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  'Darby's hanging tough,' Vail said. 'He doesn't have any choice.'

  'You think Rainey really believes him?'

  'I have no doubt he believes Darby's innocent. We haven't given him anything to change that. He knows we don't have a case.'

  'Darby killed her in cold blood,' Shana Parver said. 'I know it, we all know it.'

  'Let me tell you a little story,' Vail said, as they started back to the fourth floor. 'A few years ago an elderly man named Shuman was found in a northside apartment dead of a gunshot wound to the head. The windows and doors were all locked, but there was no weapon anywhere on the premises. The last man to see him alive was a friend of his named Turk Loudon, a junkie who had served time for robbery and assault. He had the victim's ring and fifty-seven dollars and a key to the apartment. And no alibi. He claimed the old man had told him he was sick of living and had given him the money and the ring earlier in the day. He had the key because he was homeless and Shuman let him sleep on the floor at night. He was arrested and charged with murder one.

  'His pro bono lawyer wanted to go for a deal. Problem was, the gunshot wound to the head was a contact shot, which suggested extreme malice. A bigger problem was Loudon. He absolutely refused to plea. He claimed he was innocent, period. Nobody believed him, particularly his own lawyer.

  'Then about two weeks after Loudon was arrested, some painters went to redo the apartment. They found an army .45 calibre pistol lodged behind the radiator. Shuman's prints were all over it and the bullets. Ballistics matched the gun and the bullet in Shuman's head. Shuman had shot himself, and when he did, his arm jerked out, the gun flew out of his hand and dropped behind the radiator. The cops missed it when they searched the place because they didn't think a gun would fit behind it and it was hot. So they looked under the radiator, but not behind it.'

  'Were you the prosecutor?'

  'No, I was the lawyer. I didn't believe my client - and I was wrong. I damn near plea-bargained him into Joliet for the rest of his life.'

  'So you're saying give Darby the benefit of the doubt?'

  'I'm saying if you're going to defend someone, particularly for first-degree murder, you can't afford to doubt their innocence. Paul Rainey believes Darby's innocent because he doesn't have any choice. If we can crack Darby's story, if Paul begins to doubt him? It'll gnaw on him until he finds out what the truth is. The trouble is, we can't make a dent in Darby's version of what happened.'

  'So Darby sticks to his guns…'

  'And we're out of luck,' Vail answered. 'He got lucky. Usually amateurs like that, some little thing trips them up. Something they overlooked, a witness pops out of the cake, a fingerprint shows up where they least expect it. We've been working on this guy for a month and right now we don't have a case.'

  'Let me go back to Sandytown,' she said. 'Take one more crack at it, just to make sure we haven't missed something.'

  Vail sighed. He knew the frustration Shana Parver was feeling - they all were feeling - but he also had seen more than one felon walk for lack of evidence and he had to balance the time of his prosecutors and investigators against the odds of breaking Darby. The odds were in Darby's favour.

  'You know, maybe it happened the way he says it did, Shana. Maybe we all dislike this guy so much we want him to be guilty.'

  'No!' she snapped back. 'He planned it and he did her.'

  'Are you ready to go up against Rainey in the courtroom?' Vail asked her.

  'I can hardly wait,' she answered confidently.

  'With this case?'

  She thought about his question for several moments. Then her shoulders sagged. 'No,' she said finally, but her momentary depression was gone a second later. 'That's why I want to go over all the ground once more, and question Poppy Palmer again, before we shut it down,' she pleaded.

  'Okay.' Vail sighed. 'One more day. Take Abel with you. But unless you come up with something significant by tomorrow night, this case is dead.'

  Five

  Harvey St Claire was on to something.

  Vail could tell the minute he and Parver got off the lift. The heavyset man was sitting on the edge of a chair beside the main computer, leaning forward with his forearms on his thighs. And his left leg was jiggling. That was the tipoff, that nervous leg.

  Sitting beside St Claire was Ben Meyer, who was as tall and lean as St Claire was short and stubby. Meyer had a long, intense face and a shock of black hair, and he was dressed, as was his custom, in a pinstriped suit, white shirt, and sombre tie. St Claire, as was his custom, wore a blue and yellow flannel shirt, red suspenders, sloppy blue jeans, heavy shoes, and a White Sox windbreaker.

