“I’ll keep an eye on it, Joe. And, by the way, your coming over last night made a big difference. I think you should drop by any time you feel the urge, as long as you keep the same tone. I’ll tell the others you might do that.”
I thanked her and hung up, ignoring the fact that “keeping the same tone” might be easier said than done, depending on my own emotional mood swings.
I pulled open my bottom desk drawer and removed an old electric razor, with which I did an approximate job on my face, using my fingertips in place of a mirror. The shower would have to wait. I knew that with this morning’s headlines, the political natives were going to be at least restless, and perhaps arming for battle.
I crossed the hallway to Brandt’s side of the building, only to find him putting on his jacket and preparing to leave. “I was just about to round you up. Dunn wants to see us-I think he’s getting sweaty palms.”
I accompanied Tony back out to the hallway and upstairs to where the State’s Attorney had his offices on the top floor. Dunn’s request-and Brandt’s reaction-were in perfect keeping with my own concerns. The SA had been a fixture in the county for the past fifteen years, a feather in the community’s cap when he’d first been elected as a highly respected prosecutor with big-city credentials. He’d been slumming then, a fifty-five-year-old flatlander, newly retired from handling big criminal cases in New York, and his run for office had reflected that lack of desperate hunger so common among office seekers. Dunn had felt free to say whatever was on his mind, regardless of the consequences, because he’d literally had nothing to lose. It had even seemed to some of us in those days that, were he elected, he might not choose to serve, having found something else of more interest. This curious nonchalance had worked well in his favor, being misinterpreted by both press and public as courage rather than arrogant indifference.
Time had worked its devious alchemy, of course, eroding the man’s lack of ambition-and the public’s gullibility-with the result that he was now as driven to hang onto his position as a growing number of people were to see him replaced.
Having the chairwoman of the board of selectmen raped, therefore, with no suspect in jail and both these facts in banner headlines, was not good news.
He greeted us silently from behind a large, gleaming, imposing cherry-wood conference table, looking like a bad caricature of some egomaniacal dictator. Before him, in pointed isolation, lay a single copy of the morning’s newspaper, face up. We were not invited to sit.
He extended one long, manicured finger and tapped the newspaper gently with it, looking me straight in the eye. “Why wasn’t I told about this?”
I hesitated a moment, weighing any number of possible responses, and finally settled for, “I didn’t think of it. Sorry.”
“You guys made me look like an idiot. Alice Sims called me up at the crack of dawn and asked for an on-the-record comment, and I had to ask her what the hell she was talking about. She said you and Raffner’s crowd cooked this up together.”
Alice was Stan Katz’s “courts-’n’-cops” reporter, covering his old beat. She was young and aggressive and dying to make an impression, just as Stanley had been before her. I was sure Dunn was right that she’d make the most of this communications glitch, and felt badly that I’d dropped the ball. I didn’t like Dunn, but it did none of us any good to make it appear the police and the SA weren’t talking.
Dunn continued coldly, “She also told me that Jack Derby had weighed in with his own homespun country-cracker bullshit about the plight of women in this violent society, and how bravery like Ms. Zigman’s was an example of how to stem the tide-or some other highly original piece of crap.”
He pushed aside the paper and laid his thin, pale hands flat on the table’s shiny surface. “Are you two gentlemen counting the days until Mr. Derby moves into these offices? Perhaps you think he needs a little help?”
I had seen James Dunn pull the imperious magistrate performance before-it was one of his better acts. But it had always been directed outward, at a suspect or a reluctant witness. Turning his vitriol on us, especially on purely political grounds, was a mistake I knew Tony was not going to take in stride.
Brandt walked around the end of the long table to join Dunn on the other side. The latter looked taken aback by this gesture and, as Tony approached, even faintly alarmed. He shifted in his chair and raised his hands vaguely over his chest, as if prepared to physically defend himself.
Tony, however, smiling thinly but affably enough, merely pulled out the chair right next to Dunn’s, sat in it, leaned back, and placed his crossed feet on the immaculate tabletop, all the while reaching into his jacket pocket to remove his pipe and pouch. Dunn’s theatrically staged and imposing set dissolved. As an afterthought, I sat down on the edge of the table, instead of standing like an abashed schoolboy.
Tony’s voice, despite his mild appearance, was ice cold. “Want to run that by us again?”
Dunn looked ready to explode. “How did Derby know about this before I did?”
Tony focused on stuffing his pipe. “The paper knew about it before we did, and the paper’s endorsed your opponent. How do you explain it?”
The SA’s eyes narrowed slightly as he stared at me. “What do you mean, the paper knew about it before you did? She’s your goddamn girlfriend, for Christ’s sake.”
I decided to play Brandt’s bland game. “She called them, an informant there called us, and I went over to their office to make it look like we were all coordinating. Katz bought it. You just slipped my mind. I am sorry about that. I’m afraid I was scrambling for cover myself.”
Dunn’s lethal gaze shifted back and forth between us. Tony lit up and his pipe erupted into a cloud of smoke. “Was there anything else you wanted to talk to us about, James?”
It was a graceful offer from someone who would have been entirely justified in simply walking out of the room. Dunn grudgingly recognized it as such.
“Yes. How is the investigation going?” he asked, switching gears.
Brandt spoke as if the conversation had just begun. “Fine. We’ve got two possibles from among the files Joe collected at the intelligence meeting yesterday, and a third one Gail gave us of a guy who replaced a couple of windows at her house a year ago-”
“And Jason Ryan,” I added, “who said she deserved what she got, a few days before the rape. We also have a guy from Massachusetts on parole here on a burglary rap who has a long history of sexual assault.”
Tony gave me a quick glance, since I hadn’t had a chance yet to update him on Bob Vogel. He also was not one who enjoyed being left out of the informational loop, especially with Dunn on the warpath.
Dunn looked at his watch, eager to get this over now that it had blown up in his face. “I take it Todd’s being kept abreast of all this.”
“I haven’t seen him this morning,” I said, “but I’ll fill him in.”
Dunn stood up and walked to the door that led to his private office. “All right. Let me know when something develops.”
He closed the door behind him, and Tony and I looked at one another. “Can’t imagine why the race is so close,” Brandt muttered.
Lunch was a combination of brown-bag sandwiches and chips, ordered-in slabs of glistening pizza, and a mismatched assortment of carrots, pickles, cookies, yogurt, soda, and one Twinkie, belonging to Dennis. Sitting around the least cluttered conference table in the command post were the entire detective squad, Brandt, Billy Manierre representing Patrol, and Todd Lefevre from the SA’s office.
Ron Klesczewski was running the meeting. “Of the two possibles gleaned from the intelligence meeting-Lonny Sorvin and Barry Gilchrist-Sorvin looked the most likely. They had both blindfolded their victims in the past, but only Sorvin used ropes and spoke in a whisper. Neither one of them broke into their victims’ homes, neither one had used a knife, and neither one had stripped naked prior to sexual contact. Still, they were the only ones that even came close to fitting the MO of the guy we’re after. Also, given their jobs and generally known habits, they both had the opportunity to commit the rape in question.