Standing, he began excavating the mess that was Theo Kovacs’s files. After a few minutes, a ten-inch stack of paper teetered on his desk, most of it made up of articles about the bombing of Guardian Microsystems, the shooting of the two police officers, and the siege that followed. Franciscus concentrated on the latter, in particular the sections detailing the shooting of Professor David Bernstein and the escape of his common-law wife, Bobby Stillman.
He was quick to find some major discrepancies in the outline of events. There were shots fired from the house. There were not. Police spotted several suspects inside the house. Police believed Bernstein to be alone. He had acted alone shooting the two police officers. He had acted with the help of an accomplice. The newspapers, however, were unanimous in stating that a second set of prints found on his pistol belonged to Bobby Stillman. Theo Kovacs had thought differently. If you believed his wife, it had cost him his life.
Franciscus spotted a brown folder that had the look of a case file at the bottom of the box. Prying it loose, he opened the cover and skimmed its contents for the fingerprint sheets. Bernstein’s prints were there, but he couldn’t find any others. Neither Bobby Stillman’s, as the various and sundry newspapers had reported, nor those belonging to the third party Theo Kovacs claimed to have discovered himself.
The police report made clear that at no time had the assailant, David Bernstein, fired at the SWAT team surrounding his house. Similarly, at no time had the police observed a second party in the house with him.
As Franciscus sorted through the stack of interviews and statements, he thought of Thomas Bolden. Half the city was looking for him in connection with the murder of Sol Weiss. Headquarters had blast-faxed a copy of his picture to every precinct with the order that it be copied and handed out to all patrolmen. But Franciscus wasn’t buying it all. First off, the tape was fuzzy. It looked very much like an accident. Second, there was the matter of the perp with the broken jaw who’d been released from 1 PP. And third was this business of blast-faxing Bolden’s picture all over hell’s half acre. For a second-degree-murder beef? The whole thing reeked of politicking, or worse. Mostly, John Franciscus wanted to know why a retired detective named Francois Guilfoyle wanted to question Bolden about Bobby Stillman, a woman who’d been a fugitive for a quarter of a century.
Grabbing a block of paper, he wrote down the facts as he saw them.
Bobby Stillman and David Bernstein had bombed Guardian Microsystems. When officers were sent to arrest Bernstein, they were shot and killed. Bernstein barricaded himself in his home and when police stormed it forty-eight hours later, he was killed by SWAT fire. Later, Theo Kovacs discovered that Bernstein had not died from the SWAT team’s fire, after all, but from a single gunshot wound to the head fired from eight or ten feet. And that the bullet had come from the same gun that killed Officers O’Neill and Shepherd, in theory Bernstein’s pistol.
Theo Kovacs discovered a second set of prints on the gun-ostensibly of the murderer-but his partner, Detective Francois Guilfoyle, discouraged him from following up on the lead. Kovacs went ahead anyway. Before he could share his discovery, he killed himself.
Twenty-five years go by, and the same Guilfoyle is chasing down Thomas Bolden, and asking him what he knows about Bobby Stillman and something called “Crown.”
Franciscus tossed his pencil onto the desk. Something was missing here, and he knew what it was. It was the set of fingerprints that Kovacs had found on the gun.
He put aside the case file and sifted through the remaining papers. There was a class shot from Kovacs’s days at the academy. Some snaps of the guys at work. Franciscus examined them, trying to pick out Guilfoyle. Eyes that look into your soul, Kovacs’s wife had claimed. A mind reader. Carnac. Franciscus settled on a creepy-looking guy with milk white skin and dark drooping eyes.
He put aside the picture and picked up Kovacs’s badge. It was his patrolman’s shield pinned to the cardboard backing that you wore under your shirt. The kid must have been one helluva cop. He had about six meritorious medals running above the badge. Definitely a comer. One of the pins came loose and he put down the badge. There was a trick that every cop knew to holding the medals in place. You needed to pin ’em through your shirt to the tiny rubber stoppers found on crack vials. Worked every time. He picked up the badge to fix it, and it separated from the cardboard backstop altogether. “Crap,” he murmured, as the two pieces fell apart.
“John, I’ve got something for you!”
Franciscus tossed the badge onto the table and hustled into Vicki’s office. “What is it?”
“Guilfoyle’s address and phone,” she said, holding out a piece of notepaper. “Were you expecting an extra ticket to the show?”
“Not tonight,” he said, holding her eyes. “Now, get out of here. You’ve still got time to make it. But if the bum gets out of line, you give me a call.”
“Yes, Dad,” she said. She wasn’t taking her eyes away either.
With a sigh, Franciscus sat down at his desk. A name. An address. Francois Guilfoyle, 3303 Chain Bridge Road, Vienna, Virginia. Big deal. Guy wasn’t even hiding. He was happy to collect his pension every month and go about his business. Unexpectedly, Franciscus felt a lump form in his throat, a big rough-edged lump that felt like a chunk of coal. He read the name. Guilfoyle. He didn’t know the man. He’d never met him, wasn’t even sure what he looked like, but he hated him all the same. He’d screwed his partner. Franciscus didn’t have any proof, but he knew it was true, just like Katie Kovacs knew it. Theo Kovacs had come to him with a set of prints that did not belong on David Bernstein’s gun, prints that had no business whatsoever being there, and what did Guilfoyle do? He told him to forget about it. Case closed. Move on.
Franciscus frowned. That was not kosher.
When you were young and starting out on the force, you and your partner weren’t a team. You were a unit. Indivisible. One had a hunch, a lead, a whatever, and you both followed it. One of you was in trouble, the other pitched in. That didn’t just go for work. It also went for your personal lives. Advice, money, a pat on the back, you lent it. You didn’t tell him to go to hell. You didn’t… Franciscus couldn’t bring himself to say “kill him.” That was going too far. You didn’t pin murder on anyone until you had proof. That wasn’t kosher either.
Franciscus replaced all of Kovacs’s files into the moving box. He put the articles in first, then the police file. Finally, there was only the badge. He looked at it lying on his desk. The goddamn badge. He picked it up and weighed it in his hand. Thirty years on, it still meant something to him.
He reached down to pick up the rectangular piece of cardboard backing and put the two back together. A corner of it had peeled away. A sharp-edged transparency protruded. He brought it closer to his eyes. “What the-” he muttered.
Opening his drawer, he found a set of tweezers and slipped the square free. The clear plastic was a little bigger than a stamp and folded into quarters. Unfolding it, he raised it to the light. The transparency showed a photograph of two perfect fingerprints. Handwriting at the bottom attested to the fact that the prints were dusted and lifted from the barrel of David Bernstein’s 11 millimeter Fanning automatic on July 29, 1980.