Proof of Intent (6 page)

“You'd be prepared to testify to that effect?”

“Is he really going to be charged with killing Diana?”

“I don't know the answer to that.”

Rourke scowled. “It's ridiculous. Underneath the mask, he's a sweet man. He'd never do a thing like that.”

“So you'd testify? If it came to that?”

“Of course.”

“Hopefully it won't come to that.”

“I'm sure it won't.”

I wished I was equally confident.

Since there was nothing more for me to do in New York, I took an early flight home the next morning. My cell phone rang as soon as I got off the plane in Detroit. It was Miles Dane.

“Charley?” Miles sounded shaken. “I've been trying you and trying you.”

“I've been on a plane. What is it, Miles?”

“I think . . . I think I made a mistake.”

“
What did you do?
”

“I talked to that woman again. Chantall Denkerberg. The cop.”

“Miles, what did I tell you? Talk to nobody without me? Remember that?”

“That's not what I'm saying, Charley,” he snapped. “What I'm trying to tell you is she just called and asked if I was going to be home for the rest of the day. I don't think she wants to talk.”

“Sit tight, Miles. Keep your mouth shut, stay calm, and I'll be there as soon as I can.”

“This is scaring me a little, okay?”

“Sit tight.”

The largest, most expensive houses in Pickeral Point are on Riverside Boulevard. The view of the river that separates Michigan from Canada is spectacular, the trees are large and old, and the houses are grandly massive. These days the smallest house on the road would easily run you a million five.

Riverside Drive is not the sort of place you expect to see squadrons of police cars, certainly not twice in one week. But as I pulled up in front of Miles Dane's house, that's what I found.

I jumped out and found Detective Chantall Denkerberg standing on the street, her hands on her hips, a cigarillo dangling from her lip. Chief Bower was there, too, along with about fifteen patrol officers. More ominously, a black panel truck that read
S-TAC
in gold letters on the side was parked half a block down from Miles's house. Standing around the van were six or eight muscular young guys wearing black BDUs and Kevlar, and carrying machine guns. Great. S-TAC was the Sheriff's Tactical Unit, recently created by the megalomaniacal new sheriff of Kerry County. As I was pulling up, the Channel 5 news van screeched in behind me and began hoisting its satellite dish so they could broadcast live to the newsroom back in Detroit.

I breezed past Detective Denkerberg and went straight to Chief Bower.

“What in the name of God is going on here?” I said.

“Hi, Charley.” Chief Bower gave me the dry, appraising look that is about the most enthusiastic greeting I can expect from law enforcement people. “Your client seems to have wigged out on us.”

“Meaning what?”

“Detective Denkerberg was coming to talk to him, and he assaulted her.”

“What do you mean assaulted her?”

“He pulled a gun on her, punched her, and now he's barricaded himself in the house with a weapon.”

“Did she come to talk? Or to arrest him?”

Chief Bower briefly avoided my eyes. “We haven't released the crime scene yet. She's well within her rights to come back for a crime scene follow-up.”

“And what's up with S-TAC?” I said. “Do you really need those trigger-happy morons here? This isn't even their jurisdiction.”

“I requested their assistance,” Bower said. “Your client is making threats and waving a pistol.”

“I'm extremely upset about this,” I said. “I told your pit bull Denkerberg if she wanted to talk to him, to call me.”

“Look—”

“Forget it. I'm going in to talk to him.”

“You can't go in there,” Bower said. “He's got a
gun
.”

“So do half the people in this state,” I said. Then I smiled pleasantly and started striding across the yard toward the front door. I admit, I don't cut much of a figure, but I do my best. Chin up, big smile on my face. I knew some eager cameraman over in the Channel 5 van was rolling tape by now, so every move I made counted. The spin was starting this very minute. If I went creeping in like I was afraid of being shot, that would show up on the news, making Miles appear to be a dangerous nut.

My rational mind told me I was in no danger, but my heart was beating hard as I knocked on the door. I turned and waved pleasantly at the mob of police, gave them a big cheesy thumbs-up.

