“You want to know the results of our comparisons?”

“Your smile pretty much says it all,” I said as a sickening slick of despair rose in my gut.

“They didn’t match,” said Torricelli, enjoying this way too much to stop. “The latent we found at the crime scene, the one that your expert identified as matching the one he found at the storage locker and then on the tape, didn’t come from Dr. Pfeffer.”

“I’ll have my expert check the results.”

“Do that, but he’ll come to the same conclusion. First, he’s got an alibi. Then the fingerprints don’t match. It sort of puts a hole in your theory that the dentist did it.”

I twisted my lips and tried not to throw up.

“I hope I didn’t ruin your lunch,” said Torricelli.

But he had, hadn’t he? The little treat of information he’d passed on had sent my stomach spinning. It was the kind of news that hurts the most, the news that you’ve been both dreading and expecting all along.

You might remember I had pocketed Dr. Bob’s whiskey glass during our strange night at the bar. But that glass still lay in its plastic bag, the prints still latent, still waiting to be spirited into being with chemicals and powders and then memorialized forever on contact sheets. I had never sent the glass to Anton Grammatikos to be tested.

Why had I never sent it? Because there were two possible answers, either Dr. Bob’s prints matched the unknown print from the tape and the crime scene or they didn’t, and my defense could survive only one of those answers. Better an uncertainty you can argue to the jury than a certainty that renders your defense a nullity. But now Detective Torricelli, proving himself to be quite the detective after all, had just done the rendering.

With my appetite having fled, I thought it through over the lunch hour and kept at it as Beth continued laying out the timeline in court. My whole theory depended on the killing being an accident. Dr. Bob had been trying to help Leesa Dubé. Dr. Bob had been bringing the tape to Leesa to help in her divorce case. Something had gone wrong, and Leesa had ended up dead, and Dr. Bob had framed François before squirreling the tape back to François’s storage locker, still covered as it was with Leesa’s blood. The picture found in Leesa’s hand, much as a picture had been found in the hand of Dr. Bob’s mother, was the crowning piece of evidence. In fact, I even believed that Dr. Bob had set up the storage area just as it was so that if anyone came snooping, like, say, me, he would sit in the chair and be horrified at the tapes and know that the frame had been the right thing to do.

But now it seemed that Dr. Bob was not the person who had taken the tape from the crime scene.

Who could it have been? The district attorney’s answer was damn convincing. Who would the tape hurt the most? François. Where was the tape with the victim’s blood found? In François’s storage locker. Who had the motive? François. It was all so clean, made so much sense, except why would François keep that tape after that? Why had it not been burned, shattered, destroyed irrevocably? Why had it been left lying around for someone to find? Because he was arrested too soon? Because he didn’t have time to destroy it? Time to return it to the locker but not destroy it?

None of it made sense if Dr. Bob hadn’t done the crime. But if Dr. Bob hadn’t done the crime, who had?

Strangely, at that moment I thought of Rex, the man mountain with the soft gaze who had confronted me outside the Hotel Latimore. Something Dr. Bob had said about Rex struck a chord. I’m always on the lookout for new talent, had said Dr. Bob, a pure soul with the heart, the muscle, the determination to make a difference in the world.

Rex had entered the story far too late to be involved, but maybe it was one of Dr. Bob’s other recruits who had done it, maybe someone whom Dr. Bob had found and trained, someone who had done Dr. Bob’s bidding and then left to go out on his own and who had now gone deep underground. But who could it be? And how would I find him? And how could I use him to save my client?

It was the phrase “deep underground” rattling through my thoughts that finally clued me in to the entire truth. When it came to me, it was as if a window shade had been lifted and the sun was streaming through. When the light hit my face, I stood up suddenly.

Beth was in the middle of framing a question. She stopped midsentence and looked at me. The courtroom stilled, all heads turned in my direction.

“Is there anything you want to say, Counselor?” said Judge Armstrong.

“Just that I have to go, Judge,” I said. “Right this instant.”

“Something you ate, Mr. Carl?”

Before the laughter died, I was out the courtroom door. Where was I headed?

To find me a two-bit whore.

74

Detective Gleason was nothing if not a professional. It was in the way he could spot the prostitutes from even a great distance. “Look for the shoes,” he advised me. It was in the way he walked on the street with total assurance while I sat in the car, the way he approached the claques with a smile and a wave, the way he spoke softly to the women one at a time, the way he asked his questions, laughed at their wisecracks, listened to their answers with nodding unconcern, the way he slipped them the bills when he was through talking.

And he did all this, projected all this authority, without a badge, being as he was still confined to desk duty. But for him this wasn’t business, this was personal.

I had found his Elvisine figure at the auto squad’s front desk, sitting there glumly, answering phones, handing out paperwork to the saps who had lost their cars. When he looked up and saw me, it’s safe to say he didn’t flash a smile of welcome.

“I need your help,” I said.

“Your car missing?”

“No.”

Detective Gleason shook his head. “No crying in the chapel, boy. We’ve helped each other enough. I helped you get a new trial for your sleazeball client, and you helped get me permanently deskbound.”

“Yeah, sorry about that. Want me to talk to the commissioner?”

“You really want to bury me, don’t you? What happened to your face?”

“My television bit me.”

“So even your TV hates you.”

“That’s me, Mr. Popularity.”

He let out a long breath. “What are you looking for, Carl?”

“The truth,” I said, “about Seamus Dent.”

His eyes squinted at the name.

“I think I know what he was doing in that crack house when he was killed,” I said, “and I think I know who drove him to it.”

“Okay, so?”

“You want to help me prove it?”

“Not especially. I’m moving on. And it’s hard to dig out facts from behind a desk.”

“You’re not allowed on the street officially. Don’t do this as a cop, do this as a guy who wants to find out what really happened to a kid he helped.”

“And why should I care anymore?”

“Because you tried to make a difference in that boy’s life and you want to find out why it went all wrong and who might be responsible.”

“Some things just don’t work out.”

“No, this was more. There was someone who pushed Seamus in the direction he took, someone who set him on the path that led to his death.”

“And you think you know who?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Baby, what do you want me to do?”

“I want you to help me prove it.”

“How?”

“There’s a girl.”

“Isn’t there always?”

“Not like this one, a sad mess of a girl who is looking for the surest path to oblivion. Drugs, violence, complete and total self-degradation.”

“You think she’s on the street?”

“Can you think of a better place to find what she’s looking for? Her name’s Kylie, and I think she’s the reason Seamus is dead. If anyone knows what really happened to Seamus, it’s Kylie.”

“So why do you need me?”