The Letter Of The Law

CHAPTER 2

The spring rain was light and fresh. The air was warm. A sliver of sun had torn through the hem of the western clouds with the promise of better weather. Bright sprouts of grass had recovered from a chilly Texas winter and blanketed the lawns in a shimmering lime green. The trees lining either side of the busy street were exploding with new buds. But Bob Bolinger didn't notice any of that. The heat was getting to him. The air pumping out of his car vents was tepid at best. He needed Freon, among other things. He also needed a date. He knew that. It was almost five years since he had found his wife in bed with his ex-best friend.

Bolinger looked at his watch. Quitting time. He loosened his tie, slid down in the driver's seat, and relaxed for the first time that day. Like Houdini, he squirmed out of his old gray blazer while keeping one hand on the wheel, noticing for the first time a week-old mustard stain on the jacket's sleeve. Maybe he'd get in a quick nine holes before dark. Then he could shoot on over to the Romper Room, have a couple of scotch and sodas and a burger at the bar, and who knew? He might get lucky. What was the lottery slogan? You gotta be in it to win it.

Then the call came in. Bolinger cursed out loud but gladly took the call. The last thing the Romper Room needed was a mangy old cop on the prowl for some love. Anyway, this call was important. Apparently, a young woman, a law student, needed a body bag. He wondered fleetingly if his ex-wife would ever end up in a body bag. He cast that whimsical notion aside and ran a hand up over the top of his bristly gray crew cut, scratching the back of his leathery neck.

From the tone of the call, it sounded like a messy scene. Bolinger spun the wheel and turned back his unmarked cruiser against the grain of the traffic. He shot up Guadalupe and into the old homes near the university. The University of Texas was as big a part of Austin as the state capitol itself. So when a body turned up anywhere near the campus, all kinds of noses got out of joint. No one liked the idea of anyone dying young.

There were already six squad cars and an unmarked at the scene, as well as an ambulance with its lights still flashing. The patrolmen were well into the process of sealing off the area. Bolinger didn't have to show his badge as he dipped under the yellow tape. They knew who he was. The crime lab techs arrived at the same time, jumping out of their van and invading the scene like paratroopers. They spilled around Bolinger and he let them. He was in no hurry to get inside. He wanted to take in the scene. The house was an old two-story surrounded by towering oaks. The number of mailboxes told him the place had been split up into three apartments. A cracked driveway led to the detached garage in the back of the house. The girl's apartment was back there on the ground floor. Bolinger met his best friend on the force, a detective named Farnhorst, on the back steps. He was the first suit on the scene, and his honey-colored skin had a green cast.

"I heard it's ugly," Bolinger said.

Farnhorst looked down at his boss. Bolinger was only five feet six. Tears welled in the bigger man's sad-looking eyes, and this puzzled Bolinger.

"Goddamn, Sergeant." Farnhorst choked. "Goddamn."

"Anyone see anything?" Bolinger asked. His square-cut chin was protruding, and his dark brown eyes bore into his friend like deadly weevils. Bob Bolinger did his job without emotion.

"Nothing yet. No one home in either of the other places. The paperboy found her and called nine-one-one, out of his mind. I guess she'd leave the money on the kitchen table, and he'd just walk in to get it if she wasn't home." Farnhorst let Bolinger pass and said quietly, "Her name was Marcia Sales…"

Bolinger could smell the gore the second he walked through the door. When he saw the body, he took a deep breath.

"Holy shit," he uttered.

A tech snapped off a shot and stepped to the side. The girl lay on her back in the middle of the floor, naked. A thick band of duct tape encircled her head, covering her mouth. Her eyes were frozen wide with horror. Blood was everywhere. Bolinger moved closer.

"Watch it, Sergeant!" cried a scowling tech as he darted toward him. Bolinger sidestepped a bloody organ he couldn't identify and crouched down next to the body. There were bruise marks around her neck, and Bolinger found himself involuntarily hoping that was how she died. On the couch were what he presumed had been the girl's clothes. Oddly, they were folded. That told him she probably got naked on her own and that she knew whoever did this pretty well. Carefully, he poked through the clothes. There was no underwear or bra anywhere, and Bolinger wondered if there was a reason or if it had simply been the girl's style.

There was a scuffle in the entryway accompanied by Farnhorst's bark. Bolinger looked up to see a large man with long dark hair. He pushed his way into the living room. Bolinger stood up to face him. Before he could speak, the man, who wore faded jeans and cowboy boots, froze in his tracks and let out a maniacal howl that made Bolinger reflexively draw his gun. The man's face was contorted and he pulled at his own hair. When Farnhorst and his partner got hold of either arm, the man burst into a wild flurry of arms and legs. Farnhorst, who weighed in at about three hundred pounds, went flying like a lawn chair. The other cop, too, went sideways into a lamp, and they both crashed to the floor.

