First Lady

by Michael Malone

  I said, “You mean email? Just because I use wax and a goose feather, doesn’t mean I haven’t heard of computers. Lucy had a little cheap laptop in her apartment. She had web access through Haver, but believe me we checked that thing. No incoming saved mail. No sent mail on file offline. Nothing. Either she cleaned it out or somebody else did.”

  “Maybe Norris?” suggested Bunty. “He’d think of a detail like that.”

  The young deputy counsel was twisting hard at her hair as if she hoped the pinch would make her think more clearly. Then she clapped her hands together. “Justin, what did you just say? She used the Haver Internet?”

  “Yes,” I told her. “Students get it. But if she printed those emails out, we can’t find them. Maybe she actually carried them around in that mesh bag and he got them, along with the camera.”

  Lisa nodded eagerly. “Listen to me. Faculty use that web too.” She checked her watch. “I’ll give you two cases, okay. Wendy Freiberg got involved with one a year ago. She got called in because this was at State so NCBI caught the case. Some professor in the—I kid you not—religion department is checking out some skuzzy child porn on the web. So the university gets wind of it because—get this—they monitor their server. Hey, I mean, they’re not as bad as the FBI Carnivore.” She waved her arm at the two female Bureau agents.

  “Chomp chomp chomp,” Rhonda grinned: it was a comic reference to the FBI’s extremely invasive national email surveillance technique that had come under attack from civil libertarians. “Hey, you kill six women, I say you lose some rights.”

  Lisa nodded. “So State fires this professor, even though this is like some old geezer with tenure. He files a grievance, screaming invasion of privacy, yada yada yada, and the university goes, ‘Sorry, Sleazo, you log on through us, it’s not private. It’s State business and the State is not happy being in the child pornography business. So bye-bye.’”

  “I see where you’re going,” murmured Bunty. “There was a Haver civil suit back in the spring, right?”

  Lisa nodded. “Couple of Haver biochemists were emailing each other all these genome schemes—patentable biotech-type stuff. So Haver seizes the correspondence. It goes to civil court. Haver claims they own the patents because they say anything on the Haver web is Haver intellectual property. Guess what, they win. Guess why this relates to our friend Professor Tyler Norris?”

  Bunty said, “Because all email sent through the Haver server is stored in a back-up system for 365 days. If Norris and Lucy Griggs corresponded by email, there’ll be copies in the Haver mainframe.”

  Lisa grinned at her. “You got it.”

  I said, “How do we get it without the mayor, the D.A., etc., etc., etc.?”

  “I know a judge’ll give me a warrant right now in the middle of the night to subpoena those files.” Lisa started looking up a phone number in her cell phone. “She’s appeals court, lives nowhere near here. She’ll do it for Margy Turbot.”

  Dick Cohen, entering, passed Lisa as she hurried out the door of 105. “Sorry guys, I got nothing for you. No hairs, no prints, no semen, no help.”

  “Nothing in Margy’s mouth?” I asked.

  “Sorry. I’m headed home,” he yawned. “I wanna see if my two kids, the ones I left off in sixth and seventh grade, are now attending the colleges of their choice. Anybody for strudel?” He set a large tin box on the conference table. “All the way from Brooklyn. My mother made it.”

  Rhonda affably opened the box, broke off a piece of pastry but had difficulty chewing it.

  Dick shrugged. “My mom should spring for priority, I keep telling her, Parcel Post won’t cut it with strudel.”

  “She could freeze it,” I suggested.

  “Oh crap, that reminds me.” Dick turned around in the door. “Sam Chang faxed me this. Amazing guy, here he is testifying in Seattle and his brain’s still spinning on our problem.”

  I said, “A star is a star is a star.”

  Dick found the paper. “We were muddling over some tissue discoloration extending from those match burns on G.I. Jane—”

  “Kristin Stiller,” Rhonda reminded him.

  “Right. Well, Sam was going along with the idea it all came from the sulfur matches, but now he’s thinking you know maybe it’s actually freezer burn. Maybe G.W. tried to cover the freeze spots with the match burns—”

  I interrupted. “I thought you told me you checked weather reports. The ground out there never really froze.”

