“That was pleasant,” Frank said as the detectives walked back to their desks.
“Asshole motherfuckers,” Robb muttered.
“They did make a few good points,” Frank said.
Before Robb could reply, the intercom on Santoro’s desk buzzed.
“Detective Santoro, there’s an Arthur Jefferson out here,” the receptionist said. “He wants to speak to you about the Blair case.”
Robb started to say that they didn’t have time, but Santoro held up his hand.
“Okay, send him in.”
“Jefferson is a bottom feeder,” Robb said as soon as Santoro let up on the button. “He barely makes a living off of court appointments and traffic cases. What could he possibly know about the Blairs?”
“Hey, we can use all the help we can get. And the tip about the Bentley panned out.”
Arthur Jefferson was a skinny, light-complexioned black man with a wide smile and outsized gestures. He talked too loud, he swung his arms to emphasize his points, and he was quick to bend the truth. He also looked like he wasn’t doing too well. His dark blue suit was shiny from wear, the collar of his white shirt was frayed, and his shoes were scuffed.
“How y’all doin’?” Jefferson asked when he drew in sight of the detectives.
“We’re doing good,” Frank answered. “How about you?”
“Can’t complain, can’t complain.”
“So, Arthur,” Robb began impatiently, “what brings you here?”
Jefferson grinned. “I am here to make your day. Yes, ma’am, I am here to make you one happy detective.”
“And how are you going to do that?” Santoro asked.
“Y’all been lookin’ for Carrie Blair, have you not?”
“We have.”
“A client of mine can help you find her.”
“Who is this client?”
Jefferson threw his hands out at his side. “Not so fast. We got to come to an agreement first.”
“Keep talking,” Santoro said.
“My client fell in with a bad crowd, yes sir, a bad crowd.” The lawyer shook his head slowly to show how bewildered he was that one so good could have made such a tragic mistake. “Now he’s facing some jail time. If he helps you out, we’d like you to make things right for him.”
“And how exactly is he going to help us?” Santoro asked.
“He’s gonna tell you where Carrie Blair is buried.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Frank Santoro held open the door to the interrogation room and Arthur Jefferson gestured Barry Lester inside. Lester had been brought to the Homicide Bureau so that other inmates wouldn’t know he was snitching. He was dressed in an orange jumpsuit and his hands were cuffed. Santoro took off the cuffs and Lester flashed his most ingratiating smile as he and his lawyer took seats on one side of the room’s only table. Robb and Santoro sat on the other side.
“I hope I can help you guys,” Lester said.
“I checked you out, Barry,” Santoro said. “It looks like you’ve made a habit out of helping the police solve crimes.”
“Look, I know I’ve got a record, but I’m not a bad guy, and when I get a chance to pay back my debt to society by helping you guys solve a crime, I take it.”
Lester shook his head in disgust. “That Blair is one sick puppy. Killing his wife, that’s cold.” He turned his attention to Robb. “The stuff I’ve done, none of it is violent. I don’t go for that. And men who abuse women, well, I draw the line there. My mother—God rest her soul—taught me to respect women.”
Robb’s features hardened and her shoulders tensed. Stephanie hated ass kissers.
“That’s good to hear,” Santoro said to head off anything rash his partner might do. “So, Barry, your lawyer says you know where Carrie Blair is buried.”
“I do.”
“How did you learn this information?”
“Blair told me.”
“Really?” Robb said, unable to mask her skepticism.
“They had him in isolation for the night, and he had the cell next to me. Man, was he scared. Here he is, a big-shot millionaire with Hong Kong tailors, and they put him in a jumpsuit two sizes too small, locked in with hardened criminals.” Lester grinned. “So I calmed him down and we got real friendly.”
“Blair is the head of a multinational corporation,” Robb said. “He negotiates with the Communist Chinese and the Russians. I have a hard time believing that he would be stupid enough to tell you he’d killed his wife, then give you the location of her grave.”
