by Jan Burke
And so certain anonymous tips nearly always led to arrests, and then convictions, because he orchestrated events to ensure the best outcome. He did his best to ensure that the evidence was in place, that witnesses would be present, that anything that had gone wrong in the first trial would not go wrong in the second.
He frowned as his thoughts strayed to Trent Randolph and to Seth and Amanda. He thought of Lefebvre and suddenly shivered. Was there some divine message here? A warning from the cosmos, perhaps? Some reason Lefebvre’s body had been found now, of all times, when he was within reach of his long-awaited goal?
Lefebvre! Even now, Lefebvre caused him trouble.
He stood and walked over to a short row of file cabinets, precisely positioned in an area that would support their weight. The drawers of the cabinets were labeled by date. He unlocked one and pulled the second drawer open. He did this every day — came to this room, opened a file cabinet, and read from a file. Sometimes he could read one in a day; other files took several days to complete. He read them in order, oldest to newest, and back again. This ritual kept him focused on his calling.
He had been collecting information on Kerr for years now. He doubted Kerr himself had such meticulous records of his own actions. Tonight’s reading was the final section of a lengthy transcript of court proceedings. It was a case in which Kerr dismissed all charges against a man who had asked his ex-wife and young son to drive with him to visit the child’s paternal grandparents — then taken them to a remote area and shot and killed them both. Judge Kerr claimed the evidence against the man was gathered in an improper search. The transcript was just the sort of thing the Looking Glass Man needed to read right now, because it reminded him of why he must fight this good fight. He carefully replaced the file and went back to the desk.
He opened the notebook to a new page, ready to begin to write up this latest event. He would start with the moment his pager went off, when he was in his van watching Harriman look at maps in his car. He placed the tip of his mechanical pencil in the middle of the first square, then lifted it again as a new question occurred to him.
Where had Harriman been all afternoon?
15
Tuesday, July 11, 12:01 A.M.
Las Piernas
He watched the taillights of the Jeep Cherokee as he followed Irene home. They had left Miriam in the care of her sister, who had arrived — remarkably energetic after her long drive — a little before eleven-thirty. Irene had followed him to the department, where he had taken a moment to examine the paper airplane. Wearing gloves, he had gently unfolded it, looking for writing or any other enclosed message. There was none. The plane had been made with over a dozen folds, and a section of the tail had been shaped by cutting curves into it. He had filled out paperwork describing when and where the plane had been found, then placed a copy of it with the plane in an evidence locker, where it would remain secure until the lab examined it.
Now, at last, he thought, they could call it a day.
They were stopped at a light when his cell phone rang.
“Hi — it’s Polly Logan. If you come by right now, I can show you the tape.”
“Now? It’s after—”
“I do know how to tell time, Frank. You said I could call anytime, and it’s now or never. I’m not sure how my station manager will feel about my showing this to you, so I’d rather not have a lot of folks around while you’re looking at it — all right? You know where the station is?”
“Yes.”
She gave him directions to a back entrance. “And don’t tell the doofus at the gate that you’re a cop. He’s a wannabe, and he’ll keep you there all night. Besides—”
“The station manager.”
“Right.”
He tried calling Irene’s cell phone number, but got her voice mail. He hung up without leaving a message. He sighed in frustration. She probably didn’t have it with her — she disliked it and had only recently agreed to carry one at all.
This was not the time to complain to her about it, he decided.
He pulled alongside the Jeep at the next intersection and motioned to Irene to roll down her window.
“I’ll make sure you get home safely, but then I’ll have to take off. I’ve got to meet with someone on the other side of town.”
“They’ve given you another case?”
“No, more of the same. This just worked out to be the only time I could get together with this person.”
“‘Person,’ huh? Must be a woman. If you’re going in the other direction, don’t worry about following me home. I’ll be okay.”
He found himself unable to resist saying, “I’d feel better if you had your cell phone with you.”
She shrugged. “I’ll be okay,” she repeated, a little impatiently. When she saw his reluctance to let it go, she added, “Besides, Big Brother, you can ask the comm center to track the Jeep’s LoJack signal if you’re worried that I’m heading out of state.”
“Before you decide that the LoJack in the Jeep is there just in case I want to abuse my mighty police powers, I’d remind you that Ben had it installed long before we bought the Jeep from him.”
“Don’t take everything I say so seriously, Frank. And you don’t need to watch over me every minute. I’ll be fine. I’ll call you when I get in, if it will make you feel better.”
Afraid she was feeling hemmed in, he said, “All right. I’ll be home as soon as I can. Listen — I’m sorry this meeting came up. I was hoping we could talk.”
She shook her head. “Not a good time to do that anyway. I’m beat.”
A car pulled up behind her and the driver tapped his horn — the light had changed. She moved off, waving to Frank as she drove through the intersection.
He watched until he could no longer see the Jeep’s taillights, then made a U-turn.
If someone had hauled away the satellite dishes and painted over the mural that adorned one side of the Channel 6 studios, the building would have looked no more exciting than a warehouse. The mural showed the “News Where You Live Team” in smiling, bright-eyed, larger-than-life scale. He noticed that Polly Logan’s portrait was also younger than life.
