Act of Betrayal (15 page)

More than once she had thought Merlin might be an intelligent computer program rather than a human being. But the insight offered and compassion dispensed made that seem unlikely.

What’s the buzz, Keypunch?

The familiar greeting appearing on her screen warmed her. Merlin could always be counted on to simply be there when she needed him.

Merlin, so much has happened I hardly know where to start.

Tell me everything. I need my soap opera fix. Lay bare your soul and we’ll go from there. Lay bare whatever else you wish, too.

You dirty old man. You ought to be evicted from cyberspace.

She told him about Rick’s death, her time with Schultz and his enigmatic phone call, and the girl’s death. After some hesitation and gentle prodding by Merlin, she told him about her visit to Schultz’s house and the discovery of the empty bottles.

Was it good quality? The booze, that is.

Dewar’s. What has that got to do with anything?

Just checking to see if he has good taste. Wouldn’t want you hanging out with a cheap drunk.

Merlin!

Yes. Sorry. That was uncalled for. So do you believe Schultz or not?

PJ closed her eyes. At least he hadn’t asked if she loved Schultz or not. Or perhaps it was the same thing.

I want to believe him,
she typed,
but everything’s stacked against him.

My kind of poker game. What are you doing to find Rick’s murderer?

She described everything her team had gone through.

Very pedestrian.

What’s your idea, oh great crime-solver?

It’s about time you recognized my abilities. Raise up thine eyes from thine own concerns and look about thee.

Merlin, the biblical prophet. I can do better getting an old movie at Blockbuster.

Very funny. Good to know you still have that lightning wit.

Cut the crap and tell me what you’re thinking.

Oh, how unladylike. I’ll have to tell your mommy.

PJ nearly broke her connection. Sometimes Merlin fell into a loop of mock insults, and she wasn’t able to get anything useful out of him. She waited him out.

Oh, all right. You ‘re not thinking in a synergistic way. Look for connections, even ones that don’t seem to make sense on the surface.

I’m all ears.

Do you think somebody is out to get Schultz?

I’m not sure,
PJ typed.
He thinks so. He said something on the phone about being framed.

Consider this: a detective who arrests killers suddenly has his life turned upside down. A prominent prosecuting attorney who brought killers to justice is wiped out. Key word in both sentences: killers.

Victor Rheinhardt.

I read the news, cutie.

Do you think they’re related?
PJ’s eyes were wide.

No, but their deaths might be.

I hadn’t thought of that,
PJ typed, letting his remark slip by.

That’s what I’m good for, the Big Picture. Separately, they each have a lot of bad guys in their pasts. Go for the intersection points in their careers.

I need to get on this.

Not before you get your list. The word for the day is “connection “ and the list is mercifully short.

1. Connections can be physical, emotional, or spiritual. Physical ones are the most fun.

2. Revenge is a form of connection that isn’t on the plus side of the personality ledger.

3. Soap operas = tangled connections.

4. My stomach’s grumbling and I’d like to connect with a few enchiladas right about now.

5. The ultimate connection is that we are all made of star stuff.

Take care, Keypunch.

PJ didn’t know much about the Rheinhardt case, certainly not any insider details. Ordinarily, Schultz would be her conduit for information about cases that didn’t belong to CHIP. She couldn’t rely on that. In fact, she couldn’t even reach Schultz. She had no idea if he’d contact her again or not.

She was on her own, and she told herself she’d better start dealing with it.

Then she realized that it wasn’t really Rheinhardt’s death she needed to learn more about, but his life—specifically, where it crossed Schultz’s. PJ had one contact she had developed all on her own. She checked the clock on her desk. Would he be there on a weeknight at 9:00 P.M.?

Probably. It’s not like he has a wild social life.

Gathering up a few things from her desk, she set out toward the Audiovisual Department in search of Louie Bertram.

