“That was different,” Hannibal said. “I lost my dad to a faceless enemy a thousand miles away. And I didn’t have to see him dead.”
Janet never turned from the monitor. Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana and Iowa all failed to match Hannibal’s description. “That’s a terrible thing, but does it make him an eyewitness?”
“That’s kind of where the story gets muddy,” Hannibal said. “Bea told me he never actually saw his mother in the house. But he testified she was there to please his aunt. That probably explains some of his guilt.”
Cindy resumed her seat. “Sure. He thinks he’s the reason his mother’s in jail.”
Hannibal watched license plates flash across the computer screen over her hair: Kansas was a loser.
“What about Kentucky?” Janet asked. “The numbers. Fairly dark at the top.”
Hannibal leaned in close. “No, I don’t think so. I seem to remember a dot. A dot after the first three numbers. And Doctor Roberts admitted Dean thinks he’s responsible for a lot, including his father’s death and Oscar Peters’.
Cindy kissed his neck. “You think the two murders are connected somehow, don’t you?”
Louisiana, Maine, Maryland and Massachusetts were the wrong color. Michigan could have been it, but the plate started with three letters instead of numbers. “Connected? Well let’s see. Stabbings both times. In the victim’s living room at night both times. Knife gone both times. Men in Dean Edwards’ life both times. Dean finds the body both times. Yeah, I’d say they might be connected.”
Janet fanned past the next five states. Hannibal was momentarily distracted because Cindy pressed her mouth against his and he was enjoying the sweetness of the wine mingled with her kiss.
“Hey cut that out you two,” Janet said with a grin. “How about this one, Hannibal?”
Hannibal pulled himself free of Cindy’s embrace and stared hard at the monitor. The license plate was cobalt blue with three numbers and three letters separated by a dot. The raised characters were silver, with a reflective quality Hannibal recognized. That and a number of subtle visual cues he couldn’t name made his heart quicken beyond what the wine and Cindy’s kiss could do.
“That’s it,” he said softly. “Now we know what state the real killer drove in from.”
12
Wednesday
Silver Spring was a community in search of an identity. Like its sister communities
Bethesda and Chevy Chase, Hannibal thought of it as a growth on the northern skin of Washington, growing up into Maryland, technically independent but too close to call a suburb. Coming in off the capitol Beltway, a driver slid into these cities and could never know he had crossed over into The District if not for signs indicating a change.
Hannibal had a couple of errands to attend to in Silver Spring, which is tucked into that three or four mile space between the Beltway and the District. In that narrow space it graded rather quickly from affluent suburb to inner city business district as it merged with the narrow dirty streets of Washington. So almost as soon as he was off the highway Hannibal was turning right into an older neighborhood, older but still proud and, to the extent it could be, exclusive. In many ways the neighborhood reminded him of the woman he was here to see, Ursula Voss.
Janet Ingersoll had verified that this year’s Nevada license plates held three numbers followed by three letters, not counting vanity plates and special plates of course. She promised to check the Nevada motor vehicle database today and give him a printout showing which of the seventeen thousand possible combinations starting with 902 were currently issued in Nevada. In the meantime, he had little to go on to help solve Oscar’s murder. So he decided that he would try to find out more about the death of Dean’s father. Ursula was the most likely source of information there.
On the telephone, Ursula told him her office was in her home and that she could give him a few minutes if he came fairly early. Less than an hour after that call, Hannibal pulled up in front of Ursula’s house and set his parking brake. The large brick structure was probably forty years old. He’d bet Ursula bought it new at a time when the idea that it would one day be worth a quarter million dollars would have raised a laugh. And he was sure she had lived there ever since. Despite the bay window, the porch was reminiscent of the one on the front of Oscar’s house.
Hannibal tightened his gloves before he rang the bell. When Ursula opened the door she was wearing a blue flowered dress that could have come off the same rack as the one she had on the day before. A pair of reading glasses hung from a chain around her neck.
