Guilty as Sin (31 page)

Zen garden.

Satisfied with the task, she pushed her chair into its cubbyhole, dug in her coat pockets for her gloves. Her mind was already halfway out the building, wondering how much snow had fallen in the two hours since she had come back. Four to six inches was predicted. The road back from Campion had already begun to drift over in spots.

She dug her keys out of her purse, slung the bag over her shoulder, and started for the door just as the telephone rang.

"What now?" she muttered on a groan, fearing the worst behind the screen of annoyance.

"Ellen North," she said into the receiver.

Nothing.

"Hello?"

It was Monday night all over again—the heavy sense of a presence on the other end of the line, a silence that seemed ominous. Her stomach churned as the line from last night's call played through the back of her mind. "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."

"If you've got something to say, then say it," she snapped. "I've got better things to do with my time."

A breath. Soft and long. It seemed to come out of the receiver and curl around her throat like a snake. "Ellen . . ."

The whisper was little more than thought. Androgynous. As thin as gauze.

"Who is this?"

"Working late, Ellen?"

She slammed the receiver down. Mitch had set up a caller-ID tracer on her home telephone, but there was nothing on the office phones, and she questioned the legality of installing anything.

The call had come in on her direct line, a number that was not listed in any public directory. Did that mean the caller was someone she knew or someone who had been in her office without her knowledge? Business hours were long over. Had the caller caught her here by chance or was he

aware hers was the only office light on in the building?

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. . . ."

"Working late, Ellen?"

She cast a glance at her window. Even with the blinds drawn, the light I
 
would be visible from outside. Lifting the blinds away from the glass at one side, she tried to peer out, but there was nothing to see except the weird mix of night and swirling snow.

"Your boss needs to have a word with someone about security. This is a highly volatile case you've got here. Anything might happen. . . ."

"Ellen . . . you're a likely target. . . ."

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. ..."

The blinds clattered back against the window glass. Ellen grabbed up the receiver and punched the number for the sheriffs department in the adjacent building. For two years she had worked in this building without fear. She had never felt a need for a security guard, had never turned a hair walking the halls alone at night. That sense of calm was one of the things she had come here looking for. In Deer Lake she could walk her dog along the lake at night, she could leave her bedroom window open and go to sleep with a cool fall breeze caressing her face. Now she was calling for a sheriff's deputy to escort her to her car.

The deputy who appeared at the office door five minutes later was Ed Qualey. Pushing sixty, he was lean and sinewy with a pewter-gray flattop and piercing blue eyes. He had testified in court for Ellen from time to time. A good, solid cop.

"I hope I didn't pull you away from anything too important," she said as they headed together down the dimly lit hall.

Qualey shook his head. "Naw, accident reports is all. Nothing much more than fender benders going on around here tonight. I'm on light duty, anyway. Banged up a knee playing hockey. I guess all the action tonight was over in Campion, huh?"

"Mmm."

"Well, I don't blame you for wanting a walk to your car. Everyone's a little edgy these days. A person just don't know what to expect anymore."

"I used to have a motto," Ellen said. " 'Expect the worse, hope for the best.' "

Qualey frowned as they started down the stairs. "We're sure getting more of the one than the other lately. You parked on the side?"

"Yes."

They cut across the rotunda, the sound of their footfalls soaring up three stories. A sharp crack rang down one of the dark corridors, and Ellen flinched, then scolded herself. The building had a century's worth of creaks and groans.

"Too bad about Denny Enberg," Qualey said. "He was a decent sort for a defense attorney. Everyone says it looked like suicide."

"Looked like. We'll see what the ME has to say."

Qualey hummed a noncommittal note. It struck Ellen that people would have much preferred Dennis to have stuck a gun in his mouth and ended his own life, as terrible as that would have been. They would rather he had been so crushed by the weight of his problems that he saw no ther way out, because then the madness was contained to one man. Something to lament, but not contagious. The alternative was vulnerability, and no one wanted any part of that.

Ellen's Bonneville was the only car in the courthouse lot. Sixty yards in the other direction, adjacent to the sheriff's department and county jail, a dozen or so vehicles were clustered together like a herd of horses, snow mounting on their backs.

The wind swept in from the northwest, wrapping itself around the contours of the buildings, creating small powdery-white cyclones that skittered across the unplowed parking lot. The sidewalk had disappeared. Streetlights took on the hazy glow of tiny moons. The streets themselves were all but deserted. Residents had chosen to hole up for the evening, to wait for the ten o'clock news and the predictions for the morning commute to work and school.

"Thanks, Ed," Ellen said, waving him off as they neared the car. I
 
"No problem. Stay warm." Hunching his shoulders, he started up the slight grade toward the sheriffs-department entrance.

Ellen hit the button on her remote that unlocked her car doors and brought the interior lights on. Her gaze swept the area, seeing it in a far more critical light than she had when she had parked here in Rudy's personal spot two hours ago. The spot that was close to the building, that had looked so handy, that shortened her walk through the weather, now struck her as a stupid choice. Better to have parked in the second
 
row, away from the building—where shadows and shrubbery could offer cover—and under a security light.

