Indefensible (3 page)

“I don't know,” Chip says, “I'm betting we find a calling card: ballistics, DNA, fibers. Something.” He has a cup pressed to his face, and I realize I'm doing the same, warming my cheek on willowware, though the room temperature is in the seventies. Dorsey and I have coffee. Chip has herbal tea of some kind that he picked from a wicker basket the waitress brought over. He had engaged her
at length about the different qualities of the herbal blends before choosing from the assortment.

“We could get her hypnotized, I suppose,” Dorsey says of Cassandra. “Like, maybe she saw their car parked out at the road. Something like that. You know?”

Chip shakes his head and says, “I suppose.”

I shrug. Dorsey shrugs. The hypnosis idea is dead. We know she didn't see anything.

At the other table, Cassandra and Lizzy are talking quietly. Kenny is silent.

“. . . because she's really no witness at all,” Chip says.

“She doesn't exist, evidence-wise. Investigation-wise,” Dorsey says.

“Trial-wise,” Chip adds.

“Just a bloodhound after it finds a body.”

“Let's send her home,” Dorsey says, and he's up and at the door, beckoning someone in from the parking lot. A uniformed trooper enters. Dorsey thanks Cassandra for all her help and introduces the trooper, Officer Penhale, who will drive her back to town, where someone at headquarters will take a formal statement.

“I can drive her,” I say.

Dorsey's steroidal mustache crinkles. “No, I want to talk this through with you gents. Strategize. How to catch the bad guys, eh? No time like the present, eh?”

“Except that—” I say. And I stop. Everything about the morning has left me shaken, and I just want to hunker down with Lizzy and my new friend Cassandra. But before I figure out how to derail Dorsey's plan, Cassandra is already on her way to the door with Penhale, and Lizzy is on her feet, fingers wrapped around Cassandra's arm. “I'll come, too,” Lizzy says, her only concern being that she rides with Cassandra. “Meet you at your office, Daddy.”

Though I don't want to let Lizzy out of my sight, I have no good reason to forbid her. “Guess I'll go, too,” Kenny says.

Then they're gone, Penhale, Lizzy, Kenny, and the lovely Cassandra. I'm left behind with Dorsey and Chip, wondering how it all
got away from me and how, with this turn of events, I can finagle a phone call or, better, a coffee date with Cassandra.

•  •  •

“Here's what I'm thinking,” Dorsey says when we're settled back around the table. “We'll put all our manpower into surveillance. Watch the major players. Then we let word out that someone saw it all. See who starts making a move. Dollars to doughnuts, we snare somebody right off the bat.”

“What about the witness?” I say, indicating Cassandra with a flick of my head toward the exit door. “Is it dangerous for her?”

“Not dangerous,” Dorsey says. “The Bureau will protect her, and there's no way for them to know who she is. Besides, like we said, all she did was find the scene. She didn't actually
witness
anything.”

Chip nods his agreement, eyes closed, breathing in the steam of his herbal tea.

Dorsey starts to lay out a strategy for leaking the false info that a witness saw the perps in the woods.

“Not so fast,” I say. “If you want to use Cassandra Randall as bait, we need her permission.”

“Oh, for crip's sake,” Dorsey snaps. “She's not bait. She's nothing. We're making it all up. Ms. Randall doesn't exist.”

“I'll talk to her,” I say.

Chip raises eyebrows at Dorsey. Dorsey shrugs, opens his notepad, copies down Cassandra's phone number and address, and hands it to me. I stuff it into my shirt pocket. Chip looks at me wide-eyed and laughs. “You sly bastard,” he says, eyeing the pocket.

•  •  •

On our way out of the café, Dorsey stops to study one of the old sepia photos on the wall: Workmen are digging in a graveyard; there are dozens of holes already dug, and a wagon is stacked with wooden caskets.

“They dug up all the dead,” I tell him, “moved the cemetery to higher ground before closing the dam. Seventy-five hundred
of them. Bones, jewelry, trinkets, grave markers. Lock, stock, and barrel.”

“You know this because . . . ?”

“Undergraduate history project,” I say. “Mom's family had a homestead here, so I took an interest. Big beautiful farm right in the middle of the valley. It's all lake bottom now.”