“But he did. Like I said, I got his confidence, and he admitted he did her. He said he put her in the trunk of his Bentley and drove her to this place and buried her.”
Santoro and Robb didn’t show any reaction, but they both wondered how Lester knew that Blair had a Bentley and that the body might have been in its trunk.
“He just confessed and told you the exact spot where he dumped the corpse?” Robb asked.
“That’s right.”
“How do we know you didn’t kill Carrie Blair?” she said.
“No way. I’ve been locked up since before she disappeared. Check the records.”
Santoro leaned back and folded his arms across his chest. “What do you want, Arthur?”
“He leads you to the body and testifies, I think he’s earned himself a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card.”
“We’ll talk about that with the commonwealth attorney if Mr. Lester takes us to the body.”
The picturesque Blue Ridge Mountains are part of the larger Appalachian range. The densely packed trees release isoprene into the atmosphere, which creates a haze and makes the mountains look blue from a distance. But Stephanie Robb and Frank Santoro were not appreciating the beauty of the region as their caravan of police vehicles headed for the abandoned campground where Barry Lester claimed they would find Carrie Blair’s grave. The lead car was driven by two uniformed officers. Lester was sitting in the back beside his attorney. Robb and Santoro were next, followed by a van from the crime lab. The morgue wagon, piloted by medical examiner Nick Winters, was also there in case Lester knew what he was talking about.
Santoro hadn’t said a word since they’d left police headquarters, and Robb could tell that he had something on his mind.
“What’s bothering you?” Robb asked her partner.
“Something about this case doesn’t feel right.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. There’s just a lot of odd stuff going on.”
“Such as?”
“First we get an anonymous tip about the Bentley, and the paper gets an anonymous tip about a prenup. Then there’s Blair; he’s the head of a multinational corporation, he deals with heads of countries. You can’t be a wimp and get where he’s gotten. Can you see him spilling his guts to Lester?”
“Sometimes things are exactly as they seem, Frank. In real life, if the wife gets killed, it’s usually hubby whodunit.”
The lead car turned off the highway at a sign advertising Rainbow Lake Resort. The sign was weathered and the paint was peeling. The resort used to give guided trail rides, canoe trips, and provide a place for camping. Three years before, the owners went bankrupt and closed it down. Now the deserted camp was used by the homeless and rowdy teenagers.
Robb turned the car onto a dirt road. Vegetation had reclaimed part of it and there were potholes to navigate. There had been heavy rains the week before that would have wiped out any trace of tire tracks. The lead car stopped in a gravel parking lot in front of an abandoned log cabin that had served as the office and rec room for the camp. Santoro could also see the empty stables and cabins. The area was surrounded by dense woods. Straight ahead, a sharp wind was driving the blue-green waters of a large lake onto a rocky beach.
The van from the crime lab and the morgue wagon pulled in. Robb parked next to the patrol car. When she got out of the car, the wind off the lake seared her cheeks. Robb turned up her coat collar before opening the back doo
r of the car that had transported the prisoner. Jefferson got out. Then Lester edged across the seat and stood up. He was handcuffed and his ankles were secured by manacles. Santoro watched him carefully when Robb unlocked his shackles.
“Thanks,” Lester said as he shook out his hands and hopped up and down for a few seconds.
“Where is the body, Barry?” Robb asked.
Lester turned in a circle and stopped when he spotted the lake.
“Okay. We go along the woods on the left toward the water. He said there was a trail.”
“Lead on,” Santoro told him. Lester started walking with his lawyer close behind and the detectives on either side. Nick Winters and an assistant from the morgue followed the forensic experts. The officers who had driven Lester took shovels out of the trunk of their car and brought up the rear.
A narrow hiking trail led into the woods a few yards from the lakeshore.
“Let the people from the crime lab go first,” Santoro ordered. A man and two women worked their way cautiously down the trail, recording everything with a video camera.
“He said he buried her about a quarter of a mile in on the left side of the trail,” Lester said.
