Key Witness (49 page)

“What about the Public Defender’s office?”

“I’m a cop,” she said. “I don’t think I’d feel comfortable working the other side of the aisle.”

“You’d be surprised,” he told her. “Some of the best defense lawyers I know are former cops and prosecutors. You guys, better than most people, know what that’s like, the convict’s life—what makes a man become a criminal. Like Dwayne Thompson, for instance,” he threw in smoothly. “A smart man like him, who knows how he might have turned out if a good lawyer had gotten hold of him at the beginning, before he went hardcore bad.”

“Maybe,” she said, hoping she wasn’t flushing. “I hadn’t thought about it that way.”

“I could arrange a meeting with you and my boss,” he offered.

Her entire countenance changed. It was as if a light had been turned on inside her head, where previously it had been a dark, empty shell. She smiled, the shy smile of the wallflower no one is ever nice to. “I’d appreciate that.”

He made a show of checking the time on his watch. “I’d better move this along,” he said. “I know you’re busy.”

“It’s okay.” She was enjoying the unexpected attention.

“Let’s get back to Dwayne Thompson. You knew him at Durban State Penitentiary?”

Blake blinked her eyes rapidly. “He was a prisoner there during some of the time when I was a guard, yes.”

This was attention she didn’t want. She was going to ration her responses regarding Dwayne Thompson—grudgingly and warily. He knew that—he was counting on it. He was deceiving her, so that by the time she understood his true motive—to get to the core of her personal relationship with Thompson—she’d be in too deep to get out.

“How well did you know him?” he asked.

She flushed. “What do you mean?”

“You knew who he was. You knew his name, what he looked like?”

“Yes.”

“You knew him better than you knew some of the other inmates.” He was humming along, throwing out innocuous little facts.

“I didn’t say that,” she protested.

“You just told me you didn’t know anything about Marvin White, that you hadn’t even seen him.”

She didn’t answer.

“Yes?” he pressed.

“Yes,” she agreed.

“Durban is bigger than this jail. But you knew Dwayne Thompson, you talked with him on occasion, who knows what else,” he threw out elliptically. “So you must have known him pretty well, better than many of the other prisoners.”

“Well, yes, I did know him better than some of the other prisoners,” she admitted reluctantly. “He was there a long time. Guards get to know prisoners when they’re exposed to them over a period of time. Not like in here, where it’s a revolving door.”

“Makes sense,” he conceded. “But you and Thompson were friends, right? Are friends?”

“I know who he is,” she flared. “That doesn’t make us friends.”

“You visited him in the infirmary, where he’s working.”

Her exhale was caught in her throat—she had to push from her diaphragm to get it out. “Where did you get that idea?” she challenged him.

“Several people told me,” he lied smoothly. “Surely you aren’t disputing that. I would think it’s logical, since you knew each other up at Durban.”

She took the bait. “Yes, that’s true,” she admitted. “I did say hello to him a couple of times down there.”

He had a flash of intuition. “Thompson’s job in the infirmary. He’d done that kind of work before at Durban, hadn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“Which was why you thought that would be good duty to assign him to while he was here awaiting the trial he was testifying in.”

She recognized the trap he was setting, and sidestepped it. “I don’t assign jobs,” she said. “That’s done by the booking officer when a prisoner enters the system.”

This would be easy to check. He’d bet that her fingerprints would be all over this. And if his hunch was right, he could come back and confront her with her lie, and blow her out of the water.

“Okay,” he said. “I guess that’s about it. Thanks a lot.” He picked his briefcase up from the floor. “Oh, one more thing. I almost forgot. Dwayne Thompson knows his way around computers, right? Warden Jonas up at Durban said he was a computer genius—that he even got a college degree in computer science. You wouldn’t know if Thompson had any access to a computer here, would you?”

Blake looked him squarely in the eye. “Not that I’d know of,” she said.

I
T WAS AFTER SIX
by the time Wyatt pointed his car toward the hospital, where his daughter lay recovering. Moira was sitting by the side of the bed.

The television was on to a game show,
Wheel of Fortune.
They never watched shows like that at home. The two women were staring soundlessly at the screen, as if using the distraction to avoid interacting with each other.

