Chapter 17

DUNCAN FELT AS IF THE BRIDGE HAD GIVEN WAY BENEATH him and he was falling through thin air. He stared at Worley.

“Did I hear you right?”

“You heard him right,” DeeDee said, grinning. “You owe me a hot fudge sundae.” Then she asked Worley if he’d been in contact with the judge yet.

“No one answered their house phone, but Captain Gerard had the judge’s cell number on account of the Trotter thing. Found him at Silver Tide Country Club, where he was playing poker with some of his legal eagle buddies.”

Duncan had thought it preposterous when Elise had told him about it earlier. Apparently DeeDee thought so, too. “He’s out playing poker the night before his wife is interrogated about a fatal shooting?”

Worley shrugged. “He must be confident of her innocence. Or cocksure of his influence. He was playing ante-up with the DA. Anyhow, he confirmed the car is his, said it’s the one his wife drives.”

Duncan ’s heart had been ranging from a dead stop to full-out ramming speed. He continued to experience the sensation that he was falling.

“Mrs. Laird’s purse was in the passenger seat,” Worley told them. “We’ve bagged it as evidence.”

“Of what?” DeeDee asked.

“Of whatever.”

Duncan needed to sit down. He needed to vomit. But he had to keep it together, had to appear personally detached, interested only insofar as he was a homicide detective and Elise Laird was a key player in a fatal shooting.

Now two.

He managed the language sufficiently to ask Worley if anybody had seen or heard anything of Mrs. Laird.

“Negativo. Last time the judge saw her was between nine thirty and ten. He said she was gonna take a sleeping pill and go to bed.”

But she hadn’t taken a pill and gone to bed. She’d met Duncan. He’d seen her since her husband had, tear tracks on her cheeks, holding her tank top against her breasts, looking ravished.

“Soon as Gerard notified the judge of this,” Worley was saying, gesturing toward the body, “he tried to reach her at home. When he didn’t get an answer, he called the maid, asked her to go to their house, see if the missus was all right. He, the maid, Gerard-who told me all this by phone-converged at the judge’s house. The lady of the manor wasn’t there, and her bed hadn’t been slept in.”

“Cell phone?” DeeDee asked.

“It was still in her purse,” Worley said. “So either she got separated from it before she was called, or she didn’t answer when it was called.” Looking beyond DeeDee and Duncan, he said, “Here’s Dothan.”

As the medical examiner approached, he was breathing heavily from the exertion of walking up the gradual incline from where he’d left his car. Sweat was rolling in wide streams down his fat face. “ Napoli ’s turned up, huh?”

They moved aside and gave him room to inspect the body, although he could barely wedge his bulk into the open car door. “Bullet’s well placed. Probably bled out.”

“Told you,” Worley said, casting DeeDee a smug glance.

“I never said he didn’t.”

“Hard to tell until we move him, but I don’t think there’s an exit wound,” Worley reported. “No blood leaking around the seat behind him.”

“Bullet must’ve ricocheted off a rib in the rear,” the ME observed. “Got the stomach for sure. Could have also hit the liver, spleen, and an artery or two. No telling what all was nicked or busted.”

“His pistol is missing from his ankle holster and there’s no shell casing,” Duncan said.

Brooks took a flashlight from his pocket and directed it toward Napoli ’s bloody hands, then bent down and sniffed both of them.

“Looks like you’re giving him a blow job,” Worley remarked.

“You’re a pimple on a pig’s ass, Worley,” DeeDee said.

The ME ignored them. “Don’t smell gunpowder, so he didn’t shoot himself. Was he in a fight?”

“A struggle of some sort, we think.”

“I’ll bag his hands. He could have tissue underneath his fingernails.”

“That would be a break,” Worley said, “if we could nail Elise Laird with a DNA test.”

“Hey, y’all?”

The shout came from Baker of forensics. He was standing near the wall of the bridge, quite a distance from the car. He motioned toward something on the pavement. Duncan was the first to reach him, but when he saw the object, he stopped suddenly, forcing Worley and DeeDee to eddy around him.

DeeDee knelt down. “My gosh. Duncan, do you recognize this?”

He shook his head, but he was lying. A few hours ago, the sandal had been strapped to Elise’s right foot.

“I do.” DeeDee stood up and faced him. “Mrs. Laird was wearing a sandal like this the other day when we interviewed her and the judge in their sunroom. I remember the turquoise stones. I started to ask her where you can buy sandals like that, but figured it wasn’t any place I could afford.”

The three detectives moved aside so Baker’s photographer could take his pictures of the sandal before it was placed in an evidence bag.

“What do you make of it, Dunk?” Worley asked.

He roused himself from his daze. “Don’t know.”

“You think she did Napoli?”

“Have you ever known a perp who gut-shot a man, then left her recognizable sandal behind?”

While Worley and DeeDee were mulling that over, sirens signaled the speeding approach of a police vehicle in the opposing lane. When it was even with Elise Laird’s car, the souped-up SUV came to an abrupt stop next to the concrete median that divided the inbound and outbound lanes of the bridge.

As soon as the vehicle was braked, doors opened. Bill Gerard stepped from the driver’s seat. Judge Cato Laird was riding shotgun. Duncan had never seen him looking so disheveled. He and Gerard stepped over the low wall and crossed the two inbound-traffic lanes at a brisk clip, reaching the car on the shoulder just as the trio of detectives returned to it.

“Okay for us to approach?” Gerard asked Worley, fairly barking the question at him.

“Yes, sir. Forensics is done with the car.”

“What about it, Dothan?” Gerard asked.

The ME gave them a brief summary of his findings. “I doubt he lasted long.”

“I don’t give a damn how long he lasted.” Laird elbowed Gerard aside and bore down on Dothan Brooks. “What about my wife?”

“I don’t know anything about your wife.” The ME removed a handkerchief as large as a tablecloth from his hip pocket and wiped his sweating face with it.

Gerard turned to the detectives. “What do you know?”

He was uncharacteristically curt, probably because his responsibilities in the VCU were now mostly administrative. It had been a long time since he’d attended the scene of a murder, and no matter who’d been killed, even a nasty character like Napoli, it was never a pleasant experience.

But mostly, Duncan guessed, his boss was feeling pressure from the judge to get answers quick.

Worley removed the toothpick from his mouth and gave a concise account of the facts. “A few minutes ago, we found a shoe, a sandal with turquoise stones. Way over there.” He pointed to where the photographer was still taking photographs.

“Oh, Jesus.” Laird dragged his hand down his face. “Elise owns a pair of sandals like that. I want to see it.” He struck off in that direction.

“You may be tempted to pick it up, Judge. Please don’t touch it.”

He glared at Worley. “I’m not an idiot.”

Duncan looked after him, and despite his dislike of the man, he sympathized with his situation. If circumstances were different, vastly different, he would be behaving exactly as the judge. He would be frantic with worry, anguishing over possibilities, desperate for answers.

But he wasn’t Elise’s husband. He wasn’t even her friend. He wasn’t her anything except the detective who would probably have to hand her over to the DA for indictment. He couldn’t give vent to the uncertainty and fear raging inside him. He had to do his job.