New River Blues (25 page)

‘Well. Ahem. Adam,' Hartford's gray eyes had clouded over, ‘um, perhaps you could call my office and make an appointment? I can't, um, tell from here when I have an open time.'

‘Well, Devvy, my God,' Adam raised his voice and set the tone at broad mockery, ‘you mean you're not going to treat me like a rock star, take me to lunch? Come on, the prodigal son's returned, and now he's rich!' He turned back to Sarah, smiled at her cordially as if they were suddenly friends. ‘Devvy's a Third, you know. Thirds are very upper-crusty, they have to be careful who they break bread with.' Hartford's rejection had set him on fire. His blue eyes blazed with barely controlled rage. ‘He's always treated me like a dirty shirt in the past, but I was sure my coming into a pile of dough would soften him up. Because I've noticed over the years that ol' Devvy'll pretty much sit up and beg when he sees a stash of cash.' He did a quick imitation of a friendly canine lolling his tongue and wagging his tail, somehow retaining enough similarity to Hartford to be devastating. ‘I guess Mommy's fortune must not be big enough after all. Damn! How much does it take these days, I wonder?'

‘Well, now, Adam, we're glad to know your sense of humor is intact—'

‘Oh, you bet! Still got my sense of humor and my dancing shoes and there's nothing wrong with my appetite, either, when I can get hold of anything fit for it to work on. But I've been locked inside a germ-infested airplane all morning and as Tom Wolfe would say, I'm starved to near perfection.' He turned his dazzling, overheated smile on Sarah again and asked her, ‘Want to go to lunch, Ms Detective?'

‘No thanks.' She stood up. ‘Here's my card, though, in case you have any questions after you've eaten.'

‘Questions. About the untimely demise of my crazy mom? Not likely. I bet
you'd
just
love
to talk about it, though, wouldn't you?'

There was a tiny moment of dead air, like the interval between lightning and thunder, before Hartford stood up and said, ‘Your mother was always very kind to you, Adam. I think you ought to show a little respect.'

‘Hey, I'll show you mine if you'll show me yours.' A hard little bark of laughter came out of him, and then he quit smiling and said, ‘Fuck lunch, I want to go
home
. These people,' he indicated Delaney and Sarah with a tilt of his head, ‘as I understand it, are somehow able to keep me out of my own house. Can you at least fix that, Mr Bigtime Lawyer the Third?'

‘It's a crime scene, Adam,' Hartford said. He picked up his briefcase. His eyes had iced over completely. ‘When they're done investigating it, they'll release it. To your father. Talk to him about getting a key.' He walked around Adam without looking at him, and stepped into the hall.

‘Don't you walk away from me, you prick!' Adam Henderson yelled at his back. ‘I need to talk to you and I need it now!'

‘Call my office,' Hartford's mild voice said, from somewhere near the elevator. ‘Make an appointment.' The doors opened and closed and the car hummed downward.

Delaney's phone vibrated. He looked at the number, said, ‘Excuse me,' and disappeared. Sarah was left in the small room with a young male person who looked as if he might be going to implode.
What do I do if he foams at the mouth?

For a few seconds he did look as if he might go into spasm. His eyes rolled up and he turned white. But instead of slumping to the floor he turned all the way around, like a dog at bedtime, and by the end of that maneuver he was staging a comeback. He rattled coins in his pockets, frowned in a puzzled way, hummed a snatch of music, and abruptly began grinning at her brightly. ‘Well, hey,' he said, ‘at last we're alone, huh? Let's get better acquainted – what's your first name, Ms
Po
-lice?' That fierce bit of impudent humor snapped him out of his funk entirely. ‘Hoo!' He clapped his hands over his head and rotated his pelvis in a prancing-stud move.

If I were still on the street I could take my baton to you, then we could both have fun.
But she saw the sweat on his upper lip, and the jittery way his left hand kept tugging at the hem of his jacket.
Doesn't anybody care that this kid is a total train wreck?
A couple of years younger than Patricia and already well on the way to trashing himself. How long had he lived at boarding schools where nobody gave a damn about him? How many of those years had he been using?

‘You can call me Detective,' she said. But she put a little glint in it.

