Guilty as Sin

by Tami Hoag

  He had never expected to be put on the hook in the first place. Deer Lake was not a place of intrigue. His clients were generally ordinary, their cases unremarkable. He lived a quiet, decent life, dull by many standards. There was his law practice, his hunting and fishing, his wife Vicki. She worked nights as an LPN at the rest home and was taking classes at Harris to become an elementary-school teacher. They talked about adopting a baby but had decided to wait until Vicki finished school.

  The Cuervo went down like liquid smoke. Edges were beginning to blur and soften as he looked around his office. The Manly Man Cave, Vicki called it. The place where he was allowed to hang his hunting trophies and keep his guns and play poker with his buddies once a month. The walls were knotty pine, the floor covered in flat, hard carpet the color of dirt. His inner sanctum. He allowed no clients back here. His secretary left the vacuum cleaner at the door every Friday. He used it once a month.

  The building that housed his modest practice sat on the edge of a strip-mall parking lot and had once been a laundromat and dry cleaner's. Now the other half was occupied by a dentist who gave him a deal for referring clients who had ruined their teeth in car accidents and barroom brawls. The kind of clients he handled best—uncomplicated.

  I made a mistake.

  “Let it go, Denny,” he croaked, staring across the room at the ten-point buck that hung above his gun rack. “You can't win 'em all.”

  That was what he had told Ellen North when she had stopped by trolling for information. “I wasn't aggressive enough. I let my client down. He fired me. It happens.”

  The case could have made him some money, made him a name, but it was gone now, and good riddance. He didn't need the pressure, didn't want the secrets.

  “You seem distracted, Denny,” Ellen said.

  “Yeah, well, it was a big case. I could have used the business it would have brought me. But what the hell. Who needs the headache?”

  “Your heart didn't seem to be in it.”

  “No? Yeah, well . . . Vicki didn't like the idea of my defending Wright.”

  “She thinks he's guilty?”

  “Trick question.”

  “Withdrawn,” she said with a nod.

  “Anyway, the crank calls were getting annoying.”

  “What calls?”

  He shrugged. “The usual ‘You scum lawyer' variety. Some people believe he's guilty. Now Costello can worry about it. I'm out.”

  She started to leave, turning back toward him at the door, her expression pensive. “You know I would never ask you to compromise your ethics, Denny. But I trust you to do what's right. If Garrett Wright is the monster we think he is, he has to be stopped. His accomplice has to be stopped. If you could do something to stop them, I know you would. You would do the right thing. Wouldn't you, Denny?”

  Do the right thing.

  I made a mistake.

  He tipped the Cuervo over his glass and drained the bottle.

  Josh sat up in his bed and looked at the glowing dial of the clock on his nightstand. Twelve A.M. His mom had left a night-light on for him even though he was much too grown-up to have one. He was old now in ways Mom would never understand, in ways he could never explain.

  He crawled out from under the covers and went to the window that looked out on the lake. In the moonlight it looked as if it could have been a white desert or the surface of a faraway planet. The ice-fishing huts clustered in an area down the shoreline could have been a village of alien life-forms.

  He left his room and went down the hall to check on his mother. The door to her room stood open. She was asleep in bed, though he knew from experience the slightest sound might wake her. He wouldn't make a sound. He could be like a ghost, could move all around, be anywhere and no one would see him or hear. The quiet was in his mind, and he could make it as big as he was and put it all around him like a giant bubble.

  He backed away from the door, went down the hall to the bathroom, where a window looked out on the backyard. He climbed up on the clothes hamper and parted the curtains. The snow was silver, the woods beyond like black lace with the here-and-gone moon shining between the bare branches of the winter-dead trees. There was a mystical, magical quality to the scene that called to him. The feeling frightened him a little, but pulled at him like a pair of big invisible hands. He wanted to be out there, alone, where no one would watch him as if they expected him to explode, and no one would ask him questions he wasn't supposed to answer.