“Dr. Levi was by earlier,” Moira told him with a forced-bright attitude. “Things look good for Wednesday. And we’re going to have a session with a psychologist tomorrow,” she added.

“That’s a good idea,” he said neutrally. Her friend and partner, Cissy, had broached that idea, and to his surprise, Moira had responded positively. She and Michaela needed counseling, together and individually. A wide, strong bridge needed to be built to bring them back together.

He sat down next to Michaela. Her leg was extended in the pulleys and balances of the traction bar. She reached out for his hand. He squeezed back, gently. “How are you, sweetie?” he asked. She has to be so uncomfortable, he thought, lying in this position twenty-four hours a day, unable to move. Why did this have to happen to her?

“I’ll be glad when it’s over,” she confessed.

“Me, too.”

“I need to walk,” Moira said diplomatically. “I’ll leave you two to yourselves.”

After she left Michaela clicked the television off. “How’s your case going, Dad?” she asked, her face animated, eager to take a break from her own situation.

“Good,” he told her. “Making progress.”

She nodded. “I’m glad. For your client, and for you. You need a win, Dad.”

“I’ve had lots of wins, honey. You getting well will be my best win.”

“I’m going to get well,” she said with forced assurance. “Although …” She didn’t finish her thought.

“Although?”

“I have a premonition that it’s going to be a long time before I dance again.”

“You’ll dance again,” he said quickly. “You’ll do everything.”

“The bone in my leg is shattered, Dad,” she said, stating fact.

“You have to keep telling yourself you’ll do everything you did before. And you will. Dr. Levi’s very confident.”

She looked at him. “I’ve been wanting to say that I’m worried about recovering completely; but I can’t to Mom. She feels so guilty.”

“I know. I haven’t been as supportive of her as I should be,” he admitted.

His daughter squeezed down hard on his hand. “Sometimes I get really angry at her,” she said, tears beginning to form in the corners of her eyes. “I don’t want to, but I can’t help it. What if I can’t walk again, Daddy?” Her voice was quivering with fear.

“You will, sweetheart. I promise you,” he said, bringing as much conviction to his voice as he could muster.

“That gun was like an obsession with her. She even made me go to the shooting range with her.” The tears were free-flowing now; he reached over for a towel that was draped over the foot of the bed and held it to her face. “I didn’t even know you and she were in the room,” she cried. “Why couldn’t you have said something, like ‘Stop’? I would have said it was me, right away.”

She was sobbing uncontrollably. He reached out and drew her to him, cradling her in his arms. She needed to get this out. It wouldn’t be the only time.

And what about his own anger toward Moira? How was he going to deal with that? He would need therapy, too, he knew. To get his rage out, deal with it, put it behind him.

Michaela cried for a good five minutes, until the emotion had run its course—this time. She wiped her cheek on her sleeve. “Will you wet a washcloth for me?” she asked him. “I don’t want Mom to see me looking like this.”

She scrubbed her face and held ice cubes from her water pitcher to her swollen eyes. “I don’t want frog eyes,” she said to him, grinning through the residue of tears. “Mom’s already freaked enough.”

When Moira returned, Michaela was looking almost normal again. If her mother noticed anything she didn’t comment on it.

He stayed with them until nine, when the night nurse came in with Michaela’s sleeping pill. He kissed her good night and held her hand until she drifted off.

Moira walked him to the elevator. A few people passed them, preop patients in wheelchairs, and some postops, all bandaged and wrapped in various patterns. The overhead lighting was turned low; everything was hushed.

“How are you doing?” Moira asked. This ordeal was taking a heavy toll on her; she looked more haggard and wan every day.

“Okay.”

“Your work’s okay?”

“It’s going okay. Seeing her makes me feel better.”

“She looks forward to seeing you. It’s the high point of her day.” She hesitated. “It’s awkward between us. I’ll feel guilty all of a sudden, the guilt will come like a wave washing over me, and I wonder how she feels. She hasn’t said anything to me about it, at all. Nothing:” She took his hand, looking at him, searching his face. “You haven’t, either.”

“This isn’t the time,” he said.

“I hope you won’t shut me out forever,” she replied.

