Simple (39 page)

“We were wondering if you noticed, if you happened to notice, if your friend had a mosquito bite.”

“Yes. Well, yes, he had one. It was nasty, too. He joked that it looked like a hickey. It was on his neck.”

“And he got this bite when?” Christie asked.

“In the night, I guess.” She stopped, thinking about what she had said. “I know he was bothered by it in the morning.”

“This might seem very strange to you, but it is crucial that you don't talk about this visit or anything that we talked about, even a small detail like the mosquito bite, to anyone. It could seriously interfere with the investigation.”

“I can hold my tongue.”

“I thought so.”

On the way to the car, he said to Colleen, “Thank you for that.”

“When I talked to him, those two times, I thought he had a nervous tic, hand to his collar. He was scratching the bite. I had that all along and I didn't know.”

At a bit before seven they sat in Christie's car regrouping. Christie called for the lab car to get the samples he needed. Dolan pressed all advantages with the phone companies.

The phone calls to Cassie's phone appeared to have stopped. Colleen studied the
CALLS RECEIVED
menu as well as she could through plastic. “There were two more,” she said. “They stopped about fifteen minutes ago.”

Five minutes after seven, Potocki called to say the Saab and its driver were now home.

“Let's go get him.”

*   *   *

CONNOLLY AND HIS
wife decided to have coffee in the yard at early breakfast. They had been talking but had reached an impasse. She had insisted she didn't want to give up her job, even for a term to go with him to Ireland. What if her chair didn't want to take her back? Finally Connolly suggested he take the children for a time. She had answered calmly that she refused to be away from her boys. They couldn't agree on anything much, and yet, as they tried to negotiate a plan, they spent more time together than they had in years.

“I'll go alone,” he said finally. “It's not what I want, but I'll do it. Will you visit?”

“Long weekends in Ireland. What a wild idea.”

“There are ways. If you got somebody to cover a class, you could start out on a Wednesday and be back Sunday night. I know it's a lot to ask, but … no, I can't live without the rest of you, so if you say no, then, then I probably won't go.”

“How ugly is this going to be?”

“Very ugly. I can't imagine how Christie has managed to keep the … the thing with Cassie … quiet so far. It won't always be that way. And if Todd did what I think he did, there is no end to it. I could never come back to politics. Or … anything.”

“Ted Kennedy did.”

“I'm not Ted Kennedy.”

“Meaning?”

“He had a hundred twenty percent vitality. A lust for life.”

“You're a thinker. A brooder. You're a different personality, but it doesn't have to keep you from doing something good.”

Cassie Price had told him he was like a saint, of all things, a saint. A thinking, brooding saint, afflicted by sexual hunger.

“I can't even think how to bounce back. I'm so … I'm undone. Defeated.”

“It's going to take a lot of time. In Ireland or wherever you are, one day you'll wake up and you'll know how to be.” She looked away, down at her coffee cup. He studied familiar things about her, the way her hair waved, the way she held the cup with two hands, the way she sat with her knees together, feet apart. He thought, She wants to come with me and doesn't know how. She loves me and doesn't know why. His eyes filled with tears. He'd let everyone down—his wife and sons, his father and brother, his party, the Price family. How did a man come back from all that?

*   *   *

AT WELL BEFORE EIGHT
in
the morning, Christie knocks on Todd Simon's door. He has Dolan behind him and the others backing him up at a small distance. It takes a while to rouse him.

Then Simon stands there rubbing his eyes and says, “Sorry. I'm half asleep. You'll see this is a mistake. But I'll come with you, of course.” He smiles slightly, enough to press his dimples into service.

Neighbors poke their heads out of their front doors.

“It's okay,” Simon tells them. “I promise.”

By nine in the morning, they are sitting in one of the interview rooms at Headquarters and they have already asked Todd Simon multiple times about the truck, the black car, the trip in the middle of the night. He shakes his head and says with a kind of whimsy, “I'd love to talk, but I've been around attorneys all my life and I know I'm simply not supposed to. I'm sorry, but I'll wait until my attorney is here.”

