TWENTY-NINE
Jackie, Barnett’s assistant, clicked open a window with her mouse and pointed at the monitor with a shaky finger. Teddy leaned in for a closer look. It was a press release announcing that Nash had joined the legal team defending Holmes.
“I told him not to send it to the DA,” she said in a nervous voice. “I told him not to, but he did. And look what happened. Sally called and told me he may never walk again.”
She printed a copy and handed it to Teddy. She was upset, even frightened. What she was implying-that Alan Andrews might have had something to do with Barnett being run over-caught Teddy by surprise.
He sat down in the chair beside her desk and studied the copy. It was a press release, but it read more like a negative hit piece in a political campaign. Nash’s name was mentioned, along with his biography. But the results of his legal workshop were detailed as well. An innocent man had been executed as a result of Andrews’s mishandling of the case. Even worse, Andrews had suppressed evidence to win the conviction. Before his election as district attorney, he’d been branded an overzealous prosecutor by more than one judge. Nash believed that there were other cases where the DA had been less than forthright and planned to continue his investigation of the man in his workshop after the holidays. Making sure Andrews got it right in the Holmes case would only be the beginning.
It was clear to Teddy that both Barnett and Nash wanted to drag Andrews’s nose through the mud. It was a message. A first salvo. Do the deal or Andrews’s name could become the issue, not Holmes. Take the death penalty off the table, or else.
Teddy actually admired it. Particularly now that he knew Holmes was Barnett’s brother-in-law. It was ugly, even brutal, a small sample of what Barnett would do to Andrews’s name and reputation in order to save Holmes’s life.
“Do you think it had anything to do with what happened?” Jackie asked.
Teddy looked up and saw the fear still haunting her.
“No,” he said, even though he wasn’t sure. “What happened to Jim was an accident.”
He didn’t want to scare her. Didn’t want to tell her what was really on his mind.
He’d been thinking it over since four in the morning. When he finally got home, he couldn’t sleep. Instead, he stretched out on top of the bed watching the snow swirl in the breeze outside his window and letting his mind drift. He couldn’t be sure, of course, but he didn’t think the man who ran over Barnett last night was the same person who murdered Darlene Lewis and Valerie Kram. Whoever it was had left his silver shot glass behind and returned for it. When he saw Teddy had found it, he hit him over the head and knocked him out. But the man had done one more thing before leaving that would seem to rule him out as the killer. He’d dragged Teddy’s unconscious body out of the darkness of the vacant lot and left him in front of the entrance to Barnett’s house. The distance from the empty lot to the front door of the house was in excess of thirty yards and would have required considerable effort. Even risk with the house lights on.
Why?
The only answer that seemed to make sense was that the man wanted Teddy to be found. He’d smashed Teddy in the head hard enough to knock him out, but he didn’t want to kill him.
Now, in the face of what Jackie had shown him, it seemed to make some degree of sense. If not sense, it was a perversion worth considering. Barnett’s accident meant Teddy was essentially alone in his defense of Oscar Holmes. While it was true he still had Nash, the pressure on the DA had been coming from Barnett. Andrews must have been livid when he read that fax-seen his future in politics in jeopardy again and gone ballistic.
He thought about Michael Jackson.
Not the dancer, but the detective who’d worked with Andrews from the beginning and came off like Dr. Gloom. The man who had given Teddy the tour of Holmes’s apartment, following him around from room to room as he chained cigarettes and gagged on the smoke.
Teddy wasn’t sure why the man popped into his head, but remembered that old gun he saw clipped to the detective’s belt. The ominous feeling that hit him the moment they met. Jackson was another nightcrawler and looked like a real drinker. The kind of guy who walked into a bar, picked a seat away from the lights, and made sure he faced the door. Had he been the one, he probably would’ve brought a flask. Not for courage, but to keep warm.
Teddy checked his watch. It was seven-thirty, his breakfast meeting with Carolyn Powell just fifteen minutes away. Slipping the press release into his briefcase, he left Jackie at her desk and told her he’d be back soon.
THIRTY
She was waiting for him at a table on the other side of the open dining room at the Marathon Grill. As he moved toward her, he caught her black suit. The material was tight fitting and carefully tailored, rolling with the smooth contours of her body instead of hiding them. She wasn’t wearing a blouse beneath her jacket, just a thin gold necklace. When her blue-gray eyes popped over the menu, he saw them still reaching out at him and couldn’t believe that they’d made love last night. She was gorgeous, the most striking woman he had ever seen, let alone been with.
As he reached the table, her eyes rose to the cut just above his eyebrow. Teddy had removed the bandage deciding the wound needed air and light.
“What happened to you?” she asked.
“We can talk about it later.”
He sat down across from her and picked up the menu. He could smell her skin, the faint sent of body lotion and shampoo. He was hungry, ravenous, though he probably could have skipped the food.
“Tell me what happened right now,” she said.
“I ran into a tree.”
She lowered her menu and gave him a look. She wasn’t buying it.
“Do you often run into trees?” she asked.
“Okay,” he said, deciding to spill it out. “I went over to Barnett’s last night to bring some things back to the hospital for his wife. When I got there, I realized that it hadn’t been an accident. Someone deliberately ran over him. I even found an antique shot glass made of Sterling silver that someone had left behind in the snow. But I didn’t know the guy was still there. When I turned, he hit me over the head with something and knocked me out.”
She started laughing.
She looked good when she laughed. And either it was contagious, or hearing himself say what happened aloud was so convoluted, Teddy began laughing, too.
“Every word of it’s true,” he said.
“And I suppose when you woke up, the antique shot glass had vanished.”
He nodded slowly. She started laughing again.
He didn’t want to say anything, but when you fall for someone, it doesn’t really take a lot of work. You don’t have much choice in the matter. It sort of just hits and then you know. He looked down at the menu, his mind reeling to the point where the entrees looked as if they’d been written in a foreign language.
“I’ll bet this silver shot glass had something unique about it,” he heard her saying. “Some sort of ornate design.”
“As a matter of fact it did.”
“I thought so. What was the design?”
“Tall ships and whales,” he said.
When she finally stopped laughing, he looked at the warm smile on her face, took the hit and just knew.
“Em,” she said. “My advice would be to keep your eyes open in the future and stay away from the trees.”