“So this is kind of a tough place to stay buried,” Dorsey says, and we both laugh.

L
izzy's breathing is a quiet ocean against the beach.
Haaa . . . saaa . . . haaa . . . saaa . . .

Through the window, I see pinpoints of light where the moon reflects on the Volvo's chrome and glass.

We're at our cabin up north. After all of today's traumatic events, Lizzy and I loaded the Volvo with beer and Gatorade and groceries and drove the two hours from the city. We arrived late at night, built a fire in the stove, made hot chocolate with marshmallows, and huddled together under a quilt while I read to Lizzy from
Anna Karenina
. When she fell asleep, I tucked the quilt around her and left her in the big bed while I climbed into the cold narrow bunk across the room that is supposed to be hers. This is our routine.

I awaken in the night.The cabin is dark, but I can make out shapes. There is the big four-poster where Lizzy sleeps, and I see the couch and woodstove. I can see the grocery bags we left out on the table when we arrived. In darkness, the bags look solid and weathered, rising above the pine slab like the great stone heads of Easter Island rising from the grass. I see an eye, an ear, and the sad sloping nose. It is Zander Phippin, of course—not that he looked anything like those woebegone heads, but here in the darkness, it is he. His nose, his ears, his head poking up from the dirt with chunks of sod tumbling from his features.

“My own little boy,” I whisper. I'm half asleep, and my thoughts are addled. I'm confusing poor dead Zander with another boy. In most matters, I'm a shameless and unimaginative realist, but not so with regard to my own departed son, Toby. I protect my memory of Toby from the weathering elements of logic. Zander is, or was, the same age my son would be now. Toby died in Flora's arms a quarter
century ago (in this very room, actually), but I still see him in babies who are around the age he was when he died—nine and a half months—and young men like Zander, who are the age he would be if he had lived.

I snap on the light.

•  •  •

Morning now: It's the sort of morning that makes you wish for nothing beyond the simple pleasure of sitting on the dock, bathed in the indigo and pink of sky and lake. In fact, I'm sitting in my Adirondack chair at the end of the dock with a cup of coffee.

Lizzy comes outside for her run. She's heavy-boned for a runner, but she has her mom's good lung capacity. She stands in front of me, warming up, hopping like a springbuck. The jumping and the spin of her ponytail and the mesh of arms and legs are carefree and exuberant and judgmental and arrogant.

Now she eyes me with a smile that is impish and aware. “She's separated, you know,” she says with a sly smile.

“Who is?”

“Duh. Cassandra.”

I shrug.

“You like her,” Lizzy says.

I wait.

“ 'Cause she likes you.”

“Tell me what you know, babe.”

Lizzy stops jumping and jogs once around my Adirondack chair. “I can just tell,” she says, and then she is off around the lake. The pastels of morning are fading, loons are swimming, striders striding, fish finning, songbirds singing, and all of it coming together into a pretty convincing dawn-of-creation tableau with the first golden rays tickling the tops of the firs. I have the Adirondack chair oriented to give me the best view of where, in about forty-eight minutes, Lizzy will emerge again from the woods, sweaty and pink and happy.

I dial my voice mail.

Message: “Nickie, it's Flora, I'll see you Saturday afternoon. I'm just calling to say I might be a little late and that I'm bringing my friend Lloyd, I don't think you've met him yet. Nicest man. I know you two will hit it off. We met last month when I had that symposium, you know? Maybe you don't. Bye-bye.”

From here on the dock, I can see Flora's cabin through the trees. Our marriage broke up after Toby died, each of us deeming the other guilty of unforgivable acts. But neither of us wanted to give up this cabin on the lake, so we didn't. We swapped the partnership in matrimony for a simple partnership in real estate, satisfying our need to be unmarried without completely letting go.

Our friendly arrangement got
too
friendly a few times, and Lizzy was born eight years after our divorce. Eventually, we divided the land and built the second cabin for Flora.

Message: “Nick, it's Kendall Vance. Listen, I've got this Tamika . . . um . . . um . . . Curtis, Tamika Curtis case. We have to talk. I can't believe for a frigging minute you're serious about this. Call me.”

