Dirty Laundry
I set the files aside. I had more immediate problems, and the first one was David Trezize, sitting in a holding cell downstairs. It wasn’t just that he was innocent, which I firmly believed. Cobbling together circumstantial evidence against him was wasting valuable time. Plus the process had to be annoying David, and one thing I learned in Los Angeles was—don’t gratuitously annoy journalists if you can avoid it. They write their stories anyway, and people read those stories, and the words shape people’s perceptions and negative perceptions can make the day-to-day business police work, on the ground, talking to witnesses, panning the swift stream of a neighborhood gossip for a nugget of useful information, almost impossible. Conversations that start “Fuck are you doing here, pig?” rarely turn out well.
The Shoals was a small paper, but its circulation was growing and in any case every big newspaper in the country had sent reporters to the island, and David was the obvious local contact for them. He’d be telling a story, and I didn’t want that story to be one of arrogance, harassment, and incompetence.
Besides, I liked the guy. I admit it.
“So what were your footprints doing in the mud?” I asked him. He looked more rumpled and miserable than usual, sitting on the edge of the concrete slab. He needed a shower and a shave.
He looked up. “Funny, no one bothered to ask me that, Chief. I guess they figure it’s obvious. I mean, I threatened the guy in front of all those witnesses. Including you.”
“No offense, David, but weak people make threats. Killers just get the job done. And they don’t advertise it beforehand.”
He managed a smile. “Thanks. I guess.”
“Still. You came to the house. I’m betting it was the earlier in the day.”
He nodded. “I was returning Kathy’s inhaler. She has asthma and she wears glasses and she takes the antidepressant and she’s always losing her inhaler and leaving her glasses and forgetting to fill her prescription. Personally I think it’s because she’d like to be a happy person with strong lungs and 20-20 vision and some part of her just rebels.”
I sat down next to David on the slab. “So she’s in denial.”
“That’s what we were fighting about. She was at my apartment and I was trying to explain…well, it’s private.”
“Not during a murder investigation. Nothing’s private during a murder investigation.”
A lot of people were going to find that out in the next few days.
He sighed. “All right. It had to do with her boyfriend. This painter kid, Kevin Sloane.”
“He was having an affair with her mother.” David looked up, startled. “Diana Lomax was driving the car that night. Remember? You picked up the traffic stop on your scanner. Kevin Sloane was with her.”
“Makes sense. Wish I’d known that. Anyway, she didn’t want to hear it and she took off. I found the inhaler the next morning—after the big party. She threw herself at me when I brought it back, sobbing and sniffling and apologizing and calling herself an idiot.”
“She found out the truth?”
“She caught them in bed together.”
“Jesus.”
David bit his lip, shaking his head. “Terrific little present for the Advent calendar, huh? Must make you all giddy about what you’re getting the next day.”
I stood. “But we know what she got the next day.”
“Yeah.”
“Sorry about this David. I’ll expedite the paperwork, get you out of here. If you remember anything else that might be useful, call me.” I dug out my card—the one with my private cell number, the old number with the 323 area code.
He took it. “I will.”
I dismissed Kevin as a suspect—he was a pilot fish, not a shark, and three other people’s depositions placed him at the benefit party until dawn, long outstaying his welcome, still drinking Bud Light and chowing down on whatever food was left, but not helping to clean up, or even bus dishes back to the kitchen. Kevin had a clear idea who the party was going to benefit and it wasn’t some stranger with multiple sclerosis. It was Kevin Sloane. That was his MO, but that didn’t make him a murderer, especially when it came to the powerful husband of one of his many disposable girlfriends. Kevin was the type to cut and run, not make some romantic last stand with a fistful of cash and a bloody screwdriver.
He wore boots the same size as the prints in the snow, and with the same vibram sole. But the prints were too deep for him to have made them. I guessed that the person wearing those shoes had to weigh at least a hundred pounds more than the skinny painter. Hal Loomis, the taciturn SID guy from the state police, reluctantly agreed with me. I think he was surprised that I noticed. Local cops were supposed to be bumpkins. “I guess you picked up a thing or two with the LAPD,” he muttered.
That was as close to a compliment as I was going to get.
For Diana Lomax, innocence wasn’t so clear-cut. Despite her apparently solid alibi, her genuine-seeming shock and her plausible suspicion of Tanya Kriel, her genuine upset at the sight of the girl, we weren’t quite done with Diana.
There was still some of her privacy left to violate.
“You’re not gonna believe this,” Lonnie Fraker said to me as I walked into the station the next morning.