Still, no deadly figure darted out of the darkness along the building, She had almost begun to relax as she rounded the trunk and came up along the driver's side of the Bonneville.

The momentary letdown made the instant burst of fear seem all the more extreme. A gasp caught in her throat as she jumped back, the deep,
 
snow grabbing at her boots like chilled quicksand. Scratched into the paint of the driver's-side door in large, irregular letters was a single ugly word—BITCH.

CHAPTER
 
18

The weapon of choice was a switchblade knife, conveniently left behind—plunged to its hilt in the left front tire. "There won't be no patching that," Officer Dietz said. Lonnie Dietz was fifty, a decent officer with a bad Moe Howard toupee, which was covered tonight by a towering fake fur hat that made him look as if he had a pack of weasels nesting on his head. "You got a spare?"

"Just that little doughnut thing," Ellen said, hugging herself, her eyes on the knife.

The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. . . .

"You have any ideas who might have done this, Ms. North?" Officer Noga asked. Noogie Noga was roughly the size of a grizzly bear. A native of Samoa, he had come to Minnesota on a football scholarship and stayed even after a bum knee had ended his NFL hopes.

Ellen shrugged. "Specifically? No. But I've been getting some odd phone calls."

"Related to the Wright case?"

She nodded. "I just got another one before I came down. That's why I had Ed here walk me down."

"What did the caller say?" Noga asked, pencil poised against his notepad.

"For a long time there was nothing, then he said my name, asked if I was working late."

The three cops looked at one another blankly, and frustration knotted in Ellen's chest. She couldn't blame them for thinking she was overreacting. Stated flatly, the call lost all its darker, disturbing qualities.

"The call that came last night after two in the morning said, 'Let's kill all the lawyers,' " she added, hugging herself a little tighter. She felt as if she were being split in two, half of her the cool professional, the other half a panicking creature.

"Shi—oot," Noga muttered as the import hit. Everyone on the job had heard the gruesome details of Dennis Enberg's death.

"But you don't have any idea who's making these calls?" Dietz asked.

"I can't recognize the voice. It's too soft, indistinct. I'm not even sure if it's a man or a woman."

"And no one's threatened you outright?" Qualey asked.

"There are plenty of people unhappy with me for prosecuting Garrett Wright, but none of them have made an overt threat to my face."

She listed the names for Noga, the faces floating through her head like puzzle pieces. Wright was out on bail, but he would never risk such a foolish gesture himself, and she doubted Costello had let him out of his sight. Then there was Todd Childs, and Christopher Priest. Karen Wright. Paul Kirkwood, who blamed her for Grabko's decision on bail. The students who had taken up Wright's cause on the picket line in front of the courthouse.

Her confrontation with the Sci-Fi Cowboys came most vividly to mind. "Hey, you that bitch lawyer . . ." Bitch lawyer . . . BITCH. She could see Tyrell's angry face, eyes seething with hate.

She didn't want to blame the Cowboys out of hand. The whole point of the program was to show that these young men had the potential to be productive citizens. But she had worked in the system and knew too well the destruction and violence these kids were capable of. She had seen too many with no conscience and no respect for anyone or anything.

"The program has sure got a lot of press," Qualey said.

Dietz sniffed and spit a gob into the snow. "I don't care what anyone says. They're a bunch of city punks. Did you see them out here today with
 
damn rap music cranked up? We don't need their kind of trouble. If want to fear for my life walking around town, I'll go up to Minneapolis and take a stroll down Lake Street after dark."

"We'll check it out, Ms. North," Noga said. "See what we can come up with on any of those people."

He crouched down and snapped a couple of Polaroids of the damage, slipping the undeveloped photographs inside his parka.

Ellen stared at the word gouged on her car door. An angry scrawl written with a blade deadly enough to kill. The knife handle thrusting up from the tire was like a misplaced exclamation point. She shivered at the thought of what might have happened had she come out of the building alone and surprised the vandal at work.

"You'll have to have someone take care of that tire," Dietz said. "Won't happen tonight. You want a ride home?"

"I'll take her, officer."

Ellen jerked around at the sound of the voice. Brooks stood behind her, his shoulders hunched, coat collar pulled up high. He squinted against the wind and the cold and her scrutiny.

"What are you doing here?"

The annoyance in her tone didn't stop Jay from asking himself the same question. He had notes to go over and sort, and phone calls to make to pry into the past lives of Garrett Wright and his disciple Todd Childs, and he sure as hell would rather have been in his rented house making use of the fireplace tools he had picked up that afternoon than standing out in a snowstorm. But here he was.

"I heard the call on the scanner," he said. And a chill had gone through him. He tried to tell himself it was adrenaline, the excitement of a new lead, a fresh angle. Then he tried to put it off to the fact that he hadn't got warm since he'd stepped off the plane into the great white North. Then he thought of Ellen, fighting a battle because she believed in the cause, standing up beneath the burden of it with grace and courage. Ellen, alone, victimized for doing her job.

Not that she wanted him there.

She looked at him askance. "And you didn't have anything better to do than check out a simple vandalism?"

He cast a pointed look at the knife handle jutting up from her tire. I "Doesn't look so simple to me, counselor."