TIM SAUNDERS ALWAYS looked like the cat who ate the canary.
Now, only a few days after Craig Thompson was found dead, his usual self-regard was so over-the-top that Julia wouldn’t have been surprised to see a feather peeping from the corner of his mouth.
He lounged in the doorway, leaning against the jamb, a GQ ad in a skinny-pants suit and a scarf knotted Italian-style around his neck, even though the weather had finally started to warm.
“Geary.” He tossed a klieg-light smile her way. “And …”
Marie let several beats pass, not leaping in to help him the way he probably expected. “St. Clair.”
If he was the slightest bit embarrassed not to have remembered her name, it didn’t show.
“Right.” He finally glanced at her nameplate. “Marie.” Reinforcing her lowly status by using her first name.
Julia didn’t dare look at Marie. She wondered if Marie had unobtrusively slid her hand to wherever she kept the gun Julia was sure she toted; wondered if Marie ever entertained fantasies of shooting the condescending asshole, not killing him but maybe sending a bullet whizzing past him, just close enough to pucker his backside.
“I’ve got good news for both of you.”
He waited. Did he expect them to jump up, question him eagerly, eyes full of dewy anticipation?
Julia raised an eyebrow. Marie cleared her throat. Tapped her pencil on the desk, an auditory signal that they were busy people and for God’s sake, out with it already. Julia felt one of those rare flashes of appreciation for her.
He straightened. Adjusted his scarf.
“I just came from the jail. I talked to Ray Belmar.”
“What?” Julia’s careful cultivation of cool dissolved. “Why were you talking to Ray?” She choked out his name, barely able to stop herself from saying my client. Because as far as she was concerned, he still was. She’d given herself a couple of days to settle down but had already begun outlining the argument she’d make to Li’l Pecker about staying on the case. Damned if she would let Tim Saunders take over.
But apparently that’s just what he’d done, as his next words—delivered with a triumphant flourish, one with more than a hint of Fuck you in them—made clear.
“He’s willing to plead guilty to William Williams’ killing. In exchange, that leaves Mary Brannigan’s death off the table, something that’s even more urgent now that a third person has been killed.”
Julia came up out of her chair. “Killed while Ray was in custody. So it’s impossible for him to have done it, and it raises even more doubt that he killed the other two.”
Tim waved his hand as though brushing away something small and unimportant. A dust mote. A buzzing fly. An unfortunate fact.
“I’ve talked with law enforcement. They’re looking into the possibility that these killings are a gang thing, something like that case in Denver all those years ago.”
“But those were kids! Preying on homeless people for fun. Why would Ray kill his friends?”
She’d have preferred outright contempt to the pitying look he bestowed upon her.
“These types have their own gangs. Factions might be a better word, fighting over territory or women or drugs or booze—or a combination of all those things. As you well know.”
Which she did. Those cases took up far too much of her time.
“People,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“They’re people. Not types.”
He shifted smoothly from pitying to indulgent. “Of course. But the fact remains that Ray”—he paused and offered a sarcastic rephrasing in acknowledgment of her “people” comment—“Mr. Belmar and Mr. Williams had a very public dispute the night Mr. Williams was killed. Mr. Belmar is smart to cut his losses like this. I’m going to work up a plea agreement, something that’ll give him serious time but not the life sentence he was facing before. I’ll shoot it over to you when I’m done with it. As a courtesy.”
And without so much as a good-bye, he was gone, leaving Julia and Marie staring at one another in mirrored narrow-eyed, clenched-fist poses.
Julia caught up with him in the hall, hating the optics of it—another woman pursuing Adonis—but under the circumstances not caring.
She swallowed the first words that came to her, phrases littered with curses and How dare yous, and forced herself to speak calmly, to pretend to merely be playing devil’s advocate.
“Are you sure this is the way we want to go?”
Even though, according to Li’l Pecker, there was no more we. “After all, there’s no real proof he killed anybody. It’s still all circumstantial.” She couldn’t take her eyes off the scarf. So fucking pretentious. So soft and beautiful. Was it cashmere? She jammed her hands in her pockets to avoid the temptation to touch it. What sort of man wore a cashmere scarf in a place like Duck Creek?
“Julia.” So she’d been downgraded to first-name status now too. He stared into her eyes in a way she supposed was meant to convey Deep Meaning. “There’s no proof he didn’t do it. If we put him on trial, that’s all a jury’s going to see. He could end up with forty years—which for someone like Ray, given the way he’s abused his body all these years, could end up being the equivalent of life. Best-case scenario, he’d be up for parole in twenty years. It’s not worth the risk. He’s in full agreement.”
Was he? Ray was many things, but he had an infallible bullshit detector. She could only think of one reason he’d agree to Saunders’s proposal. He must be terrified. But of what? Of decades in prison? She did a quick calculation. Over the last few years, Ray had spent nearly as much time in jail as out, and while he was always glad to walk, he never seemed particularly bothered by his frequent sojourns.
It had to be something else.
“Julia?” Saunders brought her back to herself. He ostentatiously looked at his watch, another expensive accoutrement. “Is there anything else?”
“No.”
There was plenty, not a goddamn bit of it anything that Tim Saunders needed to know about.