Guilty as Sin

by Tami Hoag

  “You ruined our lives!” he screamed, thrusting an angry fist in Wright's direction.

  Grabko smashed his gavel down. He had risen to his feet and called for more deputies. The courtroom rang with shouts and shrieks and the scuffling sounds of physical struggle. More deputies rushed in. Three of them grabbed hold of Paul Kirkwood and herded him toward the nearest exit.

  He twisted around as they dragged him. “I want justice! I want justice!”

  The reporters rushed after him in a flock. The remaining deputies hustled Wright and Costello out a side door. Grabko shook his head, banged his gavel, and declared court adjourned for the morning. The room was empty in a matter of seconds, everyone running into the hall to catch the continuation of Paul's show. Everyone except Ellen.

  She sat at the table with one arm banded across her middle and the other hand raised as a prop for her chin. She stared up at the empty bench as if she were trying to will the blindfold off the figure of Lady Justice. Jay hung back, his eyes on Ellen. He should have been out in the hall. Paul Kirkwood's penchant for theatrics intrigued him. There was something slightly off about those performances, something that struck Jay as calculated, disingenuous. But he couldn't seem to make himself turn away and walk out.

  Instead, he opened the gate and let himself onto the business side of the bar. Because he wanted to hear Ellen's take on things, he told himself. That was all. Not because she looked small and forlorn, sitting there all alone. Not because it touched him in any way that she was taking the loss hard.

  “It's only bail,” he said.

  “Tell that to Paul Kirkwood,” Ellen murmured. “Drive out to Lakeside and break that news to Josh's mother. Or maybe you want to call Megan O'Malley in the hospital and tell her?

  “It's only bail.” She faked a nonchalant shrug as she turned in her chair to face him. “Why shouldn't Garrett Wright be free to walk the streets, free to communicate with his accomplice, who may have committed murder last night? Who is, as we speak, doing God-knows-what to Dustin Holloman.”

  He moved closer, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his rumpled slate-colored Dockers. He had shed his coat somewhere. A bright silk tie hung like a strip of modern art down the front of his worn denim shirt. The knot was jerked loose and the top button undone as if he just couldn't bear the symbolism of a noose around his neck and yet felt compelled to make a token show of formality.

  “You lost the round, not the game,” he said, settling a hip on the corner of the heavy oak table. His thigh brushed against the back of her hand.

  The contact had the quality of an electric shock. Ellen tried to cover the involuntary reaction by shifting positions, reaching up to brush at a stray hair that had come loose from her twist. “It's not a game.”

  “Of course it is. You've played it a thousand times. You know the rules. You know the strategies. You gave up some points. It's not the end of the world.”

  Ellen glared at him, anger burning through the haze of defeat. “A man gave up his life last night. How many points is that worth?” she asked bitterly, pushing to her feet. “What's that worth to you? Another chapter? A page? A paragraph?”

  “I didn't kill him and I can't bring him back. I can only try to put it in context. Isn't that what you want to do? Make sense of it, understand it?”

  “Oh, I understand it. Now let me put it in a context you can understand. It's a game, all right, Mr. Brooks. Dennis Enberg was a piece they didn't need anymore, and now he's dead and his replacement just drew the Get Out Of Jail card for his twisted bastard of a client, and I couldn't manage to stop any of that from happening!”

  The rage and the pain boiled up inside her, boiled over the rim of her control. She turned her back to him and pressed her hands over her face, furious with herself. She had thought she had control of her emotions if nothing else in all this madness. She had vowed to fight this battle, but somehow she hadn't seen the possibility for this early defeat. She thought of Costello's threat to get the arrest thrown out and felt sick at the possibility. If she could lose this battle, she could lose that one. That vulnerability was terrifying and raw.

  Jay watched her struggle to rein in her feelings. Her back was ramrod straight, her shoulders straining against the need to shake. Despite all the time she had spent working in the system, she had managed to hang on to a sense of right and a sense of honor. She fought hard and took her losses harder. Cynicism hadn't dulled the lance of justice for her as it had for so many. As it had for him. It seemed only to have made her more keenly aware of her place in the scheme of things.

