Brewer stared at him in angry confusion. Ricci knew he wouldn’t believe his excuse for the grab. It didn’t matter. Nor did it matter that he’d incidentally happened to be telling the truth about the testifying part. He’d gotten his look at the screen image. Not a long one. But long enough.
“There a problem here?”
The voice was Erickson’s. Ricci half-turned and saw the detective standing behind him. He and Thibodeau had come over from the Honda.
Ricci left the explanation to Brewer. He doubted the cop would mention anything about the laptop, embarrass himself by admitting he’d been caught off guard.
As expected, pride won the day.
“No,” Brewer said. He was trying not to seem abashed. “The two of us were having some shop talk.”
Erickson gave his partner a long look, hands in the pockets of his raincoat, water dripping from his hair.
“Shop talk,” he repeated.
Brewer nodded inside the car.
“Ricci used to be a cop,” he said. “We were comparing notes about procedures. How they’ve changed and so forth.”
Erickson’s gaze dissected him another moment and then swung onto Ricci.
“Didn’t do much comparing with me before,” he said.
Ricci shrugged under his umbrella.
“We had other things to talk about,” he said.
Erickson was silent. Thibodeau was silent. Both of them were looking at Ricci and had separate reasons for being skeptical and displeased.
“Okay,” Erickson said at last. He gestured the Sword ops toward the road. “I think maybe it’s time I walk you two back to your car.”
Thibodeau hadn’t taken his eyes off Ricci.
“Guess it would be,” he said, and started traipsing down the gravel and mud drive in the rain.
“I get to find out what was going on between you and that other detective?” Thibodeau said.
“Sure,” Ricci said. “I aim to please.”
Thibodeau waited. They were back inside Ricci’s Jetta on the shoulder of the road, rain dashing against the roof and windshield.
“Erickson was holding out on us,” Ricci said. “I knew he wouldn’t give up whatever it was and played his partner on a hunch.”
Thibodeau looked across the seat at him.
“That hunch pay off?”
“Yeah.” Ricci told him how he’d seen Brewer in the car with his graph paper and laptop, gone over to check it out, and gotten a look at the crime scene diagram on Brewer’s computer. “It was all right there for me on his screen. The stain on the floor. Its location and measurements. And an outline of a dog. The word greyhound lettered right over it.”
Thibodeau was shaking his head, his brow creased.
“A dog,” he said. “Don’t get it. Erickson said—”
“I heard what Erickson said. Kept it nice and vague for us. Except vague only works when it’s consistent, and he wasn’t making sense. The blood left behind isn’t Julia’s and he’s thinking about other possibles. Maybe one of her attackers, maybe not. But if not, who? If he isn’t looking at anybody besides Julia being in that store when things went down, it would’ve had to belong to whoever came after her.”
Thibodeau tugged at his heavy beard as it all sank in.
“Be damned,” he said. “Be damned if it didn’t slip right by me.”
Ricci stared out into the rain.
“At first I figured he was lying straight out. That the cops had somebody in custody and wanted to keep it secret,” he said. “Wouldn’t have guessed those possibles he mentioned didn’t include human beings.”
Thibodeau was quiet a moment, still plucking his beard.
“We got to be concerned with Erickson. He hear tell about what you did… how you did it… he gonna shut us out altogether.”
Ricci shrugged.
“Let him,” he said. “Gives me one less person to second guess.”
Thibodeau shook his head some more. “I ain’t trying to start a gripe, just saying you might’ve warned me. Never know when we gonna need him. We’d put our minds together, consulted, we might’ve figured a way to get the information out of him so we don’t lose his trust—”
Ricci pitched a glance across the seat at him.
“I don’t want anybody’s trust,” he said. “Just want to know why the cops are keeping that dog’s body under wraps. And where it is.”
Thibodeau started to say something, quickly cut himself off.
“Any thoughts about how you gonna do that?” he said with a kind of yielding resignation.
Ricci thrust his key into the ignition and brought the Volkswagen to life.
“Yeah,” he said. “I do.”
ELEVEN
“This the street?”
“Sheffield’s place is just ahead of us.” DeMarco motioned to a dormered Old Quarter house on the right as he turned a corner in their Land Rover. “When I drove him over from the airport, the boss was in a pretty decent mood. Bushed, you know, but kidding with Wade and Ackerman in the backseat about it being a fancier Motel 6 than the one where he usually grabs a bed.” He shook his head. “I never would have thought I’d be here again tonight, bringing the kind of news we’ve got.”
Nimec glanced at him across the front seat.
“There’s no good time for bad news,” he said. “When things hit us over the head, we cope. Timing isn’t part of the bargain.”
DeMarco checked his mirrors and pulled to the curb. It was almost ten o’clock at night, twenty minutes having passed since he’d met Nimec’s chopper at the same field where Gordian had arrived some hours earlier.
The two men sat quietly in the vehicle’s dark interior.
“You think about how you’re going to break it to him?” DeMarco said.
Nimec’s smile was catacomb bleak.
“If I do that,” he said, “you can forget about me coping.”
He exited the Rover, strode into the building’s forecourt, and went up the steps to its entrance. The penguin who answered his ring reminded him of the waiters at the Rio de Gabao dinner reception. When did the black suits and ruffled white shirts come off?
A hurried introduction. Nimec said he needed to see Roger Gordian alone, was told Monsieur Gordian was in a meeting with his host and fellow house guests, explained he’d come about something very urgent, was then led into a side parlor, and invited to have a seat while he waited.
He stood instead with his back to the plush sofa.
Gordian was smiling as appeared through the parlor’s sliding walnut doors minutes later.
“Pete, hi,” he said. “I heard the doctors were checking you out and didn’t expect to see you until sometime tomor—”
He caught Nimec’s sober, uneasy expression and stopped in the middle of the room. The smile had faded.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
Nimec quickly went past Gordian to the doors, drew them shut, and then turned to face him.
“Boss,” he said. His hand went to Gordian’s arm. “It’s Julia.”
“That’s Rob over there on the tennis courts with the dogs,” Meredith Wagner said from the Jetta’s backseat. She motioned to the small community park on their left with her head. “He wanted to take them running while the rain gives us a letup.”
Pulled up by the park entrance, Ricci and Thibodeau looked out at the solitary figure of Rob Howell on the other side of a high chain-link fence surrounding the courts. His back to the plastic-coated mesh, hands deep in the pockets of his barn coat, Howell stood watching the dogs chase each other in repeated energetic circles around the wet artificial turf.
Thibodeau shifted around to face the woman.
“We won’t trouble him any more ’n we need,” he said. “I promise you.”
She nodded without turning from her window. Dressed in jeans and a light brown corduroy jacket that closely matched the color of her hair, Meredith Wagner was about thirty-five, plain, thin, soft spoken, and visibly worn. They had found her at the ranch-style house she shared with her husband, Nick; three-year-old daughter, Katie; and, since yesterday, her brother Rob and his five greyhounds in a quiet suburban development outside Sonoma.