Move to Strike (32 page)

He entered silently, pulling the door almost shut behind him. Other than a stack of receipts on a metal spike sticking up from a dusty Formica counter, and a mountain of dishes that had never seen soap, he could have been in any kitchen in any motel. Listening for a television or radio or an electric razor or anything that might indicate an inhabitant somewhere else in the house, he took a step and froze. He heard something.

He then put his head into the living room, hand on his gun, but there was no one there. In the bedroom, he found the source of the noise, a radio playing softly. The only other room was closet-sized and furnished with an exposed mattress, torn comforter in a heap, and two pillows without cases. A wooden desk in the corner was covered with rock samples. They would have to wait for another day, because he had to find Rankin. Paul gently pulled the door shut until he heard it click.

Outside, Wish stood behind the car. Paul transferred the stack of receipts to his pocket. “Drive back to Highway 50. There’s a convenience store near the corner.”

They drove out, turning right again toward the highway for about a mile. Wish pulled into the asphalt parking lot. “Why are we stopping here?” Wish asked. “You hungry?”

“This is Rankin’s favorite restaurant.”

“The food in those places was wrapped in China and shipped by slow boat,” Wish said, his nose crinkling.

“Ah, but it has the virtue of being a mere two blocks away. That’s the way guys like Rankin”—and guys like Paul in certain moods—“select their dining venues.” They parked to one side of the low wooden building. Paul stepped up to the door and peered inside. “Damn!” he said, kicking his foot against the building in frustration. Rankin could be anywhere, drunk in a casino in Reno, off to Santa Fe on a rock hound’s dream holiday, lying low in any one of a thousand motels along the highway.

He pulled the kitchen receipts out of his pocket and began to study them.

Detective Ditmar was trying to explain the “strong” probability finding, and this time Henry was leaning on her, and she was trying to help, but unwilling to stretch the truth. “If the blood found on the sword was not the blood of the defendant, what other findings might the tests you were able to run show?”

“Ordinarily, we can completely exclude the defendant as a possibility.”

“Meaning, you could state a probability figure of zero?”

“Well, not zero. But infinitesimal.”

“And you made this determination after testing blood that was taken from the sword that caused Mr. Sykes’s death?”

“Yes.”

“And according to your best professional judgment, that finding of a third allele in one test provides strong and convincing evidence that, in addition to the blood of the victim, Nikki Zack’s blood was found on that sword.”

“Yes,” she said eagerly. “It is strong evidence.”

“Is it possible the testing is somehow in error?”

“There’s always a small possibility, of course, but the fact that there’s a match of this unusual third allele which is also found in the defendant’s blood tells us there’s nothing wrong with the testing. I’m willing to stake my reputation that that test was an accurate one. Our lab was very careful.”

“So, in your expert judgment, there’s a match?” She hedged. “We wouldn’t ordinarily declare a match based on one test . . .”

Nina stood up, saying, “You know, Your Honor, the last time I checked, you weren’t supposed to lead your own witness. Or cross-examine her, or browbeat her, or put words into her mouth. Or . . .”

“Rephrase the question,” Flaherty said. Henry tried again, but all the detective would say was that the blood indicated the strong probability of a match.

“So you are saying that the sample
probably
came from the defendant?” Henry asked.

“Your Honor,” Nina said. “I have to object. He’s trying to get the witness to give us a conclusion of law, not a conclusion of fact.”

“Using the word ‘probably’ over and over again isn’t going to make this finding add up to probable cause, Henry,” Flaherty said. “It’s beginning to grate on my nerves a little, I must admit. Can you wrap this up?”

If Henry’s rigidly set shoulders were any indication, he had finally admitted to himself that this particular skirmish was lost. Returning to his table, he moved around some more papers, giving himself time to think.

He’s not as good as Collier was at the job, Nina thought to herself. He’s more predictable. These thoughts that should have buoyed her up instead left her even more nervous. It left a void for Flaherty, and she knew from experience Flaherty had unpredictability in abundance, enough for all of them.