“I’m quite busy Mister Jones,” she said after they exchanged good mornings. “Believe it or not, the tax season’s already underway for us accountants.”
“I won’t take up too much of your time,” Hannibal said. He took one step over the threshold and stopped. A wave of deja vu struck him and it took him a moment to sort it out. The room was more broad than deep, with a fireplace in the far wall which looked as if it had not been used in decades. Vaulted ceilings kept the room cool and imparted the slightest echo. But it was the decor that struck him. Oscar Peters might just as likely have picked this flowered wallpaper, only different from his in color. The sparse furniture was placed in analogous positions. The standing lamp in the corner, even the drapes on the windows were similar in style to what Oscar had in his house. Hannibal’s eyes dropped to a particular point on the floor. It was a hardwood floor, just like the floor in that other house where Oscar Peters stretched out in front of the door at that exact place and let the blood out of his body.
“That’s the spot,” Ursula said with ancient hatred. “That’s where Dean found Grant. Is that what you came to see?”
“No ma’am,” Hannibal said, backing toward the living room sofa. “But it does help me understand what happened to Dean.”
“And just what does that mean?” Ursula asked in a sharp tone, settling into the love seat, positioned kitty corner to the sofa.
He meant he saw Dean as a man standing just one step over the knife-edge line separating sanity from madness. He imagined Dean opening the door to that house decorated so much like the house he grew up in and looking down and seeing a dead man lying, for all practical purposes, where his father was that night, his body positioned as his father had been, with all the blood spilled in the same pattern on the hardwood floor.
“Nothing, Miss Voss,” Hannibal said, forcing the image out of his mind. “I just let my imagination run away with me there for a minute.”
“Well let’s get down to business,” Ursula said, pulling a silver cigarette case from her purse. “What did you need to see me about?”
“Actually I came to ask you for a favor, something I didn’t want to broach on the telephone.” Hannibal had expected the offer of coffee or tea but clearly this woman did not intend to make his visit any longer than necessary.
“I see,” Ursula said, touching the flame from a silver lighter to her cigarette and inhaling deeply. “Unless it will help my nephew somehow, I hardly see why I would be doing you a favor.”
Hannibal had little motivation to play softball with this hardened woman. “I’ve been hired to try to help him, and I wouldn’t ask anything of you outside that context. But after you told Thompson where he was, I couldn’t be sure how much you cared about Dean yourself.”
Ursula leaned back as if he had hit her. “What? What makes you think I told him?”
“Please Miss Voss. Only a handful of people knew Dean was hospitalized, and none of us had any motivation to inform the police of his whereabouts. But then, Thompson didn’t tell you it was his case, did he?”
“Stan Thompson and I go back a long way, Mister Jones,” Ursula said. “Since he’s working in Virginia now, I figured he could tell me just what kind of trouble my nephew was in. I needed to know what that murdering whore had gotten my poor Dean into. And no, he didn’t tell me he was involved with the case.” She forced the last sentence through clenched teeth.
; “Ahh, Bea must have told you his mother had visited him. I take it you didn’t like her very much, even before Dean’s father died.”
“That woman was white trash from the beginning. The kind of white trash you find in the hills in West Virginia.” Ursula spoke through a cloud of smoke and Hannibal could almost see the venom dripping off this black widow’s fangs. “Poor Grant was seduced by her wanton body, but we could all see through her. He married her against our will.”
“Our will?”
“The whole family was against it,” Ursula said, filling her lungs with smoke again. When she pulled the cigarette away from her mouth, lipstick clung to the filter like a bloodstain. “Wasn’t long before they were arguing violently. Grant, he was too gentle a soul for that and she just ran over him. When he finally came to his senses he and little Dean moved in here. He was the spitting image of the little brother I helped raise, not a drop of his mother’s violent blood in him. That cold-blooded murderess.”
She had no way of knowing Hannibal had looked into Francis Edwards’ china blue eyes himself, and failed to find a murderess there. “Odd for a cold-blooded murderess to be on the street in ten years, eh?”
