Guilty as Sin

by Tami Hoag

  He knew no such thing, of course. He had yet to speak directly to Garrett Wright. It was unlikely Wright had even heard about the kidnapping. For all Costello knew, Wright was a coldhearted son of a bitch who wouldn't have felt a second's pity if all the children in Campion were torn from their families and carted off to concentration camps. It didn't matter. As of this moment the press would look upon his client as a compassionate man with a deep, abiding respect for families, for the law, for America.

  “Who do you blame for botching the Kirkwood investigation?”

  He frowned in the general direction of the reporter who had shouted the question. “I think there's blame enough to go around, don't you?”

  Not having paid close attention to the case from the outset, he had spent six hours last night going over news clippings from both major dailies in Minneapolis and St. Paul. He had watched videos of newscasts and interviews, absorbing as much as he could about the principal players, though he wasn't ready yet to single any one out for public castigation.

  The female BCA agent was sleeping with the chief of police. A convicted pedophile had been working at the ice arena, then killed himself while in custody. A mummified cadaver had been found in the garage of a church deacon who had eluded capture for two days, then fell to his death before he could be apprehended. There were enough plot twists for a soap opera—which was exactly what had caught the attention of the networks and the tabloids. Immune to everyday crime, they sought the sensational, the kind of stuff writers were paid for in Hollywood. It was so much cheaper to get it from real life.

  “But though there has been a gross miscarriage of justice,” Costello went on, “I want it made clear that Dr. Wright himself bears no grudges. He still has trust in our justice system and faith that the truth will out and he will be exonerated—just as we all must have faith that the kidnapper of Dustin Holloman and Josh Kirkwood will be found and punished; that justice will be swift and sure.”

  On that glorious note, Costello stepped down from his impromptu podium and moved quickly through the crowd toward his waiting black Lincoln Town Car, his staff clearing the path for him. He had brought with him an associate, a legal assistant, and a personal assistant who was also his driver. Another of his associates had been sent ahead to Deer Lake for the purpose of leasing an office suite. It would be far inferior to his offices in the IDS tower in downtown Minneapolis, but it would serve the purpose. He believed it was important to establish a presence, like a show of muscle before a fight. It would also be easier to have a base of operations in the town rather than try to do everything long-distance. By the end of the day, the Deer Lake office would have a full complement of business machines and one of his secretaries would be hard at work.

  “Excellent presentation, Mr. Costello,” Dorman said. A fellow Purdue alumnus, Dorman was twenty-seven, sharp but not ambitious, more interested in being secure than in being famous; comfortable to learn at Costello's elbow, work like a dog, and take none of the credit—all of which made him ideal for his job.

  Costello chose his people carefully, with just such things in mind. He accepted no associates with Ivy League educations because he had not been able to afford one himself, and he did not want any snotty, silver-spoon rich kids who felt they were socially superior to him. Nor did he want his office projecting an image of elitism. He was himself the product of a middle-class, blue-collar upbringing, and proud of it.

  In choosing associates, he hired primarily family men, none of them taller than he was. Sensitive to society's current mania for political correctness, he had peppered his staff with an assortment of women and minorities. Levine, the legal assistant who sat in the front seat ahead of him, was an equal-opportunity triple score—a black, Jewish woman. He was careful to select female staff members who were neither unattractive nor beautiful.

  Everything in the offices of Anthony Costello—from plants to personnel—had been selected by Costello to showcase Costello. That was the way image was made, and in today's world image was everything. Image was perceived as success. Success bred greater success. Success opened the doors of opportunity that led to fame. Opportunity had to be seized and wrung out for all it was worth.

  Levine turned sideways in her seat and handed a neatly folded copy of the St. Paul Pioneer Press back to him. “Here's the article on the death of Judge Franken, Mr. Costello.”

