“Come on,” Lich replied exasperated. “You can’t expect us to believe that.”
“It’s true, you have to believe me.”
“Why?” McRyan retorted. “There’s nothing about you that is true, that is real. Your whole life is a lie.”
“That’s true. What you say is true, everything, except the part where I killed him,” Paris exclaimed and then slumped back in his chair, rubbed his face and exhaled. “Look, I’ve been pretending to be Michael Harris for eight years. I’ve grown eyes in the back of my head. I could sense a couple of people might have been on to me in Florida so I moved on. Same thing when I worked in Chicago, there was a lawyer in the office who started asking some questions that told me it was time to get out while I could. So I could smell it coming in Miami and Chicago. But I got nary a whiff here. I had no clue.”
It was Mac’s turn to sit back. His gut was telling him Paris might be on the level. He looked over to Lich who was unimpressed with Paris’ performance.
Mac flipped back through some pages from his notebook. “You said to me the other day that you left your office on the night Oliver was murdered around 11:15 p.m., correct?”
“Yes.”
“That’s plenty of time for you to get to The Mahogany and to the back alley and wait for Oliver to leave.”
“I went right home that night. I left the office at 11:15, I got to my apartment at 11:25 and I was asleep ten minutes later. I was exhausted from preparing for trial.”
“Can anyone verify that?”
Paris’s head went down and his shoulders slumped. He shook his head. “I live alone. I drove to my apartment along Grand Avenue, parked and went into my place.”
“Any security in your building?”
Paris shook his head.
“Any cameras that could verify your arrival?” Mac followed.
Paris shook his head.
“Any neighbors you saw on the way in?” Mac asked.
“No.”
“That’s not exactly what we would call airtight there, Jordan.”
“I don’t know what else to say, detective,” Paris uttered. “It’s the truth.”
McRyan and Lich stepped out of the interrogation room and into the hallway. It was after midnight. “So what do you think?” Mac asked.
“I think he’s guilty as the day is long,” Dick answered. “You actually have doubts?”
“I don’t know.”
Lich rolled his eyes. He was tired. It was late. “What? Something is bothering you, Mac, so frickin’ spit it out.”
Mac plopped himself down into his desk chair, pinched the bridge of his nose and exhaled. “The part where he says he’d grown eyes in the back of his head. Something about that rang true to me.”
Lich grabbed his own desk chair and rolled it over to Mac’s desk. He sat down, leaned forward in his chair, his elbows on his knees, ready to impart a little wisdom on his smart but young partner. “Mac, the guy has been lying to people for eight years. He’s gotten really good at it. Now I hate admitting this, especially to you, but in my experience lawyers tend to be pretty bright people, Mac. They’re smart. Paris adds to that, a well-developed ability to lie. Put those two things together and you have yourself a lethal weapon-which is capable of doing who knows what. In this case, the lethal weapon was willing to kill. Mac, he killed Oliver two nights ago. Since then he’s had plenty of time to think about what he would say if we got onto him, which we did. He’s playing us, he’s playing you. Don’t let him.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Mac answered as he sat back up to his desk. A forensics report was sitting on the desk. The forensics reports identified where the blood covered brass plate from the crime scene came from. “Or maybe I am right.”
“Huh?” Lich said.
Mac handed him the forensics report. “Take a look at what that blood covered brass plate is from.”
Dick read the report, and looked up to Mac.
“Do you remember where we saw one of those?”
Lich nodded.
“We got the wrong guy.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“I can prove it all.”
Stan Busch sat awaiting Mac and Lich in the interrogation room. Busch, as usual, was smartly attired in a black pin stripe suit, white monogrammed dress shirt and red silk tie, looking like a million bucks. In the last eight hours Mac and Lich managed to reveal that looking like a million dollars and living a million dollar lifestyle was why Stan Busch was their man.
Mac and Lich observed Busch briefly through the mirror into the interrogation room. Assistant Ramsey County Attorney Bobby Young was standing with them. It was easy to see that Busch was angry, upset and also, at least to Mac, nervous. He was conferring with his lawyer, a local legal heavyweight named Saul Tobin. Normally Tobin would be reason to be wary, he was good, very good. However, Mac and Lich had the goods.
“You ready?” Lich asked.
“Let’s go,” Mac answered, picking up a green garbage bag and leaving the viewing room. The two detectives stormed into the interrogation room.
“Arresting me at the courthouse on some bullshit murder charge in front of my legal colleagues? You two have a lot of explaining to do,” Busch started. “Saul and I are going to have your badges.”
“Lighten up, Stan, you’re gonna wanna hear this,” Lich said flatly.
Mac took Dick’s lead in: “Let me tell you a little story, Mr. Busch.”
“About what?” Busch snorted.
“About why and how you killed Gordon Oliver.”
Busch snorted.
“Don’t say a word, Stan,” Tobin ordered.
“Counselor, he won’t have to,” Lich responded casually.
“No, he won’t,” Mac added confidently and then started. “We’ve done some looking into you, Stan, these last eight hours once it became clear you were our guy. For me, I wanted to know why you killed Gordon Oliver. I knew that you did but I needed to know why. And you know what? I think I know.”
“Oh, do you now,” Busch spit.
“Stan,” Tobin warned.
“I do, Mr. Busch, and it’s the oldest reason in the book. Money. We looked over your billings for the last three years. You have been billing Michael Harris at $350, $375 and $400 per hour the last three years. He billed 1,922, 1,988 and 2,189 hours in those years. My Cretin High math tells me that’s $2,293,800 of billings by Michael Harris on your files. I also know that you recovered 96 % on your billings, so there has been very little discounting taking place.”
“We also understand,” Lich added, “that under your firm’s compensation system that you receive significant credit for those billings come bonus time, not to mention your own time that you put on those files. That’s why you’ve made $748,000, $792,000 and $849,000 in the last three years from your firm. Michael Harris has helped make you wealthy.”
“So what?” Busch answered.
“So what? Michael Harris isn’t a lawyer and you know it,” Mac answered, looking at Tobin, who flinched. It was clear that counsel for the defense was unaware of this little tidbit of information. “In fact, you know that Michael Harris’s real name is Jordan Paris.”
Mac looked over to Tobin. “Counselor, to bring you up to speed, Jordan Paris is a graduate of the University of San Diego School of Law but he was never ever admitted to the practice of law in California or any other jurisdiction because of some criminal issues of his own many years ago. The real Michael Harris, who was Paris’s roommate at one time, is dead as the result of a car accident eight years ago. Paris assumed his identity, moved to Florida, then Illinois and finally here, holding himself out as Michael Harris.”
“Of course we don’t need to tell you this, Mr. Busch, do we?” Lich added. “Because you already know.”
“Indeed you do,” Mac continued, flipping through his notes and then turning his attention back to Busch. “We checked your phone records and those of the law schools. You called both the Thomas Jefferson and University of San Diego School of Law in the last week. They remembered you just as they remembered Gordon Oliver calling them about the same thing two weeks ago. Your Michael Harris isn’t a lawyer.”