"Nothing," said Tommy, pointing at her. "Not even to Phil."
Over her lips, she did a lightning version of the lock and tossed key.
Tommy weighed it out. There could be a lot of other explanations, but that one was pretty good.
"Do we know who this girl is?" he asked.
Rory took a beat. "I was thinking maybe the big boys had a clue."
"We're SOL on that," said Tommy.
Rory was, too. Records of the landline phones were sixed by now, and the cell phone detail showed a few calls every day, but almost all to his house or his son or the drugstore in town.
She smiled. "We could subpoena the court's telephone records. But it kind of seems like the ninety-day letter has got to go to the chief judge. And the detail, a year and a half later, has got to be trashed now, too, just like the other phones."
"E-mail?" asked Brand.
"These days every provider purges their server after thirty days. That doesn't mean he don't have messages on his own hard drives. I think it'd be especially interesting to take a look at his computer at home. Or at work."
"We're not going there right now," Tommy said. "Not before the election. And not without more than we have."
Tommy thanked Rory, laying it on thick about the kind of job she'd done.
"I'm on this?" she asked from the door, meaning she would be the cop who got the collar, if there ever was one.
"You're on it," said Tommy. "Wouldn't want nobody else. We'll call you."
Brand and Tommy sat alone. You could hear the phones chirping and deputies yelling at one another in the hall.
"We got something, Boss. The STD test-that's not for the happily monogamous. And we know he's talking about ending the marriage just a few weeks before she checks out."
Tommy thought. "Maybe Barbara was having the affair," he said. "Maybe he's paying a PI with the COLA and it's the investigator he's meeting in the hotel, who by the way is a young woman, which is damn good cover for a PI. Maybe he tests to be sure his wife hadn't brought home the nasty. Over time he can't forgive her, so he goes to commune with Prima Dana."
Brand ripped out a wild laugh. "You really missed your calling, you know. You'd have been a whiz on the other side, Boss. You have the head for it."
"But not the stomach," answered Tommy. "Look, Jimmy. The coroner says Barbara died of natural causes."
"Because the bad judge sat for twenty-four hours to wait for whatever really killed her to dissolve in her gut." Brand came around Tommy's desk. "We gotta surface, Boss." Brand had a whole long list of things to do. Get Rusty's computers. Do interviews to see how Rusty and Barbara were getting along, and develop a minute-by-minute timeline on what happened the night before Barbara died. Talk to the Sabiches' kid.
"Not yet," Tommy answered. "It hits the press, Rusty loses the election. Rusty loses the election and we made his defense, no matter what kind of evidence we come up with eventually. You know this song, every word: 'Acting PA wants revenge for old case, keeps Sabich off court.' We take our time, we don't have to listen to that."
"They serve ten-year terms on the supreme court," said Brand.
"Not with a murder conviction," Tommy answered.
"And what if we come up short?" asked Brand. "We get close but not close enough. This guy not only strolls on murder again, but is up there beating on us."
Tommy knew all along that Brand would get to this: Let it leak and put Rusty's lights out. Do a little justice instead of none at all. In the heat of the moment, Brand was still inclined to cut corners now and then. Tommy had probably been the same way, if he was going to be honest, and without the same excuse. Brand's father keeled over dead at his desk at National Can when Brand was eight. There were five other kids. The mom did what she could, became a teacher's aide, but they were trapped in a strange existence, residing in a nice suburban house paid off by the dad's mortgage insurance, in a town where they couldn't afford to live. Brand went through school with everybody around him having more-better clothes, vacations, cars, meals. These days, Brand did a lot of gourmet cooking-he and Jody got together every month with three other couples and tried their hand at stuff they'd seen on Iron Chef. A few years ago, Tommy asked Jim offhandedly what got him interested in food.
'Being hungry,' Brand answered. He wasn't talking about mealtimes these days, Tommy realized. The Brand family wanted in a community where nobody even understood the concept. Stuck in the middle, Brand always felt nobody in his house had time for him. His mom had twins, five years younger than Jim, to concentrate on. His older brothers were both doing what they could to hold things together for the rest of the brood.
In high school, Brand was in trouble all the time-cutting school, hanging out at poker parlors, where he started playing on the sly when he was fifteen. They'd have tossed him out if it hadn't been for football. Brand was a savage on the field. But their savage. He probably ended the seasons of four or five teammates during practice and twice the number of opponents, but he was all-conference and rarely missed a tackle in the open field. They told him he wasn't big enough to play linebacker in Division I, but he changed their minds when he got to the U. He made it the same way he did here, when Tommy got him the chance, on sheer will. That in turn was why Brand loved Tommy: because Tom was the first person in Jim's life who he felt cut him a real break without something to gain for himself. But when you turned up the heat at moments, particularly at trial, the hungry, pissed-off kid was still there, who didn't like playing by the rules because he thought they were made by people who didn't give a fig about the likes of him. Sooner or later, the grown-up took over. Brand always came back to himself, but sometimes you had to kick him in the ass. And Tommy did that now.
"No," said Tommy to the idea of a leak, with just enough irritation to make the point. He had learned this lesson the hard way years ago with the first Sabich case. You're here to prosecute crimes, not decide elections. Just do the job. Investigate. Build a case. Try it. The fallout was not your concern. "No choice. Nothing public before the election."
Brand didn't like it. "Besides," he said.
There was always a "besides" with Jimmy. He thought long and hard before he saw the boss.
"We got another way to deal with all of this," Brand said. "Punch a hole in that vendetta defense."
"Which is?"
"Prove he got away with murder twenty years ago. The PA isn't looking for revenge. He's looking for justice. The blood standards and the sperm fraction from the old case have still got to be in the police pathologist's deep freeze, don't they?"
Tommy knew where this was going because he had considered the possibility a couple of times a year for the past decade, once he realized that DNA would provide a definitive answer about whether Sabich was guilty of Carolyn Polhemus's murder. Of course, he'd never had a decent reason to do the tests.
"Not yet," he said.
"We could go in for an ex parte court order. Say it's part of a grand jury investigation."
"You pull that evidence out of the deep freeze at McGrath," he said, referring to police headquarters, where no secret was safe, "especially with a grand jury court order, and every cop in town will know in two hours, and every reporter about five minutes after that. When it's time, there may be a way without a court order."
Brand stared. This was the first time Tommy actually betrayed himself, showed how much thought he'd given to Rusty-and the DNA.