The elevator doors opened. Her lips were receptive to his light kiss, more than they had been.

“I won’t,” he promised, as the doors closed and the elevator took him away.

It was dark by the time Wyatt reached his house, but he went for a run anyway. The night was vibrant with sound. Bullfrogs called to each other across the lake, crickets by the thousands buzzed with a whirrlike rattle, an owl hooted. He knew this road so well he could run it with his eyes closed, and sometimes he did for short stretches, listening to the sounds around him and to his own inner sounds as well, his heartbeat, his breathing, deep inhale-exhale five steps to a breath, feet slapping pavement. He ran on the blacktop road from his house to the main intersection, a three-mile loop. Enough to clear his head, for the moment. Except instead of his head getting clearer, it filled up with thoughts he couldn’t avoid thinking about anymore.

His marriage was falling apart. He and Moira had been drifting ever since he took leave from the firm and went to work at the Public Defender’s office. Taking Marvin White’s defense had exacerbated the situation. And now the shooting. On his way to the hospital this evening he had thought of how much he wanted to be with Michaela, how much he needed her—not her needing him, the strong father, but him needing her, the daughter who needed a strong father. And still, he hadn’t wanted to go, because Moira would be there.

As he was approaching his driveway on the final leg of his run he saw Ted Sprague. His elderly neighbor was wrestling a garbage can out to the curb for pickup. Wyatt stopped and helped Ted with the heavy load.

“You need to get a trash can on wheels,” Wyatt said.

“The gardener usually does this,” Ted wheezed. “He forgot today.” He wiped the sweat off his brow with a handkerchief. “How’s Michaela?” Ted asked solicitously.

“As well as can be expected. The doctor operates day after tomorrow.”

“Enid and I are praying for her.”

“Thanks. I’ll tell her.” He was getting cool, standing there in his sheen of sweat. “I’ll see you around.”

Before he could finish his jog home, Ted stopped him. “They caught the … burglars who did our house,” he said. “I thought you’d want to know.”

Wyatt was surprised. That almost never happened. You collected your insurance and forgot about it. “That’s good. How did they catch them?”

“Trying to sell our video equipment. To an undercover cop. The cops were running a sting, and they flushed them.”

“Great. So were they a couple of black kids, like you thought? From a gang?”

Ted looked away, embarrassment spreading across his face. “They weren’t kids.” He paused. “And they weren’t black.”

Wyatt took a step back. “Oh?”

The old man shook his head unhappily. “They were white men. Who used to work for the security agency, like you said.”

Wyatt stared at his neighbor’s miserable face. You bastard, he thought. You and Enid scared my wife so badly that she went out and bought a gun and shot my daughter with it. Which wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t been a latent bigot and a coward.

Ted didn’t want to hear that; couldn’t. So Wyatt merely shrugged.

The old man turned away. “Better be getting back inside. See you.”

A
LL THE MURDERS HAD
taken place within the city limits, so the files were kept at the city’s Department of Records at the old Police Annex, down by the old warehouse district. The sheriff’s office ran the jail, that was county jurisdiction, but the detective work was done by city cops.

Wyatt handed the Request for Information form to the police officer in charge of records, an old albino cop named Whitey who was counting the days until his retirement at eighty-five percent pay.

Whitey looked the request over. “You want a list of everyone who accessed the Alley Slasher files? That’s a lot of names.”

“You do keep track of everyone who removes a file or reads one, don’t you?” Wyatt asked.

“Oh, yeah. That’s one regulation we don’t mess around with, looking at confidential files. You want every name, starting with the first murder?”

Wyatt considered. “I don’t need to go back that far.” Dwayne had given testimony about every one of the murders, including the last one. “I only need to see the names of anyone who had any access to the files from the time the last murder was committed until now. Make that second to last.” Dwayne could have gotten enough about the last murder from the television news to make his claim plausible; earlier than that, he had to have another source.

Whitey smiled gratefully. “That’s going to make this a hell of a lot easier. Come back in about an hour. I have to cross-check a bunch of different sources.”

Wyatt spent the time in a doughnut shop across the street going over some notes. An hour later he presented himself again. “Do you have what I need?”