RK02 - Guilt By Degrees (16 page)

I woke
up at the obnoxiously early hour of six thirty a.m. with an aching throat and a monster of a sinus headache, the aftereffects of too much booze and too many tears. I crawled out of bed and rinsed my face with warm water. After a few splashes, the congestion started to clear, and I felt marginally better. But my brain still seemed foggy, so I doused my face with cold water—a painful but effective remedy. Then I threw on my robe and, although I had little appetite for food, ordered a bagel and cream cheese to soak up the acid of the large pot of coffee I intended to slug down.

The day was blustery, and a thin, stinging rain spattered against my windows. I appreciated the fact that the weather had decided to work with my mood. Though I still felt fully justified in my fury at the way Graden had violated my privacy, self-
righteousness
is a cold form of comfort.

And the one thing that really would’ve helped was the one thing I couldn’t have: the shoulders of my buds Toni and Bailey. I’d definitely have to explain why Graden wasn’t around anymore, but I couldn’t tell them the truth, because I’d never told them about Romy. It would’ve been different if it’d just been a fight. I would’ve made excuses for his absence until we made up. But this was a breakup, not just a fight. Graden had violated my privacy once, and that meant it could happen again. Like a crack in the windshield, the damage caused by this breach of trust would only spread over time. I couldn’t see a way to patch this up—ever.

A depressingly familiar isolation wrapped itself around me, bringing back the old feeling of inhabiting a separate plane, peering in through life’s window at a party to which I’d never be invited. My throat tightened, and hot tears sprung to my eyes as the memories of my childhood after Romy’s abduction flooded through me.

Abruptly I shook my head to stop the thoughts. Enough. I wasn’t that little girl anymore. I had a new life, wonderful friends, and a career I loved. And I detested self-pity parties. I resolutely swallowed and blinked until I’d forced back the wave of emotion.

Luckily, it was only Wednesday. That meant I’d have three days to dive into work and put some buffering between my breakup with Graden and the now-unclaimed “freedom” of the upcoming weekend—a looming black hole of unwanted solitude that offered too much time to ruminate on my once-more single state and, more important, the reasons that led to it…again.

Stop it.
I tightened the belt on my robe and deliberately picked up the Bayer file and flipped to my to-do list, then called Bailey.

“Since when are you up and at ’em this early?” she asked.

Without even thinking about it, I defaulted into white-lie mode. “Since I went to bed early. Want to know what I had for breakfast too?”

“No,” Bailey said flatly. “It’s too early to be that bored.”

“I’d like to get back out to the scene and see who else has surveillance cameras on the sidewalk,” I said. “See if we can get a different angle on the stabbing.”

Bailey agreed to come by and pick me up at eight fifteen, and I pushed out my room service cart and headed for the shower. I’d finished dressing and still had an hour to kill. Since the meeting with the prosecutor, Larry Gladstein, I’d found my thoughts returning again and again to Lilah. I wasn’t quite as sure of her guilt as Larry was, and even he couldn’t explain why she did it. Whether she was guilty or not, I needed to know who this woman was if I was going to track her down. I started my own private to-do list entitled
LILAH.
Engrossed, I lost track of time—until the jangling of my room phone made me jump out of my chair. I looked at the clock: eight twenty.
Rats.
I picked up the phone. “I’ll be right down,” I said.

“Or I’m leaving,” Bailey said, and hung up.

By eight thirty, she had found a parking space next to a fire hydrant. It was early, so there were other legal spaces to park, but Bailey’s devotion to her job perks bordered on the religious.

“Am I right about you saying Detective Stoner never got to any of these places?” I asked as we got out of the car.

“Sort of,” Bailey replied. “He did get to the Subway, but the camera wasn’t working.”

“The bank video come in yet?” I asked.

“No,” she replied. “But any day now.”

I looked up and down the street. “Okay, we got the check-cashing place already. That leaves the dry cleaner, the liquor store, and the travel agency.”

We decided to hit the dry cleaner first and work our way down the street.

An older heavyset woman with crooked red lipstick and hair that’d been dyed a metallic rainbow of blond hues stood behind the register, talking on her cell phone in what sounded like Russian. A bell tinkled as we opened the door, and she looked up. She said something into the phone before addressing us. “Yes?” she said, her tone annoyed. “You have something to pick up?” she asked impatiently in a heavy Russian accent.

