Innocent Page 15

  That day at Dede's, while I packed, she went on crying and saying, 'I wasn't going to do it, I wasn't going to do it. I was pretending or something, but I wasn't going to do it.'

  She said that a thousand times, and finally I was completely fed up. I zipped my last bag and slung it across my back. 'And that's what's wrong with you,' I answered.

  Those were the last words I ever spoke to her.

  CHAPTER 16

  Rusty, September 2, 2008

  Anna is already there when I arrive at the Dulcimer. She is nervous, fingering a highball glass full of bubbles, but beautiful. Her life in private practice has given her a sleeker look, a better coif and nicer clothes. I sit beside her on a tufted banquette in the bar.

  "Cut your hair?"

  "Less to take care of. More time to work." She laughs. "Confessions of a high-priced slave."

  "It's very becoming."

  My compliment leaves her briefly silent until she mutters, "Thanks."

  "What are you drinking?" I ask.

  "Fizzy water. I have something I need to finish at work."

  My heart sags: She is going back to work. I say nothing. She moves her purse so it's in the open space between us.

  "Rusty, I don't know how to say this. So I think I just have to come out with it. I'll try to explain. But the point is that I've started seeing Nat. I mean, I haven't, but I'm going to. I'm going to see him today. And I don't know where it will go, but it's pretty serious already. It's very serious already."

  "My Nat?" I actually blurt. For an instant I can feel nothing inside myself. And then what surges forth is rage. It storms out of my heart. "This is insane."

  Looking at me, Anna's green eyes are welling.

  "Rusty, I can't describe how hard I tried to avoid this."

  "Oh, for Chrissake. What are you going to tell me about now? Fate? Destiny? You're a grown-up human being. You make choices."

  "Rusty, I think I'm in love with him. And that he's in love with me."

  "Oh, my God!"

  She is crying by now as she holds the cool glass to her cheek.

  "Look, Anna, I know you want to get back at me. I know I disappointed you. I know all is fair in love and war. I've heard every crappy expression. But this is impossible. And you have to stop."

  "Oh, Rusty," she says, sobbing. "Rusty, I did everything the right way. I was so good. I wish you understood. I tried so hard to make this not happen."

  I want to think. But the dimension of this is unimaginable. And I can feel my arms and hands shaking in fury.

  "Does he know? About us?"

  "Of course not. And he never will. Never. Rusty, I know this is crazy and difficult, but you know, I have to try, I really have to try. I don't know if I can handle this or you can handle this, but I have to try, I know I have to try."

  I rear back in the chair. I am continuing to experience difficulty catching my breath.

  "Do you know how often I've longed for you and stopped?" I ask her. "Made myself stop? And now, what? I'm supposed to watch you parade around my house? This is sick. How could you do this to me? To him? For God's sake."

  "Rusty, you don't want me."

  "Don't tell me what I want." I remain angry enough to slap her. "I know how this adds up, Anna. Don't preach sincerity to me. You're tightening the screws in the shittiest way imaginable. So what's my choice? Get rid of Barbara now, right now. Is that it? Get rid of her or you'll literally destroy my home?"

  "Rusty, no. It's not about you. It's about him. That's the whole point of what I'm trying to tell you. It's about him. Rusty, Rusty--" Then she stops. "Rusty, I never felt like this about"--she stumbles--"about anyone. I mean, maybe I should be a case study in some psychiatric journal. Because I'm not sure if this would have happened without it. Without us. But it's different, Rusty. It really is. Rusty, please let us be."

  "Go fuck yourself. You're crazy, Anna. You don't know what you want. Or who you want. Psychiatric journal is right."

  I throw money on the table and hear her muffled outcry behind me as I bang out of the hotel, striding in outrage down the street. I seethe in the oldest, most elemental way. I go several blocks. Then stop suddenly.

  Because one thing is clear. No matter how angry I am, I must do something. I must. There is no clear path. I will think and think and nothing will be right. But I must do something. And the mystery of that seems as large a thought as God.

