Ricochet (31 page)

The judge fell apart. “Oh Jesus! Where is she? What did he do to her?”

Given his emotional state, no one was brave enough to venture a guess. After a moment, Gerard walked over to him and laid a comforting hand on his shoulder. “I urge you to go home, Judge. Wait there for further word.”

“I can’t leave. Something could turn up at any moment.”

“It could, and you will be notified immediately when it does. In the meantime, there’s nothing you can do here. The detective work from this point gets tedious. We’ll go over everything again among ourselves, but basically we’ll be waiting, too. Every law enforcement agency in the state is in on the search. As soon as she’s found—”

“Stop bullshitting me, Bill,” the judge said, angrily throwing off Gerard’s hand. “You think he pushed her from the bridge. You think she’s dead, don’t you?”

Gerard kept his expression impassive. “I go by what I
know
, not by what I
think
, and right now, we know precious little. I won’t consider her dead until I see her body. It could be that Mrs. Laird was traumatized by whatever happened on that bridge. She could be wandering around in a daze. Given everything that’s taken place this week, starting with Trotter, that would be understandable. When she’s found, or comes to her senses, she’ll return home. You want to be there if she finds her way back.”

That argument seemed to penetrate when no others had. Laird nodded absently and came slowly to his feet. He let himself be guided toward the door. “I’ll walk you down and have an officer drive you home and stay there with you,” Gerard said.

“Unnecessary.”

“No argument. Napoli had a lot of enemies, so most won’t be sorry he’s dead. But it’s possible he had an ally or two. In the unlikely event that he did, I’m taking no chances and neither is Chief Taylor. You’ll have police protection until we sort all this out.” He hesitated, then said, “It goes without saying that if you hear anything from Mrs. Laird, you’ll contact us without delay.”

The judge stopped and turned to him with a frown of consternation. “I would protect Elise with my own life,” he said. He made eye contact with each of the detectives in turn. “But I would also do the right thing.”

“L
IKE HELL HE’D DO THE RIGHT THING,”
D
EE
D
EE MUTTERED
after the judge and Gerard were out of earshot. “He lied to us about Napoli in order to protect her. He may be lying now. He may know exactly what happened on that bridge.”

“I don’t think so.” Duncan was almost too weary to speak. He was certainly too exhausted to go toe to toe with DeeDee, who was wired and fidgety, partly from guzzling caffeine. She was also juiced over the startling events of the past night. Her eyes were unnaturally bright and restive as she looked over at him. “You don’t think he’s lying?”

“He may be lying about some aspects of this, but I don’t think he knows what happened on that bridge.”

“Who the hell does, except Napoli and the broad.” Worley had gnawed his toothpick into splinters and was patting down his pockets in search of the cigarettes he’d quit smoking two years ago. In times of stress, he reverted to the conditioned motions if not to the habit. “One of them is dead and the other one’s disappeared.”

“Which doesn’t distinguish it from most of our cases,” DeeDee remarked. “Name me one time we’ve found the doer standing over the do-ee with the weapon at his feet and his hands in the air.”

“Yeah, but in this case…”

Worley let the rest of his thought go unspoken as Gerard returned, saying as he came in, “Judge Laird is on his way home. Unhappily, but obediently.”

“What about the media?”

“They swarmed us. TV, newspaper, the whole shebang is outside. We gave them the standard ‘no comment,’ but soon we’ll have to make some kind of statement.”

“Will you clear that statement with Judge Laird and the chief?”

Gerard nodded. “In fact, Chief Taylor will probably want to conduct the press conference himself. Judge Laird is a respected community leader, high-profile public servant, a man with strong convictions and an unimpeachable reputation for fairness. He has the support of every law enforcement agency, and those agencies are working round the clock to locate Mrs. Laird.” He finished with a sigh. “So forth.”

“What will he say about Mrs. Laird being in the company of a disreputable character like Napoli in the middle of the night?” DeeDee persisted.

“Don’t have the vaguest,” Gerard replied. “It’ll be the public information office’s problem to give that particular element the right spin. My problem —
our
problem — is locating Mrs. Laird so we can solve this thing.”