Henry was saying, “I have nothing further for this witness, but I would like to have the opportunity to cure any defect in the Information as to the felony-murder charge by bringing Mrs. Louise Garibaldi back to the stand.

“Defense counsel claims that we did not in the prelim establish a foundational fact, namely, that Mrs. Garibaldi could see the pool area of the Sykes house. Well, that’ll take about thirty seconds to cure. She is waiting outside.”

Me and Machiavelli, Nina thought. Henry had volunteered to bring in Louise. It was too perfect.

Louise marched in, chipper, quite chipper in spite of her own arthritis. Although she wore street clothes, there would always be an indefinable essence of gardener about her. She was like a dandelion herself with her head of white hair and the good cheer she emanated.

Too much good cheer by half.

Henry spent five minutes with her. He cured the foundational objection Nina had made in her paperwork right away by establishing that Louise could in fact see the area of the pool. Then he let her expand a little on her testimony. She added more details about Nikki’s furtive manner as she watched Sykes from the bushes that night, added that Nikki waited for Sykes to go in the study before dashing out to steal the box, and clarified that she saw Nikki moving toward the study door before her sightline was cut off.

“Thank you,” Henry said, satisfied. He thought he had it made.

Nina picked up the chemical analysis Ginger had given her the day before, based on the small amount of red elixir Paul had provided her. She had followed up with a conversation with Beth Sykes, who had told her a very interesting story about her neighbor’s habits every night before bed.

“Hello, Mrs. Garibaldi,” she said.

“Hello.”

“Having a good day?”

“Always do.”

“Tell me, Mrs. Garibaldi, what were you doing just before you looked out the window that night?”

“Well now, let me think. Along about nine I always settle down in my armchair and read a bit.”

“I understand you have a touch of arthritis.”

“Yes, I’ve had it for years. But I keep it under control. I’m an herbalist and I know how to take care of that.”

“You have quite a—what would you call it, a laboratory?—set up for your work with herbs in your basement, don’t you?”

Louise nodded, smiling. “So your investigator mentioned it?”

“Indeed he did. Now, let’s recap. About nine you settled into your armchair? With your book? Did you eat or drink anything?”

“No, just took my usual infusion. Some herbs I take every night to help me get to sleep.”

“What do you call that infusion you take?”

“Why, my red elixir. I take it every night at nine like clockwork.” It was exactly as Beth had said. She had met Louise one night the year before walking down the street in her pajamas, singing a merry tune. Louise had explained that she had taken a double dose of elixir that night because her arthritis was acting up, and Beth had led her home and made sure she was tucked in. Beth claimed that Louise had never once stopped smiling.

“What exactly is all this talk of herbs and elixirs about, Your Honor?” Henry demanded. “What’s it got to do with what this lady saw?”

“It has everything to do with what this lady thought she saw,” Nina said.

“I’m afraid I agree with the District Attorney on this,” Flaherty said.

“May I approach the bench?” Nina said. She and Henry came around to the side of Flaherty’s dais and Nina whispered, “I have moved to strike the testimony of this witness for lack of foundation and I need some latitude for a minute or two.”

“But we’ve made clear that she could see—” Henry began.

“The defect in this testimony is more serious than that.”

“We haven’t had notice of any other defect!”

“But I have laid adequate legal grounds to question her further about her perceptions on the night of the murder.”

“I object,” Henry said. “She saw what she saw.”

“Her perceptions weren’t the usual perceptions,” Nina said. “Judge, I just need a minute or two.”

Flaherty said, “Well, she looks pretty darn smart and emotionally positive to me. But go ahead for a few more questions.”

Henry sat down, shaking his head, and Nina said to Louise, who continued to smile, “You mentioned my investigator, Mr. van Wagoner.”

“Yes.”

“He came to your home to talk to you and you took him downstairs, right?”

“Why, yes.”

“Why did you take him downstairs?”