The AV lab door was closed, and PJ heard loud music coming from inside. She recognized it as
Mars, Bringer of War,
from the suite
The Planets,
by Gustav Hoist. Most people knew it as the music from the movie
2001: A Space Odyssey,
but PJ was familiar with it because her father used to play it at full volume when he finished his editing work for the day. When the arthritis in her father’s fingers got worse, he took to working from home so that others wouldn’t see him painfully pecking out articles or working with the layout boards. Sometimes PJ typed for him. Other days she’d be doing her homework or reading, and suddenly the music would come booming through the walls of the house, indicating another edition put to bed. It had startled more than one of her young friends who happened to be visiting at the time. She smiled as she heard the familiar music from the lab.

PJ knocked on the door, but had little hope of being heard.

After a minute of ineffectual knocking, she tried the knob. It turned, so she opened the door slightly. Peering in, she saw Louie, one hand moving his wheelchair back and forth in time to the thunderous beat, the other raised and holding an imaginary conductor’s baton. His eyes were open but unfocused and his face practically glowed. It was a private moment, and she didn’t want to intrude, but she couldn’t wait to get started on researching any possible connection between Rick’s death and Rheinhardt’s. Quietly she closed the door and went to an office a few doors down, far enough so she couldn’t hear the music, in search of a phone. She dialed his number, chastising herself for not doing that in the first place.

She hoped he’d see the flashing light on the phone.

The phone was picked up on the tenth ring. The background was silent. He’d turned the music off.

“Bertram.”

“Louie, it’s PJ. I’m surprised to find you in. I was going to leave you a message.” She kept her voice low and the phone close to her face. For all she knew, Louie could hear her through several dividing walls. The man had an uncanny knack for all things audio.

“Always glad to talk with you, PJ. What can I do for you?” he said. She knew his lashes would be brushing his cheeks shyly as he talked. He gave no indication that he knew she was on the same floor of the building as he was.

“Actually I’m still in the building, Louie. Could I come over and talk with you?”

“Sure.”

“See you in a few minutes,” PJ said. She hung up, waited in the dark office for several minutes, then went to his door and knocked.

“Come in,” Louie said cheerfully.

She pulled up a chair so she wouldn’t tower over Louie. As a short person herself, she didn’t care much for speaking to people’s chests, and she imagined Louie didn’t like talking to their belly buttons.

To others Louie Bertram was an extension of his audiovisual equipment. Because he didn’t relate easily to most people, he became invisible to them, just another one of the levers and knobs to twist or pull when A/V expertise was needed. From the first time she’d met him, PJ had tried to penetrate his shell of isolation. She had been rewarded with friendship, tentative at first, then cemented when she called upon him for help. He’d gotten in trouble once by following her requests, but it didn’t matter to him. Friends helped out, didn’t they?

He was neatly dressed in a long-sleeved blue dress shirt, open at the neck. Probably he’d worn a tie during the day and loosened up after hours. He wore black trousers and freshly shined black leather dress shoes. From the knee down his legs were spindly and twisted. As his trousers draped against them, she could make out their shape. He was about forty years old, with an unfortunate problem of overly hairy ears but a dazzling smile that she couldn’t help returning. After a few minutes in Louie’s presence, the ears didn’t seem so bad.

“What can I do for you, PJ? A tape enhanced? Voices compared?”

Louie had started out calling her Dr. Gray when they first met, but she had gently insisted on PJ. It was that simple show of warmth that had started a fledgling relationship.

“Louie, I need something outside your area. But I thought you could point me in the right direction.”

His smile faltered for a moment. “I’ll do what I can.”

“I need to know how to search old case files, pulling out ones that match compound criteria. It’s important.” PJ hadn’t had the need to examine archival computer records, and therefore didn’t have the access code or experience with the database search. She could poke around and probably hack in, but she knew that any security program worth its salt would record her initial attempts as unauthorized accesses. She’d leave a record, and Wall or someone else would be down on her head in the morning about it. Unless the idea panned out, she didn’t want to go public with it. She had resolved to give Schultz his three days, and she felt that she was sneaking around behind his back—which of course she was. She could obtain and use someone else’s ID, but she didn’t want to risk having anyone else blamed for unauthorized accesses they had nothing to do with.