  Dick waved off my question. “No, Sam’s talking a real freezer, like she was kept in a fridge before the guy dumped her. Okay, see you guys tomorrow.”

  R&B and I looked at each other. We all three knew what Dick’s news meant. If Sam Chang was right, Dick’s original certainty that Kristin had died no earlier than mid-January did not hold. In fact, she could have died Christmas Eve, the last day anyone actually saw her in Hillston. If so, and if Tyler Norris killed her because she was blackmailing him, he killed her before he murdered his wife. She was his first victim; Linsley, his second.

  Rhonda tossed a hardball from hand to hand; it was like worry beads to her. “JayJay, we need to get in Tyler’s house, see if he’s got a deep freeze.”

  It’s a legend in the department that I can remember the location of almost any object I’ve ever seen; it’s why I’ve always been the detective first to walk the scene of a homicide. I closed my eyes now and walked into the front hallway of Tyler Norris’s house on Tartan Drive back on New Year’s Eve, six months ago. Tyler had just been rushed to the hospital. His dead wife still lay on the floor, now covered by a plastic sheet. In memory, I kept walking—down three steps into the living room, through a double pocket-door opening into a dining room, through a swinging door into a kitchen, then into a rear hallway. On one side, the interior door to the garage. On the other, the door into the utilities room. In that room, appliances, shelves, a sink. A washer and dryer. Against the far wall, a large white object with a heavy lidded top. I told Rhonda, “He does have a deep freeze. I saw it.”

  Was it possible that Kristin Stiller had been in that freezer from Christmas Eve until he dumped her off the access road? Was it possible that Linsley Norris had somehow discovered her in the freezer? Had we been wrong about his motives? Had Tyler killed his wife not because she was pregnant with his father’s child and he hated her, but because she knew he was a murderer?

  I said, “Big problem. I try getting a warrant in this county, Mitch Bazemore’ll shut us down fast.”

  Bunty thought as she dutifully swallowed the pills Rhonda held out to her. “Kristin Stiller was a Swedish national. We go to a federal judge. If she was a crime victim, the FBI, maybe INS, are involved. Rhonda and I don’t even talk to local judges, we don’t bother with local police.”

  I smiled. “You hot shots don’t even know we exist.”

  There was a sharp knock at the door to 105. Zeke Caleb stepped inside, or rather was pulled inside by a large, dark short-haired dog.

  “Hey there, Geronimo,” Rhonda called to Zeke. “See you finally got your dog. You going K-9 then?” He nodded happily. “What is that, a Malinois Shepherd? I heard about them.”

  “That’s right,” he said, pulling the big animal back beside him by the short thick leash. “This is what they call an aggressive indicator.”

  “He looks it,” Bunty agreed.

  “She. Name’s Heidi. Speaks Dutch, this dog. Trained in Holland. She knows seventeen commands—I’m starting to learn them.” Zeke yanked the dog back toward him, patted her head. He said something that was presumably “Sit” in Dutch. At any rate, the dog did so. “Justin, you wanted me to tell you if a match came over the dispatch. They just picked up a black Ford Explorer abandoned with its lights on. Registered to a…” He looked at the pad he carried. “Guy named Ferraro. No answer at the residence. Dumfries Court.”

  “Where’d they find the SUV?�
��

  “Parking lot of the Rib House Bar on the byways. Kids, huh? What’s wrong with them?”

  The SUV had been dutifully impounded by the Hillston police and was now in the HPD garage. I phoned the forensics lab down the hall and spoke with Etham Foster. “Doctor D, you can thank young Griffin Pope. I’ve got your car for you. Place Tyler in it and I’ll never call you Doctor Dunkit again.”

  “Hang on,” he growled.

  Chapter 33

  Check

  It was nearly nine. I was watching Etham Foster’s teamwork on the Ford Explorer under the high-intensity lights. They’d already cut out a small square of the gray carpet fibers from under the seat. They’d already photographed the car interior and filmed the removal of the small piece of boxwood that Nancy had seen caught in the wheel frame when she’d looked at the car in the Ferraro garage. Now Etham was removing the evidence that—the minute we saw it—showed us not only that we were right about Tyler Norris but that we’d be able to prove that we were right. We saw cat hairs. Four separate white cat hairs. In their translucent latex gloves, Etham’s large hands patiently tweezered each of the short straight hairs from the gray velour seat fabric. He placed them in small round metal evidence boxes.

