“Bill, is this the way you want it?” DiGrazia asked.
“This is exactly the way he wants it,” Korkin answered for Shannon. He then sat down and crossed his legs and waited for the three detectives to clear out. As he waited, he clasped his hands behind his head and whistled the theme song for Cops. When the door closed behind them, Korkin sat upright and held a hand out to Shannon.
“Your union hired me as soon as word got out about this. It’s a good thing you’ve got friends here. Now, before you say a single word, I want to know if this interrogation room is private or if it can be observed from outside.”
“It’s private.”
“Thank god for that.” The attorney looked as if he were going to slap Shannon across the side of his head. “You ought to know better than to agree to questioning without an attorney.”
“I’ve got nothing to hide-”
Korkin glared angrily. “You ought to know better.”
“I said I’ve got nothing to hide. I haven’t done anything-”
“That’s good,” Korkin said, cutting him off. “That’s all I want to hear about the matter, understand? Nothing else. What did you give them?”
“They were trying to get a timetable for last night.”
“And?”
Shannon gave the attorney the same rundown he had given Swallow. Korkin smiled as he took it in. When Shannon was done the attorney shook his head and let out a sigh.
“You shouldn’t have said a word without an attorney present,” he said. “You really should’ve known better.”
Shannon didn’t say anything.
“Eh!” Korkin waved the issue away. “It doesn’t matter. You know what they got on you?”
Shannon shook his head.
“An anonymous phone call!” Korkin exclaimed with amazement. “That’s all. About an hour ago some punk called up and gave them your license plate. What the hell does that mean?”
“Not much,” Shannon said.
“That’s right,” Korkin agreed. “I mean, shit, you’re a cop here in Cambridge, I’m sure you’ve made life difficult for some of the punks doing business here. So one of them decides to make life difficult for you. Why in the world would anyone take an anonymous call like that seriously?”
“I don’t know.”
“Probably because your neighbor was murdered recently,” Korkin noted. “And probably by the same person who butchered Liza Keenan. But that’s probably what gave the punk the idea in the first place to make the call.”
“Probably.”
Korkin laughed at that. As he laughed his face grew redder. “I’ll tell you,” he said, “if they do try to charge you, we’ll hit them with a twenty-million-dollar defamation suit. Let’s keep our fingers crossed. With a little luck we could both be retired in the Bahamas.”
The attorney stood up and winked at Shannon. “I’ll go check and see what’s happening,” he said as he left the room.
When he came back his red face had somewhat deflated. “Bad news,” he said. “They’re not charging you with anything. You’re free to go. The Bahamas will have to wait.”
Chapter 26
Phil Dornich couldn’t keep from thinking about Liza Keenan. A lot of ink had been given to her murder-more than you’d expect for a junked up prostitute in East Boston. The pure brutality of the crime was partly responsible. Even though the papers didn’t give many details, they sure as hell hinted at them. It bothered Dornich when he read the articles. There was something oddly familiar about the murder, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. He tried calling acquaintances of his from the East Boston precinct, but they were being vague about it; either they didn’t know anything or they weren’t talking. It took over a dozen phone calls before he was told about her tongue being pulled out and then another half hour of calls before finding out about the internal damage that had been done to her.
He tried to imagine how difficult it would be to pull a person’s tongue from their body. After a while he realized he couldn’t even imagine it.
Dornich was rereading the articles when Susan Shannon called. She wanted to know if he had found anything yet. He hesitated before telling her that he had. “I think it would be better if you came to my office,” he told her.
Susan tried to get him to tell her over the phone what he had found, but Dornich refused. She finally agreed to meet him at his office during her lunch break.
Dornich closed his eyes and tried to pull out whatever it was that was lurking in the back of his mind. Eventually, he gave up and made a long distance call to California.
Susan Shannon showed up at his office around twelve-thirty. She looked a bit ragged, her eyes reddish, thin lines creeping underneath them.
“I only have about fifteen minutes,” she told Dornich after he offered her a seat.
“We shouldn’t need much more than that,” Dornich said, smiling sympathetically, showing his few rotting teeth. “I’d like to ask you to read something.”
Dornich handed her the articles he had gotten from the Sacramento Journal. As Susan read them, the skin around her mouth tightened. It gave the fat detective a good idea what she’d look like at fifty. By the time she finished with the articles her hands were shaking. She looked up at him, her eyes nothing more than small black beads. Dornich could see fear in them.
He asked her if she knew about any of it.
“N-no.” Her voice cracked. She swallowed and tried again. “All I knew was that Bill’s parents had both died. About the way she was murdered… our neighbor, Rose Hartwell, was murdered the same way…”
“I know.”
“What-what do you think it means?”
Dornich tried to make his shrug look natural. He had been thinking about that question off and on since he found those articles. The obvious explanation was that Shannon was involved-that when he blacked out, he repeated his mother’s murder. That was the obvious explanation, but it didn’t ring true to him. He didn’t feel it in his gut and usually his massive gut was right on target. Except recently. Every gut feeling he’d had about Shannon had been wrong, so why not this one…?
“I don’t know. It’s possible he’s involved. It’s also possible someone’s trying to frame him. Or it could all be a coincidence.”
“Do you think he’s involved?”
“I don’t think so.”
His answer didn’t seem to comfort her any. All her color seemed to bleed out of her. “The articles say Bill was hospitalized. They didn’t say what happened to him,” she said.
“Fingers on his right hand were badly broken. Repeatedly. I was able to speak to the doctor who treated him. He still remembers it. He thinks that the damage occurred over several hours. That the murderer, Herbert Winters, used those fingers to torture him.”
Susan put a hand over her eyes. “I can’t believe this.”
“There’s something else,” Dornich said. “His dad’s still alive.”
Susan took the hand away from her eyes. She stared blankly at Dornich.
“He’s living in California,” Dornich explained. “I’ve got his phone number. He’s willing to talk to you if you want.”
“I’d like to talk to him.”
Dave Zeltserman
Bad Thoughts
Dornich hesitated. He took out a handkerchief and wiped some wetness from his neck. “I have to warn you. It’s going to be unpleasant. There’s some mental illness there.”
“Like father like son,” Susan muttered under her breath.
Dornich started to say something and then thought better of it. He didn’t want to discourage her from talking to Shannon’s father. He wanted to see her reaction to what the old man had to say. He reached over and redialed the number to California. “I’m going to put this on the speaker phone.”
After a few rings a voice picked up. It wanted to know who was calling. The voice was both strained and hostile.