The Letter Of The Law

by Tim Green

  "Should we call the sheriffs?" Farnhorst said. "They've got a helicopter. They've got dogs, too…"

  Bolinger looked past the truck door off into the blackness of the woods and thought for a moment before sighing. With a nod he said, "Yeah, we'd better get them. Tell them he's armed.

  "Shit!" he said, kicking up a small spray of dew in the beam of the car's headlights. "A goddamn manhunt. Shit! I didn't think it was him."

  "Maybe it still isn't," Farnhorst said, but they both knew he was just being polite.

  CHAPTER 18

  "I still think Lipton killed Marcia Sales, and the girl in Atlanta," Bolinger argued. The captain looked at him skeptically.

  "There's not that much I can do with Sales anyway," Bolinger continued. "The sheriffs are out there looking. The Texas Rangers are on alert. I've got a stakeout on his cabin. No one's come up with anything. Unless Sales turns up on his own, I don't know what more I can do with that case. With the FBI I can still investigate Lipton across state lines."

  "Traces of that boy's blood were found on the seat of his truck," the captain reminded him. "Bob, admit it. You were wrong."

  "I may have been wrong about Sales," Bolinger conceded. "But just because he killed Frank Castle doesn't mean he killed those girls. His own daughter, for God's sake, John. A man doesn't do that."

  "You don't do it. I don't do it," the captain countered, "but you or I don't butcher Frank Castle, either. He was killed the same way as the girl. How do you explain that?"

  "I think maybe Sales was trying to make it look like Lipton," Bolinger said.

  The captain considered that for a moment, then said, "By the way, have you contacted the lawyer?"

  "No," Bolinger said sullenly. "I haven't."

  "Well, you should," the captain said, removing his reading glasses. He leaned forward to put his arms on the desk. "That's all we need, to have her get bumped and we didn't warn her that Sales is out there killing people involved with that case."

  "It was on the news. It's the big story," Bolinger grumbled.

  "Bob, talk to her," the captain said. "That's an order. In the meantime, as long as you give me your word you're staying on top of the Sales situation, you can help out the FBI."

  "Thanks, John," Bolinger said, standing to leave.

  "Why you thanking me?" the captain asked.

  "It's better when it's official," Bolinger said with a grin.

  "You were gonna do it whether I said you could or not," the captain complained as Bolinger went out the door. "I know you, Bob. You're the most stubborn son of a bitch I've ever known."

  Bolinger headed for the law school in an attempt to find out the seminar schedule that Lipton had kept over the past several years. On his way there, he indulged himself with a detour to Lipton's neighborhood. The professor's stately manor was lifeless. Bolinger parked across the street and wandered up the pretty stone drive. On the far side of the house was a landscaper's truck, and from the back, Bolinger could hear the sound of a weed eater.

  The rich smell of freshly cut grass filled his nose. As he approached a young Mexican man in a green jumpsuit, he eyed the back of the house for any sign of Lipton. Although wrought-iron furniture adorned the patio surrounding the pool, the pool itself was covered. Bolinger tapped the landscaper's back amid the high-pitched drone of his tool. The man jumped in the air and spun around in alarm. Bolinger disarmed him with a smile. The man shut down the weed eater and in broken English asked how he could be of help.

  "Anyone home?" Bolinger asked, casually showing the young man his badge.

  The man's eyes widened. He wiped his sweaty forehead with his cap and looked from the cop to the house and back to the cop. "No. No one home for much times."

  "Never home?" Bolinger asked.

  "No," the man said, fervently shaking his head. "I go here two times every week. No person live here."

  "Do you have a card?" Bolinger asked as he removed a cigarette from his pocket. The man looked at him as if he were from Mars.

  "Business card," Bolinger said carefully as he lit the Winston. "El nombre de su company."

  "Oh, si," he said and led Bolinger to the truck. On the other side was the name Conquest Landscapes along with the phone number. Bolinger wrote it down and thanked the man. He took a tour around the house before he left and saw nothing that indicated Lipton had been around.

  No one had seen Lipton at the law school, either. Bolinger got in to see the dean, a stern-looking overweight woman with two last names.

