Cool in Tucson (37 page)

“No kidding, they left the casings?”

“Two of ‘em, anyway.  And Gloria got some good latents off the table by the couch.  And she told me this morning they don’t match the victim
or
his clever wife.”

“No, they match the fingerprint Gloria lifted off Tuesday morning’s victim.”

“They do?”  They all turned disappointed faces toward her.  Tobin said, “I thought you said you didn’t know anything about this case.”

“Just that one thing.  Delaney told me on the phone.”  But he hadn’t had time to tell them about the goings-on at her house, apparently.  

“So we got the same killer at both scenes?  Well, hidee ho,” Ibarra said.  “We ought to wrap this one up in a hurry.” 

“But rather than break with precedent like that,” Eisenstaat leered, “we’ll no doubt find some way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.”   

“Tsk.  Who’s got the lead?” 

“Yours very sincerely,” Ibarra said.  He shrugged. “Delaney figured I didn’t have enough to do.”  He looked over her shoulder at someone standing in the hall and asked, “Help you guys?”

Sarah turned and saw that Phil Cruz and a man she didn’t know were standing outside her workspace, looking in.  Meeting her eyes, Cruz nodded gravely but didn’t speak.  Sarah stared back, wondering if her quick hit of sugar was making her hallucinate.  What would Phil Cruz be doing in homicide?  Then he said, “Detective Ibarra, could we speak to you out here, please?”

All the investigators who were crowded around Sarah’s desk turned to look at Ibarra.  He moved stiffly away from them, toward the agents.  But he was making avoidance moves─not flashing his usual dimpled  smile but looking at his watch and patting his wallet pocket, feigning relaxation like a boy on his first date. 
What’s going on?
 

He stopped in front of Cruz and echoed her thoughts.  “What’s going on?”

“Detective Jaime Alfonso Ibarra,” Cruz said, “You’re under arrest for conspiracy in the sale of illegal narcotics.  Will you put your hands behind your back, please?”

“Oh, come
on
,” Ibarra said.

“Phil, what are you doing?”  Sarah stepped toward them but Cruz put up a warning hand, shook his head and said, “Sarah, no.”

“What?  This is a mistake.  You’ve got the wrong person.”  She looked from one to another of their strangely closed faces, till Cruz said softly, “Sarah, it’s no mistake.”

“Let’s go,” the other man said.  She remembered him now; he was from Internal Affairs.  She noted the name on his badge, “Sgt. Early.”  He opened his handcuffs, clamped one around Ibarra’s right wrist and reached for the other, but Ibarra swung his left arm away and tried to punch Phil Cruz, who ducked. 

Early seized Ibarra’s swinging arm, held it steady and spoke to him in a conversational way.  “Think about it, Detective.  You don’t want to add resisting arrest to your other charges, do you?”  The two of them stood a moment, eye to eye, Early holding Ibarra’s hand and arm close against his body, as if to comfort him. 

And maybe in some strange way it did, because Ibarra stopped struggling, sighed once profoundly and relaxed his hands behind his back.  Early fastened the metal cuffs on his wrists and Jimmy Ibarra, without a backward glance, walked away from twelve years in law enforcement, from the bowling trophies and shooting awards hanging all over his workspace and the pictures of his children sweetly smiling from his cork board.  His crew-mates watched him go with the shocked faces of disaster victims. 

A frozen silence held them for ten seconds.  Then they all began to talk fiercely at the same time.

“What is this bullshit?” Tobin said.

“Arrogant bastards at Internal Affairs,” Eisenstaat said, “like to kill ‘em all.”

 “What’s it all about?” Greenaway asked, “What?”

“I have no idea,” Sarah said.

“Well, we’re sure as shit going to find out,” Eisenstaat said, resettling the small cap he always wore in the department because the air-conditioning made his bald head cold.

“Somebody’s got the wrong name, that’s all,” Tobin said. “They’ll let him go when they see they made a mistake.”

“It’ll still be in his jacket,” Sarah said, “unless we do something.  I’m going to talk to Delaney.”

“I’ll come with you,” Eisenstaat said. 

“Me too,” Tobin said.  Greenaway and Menendez came along, the five of them muttering along the corridor like the advance guard of an uprising. 

Delaney was standing in his doorway.  “I saw them,” he said, looking at their faces.  “Come in.”

His office was not much bigger than theirs but had the luxury of a door.  He closed it and they all talked at once.  Finally he shouted, “Hold it!” and then “Sit down and let me talk.”  They listened, twisting in their seats. 

“We’ve known for some time we had a mole in the department.”  He scratched his red cheeks, his skin irritated by the hot sun outside and now aggravated further by their angry faces staring at him.  “Our narcs kept saying shipments were getting moved just before they came to grab ‘em, stuff like that.”

“That don’t mean it’s Ibarra,” Tobin said.  “What’s narc problems got to do with homicide anyway?  Why are they picking on us?”

“Nobody’s picking on you.  And you know as well as I do it’s irrelevant which section he’s working in.  We all move around and have friends in other sections.  All of us know what anybody knows.  We e-mail, go to lunch, have coffee.  I heard somebody making jokes around here yesterday about this being the best news service in the world.”

“So we gossip,” Eisenstaat said.  “That doesn’t prove Jimmy did anything wrong.  Are you just going to let them haul him away without defending him?”