  The story was situated directly below the continuation of the front-page piece concerning Garrett Wright's bond hearing, as if one event had led to the other. A photograph the size of a postage stamp portrayed Franken in his robes. He looked like an apple-head doll that had begun to rot. A second, much larger photo depicted the chaos in the courtroom where Franken had died—a group of people huddled over an indistinct form on the floor. The focus of the picture was on one familiar face that had turned to glare at the cameras. Jay Butler Brooks.

  Costello hummed a note to himself. A Cheshire-cat smile creased the corners of his mouth.

  “I've got a call in to the district assignments clerk,” Dorman said, “to find out what kind of delay we can expect.”

  “Don't be passive, Dorman,” Costello said. “We won't expect a delay. We'll demand there be none.”

  His associate's brows rose, a pair of beige hyphens barely discernible from his skin tone. “We could use the extra time to prepare.”

  “The prosecution would use the extra time to prepare,” Costello clarified. “Wright was arrested Saturday night. Prior to his arrest, he had not been a suspect. I can guarantee you the county attorney's office is scrambling to put their case together. Should we allow them extra time to do that, Mr. Dorman?”

  “No, sir.”

  “No, sir,” he echoed, his gaze drifting out the window, his memory drifting back in time. “Hit 'em hard, hit 'em fast,” he murmured. “We'll have this case dismissed before Ellen North can turn around.”

  CHAPTER 11

  But though there has been a gross miscarriage of justice, I want it made clear that Dr. Wright himself bears no grudges. He still has trust in our justice system, and faith that the truth will out and he will be exonerated—just as we all must have faith that the kidnapper of Dustin Holloman and Josh Kirkwood will be found and punished; that justice will be swift and sure.”

  Jay clicked off the nineteen-inch color television that sat on the carton it had come in. Costello vanished, but the smell of his game lingered like bad gas. Jay knew the game plan well enough. He had employed it himself in his brief life as a defense attorney. Costello would attack where and when he could, create opportunities if he had to. He would paint a glowing portrait of his client that would bear only a passing resemblance to the man and slam the opposition with every kind of accusation he could think of. It was a game of diversion that tied in quite neatly with the kidnappers', as it happened. Nice coincidence that they were all on the same team.

  He took a last deep drag off his cigarette and threw the butt into the fireplace that was gray with the dust of ashes long since swept away.

  His sudden pilgrimage to Deer Lake had left him without many options in the way of accommodations. There wasn't a hotel room to be had for miles; all of them were filled with reporters. Furnished apartments were the domain of Harris College students, who were just returning to classes after their winter break. Impatient and unconcerned with the cost, he had taken this house.

  He needed to work, to immerse himself in a world that had no connection with the life he had so abruptly left in Alabama. It didn't matter what it cost him in terms of cash. He would have paid anything to make the fresh memories fade into oblivion. Lobotomy and alcoholism, while they would certainly have dulled the pain, were not viable alternatives. Work was the best thing he could find. Why he had chosen this particular case in which to lose himself was a question he chose to ignore.

  “And you don't find that just the least bit twisted? Escaping into someone else's real-life tragedy?”

  It's just a story. He repeated to himself the pat an
swer he had given Ellen, knowing there was more. Still, he clung to the lie for his own sanity's sake.

  The case was timely and fascinating. Writing about it was his job, and he was damn good at it. And so he had come to Deer Lake . . .

  With such blind, desperate haste that he hadn't packed much more than a change of underwear.

  Dismissing the temptation to self-analyze, he turned his attention to his surroundings. Overpriced by Deer Lake standards, the house had been on the market long enough that the owners had gratefully accepted three months' exorbitant rent and turned over the keys and the burden of heating the place.

  As yet, he had been unsuccessful in warming it up. Even with the thermostat cranked into the seventies, the rooms seemed cold, as if furniture and family were required for the warmth to stay instead of sailing up through the roof to be swallowed greedily by the cold. He had set himself up entirely in the living room, because the huge stone fireplace at least suggested warmth. Unfortunately, the owners had seen fit to take all fireplace tools and accoutrements with them, including the grate. There wasn't so much as a stick of kindling or a kitchen match, let alone a neat stack of fake logs ready to glow with the flick of a switch.

