Thicker Than Water (8 page)

“Next,” Louis said.

“What?”

“It's called
Next Generation,
not New.”

She shrugged and took another swipe at the cookie dough.

“I take it the cops don't believe Ronnie,” Louis said.

“They can't disprove it. And even though Ronnie
is
the son, he's pretty credible.”

“Did they find anything when they searched Cade's trailer?”

“No.”

Louis put the spoon back in the bowl. He was silent, staring at the squiggles in the Formica surface of the table. He didn't realize he was shaking his head. But Susan saw it and bristled.

“What?” she demanded.

He looked up. “What?”

“That look. If you've got something to say about how I'm handling this, say it.” She crossed her arms across her red T-shirt.

Louis drew in a slow breath. “I think you've got to reconsider the Jagger case as a motive in Duvall's murder.”

Susan's expression was stunned. “You're kidding, right?”

“No, listen to me,” Louis said. “I've been giving this a lot of thought since talking to Cade. He told me the only reason he wanted to sue Duvall was to get big money so he could put his life back together. Ronnie is broke. He owes money all over the place. The nursery business is about to go under. Cade was looking for money, that's all.”

“So?” Susan said.

“So, he had everything to gain if the Jagger case was examined in the context of a civil suit.”

“He couldn't have sued him anyway. The statute of—”

“Cade didn't know that. His intent was to sue, not kill.”

“How do you know Cade didn't know?”

“He told me.”

Susan gave a derisive laugh.

“You believe him when he said he didn't shoot Duvall. Why can't I believe him?”

“I never said I believed him. It's just the story I have to proceed with.”

Louis shook his head. “He wanted money, not revenge.”

“I don't like it,” she said. “You'd have to be able to prove Cade really intended to file the suit and that he didn't know it was futile.”

Louis nodded.

“And you'd have to be able to show someone else could have had something to lose if the Jagger case was reopened.”

“Well,” Louis said, “There's always Bernhardt. If Cade brought suit, the practice would be liable to any claim.”

Susan said nothing.

“And there's Candace,” Louis said. “She was the starter wife, remember. Maybe Duvall was looking to upgrade and she knew it.” He paused. “Spencer had a place in town. Maybe he had something going on the side, like Candace. And maybe Candace knew.” He took another lick of the cookie dough. “Even if Candace had a lover, she still had something to lose if Spencer divorced her.”

Susan was quiet. He thought she was probably angry. But maybe she was just tired. It occurred to him that her prickliness probably came from the stress of the case, not from any real part of her personality. He had asked around, trying to find out more about her and had been told by a source at the courthouse that she was just a couple years out of law school and was trying real hard to make an impression. She had landed a big case with Cade, but now she was treading water and she knew it. He took a breath. He had one more point to press.

“And of course, there's the person who really killed Kitty Jagger.”

Susan shook her head. “Do you have any idea how long it would take to solve a twenty-year-old murder?”

“Yes, I do, in fact,” Louis said.

Susan held his gaze for a moment, then a sudden frown creased her face.

“Shit!” she blurted out. She spun to the oven and jerked open the door. Smoke filled the kitchen. Louis didn't have to look to know the cookies were black. He knew the smell. Frances could never get the hang of cookies either.

Susan pulled out the cookie sheet and tossed it into the sink. “Dammit!”

“You burn 'em again, Ma?”

Susan and Louis both turned to see Benjamin standing at the door. She didn't say anything. Benjamin came in and looked down into the sink. He gingerly picked out a cookie and bit into it. He was trying hard not to grimace and Susan was trying hard not to look upset.

“How was
Jeopardy?”
Louis asked, to break the silence.

Benjamin glanced at him suspiciously. “I missed Final Jeopardy.”

“What was the question?”

He shrugged. “It was dumb. Something about a shot heard around the world. The category was baseball. I don't know a lot of sports stuff.”

“Ralph Branca,” Louis said.

Benjamin's eyes widened. “Yeah, that was it! That was the answer! How'd you know that?”

Benjamin looked up at Susan, who was standing, hands on hips, staring at Louis. She still looked angry, maybe about the cookies, but more likely about what he had suggested about the Jagger case.

“I'm going to go see Mobley tomorrow. I need to see the Jagger file,” Louis said.

“You're on my payroll now, Kincaid,” she said. “Don't waste the taxpayers' money digging up the past.”

“If I work for you, I work my way,” Louis said evenly.

Susan was silent. Benjamin looked up at her, over at Louis, then back at his mother. He grabbed another burnt cookie out of the sink and bit into it.

“Mom, these are okay, see?” he said quickly. “The outside is bad, but the inside is still okay. We can use some of them. Ma? Look . . .”

Susan's hand went out to cup Benjamin's head, pulling him to her waist. She was still staring daggers at Louis.

“This isn't going to work,” Louis said, rising.

“Take the pager,” Susan said.

He looked at her in surprise.

“I want to win this,” she said. “Bring me something I can use.”

“We striking another bargain here, counselor?”

“Call it what you want,” she said. “Just bring me something I can use.”