I guess business was so good she could afford to treat customers like a nuisance. Glad to be able to disappoint her, I replied, “No, we’re here on a murder investigation.”

This information impressed her not at all. She gave us a stony expression. “What murder investigation? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I reminded her.

“Hmmph,” she replied. “I can’t tell you anything. I was working, I don’t have time to be looking all around. Anything else?” she asked in a tone that heavily suggested her preferred answer.

“Yes,” I answered. “We’d like to see the footage on your surveillance camera from that day. So maybe you should tell your friend you’ll call back.”

“You have some ID?”

We flashed our badges.

The woman exhaled heavily and all but rolled her eyes, but she signed off with her friend and motioned to us. “Follow me.”

She led us to a back room, behind the motorized racks of hanging clothes in plastic bags. We gave her the exact date and time, and she tapped some keys on the computer on her desk.

“Would you mind starting it an hour before so we don’t miss anything?”

Bad choice of words. Of course she minded.

“I can’t sit here for an hour,” she replied. “I’ll miss customers.”

Suddenly she’s Ms. Customer Service? I raised an eyebrow. “That’s what the bell on the door is for, isn’t it?”

She gave me another of her stony looks, then tapped some more keys. Grainy black-and-white images of the sidewalk began to play on the screen. It took almost the full hour for Simon to appear. He was walking toward the camera. The woman I now knew to be Lilah was five feet ahead and almost out of frame. Because there were so many people on the sidewalk, it was hard to tell who, if anyone, in the surrounding crowd might’ve been with her. I told the woman to slow the footage.

Simon moved toward Lilah in jerky frames. His hands were both out and visible. “No weapon in either hand,” I said.

Bailey nodded. “And he’s, what, five feet behind her?”

I stared intently, hoping to get a view of the stabber and maybe a clearer view of Simon at the moment he grabbed Lilah. The latter would tell me definitively whether Simon had pulled out the box cutter at the critical moment. But as Simon closed in on Lilah, he moved out of frame. That was the last frame that showed Simon. No stabbing. No stabber.

“Damn it,” I said, frustrated. “And we can’t even see what happened after Simon grabbed Lilah.”

“Yeah,” Bailey acknowledged. “But it helps as far as it goes.”

I shook my head. “If the bank video doesn’t give us a view of the killer, Lilah’s our only hope.”

Bailey and I exchanged a look. The prospect of having to rely on Lilah was not a promising one.

Just then, the bell chimed.

“You’re done?” the woman asked.

It was tempting to say no just to irritate her, but I didn’t want to waste the time.

“For now,” I said.

We followed her out to the front of the store, where a young man in jeans and a big parka was waiting, bopping to the beat playing through his headphones. I hoped he paid her with a bad check.

“Make sure you hang on to that footage,” Bailey ordered her. “And don’t go anywhere. We may need to talk to you.”

“What for?” the woman asked.

“You’ve got a customer waiting,” Bailey pointed out, deliberately evading her question. She gave the woman an insincere smile. “Have a nice day.”

As we hit the sidewalk, I had one happy thought: if she gave
us
that much grief, she wouldn’t be so quick to cooperate with reporters. It didn’t take much to cheer me up these days.

The liquor
store was farther away from the action, but we checked out the footage anyway. Nada. The travel agency two doors down didn’t have anything for us either, though the owner was a charming sort.

“I’m so sorry I couldn’t be of more help,” he said, sounding like he meant it. “But have you considered a trip to Costa Rica? It’s beautiful there this time of year,” he said eagerly. “I could get you a great deal.”

The mention of Costa Rica made me think of Graden. On our first date, he’d casually mentioned his ten-day trip to Crete and the Greek islands. At that point I’d already begun to wonder how a cop could afford a top-of-the-line, late-model BMW, so when he mentioned that vacation, I started to entertain the possibility of drug money. He’d laughed, seeing the suspicion on my face, and explained about the video game that’d set him and his brother up for life. The memory did nothing for my mood, but that wasn’t the travel agent’s fault.

