Hale sat down heavily in his chair, his face set in stubborn lines. But he said nothing. As he watched the chief, Frank took hope from that silence. He knew that Hale was going over all that he had said, looking for holes, for weaknesses. Hale was the bishop in this little cathedral, and the man clearly didn’t want to change religions at this point — for ten years, Hale had knelt at the altar of Lefebvre’s guilt and preached it to not only his congregation, but city hall, the press, the public.
“Whatever else you want to believe about Lefebvre,” Frank said, “you know he couldn’t get up out of that wreckage to go buy a watch, then stick it into an evidence box before heading off for his final reward.”
“Don’t get cocky. It may have been impossible for Lefebvre, but it was nearly as impossible for anyone else to do so, with security cameras, and—”
“Seven years ago, sir.”
“Oh, back to calling me ‘sir,’ are you?”
“Seven years ago.”
Hale’s face reddened. “Don’t push me, Harriman.”
“Seven years ago, sir, Flynn was not in charge of the property room. Five years ago an investigation into the theft of drugs and other materials from the—”
“Yes, yes, you’ve made your point. There were no cameras before Flynn, and we did have problems with evidence control.”
Hale stood up and began pacing.
“Whom do you suspect?”
“No one in particular yet, sir.”
“So you’re telling me that you’ve spent your first week creating chaos.”
“I wouldn’t put it like that, sir.”
Hale stopped pacing. “No. Neither would I.” He paced again.
“I want to talk to a couple of commissioners today, sir.”
“Police commissioners? About this? At this stage of your endeavors? Don’t be an ass.”
“No, sir, about Trent Randolph. I need to know who in this department identified him as an enemy.”
“Maybe you’re still looking at Dane, you know. Dane hated him, and while I will admit that there appears to be insider help here, we’ve always known that Dane must be getting at least some assistance from someone in this department.”
Frank said nothing.
“You don’t believe it.”
“Why would Dane frame himself?”
“If he knew he would have insider help getting out of trouble, he might have found it all a pleasant game.”
“He wasn’t at the press conference.”
Hale sighed. “I’m not happy, Harriman. I’m not happy at all.”
“No, sir. But you’ll do what’s right.”
Hale smiled a small, quick smile. “That sounded more like hope than certainty to me.”
“If I doubted you, I’d be talking to the attorney general instead of you, sir.” He kept to himself the fact that he had looked up the number this morning but hadn’t called.
Hale gave a bark of laughter. “Laugh, Harriman, because that had better be a damned joke. I don’t want you to talk to anyone. Not anyone. Not even Pete Baird.”
“I’d rather you didn’t ask that of me. Pete can be trusted to keep it to himself. As it is — I like working with Pete, sir. He knows about Elena Rosario and her son, and—”
“And your partnership is feeling the strain of this case,” Hale said. “I’ll think about it. With Rosario and her son under your roof, you’ve probably blabbed to your wife — did you swear her to secrecy?”
“She won’t talk to the paper about it, if that’s what you’re asking — sir.”
“Which commissioners do you want to talk to?”
“Soury and Pickens.”
“Hmm. You’ll get very different views of Randolph. Be sure to tell them this is in the strictest confidence.”
“Yes, sir. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll be on my way—”
“Not so fast. One other thing you should know.” He tapped the ends of his fingers together, looking suddenly ill at ease. He cleared his throat, then said, “When someone is appointed to a commission that will be reviewing highly sensitive materials such as those seen by the police commission, we very naturally do a background check on that person.”
Frank waited. There was something slightly defensive in Hale’s tone.
“A couple of years before he became a commissioner,” Hale said, “Randolph had been involved with studies of the department and so on, so we were aware of him. He seemed to be a very straight arrow. He dumped his wife, but no one had ever been able to stand her, and he threw her over for a woman that had every man in the department green with envy. A real beauty — blond hair, blue eyes, gorgeous. But then, just after he was appointed, we learned that the woman he was dating was associated with Whitey Dane.”
“Tessa Satel — the one he left his wife for?”
“Yes. We had never observed her anywhere near Dane. We might never have made the connection except for a lucky break. One of our surveillance teams had noticed that Dane visited this one house fairly often. Turns out it belongs to an aunt of his — his mother’s sister. Good-looking woman. No criminal activity that we could discover — can’t exactly arrest everyone whose nephew grows up to be a jerk. He was over there often, though, so we started to watch the place. Every day, she picks up a little girl after school, baby-sits her until the kid’s mom comes by. Nobody stays around, nobody carries packages in and out of the house — nothing even remotely criminal.
“So we take the surveillance off. Dane visits his aunt — big deal. Some of these creeps, you know, they’re saints in their own families. Guilty of murder, theft, drug dealing, every sort of crime you can think of — but he loves his dear old auntie — who isn’t all that old. He’s more of an auntie than she is, you ask me. Have you ever seen who works at that house? I guess you met one of his houseboys yesterday.”
“About this relationship of Randolph’s—” Frank said, refusing to be sidetracked.
“Oh, yes — well, I’m getting to that. One day, while I was at lunch with Trent, he told me that he felt sorry for Tessa, because she and her daughter were all alone in the world. According to him, she’s a widowed orphan and has no family whatsoever — no brothers, no sisters, no nothing. And I had this funny feeling — you know, something bothered me about this for no apparent reason.”
“Except that if a person wants to hide her past, she might give out a story like that.”
“Exactly. So I decided to let someone outside of Narcotics take another look at her—”
“Why?”
“I wanted to know more—”
“No, I mean, why not someone in Narcotics?”
Hale shifted uncomfortably. “They hadn’t done a very good job of checking her out. That’s all.”
“And you suspected someone in Narcotics of working for Dane.”
Hale shrugged. “Such things are always a possibility. In any case, I asked Pete Baird to see what he could learn. On the first day he followed her, guess where she went after work?”
“Dane’s aunt’s house.”
“Right. Because guess who did the child care for her while she played tickle the bird with Trent Randolph?”
“The aunt.”
“Right. And the aunt isn’t charging her a dime. Because Tessa is her daughter. Tessa is Dane’s cousin.”
“So you told Randolph about this?”
“Yes. That was very difficult. But in truth, I think he had tired of her. He broke up with her not long before he died.”
“Which made you further suspect Whitey Dane of killing him.”
“I didn’t need that to suspect him! Whitey Dane had been seen by the only living witness!”
“Seth Randolph.”
The chief nodded, then suddenly smiled. “So maybe you had better think of this possibility — maybe Dane put on a different watch on the night he killed Trent and Amanda. Maybe someone in our department was indeed wearing a similar watch — after all, you tell me there were thousands of these watches sold.”