Louis set the
Sports Illustrated
aside and stood up, glancing at his watch. Mobley had kept him waiting over thirty minutes. He went to the reception desk. A bronzed blonde in a sleeveless mint green dress looked up.

“Can you buzz him again?” Louis asked her.

“I told you. He gets mad if I do that,” she said.

“Buzz him. I'll protect you.”

The blonde gave him a smirk. She didn't need protecting; her biceps rivaled his own. If he remembered correctly, Mobley kept a bench press in his office. He wondered if she worked out with him.

While he waited, Louis scanned the portraits on the far wall. It was a gallery of all the Lee County Sheriffs from the last two decades, all tight-lipped old white guys. A parade of pale stale males . . . until you got to Lance Mobley with his windsurfer hair and Robert Redford jaw. Louis's eyes went to the middle portrait. It was larger than the others with a fancier gilt frame. The gold plaque beneath read
HOWARD DINKLE, SHERIFF
1962–1970.

Dinkle looked to be in his late fifties. He had been sheriff during the Kitty Jagger case. Probably dead by now.

“The sheriff will see you now.”

Louis went down the hall and tapped on the door. Mobley hollered back and he went inside.

Mobley's leonine head was bent over his desk, a file spread in front of him. Louis glanced at the weight bench and he had a sudden image of the secretary laying flat on her back, dressed in hot pink spandex, sweating to the oldies. He had a second vision of Mobley on top of her.

He turned back to Mobley. On the wall behind him were the standard community recognition certificates and plaques, plus something that looked like a college degree. Louis squinted and could read the name of the school. Florida State University School of Law.

Mobley sat back, swinging gently in his chair. “This is interesting reading.”

“Is that the Jagger case file?”

Mobley nodded. “Had a damn hard time finding it after you called. Locating something in that shack they call a warehouse is like digging through an outhouse for used toilet paper.”

“Nice analogy,” Louis said.

“Why did you ask me to pull it?”

Louis pulled up a chair. He wasn't sure how much to tell Mobley. He was no expert at legal maneuvering and wondered if he could hurt Susan's case. “Cade claims Duvall gave him a lousy defense,” Louis said. “I just wanted to take a look.”

“You don't believe him, do you?”

Louis shrugged. “I don't know.”

Mobley closed the file and stacked it on top of two others. He pushed the folders toward Louis.

“Okay, here's the copies you wanted. Take a look—a quiet look, if you get my drift—but I doubt you'll be able to tell whether Duvall did a good job or not. Takes a legal mind to be able to do that.”

Louis glanced at the diploma on the wall. Massage the ego.

“How about some help?” Louis asked.

Mobley caught the look at the diploma. “I'm not the person to ask, Kincaid. I'm on the other side here, remember?”

“Your part is done, Sheriff. It's up to the lawyers now.”

“The lawyers,” Mobley said quietly. “Ever wonder what the world would be like if we didn't have any lawyers?”

Louis ignored the comment.

“Okay, then let me ask you this,” Mobley went on. “Did you ever stop to think about what happens if you find out Duvall
did
fuck up the Jagger case? That gives your client more motive to kill him, doesn't it?”

“Not if somebody else had a better reason.”

“You're wasting your time.”

“What if he didn't do it?”

“He's out now anyway, so who cares?”

“I do,” Louis said. “And you should.”

Mobley's jaw twitched, but he just leaned back in the chair and leveled his eyes at Louis. “I don't question any conviction without evidence to the contrary. Especially a case that happened when I was too young to care about anything other than getting laid.”

Louis had a thought. “You were here then?”

Mobley rose and went to the bench. “Yeah, I grew up here.” His eyes snapped to Louis's face. “I didn't know her, Kincaid.”

“This is a small town,” Louis said. “It was even smaller then. Why
didn't
you know her?”

“I was a senior, she was a freshmen. Big gap in those days, even at a small school like Fort Myers High. Plus we just ran in different crowds. You know how cliques can be.”

Mobley was rolling his hand gently over the circular weights.

“You don't remember anything about her?”

Mobley drew a breath, letting it out slowly. “I remember she was pretty. We never got it on with the greasers.”

“Greasers?” Louis said.

“Frats and greasers. That's what the world was divided into in my salad days, Kincaid.”

“Greaser? You mean like John Travolta?” Louis asked.

Mobley was smiling slightly, enjoying his trip back in time. “Yeah. Guys in black leather who took shop, dropped out or got drafted.”

“What about the girls?”

“They got pregnant.”

Louis was silent. Somehow that didn't jive with the picture he was building in his brain of Kitty Jagger.

“But you remember the murder?” Louis asked.

Mobley's hand dropped from the weight bench.

“Yeah. They made an announcement over the PA system. Some of the girls were crying.” He shook his head. “I remembering thinking what phoneys they were because none of them ever looked twice at Kitty Jagger.”

Mobley looked at Louis. “He killed her, Kincaid. We all know it.”

“I still want to take a look. At everything.”

Mobley walked to a credenza and opened a large cardboard box. On the side was written: #4532, Homicide, LCSO, Florida, April, 1966, Jagger, K.

