One Dog Night (21 page)

There’s no reason to make witnesses like this look bad. The jury will like and believe them, and they are testifying to facts that are really not in dispute.

It has basically been an uneventful day, and barely a diversion from my meeting with Pete tonight, which I hope will be the main event.

Alex Bauer knew the call was coming.

He had known since the moment he saw Carpenter on television. He hadn’t needed Loney to call and alert him, but Loney had done so the next morning.

Bauer had been upset at the turn of events, and had let Loney know it in no uncertain terms. He didn’t believe that Loney had cared one way or the other about his level of concern; Loney was not the type to be bothered by anything.

Bauer considered himself a cool customer as well, and he had no doubt that he would handle the call when it came. But he had been assured that there would be no slipups, and now all of a sudden there was a major one.

Bauer avoided the call twice. They came on his cell phone, as he knew they would, so there was no one to answer the call for him and make an excuse. He knew who it was because it was from a number he did not recognize, with a New Jersey area code.

The third time he answered it, if only to get it over with, and to find out how much they knew. It was a woman, which for some reason surprised him, but she sounded professional and self-assured. She introduced herself as Laurie Collins, an investigator working for Andy Carpenter.

She was probing, but it soon became obvious that she knew very little. She talked about his having received phone calls from a particular number, and wanted to know who the caller was and what the nature of his relationship with that caller was.

“Why are you asking me these questions?” he asked.

“It has come up as evidence in a major trial being conducted right now,” she said. “Perhaps you’re aware of the Noah Galloway trial?”

“The guy who set the fire?” Bauer asked.

“The jury hasn’t made a decision on that question either way as yet. But it’s a very public trial, and since you’re the head of a public company, I would assume you’d want to stay as far away from it as possible. One way to insure that would be to answer my questions without the need for depositions or testimony.”

It was a threat, not a very veiled one at that, and matched what Carpenter had said on television. In any event, Bauer was certainly not cowed by it, and he said what Loney had suggested he say.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Collins, I really have no idea what you’re talking about. And if I have to testify to that, I’ll find the time to do so.”

“So you’re saying you never received such a phone call?” she asked.

“I’m saying I receive many phone calls. As you pointed out, I am the head of a company. I have no idea which phone call you are referring to, and you don’t seem to be in possession of much information to help enlighten me. So while I would very much like to help you, I’m afraid I cannot.”

That effectively ended the call, though Collins said that he would be hearing from her again. She had no idea how close Bauer had come to telling her what she wanted to know, and he knew that there might well come a point when he would.

It was really up to Loney, and the judge in Delaware.

I meet Pete at the coroner’s office at seven.

He’s waiting for me in the lobby, and from there I can see that Nancy Adams’s office is dark. Since we’re there to meet with her, that strikes me as somewhat surprising.

“Nancy’s out to dinner,” Pete says. “She’ll be back at seven-thirty.”

“So why are we here at seven?”

“So we can talk.”

“Good,” I say. “You start.”

He shakes his head. “No, let’s start by you telling me what you think.”

“Okay. I think that there had to be a reason Butler was sent in now to implicate Noah, rather than six years ago. The only thing I can think of is that whoever did set the fire was trying to hide something. And if all of a sudden they needed to hide something, it meant that somebody was out there looking.” Pete isn’t saying anything, so I add, “Jump in whenever you want.”

“Go on.”

“Two people have told me that they were interviewed by the police recently. They didn’t say the FBI, though that’s the kind of thing people remember and mention. The interviews were not in the discovery documents, because Dylan made his case from the FBI investigation.”

Still nothing from Pete, so I go on. ”You are in charge of the department’s investigation of the fire, and have been since the beginning. That’s why I called you.”

“Not bad,” Pete says. “You are not nearly as dumb as you look. You may not believe this, but there are people in the department who like me. They’ve known how this case has bothered me, and in their downtime, they sometimes work the case.”

