“Lawd,” Harry said, staring at the result.
I scowled at the screen. Though the face was defined, it remained elusive. But I knew it from somewhere.
“How about it, Cars?” Harry asked. “Tell me you’re making a connection.”
“I can’t. But it’s so close. Like it’s on the tip of my brain…”
“Did you see him in BOLOs?” Harry asked. “Maybe he’s wanted.”
I memorized hundreds of faces on Be On the Lookout sheets, put together displays of perp photos to show victims, paged endlessly through mug-shot books.
“It doesn’t feel right.”
“How about I flip the image?” Claypool said. “Give you a different orientation.”
Claypool tapped twice on the keyboard. The right-looking face swooshed into a black dot in the center of the screen, swooshed back a second later, now looking to the left.
I closed my eyes and saw the curly-haired blond man. But not on the walk in front of the funeral parlor. Sitting to my right, looking left. A phone to his mouth. Talking through a Plexiglas window to a hulking, scarheaded monster.
“I know where I saw him,” I whispered. “He sat beside me the day Leland Harwood was poisoned.”
CHAPTER 24
Warden Frank Malone fiddled with the VCR in the corner of the room. It was VCR day, I guess. Though I was in the office of the prison’s head dog, it felt like a cell, bars on the windows, the pervasive stink of fear and disinfectant. Though we were hundreds of feet from the nearest cell block, the smell rolled through the place like smog.
There was no need for both Harry and me to drive up, so I’d made the run, cutting a big chunk out of the day. What this country needs is a good teleportation system.
Malone pressed a remote to activate the unit. He’d racked up the visitors’-room tapes from the morning I’d visited. He fast-forwarded until I saw myself enter the visitors’ room.
He looked up and I nodded. This was the start point.
I watched myself talk to Harwood for several minutes before the hulking, scarred convict entered, simultaneous with the arrival of the square-bodied, suited man with the blond hair rippling back from his tanned, blocky face. Though a solid guy, he moved like silk in the wind, a dancer trapped in a bricklayer’s body.
Malone tapped the monitor screen. “The huge convict is a serial rapist, Tommy Dowell, known inside as Tommy the Bomb, as in you never know when he’ll go off.”
Tommy the Bomb swaggered in like he not only owned the prison, he held the mortgage on every other piece of property within a hundred miles. I’d seen that look more times than most people.
“Psycho,” I said. “Full blown.”
“The guy was a biker with the Iron Rangers, got too psychopathic even for them, was cut loose.”
“Too crazy for the Rangers? That’s like being too tall for the basketball team.”
Malone sighed, removed his reading glasses. “I’m the warden, Detective Ryder. I’m supposed to use clinical terms when discussing inmates. I took courses in psychology in order to make my discussions scientific, rational.”
“And?”
“Tommy the Bomb’s a true meltdown. Three hundred pounds of fried wiring.”
“Terms I can understand,” I said. “Think he had a hand in Harwood’s poisoning?”
“Inmates do favors for folks like Tommy to stay on his good side.”
“Good side?” I pulled my chair up to the monitor, tapped the visitor. “You know this man, Warden? He’s who I’m really here to ID.”
Malone put on his glasses, started the tape segment again. The guy’s back was to the camera, mostly. Harwood blathered at me. After five minutes, he started wriggling, punching at his chest. I noticed the blond guy shooting a couple fast glances in Harwood’s direction.
Malone froze the tape. “Never seen the visitor before. The guards say the guy’s visited the Bomb three times in the past couple weeks.” He slid a sheet of paper my way. “Visitors’-log entries from the morning of your visit.”
I checked the time against the names, found the only fit.
“C. M. Delbert,” I said. “He needed ID to get in, right?”
Malone nodded. “Not many people fake their way into prison. We check the ID, but our major concern is contraband and weapons.”
“And we both know any teenager in the country can get a fake ID with the right contact and a pocketful of bills.”
Malone said, “Guy signed in as counsel for Tommy. You figure him a lawyer?”
“Long shot. At least not Harvard law.”
Malone grunted. “Not too many Harvard types want to sit across from a psychotic monster like Tommy the Bomb.”
“Think Tommy the Bomb would talk to me, Warden?”
“Think you’ll grow tits and a pussy soon?”
“Doubtful,” I said.
“Not a chance.”
Malone restarted the tape. Two minutes later Leland Harwood was convulsing on the floor as Tommy the Bomb watched. The visitor retreated from the room without looking back, like he was walking from a public restroom.
Malone dropped his glasses in his pocket. “Your man doesn’t look real interested.”
“He knows how the story ends,” I said.
When I returned to the department, Harry was in a conference room, the murder book between his arms on the table. He looked up.
“Tell me you found the golden link at the prison, Carson. That you’re about to sit your ass right down in front of me and pull it all together.”
I sighed and laid out the story.
“He signed in as a lawyer?” Harry said. “Maybe we should check local legal types, see if they can ID him.”
I ran a list of lawyers in my head. Only one got highlighted in yellow. “What we need is a lawyer perfectly comfortable with murderers, rapists, dope mules, and general pukes.”
Harry said, “I can’t go near Preston Walls, Cars. I already ate today.”
“Don’t sweat it. I can solo.”
Harry stood and yanked the orange sport coat from his chair, pulled it over the blue-centric aloha shirt.
“I wouldn’t do that to you, partner. Let’s stop on the way over and buy a can of Lysol. I want to spray down before we visit Walls.”
D. Preston Walls had an office near the courthouse, tavern on one side, bail bondsman on the other. Location, location, location. A Porsche at the curb was vanity-tagged LGLEGL. I shouted my name into a metal grate and held my badge and ID to a camera before being buzzed inside.
Walls’s secretary, receptionist, whatever, was a torpedo-breasted blonde with bee-stung lips, cocaine eyes, and a pair of handcuffs tattooed on a bare shoulder. She purred that we should sit until her boss was off the phone, then sucked a cigarette and stared at my crotch until I crossed my legs.
Ten minutes later Walls appeared, fortyish, five-seven or — eight, overweight, sloppy brown suit, hair in a ponytail like it made him hip. Diamond stud in one ear. At handshake time, Harry turned away and looked out the grated window.
“Carson, Harry, I’m floored,” Walls brayed, indifferent to the slight. “Jeez, I haven’t seen you guys since Rollie Kreeg’s trial. Last year? Has that much time gone by since…” He paused, mouth open like something slipped his mind. “I think I’m having a senior moment, guys. What was the verdict? Who won?”
I gritted my teeth. “You did, D. P. A. technicality, if I recall.”
Walls grinned. “Technicality, schmecknicality…It’s all the clash of ideas. Of constitutional guarantees. Of the collective versus the individual, the safety of the rights of private citizens who-”
Harry stared at Walls. “How safe are citizens from the rapists and murderers you get off?”
Walls raised an eyebrow. “If I get them off, Harry, they’re innocent.”
I stepped between Harry and Walls and slid a photo from my pocket, a still shot pulled from the VCR at the prison.
“How about this lawyerish-looking guy, Preston? You know him?”
If Walls glanced at the photo, it was a millisecond. He tried to hand it back.
“Look again,” I said. “Longer.”