“Hang together?”
“Yes. In a manner of speaking.”
“And who were the ‘gentlemen’ who made this agreement?”
“Me, I guess,” Sharon admitted. “Me and the PD for Ronnie Fuller, the other girl. But it was at Helen Manning’s behest. She wanted things to be fair.”
Sharon slumped on the floor, remembering Helen’s bizarre insistence that the legal proceedings must not escalate into a welter of finger-pointing and blame. I don’t care who did what, who thought of what, Helen kept saying. The important thing is that they be treated equally. It’s only fair.
“Sharon?” Rosario actually extended her high heel and prodded Sharon’s midsection with the toe.
“What?”
“My drink?”
The doorbell rang while Sharon was at the bar. She all but ran to it, eager to introduce Rosario to “their” client. But as always, Sharon needed a moment to reconcile the wide-eyed little girl in her memory with the hulking almost-woman with the impenetrable ice-blue eyes.
She hugged her anyway. “Alice, we’ve got something wonderful to tell you. Rosario Bustamante is going to be your lawyer, pro bono, and I’m to help her. The Baltimore County Police won’t be able to harass you now. They won’t dare. You’ve got the best criminal lawyer in the area working for you for free. For free!”
Helen clapped her hands in delight. Alice looked to Helen, as if she couldn’t be sure what to think until Helen showed her the way. And in that moment, in that lumpy moon of a face, Sharon saw the child she remembered, the bewildered little girl who simply could not make sense of what had happened to her life.
Monday, July 6
28.
Midnight had barely come and gone when a fourteen-year-old boy in the county due west of Baltimore crept from his bed, took his father’s gun from an unlocked drawer in the kitchen, and used it to kill his parents and his older sister. He then lifted the keys to his sister’s Jeep Cherokee from the hook next to the kitchen door and managed to drive perhaps thirty miles before he was pulled over on I-70. Thin and small for his age, with large, owlish glasses that gave him a pronounced resemblance to a young actor best known for a series of fantasy films, the boy was still wearing his pajamas. Once the state police made it clear that they did not believe his story about his intrepid escape from a trio of crazed killers who had executed his family-a story taken, more or less, from a cop show he had watched Saturday night-the boy was asked why he had done it.
“I’m not sure,” he said with a small sigh. “I didn’t really have a plan per se.”
“Per se,” Lenhardt repeated, after relaying this privileged piece of gossip to Nancy and Infante, who did not look much refreshed despite having devoted their last sixteen hours to attempted sleep. “Per se. ‘I didn’t really have a plan per se.’ I guess that explains the pajamas. My friend in the state police can’t get over it. He shot Mom and Dad while they slept, but big sister heard the shots and made a run for it. They found her in the hallway outside her room.”
“Did something set him off?” Nancy asked. “A quarrel, a disagreement, some kind of abuse?”
“His statement at the scene is the only thing he’s going to say for quite a while. He’s being charged as an adult, and his lawyer is already hinting that he’ll have all sorts of fascinating revelations to make, when the time comes. The important thing is, come tomorrow, no one’s going to care what we’re doing. We’re already B- 3.”
“Be what?” Infante asked on a yawn.
“B- 3,” Lenhardt said, pointing out the page of that number in that day’s Beacon-Light. “Eight paragraphs on the search, nothing more. Now we can fly beneath the radar for a couple of days at least, try to do some police work. Kid who kills his family trumps missing-and-presumed-dead kid.”
Nancy felt equal parts relief and dismay. “What? The Baltimore metro area can’t stay interested in two crimes at once?”
“They can barely stay interested in one,” Lenhardt said. “Nobody can, anywhere. The whole country’s got attention deficit disorder, but the kids are the ones on Ritalin. You know, I bet this kid was on Ritalin.”
“C’mon, Sergeant. You’re not suggesting Ritalin made him kill his parents and his sister.” Nancy’s reproof was simply chatter, something said to keep her end up while her morning-numb brain was still trying to clear. She loved the way cops talked to one another when alone, the certitude, the absolute conviction. In public, they had to speak of suspects, of allegations and beliefs and evidence, then wait for juries and judges to validate their work. Here, among themselves, they could speak the truth as they knew it. This boy had killed his parents. H. Grayson Campbell, the rich guy who had eluded Lenhardt, had managed to arrange his wife’s death and disappearance. Alice Manning and Ronnie Fuller were liars. What they were lying about remained to be seen, but they were definitely lying.
“No. I’ll let the lawyer who rushed out to the Westminster barracks to offer his services connect those dots. He’s got a great case. After all, he can always ask the jury for leniency on the grounds that his client is an orphan.”
He popped his eyes, prompting Nancy and Infante to laugh dutifully at the old joke. Chain of command-detectives laughed at the sergeant’s jokes.
“Now,” the sergeant said, hitching his chair closer to them and lowering his voice. “Let’s talk about blood.”
“We don’t have any,” Nancy said, worried that this was her fault. “I couldn’t trick Ronnie into giving us a drop, and Alice has that pit bull of a lawyer now.” She pushed him the fax that had been waiting for them when they arrived this morning, the announcement that Sharon Kerpelman had resigned from the public defender’s office and would be representing Alice Manning in conjunction with Rosario Bustamante.
“Pit bull? You mean bull dyke,” Lenhardt said.
“I think Bustamante might go that way, but not the young one,” Infante said quickly, as if he had spent some time thinking about this.
“Anyway,” Nancy said, “we don’t have blood samples and we’re not going to get them unless we’ve got probable cause for a warrant. Which we don’t.”
“These girls were the state’s guests for seven years,” Lenhardt said.
“Right. So?”
“So, you know anyone who goes seven years without going to the doctor?”
“I haven’t been to the doctor for ten years,” Infante said.