“I thought I’d help him out. He was in bad pain from his leg, and he asked me for help. I don’t think we were put here on this Earth to turn our backs on people in pain if we can help them.”

“Did you give him something for his pain?”

“I think I did, yes.”

“Some red elixir, right?”

“Could have, I suppose.”

“You did, am I correct?”

“Just a little. A few days’ worth.”

“What’s in this red elixir that you take each night at nine, Mrs. Garibaldi?”

“Oh, just a few herbs I get from all around.”

“I want to remind you that you have sworn to tell the truth, and, by the way, I want to inform you that we have had that red elixir analyzed,” Nina said.

Louise heaved a sigh. “He seemed like such a nice man,” she said. “That’s what I get for helping out.”

“What’s in that red elixir?”

“I don’t care to say.”

Nina looked down at Ginger’s report. “Kava root?”

“A bit, yes.”

“Saint-John’s-wort?”

“Uh huh.”

“Not to mention cocaine, morphine, and jimsonweed?”

Henry jumped to his feet, boiling. “Objection! This witness—”

But Louise was smiling. “My, my,” she said. “What modern science can do. I never thought you’d be able to identify the jimsonweed.”

There was a short burst of shocked laughter. Deputy Kimura’s eyebrows went clear up to his hairline.

“Let’s take a five-minute break,” Flaherty said.

Nina went out into the hall, happy, stretching her back and smoothing back her hair as she went. Daria and Beth were sitting next to each other on the bench outside the courtroom, and Tim was talking on the phone down the hall, but there was still no sign of the prospector.

“Paul said to call him as soon as you come out,” Daria told her. “And Sandy’s trying to reach you.”

“But I don’t have time—all right.”

She skipped down to the phone downstairs and called Paul’s cell phone number. He answered on the first ring.

“We have a line on him, I think,” Paul said. “He eats regularly at the Cantina on Emerald Bay Road.”

“How far away are you?”

“A couple of miles.”

“What’s the traffic like?”

“Relax, Nina. We’ll get there as fast as we can.”

She had to think. There was no time to call Sandy. She looked at her watch. She had two minutes.

Louise’s testimony would be stricken. Ditmar’s testimony would be stricken. She was riding high and had already accomplished her purpose in calling the hearing. The felony allegation would be dismissed.

The rest of it had been a house of cards to cover the fact that Nikki had the opals. Did she still have an obligation as an officer of the court to turn over those opals? They would incriminate Nikki! Were they still relevant evidence, when there was no longer any competent evidence that Nikki was actually at the Sykes house the night of the murder?

She didn’t know. She had talked to a legal ethics expert, who had suggested handing the opals over would be the wisest course. After running her strategy by the expert, she got a yes, it could be okay to hold on to them if they belonged to the defendant’s mother, and a no, it might not be okay at all, depending upon how the judge saw things. So she had decided to produce them with a flourish in court today, explaining them away at the same time.

But now—now what? Open the can of vermicelli?

Hard plans laid in advance of court had a way of melting into a puddle as a hearing progressed. Things changed, and she needed to be responsive to the need to change, too.

She straightened up, tucked her blouse in, licked her lips. She wouldn’t tell the judge that she had the opals in her office. She wouldn’t bring in Rankin, Tim, all the rest to try to show Nikki had a right to them. She would be silent.

Her primary obligation was to protect her client. Nikki might be hurt if she turned the opals over.

Let sleeping opals lie.

CHAPTER 26

DEPUTY KIMURA MOTIONED them back into the courtroom. Flaherty had just taken the bench. Flaherty looked at the clock on the wall. It was three-ten.

“Your Honor,” Henry began. He should have been flabbergasted, overwhelmed, desperate. Why did he still have that pregnant look? What was he about to deliver?

“Well, Counselor?”

“The prosecution has been unfairly surprised by Mrs. Garibaldi’s testimony.”

“Maybe, but counsel for the defense has performed a valuable service bringing the defect in her testimony to the Court’s attention.”

