Guilty as Sin

by Tami Hoag

  There was no one he could turn to for support. His family in St. Paul had never been anything but a burden and an embarrassment to him. He wasn't one of them—blue-collar, beer-drinking dullards. Collectively, they had the intellectual depth of a mud puddle. He had no real friends, he was finding out. The people who had called to offer their sympathy at the start of this ordeal now looked at him with a subtle reserve in their eyes. He saw it, sensed the emotional barriers they were erecting.

  None of them had offered him the use of their car. None of them would have understood his sudden need for anonymity. A reporter had bartered with him for the use of this one—exclusive comments for occasional use of the dirty, nondescript sedan.

  Karen was the person he wanted to go to. He had tried to call her tonight just to hear her voice as she answered the phone, but the number had been changed and the new one was unlisted. He couldn't go to the house because Garrett was there. Karen wouldn't come to him because she was frightened.

  It wasn't that she didn't love him. He knew she did. He thought back to the last time they had made love, a week into the search for Josh. The day they found Josh's jacket out on Ryan's Bay. He had fought with Hannah that night. He had fought with Mitch Holt. Holt thought he should be more supportive of Hannah, that he shouldn't blame Hannah. Hannah, Hannah, Hannah. He had retaliated in his own way by going to Karen. Karen understood him. Karen loved him. Karen didn't blame him for anything.

  They seldom met at her house, because the risk was too great. But he had gone there that night. She had taken him into the guest bedroom and they had made love on clean peach sheets. She did all the work of arousing him, teasing him, caressing him, riding him until he grabbed her and rolled her beneath him and fucked her until he couldn't see. She took everything he gave her and clung to him afterward.

  “I wish you could stay.”

  “I can't.”

  “I know. But I wish you could.” She raised her head and gazed at him. “I wish I could give you all the love and support you need. I wish I could give you a son. . . . I'd have your baby, Paul. I think about it all the time. I think about it when I'm in your house, when I'm holding Lily. I pretend she's mine—ours. I think about it every time we're together, every time you climax inside me. I'd have your baby, Paul. I'd do anything for you.”

  Of course, she couldn't do for him the thing he needed most now. She couldn't be with him, couldn't support him, couldn't take his mind off his worries—because of Garrett. It was the fault of that North bitch that Garrett Wright was out on bail. He should have stayed in jail until the trial. After the trial he would be out of the way permanently.

  That part wouldn't change. It couldn't. It all had to work out for him, Paul thought. He deserved it.

  CHAPTER 25

  The courthouse was officially closed Saturdays, which meant that not only would they have the office to themselves, but the press would be locked out of the building. Thank heaven for small favors, Ellen thought. They had been rabid last night, descending first on the Lakeside neighborhood after the discovery of Dustin Holloman's stocking cap, and then on the hospital after Brooks's wild chase. She hadn't thought they would let her out of the hospital intact, tearing at her verbally, sending up a racket more suited for a soccer stadium than for a hospital waiting room. And waiting for her out in the cold of the parking lot like a junkyard dog was Adam Slater.

  “Willing to freeze my cojones for a comment,” he said with a grin, dancing from one battered Nike to the other.

  “I have no comment.” Ellen barely broke stride as she stepped around him.

  “Aw, come on, Ellen,” he whined. “Just a sound bite for the folks back in Grand Forks. Just a quick line about the deviant brilliance of evil.”

  “How about the twisted deviance of the media masquerading in the guise of public service?” she said. “I have a job to do, Mr. Slater, and I'm sick to death of having to trip over you people every time I turn around. I don't owe you a comment, and you may not call me Ellen.”

  He hadn't liked that. No comment and she had chased him away from her secretary. He would no doubt make her look like the Bitch Queen of the North in the Grand Forks Herald. Big deal. She had been called worse things and survived. The personal opinions of reporters were the least of her worries.

  She went into her office and spent an hour cleaning, wiping the fingerprint grime away and setting things back the way she wanted them, trying without success to erase the feeling of having been invaded.

  How the hell had he got in here without her knowing it?

