“We also nearly got thrown out of the Net Force Explorers for that excess of…initiative,” Leif pointed out.
Megan gave him a look. “Yeah. And that’s really worried you, considering some of the stuff you’ve pulled since. You’re not about to let some idiot rules get in your way.” Her face twisted. “I keep wondering how you got all that information about HoloNews and Tori Rush. Probably charmed it out of some airhead intern. What did it take? A few dances? A couple of drinks? What else?”
Leif could feel the color rising on his face. Sometimes Megan could be downright uncanny. Or had she somehow been checking up on him? Either way, she was giving him a great case of the guilts. Megan had to know he was attracted to her. Was she using that in proposing this partnership?
He took a deep breath. “Okay, so sometimes well-meaning people can cross the line for something they believe in. Going by that reasoning, why couldn’t Winters break the rules and kill off Alcista?”
Megan looked as if he’d slapped her in the face. “If that’s that way you feel—” she began.
“That’s not the way I feel,” Leif spoke over her words. “I bend rules, skate on thin ice, push my luck — but I know there’s such a thing as right and wrong. And in my own way I try not to go over the line, to stay on the side of right. Well, James Winters is one of the rightest people I know.” He took a deep breath. “I absolutely know he’s innocent. If he wanted Alcista out of the way, he’d try to do it through the court system, not with Semtee. Of course I’ll help you. From the looks of things, we’ll have to push the envelope further than guys like Matt or David would be willing to go.”
Leif stabbed a finger at Megan. “But I hope we both learned a few useful things in our last little adventure. We’ve got to be straight with each other. This isn’t a job for the Lone Ranger here. The person behind this is a killer, and one willing to frame an innocent man in the process. We could be in real danger if we aren’t careful. We have to keep in touch. And we back each other up — information-wise, and physically, if necessary.”
Megan looked mutinous, but she nodded.
“Fine,” Leif said. “Now, you tell me what you’ve been holding back, and I’ll do the same.”
Matt paced back and forth across his room, swinging close to his computer system, then turning away again. He’d done his best to destroy the Internal Affairs case against Captain Winters, but it was like pounding his head against a brick wall. He could bring up objections and contradictions, but it was all vaporware compared to the solid evidence and supposed facts Steadman had assembled.
Yes, someone could have broken into the captain’s garage and planted traces of plastic explosive on his workbench. A very competent hacker might get into the Net Force computers and mess around with the phone logs. Someone even could have gotten hold of James Winters’s fingerprints, lifted them, and put them on the fragments of the practice bomb. Admit the means existed for one bit of black-bag work, and you could allow them all. But if you couldn’t come up with evidence to prove those activities took place, all you had was a theory. Hot air.
A smart lawyer might use that hot air to confuse the issue in court. Matt remembered a pretty infamous Hollywood murder where an old flatfilm star-former athlete had gotten out from under a murder charge that way. But his career — and his life — were ruined ever after.
Matt couldn’t wish that on Captain Winters.
There has to be some way to poke a hole in the I.A. case, he told himself. Where can we begin? Could they canvass the captain’s neighborhood, asking if there had been any suspicious characters hanging around during — what? The past month?
Maybe they should take aim at that so-called practice bomb. Hit anyone who lived near the blast site to find out if they’d heard the explosion and if they remembered anything useful….
Matt scowled. Weeks had gone by. Would people remember the details after that much time? And even if they did, which he doubted, would potential witnesses trust their hazy memories? Or would they simply accept what the media had already told them and repeat it?
Running his fingers through his hair until it stood up like some horrible modern sculpture, Matt continued pacing back and forth. Maybe they should cut right back to the beginning and find someone else with a motive, both for the murder and for the frame-up.
Tori Rush still led the pack for smearing Winters. She wanted a big, fat, juicy scandal. Attacking the honesty and integrity of Net Force would ensure her a lot of attention, maybe even a promotion. But still — to accuse an innocent man of killing someone just to get a network show…Matt had a hard time accepting that as a motive for murder.
Could there be a personal motive in the mix? Someone who hated James Winters for some reason? Hated him enough to kill to frame him? It was possible, of course. Finding out if somebody fit that mold would likely mean getting hold of Net Force records to find out who the captain had put away. Neither Steadman nor Agent Dorpff was likely to share that information.
And, as for hacking it out, well, it was illegal, though he knew some Net Force Explorers with the expertise to do it.
Matt jammed his hands into his pockets. It was way illegal. It would probably get someone caught and sent to jail. He couldn’t be responsible for that.
On the surface of things it seemed as if there was only one person who was angry enough at the captain to try framing him for murder. Unfortunately, Stefano Alcista didn’t seem the kind for subtle vengeance — and he really wasn’t the type to blow himself up.
Unless…maybe the mob boss faked his death! It would give Steve the Bull a chance to retire while sticking it to the man who’d put him in prison. After all, Alcista had been ready to blow Winters up. Why not ruin his life instead of taking it?
It didn’t even have to be a faked death, Matt thought. We should go after Alcista’s medical records. Suppose the guy was sick, didn’t have long to live…
He shook his head to clear it of such ridiculous thoughts. That level of brilliant deduction usually turned up at the end of really lame detective shows.
I might as well blame it on the saucer people, trying to discredit the captain because he’d seen a UFO.
What he needed — what everyone on Winters’s side needed — was some solid proof that Winters was never near Alcista’s car when Steadman and company said he was.
Matt went back over Captain Winters’s story. He’d gotten a call from an old informant, requesting a face-to-face. How to prove that? Tackle the informant? But the call didn’t necessarily have to come from the real informant. It could have been a computer-generated lure, designed to get Winters away from his office for the crucial time period.
In that case, if the files were right, the captain would have been standing on the corner of G Street and Wilson Avenue waiting for his snitch to arrive. Maybe he could find some way to prove that?
For a second. Matt had a disheartening image of himself standing on the corner, showing Winters’s picture to passersby and asking if they remembered seeing him on the corner two weeks ago.
Then inspiration struck. There might actually be a witness with perfect memory — and the ability to prove that the captain was where he said he was. An unshakable witness whose testimony would have true mechanical precision. Wilson and G was a downtown location, and a lot of the buildings around there were protected, at least in part, by security cameras. In the old days of videotape the recording medium might have been changed by now. But digital cameras deposited their images directly into computer memory. Maybe, just maybe, somewhere in a computer downtown, there was an archived image of an annoyed Captain Winters cooling his heels with a nice, convenient time and date stamp on it.