Elizabeth looked away from him, saw me, dropped her eyes. She said, “I won’t talk to you.”
“That’s fine,” he said, smiling. “Long as you don’t mind listening. Too bad you’re all alone, because the way I read it, the three of you are going to take the fall together. What you need to start worrying about is special circumstances. We have a multiple-murder situation here. Add to that a couple of counts of conspiracy, assault with intent, child-selling, abuse, and neglect. I could go on for a while, but you know what went down. In the end, it adds up to three lifetime passes with a mileage bonus upgrade for seats on death row.”
Elizabeth had been biting that big lip during Mike’s entire speech. I saw blood around the small, even teeth. She didn’t say anything, and Mike went on:
“The state hasn’t executed a woman for a lot of years.” He was slipping away from Uncle Ned. “But the environment is getting ripe for it. Seems to me the murder of an innocent little girl by her stepmother might be just the case the public and the courts decide to jump on.
“There are a lot of ways this could go down, Mrs. Ramsdale. Make it easy on yourself, give the state a hand. Usually, the DA wants to fry the triggerman. Or, in this case, the slasher. My take on this is that you’re the shark and the other two danced attendance. But they did the dirty deeds, not you. So do yourself a favor. Tell me a story.”
“I want my attorney,” she said.
“Absolutely.” Mike smiled. “Soon as we get you booked. Give me a few more minutes and I’ll have you taken right back downstairs.” Mike leafed through the file that had come up with Elizabeth. “Did you have your strip search? I don’t see that here.”
She hissed through clenched jaws, “Yes. I did.”
“I don’t see the paperwork.” He closed the file and smiled more. “Not a big thing. We can do it again.”
I was biting my tongue. One more minute and I was going to go out and call her an attorney. I thought Mike was skating near the edge.
“Ricco and George,” Mike said. “Hard to keep prisoners segregated downstairs. I hate it when they get together, work out their stories. Sure plays hell, especially if they decide to scapegoat a third person. The story we’re getting goes something like this. Your husband was leaving you. With the prenuptial agreement you signed, you’d be back waiting tables. Then, lucky you, you found him with his throat cut. You sank him in the front yard so no one would find him until you had drained the Ramsdale assets. The delay pissed off George. He wanted Randy declared dead so he could reclaim his little girl and cash in on Randy’s estate – that was all part of his original deal with Randy when he handed over his kid. She was his heir. Did you know Hillary’s identity, Mrs. Ramsdale?”
“I have nothing to say.”
“Okay. This is how I read it. You need the kid for a while longer. You do everything you can to scare the shit out of her so she’ll stay away from George. You harass her night and day, tell her George wants to steal her back. This makes some sense to her, because she can remember being snatched – she was four – and she can remember George helping Randy take her. You use her nightmares, you give her some new ones. You go too far, though, because after a while she decides she’s safer living on the streets than living with you. What did you do to her, Elizabeth? Did you tell her about Randy? Did you tell her his body was out in front of the house? Did you take her swimming and show her?”
Blood trickled from her lip, and she wiped it with the back of her hand. Looking down at the red smear, she said, “I want my attorney.”
“Uh huh. You were okay as long as Hillary stayed away. To make sure she didn’t come back at some inconvenient moment, you located her and canceled her return ticket for good. Just two weeks before Mother’s Day. That ever occur to you, Mother’s Day?”
She gave Mike a defiant glare. “I won’t say anything.”
“You don’t have to.” Mike kicked the chair next to her, making both of us jump. “We’ll just let Ricco and George tell it their way, Elizabeth, if that’s what you want.”
“Ricco won’t say anything.” She looked Mike right in the eye. “He loves me.”
“He loves you? Is that why he left you in a Mexican jail? His best shot is to make a deal, go state’s evidence and testify against you. If he has any brains, that’s what he’ll do.”
“You’re trying to scare me.”
Like a blackjack dealer, Mike laid down another card, the computer-enhanced picture of the driver of the Corvette. When Elizabeth saw the grotesque image of Richard Nixon, she began to have some trouble with regular breathing.
Mike leaned over the table, putting his face near hers. “You forgot to cover your hands that night, Elizabeth. You forgot to vacuum loose hair out of the mask when you took it off, wash out the traces of sweat and saliva. That was dumb. Really dumb. But you know where you really messed up?”
“Yes,” she said, snapping her head up to confront Mike. “I know where I messed up.” Angrily she swept away the pictures of Ricco and George, making a racket with her handcuffs: “I learned a long time ago that if you want something done right you’ve got to do it yourself. No matter how dirty it is. And that’s all I have to say.”
“If that’s the way you want it.” Mike pulled out a fourth picture, a group shot of junior-high-aged kids mugging for the camera. I recognized them, the journalism class at Hillary’s school. Mike had torn a page from her yearbook. The paper was a bit wrinkled from being in salt water, but Hillary’s happy face was absolutely clear in the front row center.
Mike put the page on the table in front of Elizabeth. “The individual I sincerely want to talk to is Hillary. Of course, that’s impossible. But I really would like to hear what she has to say. She looks like one great kid.”
Elizabeth suddenly lost all of her starch, and nearly collapsed from her chair.
Mike, with complete emotional detachment, grabbed Elizabeth and righted her. When she had herself in control again, he backed away from her. He stood shoulder to shoulder with me. With arms crossed, back against the wall, dramatically sad-faced, he said again, “One great kid.”
“Please,” she begged, “let me go lie down somewhere.”
Mike frowned. “What did Hillary say to Ricco before he cut her? Think she asked him to let go of her? Think she told him he was hurting her? Think she wanted to go lie down somewhere?”
Each question caught her like a blow to the face. I wished I could deliver the real thing to her. No, I wished Leslie Metrano had five minutes alone with her. I tossed off any notion of calling her attorney for her. As if reading my thoughts, she said, “I want my attorney.”
“Sure thing,” Mike said. But he didn’t move.
She took a moment’s time out for hard thinking. Then she turned her lovely eyes on Mike, looking up at him through the curly lashes. “You have to believe me. I didn’t intend for the child to get hurt.”
Mike shook his head. “You did some detective work, or maybe she called you. You found where she was cooping on the street and you sent Ricco to get her.”
“He was only supposed to pick her up,” Elizabeth insisted. “I’m telling you the truth. We were going to take her to Mexico with us, put her in a boarding school there for a while.”
“Doesn’t work, Mrs. Ramsdale,” Mike said. “If all he wanted was to pick her up, why did Ricco take a razor with him? You can’t tell me he had to protect himself. She only weighed ninety pounds. What I think is this. He cut her on the street to make it look like a hooker-client thing, hoping no one would pay much attention to it. But just for insurance, he made the razor cut look a lot like the one across Randy’s jugular. Then if George started to get froggy, you could use that little detail to settle him down. The way I put it together, George was a bigger problem for you than the cops. What were your plans for him? Guess I should ask, when were you planning to do him?”