Guilty as Sin

by Tami Hoag

  “Which would you say applies to our kidnapper?”

  A slight smile touched the corners of his mouth. “I wouldn't say. Human behavior is Dr. Wright's specialty, not mine.”

  “But you were working on a project together, right?”

  “We are working on a joint project, dealing with, as it happens, learning and perception.”

  “You've known each other a long time, you and Dr. Wright?”

  “We both taught at Penn State.”

  “Yeah, but y'all knew each other before that, didn't you?”

  “I don't know what you're talking about,” Priest said guardedly.

  Jay feigned innocence. “Well, gee, you know, I was just doing a little digging. Background work and all. Talking to an old colleague of yours from Penn State who mentioned you all grew up in the same town.”

  “I grew up in Chicago.”

  “Huh, well, you know, I'd read that,” he said, scratching his head. “Strange thing for a friend to be wrong about, wouldn't you say?”

  “Nevertheless,” Priest said impatiently, “I might have visited Indiana as a boy, but I didn't grow up there.”

  “So you didn't know Dr. Wright?”

  “We became friends at Penn State.”

  “Good friends. The kind of friends who share things, stick up for each other, help each other out.”

  “Is there a point to this line of questioning, Mr. Brooks?”

  Jay gave a shrug and a smile. “I'm just trolling, Professor. Looking for background. I never know what I might find or where it might lead me. For instance, you might just up and say you'd do anything for Garrett Wright. Who knows where an answer like that might lead?”

  “To a dead end.” Priest rose. “I'm sorry to cut this short, but I have a class to prepare for, Mr. Brooks.”

  Jay checked his watch. According to the helpful young lady in the main office, Christopher Priest didn't have another class until evening.

  “I guess I'll just have to check that background the hard way,” he said, pushing himself to his feet. “Thank you for your time, Professor.”

  He turned back at the door, catching Priest staring at him with that blank face. “That student who was in the car accident the night Josh was abducted—was he working on that joint project with you and Dr. Wright?”

  “Yes, he was.”

  “Hmm. I wonder what his perception of that coincidence would be.”

  “I'm afraid we'll never know,” Priest said. “I received word this morning he passed away.”

  Jay sensed the news hit him harder than it had the professor. Death—delivered off the cuff, as an after-thought, with no more remorse than was socially required.

  He stepped into the hall, his head buzzing. The car accident had set everything in motion; now the student who had been running an errand for Priest was dead. Todd Childs was a student of Wright's and Priest's. Olie Swain, the prime suspect until his jailhouse suicide, had audited classes of both men. Megan O'Malley had suspected Priest. She had been attacked in the yard of Priest's secluded country home.

  Christopher Priest seemed as much a part of the story as Garrett Wright, and yet no one had anything on him. He was as clean as Teflon, visible in his efforts, first, to help in the effort to find Josh, and now, in his support of his colleague.

  “We are working on a joint project. . . .”

  He had passed a polygraph.

  “. . . it's all in our perception, isn't it?”

  Priest and Wright went back a long way. It wouldn't have been a stretch to imagine them as partners in more than a school project. A pair of sharp, calculating minds. Wright, handsome and charming; Priest, socially awkward with a crush on Hannah Garrison. Motive had been an elusive creature in this crime from the first. There had been no ransom demand. No one seemed to have it in for Hannah or Paul. The taunting, the planted evidence, suggested it was all about superiority, a game of wits. But taking Josh Kirkwood had also given Christopher Priest a chance to be close to Hannah, a chance to offer his help, to call attention to himself.

  And damned if it wouldn't sell books, he thought. The twisted tale of the psychopathic professors. Brilliant minds fatally flawed.

  But had Priest had opportunity to take Dustin Holloman, to plant those clues? It seemed unlikely he would take that kind of chance, knowing the police had their eyes on him. And then there was Todd Childs to consider. . . .

