'Yeah. Maybe that's why she missed me,' he said with a sneer.
'The point is, Mr Darby, if we need to talk to you again, we will. We'll keep talking to you until we decide for sure whether or not this homicide was justifiable.'
He stood up angrily and leaned towards her with both hands on the table. 'It happened just the way I said it happened. Ramona and me are the only two people that were there and she's dead. Try to prove otherwise or leave me alone, little lady.'
He spun around and slammed out of the room.
Rainey stood and put his papers in his briefcase. He looked at Vail and shook his head.
'I object to this whole meeting, Miss Parver. The note is moot. It was there. It substantiates Miss Palmer's statement and both you and the cops have had rounds with her. Stop trying to make chicken salad out of chickenshit. You know this could just as easily have gone the other way. Jimmy could be underground and you could be going after Ramona Darby for blowing him away.' He shook his head. 'You two are whistling "Dixie" on this one.'
He followed Darby out of the room.
'Damn!' Parver said, slamming down her pencil.
'Darby's hanging tough,' Vail said. 'He doesn't have any choice.'
'You think Rainey really believes him?'
'I have no doubt he believes Darby's innocent. We haven't given him anything to change that. He knows we don't have a case.'
'Darby killed her in cold blood,' Shana Parver said. 'I know it, we all know it.'
'Let me tell you a little story,' Vail said, as they started back to the fourth floor. 'A few years ago an elderly man named Shuman was found in a northside apartment dead of a gunshot wound to the head. The windows and doors were all locked, but there was no weapon anywhere on the premises. The last man to see him alive was a friend of his named Turk Loudon, a junkie who had served time for robbery and assault. He had the victim's ring and fifty-seven dollars and a key to the apartment. And no alibi. He claimed the old man had told him he was sick of living and had given him the money and the ring earlier in the day. He had the key because he was homeless and Shuman let him sleep on the floor at night. He was arrested and charged with murder one.
'His pro bono lawyer wanted to go for a deal. Problem was, the gunshot wound to the head was a contact shot, which suggested extreme malice. A bigger problem was Loudon. He absolutely refused to plea. He claimed he was innocent, period. Nobody believed him, particularly his own lawyer.
'Then about two weeks after Loudon was arrested, some painters went to redo the apartment. They found an army .45 calibre pistol lodged behind the radiator. Shuman's prints were all over it and the bullets. Ballistics matched the gun and the bullet in Shuman's head. Shuman had shot himself, and when he did, his arm jerked out, the gun flew out of his hand and dropped behind the radiator. The cops missed it when they searched the place because they didn't think a gun would fit behind it and it was hot. So they looked under the radiator, but not behind it.'
'Were you the prosecutor?'
'No, I was the lawyer. I didn't believe my client - and I was wrong. I damn near plea-bargained him into Joliet for the rest of his life.'
'So you're saying give Darby the benefit of the doubt?'
'I'm saying if you're going to defend someone, particularly for first-degree murder, you can't afford to doubt their innocence. Paul Rainey believes Darby's innocent because he doesn't have any choice. If we can crack Darby's story, if Paul begins to doubt him? It'll gnaw on him until he finds out what the truth is. The trouble is, we can't make a dent in Darby's version of what happened.'
'So Darby sticks to his guns…'
'And we're out of luck,' Vail answered. 'He got lucky. Usually amateurs like that, some little thing trips them up. Something they overlooked, a witness pops out of the cake, a fingerprint shows up where they least expect it. We've been working on this guy for a month and right now we don't have a case.'
'Let me go back to Sandytown,' she said. 'Take one more crack at it, just to make sure we haven't missed something.'
Vail sighed. He knew the frustration Shana Parver was feeling - they all were feeling - but he also had seen more than one felon walk for lack of evidence and he had to balance the time of his prosecutors and investigators against the odds of breaking Darby. The odds were in Darby's favour.
'You know, maybe it happened the way he says it did, Shana. Maybe we all dislike this guy so much we want him to be guilty.'
'No!' she snapped back. 'He planned it and he did her.'
'Are you ready to go up against Rainey in the courtroom?' Vail asked her.
'I can hardly wait,' she answered confidently.
'With this case?'
She thought about his question for several moments. Then her shoulders sagged. 'No,' she said finally, but her momentary depression was gone a second later. 'That's why I want to go over all the ground once more, and question Poppy Palmer again, before we shut it down,' she pleaded.
'Okay.' Vail sighed. 'One more day. Take Abel with you. But unless you come up with something significant by tomorrow night, this case is dead.'
Five
Harvey St Claire was on to something.
Vail could tell the minute he and Parver got off the lift. The heavyset man was sitting on the edge of a chair beside the main computer, leaning forward with his forearms on his thighs. And his left leg was jiggling. That was the tipoff, that nervous leg.
Sitting beside St Claire was Ben Meyer, who was as tall and lean as St Claire was short and stubby. Meyer had a long, intense face and a shock of black hair, and he was dressed, as was his custom, in a pinstriped suit, white shirt, and sombre tie. St Claire, as was his custom, wore a blue and yellow flannel shirt, red suspenders, sloppy blue jeans, heavy shoes, and a White Sox windbreaker.
Meyer, at thirty-two, was the resident computer expert and had designed the elabourate system that hooked the DA's office with HITS, the Homicide Investigation and Tracking System that linked police departments all over the country. St Claire, who was fifty-two, had, during his twenty-eight years in law enforcement, tracked moonshiners in Georgia and Tennessee, wetbacks along the Texican border, illegal gun smugglers out of Canada, illegal aliens in the barrios of Los Angeles and San Diego, and some of the meanest wanted crooks in the country when he was with the US Marshal's Service.
Meyer was a specialist in fraud. It was Meyer who had first detected discrepancies that had brought down two city councilmen for misappropriating funds and accepting kickbacks. Later, in his dramatic closing argument, Meyer had won the case with an impassioned plea for the rights of the taxpayers. St Claire was a hunch player, a man who had a natural instinct for link analysis - putting together seemingly disparate facts and projecting them into a single conclusion. Most criminal investigators plotted the links on paper and in computers, connecting bits and pieces of information until they began to form patterns or relationships. St Claire did it in his head, as if he could close his eyes and see the entire graph plotted out on the backs of his eyelids. He also had a phenomenal memory for crime facts. Once he heard, read, or saw a crime item he never forgot it.
When Meyer and St Claire got together, it meant trouble. Vail ignored Naomi, who was motioning for him to come to his office, and stood behind Meyer and St Claire.