  What will I do?

  CHAPTER 17

  Nat, September 2, 2008

  How I see it is that we're all pretty much cruising along, like a bunch of people on the highway. Everybody's in his space and headed to his own destination, listening to the music they like, or different radio stations, or talking on the phone, and otherwise just trying to stay out of one another's way. And then every once in a while, you're ready to stop and welcome a passenger. And who knows why?

  I'm still not sure when I got so into Anna. I thought she was cool as soon as I met her after she went to work for my dad, but I was with Kat then, and once we broke up, my mom got completely in the way by asking once or twice if Anna really was too old for me, which pretty much iced the whole thing. And then one day this summer, I was at work and saw Anna's name on this post about her apartment, and I thought, Yeah, go check this out. And sitting out on her balcony, I couldn't quite believe how totally freaking cool she was, brainy and beautiful and funny and tuned in. Not that it was mutual at first. I hung myself way out there. And she said no. Sweet and kind and all of that. But, no.

  So now it's about a month later, I'm at work and I'm still a mess over Anna. I'm less of a mess, because I just couldn't stay as much of a mess as I was the first two weeks. When it goes bad, I have this thing where I just can't hit reset. I go down and stay down. I rewind. And replay. And cry. Totally unboy. I'd get up from my desk at the court and go into a stall in the john and cry about four times a day. Then I began to ration myself. One cry in the morning and one in the afternoon. Then once at work. And once at home. Somehow, it was worse than my breakups with Paloma and Kat. And I knew I'd built this whole thing up inside my head to be the Perfect Relationship only because it didn't happen. It's a platonic ideal. I am completely in love, even though I know it's more with the idea of love than anything else. But maybe that is worse. Real or not. Hope is an amazing thing. Hope is maybe the most essential thing in life. You go on with hope. And without it, you are flattened.

  That's still the mood today when I walk into the supreme court hearing room to deliver a brief that the law clerk on the case, Max Handley, forgot to take up to the courtroom. And there she is. For a month I have imagined a couple times a day that I am seeing her on the street, but that's only a blink, before I realize, No, too bad, no. But this time, even from the rear, even though she's changed her hair, even though I catch no sight of her face, I know it's Anna. She's sitting at the appellant's table, writing notes as fast as she can while one of the older partners from her firm is giving an oral argument that frankly has left every justice cold. This guy, the partner, is going to get flushed, maybe even before he leaves the courtroom. And when I see her, I stop so fast that half the figures on the bench, eager for distraction, stare at me. I am so fucking up!

  So I crawl up to Justice Guinari and hand off the brief. I am trying to figure out how I'm going to be able to walk out now without repeating the same stupid performance. Eyes forward, shoulders straight. But of course, I'm too broken up and hungry for her not to peek. And then, when I turn, I see, thank God--I see, thank God, there is a God, something I have always believed--her eyes are fixed on me. The partner is still droning. But Anna has stopped writing. She is not doing anything but watching me. She is not blinking. She cannot turn away. And I know everything--it's in that look. She's been as burned as me. And she is giving up. Whatever it was that made her say no, she can't say it anymore. She's giving up. She's giving in. To love. It's the movies! It's the movies from the forties! It's kismet. Fate. Dharma.

  I stumble out of the c
ourtroom and go back to my desk to use my cell phone. I leave a voice mail and tell her after work I am going straight to her apartment and that I'm going to sit there all night if I have to, until she tells me what she wants face-to-face.

  And that is what I do.

  When she gets home, I am sitting on the single step outside the old greystone. I really would have sat there the rest of the night, but in fact I've been there only fifteen minutes. And she sits next to me, she puts her arm on mine, she puts her head on my shoulder, and we cry, we both cry, and then we go inside. And it's just this simple. Take it from a former grad student in philosophy. This is what every human longs to say: It's the happiest moment of my life.

