The Perfect Suspect (22 page)

Catherine drove slowly down the narrow ramp into the garage. She removed her sunglasses and blinked into the dim lights as she followed the white line toward the rows of cars nosed against the far wall. Just as she pulled into a vacant space, the driver's door of the black sedan in the next slot flung itself open and a dark-haired man jumped out. Catherine followed the man in her rearview mirror.

“It's me, Catherine,” Nick said, and she was aware of the sound of her breath escaping like a deflating balloon.

“You frightened me,” she said, getting out of the car and slamming the door.

Nick stood with his arms at his sides, shadows lengthening his face. “Is there somewhere private we can talk?”

She gave him a half nod and headed across the garage toward the banging elevators, his boots clacking behind her. They rode up to the lobby in silence. In silence, across the tiled floor to the reception desk. Nick showed his badge and signed in, and she led the way to the elevators across the lobby. She bit her lip to keep from asking what was wrong. It must be terrible, and she had the feeling—a silly notion, she knew—that if she didn't ask, the terribleness would evaporate. The doors parted and she headed to the right, calling over her shoulder to the receptionist in front of the newsroom that she would be using the conference room for a few minutes. Nick stayed in step beside her.

“What is it?” she said when they were inside. She had never seen him like this; thin lipped, barely controlling the anger that she could almost smell. This wasn't a side of Nick Bustamante she recognized or understood. They were so new together, barely ten months old, still feeling their way.

“I went to the Hudson building this morning.” Nick started patrolling the small room, down one side of the table with the chairs pushed in at the sides, hands stuffed into the pockets of his dark slacks. “I asked to see the security videos from yesterday, thinking I might see Jeremy Whitman with somebody in the lobby we'd want to talk to. I saw you, Catherine.” He came up the other side of the table.

Catherine sank into the chair at the end. “I met with him last night,” she said.

“I know.” He was gripping the back of a side chair. “I talked to a couple of guys he was drinking with. They told me he left the bar to meet a reporter. Forty-five minutes later, he returned to the bar and said he'd been at the Tattered Cover, and when I showed photos around there, three clerks identified you and Jeremy, the couple that looked like they were having a big argument in the coffee shop. Why didn't you tell me?”

“I wanted to,” she said.

“That a fact? Well, try me now.” He yanked out the chair and sat down hard. “What the hell's going on? This is a murder investigation, and you could have important evidence. You think that's something you should have told me about?”

“I didn't think it would do any good.” Catherine stared past him down the table. She'd been wrong, she thought. She could have called Nick last night, and he would have escorted Jeremy to the police station. Maybe Nick could have convinced Internal Affairs to take Beckman off the investigation, and if that had happened, Beckman wouldn't have gotten an arrest warrant for Sydney. God, Catherine thought, she had made the wrong choice, and now she was running out of choices that mattered. The man who had seen David and Detective Beckman together in Aspen—lovers in a bar—was dead. The witness who had seen Beckman at David's house after his murder might as well not exist, and Sydney Beckman would no doubt be indicted for murder.

She turned to Nick, aware that he had been waiting for her to say something, the blue vein in his neck pulsing, his mouth and chin rigid. She told him all of it. Aspen and the excuses David had made about how he'd run into an old flame, and Jeremy's inability to disbelieve his own eyes. The phone call from the anonymous woman. Both Jeremy and the witness terrified that the police wouldn't believe them, would shrug off anything they said that reflected badly on one of their own. Detective Beckman would be alerted. She could see in the way Nick's face had started to shut down that Jeremy and the caller had been right.

“Don't pretend it couldn't happen,” she said. “Last fall Internal Affairs spiked an investigation into the domestic abuse call at a police officer's home. Spiked it for how long, three months? Long enough for the second call when the officer's wife had to be hospitalized.”

Nick let the silence settle between them like another presence. Finally, he asked, “Anyone else see Mathews and Beckman together in Aspen?”