I patted his shoulder. “You’re probably right.”
He led me into the conference room, shut the door and took out a small digital recorder. “Listen to this.”
Then the two disembodied voices filled the room. I recognized Diana’s raspy contralto immediately. The guy I had never heard before.
“Hello?”
“Hello, Paul.”
“You sound awful. Are you drunk?”
“No, but thanks for the suggestion.”
“What’s going on? Did something happen?”
She laughed. “No, don’t worry about that, Darling. Nothing ever happens. That could be my whole autobiography. At least I don’t need a ghostwriter. I am a ghost. The autobiography of a ghost. Three words. Nothing ever happened.”
“You are drunk.”
“Just high on life. Isn’t that what we used to say?”
“Diana, you have to get out of there.”
“Really? And how do you propose I should do that?”
“Go to the airport. Buy a ticket. I’ll meet you at LaGuardia.”
“And then what? We live in your tiny apartment on a music teacher’s salary? We’d be at each other’s throats in a month.”
“Divorce Preston. Than you can live any way you want.”
The room went silent. Fraker held up one finger to say “just wait.” So we waited. I felt a sickly voyeuristic thrill listening to these intimacies, and I began to understand what motivated the spies who operate our surveillance state. The sense of power was overwhelming. We were omniscient at that moment, just like God, listening in on the most private moments of these hapless creatures.
But what petty and mean-spirited little gods we were.
“Diana? Are you there? These fucking dropped calls! Every time you try to—”
“I’m still here.”
“Then talk to me. What’s going on?”
“I signed a prenuptial agreement, Paul. I would have thought you’d have figured that out by now. Everyone assumed I was a gold digger. I suppose I was a gold digger. What they don’t tell you is, it’s much easier to actually dig gold out of the ground than to live with Preston Lomax.”
“Diana—”
“If I leave him, I get nothing. Even the gifts he gave me. He makes me sign ‘gift vouchers.’ I have to return everything if we break up. Even the clothes I bought. I’d be left with a two shirts and a pair of blue jeans. And my old sneakers.”
“We’d survive.”
“That’s an attractive prospect. Survival. Between your ex-wife and my ex-husband, we could barely afford groceries.”
“So what are you saying?”
“I don’t know. I don’t see the point anymore. This isn’t even fun. Sometimes I don’t even remember why I loved you, or if I did. It’s all just talk. I hate the telephone anyway. It’s fake, it turns a whole person into this little quacking in your ear. And my ear gets sore. It’s uncomfortable. And it seems…I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m talking about.”
“I want to see you. I’ll come there.”
“You can’t afford a plane ticket. You can’t afford cab fare. You told me yourself.”
“I’ll take the bus and walk onto the boat. That’s cheap.”
“Paul—”
“Then we could be together and—”
“That’s two full days of travel, and all you have is the weekend.”
“I have a sick day coming.”
“Stop. Please just stop talking about this. It’s all too shabby and sad.”
Another silence.
Fraker perched over it eagerly, waiting to pounce.
“Listen, Diana—”
“You know what’s funny? Preston’s left me everything in his will—all the property, all the stocks, all the cars and cash. Nothing to charity, nothing to the kids. Everything goes to me. The problem is he’s healthy as a horse. He’s going to outlive all of us. Both of his parents are still alive. His Dad is ninety-three—and he drinks! Preston isn’t even a teetotaler. He allows himself exactly enough red wine every day to clean the platelets out of his arteries.”
“Well, at least you’re taken care of, that’s something.”
“Oh, yeah. I’m taken care of all right. When I’ve served my life sentence I can wear mink in the retirement home. It’ll be the snazziest retirement home money can buy, but I‘ll be too senile to notice.”
“Come on. That’s just—”
“You know what I need? I need someone to kill him for me. Can you do that, Paul? Can you kill him for me? Or will I have to do it myself? Because that’s the obvious solution.”
“Diana! Cut it out. This is a cell phone, for God’s sake! It’s illegal to even talk about this stuff, don’t you know that? It’s called conspiracy.”
“So you don’t want to talk about it.”
“Goddamn right I don’t! I’m hanging up right now!”
The recorder went silent.
Fraker stared at me, grinning. “This Paul knows what he’s talking about when it comes to conspiracy, Chief. Looks like we just found ourselves a killer.”
“What about David Trezize? You found him yesterday.”
“I didn’t have this recording yesterday.”
I started pacing the big room. My queasiness was firming up somehow, coalescing into simple indigestion, the heartburn of uncomplicated rage. I stopped walking and drilled Fraker with an unblinking stare. “How did you get it?”