  How could Dustin Holloman's stocking cap have ended up in Josh Kirkwood's backpack?

  Phoebe arrived, her natural ebullience apparently still weighted down by Friday's incidents. Dark circles ringed her eyes. Even her springy mane seemed to be drooping, hanging down her back like a limp rope, bound midway by a strip of black ribbon. She dropped her black leather backpack into her chair and made a beeline to the coffeemaker.

  Cameron showed last, bearing a container of chocolate-chip cookies in apology for being late.

  “I swung by the law-enforcement center,” he said, depositing his briefcase on the conference table and shrugging out of his ski jacket. “The stocking cap definitely belongs to Dustin Holloman. His parents identified it.”

  “I know. I've already spoken with Steiger.”

  Phoebe frowned down into her steaming mug of Irish-cream blend. “It's just too creepy that Josh had it.”

  “The cops are fuming,” Cameron said. “They're going to look like total stooges in the press. The bad guy waltzed right past them into the Kirkwood house and planted that thing. Unbelievable.”

  “We're not going to look so brilliant ourselves,” Ellen reminded him. “Unless he has a tunnel running beneath the Lakeside neighborhood, Garrett Wright can't be the one who planted it.”

  “The shell game continues.” He pulled three files out of his briefcase and laid them on the table. Pointing to each, he said, “Wright's house phone, office phone, cellular phone. Let's see if we can find a winner in one of these.”

  None of the records showed the strange, taunting calls that had been made to Hannah, to Mitch, to Ellen. There was no unusual recurring number. They found nothing, which, to Ellen's way of thinking, was something. None of the records showed a call to Tony Costello's office, which meant Karen Wright hadn't called him in. And if Karen Wright hadn't called him in, then that left one obvious choice.

  Ellen knew Costello was capable of ruthless selfishness. What he had done on the Fitzpatrick case had proved the point well enough. But this was a step beyond. A child was still missing. It sickened her to think he might have knowledge of the crime and the criminal and not do anything about it.

  Beyond appealing to him as a human being, she had no recourse. He had technically done nothing illegal. He would make the blanket of confidentiality stretch to cover his ass. Charges of aiding and abetting would be turned inside out and jumped through like circus hoops. If she brought the issue to the attention of the press, she had no doubt he would fight dirty to discredit her.

  “But what if someone else brought it up?” she mused aloud, tapping her pen against her lower lip. “What if we could get Wilhelm to turn the heat up on Costello?”

  Cameron snickered, a nasty gleam coming into his eyes at the idea of duping Wilhelm into something. “Yeah, ask Marty. He'll say anything—as long as he thinks it's his idea.”

  “All he has to do is make some noise, talk about trying to get a warrant for Costello's phone records. It's about time Costello had the press snapping at his heels instead of wrapped around his little finger.” She turned to Phoebe. “See if you can get hold of Agent Wilhelm. Ask him to stop in later.”

  Phoebe nodded and slipped out of the room, a silent wraith in coffeehouse black.

  Cameron arched a brow. “Is she in mourning or something?”

  “Death of a budding romance. One of the lesser vultures had her in his sights. I cut him off at the knees and sent
him crawling.”

  “Wow. What a mom you'd make, Ellen.”

  Ellen gave him a wry look. “Is that a proposal?”

  “Observation. You're lovely, but you frighten me.”

  She managed a chuckle at his teasing. “Thank you, Cameron. You're the little brother I never wanted.”

  “Hey, my sisters all say the same thing!”

  “Go figure.”

  He sobered then, looking at her with concern. “How are you doing after last night? Jeez, Ellen, you could have called me to go to the Kirkwoods'. After what happened here—”

  “I wasn't sleeping anyway,” she said. “Every time I closed my eyes, I saw that photograph of Josh.”

  “Maybe the lab wizards will be able to pick something up from it. Find something in the background that might give us a clue to where he was held.”

  The image was too clear in Ellen's mind. Josh in striped pajamas, his face as blank as the background. His skin color washed sickly white by the flash; a stark contrast to the darkness behind him. He appeared to be standing in a black void.