  He turned down another hall. He could take a look at Wright's office as long as he was here, see if it offered any insights. The cops would already have taken the place apart hunting for evidence, but it was still important for him to have a sense of the places the people he wrote about inhabited. To be able to describe Garrett Wright's perfectly normal office would add to the unsettling idea that anyone could be warped beneath their ordinary facades. That kind of chill brought readers back again and again. Like Romans to the Colosseum.

  The door to Wright's office stood slightly ajar. Jay brought himself up short at the sight. His escapade at the Pack Rat was still fresh in his mind—in the form of a dull headache that had nagged him since the accident. He moved cautiously along the wall, determined not to be taken by surprise this time.

  Sidling up to the door, he gently eased it open another fraction of an inch, expecting to see Todd Childs.

  The room was awash in paper. Books had been torn from their shelves and left on the floor. The place looked as if it had been tossed by goons, and in the middle of the mess stood Karen Wright. She looked utterly lost, fragile, overwhelmed by the state of the place. And he would take advantage of that, bastard that he was.

  Not giving himself time to turn noble, Jay rapped his knuckles twice on the door frame and let himself into the office.

  “Mrs. Wright?”

  She jerked around and looked up at him. “I—I can't find anything,” she said meekly.

  “Well, ma'am, it is a hell of a mess,” he said. “What is it you're looking for?”

  “Books. Garrett asked me to pick up some of his books. He'll be angry about this. He likes his office neat and orderly.”

  “Do you have any idea who did this?”

  “The police. They said they were looking for evidence.”

  Looking for evidence and taking a little revenge, Jay reasoned. Garrett Wright stood accused of attacking and savagely beating one of their own. Cops didn't take a thing like that lightly.

  “You should have seen our house when they finished,” she murmured as she began to set her husband's desk to rights. “They even took up floorboards. All for nothing. I told them they wouldn't find anything, but they wouldn't listen to me.”

  “They're stubborn that way.”

  She picked up a coffee mug that had been knocked to the floor and held it to her chest like a treasured doll. “You're that writer, aren't you? Garrett told me you're going to do a book about the case. He shouldn't be going to court. It's all a big mistake.”

  “Is it?” Jay asked quietly, watching her carefully.

  “He wouldn't take Josh.”

  Her gaze was like a butterfly, lighting and flying away from point to point, all around the room. She might have been lying, or she might have been afraid. Or she might have been as cracked as Grandma's china, as Teresa McGuire, the victim-witness coordinator, had suggested to him over coffee and cinnamon rolls at the Scandia House.

  “Garrett wouldn't have,” Karen said, shaking her head. “No. He wouldn't have. . . . He wouldn't do that to me.”

  “Wouldn't do what?” he asked, trying to keep her attention focused on him.

  “He doesn't like children,” she mumbled. “He didn't like being a child.”

  “Did you know him as a child?”

  A thin smile trembled across her mouth, and she wandered off toward one of the gutted bookcases.

  Jay moved with her to keep her face in view. “I heard you helped out at the Kirkwoods' while Josh was missing. You helped take care of the baby.”

  Karen might have been Wright's
spy—willing or unwitting—filling him in firsthand about the havoc he was wreaking on the lives of Hannah and Paul.

  “Lily,” Karen said. This time the smile was fuller, richer. “She's so precious. I'd give anything for a little sweetheart like her.”

  “You don't have any children of your own?”

  The smile fell. “Garrett and I can't have children.”

  “I'm sorry,” he said automatically. “That was good of you to help the Kirkwoods. Was that your idea?”

  “Oh, I didn't mind at all. Hannah and Paul are friends.”

  She used the present tense as if it were still true, as if she had no grasp of the magnitude of the charges against her husband. As if by saying it was all a mistake, everyone would accept her word and they would all continue their lives as if nothing had happened.

  She set the coffee mug aside, picked several books up off the floor, and slid them into place in the bookcase.

  “Garrett doesn't like messes,” she said with an odd light of amusement in her eyes.

  “Well, he seems to have got himself smack in the middle of a big one.”

  Karen Wright shook her head. “Oh, no,” she said. “It's all just a big mistake.”