“You assign things to them?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “No. Most times I’m probably not even aware that they’re doing it. It’s only if they find out anything that could be significant that they come to me with it. And that rarely happens, believe me.”

“But somebody was on to something this time,” I say.

“I think so, although I don’t know what it was. But I do know who it was.”

“Kyle Holmes,” I say. He was the young officer who was killed along with his partner when they responded to that domestic dispute. Those killings took place three weeks before Noah’s arrest.

Pete nods. “Kyle Holmes. Maybe there was more to his death than we thought.”

Pete goes on to tell me that Kyle had mentioned to him that he was looking at the case from a new angle, but didn’t say what that was. He was young and eager, and had a tendency to jump to conclusions, so Pete had told him to update him when he had something concrete to report. The next day he was shot and killed, and Pete of course had no reason to connect it to the fire investigation.

“So for the last week I’ve been trying to find out what he was doing,” Pete says. “He usually took notes when he was out on a case, but there were none found on his body. No one thought anything of it at the time, but now it seems that maybe the killer took them.”

“What have you learned?” I ask.

“Let’s wait for Nancy.”

Nancy Adams will be worth waiting for. She is absolutely beautiful, with long jet-black hair, a magnetic smile, and legs that would reach the floor no matter how low that floor happened to be. Lookswise, she’s in Laurie’s class, which is an honors class all the way.

Whenever I see her I’m reminded of that old quiz show,
What’s My Line?
If panelists had to guess what Nancy did, spending her time cutting up dead bodies would rank last on the list of possibilities, except for maybe sumo wrestler.

There’s one other thing I want to talk to Pete about, while he is in a relatively helpful mood. “I need a big favor,” I say.

“That’s a real news event.”

“I need a list of missing persons reports, starting a week before the fire up through a month afterward.”

“Just for Paterson?” he asks.

“No, I need to cast a slightly wider net than that.”

“New York, New Jersey?”

“I was thinking the United States. Continental would be fine.”

“You’re insane,” he says.

“Okay, I’ll make it easier for you. Do you get notified when a person reported missing is subsequently found?”

“We’re supposed to, but I’m sure it doesn’t always happen.”

“Anybody that was found, you can leave them off the list,” I say.

“What’s this about?”

“The people that were unidentified in the fire. I want to find out if any of them could have been the target,” I say. “I admit I’m grasping at straws here.”

“I’d like to help, but there’s very little I can do,” he says, surprising me once again with his cooperative attitude.

“Why?”

“Because there are thousands of localities; I can’t contact every one. You need to attack this nationally.”

“I will,” I say. “But for now, whatever you can do would be great.”

He nods. “I’ll do what I can.”

“You can give the information to me as it comes in; then I can get my people started on it.”

“Thanks a lot.” He sneers. “You have people now?”

“I’ve got plenty of people. If you work really hard, one day you could be one of them.”

Nancy shows up precisely at seven-thirty and we go into her office. I haven’t seen her in a while, so we make small talk for a few minutes, until Pete grunts his displeasure.

“Tell Andy about your talk with Kyle Holmes,” Pete says.

She nods. “Kyle came to see me, a few days before he died. He wanted to talk about the Hamilton Village case, so I had the file in front of me. Not that I needed it; there are some things you don’t forget.”

“Were you here at that time?” Nancy had moved here from Boston a while back, but I don’t remember if it was before or after the fire.

“It was one of my first cases when I took over the office,” she says. “Not a great way to start.”

“What did Kyle want?” I ask.

“First a little background, though I’m sure this is in the discovery documents,” she said. “The fire was unbelievably intense, and it caused the second and third floors to cave inward. So the bodies were incinerated, not cremated but not too far off either. And because the building caved in on itself, the remains, such as they were, were mixed together. It was a horrible, horrible scene, by any standards.”

I don’t say anything; the information she’s providing was in the discovery documents in excruciating detail. Reading them once was painful, and I was obligated to go over them a bunch of times.

