“This has nothing to do with politics,” Tim said.
Robert threw up his hands, bouncing forward in his chair so its arms knocked the table. The framed picture of his sister fell facefirst to the marble with a clap; Rayner’s water slopped over the side of the glass. “The guy’s a fucking sleazebag.”
“Which, last I checked, is not a capital offense.” Ananberg placed her hands palms down on the table, a vision of resolution. “I’m just not convinced he did it.”
Robert ran a hand through his bristling red-blond hair, leaving a flared Mohawk path like a dog’s raised hackles. He cocked back in his chair. His voice, low and muttering, held a startling element of malice. “If he didn’t, a nig like that’s guilty of something else.”
Tim leaned forward, chair creaking, willing his voice not to betray the full measure of his rage. “Is that what you believe?”
Robert looked away, his jaw clenched.
“Of course not,” Mitchell said.
“I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to your brother.”
When Robert turned back, Tim noticed that his eyes were strikingly bloodshot, pink veins radiating out from his pupils, leaving wakes in the white-sea haze of his sclera. “I didn’t mean it. It’s just after this thing, with Debuffier…I mean, the guy fucking kept her in a refrigerator.” He grabbed the fallen frame in front of him and smashed it down against the table once, twice, three times. His face dissolved, and he raised a hand to his eyes. Broken glass was spread across the table. His hand, cut from the glass, left a bloody smudge above one eyebrow. Mitchell reached over and kneaded the thick muscles of Robert’s neck.
“Dumone is like a father to me,” Robert said. His lips were trembling. Tim waited for him to break, but he remained stubbornly on the edge between composure and grief.
“You need some time off from this,” Rayner said. “To get your perspective back.”
“No, no. Back to work. I need work.” When Robert looked up, his eyes were scared. “Don’t you do that to me.”
“You’re a liability to our aims,” Tim said. “You’re sitting it out for a while.”
Robert remained bent over the table, shoulders drawn forward and around so his trapezius muscles pulled high and hard around his neck. His head was raised, tilted up from his hunch like a pointing dog’s, his eyes bright. “You’ve been trying to cut me and Mitch out from day one. You of all people should understand our needing to be involved. To do more. Don’t tell us to sit back and let others handle it. You’re giving us the same bullshit answers your dad threw back at you when you went to him for help.”
Rayner jumped in angrily. “That’s enough, Robert.”
Off Tim’s expression, Robert looked away uncomfortably, maybe even a touch ashamed. “Yeah, that’s right, you forget. We know about when you went to him for help, and he turned you out. We were listening.”
Tim felt his pulse beating at his temples. He sifted through the anger, searching out a sharper vexation. “I was told you’d been listening to me since the day of Ginny’s funeral.”
Mitchell strummed his short-cut nails on the table. “Dumone already apol-”
“I went to see my father three days before that.” Tim faced the Stork, who was only now perking up to pay attention. “So how were you listening to me at my father’s?”
“Yes, well, I’m afraid I was mistaken when I told you that before. I ended up doing it a few days earlier. Broke in when you were at work and your wife went to the grocery store.”
Tim studied him closely, then Robert. He decided to believe them for the time being. “Listen,” he said, “we already have a guilty vote in on Bowrick. I’m handling it alone, as I pointed out earlier. Robert, you take some time off-and I mean off-and catch your breath. And be advised, when you come back, I’m not tolerating another word of your racist bullshit. Is that clear? Is it?” He waited for Robert to nod, a barely discernible tilt of his head.
“Then we’ll move to Kindell,” Rayner said. “And I’ve already embarked on the tedious process of selecting a second set of cases for our next phase.”
“One step at a time. Right now I need you all to leave.”
Rayner’s mustache twitched in a half smile. “It’s my house.”
“I need to sit alone with Bowrick’s file. Would you rather I ran copies and took them home?” Tim stared from face to face until the others rose and shuffled out of the room.
Ananberg lingered behind. She shut the door and faced Tim, sliding her arms so they were folded across her chest. “This is coming unglued.”
Tim nodded. “I’m going to slow things down, see what I can get on Bowrick, see how Dumone fares. I can handle this operation largely on my own. If I need to use Mitchell, I’ll stick him on surveillance and keep him well clear of any situation that might go hot.”
“Robert and Mitchell won’t settle for being your spy and errand boys for long. They’re obsessed. They’re all about black-and-white logic, no mitigating circumstances.”
“We need to keep phasing them out operationally so they’re permanently on the sidelines before we embark on the next phase of cases.”
“And if things don’t move the way we want them to?”
“We invoke the kill clause and dissolve the Commission.”
“Can you make this work without Dumone?”
Tim looked up at her. “I don’t know. That’s why I’m handling Bowrick myself. I can make sure it’s done right, then move on to Kindell.”
“You must be eager to get to Kindell.”
“Like you wouldn’t believe.”
Ananberg removed a thrice-folded document from her purse and slid it down the length of the table. It stopped when it hit Tim’s knuckles.
The public defender’s notes.
“Rayner had me run a copy of this at the office. I accidentally made two. Put it in your pocket, do not look at it until you get home, and don’t ask me for anything else.”
Tim resisted the overwhelming urge to flip through the pages. As much as it pained him, he wedged the public defender’s notes into his back pocket. When he looked up, Ananberg was gone.
The sudden silence rankled him, and he tried to soothe his unease. He couldn’t risk Rayner’s walking in here and finding him examining the purloined documents, and he couldn’t leave abruptly after saying he was going to stay to study Bowrick’s file. He had to play it cool-he owed Ananberg that much.
He dimmed the lights overhead, then propped Bowrick’s photo up against Ginny’s frame. He stared at Bowrick’s discontented face for a long time before flipping open the binder.
28
THE notes from Kindell’s case burning a hole in his jeans, Tim left without finding Rayner to announce his departure. As he pulled out of the driveway, the house loomed behind him, dark and falsely antiquated. It wasn’t until the wrought-iron gate swung closed behind his car that he realized he’d imbued the building itself with an ineffable quality of emotion, something like sadness and menace mixed together.
He drove a few blocks, then parked and flipped through the public defender’s notes on Kindell. His excitement quickly gave way to disappointment. A summation of the lawyer’s pretrial talks with Kindell, the typed notes were poorly organized and incomplete.
Some of them were chilling.
The victim was the client’s “type.”
Client claims to have taken an hour and a half with the body after death.
Tim’s stomach lurched, and he had to roll down the window and breathe in the crisp air before mustering the courage to continue.
A single sentence on the fifth page slapped him into shock. In an attempt to jar himself back to lucidity, he found himself reading it over and over, trying to attach meaning to the words so they’d make sense again.
Client claims he carried out all aspects of the crime alone.
And then the sentence beneath: Had spoken to no one regarding Virginia Rackley or the crime until the handling unit arrived at his residence.