“Yes, but—”

Barbara Banning walked in, up the aisle, to Henry. Handing him some papers, she looked over her shoulder at Nina. It was a good thing human beings couldn’t be incinerated by a look.

Henry grabbed them and read the top paper. An expression of hot triumph mottled his features. Nina thought, uh oh, here we go.

“If it please the court,” Henry said. “We have had a new development. At about three o’clock today a search warrant was served on the law offices of Nina Reilly, based on information provided by an informant named Dennis Rankin. According to this informant, Ms. Reilly had come into possession of certain valuable gemstones which Mr. Rankin had given to William Sykes a few days before his murder. Furthermore, these gems had been provided to Ms. Reilly, according to the informant, by the defendant, Nicole Zack.”

“What?” She had to stay calm, had to think—

A uniformed cop came in right behind Barbara and handed Henry a small velvet bag. He promptly upended it on the counsel table. The courtroom lighting actually did a rather good job of making the stones shine.

Blue, lavender, red, purple, addictive and magical light. Flaherty leaned over on the bench to have a look.

“Bring those up here,” he commanded. He looked at them for a long time.

His complexion began to change and as Nina watched in sick anticipation, Flaherty went into ballistic red-button mode.

“You took these from Ms. Reilly’s office safe?” he yelled at the cop.

“Yes, sir!”

“Ms. Reilly! Get up here!”

She went. So did Henry, and so did Barbara.

“Where did you get these?” Flaherty demanded.

“From the defendant, Your Honor.”

“When?”

“Two and a half weeks ago.”

“Impeding an official investigation!” Henry said.

“Why didn’t you turn them over as evidence?”

“I didn’t consider them evidence.”

Flaherty scowled, a scowl from a god about to melt the ice caps and make the earth flood forever. He was awful to behold now, a beetling, bristling, ferocious presence. She had heard about this but never seen it. She took a step back.

“You are going to jail,” he said. Barbara’s mouth twitched.

“I can prove that the opals belong to the defendant.”

“You are going to jail,” Flaherty reiterated. It was hard to respond to the absolute decision in that voice.

“I can prove it. I have witnesses.”

Flaherty regarded her as he would something that had crawled onto his blanket at night. He looked at the clock.

“It is three-fifteen,” he said. “At four-thirty you will be remanded to the custody of the bailiff for contempt of court.”

“Pull over, Wish. Let me drive,” Paul said.

“I thought you said we were in a hurry! Anyway, there’s nowhere good to pull over so just let me keep going, I’ll make it through the Y without having to spend a half hour waiting for the signal to change.”

It was true. Traffic on 89 was heavy approaching the Y, and they didn’t want to get stuck in a right-turn lane and end up going the wrong way.

“Anyway,” Wish said, “you don’t even know the guy’s going to be there. Three receipts. That’s nothing.”

“He’ll be there.” He hoped that was true.

“If I were him,” Wish said, swooping around a slow-moving RV in the left lane and breaking seventeen or eighteen road rules in the process, “I’d be at the beach today.”

Paul thought he might prefer Wish at the beach too, but now they were stuck with Wish driving and he would have to sit back and be patient and call on all the universe owed him to make this thing happen right. Opening one eye, he saw that they were nearly there.

“You’re getting good, Wish,” he said, getting ready to hop out.

The unexpected praise threw Wish off his stride momentarily. A big rig moved in front of him and slowed to a crawl.

Up to now, out of consideration for Paul, Wish had driven with assurance but without great speed. Apparently, the challenge to his dominance proved too much for him, just as it had for Paul down in LA. He floored it. “Eat my dust, wanker!” For the next few thousand feet they flew, coming to a landing in the parking area in front of the Cantina.

“Wanker?” Paul said, throwing his door open.

“At the end of the summer last year these guys I know on the west shore hosted an end-of-tourists party. They put up a big sign: ‘See Ya, Wankers.’ Sounds bad. Wonder what it means?”