“Mrs. Laird or her body,” Worley said.

Duncan’s heart constricted. Thankfully DeeDee jumped on Worley’s statement, freeing him of having to comment immediately. “Are you sold on the scenario you laid out for the judge?”

“Not entirely,” Worley admitted.

“I’m glad to hear it,” she said. “Because I think that if Napoli had been shot during a struggle over the pistol, Mrs. Laird would have dropped it in horror and called for help. I mean, wouldn’t you? Even if you were in a struggle for your life, and the other guy wound up getting shot, wouldn’t you try to get aid immediately and explain the circumstances under which he was shot?”

“That’s what she did with Trotter,” Duncan observed quietly. “We didn’t believe her story. Maybe she’s twice shy.”

“Which brings me to point B,” DeeDee said, undeterred. “If a person is involved in an accidental fatal shooting once in a lifetime, it’s bizarre, a quirk of fate, damned rotten luck. It’s happened to this lady
twice
in one
week
? Give me a break.”

“Dunk is talking out both sides of his mouth, DeeDee,” Worley said. “Your conclusion is the one we drew, too. We talked about it before we got here. Dunk and I agree that if Mrs. Laird was able to call for help after Napoli was shot, she would have called.”

“ ‘Able’ meaning what, exactly?” she asked.

“ ‘Able’ meaning alive,” Worley replied. “Or ‘able’ meaning innocent of any wrongdoing.”

“Option one would indicate that Napoli pushed her off the bridge at the exact instant she shot him.” DeeDee’s frown dismissed that as a remote possibility. “I’ll go with option two. Mrs. Laird gained control of the pistol, backed Napoli into the driver’s seat of the car, and plugged him in the stomach for all the trouble he’s caused her in recent months. She then fled on foot—”

“One foot,” Duncan interjected.

“—taking the pistol with her. Or throwing it in the river.”

“She commits murder and leaves a shoe behind for evidence?” Duncan said, angrily coming to his feet. “She ‘fled’ without taking her handbag, credit cards, cash?”

“Well, what do you think, then?” DeeDee fired at him.

“I—”

He closed his mouth with a soft click of his teeth. He didn’t know what he thought.

He didn’t want to think of Elise being so coldhearted that she had fatally shot two men in the space of a week to protect her marriage and lifestyle with Cato Laird.

But it was even worse to think of her foundering in the river before being dragged under by the wake of an oceangoing vessel.

Neither could he endure thoughts of her pleading for his help, and his refusing it, hours before she died by one violent means or another.

If they thoroughly analyzed that scrap of fabric from her skirt, they would find human skin cells, and at least some of them could belong to him. He recollected grabbing handfuls of that soft fabric and bunching it up around her waist, out of his way.

If they checked his shoes, they’d find gritty gray powder on the soles. He could tell Worley exactly where to find a sidewalk in such disrepair that it was crumbling into dust.

The matching gray residue found on Napoli’s shoes was proof that he had also been in that neighborhood last night. No way did Duncan believe that to be a coincidence. But what was eating at him was this: Did Elise have an appointment to meet Napoli after her interlude with him in the abandoned house? Or had Napoli abducted her when she returned to her car, and forced her to drive to the middle of the bridge?

The car was in the
inbound
lane. Where had they been?

Was she an innocent victim? Or guilty of double murder?

These questions warranted some serious brainstorming with his colleagues. Knowing Elise’s actions before she met with Napoli was the kind of clue-worthy information that he often wrung from material witnesses who were reluctant to disclose it, fearing either retribution or exposure of their own misdeeds.

Now, he was that material witness. He was withholding pertinent information. His coworkers were watching him, Gerard and Worley with puzzlement, DeeDee with dangerous perception.

He should tell them about him and Elise now. He should come clean, as he had resolved to do. He should admit to what had happened mere hours before Napoli died bloody and Elise pulled a vanishing act.

But if he did,
if he did
, he would be immediately removed from the case. He would probably be fired and possibly jailed, but by one means or another, he would be banished from the police department. Confession would amount to abandoning Elise.

