“I don’t know. That’s what they do. I thought maybe she’d mixed it with something else.”
I remembered the autopsy that Bernie Short had faxed following our phone conversation. It had found Lisa Wooten’s body chemistry free of all other toxins except a little alcohol. “Was that one of her habits?”
“I don’t know. I just sold to her.”
“Bullshit, Eric,” Willy broke in, quick as a trap. “She’s been dead for years, and you remembered her right off. She wasn’t just a customer.”
The big man squirmed in his seat. “She was nicer than the others. That’s all.”
“What?” Willy persisted. “She give you freebies?”
I thought he’d gone too far, but Meade surprised me by letting slip a flitting boyish smile.
“She did, didn’t she?” Willy laughed. “You dog.”
I sat back down, aware that with that one breakthrough, the whole mood had become friendlier. “Okay, so you were pals. Did she ever mix her drugs with anything else?”
“Not that I ever saw,” he finally conceded.
“Who else was in her life? Any other boyfriends? Or were you it?”
The smile returned, but embarrassed this time. “Oh, no. She was just nice to me sometimes. Owen was her real friend. I liked him, too.”
“Owen’s a wimp,” Willy declared. “What’d she see in him?”
Eric Meade frowned. “Owen was a good guy. Everybody just treated him like a loser. It wasn’t fair. Lisa knew that. He and Lisa were kind of the same that way—real gentle.”
It was the longest sentence we’d heard from him yet, and told me something of where his prejudices lay—which I now hoped to use to redeem my earlier fumble.
“Not like Walter, right? The wannabe Marine.” I glanced at the military shrine on the wall behind him.
Meade became angry. “He’s no Marine.”
“He acts like one, strutting around. Looks like he gets pretty much what he wants, too. Popular guy, well liked, doing well financially.”
Eric’s face had darkened. “He’s a jerk.”
Willy laughed. “Oh, yeah. Some jerk. When we mentioned him a minute ago, I thought you’d shit your pants.”
“I did not,” Eric shouted, moving about in his chair.
“Come on,” Willy kept up. “He’s got the real stuff. The Corps threw you out. That’s why you compensate with all these stupid guns. Walter’s got what it takes—they’d take him in a heartbeat if he asked.”
“That’s a lie.” Meade tried to lurch to his feet. Willy placed his hand against his chest and shoved him back against the cushion.
“Sit down. What’s the big deal? Some people got it and some people don’t. It’s a fact of life.”
“He doesn’t got anything. He hurts people. That’s why they follow him. He messes with their minds. He would never be a Marine.”
I caught Willy’s eye, and he instantly resumed his seat, as peaceful as if he’d never said a word. Eric Meade stared at him in surprise, his chest heaving with emotion, confused by the abrupt change of pace.
“Eric,” I said gently, “it’s okay. Take a few deep breaths. You must’ve really hated him for what he did to Lisa.”
But I’d overplayed it. He looked at me doubtfully. “Walter did that?”
“He knew her, didn’t he?” Willy asked calmly.
“Sure.”
“He ever do drugs with her?”
“I guess so.”
“He know you supplied her?”
“Sure.”
“Was he hanging around more toward the end—near the time she died?”
Eric sounded contemplative. “Yeah, he was. He was paying her to sleep with him, and being real mean to Owen, too, like he wanted to break them up.”
“Talking about Owen like I was just a minute ago?” Willy asked.
Eric looked at him accusingly. “That wasn’t right.”
“I know it wasn’t,” Willy admitted with unusual gentleness. “I wanted you to be honest with us, and I knew you were worried about Walter. I heard on the street you had a falling out with him, right after Lisa died. That’s part of the reason you live out here now. What happened between you two? You challenge him for what he did?”
The big man was obviously baffled. “No. He just started coming after me. It didn’t make no sense. I never bothered him. I hardly even knew him.”
“But you did see him doing a head game with Lisa and Owen toward the end,” I spoke up. “Why was he doing that?”
“I don’t know,”
he said forcefully, his frustration climbing. “I didn’t understand.”
“Didn’t understand what? That he was trying to steal Lisa from Owen? Why’s that so strange?” I prodded him.