  In the mudroom he pulled on his snow boots and put on, over the new purple Vikings sweat suit Natalie Bryant had bought him, the new winter jacket his mom had bought him. People had bought him a lot of presents, like it was Christmas or something. Only when his mom gave them to him, she seemed sad and anxious instead of happy.

  Josh knew he was the cause of those feelings. He wished he could fix her broken heart. He wished he could make the world right again, but he couldn't.

  What's done is done, but it isn't over.

  He didn't like to think about that, but it was in his head, put there by someone he didn't dare go against. The Taker. The Taker said he wasn't supposed to tell, or bad things would happen, and so he didn't talk, even though bad things seemed to be happening anyway. Josh stayed inside his mind, even though it was a lonely place. It was the safest place to be.

  As quiet as a mouse, he let himself outside.

  The call came at 2:02 A.M., jolting Ellen from a restless sleep. She sat bolt upright in bed, scattering the files and documents she had fallen asleep reading. The fat three-ring binder that was her bible for the Wright case tumbled to the floor with a thud. She stared at the phone, her mind rationalizing as it had Monday night. The call was probably work related. A cop in need of a warrant. There were other cases ongoing in Park County besides the Holloman kidnapping. Or maybe it was about the Holloman case. Maybe it was Karen Wright, calling to confess her husband's sins.

  Still, she couldn't bring herself to pick up the receiver. Harry raised his massive head from the mattress and made a disgruntled sound at having his sleep disturbed.

  “Ellen North,” she answered. Silence hung heavy on the end of the line. “Hello?”

  When the voice came, it was whisper soft, androgynous, a disembodied spirit that sent chills rushing over her skin like ice water.

  “‘The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.' ”

  The phone went dead, but the words floated and echoed and wrapped bony fingers around her throat. Ellen pulled the covers up high and sat shivering, wondering, waiting, while the night held its breath around her.

  Journal entry

  January 26, 1994

  They're running in circles, chasing their tails.

  We play the shell game with lightning-quick minds.

  Where is Dustin? Where is Evil?

  Who is evil?

  Who is not?

  CHAPTER 14

  Denny Enberg is dead.”

  “Wh-what?” Ellen had been literally on her way out the door. Her coat was half-buttoned. Her gloves dropped out of her hand.

  “. . . looks like suicide,” Mitch said. “. . . In his office . . . sometime last night . . .”

  The sentences came to her fragmented, as if the phone connection were bad.

  The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. . . .

  “Oh, my God,” she whispered, nausea rolling like a ball in her stomach, stirring her meager breakfast of toast and tea.

  Even after reporting her crank call and being assured the night commander would send a patrol car past her house, she had slept poorly. Dreams of evil and fear had chased her up from the depths of unconsciousness and trapped her in an exhausting limbo.

  “Hell of a way to start the day,” Mitch growled. “Denny was a decent guy for a lawyer.”

  Ellen tried to gulp a breath, dimly aware that she was hyperventilating. Clammy sweat slicked a film over her skin. “Preserve the scene,” she said desperately.

  “What?”

 
; “Preserve the scene. I'll be right there. I think he may have been murdered.”

  A steady stream of foot traffic flowed between the Donut Hut on the corner and Denny Enberg's office on the fringe of the Southtown Shopping Center. The press, swarming like flies, drifted back and forth, impatient for the news being denied them by closed doors and burly cops. Several recognized Ellen's car and rushed toward her as she turned into the parking lot. She pretended not to see them, letting them fend for life and limb as she roared past them and into the inner circle of green-and-white police vehicles. She flung her door open as she slammed the transmission into park and hurried toward the building as if she might still be able to prevent what had already happened.

  The outer office was crowded. Denny's wife Vicki and his secretary huddled together on the small sofa, holding each other and sobbing, their grief intertwining in a wrenching duet. The air was thick with cigarette smoke and the sour tang of sweat from overdressed bodies and overstressed nerves.

  Ellen grabbed hold of a dark-green parka sleeve, not bothering to focus on the face above it. “Where's Mitch?”

  “In the back. You don't want to go there.”

  “It's my job,” she snapped, walking away. But it was something else that sent her down the short hall toward Denny's private office. The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. . . .

