Shaeffer rubbed her eyes for an instant, letting her thoughts turn toward Cowart. What is he hiding? she asked herself. Some piece of the crime that means something to him. But what?
She drew a portrait of the reporter in her head, sketching in the look in his eyes, the tone of his voice. She did not know much about reporters, but she knew that they generally wanted to appear to know more than they did, to create the illusion that they were sharing information rather than simply seducing it. Cowart did not fit this profile. After their initial confrontation at the crime scene, he had not asked her a single question about the murders on Tarpon Drive. Instead, he had done his worldly best to avoid being questioned. What does that tell you? That he already has the answers.
But why would he hide them from her? To protect someone.
Blair Sullivan? Impossible. He needs to protect himself.
But that still didn't get her anywhere. She doodled on the empty pad in front of her, drawing concentric circles that grew darker and darker as she filled in the space with ink.
She remembered a lecture from her police academy days: four out of five killers know their victims. All right, she told herself. Blair Sullivan tells Matthew Cowart that he arranged the killing. How can he do this from Death Row?
Her heart sank. Prisons are worlds unto themselves.
Anything can be obtained, if one is willing to pay the price, even a death. And everyone inside knows the mechanics of prison barter and exchange. But for an outsider to penetrate the machinations of those worlds was difficult, sometimes impossible. The ordinary leverages of life that a policeman so depended on – the fear of social or legal sanctions, of being held accountable – didn't exist within a prison.
She envisioned her next step with distaste: questioning all the prison people who had come in contact with Sullivan. One of them should be the pipeline, she thought. But what does he pay with? He didn't have any money. Or did he? He didn't have any status. He was a loner who went to the chair. Or was he? How does he pay that debt? And why does he tell Matthew Cowart? A thought jumped into her head suddenly: Perhaps he'd already paid.
She took a deep breath.
Blair Sullivan contracts for a killing and we assume that payment is due upon completion of the contract. That is natural. But – turn it around. Shaeffer warmed suddenly, feeling her imagination trip like so many switches. She remembered the explosive excitement she felt when her eyes picked out the broad, dark shape of the billfish rising through the green-black waters to strike at the bait. A single moment, electric, exhilarating, before the battle was joined. The best moment, she thought.
She picked up the telephone and dialed a number. It rang three times before a groan slid over the line.
'Yeah?'
'Mike? It's Andy.'
'Christ. Don't you even want to sleep?'
'Sorry. No.'
'Give me a second.'
She waited, hearing a muffled explanation to his wife. She made out the words 'It's her first big case before the conversation was obscured by the sound of running water. Then silence, and finally the voice of her partner, laughing.
'You know, dammit, I'm the senior detective and you're the rookie. I say sleep, you're supposed to sleep.'
'Sorry,' she apologized again.
'Hah,' he replied. 'No sincerity. Okay, what's on your mind?'
'Matthew Cowart.' When she spoke his name, she! made up her mind: Don't play your hand quite yet.
'Mister I'm-Not-Telling-You-Everything Reporter?'
'The same.' She smiled.
'Boy, that sonuvabitch has me frosted.'
It was easy for her to envision her partner sitting at the side of his bed. His wife would have grabbed his pillow and jammed it over her head to drown out the noise of conversation. Unlike many detective partnerships, her relationship with Michael Weiss was businesslike and impersonal. They had not been together long – long enough to share an infrequent laugh, but not long enough to care what the joke was.
He was a sturdy man, unimaginative and hotheaded.
Better at showing pictures to witnesses and thumbing through insurance company records. That he'd acquired ten years of experience to her few months was thought she dismissed rapidly. Leaving him behind was easy for her. 'Me, too.' 'So what do you have in mind?'
'I think I ought to work him a bit. Just keep showing up. At his office. His apartment. When he goes jogging. When he takes a bath, whenever.' Weiss laughed. 'And?'
'Let him know we're going to sit on him until we learn what he really has to tell us. Like who committed that
'Makes sense to me.'
"But someone's got to start working the prison. See if someone there knows something, like maybe that guard sergeant. And I think somebody'd better go through all Sullivan's possessions. Maybe he left some- thing that'll tell us something.'
'.Andy, couldn't this conversation have waited until, say. eight A.M.?' Exhaustion mingled with wry humor in Weiss's voice. I mean, hell, don't you want to sleep a bit'
'Sorry, Mike. I guess not.'
'I hate it when you remind me of myself. I remember my first big case. I was breathing fire, too. Couldn't wait to get on it. Trust me. Take it slow.'
'Mike'
Okay. Okay. So you'd rather muscle the reporter than start interviewing cons and guards, right?' 'Yes.'
"See' Weiss laughed, 'that's the sort of intuitiveness that will get you ahead in this department. All right. You go bother Cowart, I'll go back to Starke. But I want
" to talk. Every day. Maybe twice a day, got it?'
'Absolutely.'
She had no idea if she intended to comply. She hung up the telephone and started to straighten her desk, sliding documents into files, organizing reports into neat stacks, clipping her own notes and observations onto the folders, placing pens and pencils into a cup. When she was satisfied with the order imposed on her working surface, she allowed herself a small surge of anticipation.
It's all mine, she thought.
She headed back to Miami beneath a midday sun that burned off the hood of the car, humming to herself, snatches of Jimmy Buffett tunes about living in the Florida Keys, daydreaming as she drove fast.
She was new to homicide work, only nine months out of a patrol car and three months from working burglaries, elevated by ability and an equal opportunity suit brought on behalf of all the women and minorities in the department. She was consumed by ambition, filled with energy and the belief that she could defuse her lack of experience with hard work. That had been her solution to almost all problems, since she had been a lonely child growing up in the Upper Keys. Her father had been a Chicago police detective, killed in the line of duty. She had often reflected upon the phrase 'the line of duty,' thinking how impoverished a concept it truly was. It pretended to give some sort of military importance to what she had come to understand was a moment of extraordinary mistake and bad luck. It was as if something necessary had been achieved by his dying, when she knew that to be a lie. Her father had worked bunco, usually dealing with cheapskate scam artists and confidence men, trying to stem the never-ending tide of retirees and immigrants who thought they could get rich by investing in one bizarre idea after another. He and his partners had raided a boiler-room operation one morning. Twenty women and men at desks work- ing the telephones, calling folks up with a gold- investment scheme. Neither the scheme nor the raid were anything unusual, just part of daily business for both the criminals and the police. What had been unforeseen was that one of the men working the phones was a hotheaded kid with a concealed gun, who'd never taken a fall before and so never learned that the criminal justice system was going to let him go with nary a whimper. A single shot had been fired. It'd penetrated a partition made out of cheap wallboard and struck her father in the chest on the other side, where he'd been writing down the phony names of the people being arrested.