Eric ran his hands through his hair anxiously. “Because he wasn’t. He was just sleeping with her—he didn’t even like her. Right after she died, Walter was all of a sudden acting like Owen’s best friend—giving him support and a place to stay.” He shook his head and repeated, “It just doesn’t make no sense.”
Willy and I exchanged looks. It made sense to us, in more ways than one.
“I’M NOT SURE I’M GETTING THIS,”
Gail said. “Who’s Walter Freund?”
“We still have a way to go,” I explained. “But I think he’s the one who was pushing Owen’s buttons—the guy you’re after.”
We were sitting in her office late at night, just the two of us. The rest of the floor was dark, empty, and silent, imbued with that aura of abandonment that homes never seem to suffer.
“You’re going to have to give Willy high marks here,” I told her. “He went at it with a vengeance, especially after I told him how many rules we’d be breaking. To be honest, when you first came up with the Owen-as-guided-missile theory, my bets were on Jamie Good, what with all his groupies. But Walter’s smarter and more manipulative, and we’ve got him positioning poor old Owen like a chess piece. Good, on the other hand, never had much to do with him.”
“We’re going to have to do better than that,” Gail said glumly. She’d already told me it had been a bad day of sniping with Derby. “Well, it’s all circumstantial,” I continued, “but we have a witness who says Walter was putting a wedge between Lisa and Owen just before Lisa died. And afterward, although he’d been treating Owen like shit before, he tucked him under his wing like a doting mother.”
“Why?” Gail asked. “He couldn’t have been grooming Owen to kill Brenda years before the fact. It strains credibility.”
“We don’t think he was—not specifically. We think he was either planning for a rainy day or just saw in Owen the chance to mess with somebody’s mind. Knocking off Brenda by remote control was probably an experiment—and a successful one, as Walter would see it. After all, if we’re right, he’d already done a variation of that with Lisa, so it definitely fits his character.”
Gail frowned. “Hold it, explain that. I thought Lisa died of a straight overdose.”
“She did, but I don’t think it was unassisted. Bernie Short planted the idea that she may have lowered her tolerance through a period of abstinence, and thus overinjected herself by simply taking her usual dose. But now we’ve been told her drug use had been constant till the end. My bet is that Walter overloaded her last syringe without her knowing it and let her kill herself so he could gain control of Owen.
“After we found out about Walter’s possible role in all this,” I continued, “we talked to everyone we could about him, especially concerning the time period following Lisa’s death. We confirmed he made a special project out of Owen, even having him move in for a year. And it was then that Owen started telling people Lisa had been poisoned, although no one heard him say by whom, which makes me think Walter left that role blank till later.”
Gail sat forward, keenly interested. “Were there any instances of Walter directing Owen to act against his own welfare?”
I smiled, having already thought of that. “Not that anyone’s seen. Walter made sure the mind-control aspect of their relationship was kept mostly under wraps. Actually,” I added, “I feel a little guilty about that. Early on, a girl named Janice Litchfield told me Owen was ‘Walter’s pet’ and had attacked Walter once, using a pen like a knife after Walter taunted him to do it. At the time, I thought it just meant Owen was prone to violence. Now I think it was more of a training exercise—like a handler making a dog go after a guy in a padded suit. Janice told me Walter laughed right after the supposed attack, and yesterday she added that Walter even hugged him, like he was rewarding him.”
Gail shook her head. “Aside from Janice, who’re your witnesses?”
I pulled a short list from my pocket and gave it to her. “It starts with a man named Eric Meade, who was Lisa’s supplier, and then runs down a few people Willy and I have been interviewing over the past few days, including Janice. I also ran it by the department shrink, who says it’s perfectly possible. Problem is, Walter’s got Meade so spooked, he’s armed himself to the teeth and has his house ringed with security devices, and I doubt any of the others will be any less paranoid.”
She took the list and laid it on her desk. “My God. What’s Walter’s past like?”
I produced another sheet of paper. “Pretty bad. He’s thirty-five now and his record goes back twenty-three years. His juvie records are sealed, but he hit the ground running once he came of age—everything from disturbing the peace and speeding, to sexual assault, armed robbery, bank fraud, pimping, manslaughter, and some serious drug activity. Over twenty hits so far. He’s the proverbial three-time loser, and he’s currently on federal parole for a weapons charge, which is probably encouraging him to keep a low profile. All in all, a classic sociopath, and one well motivated to work from the shadows—or to use tools like Owen Tharp.”