The maniac's howl turned to a bloodcurdling scream, and he shot toward the door. Bolinger was after him with Farnhorst and his partner in tow. The man bolted out the door and down the driveway, screaming all the while.

"Stop him!" Bolinger shouted.

Halfway down the drive two patrolmen brought the man down like a pair of linebackers. But even the shock of his head hitting the pavement did nothing to take the fight out of him. He bucked the patrolmen up into the air and spun himself around. As he rose, one of the cops took out his baton and struck the back of his neck. As he went down, the big man yanked a revolver out of the other patrolman's belt. Bolinger was two steps away on a full run when the man jammed the gun into his own mouth.

Instinctively, Bolinger dove for the pistol, jamming his fingers between the hammer and the chamber just as the man pulled the trigger. Bolinger cried out in pain but didn't let go. With his other hand he grabbed for the gun and wrestled for it, but the maniac had clamped down on the barrel with his teeth for all he was worth.

When Farnhorst hit the guy with Mace, Bolinger got a good shot of it, too. Blood was running freely down his hand now, but still he kept his fingers jammed beneath the gun's hammer. With his eyes shut tight against the burning Mace, Bolinger rolled with the punches until he realized that he'd been separated from the melee and he alone held the gun. He rolled over on the pavement and sat up coughing and crying from the Mace. His eyes cleared enough to see that even with a set of cuffs on his wrists and another shot of Mace, the man continued to struggle violently. Bolinger could only think he was whacked out on PCBs.

Before he knew it, the guy was up again and surrounded by four policemen, two wielding their batons. Blood streamed down the man's face from his nose, his eyes were swollen half shut, and still he screamed. Abruptly, he dropped to his knees, hung his head, and let out a dismal sob. Then he dropped to his side and cried almost as violently as he had fought.

"It was Lipton!" he bawled. "It was Lipton! She said she was afraid! She told me she was afraid of him! Lipton! Oh my God, Lipton!"

And then his words were so garbled that Bolinger couldn't understand him. Carefully, the cops loaded the man into the back of a cruiser and let him sit.

"Shit," Farnhorst said, helping Bolinger to his feet. "You all right?"

"Yeah," Bolinger said, stooping down to pick up a wallet off the ground. He leafed through it.

"Donald Sales," he said to Farnhorst, holding up the wallet and wiping the tears from his face on his sleeve. "Girl's father?"

Farnhorst shrugged. "Jesus, I guess. You think he was the one who killed her?"

"I have no idea," Bolinger said, his lips pressed tight. "Take him in and chain him up to the floor so he can't hurt himself. Let him sit for a while, and then I'll talk to him. He said something about someone named Lipton."

"Sergeant?"

Bolinger spun around. It was Alice Vreeland from the ME's office. She was a stubby redhead and the best they had.

"Rough day?" she asked.

Bolinger shook his head. "Didn't start out that way, but it looks like that's how it's ending up."

"Looks like the photos are finished," she said, eyeing the cameraman, who was loading his equipment back into his van.

"When the crime lab is done, you want me to remove the remains, or is there anything else you need to see?" she asked.

"No," Bolinger said. "I've seen enough."

At six feet five and two hundred sixty pounds, Sales was an imposing man. Cuffed and chained to the floor, with his face swollen and bloody and his pale eyes burning with hate, he looked downright scary.

"Cigarette?" Bolinger asked.

Sales nodded and Bolinger stuck one into the other man's mouth. Sales sucked greedily when it touched the proffered flame. Besides being big, Bolinger guessed that, cleaned up, Sales was a handsome man. His tan skin had a reddish cast that suggested Native American blood somewhere close by in the family tree. Bolinger already knew that Sales was a decorated veteran who'd served in Southeast Asia and that since his return he'd been self-employed as a carpenter who specialized in building docks around Lake Travis. Just after he'd arrived home from the war, Sales had been arrested in separate incidents on charges of disorderly conduct and assault. Both had been pled down to lesser charges. The red flag was that Sales had undergone treatment at the VA hospital for post-traumatic stress disorder. It wasn't an uncommon thing for veterans, but Bolinger knew it wasn't an uncommon thing for psychopathic killers, either.

Bolinger lit a Winston of his own and looked candidly at Sales through the smoke.

"You want to sit down?" the sergeant asked.

Sales jangled his chains and snorted disdainfully but sat down anyway on the cell's concrete floor. Bolinger sat on the bench against the wall. Beside him, he put down a tape recorder whose rectangular red light glared accusingly at Sales.

