Indefensible Read online

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning the guy was coming from the direction of the reservoir toward town shortly after Ms. Randall’s encounter in the woods. The timing is about right.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Avery Illman, aka Scud. A nobody. We’ve never had direct dealings with him, but his name comes up a lot. Dorsey’s putting it together.”

  “What’s the plan?”

  “Pick him up today for questioning, then let him go. We won’t let on we found the Phippin kid. Then we follow this Scud character around a while, see what turns up, who he talks to. Circle gets wider, we’ll bring in a few of his associates for questioning. Let on we have the body, have a witness. Someone will leak something or do something stupid.”

  “Quick work, Chip.”

  “It’s what they pay us for.”

  “You’re sure this guy Scud, he doesn’t live in the west ’burbs, commutes in on the pike, maybe has a girlfriend out there? Something?”

  “Girlfriend, who knows. But he lives right in the city. Wife and a stepson. Have you talked to the bird-watcher yet?”

  “She’s my next call.”

  “And I suppose you’re going to ask me for a workup on her.”

  I laugh. “I don’t need the FBI. I have a daughter on the case.” We both chuckle. Then I switch back to the sorrows at hand: “Who took care of notifying Zander’s parents?”

  “Dorsey’s people. But we haven’t interviewed them yet.” Chip echoes my mournful tone. “Nothing worse,” he says.

  “Nothing worse,” I agree.

  • • •

  Lizzy is due back in about thirty-five minutes.

  I open my billfold to get Cassandra’s number, but it isn’t there. I must have left it at home, in the pocket of my shirt. No matter: Chip will have Cassandra’s phone number in his notes, too, so I call him back, and after some mild ribbing, he gives me the number.

  “Hi, you’ve reached 555-3080,” Cassandra’s voice says. “Please leave your name and number, the date and time of your call, the purpose of your call, your religious persuasion, political affiliation, NRA membership status, IQ, resting pulse, and whether a spot check of your freezer would reveal fillets of any upper-trophic-level fish, and I’ll call you back. Bye.”

  I hesitate. Her greeting doesn’t invite the serious tone of what I want to say regarding the FBI and Zander Phippin. But it does set the perfect tone for me to drop in a breezy, unrefusable invitation for a coffee date. Really, both matters should be addressed to Cassandra herself instead of her message machine.

  Click. Too late.

  I call back and consider hitting a few of the questions—pulse, 58; the occasional chunk of mahimahi; and a Republican Party affiliation owing to an ironic error many years back, which I’ve never bothered to correct because it landed me my job. Again, this would all be a suave lead-in to the date question, but in bad taste for the rest. I hesitate.

  Click. Too late.

  I call back. “Resting pulse and IQ are identical,” I say quickly, “but I can’t remember the number. Hi, it’s Nick Davis with the U.S. Attorney’s Office. From yesterday. Lizzy’s father. Listen, I need to speak with you as soon as possible. Please call me immediately. 555-2672.”

  Done.

  I sit back and wait for Lizzy.

  CHAPTER 7

  From my chair at the end of the dock, I fling coffee dregs into the lake. A fingerling rises to sniff the grounds. Lizzy is overdue by about twenty-eight minutes. Twenty-eight minutes is huge. I stand up, ready to take action. But if I start around the lake in one direction, she may show up from the other. And if I don’t find her in a complete circuit of the lake, I’ve wasted over an hour when I should have called for help. Besides, there are different routes she could have taken, and I might miss her. A lot of the trail is impassable by car, and even a four-wheeler is impractical because of all the fallen trees.

  It’s too soon to call for help. Any dispatcher will say, You just keep us informed, okay? But it isn’t too soon. Lizzy is a serious runner, meaning she isn’t about to turn a fifty-minute run into, say, a ninety-minute stroll. Therefore, she is either injured or diverted, and I know all about diversions; courtroom dockets are catalogs of hideous diversions. Down in the city, a number of children have gone missing over the past few years.

  I sit down in the Adirondack chair and wait. The phone rings, and I snatch it up as if it could be about Lizzy, which is silly because she’s not even missing yet. “Nick here.”

  “Is Lizzy there?”