He pulled out some plastic bags and a stack of photos, spreading them on his desk. Louis moved to it. The plastic bags held some bloody clothing, some torn clothing that looked like red cotton, and a pair of girl's panties, turned inside-out. They appeared to have droplets of brown blood and several large yellowish stains, along with some discoloring Louis assumed was from the lab testing.

“Is this semen?” Louis asked.

“Yeah, that's how they pinned the panties to Cade. He's a secretor.”

Louis knew that meant his blood group could be typed from any body fluid. “So's eighty percent of the population,” Louis said. “What's Cade's blood type?”

“O positive.”

“Most common type. Did they break it down into subgroups? Proteins?”

Mobley shook his head. “It was 1966, the dark ages for serology. I doubt they went beyond seeing that big O come up.”

“Could they now?”

Mobley was getting irritated. “Hell, I don't know. That shit's awful old. Samples break down.”

“Did Cade offer an alibi?” Louis asked.

“Yeah, some guy named Atterberry. But they were never able to find him.”

“What about the weapon? You have it?”

Mobley reached into the cardboard box and pulled out another large plastic bag. He extracted a tool and laid it on the desk between them. It looked like a pickaxe, about a foot and a half in length with a wooden shaft.

Louis picked it up, his eyes drawn to the forged steel double head. “Jesus, what is this?” he asked.

“Gardeners use it to loosen hard dirt. Cade's—and only Cade's—fingerprints are all over the handle.” Mobley gave a twisted smile. “It's called a Clot-Buster. Catchy name, huh?”

Louis turned it over in his hands. It was heavy, one end of the steel blunt-edged and coated with rust. The other metal end had three thick prongs, covered with a brown grit that Louis was sure was dried blood. It was hard to think of the evil-looking thing being used for something as innocent as gardening.

“She was stabbed with this end?” he asked, nodding at the three prongs.

“Yup. I was reading the autopsy report when you came in,” Mobley said. “The wounds all showed that three-prong profile.”

“How did they know this was Cade's?” Louis asked.

Mobley pointed to a blurred mark on the handle. “It's hard to see, but there's a phone number there, done with a laundry marker. It was Cade's business phone.”

“Anybody could have put it there.”

“Cade's wife admitted she marked his tools with their phone number because she was tired of him losing them. Cade claims this one went missing a couple days earlier.”

Louis set the Clot-Buster on the desk.

“What else you got?” he asked.

Mobley picked up a stack of photos and handed them to Louis. They were crime scene photos, each labeled with an evidence number from the trial. Louis went quickly through the first ones, which showed the dumpsite and wide-angles of the body.

He flipped to the next series of photos, all shots of Kitty Jagger's body. Blood smeared across her bare, bruised thighs. A close-up of her hands. And a shot of her torso with its gaping wounds in a slender chest.

He paused at the next photo. He was staring into Kitty's face. He was trying to see some resemblance to the smiling girl of the newspaper photo. But this face wasn't even human-looking anymore. The body had lain in the dump for two days and he knew from experience what that could mean.

It was blood-streaked, the eyes open, the corneas milky with death. Rigor had frozen her lips into a horrible grin, revealing her small teeth. The left part of her cheek had been pecked away, probably by the gulls that he had seen circling over the dump.

He set the photos down, running his hand over his eyes. Mobley had walked back to his desk and was sitting when Louis turned to face him.

“Why are you wasting your time with this?” Mobley said. “From what I hear, Outlaw hasn't got anything that's going to help Cade beat this Duvall thing. I'd think you'd be working on that.”

Louis was still looking down at the photograph of Kitty Jagger's ravaged face.

“It was twenty years ago. Let it go, Kincaid,” Mobley said quietly.

The door opened and the secretary poked her head in. “Sheriff, Vern Sandusky is on hold.”

Mobley picked up the receiver, finger poised over a button as he looked at Louis. Louis was still staring at the photo of Kitty.

“Kincaid.”

Louis looked up.

“Forget her. She's dead and her killer has been convicted. There's nothing you can do for her now.”

Mobley jabbed at the phone and swung his chair around away from Louis.

Louis gathered up his files and left. When he walked out, the Amazon was looking at him.

“How'd it go?” she asked.

“Hard to convince your boss of anything, isn't it?”

She smiled. “Not if you know how.”

Louis's beeper went off, and he tried to shift the files so he could turn it off, but she beat him to it, reaching across her desk to his hip.

“Need to use the phone?” she asked, leaning on the desk.

Louis shook his head, seeing Susan's number. “Nah. It can wait.”

“Let me know if there is anything else I can do for you.”

The look in the Amazon's eyes wasn't hard to translate. Okay, he'd use it. “What about a transcript from Jack Cade's 1967 trial?” he asked.

“You don't want much, do you?”

He tried a smile. “It would be a big help to me.”

She cocked her head, tapping her pen against her cheek. “Okay, give me your number,” she said. “I'll call you if I can get it.”

Louis rattled off the pager number. The Amazon waved the paper between two long pink fingernails. “Got it.”

He was going to ask for her name, but he had the feeling it would open doors he didn't want opened right now.

“Thanks, I owe you one,” he said.

“I'll collect later,” she said.