  Meyer, at thirty-two, was the resident computer expert and had designed the elabourate system that hooked the DA's office with HITS, the Homicide Investigation and Tracking System that linked police departments all over the country. St Claire, who was fifty-two, had, during his twenty-eight years in law enforcement, tracked moonshiners in Georgia and Tennessee, wetbacks along the Texican border, illegal gun smugglers out of Canada, illegal aliens in the barrios of Los Angeles and San Diego, and some of the meanest wanted crooks in the country when he was with the US Marshal's Service.

  Meyer was a specialist in fraud. It was Meyer who had first detected discrepancies that had brought down two city councilmen for misappropriating funds and accepting kickbacks. Later, in his dramatic closing argument, Meyer had won the case with an impassioned plea for the rights of the taxpayers. St Claire was a hunch player, a man who had a natural instinct for link analysis - putting together seemingly disparate facts and projecting them into a single conclusion. Most criminal investigators plotted the links on paper and in computers, connecting bits and pieces of information until they began to form patterns or relationships. St Claire did it in his head, as if he could close his eyes and see the entire graph plotted out on the backs of his eyelids. He also had a phenomenal memory for crime facts. Once he heard, read, or saw a crime item he never forgot it.

  When Meyer and St Claire got together, it meant trouble. Vail ignored Naomi, who was motioning for him to come to his office, and stood behind Meyer and St Claire.

  'Here's what I got in mind,' St Claire said. 'I wanna cross-match missing people and unsolved homicides, then see if we have any overlap in dates. Can we do that?'

  'State level?'

  'Yeah, to start with. Exclude this county for the time being.'

  'Nothing to it,' Meyer said, his fingers clicking on the computer keyboard.

  'What the hell're you two up to?' Vail asked.

  Hunch,' St Claire said, still watching the screen. His blue eyes glittered behind wire-rimmed glasses that kept sliding down to the end of his nose.

  'Everybody's got a hunch. I had to listen to Abel's hunches all the way through breakfast. A hunch about what?'

  'About this new thing,' St Claire said.

  'What new thing?'

  St Claire's upper lip bulged with a wad of snuff. Without taking his eyes off the big screen of the computer, he spat delicately into a silver baby cup he carried at all times for just that purpose.

  'The landfill murders,' he said. 'We're trying to get a leg up on it.'

  'Well, Eckling's got seven days before we officially enter the case.'

  'Cold trail by then.'

  'Let's wait until Okimoto tells us something,' Vail said.

  'That could be a couple days,' St Claire said. 'I just wanna run some ideas through the computer network. No big thing.'

  'Who says they were murdered, anyway?' Meyer said.

  'Hell,' said St Claire, dropping another dollop of snuff into his baby cup and smiling, 'it's too good not to be murder.'

  'What's your caseload, Ben?' asked Vail.

  'Four.'

  'And you're playing with this thing?'

  'I don't know how to run this gadget,' St Claire complained.

  Vail decided to humour him. 'You can have the whiz kid here until after lunch,' he said. 'Then Meyer's back on his cases.'
/>   'Can't do much in three hours,' St Claire groaned.

  'Then you better hurry.'

  Naomi finally walked across the office and grabbed Vail by the arm. She pointed across the room to Yancey's office.

  'He called ten minutes ago. I told him…'

  'No. N-o,' Vail said, entering his office. He stopped short inside the door. Hanging on the coat tree behind the door were his dark blue suit and his tuxedo.

  'What's this?'

  'I had your stuff picked up for you. Didn't think you'd have time to get home and change.'

  'Change for what?' he growled.

  'You have to accompany Yancey to the opening luncheon of the State Lawyers Convention. He's the keynote speaker. High noon -'

  'Oh, for Christ sake!'

  'And the opening-night cocktail party is at the Marina Convention Center at six.'

  'Goddamn it! Why didn't you tell me earlier?'

  'I may as well give you all the bad news. Yancey wants to see you in his office. He wanted me to go down and get you.'

  'Out of interrogation?'

  'I explained that to him - again.'

  'Tell him I'm tied up until lunchtime.'