He couldn’t do that, not now, not after last night. Whether she was already dead or still alive, he had to learn what had happened to her. If she was the perpetrator, the killer of two men, he would see to it that she was brought to justice, and own up to his own guilt as well. If it was determined that she was the victim, he wouldn’t stop looking for her until she was rescued, or her body was recovered.

But in order to carry out either pledge, he must remain at the epicenter of the investigation. That was essential.

The others were waiting for an answer. He plopped down into a swivel chair, grumbling, “I don’t know what to think.”

In lieu of a cigarette, Worley put a fresh toothpick in his mouth. DeeDee took a sip of room-temperature Diet Coke. Gerard was the one to break the charged silence.

“I’ve been thinking about the timing,” he said. “The housekeeper left Mrs. Laird at home around ten thirty. Dothan called a while ago to tell me that he places the time of Napoli’s death somewhere between two thirty and three. Where were he and Mrs. Laird for that four hours in between, and what were they doing?”

Well, Duncan could account for an hour of her time.

Had she met Napoli immediately after he’d left her in the abandoned house? Or later?

“If we knew where they were returning from, we might know how they’d filled that time,” DeeDee said.

“I’ve got a problem with his being shot outside the car,” Worley said. “The highway patrolman told me that the car door was closed. He remembers that clearly because he knocked on the driver’s window before he took a closer look inside and saw that Napoli was dead.”

“Okay,” DeeDee said. “What’s your point?”

“Who closed the car door?”

“Napoli,” she returned.

“He couldn’t have,” Duncan said, realizing what Worley was getting at. “There was no blood on the door handle or the panel.”

“Right,” Worley said. “Napoli’s hands were bloody.”

“So he was shot inside the car, and either the shooter closed the door, or the shooter was inside the car with him,” Gerard said.

“Either way leaves us with yet another mystery,” Worley said. “Why did savvy, ass-saving Napoli just sit there and let the shooter reach around him to put a bullet square in the spot where it would do the most damage?”

“Especially when a shot to the head would have been much easier and just as deadly,” Duncan said.

“But that would also have been messy,” DeeDee said. “People driving by would have seen the gore on the windows.”

“Besides, a shot to the head is quick, probably painless.” They all looked toward Worley for elaboration. “What I mean is, when you go for a gut shot, you’re going for a fatal wound, but a slow one. You want to give your victim time to think, Holy shit, I’m gonna fucking die!”

“I think our lady is capable of that,” DeeDee said. When nobody responded, she looked first at Worley. “Worley?”

He shrugged. “Don’t know her, but I trust your instincts. Dunk, what do you think?”

“If she did him, how’d she get Napoli to just sit there and let her do it, when he outweighed her almost a hundred pounds?”

“She was whispering sweet nothings in his ear?” DeeDee said.

None of the men smiled, especially Duncan. “Okay. Then why in her own car? Why did she leave so many clues behind? The sandal. The scrap of fabric from her clothing. How could she run, and where to, without taking the cash from her wallet? According to Baker, there was several hundred dollars in it.”

“All of which seems as unlikely as Napoli tossing her over the bridge railing at the same instant she pulled the trigger, discharging the fatal shot,” Worley said, frowning. “I don’t know what we’ve got here.”

“Third party?” DeeDee ventured.

“No evidence of one,” Worley said.

“There is one other possibility,” Gerard said quietly.

Duncan knew what Gerard was going to say. That one other possibility also had occurred to him, but he had stubbornly refused to acknowledge or accept it.

“I think it’s safe to say that Mrs. Laird had gotten herself into trouble over Coleman Greer. Whether he was gay or bi or whatever, first Trotter, then Napoli, threatened her with a nasty scandal. Her life went from sugar to shit in a very short period of time. The incident with Trotter could be explained away as self-defense. Plausibly, I believe.

“But no matter how this business with Napoli went down, it was ugly, and she was stuck with a second dead man. That was going to raise questions as well as eyebrows, and possibly incriminate her. Even if she didn’t go to jail, the scandal would have ruined her husband’s career and, more importantly, her way of life.

“Maybe the fear of all that fallout was overwhelming.” He let that statement reverberate for a moment, then concluded, “Elise Laird may have jumped from the bridge because she wanted to die.”