Here it is dimly lit, the only illumination the scant light cast by the red glow of an Exit sign over our heads on the door, and a couple of canister lights left on for security in the outer courtroom.
I motion for her to take a peek out into the public area. She does it and comes back.
“All clear.”
“Is there a separate key for the clerk’s office?” I ask her.
A stark look from Lenore. We have never considered this.
“Try the master,” she says.
What is clear is that we only get one shot. If we have no key we are out of luck. Neither of us has the moxie to jimmy the lock. At the moment my own knees are Jell-O.
I slide the key soundlessly into the lock and twist. Smooth as silk it turns. The door pops open.
My heart nearly seizes up. Lead in every vein.
“Aw, shit.” Lenore actually says this as soon as she sees him.
In the muted blue light of a computer screen, Coleman Kline stands peering back at us from the center of the room. His feet are braced wide apart, hands coupled behind his back, he’s rocking on his heels like a cop on the beat, waiting for us, the cold frontal assault.
“Mind telling me what you’re doing here?” he says. The voice of authority, he directs this at Lenore.
She recoils, gets behind me, whispers up close, reminders that I was going to do the talking.
“Ah, Mr. Madriani. You’re acting as mouthpiece tonight? And you, Ms. Goya, lost your tongue, have you? Well, that is a first, isn’t it?” He puffs out the shoulders of his suit coat, sucking up authority like a blowfish sucks water, the officious prosecutor with a bone to pick.
“We might ask you the same thing.” Lenore is the first to find words for this, though she says them from behind me. “What are you doing here?”
“I have a key,” he says. “Entrusted to me by the county. Where did you get yours?” It’s not exactly an answer, but it’s better than ours if he presses Lenore on the subject.
All the while my eyes travel up and down him, until on their second trip they reach bottom, at his shoes. Around his feet are small tufts, cottonlike and white with what looks like remnants of frayed wool. On the carpet is a dime and a jelly bean. I scan around his feet with my eyes, and then I see it. Last in, first out: a small, pink, heart-shaped button.
I stand listening, seemingly mesmerized by his harangue, a dull look on my face, until it settles on me. We are minds on a parallel course, Kline and I. Radovich left instructions to lock up the evidence tomorrow morning. I had never considered the possibility that the killer might come for it himself tonight.
Kline follows my gaze. He glances down and suddenly sees what I’m looking at. He stops speaking in midsyllable.
Then it strikes me that his hands are not coupled behind his back. He is holding something.
“Well, I don’t know about the two of you,” says Lenore, “but if we’re going to stand here and argue I’d like to feel like something other than a lounge lizard. If you don’t mind I’m going to turn on some lights.”
Before I can stop her, she steps around me toward the light switch that is on the far wall behind Kline.
“No!” I reach out but it’s too late.
He is faster than I would have credited, his hand roughly on her shoulder, he spins her in place. Lenore suddenly finds her back braced against his body, Kline’s left arm tight across her chest, his right hand holding a knife, a four-inch blade to her throat. In his left hand are the tattered remnants of Kimberly’s bear, its front slit by the razor-sharp knife. Always the quick study, Kline had acquitted himself well when we barged in on him, taking the offense, bluster and bullshit. He’d nearly talked his way clear.
Lenore struggles but his grip is firm. He presses the needle-sharp point of the knife to her throat and the fight goes out of her.
“You have been a real pain in the ass, lady.” He says this to her up close in her ear. “Damn inquisitive mind, asking all the wrong questions. You and Hall behind closed doors. My worst nightmare.”
I lean forward on my toes, looking for an opening, and he presses the knife more firmly; a drop of blood forms at the tip.
“Ahh. No. No,” he says. “Nothing personal. I don’t want to hurt her. But if you force me …”
“Easy,” I tell him.
“Back up,” he says.
I retreat a step.
“This is stupid,” I tell him. “It’s over.”
He says nothing but studies me with a look I have not seen before, something between mischief and madness: a whole new side to Kline, like the professional suddenly gone playboy.
“You’re not going to kill her,” I tell him. “You know it and I know it.”
“At this point I might consider skinning her to be a good sport. Payback for the aggravation,” he says. “I could mount the hide over my desk.”
I sidle a few steps sideways, but not enough for him to get past.
“The evidence.” I nod toward the tattered toy. “Was it a ring?”
Lenore gives me an expression like this is no time for conversation, the lawyer’s dozen.
Kline doesn’t answer, his hands full at the moment.
Then I see them, exposed by his outstretched arms around Lenore, starched linen nearly to the elbows, and punctuating each wrist, engraved with his initials, Kline’s trademark, the gold cuff links.
“Of course.”
It is the reason he had to get it back, his engraved initials along with the tool marks, the scratches from the table. I finally understand his obsession with Lenore. When the missing cuff link did not show among the items of evidence, he had to wonder. And when her fingerprint was found on the door it filled in the blank, but with the wrong information. Kline thought that Lenore had found his cuff link.
“Over further,” he tells me.
“Where do you think you’re going to go? How far can you run?”
“What makes you think I have to go anywhere?”
“What about us?” says Lenore.
“What about you? Move over,” he tells me.
I inch a few more steps to one side, but not enough for him to chance it, to step by me.
“We know about it,” says Lenore.
“And who’s going to believe you?” he says. “A bitter opponent in a capital case, and a former employee I had to fire for misconduct in office, her fingerprints all over the victim’s front door. Not a lot of credibility in that.”
Kline is right. Without the incriminating piece of jewelry, we have nothing. With the tool marks, his initials, and Kimberly to identify it as the treasure she gathered that night from the floor near her mother and fed to her bear, Kline had reason for concern.
“All that has to happen,” he says, “is for this to disappear, and we all go on about our lives.”
Everyone except Acosta, who, it seems, is expected to take the fall.
Lenore struggles in his arms. For an instant I think he is going to slice her throat like a melon. But all he manages is to shake what is left of Kimberly’s bear, like a dead carcass that has been gutted. Some of the stuffing from its innards drops to the floor, and with it a few of Kimberly’s treasures, which scatter when they hit.
He looks, darting, greedy eyes over Lenore’s shoulder.
There, on the floor between us, at her feet, glistening in the muted light, is the object of his search. But Kline can’t get it, not without letting go of Lenore. If he does he knows I will jump him.
He looks at me, then back to the cuff link on the floor.
“Back up,” he tells me. “Back!”
I don’t comply.
“You wanna see her die?”
I take another step back.
“More,” he says.
Another couple of grudging inches, baby steps each one.
“Get it,” he tells Lenore. “Be easy about it.”
He nudges her forward with a knee and the knife to her jugular.
“If I move you’re gonna cut my throat with that thing,” she says.
“Don’t tempt me,” he tells her. “I’m gonna relax my grip. Try anything and I’ll cut you,” he says. “I mean it.”