  CHAPTER 18

  Tommy, October 31, 2008

  McGrath Hall had been the police headquarters since 1921. The redstone heap might have passed for a medieval fortress, with stone arches over the massive planked oaken doors and notched battlements on the roof.

  Brand, who was still on trial, had sent a message across the street from the courtroom asking if Tommy could meet him outside the County Building at twelve thirty, and the Mercedes had slid to the curb and taken off again so quickly that it looked like a getaway. Brand zagged through the lunch-hour traffic as if he were hopped up. Tommy got a call from the FBI, and he and Brand had gone past the security gate and parked behind the Hall before he was free again to talk to his chief deputy.

  "So what are we doing here?" he asked.

  "I don't know," said Brand. "Not for sure. But the day Rusty called in Barbara's death, the Nearing coppers took all the bottles in Barbara's medicine cabinet and swept them into a plastic bag, instead of doing an inventory there. So I had Rory ship every vial over here on Wednesday to see if Dickerman could turn anything from them."

  "Okay. Good thinking," Tommy said.

  "Rory's idea, actually."

  "Still good thinking. And what did Dickerman come up with?"

  "You ask all the tough questions. Mo left a message that he had some interesting results. He wouldn't say it was 'interesting' if it was a zero, but I couldn't connect because I've been in court all day. Still, I didn't want him to put it on paper. Around here that would leak in about thirty seconds."

  "Also good thinking," said Molto.

  Brand explained that they had come to the Hall because Mo had had knee replacement surgery last week and wasn't getting out. Jim figured it was better if Tommy was here to ask whatever questions he wanted to. That wasn't bad thinking either.

  They found one of Mo's assistants holding open a fire exit in the basement. She was wearing a crepe witch's hat and a black fright wig.

  "Trick or treat," she said.

  "Indeed, indeed," said Brand. "I wake up every day thinking that very thing."

  Together, the three moved down the dark halls into the realm that Mo Dickerman ruled. Mo Dickerman, aka Fingerprint God, was at age seventy-two the oldest employee of the Kindle County Unified Police Force and without doubt its most esteemed. He was the foremost fingerprint expert in the Midwest, author of the leading texts on several techniques, and a frequent lecturer at police academies around the world. Now that forensic science was hot stuff on TV, you could barely hit the clicker without seeing Mo poking his heavy black-framed glasses back up on his nose on one true crime show or another. In a department that like most urban police forces was always mired in controversy and, not infrequently, scandal, Mo was probably the lone emblem of unimpeached respectability.

  He was also frequently a pain in the ass. The nickname of Fingerprint God had not been applied entirely in admiration. Mo regarded his opinions as akin to scripture and would not brook even so much as an interruption. If you made the mistake of cutting in, he would simply wait you out and then go back to the beginning. He was often a difficult witness, refusing to acknowledge seemingly obvious conclusions. And he was wildly unpopular with the brass on the force because of the way he leveraged his public standing with threats to quit unless his lab in the McGrath Hall basement was equipped with the latest innovations, money that sometimes might have been better spent on bulletproof vests or overtime.

  Mo hobbled forth on sticks to greet them.

  "Ready for the twist contest?" Brand asked.

  An angular New Yorker whose thick hair was only beginning to show some gray, Mo bent both elbows and rocked a few inches each way. Brand offered an earnest thank-you for Mo's quick turnaround on their request, and Dickerman clicked his way into the lab, a dim warren of crowded cubicles and pillared boxes and several clear arenas for Mo's high-priced machines.

  He stopped in front of his current favorite piece of equipment, a vacuum metal deposition unit. The top commanders had held out against it for several years because they feared explaining to the county board or the public why they needed a machine that literally developed latent fingerprints in gold.

  When Tommy was a line prosecutor, fingerprints were nothing more than patterned sweat revealed by ninhydrin or other powders. If the print had dried up, you were generally cooked. But starting in the 1980s, experts like Mo had figured out how to expose the amino acids sweat left behind. These days if you developed a latent print, there was sometimes the possibility of extracting DNA from it as well.

