"Doing what?"
"Shaking the sugar tree, seeing what falls out."
Juhle dropped his head for a minute, then looked back up and spoke in a reasonable tone. "If I asked you please not to talk to Carol Manion, could you restrain yourself? If you get her spooked and lawyered up by the time I talk to her, which I will soon, I'll have you tortured and then killed, and I mean it."
"I wasn't planning on talking to her, Dev. Even if she told me the truth, which she wouldn't, she couldn't tell me anything I don't already know."
"Except maybe where she dumped Parisi."
"That won't come out in an interview, Dev. She's not giving anything up voluntarily after all this."
"So how does it come out?"
"I'm working on that," Hunt said. "I find out, I'll let you know."
Still long before noon, and Juhle had his paperwork together as he stood in front of Judge Oscar Thomasino, on magistrate duty as he had been all week and obviously not particularly thrilled to be hassled at his home on a Saturday morning. Now the judge, in his street clothes, sat behind his desk in his office, the novel he'd been reading facedown on the blotter in front of him. "Refresh my memory, inspector," he was saying, "but wasn't it very recently that you and your partner came to me for a similar search warrant?"
"Yes, Your Honor. A couple of days ago."
"But it wasn't this same case, was it?"
"Yes, it was."
Thomasino's kindly face clouded under his wispy white hair. He removed his Ben Franklin eyeglasses and absentmindedly began to wipe them with a cloth he'd pulled from his desk drawer. "What were the results of that earlier search if I may ask?"
"We found some.22 caliber weapons in the woman's house, Your Honor, which we ran ballistics tests on. And some clothes, which we tested for GSR."
"And the results of those tests?"
"Negative."
"I see." Thomasino looked through his glasses, blew on them, then continued buffing the lenses. "And I presume you will be looking for positive tests this time on the same types of items-a gun, and clothes, and so on-if I sign this warrant?"
"Yes, Your Honor."
Thomasino put his glasses back on, threw Juhle a curveball. "Where is your partner today, inspector?"
"At his part-time job. He moonlights doing private security."
"Ah." The information gave the judge pause. "But you've been working this case together up until this time? You and Inspector…"
"Shiu."
"Yes, Shiu." He came forward a bit, elbows on his desk. "What I'm getting at, Inspector Juhle, is whether-this is just a question, so please don't take offense-whether your appearance here before me, without your partner, might indicate some lack of accord between you and Shiu about whether this warrant is supported by the evidence."
"No, Your Honor. I don't believe there's any lack of accord. Inspector Shiu feels he needs to augment his salary…"
Thomasino held up a hand. "Many of us do, Inspector, many of us do. And yet I'm fairly certain that most of your fellow homicide inspectors, if they happened to be working the extremely high-profile case of a murdered federal judge, might find it incumbent upon themselves to, say, cut their extraneous work a little short or even cancel it altogether if critical evidence suddenly came to light on a Saturday morning. Don't you think that might be the norm?"
"I do, Your Honor."
"Let me take it a little further, if you don't mind. Do you think your own partner, Inspector Shiu, would voluntarily miss the opportunity to take a more active role in what would no doubt be the most important, the most significant arrest in his entire career if he believed that you were close to a breakthrough in that case?"
"Normally, yes, he might, Your Honor. He would, I'm sure. But in this case…"
"Go on."
"Well, Inspector Shiu moonlights for the Manions. He's been with them for several years that I know of. I have often thought that it's not impossible he rose up as quickly as he did through the department and made it to homicide because of, shall I say, political influence."
"Friends of the Manions?"
"Just a pet theory," Juhle said.
"Not a nice one."
"No, Your Honor. But we were being frank."
"So you think he sees this warrant as some kind of conflict of interest?"
"I wouldn't go that far. Let's just say, he might feel uncomfortable having to explain to the Manions why he was part of having it served on them."
"And you think by the same token that he might be choosing to distance himself from an endeavor that he finds ill-conceived and which he also perceives might infuriate influential and powerful people without guaranteeing any success in the case. Inspector, people in your trade might call that a clue."
Juhle remained silent.
Thomasino nodded and sighed, an aggrieved expression flitting across his features. "Inspector," he said, "since we're being frank and off the record here, let me ask you something else, just between us. Do you feel that besides its natural importance, that there are people at the Hall and in the city at large who view this case as a kind of a test for you personally?"
The import of the question rocked Juhle, but he stood his ground. "Yes, Your Honor, I think I do. But I'm trying not to let that affect my handling of it." He pressed on in the face of Thomasino's skeptical look. "In the past few hours, Your Honor," he said, "I've learned irrefutably that Carol Manion's adopted child was the natural son of Staci Rosalier, the woman killed with Judge Palmer. Mrs. Manion has gone to great lengths over the past eight years to keep these facts hidden. To the extent that when I went to talk to her about this case just last week, she neglected to mention anything about it."
"Did you ask her about it?"
"No, Your Honor, but…"
"But you think she should have volunteered the information?"
"To me it's unimaginable that she didn't, Your Honor. Unimaginable. If only to say, 'I know this is an incredible coincidence, but I think you should know about it.' She couldn't have been unaware of it."
Thomasino considered, fingers templed at his lips. He looked down at the notes he'd scribbled while Juhle had been laying out the whole rather complex scenario. "I may have gotten some details wrong, inspector, and if so correct me. But as I understand it from the way you've outlined it to me here, Mrs. Manion adopted a baby from a Staci Keilly, isn't that so? And if so, why would the name Staci Rosalier prompt her to mention her child to you? If you, in fact, even had that name on Tuesday afternoon when you spoke to her."
Juhle's face went slack. He felt a rush of blood draining from his head. Not that the basic fact of Todd's parentage was any longer in doubt-or at least, he didn't think so-but Carol Manion didn't necessarily know about Staci on Tuesday when he and Shiu had questioned her about her original appointment with Parisi.
The only way Carol could have known Staci's true relationship to her son was if, in fact, she had been confronted with it and killed her. But that was putting the cart before the horse. If she hadn't done that, and there was no evidence at all that she had, then all of her actions since-not mentioning Todd to him and Shiu, buzz-cutting Todd's hair because, after all, summer was coming on-had been blameless.
He also suddenly realized that even he and Shiu had been unable to identify Staci as either a Rosalier or a Keilly until late Tuesday night when they'd met up with Mary Mahoney in the morgue. And what, then, did this mean about the four identifications of Todd Manion this morning?
The judge was still looking over his templed fingers. "Are you all right, inspector? You don't look well."
"No. Fine, Your Honor. I've been taking some pain medication. I just got a little dizzy there for a minute."
Thomasino clearly wasn't so sure that was it, but he let it go and moved on. "So, bottom line, inspector, is that I'm a little bit leery to sign off on what amounts to an open-ended fishing expedition on one of the city's most prominent families. Especially given the fact that this would be the second nearly identical warrant on two different suspects that I'd have approved in about as many days. You can see where it might raise some eyebrows, huh? Where you and I both might be open to accusations of overreaching? Invading privacy without cause? In your case, even launching a desperate vendetta to deflect attention away from a stalled investigation?"