  "Obviously, he's not teaching this semester," she told him curtly. She also either didn't know or wouldn't say whether or not he'd be back in the fall.

  There wasn't a question he asked that wasn't met with an abrupt answer full of mistrust. The dean apparently had no knowledge of the way in which Lipton scheduled his seminars.

  "This is a university," she reminded him, "not a police force. Our professors have private lives outside of the university. Many of them are consultants to businesses or have their own independent undertakings."

  In the eyes of such a place, Bolinger thought, he was obviously a bad guy, an overzealous cop, the kind of prying monster that innocent citizens had to be protected from. On his way out of the building, he saw a nerdy-looking kid with a crew cut who reminded Bolinger of his brother when he was a student until the kid opened his mouth.

  "You go to school here?" Bolinger asked the kid, who was reading on the steps.

  The kid marked his spot in his book with a finger and looked up through his glasses.

  "Looks that way."

  "You know Professor Lipton?"

  "I know who he is, sure, the crim law guy in the murder trial."

  Bolinger could tell from his tone that the kid hadn't taken a class with Lipton. There wasn't a hint of the recognition that a student would display for a teacher he'd studied under. Bolinger nodded and said, "If I was a guy who wanted to know about those seminars he teaches… you know what I'm talking about?"

  "No."

  "Professor Lipton went around the country," Bolinger explained patiently, "giving seminars on his specialty, on criminal law."

  "Yeah," the kid said, obviously impatient now to get back to his work.

  "How would I find out about something like that?"

  "What are you, a cop?" the kid said derisively.

  "That's me," Bolinger said.

  The kid shrugged and, turning back to his book, he said sarcastically, "How about the Internet? You know… computers."

  "I know," Bolinger said gruffly. "I'll let you get back to your studies so you can go out and sue somebody."

  The kid might have been a smart-ass, but Bolinger wasn't above taking an idea from anyone. Back at the station, he looked up Rutlege, the department's version of a computer geek. Rutlege was a muscular guy who did triathlons in his spare time. He was the best the Austin police department had in the way of a hacker. Whenever a crook had a computer, chances were Rutlege saw it.

  "You remember when we pulled in Professor Lipton?" Bolinger asked.

  Rutlege leaned back in his chair and tilted his head back until Bolinger could see the Adam's apple bobbing in his neck.

  "Yeah," he said, dropping his head back into place. "I don't remember everything on his machine, but I remember we looked at it."

  "Any chance he had his business records on there?" Bolinger said. "He ran these seminars all over the country, and I want to find out where it was he was going. I wondered if you had anything or saw anything that could help me or if you could find some stuff about his seminars on the Internet."

  "I could do a search on-line for you, Sarge," Rutlege said. "But as far as his computer, if anything turned up pertinent to the murder we would have told you back then. I don't remember any office files or anything. There could have been. I'll get you my report. It was just a little four- or five-sentence deal, I think, saying that I didn't find anything that would help in the case. I do remember one thing, though."

  Rutlege snickere
d and said, "The guy had some porn files in there. It was funny. I remember the file name, Roman Empire Limited."

  "What do you think that means?" Bolinger asked, searching his brain for some connection and coming up with none.

  Rutlege shrugged. "I don't know. You could ask the guys in vice. It's nothing I ever heard of, just a file name, I guess. I thought it was kind of unusual, though, the name. So I opened it, and there was some kinky stuff, whips and leather and shit like that with the professor right in the middle of it all. Nothing too crazy, but I remembered it because I was talking to Delucca about it and he wanted me to copy them off for him. He likes that kind of crap. Well, I went back to the property section to get the machine and it was gone."

  "Gone?"

  "Yeah, seems Lipton's lawyer showed up and demanded if the DA wasn't going to use it as evidence that he get it back."

  "Why would the lawyer want the computer?"

  Rutlege shrugged. "I don't know. The porn stuff was kinky, but it's not like the DA could have used it. And it's not like Lipton could have used the computer in jail, either. They gave it back, of course. I didn't know about it until it was already gone. Made me think I must have missed something, you know?"

