The Guilty Plea (8 page)

“Ari,” Armitage said. How convenient for him that Greene’s first name ended in a
ee
sound. No way even Armitage would call Greene Greeney. “Jennie tells me you two’ve done a few things together.”

“A few.” He glanced back at her.

“She’s not doing murder trials anymore, but she kindly agreed to come in and get things started with you.”

Tell me about it, Raglan thought. Get things started with Ari.

Armitage clapped his large hands together. Another one of his camp counselor habits. “Why don’t you two grab an empty office and go at it?”

Go at it, Raglan thought. Hmm.

They found an office with no windows. Someone had left a fan on, and it was rotating back and forth, doing nothing more than swirling hot air around.

“How’re the kids?” Greene shut the door and slipped into a wooden chair tucked in the far corner.

“Better,” she said. “Thanks for asking. How’s your dad?”

“Difficult as ever.”

“You make it sound like a good thing.”

He laughed. “It is.”

She’d tried to forget how much she liked his laugh. There was an awkward silence. Say something, Raglan told herself, her mind drifting. Like “Nice to see you, Ari.” Or “Ari, I missed you.” Or “Ari, you look so tanned.” She thought of their first kiss. It had been late at night, and they were working together. She’d shut the door and gone right over to him. He hadn’t looked surprised.

Now Greene was talking to her. “We have to keep it totally under wraps,” he was saying. She nodded. Her heart was beating as if she were a teenager on a first date. Silly.

“No matter what, it can’t get out,” Greene said.

Odd he should bring up their affair now, she thought. He was usually so understated, and they’d taken such elaborate steps to be discreet. She was convinced no one knew.

“The knife coming to us in that way. You never know how it’s going to help us,” Greene said. “Besides, the press would go wild with it.”

Raglan kept nodding. What an idiot you are, Jennifer, she thought.
He’s talking about the case. Not you. Fuck. Hope I’m not blushing. “Right,” she said. Remember, you broke it off with him. You wanted to be home. See the kids every day. Concentrate.

He summed up the rest of the evidence. The marriage breaking up, Samantha’s e-mails and voice mails, the police warning her. On Terrance’s BlackBerry he’d found the e-mail telling Samantha he’d take the deal and inviting her to come to his house. E-mails back saying she’d be there in half an hour. No signs of forced entry. No apparent defense wounds on the body. The child saying his mother had been in his room last night.

“Then this morning there was a call from your old boss, Ted DiPaulo,” Greene said. “He’s representing Samantha.”

“Ted?” DiPaulo had been the head Crown before she got the job. He’d mentored her since the beginning of her career. Handpicked her as his successor.

“Dragged me down to his office and had another lawyer give me the bloody kitchen knife wrapped in a towel,” Greene said.

“That’s Ted. Always ethical. Wife have an alibi?”

“Don’t know. DiPaulo’s stalling for time.”

“Where is she?”

“I thought DiPaulo had her in his partner’s office, so I put on a surveillance team. He just drove her home. We’ll follow her round the clock. I’ve alerted all the airports and the borders. Daniel Kennicott’s working with me on this case. He swore out a warrant, so we’ll monitor her phone, e-mails, et cetera.”

This was smart. If Greene rushed into an arrest, it would leave things open for the defense to accuse him of tunnel vision. Failure to eliminate other suspects. Besides, once she was arrested, Samantha would effectively be silenced. This way they could watch and listen to her.

“Terrance have any known enemies?”

“No. No criminal record. No police contacts. Sounds like everyone loved him.”

“Except his wife. Other suspects?”

“April Goodling, the movie-star girlfriend, seems to have an alibi. In her hotel room all night. Cutter and Gild are her lawyers.”

“That figures,” Raglan said. There was no love lost between Phil Cutter and Jennifer Raglan.

“The oldest brother works early mornings at the food terminal. Kennicott did the notification.”

Raglan knew why Greene had done this. The Michael Kennicott case was Greene’s only unsolved homicide. It would be tough for Daniel to tell someone his brother was dead. Greene was testing him.

“The rest of the family live up north, parents and a disabled brother. We’re meeting them early tomorrow morning. Right now we’re going door-to-door on Wyler’s street. Most of the people are away.”