  Mo's VMD machine was a horizontal steel chamber about three feet by two. Everything inside it cost a fortune--molybdenum evaporation dishes; combination rotary and diffusion pumps that produced a vacuum in less than two minutes; a polycold fast-cycle cryochiller to speed the process by removing moisture; and a computer that controlled it all.

  After an object for examination was placed inside the VMD, a few milligrams of gold were poured into the evaporation dishes. The pumps then created the vacuum, and a high current was passed through the dishes, evaporating the gold. It was absorbed by the fingerprint residue. Zinc was evaporated next, which for chemical reasons adhered only to the valleys between the ridges and whorls of the fingerprint. The high-definition photographs of the resulting golden fingerprints always wowed juries.

  Mo, being Mo, insisted on explaining the whole process again, even though both Tommy and Brand had received the tutorial several times. What Mo had placed in the VMD yesterday was the plastic vial from the phenelzine scrip Rusty had picked up. He had four clear prints, one toward the top, three on the bottom. The brown plastic pill bottle, now dusted in gold, was in a sealed plastic envelope on a table beside the machine.

  "Whose?" asked Tommy.

  Mo lifted a finger. He was going to answer in his own time.

  "We compared them with the decedent's. With predictable problems. I've been talking to the guys in the pathologist's office for twenty years, but they still print the dead like they're mopping the floor. They don't roll the fingers, they drag them." Dickerman displayed the ten-cards the techs had prepared as part of the autopsy. "There's nothing resembling an identifiable print on either the middle finger right hand or the right little finger." Within each of the squares Mo pointed to, there was no more than an inky smudge. Dickerman shook his long face in mild despair.

  "At any rate, I can tell you categorically that the four prints on the vial you wanted me to examine were not made by eight of ten of Mrs. Sabich's fingers."

  "So they could be Barbara's?" asked Brand.

  "Not this one," said Mo, pointing to the largest print in the photographs at the bottom, "because that's clearly a thumb. But at that point, I couldn't tell whether either of the remaining prints came from Barbara's middle finger, or even conceivably the pinky."

  "And now?" asked Tommy. Brand took a step back behind Dickerman and rotated his eyes skyward. He had no use for Mo's fan dance.

  "So the next step was to see if we could identify whose prints these were. I assumed you guys had a guess, but Jim and Rory didn't want to name names. So we ran the prints through AFIS," said Mo, referring to the automated computer identification system that contained images of all the prints from the county for the past several decades. "And we matched impressions on two different pr
int cards." Mo laid down the ten-cards that had been culled out of his own archives. One contained the prints Rusty Sabich had given when he'd begun county employment thirty-five years ago. The others had been taken when Sabich was indicted. "All four prints on that vial are his." Mo touched the cards as if each was a fetish. "I always liked Rusty," he added, as though he were speaking of the dead.

  Jim had a small, settled smile. He'd always known. Tommy would have to give him that whenever they talked about the case in the years to come.

  "And how do we know Sabich didn't just take the bottle out of the packaging to help his wife?" Tommy asked.

  Brand answered that. He had the papers Rory was carrying the other day in Wallach's courtroom.

  "The scrip was for ten pills. But when the cops inventoried the bottle, there were only six in there." He picked up the plastic envelope containing the bottle that was next to Mo's precious machine and showed Tom the six orange tablets on the bottom of the vial. "So somebody took four of them out," he said, "and what I'm hearing is that the only person whose prints are here are the judge's."

  "Could she have touched the bottle without leaving prints?" Molto asked.

  Dickerman smiled. "You know the answer to that, Tom. Sure. But VMD is the most discriminating method we have of identifying any prints that were ever here. And if I'm following what Jim just said, Mrs. Sabich would have to have touched the bottle four times without leaving prints. We've got other bottles from the medicine cabinet that we've started processing. So far we have her prints on eight of the nine we've tested. On the ninth the impressions are smudged."