I made him a present of the bottle of bourbon on his way out. “Put it in the trunk, Barry. An open-intoxicants bust will retire you for sure.”
After he left, I squirmed around in the armchair, rolling my glass between my palms and massaging my cortex with invisible fingers. In the middle of this a horn blasted five times in the street out front. When I got my heart jacked down from my windpipe, I went to the door, picking up my .38 on the way.
A gray Ford Taurus sat alongside the curb on the wrong side of the street. Only a cop has that attitude toward the law, and only John Alderdyce would call attention to it by honking. I stuck the revolver under my belt in the small of my back and approached the open window on the driver’s side. His eyes glowed in the twilight like a cat’s.
He said, “One order of DNA, hot from the oven. This the right address?”
“What’s the name on the order?”
“I’ll spell it. G—”
I trotted around and let myself into the seat beside him.
He looked at me, eyes bright under the rocky mantel of his brow. “The towel tested positive against his sample on file with the feds, and it’s all over the physical evidence in storage from the April Goss investigation.”
I sat back against the seat. “He claimed he’d never been in the apartment.”
“Twice. The first time, all there was to go on was fingerprints, and they’d been wiped off both doorknobs and impossible to recover from the razor blade she was supposed to have used to slash her wrists. That was clever, smearing the prints on the murder weapon so it would look like the killer tried to make it look like a case of suicide, but obliterating them entirely from the doorknobs to make the first assumption fall through. This time there was no excuse except the cocky son of a bitch didn’t think we’d check back; or that we couldn’t. He spent a whole episode last year reviewing the department’s sloppy handling of rape-test kits and other evidence in mothballs.”
“Lot of trouble to go through just because he and his daughter didn’t get along.”
“It might have been worse than that—the worst, if you get my meaning.”
I nodded. “I thought of that, too.”
“Then again, they might have fought, he shoved her, and she bumped her head on something. The coroner found a bruise on the occipital lobe—not enough to cause death, but maybe it looked like it in his panic. The rest was cover-up.”
“In which case all you’ve got on him is Man Three and tampering with evidence. Without proof he rigged the system so the jury didn’t know April wasn’t pregnant—which would have weakened Corbeil’s motive—you can’t even connect him to a frame. Corbeil’s prints were all over the rest of the apartment. As of course they would be, since he and April were in a relationship.”
“It’s a start.”
“You’ll be lucky to make even that stick. He’s loaded, but he doesn’t have to be to beat this case. He’s got a premium network in love with his ratings. They’ll buy him the best legal talent in the hemisphere. If they find out how Kopernick came by that towel, your probable cause to pull his DNA file goes out the window, and that whole line of evidence will be inadmissible. He’ll know you don’t have the cards to sweat the truth out of him.”
Alderdyce’s hands were on the steering wheel. He opened them, flexed the fingers, and took up the grip again. “It’s a thin thread, no argument.”
“Not just in the view of a judge,” I said. “It doesn’t wash any way I look at it. I don’t like him, hate how he manipulates due process like it’s his own set of Hot Wheels, but I don’t see him as a wild animal who’d kill his kid in cold blood, or who wouldn’t come clean if it was accidental.”
We might be able to weave it into a string. You remember Officer Cochran?”
I didn’t at first. “Glee club kid that printed me when I was brought in on the shooting in the bank; the one kept feeding me mug books after my run-in with Whitelaw in my office. Belongs in Pop’s Chock’lit Shoppe, not the CID.”
“Not the CID, anyway.” He turned his head my way; the Cheshire Cat carved out of granite.
That time I was even slower on the uptake. I nodded, and went on nodding until I realized I hadn’t stopped. “I was just saying to someone there’s a larger-than-usual leak in the department. How’d you connect Cochran to Goss?”
“Goss’s place is over the county line; those calls show up on record. In the last two weeks, twenty-seven calls were placed to his number, from a phone usually reserved for arrestees to call their lawyers or whatnot. He thought it wouldn’t be monitored like the others. He was wrong; and he was seen using it more than once. A caller who doesn’t want to be overheard tends to stand with his back to the rest of the room. We’ve got some personnel that are cop enough to know that.”
“Not conclusive.”
“Cochran didn’t know that. Or felt too guilty to take it into account. He cracked when the guy from Internal Standards asked him his name. We’re putting him on unpaid suspension. It’s up to the brass whether to press charges.”
“What’d Goss promise him, stringer?”
“What’s a stringer?”
“Ask Barry. I didn’t understand it myself.”
“Expert consultant,” he said.
I grinned. “He draws that like a gun. He might as well have offered him head of security, like me, only I’m realistic enough not to fall for it. How’d a simp like that make it through the training course?”
“Maybe his mother bribed the instructor, like they do in Hollywood.” A pair of massive shoulders lifted, fell. It’s a wonder the ground didn’t shake. “It’s a rotten world.”
“Not entirely. For every one of those, there’s a Chrys Corbeil.”
“I’d argue the math. It’s happening on some police force somewhere every day of the week. About as sensational as cheating on your taxes. Cutthroat Dogs wouldn’t give it a tumble.”
It hit me then. I was CID material myself, if you swung the shovel hard enough and knew where to aim.