He scanned the underbrush, then stopped suddenly and pointed to another trail that led into the forest.
“This should be it,” Lester said. “The grave shouldn’t be too far in. Blair told me he got tired carrying the body. That she was heavy, so he couldn’t go too far.”
“Wait here,” Santoro said as he and Robb followed the techs down the new trail. They had not gone far when they saw a cleared area with dirt that looked freshly turned. As soon as the forensic experts finished, Santoro ordered the officers with the shovels to get to work.
“And be gentle,” he said. “Treat this like an archaeological dig. The lab techs will supervise.”
The officers had moved a small amount of dirt off the grave when one of them stopped and pointed at something shiny that was half buried under some soil.
“What’s that?” he asked.
The woman from the forensic team used a light whisk broom to brush away the material covering the object. She was wearing gloves. She picked up the object and placed it in an evidence bag held by one of the other techs. The third forensic expert photographed the whole thing with a video camera. The technician with the envelope held it up. Santoro peered through the plastic at a key that looked very similar to the one he used to open his front door.
It didn’t take much more digging before a bloodless white knuckle was uncovered. The policeman who had exposed it called over the lab techs, and everyone else gathered at the edge of the grave.
“I told you,” Lester said, pleased as could be. Everyone else was somber.
As more dirt was tossed out of the grave, more and more of Carrie Blair was revealed. The blood that stained the front of her white blouse had dried and looked brown and flakey. Her face was drained of color and patches of skin had rotted away, revealing bleached bone and tissue. Santoro looked away out of respect. Robb stared hard and seethed.
“It looks like Mr. Lester came through for us,” Santoro told Jefferson, who was keeping his head up and his eyes away from the corpse.
“Indeed he did, indeed he did. Now it’s your turn to come through for him,” the lawyer said.
“You know that only a prosecutor can make that call, but I’ll tell him to do the right thing.”
“If he does,” Lester said, “I’ll sweeten the pot by telling you why Blair popped his wife.”
Robb had been listening to the conversation. She turned quickly and stared at Lester menacingly.
“You’ve been holding out on us?” she asked.
“Not at all,” Lester said, holding up both hands to placate the angry detective. “I promised to tell you where Blair buried the body, and that was all I promised. This info is a bonus. If you come through for me.”
Chapter Thirty
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Christopher Rauh said as he stomped around his office.
“I know exactly what you mean,” Rick Hamada said. “But there is definitely enough to go to a grand jury. Especially now that we have the ballistics report on the bullet that was found during Carrie Blair’s autopsy.”
Robb and Santoro were smart enough to say nothing. They had already laid out their case and it was up to their superiors to decide what they wanted to do with it.
“Arrest Blair for murder and there is going to be a shit storm,” Rauh said.
“Which I am going to have to weather,” Hamada reminded him. “I’ll be prosecuting, which means I’ll be hit with the fallout if Blair walks.”
“So you’re okay with going for a murder indictment?” Rauh asked.
“We have a body, a motive, strong forensic evidence, and the murder weapon. Yeah, I’m good to go,” Hamada answered.
Rauh looked down at his desk. Then he looked at Santoro and Robb.
“You did good work. I’m proud of you. You didn’t let me stop you from going after Blair.”
“Thanks,” Santoro said. Robb didn’t say anything. She was still pissed off at Rauh.
“Okay. You two work with Rick to get the case in shape for the grand jury. If we get an indictment, you get to make the collar.”
The meeting broke up and Hamada followed the two detectives into the hall.
“I second what Chris said,” Hamada told them. “Let’s meet tomorrow morning and work up this sucker.”
Robb smiled but Santoro didn’t. Stephanie had pushed to go to Rauh and Hamada as soon as they received the ballistics report. On paper, the case looked solid. But Santoro wondered if the case wasn’t too solid. He hadn’t voiced his doubts because Robb’s arguments for going after Horace Blair were based on solid evidence, and his doubts were based on a queasy feeling.