The gatekeeper was a cheerful, middle-aged man whose girth was wedged nearly miraculously into a tall armchair. Frank wondered how, if a pursuit were necessary, the fellow would ever get to his feet.
When he gave the man his name, the gatekeeper responded with a knowing smile and said, “That Polly is something, isn’t she?” He handed him a clipboard, then went back to reading a crumpled copy of Hustler. Frank wrote his name illegibly and handed it back. The guard didn’t look at it. He picked up a phone and dialed a number.
Frank’s cell phone rang while the guard was talking to someone inside the building.
“Hi,” Irene said. “I made it home, safe and sound.”
At that moment, the guard leaned out and handed him a visitor’s badge, saying in a loud voice, “Here you go, lover boy, a pass to see Polly Logan. But a word to the wise — with the stuff that’s going around these days, you’d better wear a rubber — that broad has laid more pipe than the local plumbers’ union.”
He heard Irene disconnect.
He drove through the gate, parked in the nearly empty lot, and tried calling home. He got the answering machine. “Irene, I know you’re there. Please pick up the phone.”
Nothing.
“You aren’t going to let one loudmouthed knucklehead cause us problems, are you?”
He heard her pick up the receiver — and set it right back down in the cradle.
He swore, turned the phone off, and headed for the building’s back entrance.
The cloying scent of Polly Logan’s perfume hit him before he saw her. She stood waiting for him, a blond beacon at the end of a dimly lit hallway — a narrow figure clad in a dark blue suit and high heels that would have made a stilt-maker proud. At six four, he was a tall man, but he thought he was only about half a foot above being eye-to-eye with her.
In this semidarkness, she bore at least some resemblance to the woman on the mural. He knew better. In her efforts to stay in front of the camera, Polly Logan must have spent most of the money she had made there on cosmetic surgery. The results were now in the waxworks stage — her blue eyes had that wide-open, perpetually startled look that was a by-product of too many facelifts, her mouth and chin so stiff as to make a ventriloquist’s dummy’s seem more supple, and her satiny, wrinkle-free face was, alas, perched atop her original, aging neck, making her look as if her head had been transplanted to the wrong body.
“Frank,” she said, extending a hand, “good to see you.”
The hand was smooth but dry and bony, so that he felt as if he were grasping an albino bat’s wing. He let go before the bat did. “I appreciate your willingness to help me out.”
“I’m sure I’ll be able to think of a way for you to return the favor,” she said with a smile.
He thought he might have grimaced in response.
She didn’t seem to notice and sauntered toward a door at the end of the hallway. “Come along, I’ve set this up in one of the conference rooms.”
She aimed a remote at a television set attached to a VCR. When the set came on, she immediately pressed a volume button, so that the sound was nearly muted. “I don’t want to attract a lot of attention to what we’re doing in here,” she said. “Not just because you’re a cop, but because — well, I’ve taken a lot of crap around here about keeping these.”
“These?” he asked, wondering how long he’d be trapped here with her, watching videotapes.
“The original footage, I mean. The clips I copied to make this one for you.” She smiled. “A labor of love.”
“How long is the final product?” he asked.
“Two hours,” she said, and pressed the play button on the remote.
The first few minutes were made up of footage from about a dozen years ago, she explained. “I shot most of this myself.”
Fleeting images of Lefebvre went by. There was an almost voyeuristic quality in them that Frank found unsettling. Most of the time Lefebvre clearly wasn’t aware he was on camera. The woman was all but stalking him.
“He had the most interesting eyes,” she said softly, after a close-up.
The rest of the tape had been shot by other camera operators. Frank glanced at Polly as she narrated in a low voice. “This was after he solved the Berton case.” Then “This is at the courthouse, after he testified against Hunter.” She gazed at the screen, caught up in memories, giving a running commentary that prevented him from hearing the soundtrack of the tape.
He half listened as Polly droned on. When the press conference in Seth Randolph’s room came on the screen, Frank found himself distracted to see Irene, ten years younger. Although younger, she had dark circles under her eyes. She seemed tired, he thought, a little down, and — what was that quality he saw in her face? Vulnerability. Yes, she seemed more vulnerable then.
The camera went back to Tory Randolph, but Frank was still thinking of Irene. He remembered her comments about getting to know Lefebvre during her father’s long, final illness. Rough days. But for all this, when the camera next was on her, he saw a familiar impishness in her eyes — she was calling out a question.
“Ex-husband, correct?” she asked on the tape.
He could see the amusement of some of the other journalists before the camera went back to Tory Randolph, who was saying something about not thinking of Trent Randolph as her ex-husband. Frank shook his head. From reading the files, he knew that within a few months of this press conference, Tory Randolph remarried. She married Dale Britton, a man who had worked in the crime lab. They had already met by the time of the press conference — Britton had been one of the criminalists on the case.
Polly had asked him a question, he realized. “Pardon?”
“Tory — have you ever seen such a stage hog?”
