“Bug off, Ben. I’m going fishing.” She kept on walking without looking back until she was out of sight.
17.
BELINDA DROPPED BEN OFF outside the DA’s office on the far end of Main Street. Swain’s office differed from the DA offices with which Ben was familiar in two principal respects: first, Swain didn’t have a secretary or receptionist, and second, he had a portable playpen set up behind his desk.
Swain didn’t see Ben come in because he was busy reading a story, or describing it anyway, to his daughter.
“See, Amber,” Swain said, “Carl takes the baby and the puppy to play in the flowers.” He turned the page. “And—oh, no!—the puppy squirts Carl with the garden hose!”
Amber pointed at the picture in the book and giggled.
Ben glanced over Swain’s shoulder and saw that the Carl in question was a huge black dog. “Every baby should have a rottweiler for a playmate,” he said.
Swain turned around. “Mr. Kincaid! I didn’t hear you come in.”
“Don’t let me interrupt.”
“Oh, no. It’s office hours. I just—” He suddenly became embarrassed. “My wife Marjorie works part-time at the hardware store, so I keep Amber on Tuesdays and Thursdays.”
“That must make it hard to get any legal work done.”
“You ain’t kiddin’. Fortunately there isn’t that much to do. We’ve never had much trouble in Silver Springs. At least not until your boy and his buddies came to town.”
“Do you mind if we discuss this case?” Ben tilted his head toward the back of the office. “It might be best if we talked in private.”
“Oh. Right. Of course.” Swain smiled down at Amber. “Honey, Daddy has to talk to this nice man. Why don’t you look at the book by yourself for a minute?”
Amber’s lower lip protruded. “Wead.”
“I will, honey. As soon as we finish talking, I’ll read it to you. Twice, if you like.”
“No!” Amber said emphatically. “Wead!”
“Honey, I can’t.”
“Wead! Wead! Wead!”
“Honey, no.”
Amber ran to the side of the playpen and pressed her face against the white mesh like a pint-sized prisoner of Alcatraz. She began to wail at an earsplitting pitch. “Weeeeead!”
“Honey!” Swain leaned in close to her. “If you’ll be good for a few minutes, I’ll give you a nice bottle of milk.”
“No!” she screamed back. Her face was a puffy crimson. “Wead!”
Swain looked at Ben and shrugged helplessly. “Okay, if you don’t want milk, I’ll give you some apple juice.”
“Wahhh!” Amber wasn’t even responding now. She just wailed.
“Okay, okay. If you’ll just be good for a minute, I’ll let you have some”—his voice dropped to a whisper—“Coca-Cola.”
As abruptly as it had begun, the caterwauling ceased. Swain turned around quickly and checked Ben’s reaction. Ben did his best to look as if he hadn’t heard.
Swain sprinted to the mini-refrigerator in the back of his office and took out an aluminum can of Coke Classic. “Normally, of course, I would never let her near this stuff.”
“Of course not,” Ben said. “That’s why you keep a case of it in your office.”
“Well … I drink it, too.”
While Swain emptied the can into a plastic bottle, Ben checked the contents of the cupboard. Chocolate-chip cookies, graham crackers, cheese puffs, and Honey-nut Cheerios. “I guess this nutritious stuff is for you, too?”
“Sometimes I get hungry during the workday,” Swain murmured. He passed the soda-filled bottle to Amber. She snatched it eagerly, popped it in her mouth, and nestled down in the playpen with her book.
“Whew.” Swain wiped his forehead. “Well, that’ll keep her occupied for two or three minutes, anyway. What did you have on your mind, Mr. Kincaid?”
“I’d like to see the evidence you have against my client. If you’d like, I can file a motion to produce—”
“Oh, that won’t be necessary. I’ll show you my whole case file.” Swain went to his desk and opened the topmost drawer. “What do you want to know?”
“Well, for starters,” Ben said, “what’s this overwhelming evidence you alluded to in yesterday’s Herald?”
“Ah. Well, you know the sheriff found the crossbow used to kill Vuong.”
“I read it in the paper.”
“It’s true. Found it shortly after the murder took place, about half a mile from where Vuong was killed.”
“And there’s no doubt that it’s the crossbow used to kill Vuong?”
“Not in my mind. How many industrial-strength crossbows do you think there are around here? That’s a pretty rarefied piece of equipment. Big mother, too. I’d find it difficult to believe anyone had one in these parts, if we hadn’t had professional killers move into the neighborhood.”
Ben decided to let that pass. “What’s the forensic evidence that links Vick to the crossbow?”
“The hairs. Two hairs, to be specific, caught in the firing mechanism of the crossbow.”
“Surely that’s not enough to bring charges on.”
“The state labs say it is. They’ve run tests and compared the hairs to exemplars taken from your client. They say they’re his. I don’t know all the scientific lingo, but they say their conclusion is one hundred percent certain.”
Sounded like a DNA matchup, Ben mused. Not at all good news. “And I expect you asked Mr. Payne’s permission before you took the exemplar from Vick?”
“Of course. He had no objection. He’s been very cooperative.”
I’ll bet. That’s probably why he was chosen. “What else have you got?”
Swain hedged. “Well, our investigation is still ongoing. …”
“What about fingerprints?”
“We didn’t find any on the crossbow.”
“That in itself must be unusual.”
Swain shrugged. “If the killer watches TV, he would know to wipe his prints off the crossbow. But he might not notice a stray hair.”
“Have you checked out Vick’s alibi?”
“You call that an alibi? He says he was walking out near the lake when the sheriff found him about an hour after the murder. No one was with him. He had both the time and the opportunity to kill Vuong.
“Frankly,” Swain continued, “I was expecting to have to bust an alibi when I heard about the arrest. Regardless of what really happened, I figured Vick would get a bunch of his ASP buddies to leap to his defense and claim they were with him at the time of the murder. But that didn’t happen. I get the impression Vick wasn’t all that popular, even with his own people.”
Now that was interesting. “I’ve heard Vick had some visitors the week before the murder. Any idea who they were?”
“Why don’t you just ask your client?”
Ben shrugged awkwardly. “I—uh—just wanted to see what you already know. So I don’t waste time with unimportant witnesses.”
“Well, I don’t have any idea who visited Vick. It’s not something anyone in this town is likely to admit voluntarily. And the ASP people won’t talk to me at all. I was planning to go out to that ASP camp with some subpoena, but given this forensic evidence, I don’t see the point. We’ve got your man dead to rights. And if I don’t have to go there again, I won’t.”
“Then you’ve visited the ASP encampment?”
“ ’Fraid so. I’ve been out a few times on some disorderly-conduct reports—and I didn’t enjoy it. That place gives me the creeps. It’s like, one minute you’re in an Ouachita paradise, and the next minute you’re in hell.”
“Can you tell me how to get there?”
“Better yet, I’ll draw you a map.” Swain ripped off a sheet of legal paper and sketched a map of the roads between Silver Springs and the ASP camp.