  CHAPTER 29

  Barred from the room!” Mitch exploded. “Bullshit!”

  Cameron winced. Phoebe cowered. Ellen looked him in the eye.

  “Were you present in the room when she filled out her statement?”

  He raked a hand back through his hair as if trying to scratch loose a memory. “Not right away. Stovich was bending my ear for a couple of minutes. When I did step into the room, no one said a goddamn thing to me. Everything was fine. If someone had tried to stop Dennis from going in, he would have squealed like a stuck pig.”

  “That's what I said,” Ellen complained. “And Grabko should know it, too. Costello has him dazzled. I've never seen so much preening and posturing in my life. While you were at the autopsy, Grabko was calling your officers in this afternoon to get their take on it, but my gut tells me we've already lost the round.”

  “Fuck me,” Mitch grumbled. “After all the trouble we went to, putting that lineup together. Jesus Christ.” He pulled in a deep breath and huffed it out. “How bad does this hurt us?”

  Ellen considered for a moment, turning her pencil over and over in her hands. “For a hearing in front of a judge, not a lot. But I wanted Ruth Cooper on the stand in front of a jury,” she admitted. “Costello would have taken apart the lineup ID because Wright was too bundled up for a dead-on no-doubt that's him. But her testimony combined with the voice ID would have made an impact.”

  “Can you salvage anything?”

  “She can testify that she saw a man on Ryan's Bay that morning, that he came to her house, that he spoke to her. Then Costello is going to get up on cross and ask her if that man is in the courtroom, if she can point him out to us, and she's going to have to say no.”

  “Shit.”

  They sat in silence for a moment, mourning the loss of their witness.

  “So,” Ellen said, regrouping. “What's the word from the ME?”

  “Preliminary results of the autopsy show nothing to indicate murder,” Mitch said. “Unless something strange turns up in the lab, he's going to sign it off as suicide.”

  In her heart Ellen knew Dennis Enberg had been murdered. The shadowed voice that had haunted her since that night whispered in the back of her mind. “The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.”

  “He had a blood alcohol level of .30, so he was good and drunk.”

  “Too drunk to rig up the gun?” she asked.

  “There are too many factors we don't know. He could have tricked out the gun when he was at .10 then drunk some more to get up his nerve. Or he could have been passed out and been fed that gun by a killer. The killer could have bashed his head in and then pulled the trigger to make it look like suicide.”

  “Any opinions from the BCA?” Cameron asked.

  “I haven't heard from them directly. Wilhelm and Steiger are off chasing a lead on the Holloman kidnapping. The mother got a phone call, allegedly from the boy.”

  A chill crawled down Ellen's spine. “Just like what happened with Josh.”

  “Apparently so. They traced the call to Rochester. They're down there now checking it out. I don't expect them back tonight.”

  The inconvenience was too timely. Ellen had asked the three principal law-enforcement officers to meet to go over everything they had one last time before the hearing. She wanted to have the clearest possible picture as to the status of the case, the most up-to-the-minute information from the BCA on the analysis of the evidence. With Wilhelm gone she would have to track down the information by phone. A time-consuming process, and the clock was ticking. Four-forty.

  Not for the first time, she felt as if their nemesis had a bird's-eye view of everything going on on their side of the case. He had been three steps ahead of them all the way, playing with them like a cat with a mouse.

  “We can't lose,” Wright had told Megan. “You can't de-feat us. We're very good at this game. Brilliant and invincible.”

  What if they were?

  “The report on the fingerprints in Enberg's office is about what you'd expect,” Mitch went on. “The place was a mess. There were prints everywhere. God only knows the last time he cleaned the place.”

  “Prints on the gun?”

  “Denny's only.”

  “What about time of death?” Cameron asked.

  “The ME put it around one A.M., give or take an hour.”

  “My mystery call came at two,” Ellen murmured.

  “And the help at the Donut Hut put Paul Kirkwood at Enberg's office around nine-thirty,” Cameron said. “That rules him out.”

