Mercer Wallace walked toward me and put his arms around me, drawing me tight against his chest. He had always been as easy at expressing emotion as Mike had been restrained. Paul Battaglia was seated at the far end of the long table, holding up a finger to tell me he’d be off his call in a minute.
“And you got that drowned-rat look on top of it,” Mike said. “Very becoming. Your only hope is an earthquake in some third-world country that swallows an entire village tonight so you’re not on the cover of the papers looking like that.”
Mercer whispered to me, “You’re shaking, Alex.”
“I can’t stop it. I’m cold.” I didn’t need to add that I was also scared.
“Rose had a late lunch sent in. There’s some soup here for you.”
“What time is it?”
“After two.”
“Have they-have they found Quillian yet?”
Mercer shook his head.
“Any other bodies?”
“No,” he said, stroking my arm.
I sat at the table and opened the cardboard container of lukewarm tomato soup. My stomach growled as I tried to fill it with something nourishing.
“I really underestimated your trial skills this time,” Mike said. “Maybe you were actually gonna pull a rabbit out of a hat and put that boy away.”
Battaglia hung up the receiver. He did his best to ask about my well-being-no more anxious than Mike to bring out any emotional reaction-and to confirm the courtroom encounter as it had already been reported to him. Then it was on to business.
“I’ve been talking with the guys here, Alex. It’s quite puzzling, this desperate attempt at an escape by Brendan Quillian.”
“Attempt my ass, Mr. B,” Mike said. “You might take note that he made it.”
“Without your snitch, your case didn’t appear to be all that airtight.”
“No, Paul. It wasn’t. But-”
“Well, what the hell do you think spooked him so that he would go to this extreme, at this point in the trial? Now he’s got a cold-blooded murder witnessed by Freddy Gertz and Lem and you.”
“From what I hear,” Mike said, “the justice was really blind this time. Forget about Gertz.”
I looked from Mike to Mercer. “What do you two think?”
“We got under his skin somehow,” Mercer said. “And I don’t believe it had anything to do with Alex’s case against him for the killing of his wife.”
I turned to Battaglia. “I think the things we’ve been digging at-things that still seem so remote and unrelated-must have struck Quillian right in the gut.”
“Like what?”
“The day we met with his sister-the day before her brother’s funeral,” I said. “Trish told Brendan when she saw him for the first time in years that she was planning to talk to Mike about the Hassetts.”
“Why?”
“She’s convinced that Duke Quillian’s murder was arranged or committed by the Hassett brothers. And yet, Brendan demanded that she not tell that to the police.”
“If there was any truth to her reasoning,” Mercer said, “you’d think Brendan would want her to dangle that before our noses. Makes you wonder what he knew-what Trish didn’t know-that made him crazy at the thought she might tell us.”
“What else?” Battaglia asked.
“I’m in,” Mike said. “On the drive back from the funeral with Quillian, I brought up the unsolved case of the murdered teenager, Rebecca Hassett.”
“You asked him about it? You questioned him?” Battaglia was annoyed enough to remove his cigar from his mouth and clearly articulate his concern.
“Nah. I just goosed him. I didn’t think it would set him off on a rampage. I wanted to see if I could raise some hairs on his neck, and like I told Coop, I think I did.”
“Add one more straw to the camel’s back,” I said. “Quillian called Lem Howell last night. Just the usual daily update, I’m sure. But that was after Lem and I left the meeting with Judge Gertz-and McKinney. I asked Lem if he told Brendan that McKinney had talked about an exhumation. If he mentioned that the girl was named Rebecca Hassett.”
“Yes? He said yes?”
“For once Lem didn’t have his best poker face on. I’m assuming he mentioned to Brendan that the subject had been raised in front of Gertz, without any way of knowing that it was a follow-up to the bombshell Mike dropped in the car. Lem wasn’t going to give up any privileged conversation with his client-so if he doesn’t drop a hint of it to whoever is interrogating him now about the shooting, I’m just saying that I think I caught him off guard when I asked about it.”
“But this one issue…?”
“Not one, Paul,” I said. “Three points, each of them coming from a different direction-his sister, the cop who locked him up, and then his own lawyer.”
“I think he was so close to beating the rap on Amanda’s case,” Mercer said, checking my reaction to Battaglia’s dismissal of my effort, “at least in Lem’s view, that he was devastated at the idea of being trapped by something more deadly, from his past-maybe something more readily connected to him-than what he faced with this jury.”
“Makes you wonder,” Battaglia said, replugging the cigar in his mouth, “why he didn’t try for a clean kill of Alex while he had the chance.”
“If what Mercer says is right, Quillian didn’t have any reason to connect these past events to me. He just wanted to get out of there-out of the courtroom, out of custody,” I said, shredding the napkin with my fingers, the soup stains on it a pale imitation of Elsie’s blood.
“You got it,” Mercer said.
“Elsie was the weakest link. He just overpowered her and started shooting. He wasn’t after her any more than he wanted to kill me. I wasn’t an obstacle to his freedom at that moment. Brendan Quillian just wanted to be gone.”
We kicked around ideas for more than fifteen minutes. Rose interrupted us when she opened the door, and Battaglia snapped at her before she could speak.
“I told you no calls.” He was waiting for the commissioner of correction to tell him how they planned to handle this fiasco before he went public on it.
“It’s Judge Gertz, Mr. Battaglia. I thought you might want this one.” Rose knew him better than he knew himself.
His lips widened into a broad smile around the cigar stub as he reached for the telephone. “A real profile in courage,” he said, winking at Mike. “Freddy, what the hell were you running up there, the O.K. Corral? Where are you now? You got a panic room here in the courthouse I ought to know about?”
Whatever the answer was, and it was a long one, erased Battaglia’s smile.
“She’s okay. She’s here with me now. Naturally, she’s shaken up about the woman who was killed, seeing her friends shot and all that. But you know Alex. One hundred percent business when she needs to be.”
“More like ninety percent blended Scotch whiskey in her veins and ten percent hair spray that makes her look like she’s glued together from the outside,” Mike said. “Blow on her gently and I think she’ll be down for the count today.”
“Lay off it, Mike,” Mercer said, putting the lid on my coffee cup. “I’ll drive you home as soon as Mr. B lets us go, Alex. Enough with the caffeine.”
“You did what?” Battaglia asked, crushing the cigar’s remains in his ashtray. “Yeah, I got Chapman here with me. I’ll tell him. Thanks, Freddy.
“Now, see, Alex? Sometimes you shouldn’t be so stubborn about listening to Pat McKinney. There’s an old saw that says, ‘All politics is local.’ Well, I guess all crime is personal, too.”
“He’s got me in this mix?” Mike asked.
“Looks like Gertz did some thinking while he was resting under the bench this morning. He’s got a real hard-on for Brendan Quillian now, if he didn’t have one before today. Wants us to leave no stone unturned in the effort to find Quillian, and to put him behind bars for the rest of his life.”