  The smell hit her like a rolling wave a dozen feet from the open door. Violent death. A putrid miasma of blood, bladder and bowel content. Thick, choking, cloying, underscored by the sharp, acidic scent of vomit. Ellen tried to breathe through her mouth. Fighting the urge to gag, she stepped into the office and looked for Mitch.

  The room was hot and too crowded. Dead animals stared down from the paneled walls with unblinking glass eyes—a deer, a gigantic walleye with nasty teeth sporting the lure that had been his undoing in some northern lake, an assortment of game birds frozen in midflight for all eternity. A radio was playing country music while portable cop radios crackled with static and mumbled messages. The voices of the men present to investigate and gawk ran together in an indecipherable murmur.

  Marty Wilhelm's mouth was drawn into a knot, his pallor a sickly pearl-gray. A uniformed officer sat on the low black vinyl sofa with his head down between his knees and a puddle of puke between his boots. Ellen wheeled away from the sight, bile rising in her throat. Mitch caught sight of her.

  “Here,” he said, thrusting a small jar of Mentholatum at her. “Are you sure you want in on this, Ellen? He used a shotgun. It's pretty gruesome.”

  “I've seen it before,” she said gamely, smearing menthol beneath her nostrils.

  “Yeah, but it probably wasn't someone you saw at the courthouse every day.”

  “I'll be fine.”

  “You'll be on the floor,” he muttered. “You're as white as chalk.”

  “Who found him?”

  “His wife. She got home from work about seven-fifteen this morning. No sign of Denny, no sign that he'd ever come home last night. She tried to call him here and got no answer. It worried her, so she came on down.”

  “Chief Holt says you have reason to believe Enberg may have been murdered.” Wilhelm leaned into the conversation, close enough to let everyone know he was one of the spectators who had lost his breakfast at the sight. Ellen swallowed hard and scooped out another finger of Mentholatum.

  “I got a call last night,” she said, focusing on Mitch. “A voice I couldn't recognize.”

  “Male or female?”

  “I'm not sure. Male, I think.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He quoted Shakespeare. ‘The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.' ”

  It echoed inside her head, the disembodied voice, the eerie silkiness of the delivery.

  “What time was this?” Mitch asked.

  “A little after two. I called it in, but what could anyone do?” she said. “I thought it might be a threat directed at me. Your watch commander sent a patrol around. I never imagined—It never occurred to me—”

  “You couldn't possibly have known, Ellen,” Mitch reassured her. “You still can't know.”

  “It has all the earmarks of a suicide,” Wilhelm said. “There are no signs of forced entry, no signs of a struggle. The gun came from his own rack. He rigged the trigger with string.”

  “I saw him just last night,” Ellen said. “He was distracted, a little down, maybe, not suicidal.”

  “He had just lost a client in a high-profile case,” Wilhelm said.

  “But his heart was never in the case,” she insisted. “I think he was as relieved as he was disappointed. He told me he'd been getting crank calls.”

  “Threatening?” Wilhelm asked.

  “He described them as the ‘You scum lawyer' variety.”

  “People pissed off because he was defending Wright,” Mitch said. “So why would any of them kill him after he'd been booted off the case?”

  Wilhelm shook his head. “They wouldn't. What would be the point?”

  “You're right,” Ellen said, “but he could have misinterpreted. For all we know, he got the same call I got.”

  “I can't base an investigation on something that vague, Ms. North.”

  Mitch ignored the agent's play at power. “So you think what? That Wright canned him for doing a half-assed job and the accomplice whacked him to keep him from talking about things that might have been attorney-client related?”

  “An attorney can't reveal that kind of information,” Wilhelm argued. “It's unethical. He'd get his ass disbarred.”

  Mitch shot him an impatient look. “You've never heard of anonymous tips? Jesus, Wilhelm, what were you—hatched yesterday?”

  The BCA agent turned pink with temper. “Wright fired Enberg Tuesday. Why wait a full twenty-four hours to off him? It doesn't follow, and the evidence doesn't bear it out.”