“Excuse me?”
“The recording. That’s a private cell phone transmission from one American citizen to another, within our borders, with no discussion of a terrorist act.”
“No, just murder.”
“But you couldn’t know that until you heard the tape. Diana Lomax was no more under suspicion than anyone else. Do you have recordings of everyone involved with the case? Because that’s a lot of talk and ninety-nine-point-nine percent of it is none of your goddamn business.”
“It’s the point-one percent we care about, Chief. And we always look at the wife first—even she knows that. She said so herself.”
“Then why would she incriminate herself on the telephone?”
He shrugged. “I’ve never understood women. Ask my ex-wife.”
We had veered off the subject. “The state police don’t have the authority for this. How did you get the recording?”
“Well, I’ll tell you, Chief. I went to an old friend of yours from your West Coast days.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Jack Tornovitch. You remember good old Jack Tornovitch, don’t you? He ran the FBI investigation that saved your ass and solved one of your cases for you. Just before you got fired. That’s how the newspapers painted it. I Googled you—and him. It’s all online for anyone to see.”
“This is unbelievable.”
Jack Tornovitch. Three thousand miles and five years later, I thought I was finally done with Jack Tornovitch. But maybe we’re never really done with anyone in our lives. They linger. They may be dormant, like the shingles virus after a bout of chicken pox. But they can flare up anytime.
Fraker was still talking. “Hey, you’re not the only detective around here, Chief. Tornovitch moved up. He’s a big wheel at Homeland Security now. So I called him and used your name and explained the situation. I told him some push with the FISA court could help the state police solve this thing while you were stumbling around trying to get DNA reports on old cigarette butts. He liked that idea. In fact I think he liked the idea of making you look bad more than he liked the idea of solving the case. You’ve got a way with people, Kennis. Too bad it’s not a good way. Tornovitch may hold a grudge, but I don’t. I’ll let you stand on stage with me when I announce the arrest.”
Well, there was no arrest. He brought Diana Lomax in, and he made her cry, but she was in the city with the boyfriend Paul on the night of the murder, with lots of witnesses and an impressive paper trail of credit card receipts and ATM withdrawals to prove it. Her phone log showed no contact with contract killers or anyone else even remotely sinister.
In the end she was just one more unhappy cheating wife who had contemplated killing her husband. If we made that illegal we’d have to arrest half the married women in America, and clear out the prisons to make room for them. It would be a good excuse for legalizing marijuana, but none of it was ever going to happen. It might comfort Diana Lomax to know she wasn’t the only one to have her dirty little secrets flushed out by the investigation. There were plenty more to come. But Lonnie Fraker chose to lay low for a while after his pair of overreaching blunders.
That left the next round of embarrassing revelations to me.
Reading through the interview transcripts I marked down every person of interest with a weak or nonexistent alibi. That gave me a short list of suspects, and I didn’t need to violate anyone’s civil rights in the process.
First up was the landscaper, Jane Stiles. Her “I was at home all night” soon clarified itself. There were some minor details that Charlie Boyce had skimmed over. It turned out that she was indeed at home, but she wasn’t alone. She was with her little boy, and her ex-husband had called several times on her landline, a comforting anachronism she maintained so she could still have phone service in a blackout. “Also, once in a while it’s kind of fun to actually hear what people are saying. And I don’t really need to go online or play Angry Birds while I’m talking to my mother in the nursing home.” It was easy to access her phone records and verify the calls. “Besides,” she said. “No matter what I wanted to do, I couldn’t just leave Sam alone. I mean—who gets a babysitter so they can commit murder?”
That made me laugh.
She said: “You should do that more often. It makes you look about ten years younger.”
“But I want to look older. I want to look intimidatingly mature.”
“No chance. I’d say you were going to go directly from boyish rogue to kindly old geezer. No transition at all. Kind of the way we skip spring on Nantucket—late winter, straight into summer.”
In her bright astringent way, she was flirting with me. It was fun but I was taken. And I had a long day ahead of me. I walked her out to the parking lot and went back to my list.
The three most obvious candidates for investigation: electrician Tom Danziger, plumber Arturo Maturo, and painter Derek Briley. The first two had the standard motivation—Lomax was ripping them off catastrophically. Briley was a crank. He had leaked the Moorlands Mall story to the newspaper. He hated Lomax, as a person and as a species. “They’re parasites,” he told me in the interrogation room. “Like deer ticks, blowing themselves up like great balloons on other people’s blood. I was in Spain, on the Costa Del Sol, working on houses there, when that bubble burst. The big boys were all long gone when the shite came down, Chief. The rest of us were swimming in it, weren’t we? Useless buggers.”