  “You’re sure?” Etham asked me again. “You saw a white cat in Margy Turbot’s kitchen?”

  “I’m sure. It was a big white Persian. It was staying close to the body. It rubbed against my legs just the way it must have done to Tyler’s. I bet I got the same hairs on the cuffs of my pants as he did.”

  “Bring me your pants tomorrow.”

  I said I would.

  “And find that cat. What happened, a neighbor took it?”

  I admitted I didn’t know.

  “So find it.” Etham unhooked the accelerator footpad in order to study it under a magnifier. Embedded in one of the treads he found a miniscule speck of blood that might belong to Margy Turbot. I left him with it. He looked as happy as anyone was likely ever to see our dour criminologist.

  • • •

  It was karaoke night at the Tinwhistle Pub that everybody still called the Tucson Lounge. A skinny man with long yellow sideburns was trying to hold onto a Mavis song (“The Tooth of Time”) that was galloping away from him. A dozen young motorcyclists (complaining loudly about being turned away from the sold-out, standing-room-only Mavis concert tonight) were not only booing the hapless singer for defiling their idol by his poor imitation, but were also throwing onion rings and plastic cups at him. The air-conditioning couldn’t compete with the crowd and the place smelled like sweat, beer, and urine. I’d gone to the bar for a quick dinner and, admittedly, for a drink. Now I lit a cigarette, one from the opened pack Brenda Moore had given me. A young woman drinking next to me screamed as the cigarette exploded in my mouth with a loud pop when I lit it. The bartender actually ducked under the edge of the bar, and I had a jolt of adrenaline that may have aged me. “A friend of mine,” I explained. “She’s a practical joker. Very anti-smoking.”

  “She could get somebody killed, somebody could have a heart attack,” the bartender protested.

  “Don’t talk about killing,” the young woman beside me said. “I’m waiting for my girlfriend because I’m scared to go out in the streets with Guess Who loose. I think they ought to fire that whole police department, what good are they?”

  I decided I didn’t like this young woman, finished my scotch (it was at least the right color for scotch), and walked out to the alley to answer my ringing cell phone. It was Lisa Grecco, who wanted me to know she’d be at the Computer Services Office of Haver University at eight in the morning with the subpoena she’d managed to acquire. She’d impound any emails they had on file to or from Tyler Norris. By the way, could Lisa ask me something personal? I said of course and she asked if I knew whether Bubba Percy was seeing anybody seriously? I told her my impression was that Bubba did nothing in his life seriously except comb his hair. Lisa just wondered because she was going out with him later tonight, and she hated to start back up with him if in fact she was just something on the side. Again, I suggested that everything in Bubba’s life was on the side.

  Lisa’s question made me remember that Bubba had, for some reason, wanted me to phone him at eight. It was now after nine and the long lazy summer dusk was finally darkening to night. He answered the phone on the first ring. “Bubba, you wanted me to call?”

  “Justin?” Instead of blasting me for being late as I expected, he sounded suddenly shocked and distressed. “Yeah?… Yeah… Oh Jesus, Justin, that’s unbelievable.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Oh, Justin, man, I’m so sorry….It’s a big shock.” He appeared to be carrying on an intense conversation with me that I was no part of. He said, “Okay, I’ll get right over there…”

  “What are you up to, Bubba?” As I asked, I heard someone else, someone very close to his phone, asking the same question, “What’s going on?” It was Shelly Bloom. And Bubba was, I suspected, in her bed and trying to avoid hanging around for the afterglow so he could make his date with Lisa Grecco.

  Ironically, I’d been thinking of calling Shelly Bloom myself; she’d impressed me with her reportage this morning in the Star. She could not only get the story (which few reporters bothered to do anymore), she could write it. I wanted to tell her, and this time it would even be true, that we had a prime suspect—although claiming we were close to an arrest might be problematic. But if we did find a way to collar Tyler Norris, why not let Shelly hand a big coup to her new paper the Star? If she was falling in love with Bubba, she was going to need some other ego boost to rely on.

