For that matter, he’d rather be at home, too. But this was something he had to do; Karen and Kathleen would have to understand. He had to prove himself to Morelli. He had to prove that he belonged on the Homicide team. And most of all, he had to keep this maniac from striking again.
9
BEN AND ROB CLIMBED the stairs to the twentieth floor of the Apollo building. The elevators were out of order—some kind of electrical short.
They’d spent almost the entire day in the document retention offices in the basement. Ben was punch-drunk from staring at endless reams of internal memoranda that Apollo was producing in the Nelson case. His fingers felt as if the friction ridges had been rubbed smooth; his body had acquired the musty smell of warehoused files.
“What’s the time?” Rob asked.
Ben checked his watch. “Almost eleven. Man, I can’t believe we spent the day—and night—reviewing documents.”
“Yeah,” Rob concurred. “And we only covered about a hundred thousand pieces of paper. We must be slow or something.”
“Is this fascinating activity par for the course?”
“I’m afraid so. Litigators are obsessed with documents, especially when corporations are involved. Everyone hopes that if enough documents are produced, somewhere in the bowels of the corporate file cabinets they’ll find an incriminating memo written by some wayward employee in a bad mood. And if it takes hundreds of hours of document-sifting to find that one memo, well, so much the better for the private law firm billing its client by the hour. For in-house guys like you and me, though, it’s hell on wheels.”
“Everyone has to pay his dues.”
“Yeah, everyone just starting out. Don’t worry, though—my impression is that you’ve entered the department much too high on the totem pole to get stuck with a lot of document productions. Soon you’ll be making legal assistants suffer through all this. Then they prepare a summary and you just read it. In fact, if you weren’t taking those depositions tomorrow, before a summary could be prepared, I bet Crichton wouldn’t have sent you along today.”
“That’s so strange,” Ben said. “I don’t understand why Crichton’s treating me like some kind of superstar. Everyone in the department must hate me.”
“Nonsense,” Rob replied. A slow grin crept across his face. “Well…perhaps. Present company excepted, of course.”
They shared a brief chuckle and headed toward their offices. About halfway down the corridor, Ben heard loud banging and shuffling noises coming from the LEXIS room, a small alcove that housed computer terminals used to access online legal research databases. The LEXIS room was an interior office, separated from the main corridor by the central computer room, where accounting, litigation support, and other computerized records were kept.
Ben heard another bang, followed by a low moan. “What’s going on in there?”
Rob shrugged his shoulders. “Can’t imagine. Mice, maybe?”
“I don’t think so.” Ben walked through the computer room and stopped at the entrance to the LEXIS alcove. He could still hear some kind of disturbance inside, but he couldn’t identify it. Cautiously, he turned the doorknob and pushed the door open.
It was hard to tell who they were at first, since the man was facing away from him and the woman’s face was obscured by his bare-bottomed body. She was lying on the main table between two computer terminals, and he was hunched over her, his pants dangling around his knees.
The thin figure finally tipped Ben off. It was Herb, busily doing what he did best—which in turn suggested that the shapely object beneath him must be Candice.
Ben quietly tiptoed back, but bumped into Rob, who was standing just behind him. Rob emitted an oof! and fell against the door, slamming it loudly against the wall.
Herb, intent on his business, didn’t even notice, but Candice did. She looked over Herb’s shoulder and screamed. She shoved Herb away and rolled over on the table, grabbing a computer manual to cover her breasts. Herb groaned, a pathetic expression of lustus interruptus on his face. He swirled around and saw Ben and Rob standing in the doorway.
“What the hell are you two doing here?” Herb shouted, as he grabbed his pants.
“Shouldn’t that be our question?” Rob said.
Herb buckled his britches and shoved his shirttail inside. “You didn’t see this, Kincaid.”
“I didn’t?”
“No, you didn’t. Let me spell it out for you.” He walked right up into Ben’s face and stood so close they could slow dance. “You don’t want me for an enemy. Bob Crichton and I are tight, got it? I can make life miserable for you. So you’d better learn to keep your trap zipped.”
“The way I see it,” Rob said, “you’d better learn to keep your zipper zipped.”
Herb snarled. “Look, jerkface, this is serious. I’m not just screwing around here.”
“I beg to differ.”
Herb slapped his hand against Rob’s chest and pushed him back against the wall. “Last warning, punk. If word of this gets out, you’ll be chin-deep in document productions for the rest of your life. That goes for you, too, Kincaid.”
Herb glanced back at Candice, who was by now fully dressed. “C’mon, babe. Let’s get out of here.” He scooped his suit jacket off the floor and threw it over his shoulders, then put his arm around Candice and marched defiantly out of the alcove.
“Jeez,” Ben said, “I can’t believe him. Herbert the Pervert—you weren’t kidding.”
“Let me give you some advice, Ben. Herb isn’t nearly as tight with Crichton as he thinks, but he’s tight enough. If I were you, I’d keep a low profile around Herb for a while. If you have to be near him, be all smiles. Laugh at his jokes. Don’t mention what you just saw. Given the way Crichton’s been larding it over on you, Herb probably hated you already. But if he didn’t before, he certainly does now.”
“Message received and understood.” They walked back through the main computer room. “Let’s dump these files in my office. It’s just across the hall.”
As they approached his office, Ben noticed that the door was closed. “That’s odd. I’m sure I left my door open. Do the cleaning people do that?” He reached for the doorknob.
“On the contrary; they’re supposed to leave the doors open all night. Fire codes or something.”
Ben froze in his tracks. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“A noise. Inside my office.”
“No.”
“Well, I did. You don’t suppose Herb and Candy reconvened their lascivious rendezvous, do you?” He grabbed the doorknob and pushed the door open. “Look, you horny lustbuckets, I want you out—”
Ben stopped in mid-sentence. Herb and Candy were not there. Everything appeared to be just as he had left it, except his desk chair was facing the back window. Ben approached slowly, crouched down, and swiveled the chair around. Something heavy was in it. Just as the chair pivoted to face Ben, the body of Howard Hamel fell forward. Ben reflexively caught him, then screamed and stumbled backward. The body continued to fall. It hit the carpet with a horrifying thunk. Ben saw a flat, square object bounce out of Hamel’s hand.
“Oh, my God,” Ben murmured. “Oh, my God, what’s wrong with him?”
Rob crouched down beside the body. “I have Red Cross certification in emergency aid. Let me see what I can do.” He pressed two fingers against the side of Hamel’s neck. “Well, you can forget about the emergency aid. He’s dead.”
“Oh, my God.” Ben felt a creeping chill race through his body. “How long?”
“I’m not a coroner, Ben. But I can tell if a body has a pulse or not. And this one doesn’t.”
Ben pulled Rob back out in the corridor. “First Herb, now this. What are we going to do?”