“Sounds wonderful,” I said. “Maybe some other time.”

We walked out to Bailey’s car.

I yawned as I buckled the seat belt. The adrenaline of last night’s fight now largely burned off, I was feeling the effects of too much stress and too little sleep.

“Thought you got to bed early,” Bailey remarked.

Caught in the lie, I was forced to stick with it. “Happens that way sometimes. The more you get, the more you want.”

“I’ve heard that’s true about a lot of things.” Bailey smirked. “Speaking of which, I meant to ask if you guys had a good time last night,” she said, then added with a lascivious grin, “though from the look of you today, I guess I’ve got my answer.”

Now what? I knew I wouldn’t be able to put off telling her about our breakup for long, but I wasn’t in the mood to get into it right now. Maybe more to the point, I had no idea what I’d tell her about why we’d broken up. I nodded noncommittally and changed the subject.

“You got the bank footage?” I asked. At this point, neither Bailey nor I held out much hope that the bank video would give us anything new. My question was a stall, and it didn’t fool Bailey for one minute. She gave me a long look, but she knew better than to push.

“Yeah, I meant to tell you, it just came in,” she replied. “Want to go check it out?”

I was about to say yes but stopped myself just in time. Going back to the police station might mean a run-in with Graden. I had a hunch neither of us needed that right now.

“I’ve gotta get back to work. Mind dropping me at the office?”

Bailey raised an eyebrow, but she wisely left it alone.

“Sure, no problem,” she said.

“I’m not optimistic about it. But on the off chance we finally get a shot of our killer, let me know,” I said as we pulled up in front of the courthouse.

“Good to see you so excited,” Bailey said dryly.

I trotted down the steps and badged my way past the metal detector. When I got to the bank of elevators, I found Toni there, waiting impatiently as she looked from her watch to the lighted panel above. It brought back fond memories of our early days, when we’d place bets on which elevator would hit the lobby first. The sight of Toni was comforting yet unnerving. In all our years of friendship, I’d never managed to get anything by her. The chances of my being able to hide my upset about the breakup with Graden from her for more than five minutes were virtually nil. I was going to have to dream up a plausible story—fast.

I forced a smile and called out, “Tone!”

“Hey, girl,” she said, returning my smile. “Been out to lunch with that hunky lieutenant of yours?”

Did everyone suddenly have Graden on the brain? Or was I just now noticing it because I wanted to avoid the subject?

“No,” I replied. “I was out with the hunky Bailey Keller on that John Doe case, now known as the Simon Bayer case.”

The smile abruptly fell from her face. “You see the
Daily Journal
yet?”

I shook my head. I read the weekly version of the legal newspaper only to catch up on the recent appellate decisions.

Toni looked around to make sure no one who’d care was close enough to hear us.

“Hemet gave ’em a quote about you,” Toni said in a low voice.

The set of her jaw told me it wasn’t a paean to my legal prowess.

“Said you’re just another cherry-picking special unit deputy and you only picked off the homeless-guy stabbing to grandstand in front of the judge.”

“What? That’s bullshit!” I said, truly shocked.

“Keep it down,” Toni said, glancing around us again. “You know you’re preaching to the choir,” she whispered harshly, her voice drenched with disgust. “But this is exactly what I warned you about, isn’t it?”

The elevator dinged its arrival, and we crowded in with the rest of the herd. We had to wait until the fifteenth floor for it to empty out.

“I didn’t expect even Hemet to stoop that low,” I said.

“Look, if you had any doubt, now you know: it’s on,” Toni said, her eyes flashing with anger. “So what’re you going to do about it?”

I shook my head slowly. We got off at the eighteenth floor, and I punched in the numerical code on the security door to our wing. As we headed to my office, I pondered my options. None was great.

“If I call the reporter and give him a response, I’ll make it a bigger deal. You know what they say—”

“You wrestle with a pig, you both get down in the mud, but the pig likes it,” Toni finished for me. “Kinda late for that. The mud’s flying, and some of it’s already on you.”

“But there’s more to it here. The last thing I need is attention from the press.” I explained about having to find Lilah Bayer before the press got its hands on the surveillance footage and spooked her into running.

“So you’re trying to outrun them?” Toni shook her head. “Good luck with that.”

