As he started down the block he glanced at the small yards in front of the houses, saw the vibrant green grass and the shrubs, mostly lilacs and evergreens. Midwesterners still weren't among the most creative gardeners, their roots stemming from corn and wheat, but then again whatever grew here had to withstand more than a 125-degree temperature swing.
The house on the corner stuck out not only because, unlike the other tall farmhouse-like clapboard houses, it was short and stuccoed, but because there were roses, lots of them in a variety of colors, in the front yard. Thriving roses, which in this climate was no small feat, since not only did they have to be tended to all summer, but buried beneath straw every winter. Okay, thought Todd as he pulled to a stop, so maybe a queer person does live here. In any case, it was someone making an effort.
But wait a minute. Just because this person might be gay—yes, the flowers are fabulous, the house perfectly maintained—doesn't mean he knew Mark Forrest. Not by any means. And it doesn't mean he knew anything about either Forrest's life or end. Yet …
In spite of himself, Todd turned off the Cherokee and got out. Whoever gardened like this was dumping all their love into these flowers, and it showed. Along the walk to the front door, an extravaganza of red and yellow and peach-color roses blossomed, and Todd admired them all as he went up to the house. It was the only structure on the block without a front porch, and to the side of the arched door was a mail slot with a few outgoing letters and a doorbell, which he rang. This could be entirely stupid, but on the other hand it couldn't hurt.
Nothing happened and no one came to the door, however. Todd stood there for a minute or so, rang again. And waited. Evidently whoever lived here was already at work, which made complete sense. Todd peered through a small window in the door, next leaned to the side and looked in the living room. No one, not a sign of life. He glanced at the house next door, then turned around and checked to see if anyone was out and about. Confident that he was unobserved, he plucked from the mail slot the stack of three or four letters left there for pick-up. Quickly sorting through them, he saw that one was a gas bill, another an electric, the others just plain white envelopes. Written in the top left corner of all of them, the handwriting even and perfect, was the return address for this house on Young Avenue and the name of the sender, Douglas Simms.
Todd stuck the stack of envelopes back in the slot, then headed to his car. He'd make a note of this guy and his address. After all, who knew. Perhaps it wasn't such a far stretch that two gay guys on the same block knew each other.
30
Shortly before noon Rawlins headed through the broad, dark tunnel that swooped beneath Fifth Street from City Hall to Government Center. Clutching a file that was sure to grow thicker by the day, he focused ahead on the dramatic wall of water that tumbled from an overhead plaza into the middle of this subterranean passage.
Okay, he was exhausted. And out of sync. Either it was because he didn't get enough rest—it was well after one in the morning by the time he got home—or because he was nervous about where this entire cop-killing thing was going.
Now, he pondered as his feet slapped the red-brick pavers, all he could do was hope that this meeting went well. Fortunately they'd had a major break. Once they'd obtained a search warrant, they'd gone through Kenney's car and late last night found—thank God—something incredible: a yellow rain slicker. And not just any old yellow rain slicker, but one that showed evidence of blood. That would do it, wouldn't it?
Hoping it was enough to cover his ass, he rode the escalators up a couple of floors to the courtyard, an enormous glass atrium that was flanked on two long sides by matching twenty-four-story red granite towers. Stepping off the mechanical stairs, he immediately came upon a round information desk, on which sat a small Plexiglas picture stand holding this week's schedule. And there it was, written in blue marker: Civil and Criminal Signing Judge: Brown 1850.
“Oh, shit,” muttered Rawlins, rubbing his brow.
Judge Brown was known as a stickler for detail, a judge who was reticent to tie up the courts with a case that was not sure to be successfully prosecuted. Just a couple of months ago Rawlins had heard that she'd been dissatisfied with the evidence presented her and had refused to sign a formal complaint, thereby halting a case in its tracks by not allowing it to be arraigned. So were they going to be able to pull this one off; would the prosecuting attorney be able to draft a formal complaint that would fly past Judge Brown's scrutiny?