  "Could you have?"

  Rutlege shrugged. "I hope not, but you know, people have files they can hide and you can't get at them unless you know they're there or unless you look hard enough. I go through so many machines I pretty much just see what files turn up in the regular directories unless someone tells me there's a chance something could be hidden that's important to the case. Then I'll take the damn thing home with me and hack on it over the weekend."

  "Could you hide a whole set of business records?"

  "Sure," Rutlege said. "You could hide a dictionary if you knew what you were doing."

  "Listen, I want you to go on the Internet and try to find out all the places he gave seminars in the last five years. Don't you think the records from this seminar business that he had have to be on a computer somewhere?"

  "Sure they do," Rutlege said. "This guy's computer literate. He was carrying that notebook with him when he tried to get away. That tells you he can't do without it. Now it might not have been on that computer, but I guarantee a guy like that has his records on a computer somewhere. But like I said, they could have been right there and I wouldn't have written anything up on it because it didn't really fit into the case at the time. All we were looking for then was any letters or e-mail back and forth between him and the girl. You get your hands on his computer, you might just have everything you want."

  "That's not too likely," Bolinger said. "I can't even get my hands on him."

  "Well, meantime," Rutlege told him, "I'll get what I can off the Internet and I'll e-mail it to you."

  "E-mail it?"

  "You've got a computer, don't you?"

  "No," Bolinger grumbled. "Just make me a good old-fashioned Xerox copy of whatever you find and put it on my desk."

  Bolinger's next stop was the federal building. He wanted to get at Lipton's credit card records. Unless he used cash wherever he went, that information should give him a trail showing where the professor had traveled over the last five years. He knew getting a subpoena from a local judge for something like that would be a tough nut. They'd want him to show probable cause. But he also knew that the FBI could get a federal judge to do it without batting an eye.

  On his way over, he dialed up Casey Jordan's office. Her assistant said she wasn't available and asked if he wanted her voice mail. Bolinger preferred her voice mail. He wasn't calling because he wanted to. He was calling because it had been a direct order.

  At the federal building, Agent Unger wasn't in and hadn't been seen all day. The secretary gave Bolinger a vacant look when he asked if she knew where he might be. Bolinger looked out the window at the bright sun, the clear sky, and the dry, warm air, a perfect day to be out on the links.

  "West Lake Hills Country Club," Bolinger said out loud in disgust. He wasn't the least opposed to grabbing a round on a beautiful day, but he figured Unger would at least go through the motions. Not to show up at all was totally negligent. He dialed up the agent's cell phone and got a machine. With a sigh, he went down the hall to Dean Wentworth's office.

  Dean looked up from a pile of paperwork.

  "What's up, Bob?"

  "I need a subpoena."

  "Have Unger get it," he said.

  "Unger's out… golfing, I imagine."

  "Bob, look, I meant what I said. I can't help you with this goddamn stuff. I got you a goddamn guy, you'll have to use him."

  "What you got me is some sorry-ass guy who's waiting to get vested so he can get a government pension and retire."

  "Bob, give me a goddamn break. Come on, I know we're friends, but you've got to leave me alone. I got people breathing down my goddamn neck."

  "Good, go ahead," Bolinger said sullenly. "Go get your high-profile bank robber, but when I turn this guy over and we find two dozen dead women all across the country, don't even think about sticking your face in front of the cameras."

  "What the hell is that supposed to mean?" Dean said indignantly.

  "It means you guys are all media whores," Bolinger said, jutting his chin out, "that's what it means. It means you're worried less about catching the bad guys than you are about having a camera there to see you do it."

  "Hey, Bob…"

  "What?"

  "Kiss my goddamn ass."

  CHAPTER 19

  Casey looked at her watch and hurried through the garage. It was Friday and most everyone else had already gone home. In her rush, she was only remotely aware of the sensation that had made her skin crawl the other day in the garage. She scanned the area as she went, but then took her eyes off everything around her as she struggled to fit the key into the door of her Mercedes sedan. After tossing her briefcase onto the passenger seat, she slid in and started the engine.