Paul thought the insult was humorous but harsh, considering that the tourists made it possible for locals to make a living up here, but didn’t take the time to update Wish. Running up to the restaurant door, he threw it open and looked inside.

Bless him, bless Wish, bless ’em all. There sat Dennis Rankin, mid-bite, his fork interrupted while attempting to carry an unwieldy, beefy bite of enchilada toward his mouth.

“One of the witnesses subpoenaed to testify at this time has—has . . .”

“Speak up, Counsel,” Flaherty bellowed. “We all want to hear this.”

“Has—” Nina said, but her sentence was interrupted by the arrival of Paul, with Dennis Rankin in tow.

“. . . arrived,” she finished. “Call Dennis Rankin to the stand.”

Looking decidedly unprepared, Rankin made his way to the front of the court to the witness stand.

“Your name for the record?” the court clerk asked.

Rankin gave his name. He pulled out a kerchief, pointedly dabbing at a stain on his khaki-colored shirt, making it clear how much he resented being there.

“You’re not here voluntarily today, are you, Mr. Rankin?” she started.

“Lucky someone showed up to remind me of the subpoena. It somehow slipped my mind.”

“Do you consider yourself something of an expert in opals and the geology of opal mining?” Rankin looked surprised. She was asking a reasonable question in a reasonable tone of voice. Maybe he had thought she’d backhand him again. She would have enjoyed it, since he had just caused the cops to ransack her office.

“Mined Coober-Pedy for more years than I can count. Grew up around miners. I’m also a certified gemologist. Read a lot, but listen more. I reckon I know more than anyone else in this room about it.”

“Tell us, Mr. Rankin,” Nina said, crossing her arms and pacing a little in front of the counsel table, “about your prospecting activities in northern Nevada. How long have you been prospecting for valuable minerals there?”

“Eight years.”

“Your land adjoined land you thought was owned by William Sykes, is that right?”

“Yes,” Rankin said. “There was a sign on the property with the name Sykes and an address right up here in South Lake Tahoe.”

“You recently contacted William Sykes about that land, didn’t you?”

“Yes. I drove up to that address at the lake one day last spring and Sykes opened the door. We started talking. He said he owned the property with his wife and sister-in-law and he could make deals for all of them.”

“What kind of deal did you discuss?”

“I wanted to buy some mining rights. Or maybe form a joint venture to mine it.”

“What happened then?”

“He put me off.”

“Why did you want these rights?”

Rankin looked more sullen than Nikki.

“It was because you had found black fire opals on that property, isn’t that right?”

“I never . . .”

Nina hurried on, “Without realizing you had strayed from your own property boundaries. Right?”

Rankin’s spirits improved. “Right.”

“Can you be more specific about when this discussion happened?”

“Early May. A week before he died.”

“Why wouldn’t Dr. Sykes sell the land to you?”

“Calls for hearsay.” Henry spat it out. He was tired, hot, and bored. He had what he wanted. Now he wanted to go home, after making sure, of course, that Nina wasn’t going home.

“Sustained.”

“Did you tell him about the opals?”

“Took eighteen of them to him and handed them over.”

“And you told him their value?”

“Roughly.” He smiled, and a metal tooth glinted. “I’m not stupid. These black opals aren’t the usual found in Nevada. It was my opinion they were uniformly less brittle and therefore very valuable, but I had no hard and fast information on that when I went to him. I just brought the opals and suggested they might be worth something.”

“And did Dr. Sykes then or thereafter make an agreement with you regarding the opals?”

“Yeah. But it wasn’t the agreement I wanted. The agreement was that I would keep quiet about the opal strike for at least a couple of months and stay off the land. He said he would give the opals to me in a couple of months if I did that.”

At last Nina was making some progress. She had struggled desperately to get here. She felt as if she’d been swimming underwater under thick ice and finally found a hole back to the air. Now to climb out. She took a deep breath.

“And did you leave the opals with him?”

“I did. Then he got himself killed. And I don’t have my opals.”

