“I’m sorry to hear that Harris is dead,” Caine said. “What does that have to do with Jack?”
The snakes writhed in my belly. Had I left a fingerprint at Harris’s house? Had my car, with its crumpled rear panel, been seen by a passerby? Had Tommy gone to the police and said that I was the shooter? I’d considered these possibilities many times, but I was sure that I hadn’t touched anything in Harris’s house. I hadn’t left any trace, I was pretty damn sure.
Ziegler opened the envelope, rummaged around, took out a sheet of paper. I’d learned to read upside down when I was three. Ziegler had a report from the LAPD’s forensic lab.
Ziegler said, “Someone took a bite out of Clay Harris’s hand. The ME matched the bite mark to Colleen Molloy’s dental chart. Looks like she bit Harris. Probably the last thing she did before he shot her.”
I already knew what the LAPD lab knew. Sci had matched that bite mark to Colleen’s charts too.
I waited for Ziegler to speak again. I guessed he was hoping I’d blurt something out, give him something on me that he didn’t have already. The silence seemed to go on forever.
Caine said, “This isn’t 48 Hours, Detective, and we don’t have forty-eight hours. You matched the bite on Harris’s hand to Colleen Molloy’s teeth. You want to know if we’re interested? We are.”
CHAPTER 121
Ziegler twisted in his seat. He’d delivered the news as if it had caused him physical pain.
“We’re all interested, Caine,” he said. “We actually want the one who killed her.”
I exhaled. It didn’t matter that Ziegler and Tandy saw my relief. They had evidence that Colleen had bitten Clay Harris. Their evidence was now our evidence.
Apparently Tandy felt the same way. He said, “We’re going to concede that Colleen bit Harris. But, Morgan, before you and your attorney start throwing confetti around, let me say that this bite mark isn’t conclusive. It doesn’t mean that because Colleen Molloy bit Harris, he killed her. You understand that, right?”
The bitterness was in his tone if not his words. Tandy had been wrong about me and that had to be killing him. I wished I could tell him that in the past couple weeks he’d funneled me through a meat grinder with a very sharp blade, that he was a bad cop, that someday he was going to pay.
I stifled myself.
“Colleen fought for her life,” I said. “I’m glad about that.”
Caine tapped the table, half a signal to me to shut up, half a signal to the detectives to keep talking.
“So you’ll be happy to hear that we also have this,” Ziegler said. He opened the envelope again and dumped out a chunk of metal. It was a hard drive. It looked like the one that was taken from my security system the night Colleen was killed.
I stopped breathing.
“What’s this?” Caine asked.
“It’s Jack’s hard drive, with video evidence that Clay Harris carried Colleen Molloy into Jack’s house. It’s time-stamped with the date and hour that approximate Molloy’s time of death. We found it in Clay Harris’s shack of junk. And that indicates that he took it from Morgan’s house and brought it home. This, along with the bite mark…”
Clay Harris had killed Colleen, but he didn’t have the ingenuity to have done it on his own. And he didn’t have a motive either.
Tommy had a motive-to put me in a hole for the rest of my life. But he didn’t have to do the killing himself. Harris had been willing to do it for a year’s salary, which he’d spent on a car.
It just made sense that Tommy had directed the action from the beach outside my bedroom window and that Harris had called him as soon as Colleen was dead.
Caine said, “My client is cleared of the murder charge.”
“We’ve spoken to ADA Eddie Savino,” Tandy said. “He’s meeting with the DA tonight. I think Morgan is going to be free of Molloy’s murder, but here’s the thing, Mr. Caine…”
I saw something I didn’t like in Tandy’s eyes, a flash, a warning.
“We’ve got another dead body,” he continued. “Clay Harris was shot dead, and Jack, if he killed your girlfriend, that’s classic motive to kill him.”
“I didn’t do it,” I said.
“Are you charging Jack with Clay Harris’s murder?” Caine snapped.
“Not yet,” said Tandy. “We’re watching you, Morgan. You and your brother.”
CHAPTER 122
Tandy’s reluctance was palpable as he gathered himself to give me evidence about Clay Harris’s murder. If Tandy was looking at Tommy for the crime, I had reason to hope that Tommy had left some trace of himself behind.
It got real quiet inside the interrogation room, except for the soft thwacks of Len Ziegler snapping the rubber band on his wrist. Tandy sat back in his seat, feigning nonchalance.
Finally he spoke.
“Tommy was pulled over for speeding on the night Clay Harris was killed. He was driving a new Lexus LX 570 that belonged to the victim. He’d been drinking.
“He couldn’t explain to the patrol officers why he had Harris’s car. He also couldn’t say where he’d been for the previous few hours or what he was doing in Canyon Country.”
Last time I saw Tommy, he was outside Harris’s house. Cops were on the way. He had to have gone back inside Harris’s house to get the keys to the Lexus. Dumb move, Tommy. Very dumb.
“We’re holding Tommy on a DUI and possession of a stolen vehicle for now,” Tandy said. “We’re not done yet.”
For a slim moment, Tandy’s expression was open and I could read his mind as if it were a newspaper headline. Tandy felt sick that he had nothing against me.
Maybe he could read my expression too.
He had nothing on me. He had nothing.
There was a big celebration going on inside my head. I grinned my face off and did the touchdown dance all over the end zone. Champagne corks blew and bubbly ran down my face. The fans stood up in the stands and cheered, and I was lifted into the air.
Caine wore serenity like a custom-made suit, but his right eyelid twitched. It was a wink, just for me.
I stood up and said, “It’s been a pleasure, detectives. I’m late for a meeting.”
I walked out of the police station with my lawyer. I could stop worrying about going back to the Twin Towers, spending a year or two in court being humiliated before being locked away at Lompoc for twenty-five to life.
I was free, again.
“Fucking say something, Jack.”
I clapped Caine’s shoulder and grinned at him.
“Happy day, Eric. Oh, happy day.”
CHAPTER 123
Colleen’s friend Mike Donahue and I were at Santa Monica Airport, where I kept my Cessna 172 Skyhawk.
I’d told Donahue that I’d flown with Colleen a few times, and that she’d taken over for me when we were in the air. She had done a couple of loop-the-loops and had shrieked with laughter every time.
Now Donahue wanted to do it too.
We ducked under the wing, and I said to him, “It’s not like you see in the movies, like flying a plane is a step or two over driving a car. In a plane, you control the mixture of fuel and air that goes to the engine, you monitor exhaust temperatures, you reset the compasses. It’s ninety-nine percent procedure and checklists. A minor screwup on the ground means something entirely different when you’re in the air.”
“Like what, for instance, Jack? No. Don’t tell me.”
“For instance, you forget to put the gas cap on. Gas just vaporizes out of the tank. Your plane turns into a glider, and you don’t want that.”
Donahue pointed, said, “Is that the gas cap?”
“Yes.” I smiled at him. “The cap is secure.”
We finished the walk-around, and I gave Donahue a leg up to the cockpit. I got into the pilot’s seat, strapped in, and adjusted Donahue’s headset so that we could talk and he could hear my conversations with the control tower.