  'I don't think he'll buy it. Raymond Firestone's in there with him. Came in unannounced.'

  Vail looked at her with a sickened expression. 'Saved the worst until last, huh? Just stood there and sandbagged me.'

  'No, no, I'm not taking the rap for this one. You agreed to both the lunch and the cocktail party last summer.'

  'And you're just reminding me now?'

  'What did you want me to do, Marty, give you daily time ticks? Three days to go until the lawyers convention, two days, eighteen hours. Call you at home and wake you up. Nine hours to go!'

  'Wake me up? I haven't been to bed!'

  'I did not drag you out to the city dump. Parver set up the interrogation with Darby, not me. And I had nothing to do with Councilman Firestone's visit.'

  Vail stared angrily across the broad expanse of the office at DA Jack Yancey's door. He knew what to expect before he walked into Yancey's office. Raymond Firestone had arrived in the city twenty years earlier with a battered suitcase, eighty dollars in his pocket, and a slick tongue. Walking door to door selling funeral insurance to the poor, he had parlayed the nickel-dime policy game into the beginnings of an insurance empire that now had offices all over the state. A bellicose and unsophisticated bully, he had, during seven years as a city councilman, perfected perfidity and patronage to a dubious art. As Abel Stenner had once observed, 'Firestone's unscrupulous enough to be twins.'

  Firestone, who was supported openly by Eckling and the police union, had let it be known soon after his first election that he was going to 'put Vail in his place'. It was a shallow threat but a constant annoyance.

  Firestone was seated opposite Yancey with his back to the office door and he looked back over his shoulder as Vail entered, staring at him through narrowed dubious eyes that seemed frozen in a perpetual squint. Firestone was a man of average stature with lacklustre brown hair, which he combed forward to hide a receding hairline, a small, thin-lipped mouth that was slow to smile, and the ruby, mottled complexion of a heavy drinker.

  'Hello, Raymond,' Vail said, and, ignoring the chair beside Firestone, sat down in an easy chair against the wall several feet from the desk.

  Firestone merely nodded.

  Yancey sat behind his desk. He was a chubby, unctuous, smooth-talking con man with wavy white hair and a perpetual smile. A dark-horse candidate for DA years before, Yancey had turned out to be the ultimate bureaucrat, capitalizing on his oily charm and a natural talent for mediation and compromise, surrounding himself with bright young lawyers to do the dirty work since he had no stomach for the vigour of courtroom battles.

  'We seem to have a little problem here,' Yancey started off. 'But I see no reason why we can't work it out amicably.'

  Vail didn't say a word.

  Like Jane Venable before him, Vail had little respect for Yancey as a litigator but liked him personally. Abandoned ten years earlier by Venable, Yancey had eagerly accepted Vail - his deadliest opponent in court - as his chief prosecutor. Their deal was simple. Yancey handled politics. Vail handled business.

  'It's about this thing between you and Chief Eckling,' Yancey continued.

  Vail stared at him pleasantly. The 'thing' between Vail and Eckling had been going on since long before Vail had become a prosecutor.

  'It's time to bury the goddamn hatchet,' Firestone interjected.

  'Oh? In whose back?' Vail asked quietly, breaking his silence.

  Firestone glared at Yancey, who sighed and smiled and leaned back in his chair, making a little steeple of his fingertips and staring at the ceiling.

  'That's what we want to avoid, Martin,' he said.

  'Uh-huh.'

  'What we're suggesting is that you back off a little bit,' Firestone said.

  'That's a compromise?'

  'I thought it had been agreed that the DA's office would keep out of the chief's hair for seven days after a crime. That's the deal, he gets the week. Am I right? Did we agree to that?' Firestone looked at Yancey when he said it.

  'Uh-huh,' Vail answered.

  Firestone turned on him and snapped, 'Then why don't you do it?'

  'We do,' Vail said flatly.

  'Bullshit! You and your people show up every time a felon farts in this town,' Firestone growled.

  'Now, now, Raymond,' Yancey said, 'it's not uncommon for the DA to go to the scene of a crime. Usually the police appreciate the help.'

  'He ain't the goddamn DA.'

  'No, but he is my chief prosecutor. It's well within his jurisdiction.'