She sat down in front of my desk and put her feet up on the table by the window. I dropped my purse into my bottom drawer and looked longingly at the bottle of Glenlivet, then quickly slammed the drawer shut and plopped down into my majestic judge’s chair—the one I’d proudly corralled after finding it abandoned in the office hallway late one night. On brighter occasions, Toni and I’d tried to picture the scenario that caused it to roll off a judge’s bench on the fifteenth floor and into a corridor in the DA’s office on the eighteenth.

I slipped off my shoes and curled my feet under me.

“You really think Vanderhorn’s going to care what an idiot like Hemet says?” I asked.

“Vanderhorn cares about what makes him look bad,” Toni replied. “Hemet’s mudslinging about you has ‘bad for Vanderhorn’ written all over it.” She paused and raised an ominous eyebrow. “Especially if anything goes wrong with the case.”

“So your advice is, what?” I asked irritably. “Don’t let anything go wrong?”

Toni shrugged. “Yeah, pretty much. Just don’t lose, and everything’ll be fine.”

I rolled my eyes. “Gee, thanks, Tone,” I said sarcastically. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

It came out a lot snarkier than I’d intended.

“Gee, Rache, I don’t know,” Toni replied. “Maybe because you’re too busy jumping my shit?” She stared at me. “What’s going on? You are not yourself.”

More than her words, Toni’s expression of concern brought me to a screeching halt.

“Or, apparently, anyone better,” I admitted. “I’m sorry, Tone.”

“You want to talk about it?” she asked softly.

Her gentle tone unlocked the angry shell I’d built around the pain of losing Graden, and against my will, I felt tears leap to my eyes. But the middle of a workday was no time to lose it. Mutely, I shook my head and pressed my fingers to my temples as I willed the tears back.

“Okay,” Toni said. “You let me know when you’re ready.”

I nodded.

Her cell phone rang, and she looked down at the number and sighed. “The IO on my geezer bandit case—I’ve gotta take it.”

I waved her off. “Go. And don’t worry, we’ll talk.”

Toni smiled as she opened her phone and headed out to her office.

I tried to lose myself in the work that’d piled up on my desk, but my thoughts kept wandering back to my fight with Graden. Was my need to keep Romy a secret really all about my feelings of guilt? Not just my desire for privacy or an escape from my past? And even if it was guilt, I knew I wasn’t just imagining Graden’s control issues. So maybe we’d never have made it anyway—Romy or no. The truth was, we’d probably always been doomed. My need for privacy—obsessive as it might be—would always clash with Graden’s need to control and know all. Better to accept that it had always been hopeless than believe the lie that we’d ever stood a chance of making it.

I pushed away from that depressing conclusion and found my thoughts returning to Lilah. I pulled out my “Lilah list” and went to work.

I was on my cell, wrapping up a call with my contact in the public school system, when my office phone rang.

“DA’s office,” I said.

“We got something on the bank video,” Bailey said.

“Something—as in a view of the killer?”

“No.” Bailey sighed.

“Then we’re stuck with Lilah.”

“Yeah. We’ve hit every place within camera range.”

I was already in a lousy mood, and this news didn’t help—even if I hadn’t really expected the bank video to give us the stabber. “Why don’t you bring it over?”

“Thought you might want to come watch it here,” Bailey replied. “It’s on your way home, and we could grab a drink after…”

It
was
on my way home, and ordinarily I’d have been on board with the plan. But now I was suspicious. Was she purposely trying to get me into the station? This was the second time she’d suggested it today. On the other hand, both occasions made sense, so maybe I was just being paranoid? Either way, I wasn’t taking the bait.

“I need to finish up some work here,” I replied tightly. Even little lies didn’t come easy with Bailey or Toni. “Why don’t you bring it here and then we can go back to the hotel for a drink?”

I knew that over drinks, I was going to have to tell her about Graden. For all I knew, he’d already jumped back into the dating pool. I didn’t want Bailey to find out from someone else. Of course, this meant I had to come up with a decent reason for the breakup, and so far I hadn’t thought of anything that’d float. Or, to be completely accurate, anything at all.

Bailey paused a beat, but she agreed. “Be there in ten.”