Injustice (7 page)

“You've got to stay, Z,” I said. He sat and tipped his head at me, incredulous. “Sorry, boy.”

I took my Glock service revolver from under the seat and put it in my pocket.

Lights over the paved trail made pools of amber every several hundred yards, but with stretches of darkness between. Tree trunks and leaves beside the path glowed pale, giving the illusion of openness, but not far off the trail, a crosshatch of shadows offered concealment to anything or anyone with the patience and cunning to linger.

I walked through the culvert tunnel, and on the far side, I found the site of Lydia's murder. It had been lit up with floodlights and flashing blues and reds during that terrible night less than two months ago, but now, like vines and saplings reclaiming a jungle clearing, darkness concealed the fact that anything of note had happened here.

I kept walking.

There were a few people out. Several men jogged past. Two female runners approached. I tried to smile at them, making the point that I was a friend, not a foe, but they looked straight ahead.

There was a bench off the trail. I sat there to see who would come along. A solitary woman ran past. This worried me: I watched her disappear up the path into shadow, and I thought of calling after her, of urging her to be wary.

After ten or fifteen minutes, I started walking back toward the car. I passed two guys in hoodies. They smiled. I nodded.

Morning. I left early and stopped at the FBI before work. I got buzzed in and took my Glock down to the basement. The range manager reviewed some things with me about grip and stance, and I proceeded to inflict a few flesh wounds on a paper silhouette. Nothing fatal; it's harder than it looks on TV.

I arrived at my office with the smell of gunpowder in my nose. Walking past the office that had been Tina's, I got the familiar tingle of nostalgia. While she'd worked there, three doors from my own office, the boundaries of propriety between supervisor and subordinate
had collapsed into a heap like clothing at the foot of a bed. We had gotten involved, fallen in love, and gotten married. We'd been together five years now, which was approaching a record for me. We haven't had an easy time of it. I sometimes think that if she hadn't gotten pregnant so quickly, the naughty thrill she got from dating her boss would have given way, and she'd have moved on.

Henry had taken over Tina's office after she left. Next to Tina's/Henry's office was my friend Upton Cruthers. I stopped in his doorway to visit for a minute.

“How do, boss?” he said, smiling his bony-faced, jaw-thrusted, stubble-chinned grin. If you stuck a corncob pipe into that grin, I'm sure you'd be able to smell salt air and a deckload of cod.

From behind the door, a voice said, “Nick-Nick-bo-bick.”

I stepped inside and saw Cicely, one of Upton's daughters, sitting in the corner at an old student desk that Upton had brought in for her. She would spend a couple of mornings a week with Upton, who kept her busy with word-find puzzles and mazes and some drawing projects until his wife came in around eleven to take her to the occupational therapist.

“Cicely-bidicily,” I said.

She laughed. Her face had a smile of sublime joy. “Nickle-Nickle-fartsicle,” she said.

“Sis!” Upton snapped, but she just laughed.

Cicely was twenty-two. She had overdosed on crystal meth at seventeen and stopped breathing. EMTs had revived her, but her recovery had plateaued pretty quickly.

“You keep an eye on your dad for me, will you, Sis?” I said.

“Nick-wick.”

I walked past my office to the coffeepot. I loved walking through the criminal division in the morning, listening to the noises of smart people deep in their work of protecting society: the clicking of keyboards, quiet conversations, phones chirping, printers rolling out page after page of elegant legal arguments crafted by clever minds.

Coffee in hand, I went into my office and called Dorsey.

“Good morning, Nick,” he said. “What can I do for you?” Did I hear reluctance in his voice, or did I just imagine it?

“You can tell me what the hell is going on,” I said. “The wellspring of sharing and cooperation seems to have hit a drought, Dorsey. You're concealing something.”

“Nick, it's okay. Settle—”

“Don't patronize me, Captain. You said you'd keep me in the loop.”

“I said I'd keep you informed. And right now I'm informing you that I can't comment on an ongoing investigation.”

“Jesus H!” I yelled. My office door was open, and Janice, my admin assistant, looked in over the top of her reading glasses.

“If you'll be patient—”

“I
was
patient. I've moved clear through impatience to arrive at irate. What aren't you telling us?”

He was silent.

“I'm coming over to trooper HQ, Dorsey, and I won't leave till you tell me a few things.”

“Don't, Nick.”

“I'm on my way now.”

The phone went dead.

I felt powerless. I wasn't really going to go over there. I thought of calling Pleasant Holly,
the
U.S. attorney, and I thought of calling Chip. But neither of them could do anything even if they wanted to.

To calm myself, I reread some files on the political corruption case. Upton and I were scheduled to have a conference with a cooperating witness first thing the next morning.

In the early afternoon, it became clear why Dorsey had been stonewalling. Henry got a call from a Detective Philbin at trooper HQ, asking him to come in for another informal Q and A.

I
drove to trooper headquarters with Henry.

Philbin was a jowly guy with sunken, disinterested eyes. He wore a suit jacket that made me think of the tarp you throw over a baby grand when you repaint the living room. He wore a wedding band that was sunk into the flesh of his finger like fence wire through the trunk of a maple.

“If you'll just wait out here, Mr. Davis,” Philbin said to me, beckoning Henry back toward the interview rooms.

“I have no intention of waiting out here,” I said.

“Pardon?”

“I'm here as . . .” I stopped. I was about to say I was there as his lawyer, but for some reason, I changed my mind. Thank God I changed my mind. I was going off half-cocked, pissed at being stonewalled by Dorsey, helpless in the face of Tina's and Henry's grief, stunned by Lizzy's sudden fearfulness. My reflex was to respond with belligerence, but I checked it. “I'm here as his friend,” I said. “And
he
is here voluntarily.”