  “Good morning to you, too, Kenny.”

  “Hi, Nick, it’s Kenny. Is Lizzy there?”

  “Actually not,” I say. “I’m beginning to worry, she went for—”

  “Tell her she owes me money,” he says, and adds a fiendish chuckle, which, if we were talking in person, he’d emphasize by hunching his back and maniacally rubbing his hands together. He does a pretty good Igor.

  “Money? How come?”

  “Sheeee’ll know.” He cackles.

  “She went for a run, but she ought to be back by now, and I’m really concerned. I can’t imagine what—”

  “Ten dollars. We had a bet.”

  “Half an hour overdue.”

  “If I could go a whole week without a smoke.”

  “It’s not like her, Kenny.”

  “And I was thinking I might come up this weekend.”

  “That’d be great. I’m driving back to town tomorrow, but Flo and Lizzy would love to have you.”

  “Yeah well, maybe. I’ll call back.” He hangs up.

  Typical Kenny, not getting dragged into my worries. No doubt it’s a result of the unpredictable and violent home of his childhood. He always resists drama and emotions, walling himself off from the woes of the world. I wish I had gotten to him sooner. He was a ten-year-old boy in foster care, and I was a fortyish divorced prosecutor with a nine-years-dead infant son. I had the notion of trying to keep some poor kid out of jail instead of continually putting people in. Juvenile services put us together. Now, at twenty-five, Kenny is still a directionless kid, but one with a good heart, and with three people—Flora, Lizzy, and me—who consider him family.

  Lizzy is forty minutes late.

  As I sit waiting, the sun lights the deck and me in a blaze of daylight. Eyes closed, I hear more of the birds, including the tinga tinga tinga tinga ting, which, though I’ve heard it a million times without really hearing, suddenly feels like a gift from Cassandra.

  Along with the warm sunshine, there is something else; something comforting. Wood smoke. I open my eyes into bleached colors that slowly flow back to brilliance. I see the thin line of smoke at half-tree height, threading its way across the dazzling water. A gray smudge, which, if this were a photograph, I’d rub away with my sleeve. I follow it back to the stretch of shore where I know the Sammels’ cabin lies hidden in a cove invisible from here. Dink Sammel is a local. He works for the town, plowing snow in winter and grading the gravel roads in summer. Dink has brothers and cousins and nephews and in-laws I can’t keep track of. The cabin, it seems, is available to all comers who can make a reasonable show of relatedness. Recently, I’ve noticed a kid with curled-in shoulders. I see him walking the road to town, but whenever I offer a ride, he whispers, “No thanks,” without bothering to look out at me through his curtain of greasy bangs. He is thin, the way only a meth or heroin user can be. It is more than thinness; it is pale, sallow, ulcerated wastedness. If he spent the night in your home, you’d burn the sheets. I asked Dink about him several weeks ago. “My cousin’s stepson,” Dink said. “He’s okay. I let him use the cabin ’cause, well, he likes his solitude. And he don’t mean no harm. You know?”

  I know why Lizzy is late. Not details, of course, but enough; I know it with the certainty parents have for things like this. It starts in my chest and flows from there, and I feel the world’s recalculated mass.

  I rise from the Adirondack chair. I think of Flora. She’ll be here in a f
ew hours, and the place will be overrun with cops. I imagine some rookie lifting the tape for her to drive under: The victim’s mother. Let her through.

  Do I believe this? Hard to say. I stand at the end of the dock, staring across to where Sammel’s cabin lies hidden in the trees.

  “LIZZYYYY,” I yell.

  Lizzy Lizzy Lizzy, the hills beyond the lake answer, with an infuriating willingness to conceal everything that wants concealing.

  “Screw you,” I tell the hills. “LIZZYYYY.”

  Lizzy Lizzy . . .

  “Daddy, what’s wrong?” She is in the doorway of the cabin, ACE bandage around her left ankle, Anna Karenina in her hand, her thumb marking the page. “I thought you knew I was here,” she says sweetly.

  “Well, I—”

  “You were on the phone. I hardly even got started. My ankle again. Can we go to the store for ice? This part with Levin,” she says, showing me her book, “it really drags. Don’t you think?”