  He stood and tried to stretch the kinks out of his back that had set in from sleeping in a sleeping bag on the floor. His gaze did a slow scan of the room, automatically comparing it to Ellen's cozy living room. Here there was only emptiness and impermanence. Instead of overstuffed armchairs, he had badly strung lawn chairs that had been left in the garage. Instead of a cherrywood coffee table, he had a pair of eight-foot fold-down rent-all tables with fake wood-grain tops. Instead of folk art and potted plants, he had leased office equipment—a laser printer, copier, fax-and-answering machine. The tables were strewn with file folders and news clippings. His laptop computer sat open and ready, its screen blank, waiting for him to fill it with the words that would bring this story to life for the hundreds of thousands of people who read his books.

  He turned away from it and went to the kitchen for a fresh cup of coffee—from the coffeemaker that sat beside the box it had come in. He had stocked the cupboards with paper plates and cups, the refrigerator with beer, the freezer with pizzas and frozen entrées. Since his divorce five years previous, he had left cuisine to restaurant chefs. Cooking a meal for himself only reminded him he had no one to share it with.

  Not that he missed Christine. He occasionally mourned the loss of the girl she had once been—pretty, sweet, undemanding. The wife who had left him was another matter. In retrospect they had been mismatched from the first. Christine had a deep-seated need for stability; he was impetuous and reckless. The bright, hot love that had sprung up between them had quickly cooled and soured to frustration. Frustration fostered resentment. Resentment bred pain. With pain came disillusionment.

  And hate. She must have hated me. She must still.

  The thoughts he had been trying to hold at bay for the last week crept in. They were never far from the surface when he was tired. He cursed his ex-wife for coming back into his life for those few days last week, however accidental their meeting might have been. He had long been over Christine, but he didn't know that he would ever get over what she had done to him without his consent or knowledge.

  In his mind's eye he saw the boy standing beside her with his thick shock of brown hair and sky-blue eyes.

  She must have hated me. She must still.

  Sipping at the coffee that was strong enough to take the finish off the kitchen cabinets, he wandered through the empty dining room and back to his base of operations.

  With four bedrooms, three baths, and a living room with a two-story cathedral ceiling, the house was certainly more than he needed, but not more than he was accustomed to. His home on the outskirts of Eudora was twice this size, a reproduction plantation-era mansion that made the Brookses' ancestral home look like a tacky bungalow. He had built it to impress and to inspire jealousy and to flaunt his success in the faces of the people who had always pegged him as his generation's Bad Brooks, destined to dereliction and drunkenness. He lived in a fraction of it, and the ostentation of the place meant nothing to him on a personal level. He would have been just as satisfied living in a two-bedroom apartment.

  He wasn't sure what that meant, considering he had never in his life felt satisfied. There had been a restlessness within him since boyhood and before. All his life his mother had taken great delight in complaining about what a restless baby he had been, so impatient to be born he had come two weeks early and hadn't bothered to wait for the doctor.

  “You hit the ground running, boy,” Uncle Hooter had often said.

  Unfortunately, in all his Johnnie Walker wisdom, Uncle Hooter had never given any indication of where or what he was supposed to be running to. Trouble had been the general consensus, and Jay had borne that out well enough. He had been a burden and a blight on the Brooks family name more times than he could count, and yet he always managed to come out smelling like a rose in the end, always twisting disaster into irony.

  He was the Brooks who had broken windows and minor laws and major traditions. The one who had forsaken Auburn—the Brooks-family alma mater since Christ was an undergraduate—for a baseball scholarship at Purdue. He was the one who had turned his nose up at the venerable old Brooks-family law practice, the one whose wife had left him. But he was also the Brooks who had made a fortune and a name for himself, the Brooks who was courted by New York and Hollywood and had his face either on the cover or the inside of every known magazine in America. He was the black sheep whose exploits the family had criticized with relish, whose fame they accepted grudgingly, whose money they took without qualm.