  The press secretary was still commiserating with me about whatever he was talking about. “Thanks for letting me know, Justin.… This is real bad news. You hang on. I’ll be there as fast as I can.”

  I said, “Tell Shelly to call me right away.”

  “What? Who?”

  But I hung up. I tried to imagine what this fictional “unbelievable bad news” was that I had ostensibly just told him. Maybe that my mother had died. I wouldn’t put it past him.

  My phone rang again. This time it was Brenda at the dispatch desk. Before I could chastise her for the exploding cigarette joke, she said Dermott Quinn was trying to reach me about something “important.” The Irishman was on one of her lines right now. She transferred me.

  I could scarcely hear him. “Where are you, Dermott?”

  “Feckin’ zoo,” Mavis’s dresser said. “Backstage. Haver Field. The eejits let a few thousand too many in and they’re hangin’ off the bloody lights. Ah, shite! Okay, okay, she’s on now.”

  Just then I heard the loud long roar of forty thousand human throats, cheering together on a summer’s night in an open stadium. Then a wild Celtic burst of drums, fiddles, and flutes.

  “Lieutenant,” he shouted, “we can’t talk on the phone.” That was certainly unarguable. “Can you come to the stadium then? Ask in security for Bernadette Davey, she’ll bring you backstage.”

  “What about?” I asked. “Shout. Tell me now.” I didn’t have time to hear any more about how I was the type of man he wanted Mavis to marry.

  But it wasn’t that, or only that by inference. He said, “Somebody got in her feckin’ room at the Sheraton. Paul and I came up to her suite after dinner. He’s a bodyguard. Since the murder, we make her stay at the bar ’til we check everything out and call her. So we’re walking into her sitting room and all of sudden we hear these noises in the bedroom. We run in, door slams, we run to the hall, a feckin’ man’s running down it.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Middle-size. Thirty or so. White man. Had on a cap. Tight black running-like outfit. Her bedroom’s a bloody mess. Tore up her covers and left this feckin’ chess piece on her pillow. You know, the game chess?”

  “Is it the queen? Is the chess piece the queen?” No
thing about the two Costa Rican chess queens had been released to the press.

  “Yeah, that’s right, the queen. Black queen, from one of those cheap wood sets. Mavis thinks it’s a fan goo-gooing about this song she did a while back called ‘Midnight Queen,’ but I don’t know, I don’t mind saying it, I nearly soiled meself.”

  I asked if they’d called the police or notified hotel security. But they’d done neither. Mavis had told them not to. “She had a bloody fit. And Mavis in a temper’s something you don’t feckin’ argue with.” She’d said they had a performance to do tomorrow night that was being filmed for a documentary. As soon as it was over, they were flying to Tokyo for another concert. She’d said they didn’t have time to get mixed up with the police.

  I told Dermott I’d get over to Haver Field before the end of the concert. “If she comes off the stage, stay with her.”

  “I’m never not, Lieutenant.” I heard a screaming rumble of cheers and applause, presumably as a song ended. “Oh Jaasuz, got to go.” He hung up.

  • • •

  Moving through the alley back toward the Cadmean Building garage, I used my cell phone to call John Emory. Roid swore that Norris had never once gotten out of his car the whole time he was tailing him but had just driven aimlessly around Hillston and then returned to his house at four P.M. He checked with the officer who replaced him and called back to say Norris hadn’t left the house. His car was still in the garage. As soon as Roid said it, I had an image of Tyler in his doorway in his professional-looking black Lycra sports pants with the thin Italian racing bike leaning against his foyer hall.

  “Roid, get over there. Norris went out through the back woods. He’s not driving, he’s on a bike. A couple of hours ago he broke into Mavis Mahar’s suite in the Sheraton.”

  Emory paused awkwardly. “Justin, listen. We got a problem. We all just got phone calls from the A.G.’s office telling us the investigation had been shut down and we can’t touch Tyler Norris.”