“He’s lived a troubled life, Teddy.”
“Holmes, you mean.”
She nodded, still gazing at the fire. “His family’s been worried about him for most of his life.”
“How so?”
She paused, thinking it over. “He never seemed to fit in,” she said after a moment. “He always had to do things his own way. There have been times as an adult when he couldn’t take care of himself very well. He’s had a problem with depression, but I think Jim already told you that. His family knew it would come to something like this one day and it has.”
“Jim told me he’s known the family for a long time,” he said. “Who are they?”
She turned to him, the fire reflecting in her eyes. “Oscar Holmes is my brother, Teddy. My maiden name is Holmes.”
It settled in with the subtlety of a death ray.
Oscar Holmes was Sally’s brother. Holmes was Barnett’s brother-in-law. It settled into the room like a deeply kept secret that had just been ripped open and exposed. As far as Sally knew, her own brother had brutally murdered two young girls. And now the DA was saying there might be ten more.
Another family tragedy was unfolding, Teddy realized. He thought about Barnett’s desk drawer again-how it had become the pharmacy drawer in recent days. And Barnett’s attitude from the beginning-how he couldn’t be reached on the phone, and when he could, all he wanted was to end the case quickly and make sure Holmes got the care his family thought he needed. Barnett was the family, not a mysterious friend from childhood or a client with the firm. The murders weren’t something to be read about from the safe distance of words printed in a newspaper. Jim and Sally Barnett were part of the story, the crime, intimately connected to it by family. No wonder Barnett wasn’t seeing things clearly.
Teddy set down his coffee mug. It occurred to him that the night Holmes checked into prison he’d tried to make a collect call to his sister but she wouldn’t accept the charges. That sister was Sally Barnett. He looked at her at the other end of the couch, her head against a pillow and her eyes closed. Her breathing had quieted and it appeared as if she was sleeping. He wondered why she hadn’t taken the call that night. It seemed odd, curious. She hadn’t paid her brother a visit either.
Teddy lifted the blanket away and draped it over her. He slipped into his shoes and stood. His legs wobbled at first, and as he steadied himself and felt the ache deepen inside his head, he wondered if he shouldn’t call a doctor. He saw his coat on the chair by the fire and pulled it on. As he walked to the front door and looked outside, he noticed it was snowing again. He could see the impression his body had made in the snow right outside the door. Stepping out into the cold air, he buttoned up and looked at the marks he’d made crawling up from the driveway. The falling snow had almost filled them in. Curiously, there were a faint set of footprints running alongside the same path. He stared at them for a while, wondering what he was looking at. It didn’t really seem like he’d crawled to the door. Instead, it looked more like his body had been dragged.
The fog lifted and burned away in a single moment. He remembered the Sterling silver shot glass with tall ships and whales etched into its side. He hadn’t run into a tree. Nothing that occurred here tonight had been an accident. He glanced back at the snow falling to the ground, softening the impressions and wiping them out.
He bolted across the lawn to his car, ignoring the pain. Ripping open the glove box, he fished out his flashlight and switched it on. Then he hurried into the yard, picking up the footprints and following them across the drive into the trees. It was difficult to see them, the impressions had become vague-some of them already obliterated by the falling snow.
There was a man, he remembered. The shape of someone standing in the darkness right behind him. A dog had been barking from somewhere in the neighborhood, but Teddy hadn’t understood it as a warning.
He moved to the spot where he remembered standing with the silver shot glass. The place he’d been knocked out and fallen to the ground. He didn’t expect to still find it here, but knelt down anyway, sifting through the snow with his hands. After fifteen minutes, he’d covered the entire area and knew it was pointless. The man had obviously returned for the shot glass, seen Teddy holding it in his scarf, and struck him as he turned.
Teddy looked back at the house, watching the lights in the windows switch off one by one. The dark house looked like every other house in the neighborhood. When the breeze picked up again and he heard the branches rattling over head, he pretended he wasn’t afraid even though he really was. He turned his flashlight the other way and took a step into the vacant lot bordering Barnett’s house. Raking the beam of light across the snow, the tracks leading from tree to tree toward the street were gone now. Everything the man had left behind was either gone or erased, except for those impressions, however fleeting, Teddy kept locked in his head.
TWENTY-NINE
Jackie, Barnett’s assistant, clicked open a window with her mouse and pointed at the monitor with a shaky finger. Teddy leaned in for a closer look. It was a press release announcing that Nash had joined the legal team defending Holmes.
“I told him not to send it to the DA,” she said in a nervous voice. “I told him not to, but he did. And look what happened. Sally called and told me he may never walk again.”
She printed a copy and handed it to Teddy. She was upset, even frightened. What she was implying-that Alan Andrews might have had something to do with Barnett being run over-caught Teddy by surprise.
He sat down in the chair beside her desk and studied the copy. It was a press release, but it read more like a negative hit piece in a political campaign. Nash’s name was mentioned, along with his biography. But the results of his legal workshop were detailed as well. An innocent man had been executed as a result of Andrews’s mishandling of the case. Even worse, Andrews had suppressed evidence to win the conviction. Before his election as district attorney, he’d been branded an overzealous prosecutor by more than one judge. Nash believed that there were other cases where the DA had been less than forthright and planned to continue his investigation of the man in his workshop after the holidays. Making sure Andrews got it right in the Holmes case would only be the beginning.
It was clear to Teddy that both Barnett and Nash wanted to drag Andrews’s nose through the mud. It was a message. A first salvo. Do the deal or Andrews’s name could become the issue, not Holmes. Take the death penalty off the table, or else.
Teddy actually admired it. Particularly now that he knew Holmes was Barnett’s brother-in-law. It was ugly, even brutal, a small sample of what Barnett would do to Andrews’s name and reputation in order to save Holmes’s life.
“Do you think it had anything to do with what happened?” Jackie asked.
Teddy looked up and saw the fear still haunting her.
“No,” he said, even though he wasn’t sure. “What happened to Jim was an accident.”
He didn’t want to scare her. Didn’t want to tell her what was really on his mind.
He’d been thinking it over since four in the morning. When he finally got home, he couldn’t sleep. Instead, he stretched out on top of the bed watching the snow swirl in the breeze outside his window and letting his mind drift. He couldn’t be sure, of course, but he didn’t think the man who ran over Barnett last night was the same person who murdered Darlene Lewis and Valerie Kram. Whoever it was had left his silver shot glass behind and returned for it. When he saw Teddy had found it, he hit him over the head and knocked him out. But the man had done one more thing before leaving that would seem to rule him out as the killer. He’d dragged Teddy’s unconscious body out of the darkness of the vacant lot and left him in front of the entrance to Barnett’s house. The distance from the empty lot to the front door of the house was in excess of thirty yards and would have required considerable effort. Even risk with the house lights on.
Why?
The only answer that seemed to make sense was that the man wanted Teddy to be found. He’d smashed Teddy in the head hard enough to knock him out, but he didn’t want to kill him.
Now, in the face of what Jackie had shown him, it seemed to make some degree of sense. If not sense, it was a perversion worth considering. Barnett’s
