Mitch turned his back and took a step toward the door before he pirouetted and answered.
“Not now, Cozy.”
“What do you mean, not now? I have a right to anything you find. You know that.”
“It’s a little early in the game to start jabbering about disclosure, isn’t it, Cozy? Your client is a suspect; she hasn’t been charged. And don’t forget I’m doing you a huge courtesy here. Act grateful.”
“In my mind, it’s never too early to poke at a prosecutor. What did you find upstairs? I saw lots of dust up there, Mitch. Whose latents did you find?”
“We were being thorough. Me? I was just looking around, Cozy. That’s all. You want to go back up there and jerk off, go ahead. You know the rules, though.”
Maitlin was not going to be so easily deterred. “Difference between us is I don’t know what to look for upstairs. What did the police find that makes upstairs important? Don’t make this difficult for me, Mitch. There’s no margin in it. You know I’ll find out soon enough. Did you find my client’s fingerprints upstairs?”
Mitchell Crest wanted to talk about something else. “If it turns out there is anything to discuss about evidence that was recovered upstairs, ‘soon enough’ is fine with me. Alan, have you seen what you wanted to see?”
“I guess. May I have a few more minutes?”
He looked at his watch to let me know what an imposition my request was. “Yeah.”
I walked around looking at everything, not knowing what was important. I was cataloguing. The initial scan felt familiar; it was like the starting minutes of psychotherapy. Everything was important. Nothing at all was clear.
“What’s in there?” I asked, pointing at a closed door on the opposite side of the theater.
“Exercise equipment. A home gym, treadmill, bike, stair-stepper. Dr. Robilio liked his toys.”
“May I?”
“Go right ahead.”
I walked into the spacious exercise room and checked out the high-end stuff while I listened to Cozy continue his maneuvers with Mitchell Crest.
“I’ll file a motion to discover what you have. Is that what you want?”
“Go ahead, Cozy. I enjoy your motions. They almost always amuse me.”
I rejoined them and as soon as it seemed they had concluded their jabbering, which seemed listless and pro forma to me, I asked, “What’s that other door?”
“Laundry room. You want to go in there, too?”
“Should I?”
Mitchell looked at me as though I were crazy for asking. “That’s up to you. They use Tide. And liquid fabric softener. No dryer sheets.”
“I think I’ll pass, thanks.”
“Are we done, then?”
“Yes,” Cozy said. He seemed satisfied. About what, I didn’t know.
Mitchell locked up and left us in the driveway, where Cozy and I leaned against his BMW.
“I met with Merritt’s stepfather this morning, Cozy. He signed a release for me to talk with you. He told me that he’d been here to put pressure on Dr. Robilio a couple of days before he died.”
“Really?”
He didn’t seem surprised.
“Trent says the meeting left him quite angry. Talked about it at home with Brenda. Merritt may have heard it.”
“Did he threaten the doctor?”
“No. But he was belligerent. And he says he told his wife he’d kill Robilio if he thought it would do any good. He’s afraid maybe he gave Merritt the idea.”
“I already knew he’d been here. My investigator interviewed all the neighbors. One of them remembered his car from earlier in the week. I assume the police already know all this, too.”
“Is that what you were pressing Mitchell about?”
“Upstairs? I was fishing, trying to get Mitchell to admit they had Trent’s prints.”
“And they don’t?”
“They’re not saying. Something is confusing them or they would have taken Merritt into custody already. There’s too much evidence and this is too political a case for so much procrastination.”
I thought about the delay. “You know, they may not have file prints for John, Cozy. He’s new in the state. He may not even have bothered to get a Colorado driver’s license.”
“I hadn’t thought of that. Wonder if they’ve thought of it. We’ll keep it to ourselves for now. Where’s he from? Where’d he live before?”
“Kansas, I think. Wichita.”
“Okay.”
“Cozy, is there something else that’s important about the master bedroom? What was Mitchell doing up there? Any idea?”
“I don’t know. An inconsistency of some kind. Typically, the prosecution doesn’t hesitate to gloat about things that they consider to be crystal clear.”
“Are Merritt’s prints up there?”
“I’m guessing yes. But I don’t know.”
“John’s?”
“Don’t know that, either.”
“Do Merritt’s prints make burglary more likely as a motive?”
“If they are there, I suppose. More than that, it just makes it more difficult for the police to pin down a scenario. The handgun that killed him? The wife says he kept it upstairs in a little box in a drawer in his bedside table. Somebody went upstairs and retrieved the weapon. Him? Was he afraid of her? Did he think there was an intruder in the house? Her? If she was planning on killing him, she wouldn’t break in hoping to find a weapon, would she? But she’s a kid. Who knows what she was thinking? See, it’s confusing.”
He concluded, “They think she did it. They’re not sure how it came down. That’s why they’re hesitating.”
I stuffed my hands in my pockets.
Cozy said, “I like a client who knows when to keep her mouth shut. But this is over the top. I need this kid to talk to me, Alan. Do something.”
Twenty-six
I stopped at Abo’s for a slice of pizza after leaving Dead Ed’s house and barely had time to eat it and squeeze in a return phone call from Sam Purdy before my one o’clock patient.
“Hi, Sam, you made it back down from the ranch?”
“Got back around five this morning. Lucy just woke me up. The Summit County cops haven’t located Haldeman yet. And the prints on the pop cans in the barn belong to the two kids. You were right.”
Having my suspicions confirmed disappointed me. I was hoping Madison and Brad were simple runaways well on their way to someplace like Sacramento or Billings. “So how do you have it? How are they mixed up in this?”
“Great question. And how the hell did they know about Ed’s cabin and his damned RV? I don’t know any of it. Lucy’s presenting everything to Malloy and the brass at a meeting right now. Maybe they’ve developed something that will help make sense of it.”
“Someone should call the girl’s mom, Sam. She’s worried sick.”
“Yeah, don’t worry. I’ll get someone to call her. Lucy’s good at that.”
I was trying to finesse a way to let Sam know about John Trent’s visit to Ed Robilio a couple of days before his death. But I couldn’t find a detour around the confidentiality issues. Cozy figured that the cops already knew, and if Lucy knew, then Sam knew, so I decided to let it rest.
“I was just at the Robilio house with Cozy Maitlin. He talked Mitchell Crest into giving him a little tour of the crime scene. Cozy’s suspicious that there’s some evidence that your colleagues haven’t explained, some physical evidence or some fingerprints or something, and that’s why Merritt hasn’t been charged. You know anything?”
He was silent.
“Okay, let me rephrase my question. You know anything you can tell me? Anything I can use with Merritt to goose her to talk? I have to get her to start talking, Sam. She’s not helping Cozy at all. And I can’t judge how suicidal she might still be.”
When he spoke, his voice had slowed and softened. The change in tenor grabbed my attention. He asked, “You saw her the first day in the hospital, right, after her overdose?”
“Yes, I did. Not in the ER, but upstairs in the ICU. She wasn’t conscious, though.”