it. You and Nancy said the same thing. The jury was hung up and then something happened. How did you know that?'
Harry was silent for a moment, Mason visualizing him as he called up his memory of the trial. Harry remembered the details of every case he ever worked. Mason waited patiently.
'It was the priest,' he said at last. 'You remember the priest at the execution?'
'Father Steve. He's practically my new best friend,' Mason said.
'He didn't miss a day of the trial. He was the one who told me.'
'Father Steve says that Whitney's father told him about the jury,' Mason said.
'Whitney's father didn't know squat. He never got within a mile of that courtroom.'
Mason rode the surge of energy he always got when he put things in motion. It wasn't much but it was better than whining and throwing darts at his defenseless wall. He drummed a pen against his desk, shuffled stacks of paper, wiped off the dry erase board and started a new mosaic, linking names with lines, broken and solid. He was ready to try anything to nurture his rekindled momentum.
He stood back from the board, the pattern plain. Father Steve was at the center of this new universe. The Kowalcyzks and the Kings were his parishioners. He was the last one to have seen Mary and the one witness to the shooting of Nick Byrnes. His church depended on Whitney's money.
The latest flake of suspicion was even more intriguing. Father Steve knew that the jury had been deadlocked, though he shouldn't have known anything about their deliberations. His claim that he had learned that fact from Whitney's father didn't wash with Harry's memory.
Mason conceded the vagaries of fifteen-year-old memories; he'd won enough cases by convincing juries that memory had an accurate half-life of minutes, not years. Unless it was Harry's memory. None of this made the priest guilty of anything, but all of it made Mason wish for a seat next to Father Steve the next time he made confession.
Mason asked himself what angles he wasn't working, what rocks he was stepping over instead of turning over. Vince Kowalczyk, he realized, might not be in the Omaha phone book, but Mary said he was a carpenter, which meant he could be in a union. Mason got the phone number of the Omaha local from directory assistance. A human being answered his call instead of an artificial voice telling him their options had recently changed.
'I'm looking for someone who may be a member of your union. His name is Vince Kowalczyk. I am an attorney representing his wife, Mary. It's very urgent that I talk to him,' Mason explained.
'Hold on,' a man said, asking someone named Jim if it was okay to give out membership information. Mason eavesdropped from his end of the conversation. Jim said to take the guy's name and we'll give the message to Vince, let Vince call the guy if he wants to.
'Works for me,' Mason said, leaving his phone number when the man repeated the message.
His paper shuffling brought the clipping about his parents' accident back to the surface, Mason picking it up again, asking himself the same questions. What was he missing? The article told only part of the story: how the car went off the road. Mason wanted to know why. The article said nothing about witnesses, but that didn't mean there weren't any. Their names would be included in the police report. Mason picked up the phone again.
'Detective Greer,' Samantha said.
'What's the best way for me to beg a favor?' Mason asked.
'Dial another number,' she answered.
'Too late. I'll settle for the second best way. I need an accident report.'
'A car accident? You've got to be kidding. Get off your ass, go to the records department, pay your ten dollars, and wait for the mail. Just like everybody else.'
'I would, except for one thing. This accident happened forty years ago. No records clerk is going to lose any sleep tracking that down unless it's an order instead of a request.'
'What's so important about an accident that happened forty years ago? A little late to file a lawsuit, isn't it?' Samantha asked.
'It's my parents' accident,' Mason answered. 'They were killed. I never knew the details. Now I want to know.'
'I'll buy that if it will keep you out of trouble for a while,' she said. 'Friday afternoon is no time to ask someone to start a search like this. Can it wait until Monday?'
'Monday would be fine. And, thanks, Sam.'
Mason wondered if the accident report would tell him why someone was visiting his parents' grave now. The accident happened on August 1 forty years ago. Today was July
19. There was no way to know when the rock Mason had found had been left there. It could have been a week, a month, or a year.
Mason couldn't remember when he'd last visited his parents' grave or whether there were any rocks on the headstone. But someone had left another rock today. Mason knew the question, writing it on the board, even if he didn't know the answer.
Mason didn't have answers, but at least he had questions. He'd kick-started his case and peeled open his past. Now all he could do was the one thing he hated to do most of all. Wait.
Chapter 25
There's only so much heat a city can take. Some people shrug it off at first, declaring over cold beer and barbecue that it augurs for a hard winter and pass the beans, please. Like they'd written
But stoke up the blast furnace long enough on people who struggle every day to hold their lives together in the midst of money problems, job problems, family problems, and the heat starts burning them down like a wildfire on a New Mexico mountain. Short tempers get shorter, disappearing in a swallow of whiskey or in the crack of an insult. And people start killing each other.
A local shrink said as much on the Channel 6 evening news Monday night, a week and a day after Ryan Kowalczyk was executed, a legal killing that didn't offend the laws of nature or cause the distress that an outbreak of weekend fights and domestic disturbances had generated.
Two Hispanics in a bar on Southwest Boulevard fought over whether one had insulted the other's girlfriend, both of them too drunk to know for certain. The fight ended with the boyfriend's throat ripped open by the jagged edge of a broken bottle of tequila. The boyfriend bled out. The girlfriend grabbed a table knife, snapping the blade off between the other guy's ribs. One dead, one wounded. The girlfriend in jail.
North of the river, two brothers fought over a gold cap for the younger brother's tooth. He'd left it in the older brother's car and the older brother offered to sell it back to him for thirty dollars. The younger brother decided it was cheaper to cap his brother with a.38.
On the east side, rival black gangs cruised up and down Prospect Avenue, trash talking until respect and disrespect turned into guns and knives, the cops firing tear gas and busting heads. Two dead, eight injured, two of them cops.
In Mission Hills, a part of town where only the hired help spoke Spanish and the only cruising was done on a ship, a bank president grilling steaks dumped hot coals on his drunken wife when she confronted him about his latest mistress. The banker told the cops his wife was screaming so loud, he thought he'd give her something to scream about.
Mason half listened to the news, finishing a cold beer and short end of ribs as he leafed through part of the King file he'd brought home from the office. Setting the file aside, he replayed his weekend. Tuffy nudged his thigh until he shared the ribs with her.
Friday night, he'd found Josh Seeley's campaign Web site, clicking on the candidate's itinerary, toying with
