"Fine," Matthews said.
"I hit a bird last week," Neal volunteered. "Right side of the car, right?" he called out after a retreating LaMoia.
LaMoia stopped. "With your permission, Mr. Neal, I'm going to check for that key." He waited for a response.
Neal looked back and forth between the two, clearly weighing cooperation versus objection. He looked as if he might ask a question of Matthews, but she made no effort to encourage this. If LaMoia was operating on a bluff, the wrong answer now could sway Neal to start protecting himself-the last thing she and LaMoia wanted.
Neal said, "What the hell?" LaMoia opened the door but did not leave. He turned to Neal and nodded faintly, sending the man a signal. "You have my permission," Neal conceded.
If a randomly placed key existed somewhere on the car, any decent first-year defense attorney could shred their attempts to lay blame on Neal for any damaging evidence collected. Confusing
Matthews further was Neal's willingness to cooperate with the search. His earlier conviction and brief prison time, when combined with what was obviously an above-average intelligence, should have prevented him from making any such agreements. Guilty or not, she thought.
"I hit a bird," he repeated for her benefit.
"Sure you did," she said, trying her best to sound utterly unconvinced.
"No key, Mr. Neal," LaMoia announced when he returned less than five minutes later. "I checked the same location behind all four tires."
"Yeah?" His bravado seem to crumble. Matthews had seen this dozens of times before: that point when the lies collapse under the weight of truth. "Then it fell off somewhere.... Or maybe ... I never put it back after the last time."
"Sure."
"I'm telling you ..." But he couldn't think how to complete the thought.
LaMoia was just getting warmed up. "Crawling around under the car just now, you want to know what I found?" He asked this to Matthews, as if Neal weren't in the room.
"What's that?" she answered.
"Some hair. A nice little smudge of blonde hair and blood. Bottom of the rear bumper, and more on the bottom of the gas tank. Rear of the vehicle," he said, for Neal's sake. "You ever hit a blonde bird, you scumbag? Backing up? Maybe you'd like to start doing some talking, on account SID is going to collect all that physical evidence-including, I want to bet, some blue cotton fibers from the sweatshirt that you, yourself, put Mary Ann in that night-and you're going to lose any chance you had to put us, or the court, on your side of this. You understand how that works, don't you? You're no stranger to the process."
"An argument," Matthews said, seizing on LaMoia's discovery of this evidence. She felt energized, gripped by adrenaline. "Maybe she shoved you. Hit you. Swore at you. All that affects the way the lawyers look at a domestic."
"But if that evidence piles up ahead of time," LaMoia said, "then what the hell do we need you for? How the hell you going to get anyone to listen if we've already got you in the bag?"
"We're listening right now, Mr. Neal," Matthews said. But Neal looked as paralyzed by LaMoia's announcement as she felt. Every time they had a leg up on this guy, he threw her into doubt with an unexpected reaction. She cautioned herself to work the Boldt method-listen to the victim, follow the evidence, discount witnesses, and ignore the suspect completely until all the facts were in. She tended to react emotionally to suspects, at least on a surface level, and to trust that reaction. It was this opposite approach of theirs that made their combination such an effective team. With LaMoia, things were a little different.
He tended to cut to the chase, go for the heart and then leave it to her to show the suspect the error of his ways. She added, "We won't be around forever, Lanny. This thing will be out of our hands soon," she said, wondering if they could be so lucky, "and into the hands of the attorneys. At that time, your chance of gaining any points for cooperation pretty much disappear."
"I don't know anything about any blood being under that car."
"That's the wrong answer," LaMoia said. His cell phone rang. "And you know what that is?" he asked the suspect, viewing caller-ID. "That would be my court order coming through to search this dump." He silenced the ringing of the phone with the push of a button and held the device to his ear. "LaMoia," he announced into the phone. "Talk to me, darling'. Tell me what I want to hear."
Voice Male
A blinking message light was no great surprise to Matthews as she returned to her office that evening. In what had become an automatic gesture, she dialed in to retrieve her voice mail, which announced that she had six messages. She cringed as she intuitively anticipated that at least one of these could be from Deputy
Sheriff Nathan Prair. He'd attached himself to her once before, and now, with their renewed acquaintance, with the description of the brown uniform in the parking garage, she felt nearly certain she would need to deal with him again.
The first message on the system was an earlier one from LaMoia asking for her company when he went to interview a possible peeper victim, Tina Oblitz. He explained Oblitz's prior attempts to "cancel the order," as LaMoia put it, and how he hoped he might gain insight into Hebringer's and Randolf s "vanishing act."
She felt closer to John-his teasing bordered on flirting. His earlier struggle with the OxyContin had revealed a more human LaMoia. Some people were helped by such challenges, and LaMoia had the makings. She scribbled down his initials-this was how she took note of all such phone messages-a reminder to return his call.
The second message caught her by surprise, and because of her premonition, she mistakenly assigned the voice initially to Prair, though her brain quickly straightened her out. "Lieutenant
Matthews?" It was Ferrell Walker. "I wondered if my gift helped you out? I don't have a phone, so ... listen... I'll call you back."
Her image was not of Walker at the ME's half out of his mind with grief, nor was it the boyish man delivering his sister's soiled sweatshirt as a gift; it was, instead, an image of Walker in his bloodied apron standing in the falling rain, his eyes bloodshot with fatigue but looking up and down her body, his wet, matted hair. One black rubber glove, one yellow-she remembered so many details of that interview.
"Pass," she said aloud, deleting the message.
At the start of the third message, the first vestiges of concern warmed her, spreading through her like a shot of alcohol. "Me again." She was mad at herself for being distracted by Prair, only to be blindsided by the much more obvious, emotionally unstable Ferrell Walker. Trouble came in threes-she'd heard detectives talk of this for years, though dismissed such superstitions-and yet, it seemed she'd been served up a pair. Walker said, "I forgot to mention that I love what you're wearing especially the orange blouse." It was peach, not orange, she thought as she looked down past the phone and took in her clothing. "Listen ... we could have a beer, or coffee, or something.
Talk about the case. Do you even drink coffee? So much to learn about you."
How had he managed to see the color of her blouse? she wondered. She'd worn her gray rain jacket all day because of the persistent drizzle. She'd taken it off only when inside. The thoughts connected like a magnet picking up filings. She glanced over at her office window. The blinds were twisted open. Not possible! She pressed the keypad to save Walker's message, then crossed the room, peered curiously out her seventh-floor window, and twisted the blinds shut. It wasn't as if she wore her rain jacket zipped to her neck-he could have seen her anywhere
away from the office. But to do so, he would have to have been watching her, and watching her closely.
The fourth message played automatically from the speakerphone as she stood across the room. Walker's voice yet again: "Me again. Sorry. But we could take a walk or something. It doesn't have to be a drink. Later."