  'We're talking about cooperation here,' snapped Firestone, his face turning crimson.

  'Why don't I go back to my office?' Vail suggested with a smile. 'You guys are talking like I'm not even in the room. I feel like I'm eavesdropping.'

  Firestone whirled on him. 'You go out of your way to make Eckling look bad,' he said, his voice beginning to rise.

  'I don't have to,' Vail said. 'He does that all by himself.'

  'See what I mean!' Firestone said to Yancey. 'How can Eric do his job with this smartass needling him all the time?'

  'You'll excuse me,' Vail said calmly, and stood up.

  'Take it easy, Marty, take it easy,' Yancey said, waving him back to his seat.

  'You got a beef with me, tell me, not him,' Vail said to Firestone, his voice still calm and controlled.

  'He's your boss, that's why.'

  'Not in this area,' Vail said. He knew the best way to get to Firestone was to stay calm. The hint of a smile toyed with his lips. 'You know, frankly, I don't give a damn whether it pleases you or not, Raymond. You're a city boy. The county runs this office. You don't have any more clout over here than the janitor, so why don't you mind your own business and stay out of ours?'

  'Jesus, Marty…' Yancey stammered.

  'C'mon, Jack, I'm not going to listen to this windbag yell insults at me.'

  'Goddamn it, I told you this was a waste of time, Jack,' Firestone said angrily. 'Vail isn't capable of cooperating with anybody.'

  'Did you say that, Jack? Did you say I'd cooperate with them?'

  'What I said was, maybe everybody could kind of stand back and cool off. What I mean is, try a little cooperation between your two departments.'

  'I'm quite cool,' Vail said. 'And as far as cooperating goes, I wouldn't share my dirty socks with Eckling. He's incompetent, he's on the take, and he wouldn't know a clue if it was sitting on the end of his nose.'

  'Listen here - '

  'No, you listen, Councilman. I'm an officer of the court. I'm charged with the responsibility of prosecuting the cases that come before me to the best of my ability. I can't do that if I rely on Eric Eckling. Two years ago he was ready to drop the case against your two buddies on the council. We took it away from him and they're both doing hard time in Rock Island for malfeasance.' Vail stopped for
a moment, then added, 'Maybe that's the problem. Maybe you're just getting jumpy, Raymond.'

  Firestone began to shake with anger. His face now turned bright vermilion. He started to speak, but the words stuck in his throat.

  'Tell you what,' Vail went on. 'You throw Eckling out on his ass where he belongs and put a police chief instead of a pimp in the job and you won't have a problem.'

  'Goddamn you!' Firestone screamed, and stomped out of the office.

  Yancey watched him leave. He blew a breath out. A line of sweat formed on his forehead. 'Jesus, Marty, you gotta be such a hard-ass?' he said.

  'You and I have a deal, Jack. I run the prosecutor's office and you do the politicking. I don't ask for your help, don't ask for mine, okay?'

  'He throws a lot of weight in the party.' Yancey had, within his grasp, the thing he had yearned for all his life, an appointment to the bench. But he needed the support of every Democrat in the county, so at this moment his chief concern was keeping peace in the family. Vail knew the scenario.

  'So throw just as much weight round as Firestone does. Stop acting like the Pillsbury Doughboy and kick his ass back.'

  'I didn't mean for you to—'

  'Sure you did. We've been through this song and dance before. You don't need Firestone anyway, his whole district's union and blue collar. Solid Democrats. They wouldn't go Republican if Jimmy Hoffa rose up from the dead and ran on the GOP ticket.'

  'I just hate to look for trouble.'

  'You know, the trouble with you, Jack, is you want everybody to love you. Life ain't like that, as Huckleberry Finn would say. Hell, when you're a judge you can piss everybody off and they'll smile and thank you.'

  Vail started out the door.

  'Marty?'

  'Yeah?'

  'Uh… are you gonna wear that suit to the luncheon?'

  'Sweet Jesus,' Vail said, and left the office.

  St Claire and Meyer were scatter-shooting, feeding information into the computer and looking for links, bits of information that St Claire eventually would try to connect together into patterns. Meyer was caught up in the game. It was like Dungeons and Dragons, where the players are lured through a maze of puzzles to the eventual solution.