Delaney smacked his fist on his desk.  “I already defended him!  I defended him plenty!”  His eyes got a wet look and Sarah realized he had hurt his hand.  “But this last sweep at DEA…for months they’ve had a phone tap on the big guy’s phones—what’s his name? Ortiz—and a mike in his car and Christ knows, maybe a bug up his ass.  They’ve even got conversations he’s had in bed with his wife and his girlfriend.  And they’ve got Ibarra on tape telling the bastard all about every move we make around here.  Everything you learned about Ace Perkins, as fast as you got it,” he said, glaring at Sarah. 

“You heard this?  They played it for you?” Sarah asked him.

“Last night.  At home, right after supper, when I should have been reading the paper and watching the ball game, I got to listen to that.”

“You’re sure it was Jimmy’s voice?” Eisenstaat asked him.  “They can fake anything now.”

“It was his voice.  You know that tricky thing he does with his esses?  Only part of the accent he’s got left.  I’d know it anywhere.” 

Watching them, Sarah thought,
This would have been so much easier to believe about Eisenstaat.  He’s got the right face for a spy and he’s so easy to dislike. 
She asked Delaney
,
“They came to your house?”

“Two DEA agents and that Early guy.  Quite a delegation.  My wife told me later, ‘For a minute I thought
you
were getting arrested.’  How’s that for faith?”  He was trying to make them laugh.  They looked at him stone-faced.

“They didn’t have to come into our section and arrest him in front of everybody,” Sarah said.  She was having trouble controlling her voice.  “Early held onto his arm and they put
cuffs
on him, Boss, right there by his own desk.”

“Like he was some goddamn rapist or something,” Eisenstaat said.  “Fucking pansies couldn’t walk him out to their car without
restraints
?”

“Yeah, how chickenshit is that?” Greenaway said. 

“The entire procedure was by the book,” Delaney said.  “They just did what they always do.  What all of us do,” he reminded them, “when we have to.”  He looked around the circle of his detectives, blinking.  “You just don’t like it now because it’s happening to one of us.” 

When he had blinked at each of them once, Sarah got up silently and walked back to her own desk.  She sat there alone, listening as the other four detectives came back along the hall, bunched together, talking in angry undertones about the defiant, rebellious moves they would make next.  We’ll take it to the Union rep, one said, and another added, I got a friend who can put some heat on the chief.

As soon as they were back at their own desks, though, they sat down quietly and began making phone calls, pulling up e-mail, typing.  They had good jobs with seniority and benefits, retirement funds growing, everything to lose.  To deal with the pain and frustration of not doing anything, they settled back quickly into the reliable comfort of the work, the many tasks that were always there waiting. 

And Sarah, after the burning knot in her throat dissolved enough so she could swallow, got ready to go back to work too.  She pulled up the report forms she needed for the arrest of Hector Rodriguez, filled out the date and time.  As she tabbed to the next line, though, a bright light of understanding circled in out of the cosmos and burst in her brain.  She took one long deep breath, got up and walked back to Delaney’s open door. 

As soon as he saw her face, he knew what she’d come about.  He nodded and said, “Sit down.”

She sat.  “You thought it was me.”

“It was just a lousy coincidence.”  He was holding a report of some kind and he began to fold it, precisely, into thirds.  “The problems started soon after you transferred over from auto theft, all the bitching about leaks.  They’d set up a bust and all the stuff would be gone when they got there.  We all defended our sections, told the narcs they had their own leaker, or they weren’t being careful enough.  Then all the department heads got called on the carpet and told to look again at whoever was new about twelve months ago.”

“So you’ve been watching me ever since—” 
Jesus.  Almost a year.
  “I kept trying to get you to tell me what was wrong.”

“I know.”  He creased and re-creased the paper in his hands.  “We should have thought to look for long-time employees with new problems.  Jimmy’s wife kept getting pregnant and two of the kids were sickly.”  He opened the report and carefully re-folded it the opposite way.  “You’ll see when you sit in this chair,” he said, watching his hands, “that there are some things you have to do that are no fun at all.”

“When have I ever suggested—”

“It’s all right.”  He wasn’t blinking now; he almost smiled.  “I always know which members of my staff are longing to replace me.”

“You make ambition sound like a bad thing.” 

He rocked his hand.  “About half and half.  The hard chargers are harder to take but they help me get the extra work out.”  Again, he just missed smiling.  “You’re going to do fine here, Sarah.  Just try to practice a little on the patience, will you?”

“All right.”  She knew she should let it go now and get out of here while she was even with the game.  But she still felt sore and it burst out of her, suddenly; against her better judgment she heard herself saying, “I just wish I could figure out why everybody thinks it’s OK to lie to me.”

Delaney began blinking again.  Damn it!  He had her in sharp focus now and was reconsidering his good will.  “Sarah, I never lied to you.”

“Maybe not exactly but you let me think I’d done something wrong.  And everybody else—I mean you expect it from the bad guys but my husband, my sister, my partner…even my darling little niece!  Everybody I care about looks me right in the eye and tells me lies!”  She meant Dietz.  She was crazy from stress and anxiety and low blood sugar, and now she was losing it in front of her boss. 
Damn.
  

But Delaney didn’t look disappointed or even puzzled.  “Well, I can’t speak for your family members,” he said, “but Jimmy Ibarra lied to all of us and so did Will Dietz.  That’s who else you’re talking about, isn’t it?”

“Well—”