Then there was nothing more for them to do but take the long ride home, face a house that would never again seem so empty, and wait out the days and weeks and months for the justice system to do what it would. For me the case had taken on a kind of inevitable flow. Everything about it felt orchestrated, as if my part in it had been preordained. A woman named Joy Bender had killed herself in the Seattle jailhouse and had named me her chief beneficiary. The Bender case was an ugly one, full of posthumous rape-and-abuse charges. A letter had been left with Bender’s mother, who had released it to the press with a raging broadside at the system. In time the Bender letter had been discredited as the work of a sick and angry mind. The mother had written it herself, but the headlines were a cop’s worst nightmare for a month. Even now there was widespread public belief that the true facts had been covered up and the mother was being framed to clear the real villains, the jailers and the cops. Things like that do happen, often enough that people retain their disbelief when a case against the cops collapses like a house of cards. So the DA was primed and ready when I walked in and made a case that sounded halfway legit. When I mentioned in passing my real concern that Rigby might harm herself, he was all ears. When I told him she had already tried it once, this hardened man who had seen everything shivered and drew in his wagons. And the overworked and bludgeoned system in Seattle had bent a rule or two and sent New Mexico’s problem packing with the fastest reliable messenger—me.
I was still sitting at the table in the cafeteria when a shadow passed over my left shoulder, too close to be moving on by. I looked up and into the face of the young blond woman I had seen taking notes in the courtroom earlier.
“Mr. Janeway.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Trish Aandahl, Seattle Times .”
I gave her a long, wary look. “This must be a slow news day. I didn’t think major metropolitan dailies bothered with simple extradition hearings.”
“Nothing about this case is simple, and everything about it interests me. May I sit down?”
She did, without waiting for the invitation. The steno pad was still clutched tight in her left hand.
“Listen,” I said. “Before you draw that Bic out of the holster, I don’t want to be interviewed, I’ve got nothing to say.”
“May I just ask a couple of questions?”
“You can ask anything you want, but I’m not going to let you put me in print saying something dumb. The fact is, I don’t know anything about this case that could possibly be worth your time. And I learned a long time ago that when you don’t know anything, the last guy, or gal, you want to see is a reporter.”
“You’ve been burned.”
“Basted, baked, and broiled. There was a time when Blackened Janeway was the main lunch course at the Denver Press Club.”
She smiled, with just the right touch of regret. She was good, I thought, and that made her dangerous. She made you want to apologize for not being her sacrificial lamb.
“I’m not a hard-ass,” I said by way of apology. “I like the press. Most of the reporters I know are fine people, great drinking buddies. I even read newspapers once in a while. But I’ve lived long enough to know how your game works.”
“How does it work?”
“If you quote me accurately, your obligation ends right there, even if I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. My viewpoint gets run through your filter system and I wind up holding the bag.”
She flashed a bitter little smile and I took a second, deeper look at her. She was one of those not-quite-rare but uncommon women, a brown-eyed blonde, like the wonderful Irene in Galsworthy’s sadly neglected Forsyte Saga . Her hair was the color of wheat in September. Her face was pleasantly round without being cherubic: her mouth was full. She was in her thirties, about Rita’s age, not beautiful but striking, a face carved by a craftsman who had his own ideas of what beauty was.
Belatedly I recognized her name. “You wrote the book: the Grayson biography.”
“I wrote the book,” she confessed.
“I should be asking you the questions. You probably know more than I do.”
“That may be. That’s what I’m trying to find out.”
“I keep telling you, I don’t know anything. I’m just a friend of the court, delivering a prisoner back to the bar.”
“Right,” she said with a tweak of sarcastic skepticism. She opened her purse and dropped the steno pad inside it. “Off the record.”
“Everything I’ve got to say I said on the record in open court.”
“You didn’t say why you’re really here and what you’re doing.”
“It’s irrelevant. I’m irrelevant, that’s what you need to understand.”
“Who is Slater?”
“You’re not listening to me.”
“There’s someone else involved in this. Slater’s not just working for a Taos bonding company.”
I shrugged and looked at a crack in the ceiling.
“I made some calls after the hearing. You left deep footprints in Denver.”
“That’s what they said about King Kong. On him it was a compliment. As a gorilla he was hard to beat.”
I waited but she missed her cue.
“You were supposed to say, ‘That gives you a goal to shoot for.’ If we’re going to play Wits, the new Parker Brothers game, you’ve got to be sharp.”
She gave me a look of interested amusement.
“We’ll put it down to midafternoon sag,” I said.
“You are a handful, aren’t you? My sources in Denver didn’t exaggerate much.”
“So who are these people and what are they saying about me?”
“Who they are isn’t important. They told me what anybody could get with a few phone calls and a friend or two where it counts.”
“Read it back to me. Let’s see how good you are.”
“You were with DPD almost fifteen years. Exemplary record, actually outstanding until that caper a while back. You have a fine-tuned but romantic sense of justice. It should always work, the good guys should always win. Then the end would never have to justify the means, a cop could always work within the rules and evil would always take the big fall. How am I doing so far?”
“You must be on the right track, you’re starting to annoy me.”
“You asked for it. Shall I go on?”
“You mean there’s more?”
“You have an intense dislike of oppressive procedure. It galled you when the courts let creeps and thugs walk on technicalities. You nailed a guy one time on an end run that cops in Denver still talk about…probably illegal but they never stuck you with it. So the guy went up.”
“He was a serial rapist, for Christ’s sake. He got what he needed.”
“You’re getting annoyed all over again, aren’t you? They told me you would. That case still bothers you, it’s the one time you really stepped over the line and let the end justify the means. Your fellow cops remember it with a good deal of admiration, but it rankles you to this day, the way you had to get that guy.”
“I sleep just fine. My only regret is that I didn’t get the son of a bitch a year earlier, before he started using the knife.”
“You’re a guy out of time, Janeway. You were a good cop, but you’d‘ve been great fifty years ago, when there weren’t any rules.”
“There’s probably a lot I’d appreciate about life fifty years ago.”
“You don’t like telephones, television, or computers. I’ll bet Call Waiting drives you crazy.”
“People who load up their lives with crap like that have an inflated sense of their own importance. You might not believe this, but I’ve never missed an important phone call.”
“I do believe it. It’s all in the eye of the beholder.”
“If it’s that important, they always call back.” I looked at her hard. “You really are getting on my nerves.”