“No one in the campaign,” Catherine said. Then she told him that David had been to a fund-raising event in Grand Junction and had insisted upon driving back to Denver alone. Everybody else stayed in Grand Junction, except Jeremy who went hiking near Aspen and, three days later, dropped into the bar at the Jerome Hotel and found David and Detective Beckman.

“I managed to convince him that he and the caller would support each other's stories. With two eyewitnesses linking Mathews and Beckman, Internal Affairs would have to investigate Beckman.” Catherine stopped; the image of the tall, gangly young man floated in front of her. She tried to swallow the lump forming in her throat.

“If you believed that, why didn't you take him to police headquarters last night?”

And Whitman would still be alive
. Nick hadn't said the words, but they echoed around the conference room as if he had shouted them.

“He was drinking,” Catherine said. “He needed to be sober when he talked to Internal Affairs.” She could hear the feebleness in her own words, the wobbly effort to excuse herself. She forced herself to go on: “I'd hoped to find the witness today. She may drive a black BMW.”

“Along with twenty thousand other people in Denver.” Nick spread his hands on the table. “So let's examine what you've got. A caller who's probably a kook. You know how many crazy people call the police in high-profile cases? Admit to the crime or claim their ex-lovers or sisters or bosses did it? All looking for their own fifteen minutes. Whitman could have been mistaken about what he saw. Mathews had a plausible explanation, right? People in his campaign will probably confirm it.”

Catherine didn't say anything. Don Cannon would confirm Mathews's explanation. Cannon believed in David Mathews.

“Bottom line, Catherine, Sydney Mathews was arrested an hour ago,” he said, his voice still tight. “Her lawyer got her out on bail, but she'll be indicted and she'll stand trial. The murder of David Mathews is solved.”

“Do you really believe that?” Catherine could feel the heat in her cheeks.

“What I believe is that you've tried and convicted a police detective on innuendo and an anonymous statement.” He drew back, pouring his gaze over her. “There's no evidence any of it is true. Jeremy Whitman could have been mistaken. He could have seen Mathews with a blond woman who resembled Beckman. An unfortunate coincidence. He was murdered in a gang initiation attack. Assaults have been going on all summer, played down, I admit, so people wouldn't stop coming downtown. The point is, the method was typical of gang initiation. As for Sydney Mathews, a search warrant turned up a 9mm Sig 226 Tactical, and ballistics says it's the murder weapon. Hard evidence, Catherine, against your . . .” He lifted his hands. “Instincts.”

“Now you see why I couldn't tell you.” He didn't take his eyes from her, and she pushed on: “The police would dismiss the whole thing, but Detective Beckman would know that Jeremy could connect her to Mathews. She'd know the witness had called the
Journal
. She could go after both of them and make sure they never talked. Last night she made sure Jeremy could never talk.”

Nick got to his feet and kicked the chair back. It shuddered against the hard floor. “Whitman took a . 38 bullet, Catherine. You think this is a game? Two homicides that the evidence says aren't related. Just a game to you? Straight out of a movie about the dumb flatfooted detective and the beautiful girl reporter who solves the crime for him? Oh, and another police detective is the murderer. How original.”

“Nick . . .” Catherine started to her feet, but he put out a hand, as if to keep her away. He turned and flung open the door.

“What this comes down to is trust,” he said, looking back. “Whether you trust me and whether I can trust you. Without that, we don't have anything.”

21

“How are things with you?” Dulcie Oldman got right to the point, ignoring the polite preliminaries Catherine was becoming accustomed to when she met with her mother's people. She could feel the intensity of Dulcie's gaze boring into her over the rim of a coffee mug. Flecks of light shone in the woman's dark eyes. She was Arapaho, in her forties, with black hair that brushed her shoulders and tiny silver earrings. She wore a blue skirt and the kind of white blouse that fit underneath a suit coat. A thoroughly modern woman, Catherine thought, with a string of degrees and a position as director of human resources for a telecommunications company. Yet rooted in the past, with black eyes framed in dark, carved features, much like Catherine's own. Looking at Dulcie was like looking at an image of herself in the mirror.