Stephanie had a meeting with an assistant commonwealth attorney, so she walked with Hamada to the prosecutor’s office. Santoro went to the jail and asked the officer who was manning the reception desk for the visitors’ log for the time Barry Lester was incarcerated. Arthur Jefferson had visited several times. Most of those visits had been in the past few days, which was not surprising. Lester’s only other visitor was a woman named Tiffany Starr. That sounded like the type of phony name a stripper or hooker would use, which meant that Miss Starr probably had a rap sheet.
When he returned to his office, Santoro ran Starr’s name and discovered that she was on parole for a narcotics offense. Parole and Probation was on the floor below the Homicide Bureau. Half an hour later, Santoro returned to his office with a copy of Tiffany Starr’s pre-sentence report. Reading a tale of another wasted life was depressing.
Tiffany’s given name was Sharon Ross and she was the daughter of Devon and Miranda Ross. The Rosses were well off, and Sharon had gone to private schools, where her grades were mediocre. Her first brush with the law came as a juvenile, when she ran away from home. Shoplifting charges soon followed. The pre-sentence writer suspected that Sharon was using cocaine as early as the eighth grade and was stealing to finance her habit.
In her sophomore year of high school, Sharon spent two months at a fancy clinic, but rehab didn’t take and she was readmitted in her junior year. She dropped out of school at the beginning of her senior year and married Fredrick Krantz, an auto mechanic who was also a drummer in a rock band that played in one of the clubs Sharon frequented. They ran away to Oregon, where the marriage unraveled. Sharon returned to Virginia, where she faked a résumé and got a job as a bookkeeper. She was fired soon after for embezzling money.
Sharon received probation with a requirement that she go into rehab for her drug problem. When she violated the conditions of her probation, the judge sent her to prison in hopes that tough love would work where all else had failed. In prison, Sharon developed a heroin habit. After leaving prison, Krantz adopted the name Tiffany Starr and began dancing at various strip clubs. That is where she met Barry Lester.
Santoro was about to put the pre-sentence report
away but he hesitated. He had the feeling that something he’d read was important though he didn’t know what it was. He started rereading the report from the beginning, and it didn’t take him long to see what he’d almost missed. Sharon Ross’s father was Devon Ross, and Kyle Ross was Sharon’s brother. On the Monday that Carrie Blair disappeared, everyone had been talking about Commonwealth v. Kyle Ross. Santoro tried to remember why. He recalled that there was something about evidence that had gone missing. Then Carrie disappeared and the case was quickly forgotten.
Santoro called the Narcotics Unit and learned that Mary Maguire was the prosecutor who had tried the Ross case. Maguire’s secretary told the detective that Maguire was handling a pretrial matter on the second floor of the courthouse.
Santoro walked over to the courtroom where Maguire was working and sat in the rear. When court was over, Maguire stuffed her paperwork in her attaché and Santoro intercepted her outside the courtroom.
“Judge Stiles can be a real hard-ass. I thought you handled him nicely.”
“Who are you?” Maguire asked, not bothering to hide her impatience.
Santoro showed her his ID. “I’m a detective over in Homicide.”
“Homicide? How can I help you?”
“I wanted to ask you about a case you tried, Commonwealth v. Ross.”
Maguire flushed angrily. “Thanks for ruining my day.”
“Pardon?”
“I was hoping never to hear about Commonwealth v. Ross ever again.”
“Why is that?”
“I had the single most embarrassing moment I’ve ever experienced trying that case.”
“What happened?”
Maguire told Santoro about the cocaine that was mysteriously transformed into fizzing baking soda.
“And Charles Benedict was the lawyer?”
“I’m certain he switched the cocaine, and Carrie was convinced she knew how.”
“Carrie Blair?”
“She was my supervisor. The judge had her come down so she could decide whether to dismiss. She was furious. She told me not to blame myself because she knew what happened.”
Sleight of Hand: A Novel of Suspense (Dana Cutler) Page 13