‘Because we're such special friends, huh?' Amusement perked him up a little, he backed off the crazy-loose-cannon anger trip. ‘How soon do you think I can get back in my house, Detective?'

Wanting to get him out of the department, she said, ‘Why don't you come over to my desk for a minute? Maybe I can find out.'

He gave a big ‘whatever' shrug. But he followed her.

She had forgotten the clutter in her office. They stood together in the doorway, looking in at the perfect storm of paper. Pointing at one of the chairs she'd put in the hall, she said, ‘Have a seat here for a minute, will you?'

He flashed a mocking smile at her and sat down, saying, ‘Tell you right now you're not getting your merit badge for housekeeping this month.'

She wagged a warning finger at him and went on to Tobin's space. He said he was done at the Henderson house, didn't know whether all the lab crews were out yet but would find out. While he was checking, she heard her phone ring, stepped back into her cubicle, and picked the phone up off the floor, trying not to make a breeze.

Delaney said, ‘Have you still got that terrible brat there with you? Well, get rid of him as soon as you can because we need to talk. You got that list of weapons Peete found in the house?'

‘Yes.'

‘Bring it with you and come in my office. Is Tobin over there? Bring him along.'

When she turned away from the phone she found Tobin standing in the door of her workspace, looking around bemused. She said quickly, ‘Don't come in.' She sidled into the hall. ‘What?'

‘Gloria over at the lab says she's finally done at the Henderson house and if she never sees another fingerprint it'll be too soon.' He was grinning. ‘She says this time she means it, she's going over to Pima College tomorrow and sign up for courses in hotel management.'

‘OK. And, uh,' Sarah leaned into Tobin's shoulder, gently nudging him toward his own workspace. Standing by his desk, at what she thought was a safe distance from Adam Henderson, she muttered, ‘What about the rest of the crew?'

‘What? Everybody's done,' Tobin said, in his normal voice, which suddenly sounded loud as a trumpet. He was thinking about his own work and hadn't even noticed her furtive behavior. ‘The yard crew took the crime-scene tape down an hour ago. Gloria said she was the last one out so she locked all the doors and turned the crime-scene lock back to Delaney. What?' He finally noticed the distress on her face.

‘Never mind.' Sarah stepped back out in the hall to tell Adam Henderson he could call his father and get a key. He was already walking away. She called after him, ‘Your house is—'

Without turning, he called back, ‘I heard,' and kept on walking.

In the hall, where the space opened out for standing room in front of the elevators, he passed Mary Waite, who was coming over from the support-staff bullpen with a couple of folders. She turned and watched him as the elevator door opened and he stepped inside.

‘Whee,' she said, as the door closed, ‘there goes a hottie.' She looked at Sarah. ‘What, you don't think so?'

Sarah shook her head and hugged herself, rubbing her arms. ‘Cold,' she said. ‘Cold cold cold.'

Ray Menendez was sitting in front of Delaney's desk, looking pleased with himself, when Sarah and Leo walked in.

‘Ray searched Nino's room this morning,' Delaney said, ‘and found a twelve-gauge shotgun, broken down, on the shelf in the closet. Let me see that list, huh?' She handed it across the desk. ‘Let's see, the Remington . . .' He compared it to a note on his blotter. ‘Yes, by God,' he said. His eyes went back and forth, checking both lists. Finally he looked up, blinking. ‘It's his gun. Can you believe this?'

‘No,' Sarah said.

‘No what?'

‘No, I don't believe it.'

‘Oh, now what? This evidence points to a shooter that yesterday's witness said was there, doesn't it? Said she helped carry him down the stairs after he passed out. But you're still holding out for the husband?'

‘I'm not holding out for anything. I'm just saying, this feels pretty pat to me. What kind of an idiot flees the area but leaves the murder weapon behind in his room?'

‘Well, pardon the hell out of me, Sarah, but that's where we found it.'

‘Anyway, Sarah,' Menendez said, ‘if bad guys never did anything stupid our clearance rate would be even worse than it is.'

‘Which God forbid,' Delaney said.