Time would soon tell, he thought, skirting a long, placid fountain. Making his way toward the Court Tower, he boarded an elevator and rode it up to the seventeenth floor.
Thankful that the sinus infection that had plagued him for so long—and which had in fact led to his discovery of his HIV status—was now long gone, he got out without a trace of dizziness. Heading along the hallway, he peered through the glass wall, which had been added because there had been so many jumpers. Shuddering, he recalled how he, too, had once considered taking such a fatal leap, one from Todd's balcony. And how he probably would have had Todd not tackled him with a kind of desperate love.
Turning away from the memories of that horrible night, he headed toward a receptionist, yet another Minnesota blonde—her hair thick and long, her face broad and cute—who sat behind a shield of bulletproof glass.
“Hi, I have an appointment with Denise Daylen.”
“Please sign in,” said the young woman, pushing a register through a slot at the bottom of the window.
While Rawlins signed in, the receptionist telephoned to the back, and it was only moments before a side door opened and a black woman in a gray suit stepped out.
“Steve?”
“Hi, Denise.”
With a broad, warm smile, she extended her hand and said, “Long time no see.”
“Yeah, well, I've been catching ‘em.”
“I know you have—trust me, I keep up with your career.” She opened the door wide. “Come on back.”
A slender, rather plain woman with straight hair pulled back into a tight bun, Denise Daylen was one of Hennepin County's senior prosecuting attorneys. Rawlins had worked with her—what was it—something like two or three years ago when some nut she had successfully prosecuted for theft began stalking and threatening her and her husband. He'd admired her strength back then—she wouldn't be intimidated, even when the creep had killed her dog—and was glad to learn earlier today that the assigning attorney had passed this case directly on to her.
Rawlins followed her down one narrow corridor and around a corner. Reaching her office, they entered a small space filled with a desk, three or four bookcases packed with books and papers, and a window that looked east toward the inflated hump of the Metrodome, the University of Minnesota, and eventually St. Paul. As Daylen sat behind her desk and slipped on a pair of large glasses, Rawlins pulled up a wooden chair.
“Here's my report,” he said, opening the file and taking out a sheaf of papers and forms. “And the NCIC printout on him.”
This was the part he hated, the part that reeked of his grade-school days—sitting and waiting to see if he'd passed.
“Anything new since we spoke?” she asked, referring to their lengthy phone call some forty-five minutes ago.
“Ah, no. Not since the yellow raincoat,” he said, trying to keep that front and foremost. “Like I said, Kenney let it slip that he was seeing a shrink, but I don't have a name yet.”
“That's definitely one to follow up on.”
“Right. There's a gender program at the U—I'm going to check there first.”
“Good idea.”
“Oh, the B of I guys are almost finished going over Forrest's car.”
“And?”
“Well, they've gotten a lot of prints besides Forrest's, including some that look pretty fresh. We'll run ‘em, but God only knows if we'll get a match.” It was a long shot, of course—if by chance one of the sets of fingerprints belonged to the killer, the killer had to have a previous rec
ord for his prints to be on computerized file. “Otherwise, I think we went over everything. Everything in my report just backs up what I said. We'll be able to formally charge him, won't we?”
“I'm getting a lot of pressure from above to do exactly that,” she said, pointing upward as if to God but instead just to the floor overhead. “Not only the judges either, but your folks across the street too.”
He had no doubt about that. Every cop on the force wanted this over with as quickly as possible, for nothing shook the force to the core more than a murder of one of their brothers. Rawlins had heard that over four thousand officers from as far away as the Dakotas and Canada would attend Mark Forrest's funeral.
She opened his report and began thumbing through the papers. “But—”
“No, no, no. Don't say that. Don't say But.” Rawlins leaned forward, grabbing the edge of her desk. “Denise, trust me. This is our guy. I'm positive.”
