Time of Departure (10 page)

“Black, no sugar.”

I pushed back from the desk. “Thanks. Maybe I shouldn't. It'll keep me awake.”

“I thought you were going for an all-nighter.”

Startled, I checked my watch. It was after one in the morning. “Hell, I have to work tomorrow!”

“You can sleep in the guest room if you don't feel like driving.”

I thought about the look I'd seen in his eyes a few moments earlier. “I don't think that's a good idea.”

“Suit yourself.” If he was disappointed, he didn't show it.

The aroma of the coffee enticed me. “Maybe a few sips,” I said, and reached for the mug.

Marc rolled his chair over and sat across from me. He checked the label on the binder. “You've covered a lot of ground.”

“Just scanning. I see thousands of words, but not many facts.” I leaned forward. “Tell me the truth, Marc. I'm a seven-year lawyer. I have no deep experience in conducting criminal investigations, just criticizing them, which hasn't made me a lot of friends in the police. Why are you so sure I'm the one who can break this case?”

He thought for a moment. “Call it instinct. I've watched you … in court. You're good. You're thorough. And you're tough.”

I eyed him. “I've seen you in my courtroom exactly once. There's something you're not telling me. Something important.”

His silence told me I was right.

“What is it?” I demanded.

“Something you need to discover for yourself.”

The man was exasperating. I flared. I waved a hand, taking in the room. “One word from me, and CID takes all this away! You know that, don't you?”

His facial expression shut down, closing me out. “That's up to you,” he said stiffly. He got up from his chair and left the room.

 

13

Court was in session, and I was hating every minute of it.

Specifically, I despised the judge. He was tall and bony, with a narrow face, long nose, and a pair of small eyes embedded like raisins below his bushy eyebrows. He swept into his courtroom like a comic opera grandee, wearing his robe, a pair of god-awful oxblood dress shoes shined to a mirror finish, and a perpetually sour expression. Of course, his appearance would have been irrelevant had he been a man of evenness and courtesy. Regrettably, he was not. His angular presence came complete with an oversized affection for his own intellect. To some degree, that may have been the result of his election to the bench at a relatively young age, encouraging him to believe his own campaign propaganda. Whatever the reason, according to his haggard and much-harassed clerk, any reversal of his judgments invariably elicited a braying rehearsal of foulmouthed invective against “those pygmies squatting on the Court of Appeals.”

Altogether, His Honor Judge Theodore P. Barlow was a thoroughly dislikable man.

But … the fact remained that, whatever the reasons behind the man's acerbic disposition, he was the judge and I was the lowly prosecuting attorney. I was obliged to veil my true opinion of the arrogant bastard behind the polite rituals of courtroom courtesy.

Today's hearing had been another example of Barlow's infamous dawn raids. We had convened at eight o'clock sharp. The judge took perverted pleasure in imposing early morning starts on attorneys—no doubt so he could ruin their days before they even got started.

I sat at the counsel table with Tracy Collins, our office's visibly confused young intern, studiously concealing my thoughts. Behind my bland expression, I was able to enjoy at least a moment of immature satisfaction. Because of me, Barlow was sitting straight-backed on his dais, presenting the packed courtroom with a spectacle of undisguised judicial rage.

At the other table, a rat-faced defense attorney from Live Oak named Morris Pascoe was whispering to a pockmarked lug in an orange jumpsuit. His client had beaten his own brother half to death with a crystal vase. Fortunately for the victim, the vase hadn't shattered. Unfortunately for him, he'd sustained a fractured skull and two cracked vertebrae in his neck.

“I'll give my ruling at eight o'clock tomorrow morning!” Barlow glared at me as he rapped his gavel. He slammed his bench book closed.

The bailiff stepped forward, nervously cleared his throat, and ordered, “All rise!” Barlow swept off the bench and vanished into his chambers.

As I started packing my briefcase, I noticed Marc standing near the back of the courtroom.

“What was that?” Tracy asked.

“He hates it when lawyers prove him wrong.”