It didn’t take long to unearth the tough little cockney’s whereabouts on the night of the murder. Nathan Parrish ran a high-end poker game out of his house and anyone who could afford the five hundred-dollar table stake was welcome. The game provided a utopian model of social equality: Parrish and a few wealthy friends, a retired executive recovering from knee surgery, a Chinese hedge fund mastermind, along with people like Tom Danziger, Derek Briley, and the groundskeeper for the Sankaty Head golf course. Briley didn’t like admitting he hung out with the “toffs” as he called them; and his girlfriend thought he was attending AA meetings.
Danziger’s wife was a trickier problem: a hard-line Jehovah’s Witness who hated gambling. She thought Tom had joined the reading club at the Atheneum, and he was working his way through Moby Dick. Tom faked it easily, as he read everything he could get his hands on—including a stray copy of the Lola Burger employee handbook he found on the counter as he waited for his Wagyu hot dog, and the annual Town Meeting Warrant he found in the post office, while standing on line to mail a package. His wife Judy read nothing but her personal translation of the Bible and the Watchtower magazine.
I had to ask. “How did you two wind up together?”
He shrugged. “She was the prettiest girl at Nantucket High School. She could probably still qualify as the prettiest girl at Nantucket High School.” I watched him quietly across the chipped Formica tabletop. He knew he had to give me more. “And she’s a good person, Chief. She helps people. She volunteers at the food bank. She nursed her sister in our house for two years when she was dying, She had Ewing’s Sarcoma. It’s like bone cancer. The parents had disowned her and she had no insurance.”
“That sounds tough.”
“If Jill had been a great person it would have been tough. But she was a nasty little bitch and being in pain all the time didn’t help her personality any.”
“You sound like the hero to me, Tom. Jill wasn’t your sister.”
“Yeah, well. I wasn’t as nice about it as I could have been. I recall saying something like ‘If that troll doesn’t die soon I’m going to shoot myself just to get the fuck out of here.’ But Judy made it work. And she has a sense of humor. You don’t normally associate Jehovah’s Witnesses with a sense of humor. She came back from her door-to-door visiting thing a couple of nights ago and said, “The Pomeroys’ marriage is in trouble, Tom.’ I asked her how she knew and she said. ‘They let us in. They’d rather talk to the Jehovah’s Witnesses than to each other! That’s scary. They seemed really interested in Armageddon. After being in that house for an hour I can see how they might be looking forward to it. They even invited us for dinner. I thought they were going to make up the guest room.’ She got me laughing, Chief. She does that a lot. So I’d like to stay with her and I’d really appreciate it if you kept this poker thing to yourself.”
David Lattimer was a regular at that poker game, too, lucky for him. Lonnie had found out he’d been some kind of Delta Force elite combat soldier in Vietnam (“He wears long sleeve shirts all the time, even at the beach. Know why? He’s got military tattoos all over his arms!”). Of course the Lattimers loathed the Lomaxes, as old money always loathes new money, but the clincher was that one of Lonnie’s men found a pack of Camel Regulars in the Lattimers’ freezer when they went in for a follow-up interview. He told them they were for emergencies only, but it didn’t matter. The DNA would set the record straight one way or another. In any case he’d been losing at poker—ineptly bluffing his way out of more than a thousand dollars—at roughly the moment Lomax was being stabbed with a screwdriver, four miles away.
His wife had no philosophical problem with poker in particular or gambling in general, but she hated how tragically bad at it her husband was, and it broke her heart to see him lose. I agreed to keep David’s secret as I had agreed to keep Tom Danziger’s.
I did the same for Arturo Maturo. His secret was much bigger and potentially much more damaging than the others’, but it was no more relevant to the matter at hand. I was beginning to feel like a priest, taking all these confessions. No one was confessing to murder, though. That was the real problem. About eighty percent of major crimes are solved that way. But no one had come forward in this case so far, and I had a feeling that they weren’t going to.
Meanwhile, I spent my days uncovering the sad and sordid hidden lives of my new neighbors.