  “You didn't think it could happen here, did you?” he murmured, stepping behind her.

  “It shouldn't be happening here,” she whispered. “Children should be safe. Dennis Enberg should be alive. Garrett Wright and whatever other madman is playing this game with him should be stopped forever.”

  “Is that why you left the city?” He was close enough that the scent of her perfume caught his nose and drew his head down. The nape of her neck was no more than a breath away—tempting, too tempting.

  He wanted her and knew better than to give in to that seductive need. She was part of the story. The story was what he had come here for—to bury himself in it, to lose himself in it, to run away from his own pain and dissect someone else's.

  The reminder brought a bitter taste of self-loathing. The anger made him cruel.

  “Is that why you left, Ellen? Because you didn't want to fight this kind of fight? Is that what you ran from?”

  She wheeled on him and he caught hold of her arms before she could slap him.

  “I didn't run from anything.”

  “You were on the short list of up-and-comers in Minneapolis,” he said, deliberately goading her. “Then suddenly you're riding roughshod over drunks and losers in Mayberry.”

  “I walked away. I wanted a saner life. I made a choice, and I certainly don't have to justify it to you.”

  “There's sure as hell nothing sane about what's going on here now,” he growled.

  Ellen didn't know if he meant the case or the heat building between them at that moment. He was too close, his hands too tight on her upper arms, his mouth just inches from hers.

  “Let go of me,” she ordered, jerking out of his grasp.

  The hall door swung open, and Henry Forster, a longtime reporter for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, stepped in. Through the perpetually smudged lenses of his thick bifocals, his gaze hit Ellen with full magnified force.

  “Ellen, are we going to get a comment from you?” he barked. “Or are we just supposed to draw our own conclusions?”

  “I'm coming right now,” she said.

  Not sparing Jay so much as a glance, she picked up her briefcase and walked out.

  He followed at a distance, waiting for her to capture the full attention of the reporters before he slipped into the hall. The wait also gave him a moment to clear his brain. Damn, but he had got his balls in a vise this time.

  This was what he got for sniffing around a live case. Ordinarily, he had sense enough to come in after the fact, after the strongest of the immediate emotions had faded away and the parties involved had gained perspective on the crime that had touched their lives. There was no perspective here. This case was as hot as a live wire . . . and just as dangerous.

  Scuttlebutt had the body of Dennis Enberg being hauled away for a look-see by a medical examiner. Ellen had as much as said she believed the lawyer had been murdered, even though the official rumor was suicide.

  Jay had heard the calls on the police scanner, had found his way to the Southtown Shopping Center and bided his time in the relative warmth of his vehicle until the reporters lost interest in the scene and split in search of quotable sources. A single uniformed cop had been left to guard duty in front of the building.

  Jay had wandered up, bummed a cigarette, stayed to chat as if he had nothing better to do with his time. The cop, young and unaccustomed to the sight of gruesome death, had eventually let t
he details of the scene come rolling out. His hands shook so violently, he could barely bring his cigarette to his lips.

  “Man, I mean, you see things like that in the movies, but this was real,” the kid mumbled. Far across the way, half a dozen cars were parked in front of Snyder's Drug. People came to buy cold tablets and headache remedies, ignorant of the fact that a hundred yards from them a man had had his brain splattered all over the wall of his office.

  “It's a tough sight to stomach,” Jay said. “Truth to tell, I've seen many a strong man toss his cookies right there and then. And there's no shame in it, if you ask me. Sight like that oughta make any decent person sick.”

  “Well . . . it did me,” the kid admitted. He looked at Jay out the corner of his eye. “I suppose you've seen a lot. I read Twist of Fate. That was grisly.”

  “True enough. Never ceases to amaze me the violence people will do to one another.”

  “Yeah . . .” He sucked his Winston down to the filter, the ash glowing red as he tossed the butt. The look in his eyes was faraway, deep inside, where people keep their darkest fears and seldom look at them. “I can't imagine sticking a shotgun in somebody's mouth and pulling the trigger.”