“Up north at their cottages, no doubt,” Raglan said.

“I’m trying to trace Samantha Wyler’s movements for the last twenty-four hours. We checked the video in the lobby of her apartment. She left at nine forty-one on Sunday night and never returned. Doesn’t have a license. The nanny says she never learned to drive. We’re checking the cab companies, the videos at the subway. We’ll interview the late-night bus drivers when they come back on shift. Nothing so far.”

“Where do you think she went?”

“I have a hunch. We’re going door-to-door in Yorkville, where her family lawyer, a guy named Feindel, has his office. DiPaulo got that knife from her somehow. Makes sense to me she gave it to Feindel.”

Many homicide detectives took pride in making speedy arrests, but Greene had a way of seeing another angle to even the most straightforward set of facts. This time, though, Raglan wondered if he weren’t being too conservative. “She has motive and opportunity. You’ve got her e-mailing him that she’s coming over, the knife, her son saying she was in the house. Then she disappears. What else do you need?”

Greene stood up. His eyes were a mesmerizing gray-blue. Easy to stare at. “The boy’s already lost his father,” he said. “Last thing I want to do is make a mistake. Then he’ll lose his mother. Let’s see if she comes up with an alibi.”

That was so like him, Raglan thought. Any other detective would arrest her right now. But Greene didn’t see Samantha Wyler only as a suspect, but as the boy’s mother.

“What are you doing next?”

Greene looked at his watch. “Going back to Wyler’s house. The forensic officer is ready to walk me through the scene. Kennicott’s meeting me there in half an hour.”

“Has the child been told?”

“The family’s going to speak to him tonight.” Greene clenched his
jaw. “Before he’s been told, I’m going to try to get him to tell me on tape what he said this morning. That his mother came into his room last night. If I can do that, the case is almost over.”

“Oh, Ari,” she said.

He looked away. “I’m picking him up at four. We have a special room for kids at police headquarters.”

The Old City Hall clock, which was in a spiked stone tower almost above their heads, rang through the four parts of its hourly chime and started to dong twelve times. It was noon. She had to hurry or be late to pick up her daughter.

Ari Greene, Ari Greene. Every time she thought she could reach him, he slipped away. Like a shadow over a cliff.

That night in her office, she hadn’t been sure if he’d let her kiss him. Raglan had heard women’s washroom scuttlebutt about Greene over the years. Others had tried without luck. Thinking back, every detail was still so clear. The roughness of his hands. His clean smell. He hadn’t been shy about her body.

What did she really know about him? There were all these gaps. Greene’s parents were Holocaust survivors, and he was an only child. His mother had died last winter, and his father still lived in the house Greene grew up in. He didn’t join the force until he was thirty. About fifteen years ago, he took a twelve-month leave of absence. One of those cop mysteries that no one could figure out. When he returned, Chief of Police Hap Charlton became his “rabbi,” promoting him up the ladder fast. Greene liked to joke that this had special relevance, since he was the only Jewish homicide detective on the force.

Raglan knew that Greene had been in Europe, because every once in a while he’d mention an old town square he’d seen, an ancient bridge he’d walked across, a painting in a gallery. From all the French books in his house, she could tell he’d spent time in France. Two French stations were programmed into his old car radio.

One night when they went to a country inn for the weekend, he’d awakened in a sweat. She’d touched his back, and he jumped. “
Quoi?
” he said, casting his arms out in the air.

“Ari,” she asked, “you okay?”

He had rolled over and looked at her in the dim light. Lost for a moment before he pulled her to him.

… Dong, dong, dong. The bell tower finished ringing out twelve o’clock. “I’m glad for that boy that you’re on this case.” Raglan was watching him.

Greene had an unconscious habit of licking the top of his lip for a moment before they kissed. She was sure he had no idea he did it. The edge of his tongue slid across his upper lip for a split second. He still wants me, she thought.

He flashed her that grin of his again. “But we all know you’re not doing any more murder trials.” Greene grabbed his briefcase and slipped out of the hot room, leaving the door open behind him.

Raglan leaned back on the desk, alone, replaying their last seconds together over and over, her hair sticking to her forehead in the heat.