  “Because it's a game to them,” Mitch growled. “Wright and his pal like to fuck with people's minds. Wright might have confessed anything to Enberg before he fired him, just for the pleasure of knowing the man would wear a hole in his conscience trying to decide what to do about it. Like pulling the wings off flies, the sick son of a bitch.”

  The idea shot ice through Ellen's veins. But she did her best to pull together the remnants of the tough shell she had developed working in the city, and shed there two years ago.

  “Let's get this over with,” she muttered.

  Mitch tipped his head in deference. “If you say so.”

  He steered her in the direction of Denny Enberg's desk. Be calm, be detached, she recited, calling up old skills that were rusty with disuse. That was the key, not to think of the body as a human being who had a wife sitting out in the reception area. It was just a body, evidence in a crime, not a man she had spoken with just last night in this very room.

  “You know I would never ask you to compromise your ethics, Denny. But I trust you to do what's right. If Garrett Wright is the monster we think he is, he has to be stopped. His accomplice has to be stopped. If you could do something to stop them, I know you would. You would do the right thing. Wouldn't you, Denny?”

  They would never know. Denny Enberg's conscience was gone, along with most of his head. His body was sprawled in his desk chair, the shotgun used to kill him resting between his spread legs, barrel up. Brain matter, bone fragments, and blood had exploded up and back from the body, sticking to the knotty-pine paneling and acoustic ceiling tile in a grisly spray.

  Stuart Oglethorpe, Park County coroner and director of the Oglethorpe Funeral Home, stared at what remained of Denny Enberg.

  “Well, he killed himself,” he announced with disgust.

  “Maybe.”

  Oglethorpe glared up at Mitch through his thick black horn-rimmed glasses. “What? It's plain and simple!”

  “Nothing is simple.”

  Wilhelm blew out a breath. “Look, Chief, he's sitting in his desk chair, there's no sign of a struggle. Do you think he just watched the k
iller walk in and obligingly opened his mouth for the gun barrel?”

  Mitch turned away from him, only half listening. “There's no suicide note,” he mumbled. He pulled a pencil out of the crowded cup beside the bloodstained blotter and tapped it against the empty bottle of Cuervo. “He'd been drinking,” he muttered. “We don't know how much.”

  “That bottle was half-full when I was here,” Ellen said.

  “What time was that?”

  “Seven, seven-thirty.”

  “And there's only one glass sitting here,” Mitch said. “That's a lot of tequila. The toxicologist can tell us how much. If he drank enough to pass out, that would explain the lack of a struggle.”

  “What about the string on the trigger?” Wilhelm countered. “The gun was rigged—”

  Mitch scowled at him. “For Christ's sake, Wilhelm, if you wanted a murder to look like a suicide, wouldn't you be smart enough to trick out the goddamn gun?” He held up a hand and rolled his eyes. “Don't answer that.” Turning to Oglethorpe, he said, “As soon as the scene has been processed, we'll get him bagged and you can transport him up to HCMC. The sooner they get tissue samples to the lab, the better.”

  “An autopsy?” The coroner groaned. Once a body was transported to the Hennepin County Medical Center, there was no guarantee of its coming back to the Oglethorpe Funeral Home for preparation for the world beyond, and therefore no guarantee of profit.

  “I'll call for the mobile lab.” Wilhelm's tone indicated that he considered it too much trouble.

  “Call for a new attitude while you're at it,” Mitch ordered. “If you think crimes should be committed in an orderly fashion, one at a fucking time to fit into your schedule, you're in the wrong job, Agent Wilhelm.”

  The exchange barely registered in Ellen's mind. Her attention was drawn by Denny Enberg's hand, frozen by rigor mortis on the arm of his chair. Broad across the palm, with short, blunt-tipped fingers. The plain gold band on his ring finger gleamed.

  Just an ordinary man with a decent law practice and a wife who worked nights. A nice, quiet, ordinary life that had been taken from him by force. If what she suspected was true, he had been used as a pawn, toyed with and destroyed as if he were nothing more than a playing piece in the game.