“He was badgering you! He was insulting.”

“He hates it even more when female lawyers prove him wrong.”

“It's not fair! It's like you had two defense lawyers against you! I thought the judge was supposed to be—!”

“This isn't law school, Tracy. If you want to practice in the criminal courts, you're going to need a thick skin. I'm afraid you'll have to get used to it.”

The young woman subsided into offended silence.

I finished packing my briefcase. When I looked up, Marc was gone.

He wasn't waiting in the lobby, either.

I asked Tracy to take my briefcase back to the office.

“Where are you going?”

“I'm making a detour. It's time I paid a little visit to CID.”

*   *   *

Lieutenant Ted Lipinski's office was located in a boxed-off corner on the CID floor. It had no outside windows, but two walls were paneled with tinted glass so he could survey the array of desks and cubicles in the squad room.

When I knocked and entered, I was presented with an interesting tableau.

Jeff Geiger was slouching in a chair with his gusseted loafers propped on his boss's cluttered desk. He was decked out in his customary microfiber cool duds, flipping through a glossy skin magazine and listening to what sounded like a ball game on a smartphone positioned on the desk near his feet.

Lipinski was standing in some kind of pose behind his desk. His sports jacket was a nauseating shade of green. He appeared to be admiring his reflection in the tinted glass. Quite apart from the ridiculous jacket, Lipinski's reflection was not one to admire. He was a doughy specimen in his late fifties, with just enough sagging skin and broken veins in his face to corroborate a lifetime of unhealthy habits. Considering the man was a contemporary of Marc Hastings, the contrast between the two could not have been more striking.

I noticed a tag dangling from one sleeve of his jacket. It bore a marked-down price notation in red.

“So, Lieutenant,” I said as I shut the door behind me, “I see you're leaving the job.”

Wary eyes studied me. “What are you talking about?”

“Judging from the jacket, you're going into real estate.”

“Toldja, boss!” Geiger piped in as he lowered his feet from the desk and killed the game on his phone.

Lipinski looked affronted. “The woman at the store said it looked good.” He aimed the response at me.

“This woman … would she happen to be the one who sold it to you?”

He scowled.

There was a metal-framed chair jammed against the wall to my right. I pulled it up and sat down. “Before you run off and join the Million Dollar Club, I'd like you to tell me what's going on with those two skeletons.”

“Thought you were here to talk about your own case,” Lipinski said. He dropped into the lopsided chair behind the desk. “That mugging. Or whatever it was.”

This man really is an insect.…

“What it was,” I replied mildly, “was something more than a mugging. But I know perfectly well how to write a witness statement. I'll e-mail it to Jeff. Right now, I want to know where we are on this one.”

“Where
we
are?” Lipinski's voice notched up as if I'd just issued a threat rather than merely asked a question. “It's not your case yet, Counselor! And it probably never will be!”

After today's session with Judge Barlow, I wasn't going to be fazed by Lipinski's saber rattling. I was about to highlight a few facts of life—for example, our relative positions in the food chain—when Geiger spoke up.

“We trolled through the Jordan file, looking for witnesses to reinterview,” he said in a placating tone. “Almost everyone's either moved or dead. We think the guy she was planning to marry is living in Iowa. The state police up there are trying to track him down.”

“Those bodies were found because of a road-widening project. The DOT's attorneys probably used their eminent domain authority to condemn that property and take it for public use. Have you tracked down the former owner?”

“Yes.”

“Batty old broad!” Lipinski snorted.

I ignored Lipinski and focused on Geiger. “Tell me.”

“Her name's Anna Fenwick. Lives down near Ocala. She told us she hadn't been near the property in over ten years. Sold it to the highways guys last year. Accepted their first offer.”

Lipinski interjected. “Take it from us … the old woman's loopy!”

“What do you mean?”

“Because she's weird! Kept looking at me, calling me ‘you poor dear,' saying I should be drinking some kind of herbal tea. ‘Gabble' or something.”

“GABA?”