Nina brought him the cloth bag, freshly bedecked with its exhibit tags, and they all watched him take out the stones, one by one.

“And are those the opals you brought Dr. Sykes?” Nina asked.

He looked at them, exhaled, and said sourly, “Those are most of them.”

She paused and studied Rankin. She had him on the stand. He had threatened Nikki, chased Bob; he had never been cooperative. She felt that he knew more, but what?

He looked back at her. And showed his teeth in a grin. He just couldn’t help himself. And she knew, was absolutely positive now, that he had snowed her and Paul, had made himself a little hard to find, had let her pull a few things out of him.

“Anything further?” Flaherty asked.

“Just a moment, Your Honor.” She was mentally trying to make him for the murder. He knew the house; Sykes had his opals; who knew what else was true? What if he had come to the house after Nikki, rung the doorbell, gone into the study, and killed Sykes with the sword? Then left when he heard Daria?

But there was no physical evidence, no fingerprints, no blood—the blood on the sword was probably Nikki’s . . .

She had no more time. She had to get Daria on the stand but the thing that had been fulminating in her mind had reached a critical mass. Daria and Rankin came together in a mental explosion, leaving a cloudy but seductive thought.

What if Rankin was Nikki’s father? That was the thought, and she was definitely losing her concentration and everything else—what was the even crazier thought? That if he was her father, wouldn’t his blood exhibit the third allele?

“Mr. Rankin,” she said, “do you know, or have you ever known, Daria Zack, the mother of the defendant?” Rankin looked very surprised at this.

She waited.

“Never had the pleasure,” Rankin said. And she nodded urgently at Paul, who got up and went out to the hall where Daria was and came back in a second shaking his head. So Daria denied it too. She was on the wrong track. What had she expected?

So she was crazy.

But what about the allele?

From Rankin and Daria to the allele—

“Nothing further,” she said.

“No cross,” Henry said, affecting extreme boredom.

It was four o’clock. “Call Tim Seisz.”

Deputy Kimura walked down the empty aisle to the door, opened it, and called out the name. Tim followed him back in, looking like a lean gray wolf in professor’s clothing, wearing his hiking boots.

“You are a full professor at the University of Nevada in the Department of Geology, am I correct?”

“That is correct.”

“How long have you been a professor there?” Nina took him through his education and experience, which was impeccable. The best thing about Tim’s background, and the reason Nina had gone to him originally, was that Tim had been awarded his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California, where Flaherty had gone to law school. At this point, though, she doubted anything would help.

“On June twenty-fourth, did you accompany me and Paul van Wagoner on a trip to a mining claim in the Nevada desert?”

“I did. I confirmed our location with a United States Geological Map and I have also obtained copies of the claim registrations in the area, indicating names of the registrants.” Nina had both items marked as exhibits and after a few more questions and a shrug from Henry had them admitted as evidence.

“Where did we go at that time?”

“To this particular claim, located about a hundred miles northwest of Winnemucca. The sole claim holder is named Dennis Rankin.”

“And what did you do there, at my instruction?”

“Examined the contents of several buckets of rock samples Mr. Rankin was collecting from one of the rock walls on his property.”

“Were you able to identify those samples?”

“Yes. They were low-grade opaline rocks.”

“Did you observe at that time any example of rocks which might be gem quality?”

“No.”

“What did you do then, again at my direction?”

“Traveled to an adjoining claim.” Tim pointed to the map again, showing Grandpa Logan’s claim, and went on, “That land was originally owned by Beth Sykes and her sister Daria Zack, who have an undivided interest as tenants in common. My instructions were to examine the claim for evidence of high-grade opal rock. I did that, and within an hour located a ledge of bentonite beneath a volcanic extrusion which showed evidence of an ancient lava flow and a more recent landslide. I must say I was quite surprised. It was an entirely localized phenomenon and I have not been able to find any report of any prior examination of this area by a qualified geologist.”

“What else, if anything, did you find?”