  “Maybe,” she murmured without hope.

  “So is Grabko going to find anything in those medical records?”

  Ellen shook her head, grateful for the change in subject. They had business to do. Better to focus on what they had to do rather than on what they couldn't change or had no control over.

  “Costello's blowing smoke,” she said, “hoping the press will yell fire.”

  “But he's planting doubt in Grabko's mind while he's at it.”

  “Grabko has to rule on the evidence. This ought to tip the scales in our favor.” She tapped the copy of the fax with the preliminary lab analysis. “Josh's blood was on that sheet. Josh's hair was on that sheet. Garrett Wright's hair was on that sheet. That's our first concrete piece of physical evidence that ties Wright to Josh.”

  “Makes you wonder what the hell Wright was thinking, wrapping that sheet around O'Malley that night.”

  “He was thinking he would escape. He was thinking he was invincible, that even if he gave us that evidence, it wouldn't make any difference because we wouldn't have him.”

  It was a taunt, the same as that photograph of Josh. Had that file been in her cabinet a day or a week? When had she last opened that particular drawer?

  She slid her reading glasses down her nose and peered at her colleague over the rims. “How's that brief coming? We will have Garrett Wright, won't we?”

  He shot her a cocky grin as he pulled a document from his open briefcase. “Anthony Costello should wish his high-priced associates could write a brief this good. He doesn't have a leg to stand on when it comes to arguing this arrest away on the basis of Fourth Amendment rights.”

  Ellen plucked the brief from his fingers and looked it over. She felt as much confidence as she could that Grabko would rule in their favor. Cameron's arguments were dead-on, but beyond that the case was too big to throw out the arrest on a dubious technicality.

  Costello had to know that as well. This was just another example of what Ellen called a “kitchen sink” defense, where the lawyer threw in everything he could find—including the proverbial kitchen sink—in the attempt to muddy the waters and cloud the issues. And to divert the energies of the prosecution. Cameron had spent hours on this brief, constructing an argument against what was essentially a bluff on Costello's part. He could have been using that precious time helping to strengthen the case against Wright.

  “Did you hear the toxicology reports came back on Josh's blood?” she asked. “Traces of Triazolam, aka Halcion.”

  “If we can put Wright at a pharmacy filling that prescription . . .”

  “We'll be too lucky for words,” Ellen finished.

  “Bet Todd Childs could get us some Halcion if we asked nice.”

  “If we could find him.”

  “Or someone who buys pharmaceutical goodies from him.”

  “We need more manpower. Our resources are spread too thin as it is without sending guys out hunting for Childs's buyers. We don't even know that he deals drugs, just that he indulges. Have you got anything from Wilhelm's guy regarding Wright's background?”

  Cameron rolled his eyes. “Yeah, a lot of lame excuses. They faxed me the same information two days in a row.”

  “Oh, great.”

  “Mitch put in a request to NCIC for cases with a similar MO perpetrated in any of the areas Wright has lived since 1979, but nothing has come back yet. He requested info on unsolved murders in the same geographical areas as well.”

  “Building a haystack to find our needle,” Ellen grumbled, thumbing through the thin file folder Cameron handed across to her.

  “And the thing is, of course, we don't have time for it. Even if NCIC gets back to us before the hearing, all we'd have is conjecture and supposition. There won't be any time to investigate. We won't have anything admissible.”

  “No, but we have to think beyond the hearing. Have you found anything on your own?”

  “It's all in there, such as it is. I started at Harris and worked backward. Before coming here Wright taught briefly at the University of Virginia; before that, Penn State—where Christopher Priest also taught during the same period.” He bobbed his eyebrows. “Neat coincidence, huh?”

  Nerves prickled along Ellen's spine. “I don't believe in coincidence. Where did you get that information?”

  He looked sheepish. “I read it in the Pioneer Press.”

  “God,” she groaned, “the press has better access to information on our suspect than we do.”