She continues. “I’m embarrassed to say that there was very little science involved. We could independently identify very few of the bodies; it was really guesswork based on secondary evidence, like testimony of people who claimed they knew who was in there.”

“But some of the bones were intact,” I say.

She nods. “Yes, but keep in mind we never had DNA samples of these people to start with, so even if we were able to extract some from the remains, there was nothing to compare it to.”

“Okay, I understand the situation you faced.”

“Good, because I never tried to hide it. It’s in all my reports. And those reports are what Kyle came to talk to me about.”

“Something specific?” I ask.

“Yes. He was interested in one of the victims. Roger Briggs.”

I’m familiar with the name; he was the grandson of Jesse Briggs, whom Laurie and I interviewed. The child’s mother, Jesse’s daughter, was killed as well. “What about him?”

“Well, keep in mind that we did not attempt to put too much information about the victims in our report. We just couldn’t do so from the remains alone, and the rest would be more of an investigative effort, which is not really what we’re geared to do. We basically just listed each victim that we knew about by name, sex, and age.”

“Roger Briggs was on the list,” I say.

She nods. “Yes, but there was a mistake, and information was not transcribed correctly. It said Roger Briggs, male, eight. The fact that he was eight months old was not clear; it appeared from the list that he was eight years old.”

“So?”

“So nothing about the remains listed in the report corresponded to the size of a victim of that age. Kyle was asking me about that.”

“What did you tell him?” I ask.

“Well, I spent some time studying the report, and my backup notes from the examinations. It confirmed what I thought; there was nothing intact that corresponded to an eight-month-old. Of course, that isn’t necessarily conclusive; those remains could have been burned too badly.”

Pete speaks for the first time since Nancy started relating the story. “So bottom line, what do you think?”

Nancy pauses for a moment, seeming to weigh her words. “I don’t think there was a baby in that fire.”

It seemed significant when Nancy said it, but the possibility that there might not have been a baby in the fire is not exactly a case solver. First of all, we can’t be sure it’s true. Second of all, if it were true, we don’t know where the baby is, or what he or she has to do with anything.

What is important is the knowledge that Kyle Holmes was working the case, and that he thought he was on to something. What might be more important is that someone else thought he was on to something, and killed him for it. Then, if my theory is correct, the frame of Noah that was kept in reserve was finally unveiled, to stop anyone else from following up on what Kyle was learning.

At this point, the threat to Becky, which was clearly a way to stop the trial, might even be logical. The perpetrators might have been banking on the case being so strong that Noah would have pled it out, and not gone to trial.

Once I convinced him to do so, and the trial date came so quickly, the entire matter would automatically be subject to intense scrutiny, which the bad guys clearly would not want.

So now, in addition to having no idea who the significant adults are in this case, we have added a baby to be in the dark about. But at least it’s starting to make a little sense, and at this pace we should have the whole thing nailed by Noah’s thirtieth parole hearing.

I ask Laurie to focus as much time as possible on learning whatever she can about Natasha and Roger Briggs. Roger was the only baby listed among the victims of the fire, and they lived on the third floor, which I have always considered worthy of special investigation. The fire would have consumed the entire house from the first floor up, yet special attention was given to spreading the mixture on the third floor.

Today is going to be another depressing day in court, watching Dylan parade his witnesses in front of the jury, questioning them in excruciating detail. It’s like getting a legal colonoscopy.

Before I leave I take Tara and Bailey for our daily morning walk, during which I get my monthly idea. With Bailey with us the walks are much slower; I think she would prefer that we push her in an enormous stroller.

Along the way we run into a neighbor walking her beautiful golden, Callaway. She’s one of Tara’s favorite dogs to interact with, they can spend all day sniffing and chatting. This time is a little different, as Callaway can’t take her eyes off Bailey. It’s like she wants to pull Tara aside and ask, “What the hell is that?”