  Murder. As if this case hadn't been sinister enough to begin with.

  Jay now shot a sweeping glance across the crowd gathered for Ellen's impromptu press conference. The old warhorse with the beetle brows and bad comb-over who had walked in on them shouted down his colleagues.

  “Ms. North, what is your reaction to Garrett Wright's release pending payment of bond?”

  “It goes without saying, I'm extremely disappointed.” She was all cool control once again, as if those moments of discomposure in the courtroom had never happened. “However, Judge Grabko listened to both sides and made his decision, and we'll live with it. That's the way our system works.”

  Which was essentially saying it hadn't worked this time.

  “Will Dr. Wright return to his home in the Lakeside neighborhood—virtually yards away from the Kirkwood home?”

  “I don't know,” Ellen said. “I hope not, for the family's sake.”

  “What about rumors that Dennis Enberg's body was transported to the Hennepin County Medical Center for an autopsy?”

  “Mr. Enberg died a violent and unexpected death. The city and county agencies are obligated to investigate that death to determine beyond question whether or not it was self-inflicted.”

  “Was there a suicide note?”

  “No comment.”

  “With Garrett Wright in jail at the time, you can't possibly suspect involvement on his part in either Mr. Enberg's death or the kidnapping of Dustin Holloman, can you?”

  “I have no comment regarding ongoing investigations.”

  The stone wall had gone up. She had made her point about Wright's release; the rest would be for show. The tough lady prosecutor showing the world this small defeat didn't faze her. None of these reporters had seen her tears or heard the self-castigation in her voice.

  Jay had. And that mattered to him in a way that was patently unwise.

  He pulled his gaze off her and continued to scan the crowd. Courthouse personnel hung around the fringes of the media group, curious to see their allegedly ambitious assistant county attorney in action. Until the first kidnapping, press conferences had likely been a rarity here.

  A flash of rusty-red hair caught his eye. He moved slowly down the hall, skirting the crowd, like a hunter easing up on wary prey.

  Todd Childs had focused his attention on Ellen, his gaze flat and cold behind retro-look glasses. He stood half-hidden by a marble column, wearing a long olive-drab wool coat that looked as if it had been fending off moths in someone's attic for years. A student of Wright's at Harris, Childs had been mentioned in the news reports following the O'Malley incident on Saturday. One of the local TV stations had included a shot of him and a comment as to Dr. Wright's innocence in their follow-up story on Sunday.

  Jay eased up beside him, tipping his head conspiratorially. “She's a cool one, isn't she?” he murmured.

  “She's a bitch,” Childs said between clenched teeth. He jerked his gaze away from Ellen, looking at Jay as if he felt he had been tricked into responding. “You a reporter?”

  “Me? Naw. Just interested. How about you?”

  He scratched his scruffy goatee and sniffed. “Yeah . . . I'm interested. Dr. Wright is sort of a mentor of mine. The man is fucking brilliant.”

  “Yeah, but is he guilty?”

  Childs glared down at him, pale skin tightening over his bony face. Even though the light in this part of the hall was poor, his pupils were black pinpoints, suggesting he had indulged in some substance other than the dope he smoked, the smell of which had become as ingrained in his ratty coat as the scent of mothballs.

  “The man is fucking brilliant,” he said again, enunciating each word crisply. “The case against him is bullshit.” He cut a nasty glance toward Ellen. “She'll wish she'd never started this.”

  He backed away from the pillar and turned toward the steps at the far end of the hall. The sudden mix of voices talking all at once told Jay the press conference was over. He didn't look for Ellen but fell in step behind Todd Childs. Keeping his head down, he hustled down the first set of stairs, coming even with Childs on the second-floor landing.

  “So are you involved with the protest out front?” he asked as they made their way toward the ground floor.

  “Yeah.” Childs shot him a sideways look. “You ask a lot of questions. Who are you?”