  “They had a head start. A lot of what they've written on Wright is coming out of old pieces they did on the Sci-Fi Cowboys a couple of years ago. I looked them all up at the library and made copies. They're in there, too.”

  Ellen flipped through the pages of typed notes to the clippings. One featured a photo of Christopher Priest and one of the Cowboys bent over a small robot that was supposed to scoop up balls and deposit them in a basket. Wright and three more boys stood in the background, their faces distorted by the poor quality of the copy.

  “Priest sent over his list of Sci-Fi Cowboys past and present,” she said. “Grudgingly, I might add.”

  “You think there might be something there?”

  “I don't know. I think he doesn't want the scrutiny. He may talk those kids up like they're National Honor Society material, but he knows darn well any one of them could have taken a knife to my car.” She stared at the article titled “Juvenile Hall Meets Hallowed Halls.” “Anyway, I called a couple of people I know in the Hennepin County system to see if they might be able to help us track down some of the former members to get their take on Wright. And I got my hands on rap sheets on the present members. I want to know who we're dealing with.”

  “Priest could make some big noise if he thinks we're stepping over right-to-privacy boundaries,” Cameron warned. “He's connected, you know. The Sci-Fi Cowboys is a popular tax-deductible contribution with some major political players.”

  “He's an inch away from being considered an accessory. I don't care if he's connected to the pope.”

  “He passed a polygraph,” Cameron reminded her.

  “Big deal. All that means is he's devoid of emotion when he has to be. It's not a stretch to imagine that. He could pass for an android most of the time.”

  She turned back to the initial typed report listing Wright's former teaching positions, tapping a finger under “Penn State.” “Wright and Priest were at Penn State during the same time period. It makes sense to request the NCIC reports on unsolved kidnappings and murders in that geographical area first.”

  “Done.”

  “Good.”

  “But if Wright's done this kind of thing in the past,” Cameron said, “he's done a bang-up job covering his tracks. I haven't found a hint of trouble in his background. He grew up in Mishawaka, Indiana. His parents split when he was eleven. Father remarried and moved to Muncie. Wright and his sister stayed with the mother,
who died of a brain embolism a few years ago.”

  “Sister?” Ellen perked up. “Where's the sister? Have you talked to her?”

  “I've got nothing on her. She's probably married somewhere. Wright himself would be the only one to ask, and I can't see him giving us that information out of the goodness of his heart. I'd say the sister's a dead end, though she may come out of the woodwork now to star on The Ricki Lake Show—the siblings-of-evil-serial-criminals segment.

  “Slight change of topic,” Cameron said, waving a photocopy of Wright's official written alibi. “Wright states he came home for a late lunch Saturday, the twenty-second, then returned to Harris around two-thirty. They have a witness who claims to have seen Wright's Saab headed south on Lakeshore at that time.

  “Now, we, of course, don't believe Wright was driving the car, because that was about the time O'Malley was attacked. But we also know Christopher Priest was in St. Peter. So who do we think was driving the Saab? Childs? The wife?”

  Ellen pulled her glasses off, pushed her chair back, and stood slowly, grimacing at the tension that had settled in her back.

  “We know Priest stayed in St. Peter Saturday night,” she said. “Does he have anyone who can verify he was there Saturday afternoon?”

  Cameron checked his notes. “He had lunch with a professor friend from Gustavus Adolphus. Time unspecified. I'll double-check.”

  “God, what a Gordian knot,” she murmured, turning toward the window. The park across the street was empty. Downtown looked windswept and deserted. Yellow ribbons that had been tied to every light pole as a symbol of hope for the return of Josh Kirkwood now fluttered for Dustin Holloman. The posters and pleas that had been plastered to the windows of stores and restaurants had been replaced with a fresh set.

  “We have only to put doubt in Grabko's mind that it was Wright behind the wheel.” Cameron walked around the end of the table and settled a hip on the credenza. “All we have to do is get him bound over for trial. It's up to the cops to catch the accomplice.”

  “I know. I just can't shake the feeling that Costello's got a big fat rabbit to pull out of his hat.”