An hour and a half ago, Catherine had been huddled over the computer in the newsroom, forcing all of her strength and thoughts into writing the background article around Jason's report of Sydney's arrest for tomorrow's paper, pulling the curtains in her head to block out everything else—Jeremy Whitman and David Mathews. Nick Bustamante. She had felt herself shaking inside, as if she were being bounced about. How could she have let this happen with Nick? It was not what she wanted, not what she had hoped for. She had wiped at the moisture in her eyes and pulled hard on the curtains in her head and forced herself to concentrate on the story. That was how it had been from the time she had learned to read and write, a little brown girl huddled over a notebook with a pencil in hand, lost in a world of scribbled, imagined stories that made more sense than the white world around her. She wrote the last line, read through the piece and sent it winging electronically twenty feet away to Marjorie's computer. Then she had called Dulcie, the woman she had met at the Indian Center last year when she started looking for the part of her that was Arapaho.

She had finished her own coffee and gotten a refill while she waited for Dulcie's Honda to pull onto the concrete slab in front of the coffee shop. On her way over, Catherine had stopped at the 7-Eleven and bought a can of tobacco, cans of tuna fish and candy bars. She had given them to Dulcie, knowing Dulcie would take them to an elder. The double gift, in the Arapaho Way. Dulcie would have the pleasure of both receiving and giving. She glanced away from the woman across from her. The image of Jeremy Whitman heading down the sidewalk to the bar last night, floated ahead like a ghost, as if she might still run after him, take hold of his arm, insist he get into her car so she could drive him to police headquarters. She should have seen the danger. Anything she had put together, Detective Beckman could also figure out.

“A young man was murdered last night,” Catherine managed, the lump so big in her throat, she felt she might choke. “I could have prevented it.”

“Tell me about it.”

“I should have recognized the danger and warned him. I should have insisted he come with me. I could have taken him home or to a hotel or someplace else the killer wouldn't have known about. He'd be alive this morning . . .”

She broke off and crushed the napkin against her mouth. God, she didn't want to cry. Dulcie was quiet, giving her a moment, and that was something important that she had learned from the Arapahos, the patient, quiet waiting. When she trusted her voice, Catherine said: “He had information about a murder, and he had agreed to go with me to the police this morning. The killer got to him first.”

She was aware of Dulcie's hands moving across the table and grasping her own. “You must be a very powerful woman,” she said, “if you could have read this killer's mind.”

“I should have known.” It was a small voice, a remnant of her own, that Catherine heard.

“Nobody has that power.”

“Then I should have sensed what might happen.” It was Dulcie who had urged her to trust her instincts and not reason them away, as she had learned growing up in a white family, going to white schools. “Listen to your instincts,” Dulcie had said. “You'll be surprised how helpful they are in this crazy world.”

“I should have felt the danger around him.” Catherine said. The tears started, a rush of moisture that blurred her vision and washed over her face. “He shouldn't have died.”

Dulcie settled back, her face a calm, unreadable mask. She waited a long while before she said, “What do you feel you should do now?”

“I can't do anything,” Catherine said. “It's too late.”

“You said the murdered man knew something he wanted to tell the police.”

“It belonged to him. Without him, the information is only hearsay.” Catherine twisted the damp napkin in her hands. “There's more,” she said. “A woman has been arrested for a murder she didn't commit.” She waved a hand between them. “I might have been able to prevent her arrest.”

Dulcie was quiet a long moment before she said, “Anyone else involved?”

Catherine felt a sharp prick of pain in her chest, as if Dulcie had laid the point of a knife against her skin. The witness also had information. Information that placed Detective Beckman at the scene of Mathews's murder. And last night Catherine had told Jeremy about the witness. What if Jeremy had blurted out the truth before he died? She saw where Dulcie had been leading her. Detective Beckman, with the resources of the Denver Police Department at her fingertips, would be looking for the anonymous caller.