just got a call from the assignments clerk. They're giving Garrett Wright to Judge Grabko. I thought you'd want to know."

"Are you all right with that choice?"

She shrugged. "We could do worse."

"Will you recuse?"

And let Tony Costello throw a public fit about the prosecution delaying his client's right to a speedy trial, to say nothing of alluding to the maneuver as the tactics of someone with a weak case? He had already made noises on both those points at his four o'clock press conference in the courthouse rotunda.

Ellen had sent Phoebe to the press conference as her spy, refusing to show up herself and give Tony the golden opportunity of engaging her in some impromptu sparring. When he marched upstairs to the county attorney's offices afterward, with reporters in tow, she made the receptionist lie and tell him she was out, for the sole purpose of spoiling his big moment of confrontation.

That small victory had been sweet, but the fact that she was letting Costello affect her decision making irritated her in the extreme. Strategy, she told herself. She had to think in terms of strategy rather than in terms of being manipulated. Always put a positive spin on a negative possibility. Control was the name of the game.

"No, I won't recuse Grabko. He knows his stuff. He's fair. I've never had any big complaints about him other than that he tends toward pretension."

Rudy shot an I-told-you-so look at Manley, who pursed his lips as if holding back a belch.

"I'm still amazed Wright got Costello to represent him," Rudy said.

"I'd like to know how that happened," Ellen said. "Who called him in? Wright isn't allowed to make long-distance calls from jail. I doubt Denny Enberg would have been so gracious as to contact his own successor. Who does that leave?"

"Wright's wife."

"Who is barely functioning. I saw her myself the other night. Unless that's all been an act, she could no more have had a coherent conversation with Tony Costello than my golden retriever. That leaves Wright's accomplice."

"Which could mean Costello has been in contact with the kidnapper of that Campion boy," Rudy surmised.

"And fat chance we'll get him to tell us anything."

Rudy made a serious, contemplative sound, arranging his features in an expression he thought would look judicial. "Yes, well, do what you can, Ellen. I'm confident you can handle Costello."

Ellen took the platitude for what it was worth, which was nothing. She left Rudy to his scheming for Franken's seat on the bench and headed back to her own office. The staff was clearing out for the day. Sig Iverson and Quentin Adler were headed out the door, heads bent toward each other as they discussed some point of law or gossip. Phoebe was pulling on her llama poncho over her daisy-print dress and thermal leggings. Her head popped up through the opening and she pulled her mass of kinky hair free.