She could also wait and make a request through appropriate channels in the morning. She was assigned to the Rick Schultz case, and it would be a legitimate request that wouldn’t garner any special notice. But her sense of urgency wouldn’t hold still for that.

Louie’s face lit up. “Oh, no problem. That would be Georgina.”

PJ sat back, relieved. He hadn’t questioned her reason for wanting the information, and Louie seemed to know everyone. “Great. Let’s go see her.”

“One small problem. She works days and always goes home right on time. She’s got two boys under five years old.”

“Oh,” PJ said, disappointed.

“I could probably get her to come in if I went over and stayed with the boys,” he said. “They’re asleep by now, and wouldn’t even know their mom was gone. And if they did wake up, they know me from the time I rewired her furnace and helped her put in smoke alarms.”

PJ wondered how Louie could possibly help install smoke alarms on the ceiling, then moved on to another thought:
Was there anyone around here that Louie hadn’t helped out at one time or another?

When she thought about it further, she realized that all of his contacts were among the support personnel, technicians, or administrative staff, not the officers. There was an entire network of people who worked within, around, and underneath the visible structure of law enforcement that the public saw as “the police.” They were civilians, like herself, highly dedicated to their work.

And Louie was the entry gate.

“I couldn’t ask you to do that,” PJ said. “I’ll just wait until morning.”

“Let me give her a call and see if she goes for it.”

PJ shrugged. She felt she was imposing too much, but she was eager to see if the connections idea had any merit.

Louie rolled over to a phone. He had a short conversation with his back to her, so she couldn’t make out much. Then he spun around.

“It’s a done deal. I’ll leave now for her house. It’s only a twenty-minute drive, so she’ll be here in less than an hour.”

“Louie, I don’t know what to say. Thanks, and if there’s anything I can do for you sometime, you just let me know.” She realized she had volunteered to enter Louie’s web of contacts, and might be called upon sometime to do a favor for someone else in the department she didn’t even know well. Louie was the controller who sat at the center, working the contacts for the benefit of all. He reminded her of Merlin. It wasn’t the first time she had called upon Louie for help—with this request, she’d used up her freebies. Sooner or later something would bounce back her way, and she hoped that she’d be up to the task.

Georgina arrived as promised, and sought out PJ in her office. She had an authorization form for the release of archival information, which she had PJ sign and backdate with a time of early that morning. Georgina was covering herself in case anyone questioned the search, which was highly unlikely.

Half an hour later, PJ sat at her desk with a stack of printouts of eighty-nine homicide case summaries in which both Schultz and Rheinhardt had played a role during their careers. She had decided to limit the search to homicides only, whether they were successfully prosecuted or not. She reasoned that if the defendant was found guilty, he or she—and there were only a handful of women defendants in the stack—could have served their time, been released from prison, and be bent on revenge. If the defendant was not found guilty, there could still be a vengeful party—a relative or loved one of the victim who felt that justice had not been served.

PJ marveled at the fact that Schultz had been involved in eighty-nine homicides brought to trial—and those were just the ones that Rheinhardt had prosecuted himself, mostly from earlier in his career when he went to court more often in person. Schultz’s career actually included about two hundred and sixty homicides in his entire thirty-three years, but only eighty-nine had close personal involvement with Rheinhardt. The most recent one was six years ago, the oldest twenty-three, from before the time when Rheinhardt was elected to the top spot and was a peon in the prosecuting attorney’s office. She fixed a pot of coffee and began reading the first summary, hoping that something would leap off the page and strike her between the eyes.

She also worried that she had taken the wrong approach, and there was nothing to be found in the summaries that would lead her to the person who killed Rick Schultz and Victor Rheinhardt and—if Schultz was telling the truth—had also run little Caroline Bussman down on the sidewalk. The whole thing could be a colossal waste of time.