“Is much blood,” the identification officer, Brygida Zeilinski, said to Ari Greene and Daniel Kennicott when she met them at the front door of Terrance Wyler’s house. A heavyset woman with thinning hair and a permanent frown, she spoke with a thick Polish accent. The book on her was that in her twenty-five years on the force, no one had ever seen Zeilinski smile, crack a joke, or laugh.

Greene took his notebook and wrote down the time. It was twelve-thirty. He’d arranged for Kennicott to meet him here to do a walk-through of the murder scene. Zeilinski led them inside.

“Is messy.” Her face assumed its perpetual scowl as they entered the kitchen. Zeilinski wore latex gloves on her stubby fingers and plastic booties over her shoes. She handed Greene and Kennicott fresh pairs of both to put on.

The spot where Terrance Wyler’s body had lain earlier in the day was vacated. No one outlined a corpse in white chalk anymore—except in TV shows. When the forensic officers arrived at a murder scene, they videotaped everything, photographed the body in situ, and had it removed. The room was then measured and photographed to produce a scale drawing.

With Kennicott behind him, Greene followed Zeilinski’s footsteps around the kitchen, their plastic booties squeaking on the tiles. The floor, the fridge, and the counters were covered in little metal numbered signs, with arrows pointing to bits of dried blood and other pieces of evidence. The room was hot, and the smell of death still lingered. Greene looked around.

On the right wall was an expensive-looking gas stove with thick
black grates on top. Farther along was a deep double sink and a large window above it. The house was on a wide lot built into a hill. The driveway to the left climbed up and curled around, with space for three or four cars, level with the back. To the right was a manicured lawn. Instead of a fence, there was a row of mature cedars planted quite far apart. A well-worn footpath led through the trees to the neighbor’s back door.

“Is one knife missing.” Zeilinski nodded toward the woodblock knife holder on the counter.

“I noticed that this morning,” Greene said.

“Is maybe one towel missing also.” She pointed to the stove handle, where there were two green-and-white towels, but only a single red-and-white one.

“Is one missing,” he said.

“And here.” She led them back through the door frame between the kitchen and the front hall. “Is contact stain. One hundred forty-seven point thirty-two centimeters. Four feet, ten inches from ground.”

Greene looked at Kennicott. A contact stain was usually from someone’s hand. Probably the perpetrator fleeing the scene.

“More blood.” Now they were on their way out of the kitchen and going up the wide staircase. “Is here, here, here, and here.” Walking up the stairs, she pointed to small droplets on the rails. “And is here.” She brought them into Simon’s room. On the Curious George carpet a label pointed to a small red dot on the man’s yellow hat.

Greene and Kennicott exchanged glances again. Both were thinking about Simon saying that his mother had come to his room. “Good work,” Greene said as Zeilinski trooped them downstairs.

Even though she’d been in the warm house all day, the woman looked as if she could keep going for another twelve hours, which she often had to do. Greene had seen identification officers go more than twenty-four hours without a break.

Her biggest regret in life, she’d told Greene when they’d first met on a case more than a decade ago, was that her parents left Poland when she was twenty-one. “Is five years before, and I not have this accent.”

“Bad luck,” Greene had agreed.

A few years later, when she discovered that Greene was Jewish, Zeilinski was eager to set the record straight.

“Is no Nazi, my family,” she’d told him.

“Many Polish Christians helped Polish Jews,” he said. “Three different families hid my father.”

“Is in Auschwitz, my father, whole war. First transport. Was political prisoner. Number four hundred and fifty-one. Name in museum in Jerusalem.”

The last time Greene had been to Israel, some of his mother’s distant relatives—no one was left on his father’s side—took him to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial. There was this woman’s father’s name in the special tribute to Righteous Gentiles—Jozef Zeilinski.

“Now the outside doors.” Zeilinski showed them the front of the house. “This door, no marks, no paint chipped, is no sign forced entry.”

This was often evidence that the victim knew the killer, or at least voluntarily let the person into his house.

“Blood,” she said, pointing to the door frame. “Is contact stain.” A labeled tape measure ran up beside it.

“One hundred twenty-seven centimeters. Four feet, two inches from ground.” It was about the height of the stain on the door frame in the kitchen. Consistent with its being the same person.