“Meanwhile, we need a swab. DNA.”

“Not just fingerprints these days!” he says in pretend surprise.

As soon as Christie has the swab, he couriers it to the lab, and before it gets there, he is on the phone with Ann Cello, Colleen's contact over there, a jewel, a glorious jewel of a woman. He's leaned on Baitz as much as he can, and now he leans on Cello. “This is absolute priority. Think of it as … oh, I dunno, a whole institution coming down if we don't have our answer. Think of it as practically presidential. Please. Three days.”

“Sir, I'm not … Everybody will tell me it can't be done.”

“I've heard it can.”

“I might get fired.”

“I will turn somersaults for you.”

“Three days. Okay. Okay, I will.”

Christie meets his drooping detectives in his office. “Nothing we can do but wait. Simon sees his attorney at three this afternoon—some sort of hotshot from Harrisburg is coming in—I knew it, too, didn't I say? So let's all go home, sleep a little, and meet back here at five or even six. I know we're not much good now, none of us. We've been up all night—”

“Except when we fell asleep,” Dolan mutters.

“Seriously. We need time to think.”

“Six o'clock,” Dolan begs. “I'm not as young as I used to be. As opposed to you.”

Christie lets himself laugh. “Six o'clock, then. If we work it right, we get six hours of sleep. Good. Go home.”

They get up to go to their cars, and Christie walks out with them.

Colleen walks alongside him. “Promised myself I'd talk to you,” she says.

“Talk.”

She feels a little like a criminal, confessing. “Potocki and I
are
an item, as you once observed. So I'm calling it what it is. We like working together, but we know we can't anymore. After this is over, I mean. It's hard to give up being partners, but the truth is, it does get in the way.”

“What are you saying?”

“That we love our jobs. But he worries about me and I worry about him worrying.”

“That part won't go away, but it's easier when you're not involved. I … like Potocki.”

“He's a good guy.”

“Yes.” He can feel his own eyes soften. She looks as if she might cry. “Let me think how to scramble the pairings. I need some time to figure it out.”

*   *   *

JUST LIKE THAT. IT'S
done
.
Just like that. “I told him,” Colleen announces.

“I'm sure it stung him some.”

“He was fine. He's … Boss. He was fine.”

“We need to get some sleep. Do you need to be alone?”

“No. You can come to my place if you want.”

Potocki hesitates, surprised. “Okay. Yeah, let's.”

*   *   *

TODD PUTS ON HIS
thinking cap: If he names Haigh or Benton, they will deny it. If he takes the fall, they will get him out. They'll find a technicality. He keeps repeating this wisdom over and over to himself as they put him in the scanning chair, fingerprint him, do a preliminary arraignment by video.

“No bail,” the magistrate says. He peers at the screen. This surprises him. He has some money; Haigh has lots of money. Earlier, as he sat in Headquarters putting up with the detectives, he was working out what he thought would happen. He'd thought bail would be set high, say a million, but he did the math and figured out how to meet it—with Haigh's help. This is weird, all right—even Cal Hathaway got bail.

He doesn't yell or protest. He can work within the system. There are bond hearings. He can get this no-bail ruling reversed.

Temporary, he says to himself. I will get out.

But what the hell do the police have on him? The phone and wallet—have they been found at Cal's place? He can't ask; the police are giving up almost no information. A good lawyer can get them on that, right—false arrest, intimidation, blah, blah, blah. He drums into his brain that he must insist he is innocent and otherwise shut up, say
nothing
that could incriminate him. The problem with silence is it bores him.

They will try to provoke him.

His attorney has got to get information.

He squeezes his head. Thinking cap. The photos in his house were the
only
incriminating evidence, and when he saw the cars outside, when he heard the knock at the door, they went down the garbage disposal. He gave them a good long grinding. They're gone. Forever.