“I hope you're right, I hope he's the right one, I really do.” She shrugged. “Listen, Rawlins, I want to make this stick too—that's my job, to make sure the guilty ones get put behind bars—but right now we don't have it. Not the way I see it. Not yet anyway.”
“Someone saw his car parked down by the river the night of the murder. That's how I got his license plate.”
“Okay, who?” she pressed, looking at him over the tops of her glasses.
“It was an anonymous tip to a television reporter.”
“Right, and that's problem one—we need a witness who's willing to come forward. A witness who actually saw the car.”
“The reporter who got the call will testify,” said Rawlins, sure as hell that Todd would.
“Did he actually speak to this person?”
Rawlins hesitated, then admitted, “No. I think it was the receptionist at Channel Ten.”
“Well, find out for sure. And get a statement from that person.” Daylen looked down at the papers. “Still, that's not very good. We really need more than that. I mean, we want someone who can swear on a stack of Bibles a mile high they saw Kenney's car down by the river. Even with that, it's rather circumstantial—just because he might have been down by the river doesn't mean he pulled the trigger. If we can't find someone who saw him fire the gun, then we at least need someone who can place Kenney on the Stone Arch Bridge at approximately the time Sergeant Forrest was killed.” Daylen hesitated, then asked, “This reporter—it's Todd Mills, right?”
Rawlins nodded.
“And rumor has it that he's your …”
Rawlins nodded again. “Boyfriend.”
“Okay.” She took a deep breath and pursed her lips, obviously mulling how to put this.
Rawlins guessed her thoughts and said, “Don't worry. At first we were trading information, which was helpful, but now—”
“Now you can't tell him a thing—nada, zip.”
“I know, I know. Trust me, Lieutenant Holbrook has been all over me about it.”
“You know how these things work, Rawlins. You say something to someone in the media, no matter how innocuous, and it gets passed along and twisted around. You have to be very careful. In fact—and I couldn't be more serious—from now on I don't want you talking about this case with Todd Mills in anything but a formal interview, one that's recorded. Am I clear? I don't want anything we're working on leaked to the press, no matter how inadvertently.”
“Absolutely, but—”
“I mean it, if you leak anything to Mills I'll see to it that you're off this case in two seconds flat.”
“Sure, but you know he's the one who was there when Forrest was killed. He saw the whole thing.”
“Right, I saw his report on TV. Pretty dramatic stuff, I know, but he can't ID this guy, can he? That right?”
“Doubtful. Very doubtful,” admitted Rawlins. “The perp was wearing a jacket with a hood, his face was covered, and it was storming like all hell. Todd can testify about the guy's height and weight, which by the way match Kenney's, but—”
“What about the face? We need something definitive.”
“Listen, Todd's coming in this afternoon to take a look at Kenney. Maybe he'll remember something. Maybe he did see the guy's face or…or a spot or a scar on the guy's hand.”
“Let's hope so.” She looked at Rawlins's report, turned a page, and jotted something in the margin. “And while he's down there take him into one of the interview rooms and get a formal statement from him as well, okay?”
“Sure.” Pushing what he hoped would be the clincher, he asked, “Now, what about the yellow raincoat?”
“Yeah, what about it? You sure you didn't touch it before you got a search warrant?”
“Positive.”
Rawlins sat back, rubbed his eyes, shook his head. Lawyers—they were such a pain. He knew that Daylen was being careful, that she had to be, but, Jesus Christ, they were always panicky, always bringing up the absurd. What kind of fools did they take cops for?
Rawlins, his calculated speech belying his frustration, said, “It went like this: Kenney was standing by the back of his car when I went up to him. The trunk was closed. Kenney then took off and we apprehended and arrested him. While I took Kenney downtown, another police officer got a search warrant. In the meantime, I had two cop cars sitting on the house and the Olds. After I interviewed Kenney, we went back with the warrant and—”
“Okay, okay. I get the picture,” said Daylen, raising her hand for Rawlins to stop. “I just don't want this slicker tossed out on a technicality. After all, it's probably going to be our best piece of evidence.”
