“This is creepier than doing it in front of our building,” Nan said. “Imagine tossing all this stuff into someone’s grave? They really need to solve that problem.”
Mike had turned back to Alex Trebek, just as he announced the Final Jeopardy! category. “That’s right, I said DEATH VALLEY LIFE. You’ve got sixty seconds to figure out how much you’d like to wager.”
“Mercer and I have this one. He’s big on wildlife. We’ll take on you three girls. Twenty bucks.”
“Fine, guys.” I was drawing the links between Salma’s apartment and the well on the Gracie Mansion lawn that overlooked Hell Gate, and the place on the FDR Drive where Ethan Leighton crashed his car. I circled the Leighton home and wrote Claire’s name, with a big question mark beside it. “Then we get to work.”
Each of us was nibbling on halves of the large sandwiches that Laura had ordered when Trebek revealed the answer and repeated it twice. “Devil’s Hole denizen facing extinction.”
The three contestants each seemed to be struggling to write a question.
“You think California condors live in a hole, or the hole name is just to throw us off?” Mike said to Mercer as he started on his second bag of chips. “Gotta be some kind of prairie dog or burrowing owl. You call it, Mercer. You give it the what-is that’s about to become a what-was.”
The theme music was playing in the background. I started to chalk a list of local political figures recently tainted by possible links to scandal. Congressman Ethan Leighton, former governor Eliot Spitzer, Lieutenant Governor Rod Ralevic, former police commissioner Bernard Kerik.
“What’s the Devil’s Hole pupfish?” Catherine said, surprising me as she took the chalk from my hand. “Humor me, Alex. Let’s just put Tim Spindlis here to round out the list.”
“He didn’t do anything bad,” I said. “And he’s not a politician.”
“But I so enjoy seeing him in such lousy company, even if you erase him later. Exonerate him whenever you’d like.”
“Now, how’d you know that about pupfish?” Mike asked, offering her some chips as Trebek consoled the three men who had guessed wrong.
“Studied the case in law school. It’s a little blue minnow that’s lived only in that hole, in a spring-fed pool in that hellishly hot desert, for tens of thousands of years,” Catherine said. “One of the original fish protected in a landmark water rights case before the Supreme Court.”
Nan and I looked at each other and laughed.
“You two girls must have been too busy partying to do your homework, I guess. Used to be five hundred of those fish. Probably aren’t even fifty today. The court curtailed groundwater pumping meant to develop irrigation in the Mojave to save these guys. They had to put up a chain-link fence to keep all the law students from peering down into the little pupfish pool.”
“Probably wouldn’t let Coop anywhere near the hole for fear she’d crash through that fence too,” Mike said. “Crush all those little minnows to death.”
“Okay, kids, recess is over,” I said, sitting down at the table. “Somebody want to take a stab at suggestions about Salma and where all this leads?”
Mike muted the volume but turned the set back to NY1 so that we could keep an eye on developing events at City Hall.
“First we got to figure out who she was,” Mercer said. “I’m assuming you’re right, because of the tattoo, that she was trafficked in. When did she get to the States? Did the snakehead pick her out to breed her for high-end customers, and bring her to New York?”
“Who introduced her to Ethan Leighton and how often were they together?” Nan asked. “Was there any paper in her apartment? Passports, bank records.”
“Not that Hal and Jack had come up with by the time we’d left.”
“That’s really unusual. Most of the time, if these women make the transition and become legal, they cling to that documentation like a life jacket.”
“Maybe Salma thought she had a better form of protection,” I said. “Maybe her local congressman offered all the coverage she needed.”
“I’ll call Hal in the morning. If he took any paper out of there, I’ll let him bring it here to voucher and I’ll go through every piece of it,” Catherine said.
“So we’ve got to talk to Ethan Leighton,” Mercer said. “That’s clear.”
“Which means I have to offer Lem Howell everything under the sun to bring his man in to sit down with us.” Maybe I shouldn’t have hustled out of the limo so quickly.
“Look,” Mike said, leaning on the table, “Battaglia’ll toss the drunk-driving case to get a leg up on the murder investigation, don’t you think?”
“He tosses that, and what’s to prevent Leighton from keeping his seat in Congress?” I asked. “Not so fast. Battaglia may have a horse in that race. I have no control over offering to drop the charges.”
“Who’s handling the vehicular?” Catherine asked.
“Ryan Blackmer. But he’s cool with it. The front office has told him it gets folded into whatever direction we take with Salma,” I said.
“So we probably have to work with Ethan’s father too,” Mercer said.
“Moses Leighton? He’s tougher than nails. And not above trying to bribe his kid’s way out of any situation.”
Catherine walked to the board and added Moses Leighton’s name. “Let him give it his best shot. I’ve always wanted to wear a wire.”
“Well, then, how about Claire?”
“I don’t think I could look Claire Leighton in the eye,” Nan said. “She must be crushed.”
“Not half as crushed as she’s going to be unless she comes up with a decent alibi,” Mike said.
“Let me try to get Claire in,” I said. “We’ve got a number of mutual friends.”
“Don’t go there unless you’ve got Mercer or me with you. She’s got a shitload of proverbial beans she might be looking to spill, Coop.”
“Yes, but I think the source of all our trouble-all of Salma’s trouble-comes back to the spoofing. Who would have done that to her-and why?”
“Five days, at best, is how much time the phone company is telling me it’s going to take to see if they can source the calls,” Mercer said. “The software to do the scam and even the voice scrambler is available all over the Internet. Really tough to trace.”
Catherine hadn’t left the blackboard. Off to the left of the main list, she drew an arrow from Claire’s name and made a subgroup, including Moses Leighton and Lem Howell.
“Oh, Catherine,” I said. “That’s really a stretch. Lem’s all talk but he’d never do anything that unethical.”
Days ago, I would have said those words sincerely. Now I questioned everything that had been going on.
“He’s in this deep, Alex. I’m not saying he’s the player, but he’s capable of being the puppeteer pulling the strings. Don’t let your affection for him blind you.”