After a moment the lock clicked and the door opened. Miles Dane stood there, ashen-faced, hair uncombed, clutching a big Smith & Wesson with a custom grip. Every time I'd seen him before, he had looked taller than his five-foot-six-inch frame; he was enlarged somehow by his physical energy. But now, he looked very small, like something had been drained out of him, causing his body to wither and shrink. I forced my way past him, quickly slammed the door shut. I didn't want any visuals of Miles Dane and his trusty revolver showing up in the media.

“Have you lost it, Miles?” I said.

Miles looked around vaguely. There were bags under his eyes and the skin sagged in the hollows under his cheekbones. “I got . . . I got scared, Charley.”

“Well, I'm here, and we're going to work things out. Now put the cannon down for a minute, okay?”

Miles nodded, locked the door, then walked into the living room, where he set the Smith on the coffee table.

“Explain to me
precisely
what happened here,” I said.

“I got a call from Denkerberg,” Miles said. “About an hour and a half ago. She said she was calling to make sure I was home. I go, ‘Obviously I'm home.' She goes, ‘Well, don't go anywhere. I need to talk to you.' That's when I called you. If she really needed to talk, she'd have been all peaches and cream. As much as she's capable of it anyway. Plus, she'd have called you first so that you'd be present for the interview.”

“So you figured she was coming to arrest you.”

Miles nodded miserably.

“What did you do when she got here?”

“She showed up on the doorstep. I told her she couldn't come in. She got real insistent. So I . . . ah, I kind of . . .”

“You pulled your gun.”

“Well. Not
actually
. I was wearing my shoulder holster, and I just sort of put . . . I kind of rested my hand on the grip.”

I felt like shaking him. “Did she show you a warrant?”

Miles shook his head no.

“Then what?”

“She started to pull her pistol . . .”

“So you punched her?”

“Punched her!” His eyes widened. “Is that what those morons are saying? Give me a break. No, what happened is I could see that she was about to draw down on me—with no legal justification, I might add—so I just sort of reached out the door and shoved her. Just to keep her out of the house. She kind of stumbled back, and I slammed the door.”

“And that's it? Next thing you know, we've got
this
?” I waved my hand at the flashing lights and camera crews outside.

Miles shrugged. “I may have yelled a couple things out the window.”

“Great. You wave the gun around, too?”

Miles avoided my eyes.

“Miles, Miles, Miles . . .” I sighed loudly.

Miles started pacing up and down.

“Okay, let me think. First, you're sure she didn't show you a warrant?”

“Absolutely not.”

I smiled. “What you did, nothing personal, Miles, but this was pretty asinine. Nevertheless, we can salvage this. Give me a minute, okay?”

I went back to the door, walked across the lawn again, smiling pleasantly. Charley Sloan, out for a nice afternoon constitutional. I noticed there were now four TV trucks on the scene. When I reached Chief Bower, I laughed genially. Not for the chief's benefit and certainly not because anything funny had happened, but because I knew I was on camera. Cameras love a friendly face.

“I hope you plan to take disciplinary action against Chantall Denkerberg,” I said. My face was jolly, but my tone was not.

“Excuse
me?” the chief said, eyes narrowing.

“You are aware she tried to force entry into an established and lawful residence without legal authorization?” That wasn't precisely what had happened, but it was close enough. The main thing was that I needed to put the chief on the defensive. “I think probably breaking and entering would be about right. Maybe throw in some battery, just for good measure.”

“Give me a break, Sloan. It's a crime scene. She has the right of access.”

“Three days ago it was a crime scene. Your own people cleared him to take possession when you were done. Now it's his home again. I don't know what
she's
saying happened, but she had no warrant, and she tried to force her way in there, Chief, and that's against the law. At that point Miles basically just showed her his gun. Didn't draw it, didn't point it, just let her observe that he had it—a right he has, I might add, under protection of the Constitution of the United States of America. Then when she tried to draw down on him, he nudged her backward so he could close the door to his own lawful residence. End of story.”