I am chagrined to hear that Kendall has been assigned to the Tamika Curtis case. He is an arrogant defense lawyer who sometimes takes pro bono cases for the federal-defender program. The Curtis case is one of them, because Tamika Curtis's only pot to piss in is the one in her cell. It's typical of Kendall Vance to call me directly instead of talking to whichever assistant is handling the case, because Kendall doesn't want to discuss procedural issues. He wants to harp about the unfairness of the law, the courts, the government, and life in general. He's a Sixth Amendment nutcase (that's the one guaranteeing the defendant's right to counsel) who strains his shoulder patting himself on the back every time he puts a murderer or drug peddler back out on the street. He no doubt wants to make me the great Satan of poor Tamika's miserable existence.
Don't argue with me,
I'll tell him,
your beef is with Congress.

Which is one of the things I like about my job: There's no room
for moral anguish. Somebody else makes the tough choices. I just enforce.

I delete his message.

Message: “Nick, it's Chip. Call me.” Chip d'Villafranca, my FBI buddy. I'd like to call Cassandra first, but it's too early to be jingling at the bedside of an almost stranger, so I call Chip. He answers in a laconic Saturday-morning voice, but after a few seconds of small talk, he switches to his badass FBI-agent voice. “I have news,” he says. “A person of interest passed through a toll station off the eastbound lane of the pike on the morning in question.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning the guy was coming from the direction of the reservoir toward town shortly after Ms. Randall's encounter in the woods. The timing is about right.”

“Who is he?”

“Avery Illman, aka Scud. A nobody. We've never had direct dealings with him, but his name comes up a lot. Dorsey's putting it together.”

“What's the plan?”

“Pick him up today for questioning, then let him go. We won't let on we found the Phippin kid. Then we follow this Scud character around a while, see what turns up, who he talks to. Circle gets wider, we'll bring in a few of his associates for questioning. Let on we have the body, have a witness. Someone will leak something or do something stupid.”

“Quick work, Chip.”

“It's what they pay us for.”

“You're sure this guy Scud, he doesn't live in the west 'burbs, commutes in on the pike, maybe has a girlfriend out there? Something?”

“Girlfriend, who knows. But he lives right in the city. Wife and a stepson. Have you talked to the bird-watcher yet?”

“She's my next call.”

“And I suppose you're going to ask me for a workup on her.”

I laugh. “I don't need the FBI. I have a daughter on the case.” We both chuckle. Then I switch back to the sorrows at hand: “Who took care of notifying Zander's parents?”

“Dorsey's people. But we haven't interviewed them yet.” Chip echoes my mournful tone. “Nothing worse,” he says.

“Nothing worse,” I agree.

•  •  •

Lizzy is due back in about thirty-five minutes.

I open my billfold to get Cassandra's number, but it isn't there. I must have left it at home, in the pocket of my shirt. No matter: Chip will have Cassandra's phone number in his notes, too, so I call him back, and after some mild ribbing, he gives me the number.

“Hi, you've reached 555-3080,” Cassandra's voice says. “Please leave your name and number, the date and time of your call, the purpose of your call, your religious persuasion, political affiliation, NRA membership status, IQ, resting pulse, and whether a spot check of your freezer would reveal fillets of any upper-trophic-level fish, and I'll call you back. Bye.”

I hesitate. Her greeting doesn't invite the serious tone of what I want to say regarding the FBI and Zander Phippin. But it does set the perfect tone for me to drop in a breezy, unrefusable invitation for a coffee date. Really, both matters should be addressed to Cassandra herself instead of her message machine.

Click.
Too late.

I call back and consider hitting a few of the questions—pulse, 58; the occasional chunk of mahimahi; and a Republican Party affiliation owing to an ironic error many years back, which I've never bothered to correct because it landed me my job. Again, this would all be a suave lead-in to the date question, but in bad taste for the rest. I hesitate.

Click.
Too late.

I call back. “Resting pulse and IQ are identical,” I say quickly, “but I can't remember the number. Hi, it's Nick Davis with the
U.S. Attorney's Office. From yesterday. Lizzy's father. Listen, I need to speak with you as soon as possible. Please call me immediately. 555-2672.”