If it's something about the truck and what he was doing in the middle of the night, he must say he couldn't sleep, was out driving, hated the guy Cal for what he did to Cassie, drove by and saw Cal throwing out garbage. And if they get him on the phone call to the police, okay, he pretended to be a neighbor so Cal's garbage would be investigated.

And if they try to trace the phone calls made to Cassie's phone, they won't find anything but a prepaid number calling from the road. The phones that made the calls are gone. They're in the bushes along the parkway. Not a print on them.

Didn't he think of everything?

He sits in his cell for only a brief time, getting used to it. He is not going to be here long, but he examines the metal beds, the futon mattresses covered in turquoise plastic, the small bolted stool. Apparently, he has a cellmate, someone in the lower bunk who doesn't make his bed. After a full inspection of the place, he plunks his bedding on top of the upper bunk and goes down to the common area, where there are sounds of activity; he's a social creature, and this is where the people are, such as they are. So this is the Allegheny County Jail—basketball, chess, TV. Okay, not that he's surprised, exactly, but it's like a vacation in an ugly campground, hard earth, bad food. If you can exhaust yourself in play, you'll sleep anyway.

Haigh will send him someone good.

Is Connolly, probably having a nice lunch somewhere today, even the slightest bit grateful?

Todd takes a chair in front of the TV and watches a nature program with twenty or so other men. He's always liked nature—flowers that eat animals and such. He can tell that he is being watched, but he knows how to work a place like this. Already they're giving him space, as if he's somebody.

*   *   *

SIMON'S DEFENSE
attorney, Morty Silber, is a long, wily, skinny man who pretends to slouch backward in his chair but who is reptilian, ready to strike. He arrives at Headquarters a bit before three, having demanded to see Christie, who has to rouse himself from the sofa in his office.

“I got into town early and went to the jail, where I stopped by long enough to introduce myself to my client. I intend to go back as soon as I've made a few things clear. I have advised him not to speak. He's quite worried about unfairness in these proceedings. He's wondered aloud to me if he is being framed—that you've got some wrong idea about him and you can't get it out of your head.”

Christie shakes his head. For a moment that charge sounds almost true.

“He went for a drink with her. He liked her. A lot. And he's furious with despair about the fact that that kid, that worker, or some other jerk, brutally murdered her. Somehow because of the drink, you're after my client.”

“The drink and the fact that he denied it and … other evidence, plenty,” Christie says, baiting the guy.

Will Simon flinch when he hears it?

“And we're still gathering details,” Christie adds.

Morty Silber smiles tightly at the sweet stupidity of the police, but he can't hold his composure. He slaps the table. “Just remember, there's such a thing as the discovery phase, and if you hold anything back, we're going to make a fuss you'll never recover from.”

“Certainly. In time. In time you will have it all, counselor, and a good deal of it at the hearing.” Christie, knowing that Silber would see the probable cause affidavit, wrote it in the most general terms. “Proximity to deceased on the day of the homicide, suspicious movement of vehicles, political motive, trip to original suspect's house in the middle of the night.”

Silber makes a showy angry exit. “There may have to be reports filed on the handling of this case.”

“I'm not worried.”

Christie tries again for a nap on his sofa.

And succeeds, a little.

At six o'clock, he pulls his people together in his office. “Are we rested?”

“Yes, Boss,” the whole group says. He doubts that it's true, though they look a bit more brushed up than he does.

“I've got a search warrant for Simon's house. We're on the proof phase now. I need for you to be supercareful not to contaminate anything. You all can start on the house; I plan to catch up with you in a bit. I want a complete search. The way I wrote the warrant was for trace evidence. That means you have a right to
everything
—the space under the cellophane in the cereal boxes, locked drawers, everything.”

“What are we looking for, though?” Hurwitz asks.

“There was some dirt, soil, in the bag with the rags and the phone. More of that soil? Hairs, fibers? Written material. Her family and her officemates listed among the possessions in her wallet some photographs. They're not in the wallet now. And money, of course, was missing. Where are those things—right, I know, spent, destroyed, probably, but we have to look.”