“Trust me, there won't be a problem.” Rawlins thought for a second, recalling the scene and just who had been there. “Mills and his crew were filming when I first went up to the car. If need be, we can subpoena his tape.”
“Excellent.” She read something once, twice. “There's just something I don't like about this.”
“What?”
“You say that the trunk didn't have a lock on it, that it was held shut by a wire.”
He knew this would be a problem, and he reluctantly admitted, “A twisted coat hanger, actually.”
“Which means anyone had access to it.”
“I suppose, but—”
“My job is to prove him guilty beyond a doubt. And trust me, the defense will be all over this one. They'll lunge at any angle that looks weak and—”
“Denise, we sprayed luminol on the raincoat, and—”
“I know, blood came up.”
“Not a tiny bit either, but a lot. A big splotch of it fluoresced as a matter of fact.”
“So maybe he cut himself last week on his umbrella?”
“The lab says that because it came up so strongly, it looks like the blood had recently been washed from the front of the coat.”
“But that's just a guess, albeit an educated one.”
“Jesus Christ,” said Rawlins, leaning onto the desk, “we got a sample of blood from just inside the right sleeve!”
“Rawlins, trust me,” said Daylen, looking up at him again. “We're on the same side, but it's going to be a hell of a battle. An uphill battle. I just want to make sure that raincoat looks as damning as hell in court.”
Rawlins sat back in his chair, stared past Denise and out the window. But rather than seeing a few white clouds set against a rich blue sky, he saw, to his dismay, precisely where this thing was going. Oh, fuck. If she didn't care for what they'd already discussed, then she really wasn't going to like this.
Trying not to sound defeated, at least not yet, he admitted, “The coat's down in the serology lab, and they've got this all on a rush. If the blood matches Forrest's, we've got it, don't we?”
“If we get a DNA match, sure. That would certainly be enough to formally charge Kenney. Everyone's so worked up about this that that would certainly be enough to put him on trial—and probably convict him too.”
“There's only one problem,” muttered Rawlins, clenching his fists, for this was the part she was
n't going to like. “I just spoke with serology before coming over here, and the blood sample's not big enough.”
“What?” she snapped. “I thought we were one of the few places that had one of these labs for DNA testing and everything. What have they been bragging about anyway? I mean, that joint cost millions.”
“I know, but their equipment isn't powerful enough for the size of the sample we got.” He added, “They're going to have to send it out.”
“And how long's that going to take?”
“Ten days.”
“Oh, shit,” moaned Daylen, sitting back.
The problem, Rawlins knew, was that they had but thirty-six hours to formally charge Kenney, and the clock had started ticking today at 12:01 A.M. Even a twenty-four extension, which they would certainly be able to get, would do next to nothing.
“We're going to have to let him go, aren't we?” said Rawlins, staring down at the floor and shaking his head.
“Right now it doesn't look good.”
“God, I'm going to have to really hustle.”
“Yep.” Daylen thought for a moment, took off her glasses, and said, “Listen, you guys have to get statements from Mills, from the receptionist at Channel Ten, and also from Kenney's cousin, the one he lives with.”
“Yeah, I've got her coming down this afternoon too. I thought a formal interview with her might rattle something loose.”
“It's just an idea, but make sure this cousin has an alibi for that night. You never know …”
He hadn't thought about that, considered the possibility that it might have been Kenney's cousin down there on the Stone Arch Bridge. While Todd had presumed it had been a guy, couldn't it have been a woman cloaked by that yellow slicker? A possibility, albeit a stretch.
“And keep at this shrink thing. Maybe Kenney confessed something to his therapist.”
“Perhaps.” Rawlins continued, saying, “I've been poring over everything I can get on what happened in California.”
“You mean the cop-killing out there, the one Kenney was initially charged with?”
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