  “Unless he came back later,” Ellen offered.

  Mitch shook his head. “I don't figure Paul for this. What's his motive? Enberg was no longer representing Wright, and he was doing a half-assed job before he got canned. Why should Paul off him?”

  “Why should Paul go to see him?” Ellen asked.

  “It makes sense if Paul was Wright's accomplice,” Cameron suggested.

  “We've had this conversation before,” Mitch said. “It's too bizarre for words.”

  “Well, Costello would buy half of it.” Ellen tossed her pencil down. “He's already tipped his hand. He's going to do his best to divert attention to Paul. Grabko ruled against him on the medical records, but that isn't stopping him from making his case to the press.”

  “Asshole lawyers,” Mitch muttered. He caught himself too late and gave Ellen a look. “Present company excluded.”

  She shrugged it off. “What about the Sci-Fi Cowboys? Has anyone confirmed their whereabouts on the night Dennis died?”

  “All present and accounted for, provided you can believe the people who gave them alibis. They were in Deer Lake as a group on Tuesday to meet with Priest and returned to the Cities that evening. They didn't come back until Thursday afternoon.”

  “Any holes in their stories for Saturday night?” Cameron asked.

  Mitch shook his head. “Not yet. I'd bet my pension Tyrell Mann torched that Cadillac, but I don't have a witness and I don't have any evidence. In other words, at the moment we don't have shit. It's as simple as that.”

  Ellen pulled her glasses off and rubbed her hands over her face. “Nothing is simple where this case is concerned.”

  “That's old news, counselor,” Mitch said. “If anything new comes in, I'll call. I'll be at home if you need me. Jessie's making dinner for Megan, and I get to help.” A spark of happiness lit his bloodshot eyes. “I'd better stop for antacid on the way. Kindergartners aren't known for their culinary talents.”

  Ellen followed him to the conference-room door. In the outer office Quentin was regaling someone with his harrowing tale of being accosted outside family court.

  “. . . and just as security arrived,” he said, gesturing like a maestro, “the guy steps back and says, �
�Hey, man, you're not who I thought. Sorry!' ”

  Ellen pulled her attention back to Mitch. “How's Megan doing?”

  “Chomping at the bit to testify. She doesn't like being on the sidelines, you know. She's a cop right down to her toenails.” A shadow of doubt crossed his face as he weighed the wisdom of telling her something. Then he set his jaw in a stubborn line and plunged in. “I dumped Wright's background stuff on her to sort through.”

  “Mitch—”

  “I don't want to hear it, Ellen. We're just too shorthanded with everything that's been going on. And she's too damn sharp to waste,” he argued. “I'll keep the paper trail clean.”

  His expression softened. “She needs it, Ellen. She needs to know she can still do the job.”

  “Fine,” Ellen surrendered, too tired to fight, and too concerned for Megan's well-being. It wasn't as if Megan were being given access to physical evidence. The information she would be looking over was cut-and-dried, facts that were years in the past. Anything she might find had already become a part of history and couldn't be tampered with. God knew they needed all the help they could get.

  “Quentin's still reliving his narrow brush with excitement,” she announced back in the conference room.

  “Polishing up the performance for his paramour,” Cameron suggested with a smirk. “By the time he tells Jan, he'll have it sounding like a fight scene from Die Hard.”

  “Our comic relief,” Ellen said, settling back into her chair.

  Phoebe fluffed herself up like a little quail, tilting her chin to a proud angle. “Well, I think it was really gallant and original of Adam, the way he helped you.”

  Cameron pulled a face of mock horror. “Adam?”

  Ellen frowned at her secretary. “There was nothing noble about it. It was a business deal. And he enjoyed himself. He got to be annoying and got rewarded for it. And what's with the first-name basis?”

  “Nothing.” Phoebe's gaze landed everywhere but Ellen's face. “That's his name, that's all. What am I supposed to call him?”

  “A distant memory,” Ellen suggested sharply. “We've talked about this, Phoebe. He's a reporter. Being cute doesn't cancel that out.”