He threw the binder on the desk and gasped. Jill turned from the computer, saw the murder book opened to Holmes’s picture and jumped to her feet.
“Jesus Christ,” she shouted.
Teddy grabbed the binder and slammed it closed. He was carrying enough of the horror inside his head for both of them.
“What do you know about William Nash?” he asked.
He was trying to distract her by raising a simple question, but her eyes were locked on the binder. From the look on her face, Teddy hadn’t closed the book fast enough.
“He teaches at Penn,” she said slowly.
“You ever take any of his classes?”
She nodded. “One. But only because I had to.”
“Are you okay, Jill?”
She nodded again, her eyes finally meeting his as she sat down. Teddy made a point of settling back in his chair.
“I’ve never met him,” he said after a moment. “But everybody says he’s good.”
“He gets people off for murder. I’m not sure I’d call that good.”
Jill was still preoccupied with the binder. Teddy threw it in his briefcase, then got up and moved over to the couch.
“That’s what defense attorneys are supposed to do,” he said.
“I don’t mean the innocent ones,” she said. “I mean the people where all the evidence is against them, and Nash finds a way to get them off on a technicality. The people who really did it. Remember in your first year when you had to take everything? Who’d you get for criminal law? Diliberto?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, Nash was filling in for Diliberto, and I got stuck with him. He went through his past cases. The Hilltop Rapist. The Venice Beach Strangler. That man who killed seven women in Michigan and buried them in the sidewalk outside his house. Nash defended them and got them off. It was like he was happy about it. Proud of what he’d done.”
Teddy wasn’t sure about the first two cases, but thought he remembered reading something about the Sidewalk Murders in a news magazine. The man lived in a suburban neighborhood outside Detroit. He’d been retired for ten years and spent most of his days working on his lawn and various gardens. It was a quiet neighborhood, most of the middle-class homes owned by families with young children. The kind of place where kids still played in the street. And the little man who lived at the end of the block always seemed to take great pleasure in watching the children play on his section of the sidewalk. Then one day an underground water main burst open. When the utility company tore up the street and sidewalk, they found the bodies of seven women buried in the concrete.
“How’d Nash get the guy off?” Teddy asked.
“Everyone in the neighborhood liked the old man. No one could believe he did it. And he was small man with a bad back. The police couldn’t figure out how he tore up the concrete, put the bodies in, and then laid new concrete down. Neither could the jury. Nash got the man off and he was set free.”
Teddy laughed. He couldn’t help it. Jill seemed so intense.
“Maybe he didn’t do it,” he said.
She shrugged, brooding in silence.
“Then how’d he get the bodies in the concrete, Jill?”
“The bodies weren’t in the sidewalk,” she said. “They were under it. He could’ve dug the holes when he was gardening and slid them underneath.”
“I thought he was an old man with a bad back.”
“Maybe he had help. What does it matter? He did it, and Nash manipulated the jury and got him off.”
Teddy stood up, rubbing the back of his neck. His headache was gone, but not the tightness above his shoulders.
“Then why do you think Nash is so popular on campus?” he asked.
Jill shook her head. “Are you trying to recruit him? Are you trying to make the world a better place by getting Oscar Holmes off?”
“I don’t think there’s much chance of that.”
He packed up his briefcase and got into his coat. As he headed for the door, he turned and gave her a look.
“If Jones stops by,” he said, “tell her the files she wants are right beside you on the windowsill.”
TEN
He scanned the building directory, unable to find Nash’s name among the list of faculty members. Although he’d graduated from the school, Teddy had been so absorbed in his own studies that he never had a reason to meet Nash or visit him in his office. It struck him that the legal workshop operated out of its own building on the edge of campus. Nash’s office would probably be there.
He looked around for someone to ask, but the lobby was deserted. With the holidays less than two weeks off and exams underway, students wouldn’t be in class. Teddy exited the building. Squinting at the bright sunlight reflecting off the snow, he turned down the path and headed for the library. He could have called Nash, of course, but the man had already refused Barnett. Giving him another easy chance to say no over the phone didn’t seem to make much sense.
The librarian behind the checkout desk found Nash’s address in the faculty directory, confirming that his office and workshop were in the same building. It was five blocks west. Rather than return to his car, Teddy buttoned his jacket and set out on foot. The truth was that he needed Nash as much as Barnett or even Holmes did. He needed the case to go away, needed his nightmares to sink back into the past so that his fresh wounds would have time to heal.
The light turned green and he started across the street. It was a small, two-story brick building set on the corner. Teddy guessed it had been built sometime in the early 1900s, but undergone a major renovation in the last few years. The mortar between the bricks looked fresh, and the windows on the second floor were too large and modern to fit the period.
He found the front door unlocked and entered a central hallway. There were three rows of unmarked doors on each side of the staircase. The smell of fresh plaster caught his attention. When he glanced inside one of the rooms, he saw sheets of blue board stacked on the floor and realized the building’s renovation was still underway.
He climbed the staircase, greeted by the smells of fresh paint and polyurethane. Directly before him were a set of glass doors opening to a small library. Skylights had been installed in the ceiling, flooding the rows of books with overhead light. When he checked the doors he found them locked. On the other side of the hall were two classrooms. Then Teddy noticed a door to the right of the library and opened it. Construction was complete, but the walls remained unpainted and it looked as if the room was being used to store the construction workers’ more expensive tools.
The door at the other end of the hall opened. Teddy turned, watching a middle-aged woman start for the stairs.
“I’m looking for Professor Nash,” he said.
The woman smiled. “Are you a student?”
“I used to be. I’ve never been here before.”
She pointed to the door she’d just exited through. “In there,” she said. “The signs aren’t up yet.”
Teddy watched her vanish down the stairway. Then he swung what seemed like an unusually heavy door open and stepped across the threshold.
It was a lobby. No one was at the desk, and Teddy figured the woman he’d just met was Nash’s assistant on her way to an early lunch. When he heard someone begin speaking, he looked through a second doorway into Nash’s office. He was on the phone, staring back at Teddy from his desk at the far end of the long room. It was an odd look, piercing at first, followed by the slightest of smiles, as if the man recognized him and had been waiting for him.
Nash waved him in, motioning Teddy to take a seat beside his desk. Not wanting to invade the man’s privacy, Teddy hesitated a moment before finally deciding to enter.