"What brought you to your daughter's apartment?" he asked quietly.

"Ha!" Sales barked. His face crumpled in pain, and tears began to stream freely down his face. He shook his head from side to side as if trying to make everything go away. "Ha! My daughter! Oh God! Oh my God!"

Bolinger waited. In ten minutes, the big man's crying subsided enough for him to take a deep breath and say, "We were supposed to have dinner together. I was taking her to dinner…

"We did that," he explained sadly, looking directly into Bolinger's eyes. "I promised her that if she went to law school at UT I wouldn't be around all the time. I only live an hour up the road. But I told her I wouldn't always be checking up on her. When she was at San Angelo State, I used to drop in on her a lot…"

Here Sales looked at Bolinger to see if he understood. Bolinger didn't have kids, but his brother did, so he nodded with commiseration.

"Yeah, so I stopped doing it, but we'd still see each other pretty regular. We were going to dinner- Oh God!"

Sales started to shake and cry again. When he was quiet, Bolinger said, "Where were you before?"

"Home," Sales said dully. "I finished a job after lunch and took the rest of the day off to work around the house."

"Anyone with you?"

Sales shook his head.

"Anyone see you?"

"My house is out in the middle of nowhere," Sales said. "No one ever sees me."

"Would you sign a consent that allows us to search your house and your truck?" Bolinger asked.

Sales looked at him, mystified. "Why?"

Bolinger shrugged and held out a consent form with a pen.

"Ha!" Sales erupted. "Ha! You think I… Ha! I told you who did it! It was Lipton. Her professor, he was after her. I told her I'd talk to him, but she didn't want that. He gave her the creeps.

"Give me that," he said in disgust. "I'll sign anything. You can look anywhere you want for anything you want, but you better have someone go get this guy!"

Bolinger talked with the father for over an hour, pumping him for every bit of information from every angle he could think of. At the end of that time, he excused himself and reported to his lieutenant.

"I'm letting him go," he said.

The lieutenant raised an eyebrow. The father was all they had. They could book him and hold him on charges of assaulting an officer and resisting arrest. They didn't need to let him go anywhere. They could sit on him for another day if they wanted, unless he started barking for a lawyer. But Bolinger cut through all that. He was a man who'd built his reputation on instinct.

"He didn't do it," Bolinger said. "He's calmed down now, and if he blows his brains out, then he does. But I don't think he will. I think he just lost it. If I book him, then I'll have to deal with some lawyer, and I'd rather be able to talk to this guy straight. He may be able to help us, I don't know."

The lieutenant nodded and said, "You going to go home and get some rest?" It was after ten, and Bolinger had gone on duty that morning at seven.

"No."

"Didn't think so. What next?"

"The professor. According to Farnhorst, the girl's criminal law professor is a guy by the name of Eric Lipton, a well-known academic. Besides teaching at UT, he travels all around the country giving seminars on defendants' rights. He's the one the father thinks did it."

"Holy shit," the lieutenant moaned, "a law professor. That'll be fun. Anything prior on him?"

Bolinger shook his head. "Clean as a whistle."

The lieutenant paused for a moment before asking, "You ever look at the crap that builds up on the inside of someone's whistle?" He'd spent the first two years of his career in the traffic division.

"No," Bolinger said, "but I'll take your word for it."

Professor Eric Lipton lived in the fashionable neighborhood of Terrytown. It was where a lot of the old money lived, expensive real estate directly adjacent to the wide, placid stretch of the Colorado River running through the center of Austin. Lipton's place was a big white contemporary speckled with GlassBlock cubes that allowed light without compromising privacy. A wrought-iron fence surrounded the property. Although it was night, landscape lights illuminated the house and the lawn that sprawled under carefully manicured trees cut into geometric designs. It was a big-money place, and Bolinger could tell by the shape it was in that Lipton was the kind of person who squeezed his toothpaste out of the tube from the bottom up. White gravel crunched under Bolinger's tires as he pulled into a semicircular drive and underneath a tall, flat-roofed portico supported by a cluster of narrow white columns.

Lipton came to the door in a white satin sweat suit and expensive Polo leather slippers. His glare was hostile. He was a tall, angular man whose figure suggested that of a swimmer. He had none of the usual stoop for someone of his height and age. His hair was a wavy faded blond, flowing back from his face as if he'd just come out of the wind. His skin was tan, but its orange tint told Bolinger he was the kind of person who'd spent time under an ultraviolet light. His high, rugged cheekbones, perfect teeth, and the weathered skin around his bright blue eyes reminded Bolinger of the tennis pro who had tried to teach him how to serve on his last vacation in Fort Lauderdale.