Gail sat back in her chair and rubbed her eyes. “You’re sure Brenda Croteau didn’t sell Lisa the dope that killed her?”
“As sure as I can be. As far as we know, they never even met.”
Gail gave me a tired smile. “Well, I guess I asked for this one. I’m going to have to tell Jack I just came up with a late Christmas present for McNeil, without having anything to replace it except a bunch of psychological mumbo-jumbo. You mind sitting in when I break him the news? He’s going to want to know the details.”
I got up, leaned toward her, and gave her a kiss. “You couldn’t just hang the bad guy and be done with it, could you?”
She caught my face in her hands and kissed me back. “Nope. It’s not my job.”
“No one would agree with you, but that’s one reason I love you.”
· · ·
Jack Derby’s office was a modest affair—a box in a string of boxes, lined up along a hallway on the second floor of a modern bank building. One wall was covered with two windows looking up Main Street toward the courthouse, while the others had either pastoral pictures or framed law degrees hanging on them. His predecessor had been more of an egomaniac, and while admittedly the SA’s office had been housed elsewhere in his day, James Dunn had always made sure he got the biggest desk, the best view, and the grandest room to call his own. It made me wonder how Dunn would rearrange things in the unlikely event that he won in November.
In fairness to Jack Derby, who’d recently been getting on all of our nerves, he was certainly no egotist. He was a decent, hard-working, well-intentioned man who—I personally believed—had let his inexperience, an enormous workload, and a premature case of reelection jitters get the better of him. Which probably helped explain both his testiness and frazzled appearance, even though that election was still eight months off.
Nevertheless, as he sat opposite Gail and me the following morning, he didn’t look as if he were going to let any deep-seated honorable character traits get the better of him.
“I can’t believe you did this, Gail. I can’t believe you’d be so totally out of touch with what we do here. To willfully dig up exculpatory evidence against a prime suspect in a capital case. I mean, my God, it boggles the mind. What the hell were you thinking?”
Gail had prepared for this. “I’ve said from the start there’s more to this case than we’re willing to admit. I have no doubt that Owen Tharp killed Brenda Croteau. I have a big problem leaving it there. My interpretation of our job, since you mentioned it, is to seek justice on behalf of the people—the innocent, the guilty, and especially the ones who for one reason or another fall in between. I absolutely believe that to just nail bad guys is a violation of the very premise on which this office is founded.”
Derby stared at her in astonishment, opened his mouth to speak, hesitated, and then finally said, with visible self-restraint, “I think we’d better agree to disagree on that for the moment and stick with the nuts and bolts. Joe, I know the ME said there was no poison in Lisa Wooten’s last dose—Gail handed me that small grenade a while back—but are you absolutely sure Brenda Croteau didn’t sell it to her?”
“We can’t find a single witness who says she did,” I answered carefully. “And we do have someone who says he was her supplier right up to the end.”
Derby glanced at the report Gail had placed before him at the start of the meeting. “Eric Meade. How reliable is he?”
I put the best slant on it I could. “I think he’s utterly truthful—not a devious man at all. He might not make the best witness if you were to put him on the stand, though. A little reclusive.”
Derby stared at me a moment. “Swell.” He checked the report again. “And Walter Freund—he’s the guy you think killed Wooten to gain control of Owen and then steered Owen at Croteau.”
“We think so. According to witnesses, Wooten’s intake hadn’t altered over those last few months, and she was known to be a fastidious shooter. The only variable cropping up near the end was Freund.”
He sighed and pushed the report away from him. “Gail, let’s be honest here. What’ve we got now we didn’t have before?”
Her response was instantaneous. “Doubt.”
He didn’t react but looked at me instead. “Joe?”
“I
would
like to look into Walter Freund.”
He surprised us both by smiling slightly. “Okay, fine. Why don’t we compromise, then? We have a bird in hand. Let’s prosecute Owen Tharp for the double murder of Brenda Croteau and her baby. Then, once he can no longer hide behind his Fifth Amendment rights—and while you, Joe, have had a chance to build a case against Mr. Freund—we can use him as a state’s witness and issue an invitation to Freund to join him in jail.”