  “Sure,” I say. “Ice.” I turn my back to her and stare out across the lake. Everything goes blurry as my eyes fill.

  CHAPTER 8

  Southbound on the interstate: I drive toward high-rises that quiver like mirages on the horizon. Other than Lizzy’s ankle, this weekend has served its cathartic purpose. Flora and her friend Lloyd and Bill-the-Dog showed up yesterday afternoon. Lloyd seems harmless enough, though dandified. He arrived in green pants and loafers. Mercifully, he never changed into shorts, but he did come outside in a T-shirt once—or rather, a white V-neck undershirt, yellowed at the armpits, revealing a chest and arms that hadn’t seen daylight since the doctor smacked his butt.

  I haven’t reached Cassandra Randall yet, which Lizzy tells me is because Cassandra, like us, was away for the weekend, though Lizzy doesn’t know where or with whom. Chip called back to tell me that Scud Illman, our suspect, seems also to have flown the coop for the weekend with his wife and stepson. Everything’s on hold till Monday morning.

  But Monday starts on Sunday evening, because now, as I pass beyond the last of many cell phone dead spots, my phone chirps its message-waiting jingle.

  “Hi, Mr. Davis, it’s Cassandra Randall. From, you know, the murder. I’m going out right now, and I probably won’t be home till late. You can call late if you want, okay, but otherwise I’ll speak to you in the morning? And say hi to Lizzy for me. Okay? Bye.”

  I press 4 to replay. I hear tension or sadness, except at the beginning. Hi, Mr. Davis, and the end, say hi to Lizzy, where the voice has a lilt that I find encouraging. Though, I wonder where she’s going and why she won’t be back until late. I’m about to see if I can catch her before she leaves, but the phone chirps again. Chip calling.

  “Nick, we just made contact with the guy I told you about, Scud. Avery Illman. He says he’ll talk to us. You want to come, or are you still up north?”

  I’m thirty minutes out, so I head right for the FBI building. Chip meets me in the hallway and hands me Illman’s file.

  “Your basic petty criminal,” he says. The skin under Chip’s eyes is baggier than it was two days ago. “We haven’t told him anything, just that we have a matter we’d like to talk about. He drove over voluntarily. Pretty cool customer. Captain Dorsey will be along in a few minutes. It’ll be an odd interrogation. Actually, not even an interrogation, just a chat, because we don’t expect any info, and we definitely don’t want him to know we found the body. We just want him thinking someone’s been blabbing.”

  “You have a strategy?”

  “Aimlessness, incompetence, haplessness,” Chip says. “Basically, we could have called him up and said someone mentioned his name. But I want to set the hook deeper. Get him feeling a little threatened so he does the silverback routine: goes out and beats his chest and kicks some ass in the jungle. Then we simply pick up everybody whose ass got kicked, let on we have a body and a witness. Everyone’ll sing. We’re going to need a goddamn choir director.”

  “Got anything from the body? Anything from the scene? Autopsy results or anything?”

  “No reports yet, but I went down and took a look at the body. It’s definitely an execution-type job, but he was roughed up first. Tortured. Nothing in his stomach, so he must have been held a few days, anyway. And he had, like, paint.”

  “Paint? Where?”

  “On his hands. A couple flecks on his face, too.”

  “What kind of paint?”

  “I don’t know. Different colors.”

  Chip shows me to the observation room. It is closet-sized and dim, with a shelf along the windowed wall. The only light in here comes through the one-way glass looking into the interrogation room. The interrogation room has the usual table and chairs, but it also has a bookcase in the corner. I can make out a few of the titles; there is the familiar bright blue binding of an old DSM III.

  A guy comes in and flips some switches on the electronics.

  “Nick Davis,” I say, offering my hand.

  “Sparky,” he says. “You a witness or something?”

  “DOJ.”

  “Yeah, that makes sense. You don’t seem all witnessy.”

  “Witnessy?”

  “Jumpy. Nervous, with this ‘oh wow’ thing going on. And an escort. They always send an agent with the witness.” His voice has the barely detectable roundness of someone with a hearing disability.