  “James Butler,” he lied without hesitation. “I'm doing some independent consulting work with the county auditor's office. You might have guessed, I'm not from around here. I just sort of dropped in on all of this—like tuning into the middle of a movie, you know?”

  “Yeah, well, you know what they say, man,” Childs muttered as he flipped down his clip-on shades. “Truth is stranger than fiction.”

  He pushed through one of the heavy main doors and cut diagonally down the steps, his bushy hair bouncing like a foxtail down the center of his back. Jay watched from the door, his sixth sense stirring restlessly.

  “Hey!” a voice sounded beside him. “You're Jay Butler Brooks! Adam Slater, Grand Forks Herald. Could I ask you a couple of questions?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Jay mumbled resignedly. His eyes remained on Todd Childs, who approached the small crowd of student protestors now celebrating his mentor's release . . . and walked right past them as if they weren't there.

  CHAPTER 16

  The news of Garrett Wright's release on bond swept through Deer Lake and on to Campion like a blizzard wind. Telephones at the courthouse and law-enforcement center were jammed with irate calls from the faction of the population who believed Wright was guilty. In Campion the search for Dustin Holloman went on unrewarded, and the reporters lost interest in shooting still more footage of grim-faced volunteers trudging through the snow. Word that Anthony Costello would be giving a formal statement in front of the Park County courthouse about Wright's release sent them packing.

  The sidewalk in front of the courthouse took on the carnival atmosphere of a political campaign riding the tide of victory. The Harris College students who had been protesting Dr. Wright's incarceration took up new celebratory chants. The Sci-Fi Cowboys, freed by a teacher in-service day in the metropolitan school system, had set up a vendor's cart on the sidewalk and were selling T-shirts to raise money for Wright's defense fund. A boom box blasted out rap music with strong themes of injustice and oppression. Deer Lake natives watched the festivities with wary eyes from the front window of the Scandia House Cafe. In typical rural Minnesota fashion, all overt displays of emotion were considered suspicious.

  Ellen looked down on the goings-on from the window of the conference room. Momentum was swinging Wright's way. Just days ago she had held the control. Now her handhold was being pried away one finger at a time.

  “Do you think they have a permit to sell those T-shirts?”
Cameron asked.

  “They do,” Phoebe said, holding her glasses on her button nose as she looked down. “I checked. And we can't stop Mr. Costello from speaking on the steps of the courthouse, either.”

  “He would only use it against us if we tried,” Ellen muttered.

  She turned away from the window and faced her team. Mitch had seated himself at one end of the table. Steiger positioned himself at the opposite end, standing with one dirty boot planted on the seat of the chair. Wilhelm sat halfway between them, looking shell-shocked, glassy-eyed. The idiot grin he had worn to Deer Lake a week ago had slipped badly in the last few days. Between developments in the Kirkwood case, the Holloman kidnapping, and Denny Enberg's death, the hours had been hellish, the pressure immense, the leads nonexistent.

  “I'm familiar with Costello's tactics,” Ellen said. “He believes the best defense is a good offense. He'll do everything he can to make us look bad.”

  “You mean he'll throw as much shit as he can at the wall and hope some of it sticks,” the sheriff said bluntly.

  “I'm sure he wouldn't put it quite that way, but that's the gist of it. He plays big-league hardball.”

  “He's an out-of-town stiff,” Steiger snorted. “Just because he's from the Cities, we're all supposed to crap our pants at the sight of him. He's just another shyster lawyer.”

  Cameron rolled his eyes. Phoebe gave the sheriff a look that suggested he smelled as if he had already seen Costello and fulfilled his statement.

  “This shyster is like having a great white shark land in our lake, Sheriff,” Ellen said. “Do not underestimate him.”

  “He's got his own private investigator,” Mitch interjected. “Raymond York. The guy was sniffing around St. Elysius today. Father Tom called to complain.”

  Steiger scowled at him. “So?”

  “So this PI will be working full-time to find anything that might get Wright off the hook, while the rest of us are trying to work this case, find Dustin Holloman, figure out whether or not Denny Enberg killed himself, and deal with our everybody, garden-variety mopes.”