“Whatever,” Philbin said. He asked if we wanted coffee, then pointed out soda and candy machines in case we were hungry. He led us into a windowless interview room and left the door open. The female detective stood in the doorway eating a yogurt. She looked like a much younger version of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

“So, Mr. Tatlock,” Philbin said, “you told us earlier you were home at the time of Ms. Trevor's murder, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“But Mr. Davis here—lucky you came along, Nick, you can confirm this—Mr. Davis thought you were at your office. True?”

“Well, I started at the office, but I ended up taking the memo home to work on.”

“What time was that?”

“Um. Five-thirty, say.”

“Any particular reason you went home instead of working at the office?”

Henry shrugged. “Home,” he said. “Home is home. You know?”

“Yeah,” Philbin said, “I hear that. And where was Ms. Trevor when you got home?”

“I don't know. She wasn't there. We had plans to meet later at the park.”

“And I think you told us last time you can't think of anyone who might be able to confirm your whereabouts between five-thirty and when you arrived at the park, about nine. Is that right?”

“Yes. By the time I got to the park, Lydia had already been, um . . .”

“Killed. Yes. How come you worked at home so long? I mean, the concert was starting at eight-thirty; Fourth of July and all, you had plans to meet your friends and family for fireworks and the concert. But you're staying home working till nine? What's that about?”

Henry looked at me for support. “Nick and I had a brief due first thing next morning,” he said.

“But what I hear,” Philbin said, glancing at me, “Mr. Davis had already written the brief. You were just reading it. So it takes three hours to read? What was it, like
War and Peace 
?”

“I was revising,” Henry said. “You know, tightening it up.”

I gaped at Henry. Any other time I'd have asked him what the hell needed tightening, but I kept quiet.

“Okay,” said Philbin. “Time line we got goes like this: You're at Nick's barbecue with your fiancée. Then you and her leave at about four-thirty. You drive home, drop Lydia off, then head over to your office. Brings us to about five o'clock. At the office, you pick up some work and head right on back home and get there about five-thirty,
by which time Lydia has left for the park. You stay home working without seeing or talking to anybody. Then about nine, you head over to the park, where you find Lydia's sister and family sitting around wondering what the fuck's going on. That summarize it pretty well?”

“Pretty well.”

“Mr. Tatlock,” Philbin said, “do you know a guy named Pursley? Aaron Pursley?”

“Yes,” Henry said. He sounded wary.

Philbin put a phone bill in front of Henry. Half a dozen calls to the same number were highlighted in yellow. “So, are you guys friends or what?”

“I wouldn't call us friends.”

“What, then?”

“Mr. Pursley was doing some work for me,” Henry said.

The Ginsburg look-alike who had been leaning against the doorframe came and sat beside Philbin.

“What kind of work?” Philbin said.

“Investigating.”

“He's like, what, a private investigator?”

“Yes,” Henry said.

I had trouble reading Henry's face because of the scarring. But his body language was obvious. He was squirming. If he'd been wearing a blood pressure cuff, the mercury would have blown out the end of the tube.

“Investigating what?”

“Me. I'm looking for my biological family,” Henry said.

This was news to me. I'm not sure I even knew he was adopted.

“Lydia encouraged it,” Henry said. “I never really wanted to before.”

“Detective Sabin,” the Ginsburg woman said, introducing herself. She had a heavy New York accent. “Tell me, Mr. Tatlock, do you know if this Pursley guy is a licensed PI?”

“I didn't think to ask him,” Henry said.

“How did you find him? The phone book, maybe?”

“No,” Henry said. “I hired someone else who I got from the phone book, but the first guy never found anything, so he gave me Pursley's number. He said Pursley cost a god-awful lot, but he used unconventional techniques, which sometimes had more success.”

Detective Sabin put a rap sheet in front of Henry. “Aaron Pursley,” she said. “Or at least that's one of his aliases.”

I leaned over and looked at the rap sheet with Henry.

“It's a pretty good read,” Sabin said. “B and E, extortion, identity fraud, oh, and right here”—she snatched the sheet away, studied it a moment, then slid it back to us with her finger on one particular entry—“possession of and sale of a firearm with the serial number removed.”

Henry shook his head. He seemed surprised but maybe not surprised enough. He looked at me. “Nick,” he said, “I didn't—”

“You see our concern,” Philbin said. “Best-case scenario, you innocently hired a guy you thought was a legitimate investigator to legally obtain some buried information. But I've got to tell you, Mr. Tatlock, I'd think as a federal prosecutor, you'd have had the—what do you call it . . . ?”

“Savvy,” Sabin said.

“. . . to be suspicious. Check his PI license or something. But that's best-case. Worst-case is that this biological-family stuff is a crock, and you were buying an untraceable gun from Mr. Pursley for the purpose of shooting Ms. Trevor. Or maybe, here's another theory, you were having him arrange for someone else to shoot her for you.”

Henry sat paralyzed.

“Or here's a second-to-best-case scenario,” Philbin said. “The bio-family stuff is true, but you contracted with someone, knowing he intended to obtain nonpublic information through—what's the word you used, ‘unconventional'?—unconventional methods of breaking and entering, records theft, and perhaps violent intimidation.”

“I'm no legal expert,” Sabin said, “but I think that'd be conspiracy:
hiring a guy, knowing he plans to break the law.” She looked at me. “Right, counselor?”

This was bad. We needed time to think it through.

“I'm not here as Mr. Tatlock's lawyer,” I said, “just as a friend. So I'll merely make the observation that if I were in his position, I'd invoke my right to counsel at this point.”