  Through the glass, I see Dorsey and Chip walk into the interrogation room. Dorsey wears a shoulder holster and no suit jacket, but unlike Chip, he’s in dress slacks. “Anybody over there?” Dorsey asks, looking toward me through the one-way window. His voice comes through the intercom.

  “Nick Davis has joined us,” Chip says. “He and Sparky are in the observation room.”

  “Hi, Nick,” Dorsey say, looking toward Sparky and me through the one-way glass.

  “Hi, Captain Dorsey.”

  “They can’t hear you,” Sparky says. “We hear them, they don’t hear us.”

  “He could join us in here,” I hear Dorsey say to Chip. “Nick, you want to join us in here?”

  “Um, I don’t know,” I say, “should I?”

  “They can’t hear you,” Sparky says to me.

  “No,” I hear Chip say to Dorsey, “having the prosecutor might make the guy more guarded.”

  “I wonder,” Dorsey says. “Might give us a better dynamic.” He makes a seesaw motion with his hands. “You know, get something going.”

  Chip shrugs. “I think it would look more like we have something. We want it to start out like we got squat. Don’t you think, Nick?” He looks toward me through the one-way glass.

  “Yeah, squat,” I say.

  “They couldn’t hear you,” Sparky says. He flips a switch. “There. Intercom. Now they hear you. Can you guys hear us?”

  “Hi, Sparky,” Chip’s voice says through the intercom.

  “Guy in here talking to a window,” Sparky says.

  “So maybe we’ll bring you in later, Nick,” Chip says. “Can you do the moral-superiority bit?”

  I nod.

  “They can’t see you,” Sparky says to me.

  “Yeah, that sounds good,” Dorsey says. “We’ll act like incontinent fools, then Nick comes in all serious.”

  “Incompetent,” I say.

  “What’s that, Nick?” Dorsey asks.

  “Nothing. Never mind.”

  “So when we want you in here,” Chip says, “I’ll say to this guy, Scud, I’ll say, ‘Is it too warm in here?’ Then you come in acting like your shit don’t stink. Like Dorsey and me are bozos. That’ll put Scud on our side, maybe make him just a tad more forthcoming.”

  “Gee whiz,” Dorsey says, stroking his mustache and looking at me/himself in the one-way glass. “Tough order. You think a prosecutor can do that? Act all superior and holier-than-thou?”

  Sparky laughs, though it isn’t actually a laugh but a hum. Even Chip looks at me (or himself) and laughs. “Just follow our lead.” Then Chip brings Scud in. “Got coffee here, or we can get
you a Coke or something if you like.”

  “Free Cokes?” Scud says. “I’ll start spreading the word: Bureau’s buying!” He cups both hands against the one-way glass and peers in at Sparky and me. “Oh my God,” he yells. “It’s Director Mueller and the governor in fragrant directo. Sorry, boys, didn’t mean to snoop. You two just enjoy yourselves.”

  Sparky hums.

  Inches from my face—hard to believe he can’t see a thing, because his eyes seem to find mine—is the killer. Or we assume he’s the killer. He is laughing at his own humor, giving me a chance to scrutinize his dental work, which is strangely clear in the dim light. His front teeth are straight and square, probably the product of some porcelain caps, but farther inside his mouth is a forest of sinkholes and deadfall and rot.

  “Let’s get started,” Chip says.

  The guy steps away but watches his reflection a moment, then reaches up to smooth his hair. I almost reach up to smooth mine. Scud Illman has wavy red hair, a Sunday-night shadow, squinted eyes, and freckles. He looks uncool and eager to please; even his joking about the director and the governor seems more awkward than mean.

  “Here’s the situation,” Chip says. “There’s a guy we’re interested in. Twentysomething named Zander. He sells pot and probably more that we didn’t know about. No big deal. But maybe he’s connected into something. So we talked to him once, tried to get his cooperation, but right away he lawyers up and won’t say a word, and truth is, we don’t have squat to make a case for anything but possession. And busting college kids for peddling a couple of joints isn’t really what the FBI’s all about. So we let him go, figuring he’ll stew awhile and maybe we can put something together later.” Chip pushes his chair back from the table and takes a pack of cigs from his shirt pocket. He lights up and holds the pack out to Scud.