Nothing he saw on the tape made him think she was wrong, but he didn’t answer.
The camera went back to Seth Randolph for a moment. Knowing how little future Seth had — knowing the futures of many of the people he was now watching — Frank found the tape unsettling. Lefebvre and Seth Randolph would die violently the next evening. Lefebvre, obviously a hero at this point, would be in disgrace during the ensuing decade. Irene would bury her father and suffer other ordeals, including being held captive in a small room — an experience that would leave her far too claustrophobic to stay calm in a room as crowded as the one on the tape.
She would also marry Frank — although she might, at the moment, count that as another ordeal.
Polly Logan would fail miserably at recapturing her youth — a bird that was already well on the wing ten years ago. As he watched, he was surprised by how much footage she had kept of this press conference — it was much more extensive than what had gone before on the tape. When he commented about this to her, she said, “I kept all of it, because it was the last time I ever saw him.” Tears started rolling down her expensive cheeks. “And the things they said about him! Look at him! Does he look as if he wants to harm that boy? No! He’s more protective of Seth than Tory is!”
Frank had to agree. The brief shots he had seen in Bredloe’s office on the afternoon news were, he realized, misleading. And when Seth’s reactions were shown in context, rather than in the brief segment he had seen before, he could see that the boy trusted Lefebvre — had turned to him for protection, in fact.
Hearing Polly sniff, Frank offered a tissue to her. She thanked him, wiped delicately at her eyes, then murmured, “I loved him, you know.” She blew her sculpted nose. “Not requited, I’ll admit.”
“No? You didn’t ever go out together?”
She shook her head, looking more miserable than ever. “No, not even when I asked him. He turned me down flat. He was too busy panting after your wife.”
“I don’t blame him,” he said evenly. “She was single, after all.”
“Your loyalty is refreshing, and of course you’re right — she was very available in those days.”
She glanced up at him, saw the hard look that had come into his eyes, and said, “Don’t get bent out of shape — I didn’t mean anything by it.” She gave a short, bitter laugh. “God knows, I can’t cast any stones.”
He thought of the boy he had seen at the condo and asked, “Do you know of anyone else Lefebvre might have dated?”
“Other than Irene? No. Except for trying to go after her, he was married to his work.”
The tape started hissing, and she removed it from the VCR and held it out to him. “This copy is yours, if you’d like it.”
“Thanks,” he said. “This is a real help. And thanks for your time this evening.” He said this politely, even though he was irritated with her. If she had simply given him the tape or sent it to him at the department, he could have gone home much earlier. Instead, she had forced him to attend this private screening with her, while she grew maudlin over a man who had not, apparently, returned her affection.
Her devotion to Lefebvre did not puzzle him — long ago he had realized that some people never really wanted what they could have. Some women would fall in love with priests, with gay men, with men who were in love with other women — precisely because they were unobtainable. This devotion at a distance seldom ended with the beloved’s death — after all, nobody was more unobtainable than a dead man.
“When I heard you were on the case,” Polly said, looping an arm through his as she led him out, “I knew Phil stood a chance.”
He halted. A vision of Lefebvre as he had found him — dried remains in the wreckage of a plane — flashed before him. “A chance?”
She urged him forward. “Yes, to be proven innocent. It would have been important to him.” When they were almost at the building’s exit, she said, “I always hoped he’d come back alive. I thought I might be able to get him to take a second look, you know what I mean?”
“Sure.”
At the door
he gently extricated his arm, said good night, and made his way back to the car. As he shut the car door, he could smell her perfume on his suit.
Perhaps she didn’t get all that plastic surgery to keep her job, he thought. Maybe she was trying to bookmark a page in her life, trying to stay at a certain point in the story, so that Lefebvre would come back to her like a reader who had only temporarily set her aside and find his place.
He turned his phone on, and it beeped twice to indicate that he had a voice-mail message. He retrieved the call, which had been received about five minutes after Irene had hung up on him.
“Frank, I’m sorry. Call me as soon as you have the phone back on — wake me up, I won’t care. Call me. I keep thinking about Bredloe and — just call and let me know you’re safe, okay?”
He glanced at his watch. It was after three in the morning.
He drove home without calling.
She was awake. She met him at the door, drowsy but intent, and without saying a word took his face in her hands and kissed him long and hard. He made a small, low sound of surrender, and she pulled him closer. She stepped back a little, wrinkled her nose as she caught the scent of the perfume, but didn’t remark on it. He started to say something, but she stopped him with another kiss, this one softer, sweeter, coaxing.
“Enough talk,” she said.
16
Tuesday, July 11, 9:00 A.M.
Las Piernas Police Department Homicide Division
The story of the attack on Bredloe made the front page of the Express. A much smaller story about Lefebvre’s funeral appeared on one of the inside pages. Frank had just finished reading it when his phone rang.
“Harriman,” he answered.
“How dare you give that man a special police funeral!” a woman screeched.
“Excuse me?”
“This is Detective Frank Harriman — am I right?”
“Yes, it is.”
“This is Tory Randolph-Britton.”