“Bullshit,” Bower said. “He was yelling out the window about how he was going to kill anybody who set foot on his lawn.”

“Any of these folks have that on tape?” I waved at the TV trucks. I knew they hadn't because I'd seen the first TV truck roll up myself. “If not, it's the word of small-town cop against a world-famous author.”

Bower rolled his eyes and turned his head away from me.

“Thought not,” I said. “But look, all of that's irrelevant now. Denkerberg came here to talk to my client. If you want to talk to Miles, I'd be more than happy to bring him by the station right this minute. But I got news for you, he's not coming out as long as all the Gestapo stuff is going on out here.” I gave a big sweep of my arm, taking in the pumped-up S-TAC boys, the parade of flashing lights, the uniformed police, the TV trucks.

Bower laughed derisively.

“I don't see the humor,” I said sharply. “You've got a rogue officer over there who just unlawfully provoked a potentially life-threatening situation with the grieving spouse of a murder victim. Now I'd hate to have to file suit against the city over some silly little misunderstanding like this. Put a leash on the S-TAC guys, send them back to their cage, and Miles will happily come down and chat.”

Chief Bower scowled.

“Are you
that
eager to have people talk about Pickeral Point in the same breath as Ruby Ridge and Waco? I give you my word, Chief. Fifteen minutes after the last cop is gone, Miles Dane is standing in your station house. Then it's your move.”

“He's agreed to this?”

“Absolutely.”

Chief Bower sighed, turned to the patrol sergeant on the scene. “You heard him. Everybody out. Now!”

The fifteen minutes gave me an opportunity to make a little statement to the TV crews, which went live on the moon news. I made sure the cameras were aimed so they could see the S-TAC boys packing up in their black van. I smiled a lot and made a statement about the Pickeral Point police that, while sounding complimentary on its face, had the obvious implication that they were bumbling idiots. I praised their “restraint,” in the same breath that I referred to Detective Denkerberg as “a confused female officer.” I may have even used the phrase “storm trooper” once or twice. It was all a bit of a cheap shot. But it also served to put them on notice that if they came after Miles Dane, Charley Sloan wouldn't take it lying down.

Then I went inside 221 Riverside Boulevard, and said, “Okay, Miles, comb your hair and put on a white shirt and a pair of khakis.”

“A
white
shirt? I never wear white.”

“And I'm telling you, white shirt. Until I say you differently, black has disappeared from your wardrobe.”

We drove to the police station in my car. For reasons known only to the four members of the city council (all of them, not coincidentally, heavily involved in the real estate business), the new Pickeral Point police station had been built way on the western outskirts of town in the middle of a very large field. The field—which had been sold to the city for three times its value, naturally—had once been devoted to the cultivation of soybeans. Since the soybeans were long gone, there was now plenty of room for all the TV trucks to spread out, their antennae thrusting pugnaciously at the sky. They weren't just local stations either, I noticed. CNN and CNBC were both also represented. And if CNN and CNBC were there today, tomorrow it would be national crews from NBC, CBS, ABC, and Fox.

I took Miles by the arm and led him inside the building. Chantall Denkerberg was waiting at the front desk. She had a smear of dirt up the side of her blue suit—presumably from falling down the stairs of Miles's house.

“
Confused
, Mr. Sloan?” she said, smiling coldly and holding a piece of paper in front of my face. I got the feeling she hadn't appreciated my confused-female-officer speech on TV. “Here's an arrest warrant. Is this
confusing
to you?”

I saw in a flash what had happened. She had almost certainly had the warrant in her pocket when she had rolled up at Miles's house. She had gone over there hoping to con him into talking some more. But if he wasn't willing to talk, she had intended to serve the warrant.

Miles saw the piece of folded paper in her hand, stopped, then took a step backward. The color drained out of his face. “No!” he said. “No, I can't—”