Arturo Maturo represented the pinnacle of his type: the arrogant, greedy, inconsiderate Nantucket plumber. Plumbers reigned as the kings of the local trades—uniquely skilled, high-priced, state-licensed, over-booked, indispensable, careless, tactless and smug. They looked down on everyone else—except the equally elite electricians. They stomped into houses and left chaos behind them—dust and chunks of plaster where they cut through a wall or ceiling, water stains where they had cut a PVC pipe, boxes, and packing materials for faucets and sinks piled behind them when their work was done. It was generally understood that the painters would clean up after them, or at least that was what I understood from Derek Briley and Mike Henderson.
Maturo was willing to go face to face with any of the lower orders, and had been known to punch out the occasional plasterer or floor-finisher in the heat of the moment at the end of a job. He was tough. He was macho. He was a legendary cocksman, also—notorious for sleeping with other people’s wives, and stealing their girlfriends. He had verbally threatened Lomax on numerous occasions. He was in the Chicken Box when Mike Henderson announced that the tycoon was about to run out on all his bills. Arturo had motive and opportunity. He had the right personality profile. He also had an air-tight alibi.
He just didn’t want anyone to know it.
Arturo Maturo was bisexual. On the night of the murder, he was with his gay lover in the kid’s family house in Monomoy. That he’d managed to keep that side of his life a secret for this long, among the prying eyes of his neighbors, was something close to a miracle. I didn’t want to wreck that for him.
I gave Arturo the news, and a vow of silence, a few days after our first interview.
“I owe you one, Chief,” he said, pumping my hand. “Just name it.”
“Sorry. Cops are like EMTs. We can’t take a tip, even if we really want to.”
He squinted at me. “I don’t get you. Cops are supposed to be hard-ass pricks.”
“Like plumbers?”
He laughed. “Yeah.”
“The trick is knowing when to be a hard-ass prick, Arturo. That’s helpful for plumbers, too.”
“Hey, I’m not turning into a nice guy just because you got me off the hook for this.”
“You don’t have to. But you might think about cleaning up after yourself on the job, time to time.”
“Oh yeah?”
“That’s what you can for me. Think about other people. Promote harmony.”
“I don’t know about you, Chief.”
“Give it a try.”
He nodded but I didn’t think there was much chance that he’d follow through. Still, it was worth a shot.
All my other efforts were going nowhere.
I was sitting in my office late on a Thursday afternoon going through the Lomax file one more time, trying to figure out what I’d missed, when Lonnie Fraker barged in, like a cat with a dead mouse in its jaws. He had found another culprit to lay on my doorstep.
“I got a movie for you, Chief.”
I looked up, set the file aside. It was almost quitting time and I was thinking about taking a long weekend. Sometimes the best thing you can for a case is ignore it. The fussy left side of your brain goes to the beach or the barbecue and the secret intuitive part, the corpus callosum, can get some real work done. But it looked like Fraker was ready to put in another shift.
“What are you talking about, Lonnie?”
He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a DVD in a plastic lined paper cover. “You know how Lomax paid for the kid’s apartment off Bartlett Road? Eric?”
“Sure. So what?”
“Well he had it wired for surveillance—state-of-the-art stuff. There’s a rig just like it at the Eel Point pile, but they were still installing it when he died.”
“So he was filming his son all the time?”
“HD video and surround sound, baby. “We were searching the place and we found the whole setup. We copied the files, burned them to a DVD—and boomp, it’s a done deal.”
“Boomp?”
“I say boomp, you got a problem with that?”
“It’s fine, Lonnie. What’s on the disc?”
“Wait and see.”
“Let me guess. The brothers murdered him there and dragged the body back to the house.”
“Very funny.”
“What then?”
He walked over to my Blu-ray/monitor set up, grabbed the remote and set the DVD on the sliding tray. “This shit is definitely NSFW—not safe for work. But this is our work, you know what I mean? Which is one of the main reasons that we love our work! Am I right?”
I swiveled around in my desk chair to face the flat screen TV.
“Let’s take a look at it.”
The screen went blue for a second, then we were watching a freeze-frame of Tanya Kriel and the Lomax brothers, sitting in the cramped living room of Eric’s garage apartment. She was wearing a jeans and a Cutting Edge Painters T-shirt, that sported Mike Henderson’s company logo: two brushes crossed under a bucket of paint
“The camera was hidden in the bookshelf,” Lonnie informed me. “Built into a dummy copy of 1984. You can’t say Lomax didn’t have a sense of humor.”
“I’m surprised they had books at all.”
“What a snob! Lots of killers read books. Some of ‘em even write books. Mao was a pretty good poet when he wasn’t slaughtering everyone who looked at him funny.”
“Okay, okay.”
“Check it out.”