  On her way up the ramp, Casey glanced into the rearview mirror. A figure dashed across her field of vision and her heart froze. She jammed on her brakes and turned around. There was nothing. Was her mind playing tricks on her? She waited and even considered going back, but it was too creepy down there, so she told herself it was nothing and went on with tires squealing through the turns until she pulled up out of the garage and into the evening light.

  She already knew about Frank Castle. It was all over the news. She couldn't let that scare her. An attorney had to expect things like that to happen. As a prosecutor, she had received threats as a matter of course. Since she'd been doing defense work, she hadn't had such a situation. Now, she needed to call on the rationale that every prosecutor repeated to herself, talk was cheap. Criminals rarely followed through on their vengeful desires. You were more apt to be struck by lightning.

  Still, as she drove along she turned the situation over in her mind. The image of Donald Sales's last hateful stare filled her mind. It had to be him who killed Frank Castle. It was him… or it was Lipton. Lipton's confession echoed through her mind. Had it been a sick joke or was it really true? But why would Lipton kill Frank Castle? Only Sales had reason for that.

  And if Sales would go to the trouble of hunting down Frank Castle, couldn't he be watching her as well? Casey shivered involuntarily and checked her rearview mirror again. There was nothing there outside the normal evening traffic. Casey thought about the guard gates that protected her community and the extensive alarm system in her home. She was safe. With disgust, she turned her mind to Taylor. They had spoken only briefly during the day, and he had brushed off the news about Frank Castle the way he did everything else. Casey imagined what it would be like to have a man who hurried home from halfway across the world to make sure she was all right. Didn't she deserve someone like that? To be sure, there had been men in her life who would have reacted that way.

  When she got home, she changed out of her work clothes, then took a steak from the freezer. While it defrosted in the microwave, she steamed some broc
coli. When the meat was ready, she put it on a plate and took it out back to the grill that was built into the stone bar beside the pool. Casey relished a good steak and she didn't mind cooking it herself. Growing up, steak had meant chuck steak, a cut of meat so tough your cheeks were sore the next day from chewing. One of the things she enjoyed most about being financially comfortable was eating well.

  As the meat popped and sizzled on the open flame, Casey gazed out across the low shrubs surrounding the pool area to the rippling golf course lake, the lush fairway, and the dusty green hills beyond. Casey took a deep breath of evening air laced with the smell of good steak. The tranquillity of her surroundings sometimes allowed her to relax. She'd come a long way.

  She thought back to her girlhood home, a modest farm that revealed its age by a rash of ancient gray wood beneath the pockmarks of peeling paint. She looked back over her shoulder at the towering white edifice she lived in now. Maybe her marriage wasn't as bad as she was making out. Most people had problems. Things were never perfect. She thought of her own mother's devotion to a husband who treated her like a chair. Occasionally, he would take his ease with her. Otherwise, he apparently gave her no thought whatsoever.

  They'd never done much of anything together besides eat at the same silent dinner table to begin with, although in the early days there was at least a vitality about them. Her mother's pretty cheeks always seemed flushed with sun or wind, and the muscles in her father's forearms bespoke the sinewy strength of a farmer. But then, as the years passed, each of them went to seed. Her father's belly began to hang over his belt, and as her older brother did more and more of the work, his muscles grew flaccid. Her mother's face grew pale and drawn, and her hair began to fade to a mousy gray as she shrank in stature. It wasn't long before disinterest grew into disdain, at least on her father's part. Casey's lot was better than that anyway. If nothing else, Taylor still had a strong sexual hunger for her.

  Casey flipped the steak and in the edge of her vision saw something move. Someone had ducked back into the woods bordering the fairway. She searched the cart path that looped around the water, back to the tee, and then snaked along the fairway through the cluster of trees on the near side of the course. There wasn't a cart in sight. Neither was there a golf bag or anything that would indicate the presence of a golfer who'd hooked his shot into the thick woods on the far side of the fairway. The sun was low in the west but not yet below the ridge of hills beyond the golf course. It still burned brightly yellow, and Casey had to shade her eyes and squint toward the spot in the woods where she was almost certain she'd seen the strange movement.