Suddenly Tombo stepped in. "Hey, Spence, easy…"
But the producer didn't back off. "Hey, yourself, Rich. It wouldn't be the first time Andrea's hooked up with some guy to boost the old career another notch. First me, now maybe Wyatt here…they're fooling everybody, the two of them, thinking this is just a hell of a lot of fun." He turned. "What do you say about that, Hunt? True? False? Any comment at all?"
"Yeah," Hunt said, "here's a comment. You're pathetic." Every impulse in his body wanted to take a swing at Fairchild and deck him, but he forced himself to turn away.
Fairchild walked several steps after him. "When you see her, tell her she's played this out too far already. There's no getting back from where she's gone! She'll never work in television again!"
Nearly blind with anger, Hunt willed himself through the lobby doors and across to the elevators. The elevator doors would open in a couple of seconds on the fourteenth floor, and he still had very little conscious idea of exactly what had brought him up here. It was more than the need to escape from Fairchild's insane accusations-he'd been on his way over here before he'd ever seen the video cams outside. He'd been wrestling with the logic of what he thought he knew about Andrea and what he could accept, what he felt. For if she were dead, as they all now feared, Hunt still in some obscure way felt a degree of responsibility.
Not for her death itself, of course, but for the last hours of her life, when he'd voluntarily taken on the role of her protector. And lover. With a stab of guilt, for the first time, he realized that he perhaps unknowingly had, in fact, taken advantage of her fragile state, her vulnerability. He hadn't seen it like that at the time. But he didn't want to fool himself-that might have been the true dynamic after all. The thought curdled his stomach.
And then, after he'd left her, someone had abducted her and done her grievous harm.
He did not believe, as Juhle did, that she had killed Palmer and Rosalier and then taken her own life.
He did not believe, as Fairchild did, that she'd plotted her own disappearance as some sort of publicity/celebrity-making stunt.
Hunt believed that he knew what had happened with a certainty that was startling. And that certitude-in its first flowering now after everyone's hope but his for Andrea's life had flown away-was rearranging his interior landscape back into something that he thought he had long abandoned and that he now recognized as both terrifying and familiar.
The anger that had nearly literally blinded him downstairs wasn't occasioned by the ravings of a prancing jackass like Spencer Fairchild. But those irrational stupidities had shattered somewhere within him the last resistance to the deep and abiding rage that he'd come to believe in the past four or five years he'd finally tamed.
A rage that had ruled his days from his sense of abandonment through his succession of foster homes until he'd finally moved in with the Hunts. A rage that had fueled his CID work in Iraq, then delivered him to his work rescuing children, finally blossoming into a general rage at the world he'd been left in when Sophie and their unborn baby had been taken from him. A wide-ranging rage at bureaucracy, at venality, at the incompetence and outright villainy of men like Wilson Mayhew. A rage, finally, that had almost undone him with its power and intensity. Day to day, night to night, unyielding and terrible rage. For the world seemed to promise so much. And that promise so often was a lie.
And then, after he'd established his business and worked as a private investigator for a while, the rage had gradually started to subside. His work was a job now, not a vocation. Wyatt Hunt read, he did his sports, he played his music, he satisfied his clients. He would not feed his rage any longer with his overwhelming desire to excel, to make right, to care, to love. The inevitable failures-and he'd come to believe that at least partial failure was always foreordained-had taken too great a toll on him. He didn't choose to live at that level anymore, and he'd been content. Marginalized, perhaps, never too deeply involved. But content.
And now suddenly, a toggle switch thrown, that inner contentment was over. And this was why he had felt so disoriented at Farrell's, so distracted on the walk over here, so unable to connect with what should have been sorrow at the idea of Andrea's death. He was not really sad, not unfocused, not lost. With a kind of terrible joy, he realized that what he felt now was pure-the rage for justice that had nearly consumed him before but that had also given his life ballast, moments of real connection and meaning.
If someone had killed Andrea Parisi, had rent the fabric of his world so thoroughly, he was going to bring whoever it was to justice. Nothing else mattered. He would take whatever help he could get, but if he had to do it all alone, then he would.
The elevator door opened, and he strode out to the first desk to his left, where a young woman stopped her typing to look up at him. "Can I help you?" she asked.
"Yes," he said. "I need to talk to Carla Shapiro."
Juhle said, "No. No evidence."
He was in Lanier's office, sitting awkwardly forward because of his sling. Shiu stood one step inside the closed door, at rigid attention. It was a small room with a big desk in it. There were three windows, two in the wall behind Juhle and one in the wall behind Shiu. None of them opened to the morning's sunshine in the real world. None of them opened at all, in fact. Just beyond Shiu's window, about a million miles away, Juhle could see four of his fellow homicide inspectors shooting the breeze and laughing about something.
When Juhle brought his gaze back inside, Lanier wasn't laughing. "No evidence at all?"
Juhle looked over at Shiu-no help. "Maybe if we can get Mrs. Levin-the Palmers' neighbor-down to see Parisi's car, she might give us a positive make."
Lanier grunted, leaned back in his chair, and pushed himself away from the desk until he got to his back wall, where he stopped. "Maybe she might, huh?"
Juhle shrugged. "What we've got, Marcel, are connections. Six or seven of them, which taken together are pretty damn compelling if you ask me and Shiu, and you did."
"We don't have any other suspects, sir," Shiu said.
"Here's a tip, my son," Lanier said. "That's probably the kind of thing you don't want to mention out loud to somebody who does your performance reviews." He turned to Juhle. "But Parisi?"
Juhle shrugged again. "I didn't just make it up, Marcel. I think she did it, tried to bluff it out, made it a day or two until guilt or remorse or whatever the hell else you feel made her kill herself."
"I don't feel anything," Lanier said.
"I know, me neither. Feelings, I mean. I don't feel any feelings. I do feel my shoulder."
"He won't take ibuprofen," Shiu said.
"I did for the first ten days. Not only didn't it work, it hurt my stomach."
"I'll tell you what hurts my stomach," Lanier said. "My stomach hurts when I start thinking about going out in front of our ravenous media representatives with the announcement that the case on Federal Judge George Palmer-did I say federal judge?-only the fourth federal judge to be killed in the entire history of the United States-"
"Is that true?" Shiu asked. "Only the fourth one? Wow."
Lanier risked a quick, conspiratorial I-know-why-you-hate-this-guy glance at Juhle. "Right. So I tell the jackals we've solved this case, locked it up tight in only three days. The murderer's Andrea Parisi. But you'll just have to take our word for it because we don't have any evidence. What do you think, Dev? You think they'll go for it?"
Juhle sulked. Lanier was right, and Juhle was dead beat after the last couple of sleepless nights. "What do you want us to do, Marcel? I could drive out to Andrea's house, find some hair in the sink or something, drop it off over at the judge's…"