“That trial was a travesty,” Ursula said. “Manslaughter they gave her, not a murder conviction. Her lying trickster lawyer Walt Young convinced those idiots it was a crime committed, let’s see, in the ‘heat of passion,’ I believe is the exact legal term he used.”
“And just how did he manage that?”
Here Ursula leaned forward and lowered her voice. “He convinced those sheep on the jury that Grant had another woman. As if my brother would have strayed, even from that lowlife, before his divorce was settled. She admitted she came to the house that night because she got the final papers and was trying to talk him out of it. If only I’d been home. Dean heard them arguing about the divorce. Poor Grant finally stuck to his guns about something and she…she…and poor Dean had to see it.”
Hannibal wondered why he was not inclined to comfort this woman. “Yes, and Dean told a court that he saw his mother with the knife.”
“Yes, that’s right. If he hadn’t that whore might have gone free.”
“So I gather,” Hannibal said. “But Dean now says he didn’t see his mother at all. He lied, Miss Voss, to please the grownups, he says.”
The drapes were parted, and the blinds threw prison stripes across Ursula’s form. Her mouth held firm but her eyes moved down and for a moment Hannibal let her stew in the silence. When she finally spoke she had left the past behind. “I’m a busy woman, Mister Jones. What did you come here for?”
“I gather you and Thompson are old friends,” Hannibal said with an edge in his voice. “You wouldn’t have called him otherwise. He thinks he’s got his killer, Miss Voss, but I think he’s wrong. I saw a man running from the victim’s house just before we found the body. But I need time to find him. All I want is for you to ask your good friend the police detective to back off Dean for a few days. Give me time to find the real killer.”
When she looked up at him he saw indecision on her face so he pressed harder. “You know he’ll accept anything as evidence to prove a shaky case. Give me a chance to find the truth.”
“I’ll call him.”
13
The Silver Spring Boys and Girls Club wasn't far from Ursula Voss' home, just off Forest Glen Road. The practice field behind it was a vast space of sparse grass bordered by closely planted oaks whose denuded branches swayed gently, sweeping the underside of the clouds above. Hannibal sometimes wondered why trees planted in a line often seemed to stop at an agreed upon height, forming a clean line at the top.
The man waiting for Hannibal near the goal post stood with his hands deep in the pockets of a black windbreaker. Hannibal didn't recognize the logo on the jacket, sort of an orange claw striking from under the word “Predators.” The man inside the jacket flashed a bright smile from the middle of a very dark, round face. Even at a distance, he seemed too pleasant to be a football coach.
“Thank you for meeting me here, Mr. Lee,” Hannibal said, offering a hand.
“No problem, I've got to be here tonight to run the practice anyway. And please call me George.” The man had a strong handshake that challenged Hannibal to match it. “Now you said you wanted to talk about one of my boys, Ingersoll. Is he in some kind of trouble?”
“I’m involved in a dispute with his wife,” Hannibal said. “She has asked me to advise her. But if I'm going to be fair I need to know a little more about Isaac.” Lee would probably think Hannibal was a lawyer, which was fine for now.
Lee nodded and started walking toward the sidelines. “He hit her didn't he?”
Hannibal followed, enjoying the quiet of the unused field. “I understand he has a problem with his temper. Is that your experience?”
Lee laughed, turning along the sideline and strolling slowly down field. “Yeah, he's a hothead. But he's a hell of a guy to have on the line. The Predators wouldn't do nearly as well without him. I just wish he wasn't such a sore loser.”
“I'm surprised he's even on a semi-pro team like the Predators,” Hannibal said. “I mean, if a guy's too violent for the Redskins, he must be downright dangerous.”
Lee stopped at the thirty-yard line, turning an eye toward Hannibal's face. “Is that what he told you?”
“That's what she told me.”
Lee shook his face at the ground. “Well that's probably what he told her. Too violent? Not sure if that’s even possible. Mister, Ingersoll was cut from the Redskins for the same reason guys usually get cut. He just wasn't good enough. The fact that he didn't get along with most of the guys, well, that was just an added incentive to show him the door.”