‘Well, granted. But this is so ridiculous it makes me wonder if something else is going on. Leo,' she turned to Tobin, ‘you buy this scenario?'

‘It seems incredibly stupid, but then how dumb do you have to be to kill somebody at a party with half a dozen witnesses? Anyway, I don't think ballistics is going to make this case for us.'

‘You said that before, when we didn't have the gun,' Delaney said.

‘So now you've got the gun and what have you got? OK, we can prove it's Henderson's. But we can't prove it's the gun that killed his wife, can we? Unless we found the cartridges, which we didn't.'

‘They're testing it now,' Delaney said. ‘By tomorrow we'll know if it's been fired recently.'

‘And if it has, that's very strong circumstantial evidence but you're still not going to convict anybody with it.'

Delaney scratched his ear thoughtfully, blinked a while, and finally said, ‘I guess you're right.'

‘I know I'm right. All we've got in the bodies is buckshot that a first-year law student would tell a jury could have come from any shotgun. And even if we had the ammo we couldn't put Henderson there pulling the trigger, could we? Suppose the gun is covered with his prints and DNA, so what? It's his gun, why wouldn't it be? As for this Nino person, now . . .' He thought. ‘If his DNA is on the gun, that might put him in prison. But it won't get us to murder one.'

‘OK, Leo,' Sarah said. ‘I promise not to rely on ballistics.'

Tobin shrugged. ‘Just trying to save you some time.'

‘Nothing so far on the APB on Anthony Giardelli,' Delaney said. ‘And why aren't we finding this Zack person? He's right here in town.'

‘Who says?' Sarah said. ‘He's not in his shop, I've had patrolmen checking it every hour. The door is locked, the lights are out, and the van is gone.'

‘Didn't Felicity say he's got a room above the shop? Maybe he's up there with the lights off, hiding.'

‘I'll see if I can find out who owns the building,' Sarah said. ‘Hate to break down a door if we don't have to.'

She was sitting at her computer, typing in the order for a Need to Locate on Nino, when a familiar shape scooted past her peripheral vision. She turned away from her screen and said, ‘Jason Peete!'

He said, from somewhere in the hall, ‘Yes?'

Two seconds later, Menendez popped out of his cubicle and stood in the hall outside Sarah's door, grinning, asking, ‘Hey, Jason, my man! Come back here and tell us all, how'd the autopsy go?'

Hearing Menendez, Tobin came out in the hall, too, asking, ‘You like the blood and guts, buddy?'

Ollie Greenaway called over the top of his half-wall, ‘Did Animal let you hold the brain before he weighed it?'

Everybody on the whole flaming floor, evidently, except Sarah Burke had known this was Jason Peete's first autopsy. Did Elmer the Grump know it too? She actually opened her mouth to say how very helpful it might have been if any of them had seen fit to mention this well-known fact yesterday morning. But before she could say a word Jason Peete stepped into her doorway looking as if he might be getting sick again. And looking at his desperate face, she realized what he wanted to tell her:
the other detectives didn't know
.

Animal hadn't told any of them that Peete had hurled in the autopsy room, why would he? Animal didn't give a damn who took heat around here, he was a busy man. He'd only taken the time to call her, Sarah realized, for the sheer joy of dressing somebody down.

So now Jason Peete was standing in the doorway of her cubicle with
please please please
written all over his face.

She'd promised herself she'd get even for the sneaky way he'd finessed himself into the autopsy assignment. Now all she had to do was repeat what Animal had said, and the rest of the squad would punish Peete for her, for weeks, relentlessly.

But now she couldn't do it. The mocking faces of the three detectives in the hall took away her taste for revenge. Their days were tough enough in this department without playing any gotcha games.

So she ignored the taunting questions of the other detectives and asked Peete, ‘How are you doing on that autopsy report?'

‘Just, uh –' he swallowed hard – ‘on my way to wrap it up?'

‘Oh, good. Can you help me with something else this afternoon?'

‘Sure,' he said. And then, trying hard not to look like a pitiful suck-up. ‘You want to tell me about it now, or—?

‘Might as well.' As the three detectives in the hall drifted away, she asked Jason Peete, ‘I'm hoping you'll go on a little spying mission for me.'