He hit “play” and Tanya said “You’re stuck, both of you. You’re going to talk about killing your father until you die and he goes to your funerals.”
“So what do you suggest?” Eric said, walking into the frame.
“Just do it.”
“And how are we supposed to get away with it?” Danny asked. He was sitting in a ratty armchair sideways to the couch where Tanya lounged, legs parted, one foot on the pillow.
“There are lots of poisons. I’ve been doing some research—poisons that take an hour or ten hours to do the job, poisons that break down in the bloodstream and ten hours later it looks like he died of a heart attack.”
Eric:“And where do get this stuff?’
“Online, obviously.”
Danny: “Poisons.com?”
“There are sites. If you know how to find them.”
“What are they?”
She shook her head. “Not yet. I don’t trust you yet.”
Eric: “I don’t know.”
Tanya stood. “Fine, whatever. You’re right. I don’t know what I was thinking about. This isn’t fair. It’s like asking a pair of paraplegics to carry me upstairs. It’s pointless and it’s mean…Sorry, boys. I’m outta here.”
She uncoiled herself from the couch and started for the door. Danny said, “No! We can do this.”
“You can act. You can be bold.”
“Yes.”
“You can take charge of a situation.”
Eric said “Fuck, yeah.”
“You can work together.”
Together: “Yeah.”
“You can stay out of each other’s way.”
“Yeah.”
“You can have a three-way without crossing swords?”
Silence.
Danny, finally: “Wait, what?”
“Sex is the marker. It tells you everything about a person. That’s why I do one-night stands, not first dates. You can bullshit on a date, show off, throw your money around, do your patented cool guy act. Everybody’s got four or five hours’ worth of that shit. But it all goes away when you’re naked. Sloppy kissers are sloppy. Rough boys are bullies. If he calls you a bitch and a whore, chances are he means it. If he comes too soon don’t count on him to keep it together any other time. If he won’t go down on you, he’s not going to come up with anything else you need. Trust me.”
Eric: “So then…I mean—what are you—?”
She pulled off her T-shirt. Fraker was watching me so I kept my expression blank.
“So let’s see what you’ve got. And what you can do. Get me off—then we’ll off your father together.”
She grabbed Eric by the belt and unbuckled it.
Fraker froze the frame.
“You don’t need to see the rest, Chief.”
“And you have it memorized.”
He grinned. “I’m working on it.”
I blew out a breath. “Wow.”
“It’s not a confession, but it’s the next best thing.”
“It’s inadmissible.”
“They made the tape themselves—the father did, anyway. It’s all in the family and we had a signed warrant to search the premises. Boomp, over and out.”
But something still bothered me. “When was the tape made?”
“Who knows? Who cares? Before Lomax got killed, that’s all we need to know.”
I pushed the intercom button on my phone console. “Betty? Could you track down Haden Krakauer for me?”
“Sure, boss.”
Lonnie frowned in irritation. “What do we need him for?”
“I have a question for him. He’s knows about this stuff.”
“What stuff? Not sex, I bet.”
I ignored that remark. “Electronics, video. He was quite a geek, back in the day.”
“He’s still a geek.”
“But now he’s on our side. No more black box phone calls and hacking escapades.”
Haden came in sneezing, still fighting the cold he picked up at Thanksgiving. We showed him the same piece of video.
“There’s something missing,” I said.
Haden nodded. “No, it’s there. It’s hidden. We just have to find it.”
I turned to Lonnie. “Police work, in a nutshell.”
“What the hell are you two talking about?”
Haden said, “The time code. It’s obviously keyed-in on this video. You need an electronic device to read the digital time code information from the tape and generate the numbers to be temporarily keyed—superimposed—over the video. The problem is that you can only see the code if you’ve got special equipment, like the right editing system.”
“Do we have it?”
“I think I can find something, kicking around here somewhere. Give me a couple of hours.”
Well, he found the proper equipment and keyed the time code onto the video: date and time. But that was the problem. Tanya and the boys were planning Dad’s murder on the precise date and time that someone else was actually murdering him. I took Lonnie to lunch at Kitty Murtagh’s and broke the news
“It’s the perfect alibi,” I said.
Lonnie grabbed his hair with both hands and pulled it hard. “Fuck this. I give up.”
Thomas Edison once answered an interviewer’s question about the frustration of his thousand failed efforts to invent a working light bulb: “No, no, It was wonderful! Now I know a thousand ways not to make a light bulb.” Same with police work. I knew it, even if Lonnie didn’t.
Every wrong guess and dead end and failure was bringing us closer to the truth