“About once a month. I hope you realize this makes me damned uncomfortable, Wyatt. I’ve been trying to put that all behind me as just another dumb mistake. Sam and I almost broke up over it, too, among other things. What does it matter how often I scored with Dylan?”

“Again, Wes, I don’t know. I’m trying to get a sense of how much marijuana he moved, or anything else. If he had seventy regular customers, give or take. What did a bag go for?”

“Mine were a hundred.”

“So call it ten grand a month?”

“If you say so.”

“I’ve got to think that’s serious enough money to get shot over, in spite of everybody seeming to believe it wasn’t about the dope. How’d it get delivered?”

Once again, Hunt heard a frustrated exhale. “You asked for the manager’s special, whoever was on the register would call Dylan. He’d go in the back, come out with a sealed Ziploc in the bottom of a regular coffee bag, grind some beans in over it, close it up.”

“And how long had this been going on?”

“I don’t know. I made the connection maybe six years ago, so at least that long. And I don’t really believe I was his first customer.”

“And you’re telling me that in all that time, none of the employees picked up on it?”

“No. I can’t imagine they wouldn’t have figured it out.”

“But according to Diz that’s been no part of the police investigation.”

“That’s hard to believe.”

“Yeah, but I bet I know where some of that ten grand went every month. And I know why the guy had such loyal employees.”

“You think one of them…?”

“I have no idea, Wes. Just like when I called you. But at least now I’ve got someplace fresh to start looking.”

Tamara stood in the open doorway, her face blotched, her eyes red. “I’m sorry.”

Hunt waved off the apology. He’d known his secretary since the time when, as a Child Protective Services worker, he’d been called to the home of the two Dade children, brother and sister, who’d missed several days of school without an excuse. At the time Tamara had been Tammy, a starving twelve-year-old trying to feed and care for her emaciated younger brother, Mickey, and waiting for her mother-a heroin addict who’d died in her bedroom of an overdose-to wake up. Hunt, a former foster child himself, had followed the lives of both of the kids into young adulthood and, when he’d opened his agency, had brought Tamara along full-time, and began using Mickey as a runner and occasional driver.

Now she said to him, “Craig and I had a fight. I think we might have broken up.”

“Is that why he’s not in here?”

“I’d guess so. There was just the message when I got in, that he was sick. But he wasn’t sick last night.”

Hunt leaned back in his ergonomic chair, rocked in it once or twice. “You want to talk about it?”

“I don’t know.” But she came inside his door and let herself down onto one of the chairs in front of him. “It’s just so stupid, is all.”

“Stupid happens.” He gave the silence another beat. “Do you want to go home? I’ve got some fieldwork I need to do. We can close up.”

“No. I can stay.” She raised her eyes and met his. “I hate all dope,” she said, “you know that?”

Since her mother had died from an overdose, this shouldn’t have been so surprising; but Hunt knew or guessed that she and Craig were occasional pot users. “I’m not too wild about it myself, to tell you the truth. Is that what the fight was about? Stop me if I’m prying.”

She gave him a weak smile. “You’ve earned pry rights.” Crossing her arms, she stared into the space between them. “I mean, everybody says a little weed’ll never hurt you, you know? It’s not addictive, safer than alcohol, blah blah blah. And maybe a little won’t, but a lot…”

“Craig does a lot?”

“I don’t know how much. I don’t monitor it. But we told each other we were going to stop. Or at least I thought we told each other that. Maybe we didn’t. I don’t know. I’m not trying to get him in trouble with you, Wyatt. He doesn’t get high when he’s working. I know he doesn’t do that.” She shook her head. “I just wish he could stop.”

“He can’t?”

“Oh, he says he can. Anytime he wants. He just doesn’t want to.” From the shine in them, her eyes were on the verge of tears. “It just reminds me so much of what my mom used to say. How she used to act. And I kept telling myself that that was different, she was actually truly addicted to heroin, not the same thing as weed at all. But now, I don’t know, somehow it seems a lot more similar than not. But I just don’t think I want any of it in my life anymore, and I try to say that to Craig, and he’s all… he just doesn’t think that way.”

“Even if it means losing you?”

Now a pair of tears broke and rolled down her cheeks. “I don’t want to think that, Wyatt, but that’s what it seems like is happening. I never meant to make it either me or weed, you can’t have both, but I think it’s come pretty close to that.”

Hunt rubbed a finger against the grain of his desk. “I’ll tell you one thing, if he picks the weed over you, he’s a bona fide moron.”

“But I think he might,” Tamara said. “I really think he might.”

26

Debra Schiff had given her direct testimony to Paul Stier and now was well into her second hour on the stand. She thought she was holding her own pretty well in the first twenty minutes of cross-examination by Dismas Hardy, most of it dedicated so far to the murder of Dylan Vogler. He might have thought he’d scored some points off her on the gun issue, but she’d stuck to her guns, reiterating how Maya had lied to them initially about whether she’d even been in the alley that morning. Beyond that they had Defendant’s registration of the gun in her name, and her fingerprints, for God’s sake, on the magazine.

What more could the jury want?

In Schiff’s mind there was no question of what had happened on that Saturday morning, and she knew that she was conveying it to the jury effectively in spite of Hardy’s best efforts. Now he turned and walked back to his counsel table. He turned a yellow legal pad around and appeared to read from it for a moment-although Schiff knew, since both Jerry Glass and Paul Stier had told her, that much of this extraneous physical activity was choreographed so that attorney and witness didn’t just transmogrify into talking heads to the jury.

Hardy walked back to the middle of the courtroom, eight feet or so in front of her. “Inspector Schiff,” he began again, “I’d like to ask you a couple of questions about the Levon Preslee murder scene. We’ve seen the pictures. There was a great deal of blood, was there not?”

“I’d call it more a moderate amount, but there was blood, yes.”

“A moderate amount, then. But certainly puddles of it both on the table and also on the floor between the table and the kitchen sink, yes?”

“Yes.”

“So the blood dripped from the table down to the floor, did it not?”

“That’s what it looked like, yes.”

“But no blood was found on the cleaver, which Dr. Strout has identified from the deceased’s injuries as consistent with the murder weapon. Is that true?”

“Yes. No blood was found on the weapon. It had been washed.”

“And how do you know that?”

Schiff, for the first time, showed a brush of annoyance-a small pursing of her lips-gone almost as soon as it appeared. “Well,” she said, now directly at Hardy and not to the jury, “it appeared damp at the scene, as if it had been washed, and there were traces of the decedent’s blood in the disposal under the sink and in the pipes underneath. And the cleaver was next to the sink in a drying rack.”

“So presumably, someone had washed the murder weapon in the sink, is that right?”

“That was our assumption, yes.” Schiff cast a passing glance over at Stier, hoping that he might object. She was a little uncomfortable talking about what the crime scene meant, since that was really the provenance of the CSI team. But her ally the prosecutor just offered her a faint smile and sat with his hands crossed on his table.