“Sorry, Harry, I don’t remember the name. I might’ve never had it. I didn’t talk to her and I don’t think Jack even told me.”
I was silent while I considered whether this was a lead worth pursuing. I thought about what Kiz Rider had said about the case being worked. Maybe this was the angle. Maybe the people she told me about were FBI agents. While I was working it over, Cross started talking again.
“For what it’s worth, I got the idea from Jack that this agent, whoever she was, sort of came up with this thing on her own. It was her own little program she was running. Almost like a hobby. Not on the official computer.”
“Okay. Do you remember if you ever got any other hits on the numbers? Before this one?”
“There was one but it didn’t go anywhere. It came up pretty soon, in fact.”
“What was that?”
“It came up in a bank deposit. I think it was Phoenix. My memory’s like Swiss cheese. A lot of holes.”
“You remember anything about that one at all?”
“Just that it was a deposit from a cash business. Like a restaurant. Something we weren’t going to be able to trace any further back.”
“But it was pretty soon after the heist?”
“Yeah, I remember we jumped on it. Jack went out there. But it was a dead end.”
“How soon after the heist, can you remember?”
“Maybe a few weeks. I don’t know for sure.”
I nodded. His memory was coming back but it still wasn’t reliable. It served to remind me that without the murder book-the case documentation-I was severely handicapped.
“Okay, Law, thanks. If you remember or think of anything else, have Danny call me. And whether that happens or not I’ll be back to see you.”
“And you’ll bring the…”
He didn’t finish and didn’t need to.
“Yeah, I’ll bring it. You sure you don’t want me to bring somebody else? Maybe a lawyer that could talk to you about -”
“No, Harry, no lawyers, not yet.”
“You want me to talk to Danny?”
“No, Harry, don’t talk to her.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
I nodded my good-bye and left the room. I wanted to get to my car so I could quickly write some notes about the call Jack Dorsey had gotten from the bureau agent. But when I came from the hallway into the living room Danielle Cross was sitting there waiting for me. She was on the couch and looked at me with accusing eyes. I threw the look right back at her.
“I think it’s almost time for a show he wants to watch on Court TV.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
“Okay. I’m leaving now.”
“I wish you would not come back.”
“Well, I may have to.”
“The man is on a delicate balance-mentally and physically. The alcohol upsets it. It takes days for him to recover.”
“Looked to me like it improved things for him.”
“Then come back tomorrow and have another look.”
I nodded. She was right. I spent a half hour with the man, not my life. I waited. I could tell she was working up toward something.
“I assume he told you that he wants to die and that I’m the one keeping him alive. For the money.”
I hesitated but then nodded.
“He said I mistreat him.”
I nodded again.
“He tells that to everybody that comes visit. All the cops.”
“Is it true?”
“The part about wanting to die? Some days. Some days it’s not.”
“What about the part about being mistreated.”
She looked away from me.
“It’s frustrating, dealing with him. He’s not happy. He takes it out on me. One time I took it out on him. I turned off the television. He started crying like a baby.”
She looked up at me.
“That’s all I’ve ever done but it was enough. I hate what I did, what I became in the moment. Everything got the better of me.”
I tried to read her eyes, the set of her jaw and mouth. She had her hands together in front of her, the fingers of one hand working the rings on the other set. A nervous gesture. I watched her chin start to quiver and then the tears started to come.
“What am I supposed to do?”
I shook my head. I didn’t know. The only thing I knew was that I had to get out of there.
“I don’t know, Danny. I don’t know what any of us are supposed to do.”
It was all I could think of to say. I walked quickly to the front door and left. I felt like a coward walking away and leaving them alone together in that house.
7
Loose lips sink ships. The theory of the case pursued by Cross and Dorsey four years earlier was simple. They believed that Angella Benton had intimate knowledge through her job about the $2 million that was to be delivered to the film location and had set the robbery and her own death in motion by either intentionally or mistakenly talking about the money. Her loose lips planted the seed of the robbery and, consequently, her own demise. Being the inside link to the robbers, she had to be eliminated to cover their tracks. Because she was murdered four days before the robbery, it was believed by the two investigators that her involvement was unintentional. She had somehow furnished the information that led to the robbery and needed to be eliminated before she realized what she had done. She also needed to be eliminated in a way that would not draw suspicion to the impending cash delivery. Thus the psychosexual aspects of the crime scene-the tearing of the clothes and the evidence of masturbation-were in a way simply window dressing on the misdirection.
Conversely, if she had been a willing participant in the robbery scheme, it seemed likely to the investigators that her death would have come after the robbery had been successfully accomplished.
It seemed like a solid theory to me as Lawton Cross had recounted it during my first visit to his home. It was probably the way I would have gone if I had been allowed to stay on the case. But ultimately the theory didn’t pay off. Cross told me that he and his partner had worked a full field investigation on Benton but never came across the one clue that opened up the case. They spent five solid months on her. They traced her movements, personal habits and daily-life routines. They studied her credit-card, banking and telephone data. They interviewed and re- interviewed all family members and known friends and associates. They spent eight days in Columbus alone. Dorsey went to Phoenix to chase down a single hundred-dollar bill. They spent so much time at Eidolon Productions that for one month they were given their own office at Archway Pictures in which to conduct interviews.
And they got nothing.
As is often the case with a homicide, they amassed a wealth of knowledge about the victim but not the key piece of information that led to the identity of her killer. They ended up knowing who she had slept with in college but not where she had spent the last evening of her life. They knew her last meal had been Mexican-the corn