  There was a book in there somewhere, but he had no desire to write it. He preferred digging for skeletons in the closets of perfect strangers, trying to make some sense of the twists and snags in their lives. And so he had come to Deer Lake.

  . . . you're a mercenary profiteer no better than a vampire . . . a hack looking to steal the lives and pain of real people to compensate for your own lack of a real imagination.

  Ellen's words echoed sharply in his mind. He told himself they didn't matter, that what she thought couldn't matter to him because he couldn't allow himself to get involved with her. He was here for a purpose, and it wasn't having sex with Ellen North.

  He stood at the big windows that rose to a peak in the main wall of the living room and stared out at the harsh white landscape. Ryan's Bay, the realtor had called it, though it wasn't a bay at all but an area of sloughs out on the edge of nothing, west of the part of Deer Lake known to locals as Dinkytown. Whatever water the “bay” held lay secret beneath the dunes of snow, a frozen desert, bleak and uninviting. Blond weeds and cattail stalks rose through the drifts to flutter in the bitter wind.

  The nearest house was a quarter mile off to the north, hidden by a thick stand of pine trees. To the east he could see the last Deer Lake neighborhood that straggled out to the edge of the marsh and farm fields, small square houses with smoke curling up from their chimneys into the winter-white sky. The spires of St. Elysius Catholic Church rose above the rooftops, a pair of lances thrusting toward heaven. They seemed a long way from where he stood, though he reckoned it wasn't more than three quarters of a mile. There was a sense of isolation here that had little to do with distance.

  Josh Kirkwood's jacket had been found out here, tucked in the weeds just off a trail used for snowmobiling and cross-country skiing. An older woman named Ruth Cooper had gone out with her dog to let him run, even though the windchill factor that day had clocked in at fifty degrees below zero. The Labrador had dragged the jacket up from the weeds, and Ryan's Bay had become the focus of the search and the media.

  Jay could very clearly remember the news footage of Paul Kirkwood falling to his knees in the snow, his son's coat clutched in his hands while he sobbed. “Oh my God, Josh! Josh! Oh God! No!”

  He could still hear the anguish, could feel it run through him like a pike. F
or a fleeting second he put himself in Paul Kirkwood's place and imagined the kind of wild, hot panic that would tear through him if all he had left of his own son was a jacket and a madman's twisted message.

  The emotion hit him with physical force, punishing, crushing. Nine times sharper than the pain he had brought here with him. He pushed it away, cursing himself for a masochist. He didn't need to feel what these people felt, he only needed to capture it on paper.

  With that squarely at the forefront of his mind, he abandoned his coffee, grabbed his coat, and headed for the door.

  The accounting firm of Christianson and Kirkwood was housed in a new two-story square brick building that bore the grandiose name of The Omni Complex. According to the list of tenants in the foyer, the building also housed a real-estate agency, an insurance agency, and a pair of small law firms. Christianson and Kirkwood was located on the second floor.

  Jay walked up, found the oak door with the appropriate stenciling job, and let himself into the outer office, which looked like a thousand other outer offices he had been in—white walls hung with pseudo-southwestern artwork, the requisite potted palm, nondescript furnishings of oak and oatmeal-colored upholstery. A secretary with flame-red hair looked up questioningly from her computer terminal and gave a little jolt of recognition.

  “Is Mr. Kirkwood in?” Jay asked, flashing a smile. “Name's Jay Butler Brooks. I'd take a minute or two of his time if he's free.”

  The secretary sucked in a little gasp of breath, her blue eyes round as silver dollars in her freckled face. Apparently rendered speechless, she popped up from her chair and disappeared into Paul Kirkwood's office. Jay eyed the small sofa that had likely been picked more for the decor than comfort, and stayed on his feet. His own face stared up at him from the cover of an outdated People magazine on the oak coffee table. Crime Czar: Jay Butler Brooks Pens Arresting True Crime And Makes A Killing In The Process. People's penchant for puns never failed to make him cringe.