“So is this the usual next step? Drop down to a semi-pro team?”
Lee turned again, stepping farther away from the street, into the private peace of the football practice field. “Sometimes. If you can play at all, you can usually get a spot somewhere, like the Diamond League where we play.”
Hannibal looked to the side and imagined Isaac Ingersoll crashing through a line of defenders, racing down the field to crush a quarterback. It would certainly be where he felt most alive, most at home. “I guess a guy like him just needs to play.”
“Lot of the big guys do,” Lee agreed. “I just hope he comes up with his dues, or else I can’t even allow him to practice with us tonight.”
The grass must have been mown just that day, the sweet smell of freshly cut grass bringing a gentle smile to Hannibal’s face. “Dues? Is he getting fined for something?”
Lee spun at the fifty-yard line, one foot erasing the chalk line as he did so. “You don't know a damn thing about football, do you?” Hannibal snapped back, startled by Lee's sudden burst of energy. “You’re looking to get money out of him for the wife, is that it? You come down here thinking Ingersoll’s getting paid for playing.”
“Isn't he? I guess I just assumed…”
“What, you think this is like baseball? You fail in the majors so you go down to triple A ball?” Lee stepped in close to stare into Hannibal's lenses and suddenly, he looked exactly like what Hannibal expected a coach to look like, a mama grizzly bear protecting her cubs. “Those guys swinging a bat, they play for money. These guys are different.”
“They really don’t get paid? How do you recruit them?”
“Don’t have to, brother,” Lee said. “They find us. They play for the love of the game, something you couldn’t possibly understand. There's more than four hundred of these little teams around the country you know. Minor league teams in forty different leagues like the Diamond league. And not only don’t these guys get paid to play, they have to pay their dues to get on a team. Plus they buy the gear. Most of the time, they have to pay for their own transportation to and from games.”
“I feel like an idiot,” Hannibal said. “That’s why you have to practice at night.”
“Yeah. You got to have a job to be able to get the chance to come out h
ere and grunt, and sweat, and get run into by another bunch of guys who love this game.”
When his car was moving again, Hannibal pushed a CD into the player. After his football lesson, Hannibal needed noise. Only when he was alone did the serious rock and roll come out. He grew up on this music thanks to the American Forces Radio and Television Service but, for reasons too hard to think about, he stuck with R amp;B or jazz in public. But the truth was, he could think more clearly surrounded by Sammy Hagar’s power chords. He didn’t want to believe yesterday’s murder was in any way related to the one that cost Dean his parents, but if the acts were as similar as Dean thought, it seemed likely they were. It would help to know more about the older killing from a more objective source.
Once on the Beltway heading south and east, Hannibal set his cruise control at seventy and pressed a preset on his car’s hands-free phone. Within a minute he had Cindy’s voice filling the car with him.
“So do you get a consultant’s fee?” he asked her.
“I’ll take it out in trade, lover. What do you need?”
“How hard will it be to get the records of Francis Edwards’ trial?” he asked.
“Depends on what kind of detail you’re looking for.”
The long ribbon of asphalt stretched out before him, and it would have been easy for Hannibal to think he had all the time in the world. “Well, what I really need is a transcript of the court proceedings. I want to hear the other side of this case.”
On the other end of the phone he heard a familiar huff. He could see Cindy in his mind, jaw forward, top lip curled in, blowing a puff of air upward. “Right,” she said. “You don’t have the date of this event, do you? Or happen to know for sure where it took place? How about the prosecuting attorney’s name?”
Hannibal dodged a tractor-trailer and eased down into the right lane. His exit wasn’t that far off. “What I know, baby, is that Francis Edwards was convicted of manslaughter. That her lawyer raised the specter of another woman and must have convinced the jury it was a crime of passion. That little Dean Edwards at nine years old was forced to testify against his own mother in open court after he’d just lost his father. And that the murder victim Dean just saw yesterday looked very much the way his father did when Dean found him.”
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