“Hold on.”
“What?”
“So what did he say?”
“Who?”
“The coroner. Vedder. What did he say?”
“He, uh, he said the wound, the wound was caused by a blow to the head with a blunt instrument inflicted by a left-handed individual.”
“So?”
“So the kid’s right-handed. I called the hospital.”
“So?”
“So he’s retarded, not ambidextrous.”
“Ambi-what?”
“Ask me about the husband.”
“What about the husband?”
“He’s a lefty.”
“So are about fifty million other people-including me. Do you think I killed her?”
“I don’t know, did you?”
“Leo, you are a kind and faithful servant. Some day you’re gonna make it big. Maybe even sit here again. In the big chair. I feel it. I really do. What’s your point?”
“If nothing else, what was the son doing home alone with the mother? Feels a little bit like a setup. I wanna talk to the husband some more.”
Paula picked up a French fry. Swabbed it in a pool of ketchup. “So, who’s stopping you?”
TWENTY-THREE
It had been three years since his fall from grace, but it had been two years before that when Leo had first heard the name Frank Guaraldi.
Prosecuting bad guys was all he’d ever wanted to do. When he was a boy, countless television programs had instilled in him the ideal of fighting for justice as a worthy pursuit, but it wasn’t until after his mother had been taken in by a scam artist that he knew for sure he wanted to be a prosecutor. A man had come by the house one day shortly after Leo’s father had been taken out by a massive heart attack while cutting the lawn. The man who came to the door that day had been smartly dressed and neatly groomed. He introduced himself as Samuel Abdul, investment counselor. Mr. Abdul had ended up talking Mrs. Hewitt into investing her dead husband’s insurance money in an overseas petroleum company. Mr. Abdul had shown her conclusively, using charts and projected fuel prices, that she could easily triple her money, or more. Dorothy Hewitt had vivid memories of the 1970s oil crisis. She could remember a time when the idea of gasoline selling for as much as a dollar a gallon was laughable. But it had happened. And then some. But what had ultimately swayed Leo’s usually levelheaded mother was Samuel Abdul’s insistence that this was her golden opportunity to secure for her son’s future, for his education. She had signed over the entire insurance premium and was given a piece of paper entitling her to a thousand shares of an oil company that had never existed. Abdul, who apparently couldn’t leave well enough alone, kept pulling the same scam all over town, always targeting recent widows. Once he was caught, Leo’s mother had promptly filed charges along with eighteen other people the man had cheated. Using the money he had scammed from his mostly poor victims (who besides the poor would believe in such easy money?), Abdul had hired the best lawyer dirty money could buy. It was at this time that Leo, only twelve and wanting revenge for his mother, had decided that he wanted to be a prosecutor. To defend the defenseless. The prosecutor who handled the case had been a dedicated, intelligent, resourceful man who systematically dismantled every defense strategy the scam artist’s well-paid lawyer tried to mount. Leo sat with his mother in the courtroom every day of the trial, completely entranced with the legal battle that was waged there on his mother’s behalf. Even after the trial, Leo would sometimes skip school and spend his days in the county courthouse watching small legal dramas played out. Abdul’s trial lasted less than a week, and although others might have given up or simply gone through the motions, this public prosecutor had persevered and ultimately won back his mother’s money and sent Samuel Abdul to jail for eight years. The prosecutor had even helped Mrs. Hewitt figure out a more conservative way to invest her inheritance, and seven months before she died, Leo’s mother saw him graduate cum laude from law school.
As a deputy prosecutor Leo had been assigned to the team handling the Guaraldi case, although, at that time, no one had yet heard the name Frank Guaraldi. The case was simply known as the torso murders. It was already one of the longest and costliest unsolved cases in the county’s history. Certainly it was the highest-profile case any of them had ever been involved with, and a legitimate suspect had not even been named yet. Leo’s work on the case eventually earned him the position of prosecutor, then lead prosecutor, and, once Guaraldi had been fingered as the most likely suspect, Bob Fox had appointed Leo to the post of assistant district attorney. It was rumored that if he could bring the Guaraldi matter to a successful conclusion, he was an odds-on favorite to go on to become the youngest district attorney to ever hold the seat.
The whole thing started with an arm. A severed arm found in a drainage ditch on a rural road outside Atlanta. The arm had been eaten at by animals and was badly decayed but obviously that of a child. Decomposition had robbed the forensics team of any hope of a print ID. Only one clue offered any chance for identification. A toy ring had been found on the middle finger of the severed arm. It was a cheap plastic thing that only a child would wear. The type of toy that could only be bought out of a bubble gum machine, with cheap gold lamination that was chipping away from the pale plastic base. Investigators tracked down the Chinese manufacturer of the ring, and then the importer, and from there the distributor. The distributor’s records listed several vendors in the Atlanta area. The ring went in a seventy-five-cent machine of which there was one vendor who maintained only one such machine. That machine was located in an arcade in the Little Five Points area of downtown Atlanta. This was a definite starting point, the first real lead they had had to follow up on. All missing-persons reports from the city police department were culled for the previous two years, and from those reports investigators pulled the names of children between ages four and twelve, and from this list was pulled only those missing children who had lived within a twenty-mile radius of the Little Five Points neighborhood. A group of officers was dispatched to interview family members of the missing children.
The temperature had peaked at a record-breaking one hundred one degrees that July day, and Officer Lyle Davis was thinking only of a cold beer when he knocked on the door of the last address on his list. Donny Easton, missing for three months. He showed the photo of the plastic gold ring to Mrs. Easton, a huge and solidly built woman. Her eyes widened and hope bloomed on her face. Donny had worn one just like it. Never took it off. Officer Davis explained the circumstances of the ring’s discovery and watched Mrs. Easton crumple to the floor. He’d forgotten all about the dreamed upon beer. More body parts were found. Arms, legs, sometimes just a finger, twice an ear, and one time a severed head. Always children. Never an entire body. Some of the body parts led to identification, but many did not. Each time a piece was found, the national media descended on the city like vultures following the scent of carrion. The police department, and in particular the mayor, were singled out for criticism for allowing the slaughter of children to continue. Gestures such as a hotline number for tips and a dusk-till-dawn curfew were made to appease the frightened population, but no real progress was made.
The death count stood at nine. Possibly nine, because not a single complete body had thus far been recovered. The city lived in fear; parents existed in a constant state of maniacal paranoia. Neighbors reported neighbors for eccentric behavior. An anonymous caller to the tip line gave the name of a man, James Nice, a bachelor with no children, who was seen purchasing dolls and hacksaw blades in a local K-Mart. Nice was investigated and found to be blameless (the blades were to cut a section of burst water pipe in his garage, the dolls for his niece’s birthday), but his name was leaked to the media. They called him a person of interest. News crews set up mobile studios outside his house. His face was seen on television and in newspaper photos with captions that capitalized on his ironic name. Within a week of the tip line call, the chief of police declared him no longer a suspect, and the media pulled away. By then, Nice, a recovering alcoholic, had turned to bouts of heavy drinking and antisocial behavior. He yelled at strangers in the street and took to shoplifting. He lost his job. Lost his house. Three months after being cleared as a suspect, he was found dead in a homeless shelter lying facedown in a pool of his own vomit. Nice’s family sued the city and were eventually awarded four point seven million dollars.