“Yeah! What is it?”

“It's Japanese. They say it reduces the effects of alcohol.”

“Alcohol?” His face reddened and his eyes slid away from mine.

I changed the subject. “What about the Jane Doe?”

“No match on the dentals,” Geiger answered. “Snead's doing the DNA workups on both bodies, but it's not like the cops back then went around bagging victims' hairbrushes. No one was using DNA in 1978. We're going to have to track down family members and get blood samples.”

“Considering where she was found, the odds are that Jane Doe was one of the eight.”

“The dentals we have don't match,” Geiger said. “So she'd have to be one of the Spanish girls.”

“I don't know … those girls were both in their early twenties. Terry told me this girl was a lot older.”

“He could be wrong on that,” Geiger countered. “Said so himself.”

“She's probably one that was never reported,” Lipinski said. “A hooker nobody missed.”

“Okay,” I said, responding to Geiger. “Say Terry's wrong. Depending on whether she's Castaño or Ruiz, that would mean she was buried either two months, or more than a year, after she went missing. Either that or she was buried somewhere else and then dug up later and moved. None of which makes sense.”

Lipinski eyed me suspiciously. “You seem to know a lot about this case.” His expression darkened further. “What is this, Counselor? Some kind of test?”

My questions
were
some kind of test, but I wasn't going to tell Lipinski that. “I've just been doing my reading, Lieutenant.”

“Reading what? The investigation files are all stored here.”

I decided to understate the truth. “Our office has copies of all the old missing person reports.”

“Why?” he badgered. “Who had them?”

I had to think quickly. “I guess Roy Wells. They were in his filing cabinet.”

I was expecting more cross-examination from Lipinski, but Geiger spoke first.

“We do have one small problem: A box of reports is missing.”

“Missing? As in … misplaced?”

“As in, gone. There were twenty-six boxes, all numbered. We can't find box eighteen. We've had three people searching the archives and the property room.”

Lipinski's chair creaked as he rolled it forward and leaned his elbows on the desk. He growled, “Ya know what I think?”

“No. What do you think?”

“Hastings took it! I can feel it.”

“Hastings?” I played dumb. “You mean—?”

“The guy who saved your ass the other night! Worked here in CID, back in the late '70s. Quit before his pension locked in. Moved up north somewhere.” His lip curled. “I always thought there was something fishy about him. And now, right after we find the bodies, he shows up at the morgue! What does that tell ya?”

“That maybe this case has been bothering him all these years.”

“Yeah? Then why resign when the investigation's still going on?”

“Maybe,” I suggested, staring back at him, “because some of his colleagues started investigating
him
?”

“Who told you that?”

“Sam Grayson.”

“Oh.” He toned it down. “Well, there were some indicators. Nothing you could put your finger on. He knew the last girl. There was some talk, like maybe they'd dated at one time. All we know is the Jordan girl disappears and not long after, Hastings up and quits! He doesn't just transfer out of CID. He leaves the police department and then he leaves town. And after he quits … guess what? No more missing girls!”

“What does that prove? Sam told me Hastings was cleared.”

“He had alibis. But I always thought there was something weird about the guy. And why, after thirty years, does he just happen to be in town, and why does he just happen to have copies of those girls' dental charts?”

“Were the original charts in that missing box?”

A pause.

“No.”

“No?”

“We found ours later,” Geiger said. “But by then, Snead didn't need them.”

I almost laughed.

I stood up. I looked at Jeff Geiger—young, halfway intelligent, but exhibiting none of the drive of a man who wants to be all he can be. I took in his skin magazine, pointedly left open on the desk, displaying some anonymous temptress's crotch in all its high-def glory. I looked at Lipinski, squatting toadlike behind his desk, clad in that absurd jacket—an aging mediocrity, tired, defensive, and hostile.

I'm sure the expression on my face revealed my low opinion, but I couldn't resist driving the message home. “Maybe you boneheads should get off your butts and get to work before this Hastings guy completely shows you up!”