"Can I help you?" the professor asked with a disinterested sniff.

Bolinger knew that was not what he meant. The last thing on earth he wanted to do was help. Something about the professor didn't smell right.

"Professor Lipton? I'm Sergeant Bolinger," the detective said. "One of your students has been killed, and I wanted to ask you some questions about her. Would you mind coming downtown with me?"

Lipton looked him up and down. A light, airy laugh spilled from his mouth.

"Do you know my area of expertise, Sergeant?" he asked snidely.

"Yes, sir. I do"

"Then you shouldn't have even asked if I would go with you. This is my world, Sergeant. My view of the police is a… an adversarial one…

"However," he continued as if he were lecturing a class, "I don't wish to imply that mine is a hostile or secretive nature. You can come in, Sergeant. You can ask me whatever you like. I'm a reasonable man… I'll give you five minutes."

Lipton looked down at his watch, marking the time, then said simply to Bolinger, "Anything more would be a waste of my time and yours. My knowledge of Ms. Sales is quite limited."

"How did you know it was Marcia Sales?" Bolinger said, his blood racing and his eyes narrowing at the sound of her name coming so unexpectedly from the professor's mouth.

Lipton's eyes flickered with panic, for a moment, nothing more. Then he said calmly, "Why, Sergeant, you told me."

"No," Bolinger said with a crooked smile. "No, I didn't."

"Get the hell out of here!" Lipton said, flaring up angrily. "Don't you come here to my home making insinuations! You forget that I know my rights! I'm not some street thug. I don't have anything to say to you! You want to talk? Call my lawyer!"

The door slammed in Bolinger's face, but still he smiled. He had his man.

A slip of the tongue wasn't much. Bolinger knew that getting a warrant based on that alone might not float. But it was enough for him to stake out the house. And he was confident that by the middle of the next day the crime lab would come up with something. When they didn't, Bolinger felt his stomach sink.

"Cleanest crime scene I've ever seen," was what the crime lab's captain told him.

Bolinger had twenty men working under him on this one, and so far, no one had turned over anything concrete. He knew it was Lipton. But he needed something solid. A hunch never convicted anyone. That took hard evidence.

Ten minutes later, Farnhorst burst into his office with a mammoth grin.

"Got what you need, Bob!" he said, waving a paper triumphantly in the air. He slapped it down on Bolinger's desk and said, "Did a computer cross-check on the area and I came up with this!"

Bolinger followed the detective's thick finger to the spot on the page that chronicled a code ten-seventeen, a hit-and-run property damage. Apparently, the day before at two-thirty in the afternoon, a woman whose car was parked on the street opposite Marcia Sales's address had seen a maroon Lexus sedan back out of the driveway and into her car. The driver, whom she couldn't identify, sped off without stopping, but the woman had noted the license plate number as the car tore down the street. The car belonged to Lipton.

"Yes!" Bolinger said, slapping the paper. "Get me a warrant, Mo. I want the house and the car turned inside out, and I want him under a light before lunch."

Bolinger closed the door to his office, then opened the window before taking out a cigarette and lighting up. He rubbed his eyes and gulped down what was left of his coffee, taking time to crush a few grounds between his teeth. Sleep was something that would have to wait. This was how it was done, classic detective work. Most homicides were solved in the first forty-eight hours or they weren't solved at all. He'd known when he saw him that Lipton smelled, and now he had him.

Earlier in the morning, Alice Vreeland had confirmed for him that the girl hadn't died of asphyxiation but from having some of her insides cut out. She had bled to death. Alice told him he was looking for a pretty sharp knife.

"Sharp enough to shave," Vreeland had commented.

"By the way," she had continued, "I've got to go back to the house. I thought they had everything, but I can't find her gall bladder. No one picked one up, did they?"

Bolinger rubbed his eyes some more and wondered again at her macabre comment. Unsure of whether or not she was trying to be funny, he hadn't reacted. Now he wondered if, instead of an oversight, there was some reason the gall bladder was missing. He'd never heard of anything like it, but he'd never seen a body like that, either, half choked to death and split open like a butchered cow. Bolinger shuddered at the thought. An image came screaming into the forefront of his mind. It was the look on Don Sales's face and the sound of his horror when he walked into that room. How deep must that pain be?

Bolinger picked up the phone. He wanted to give the father something, an offering of condolence. The only way he knew to do that was to show how hard he was working to pin down the killer. He wanted to call Sales and tell him about the apparent hit-and-run. Then he thought better of it. He'd wait until they had Lipton in the bag. There was no reason to build the man's hopes on circumstantial evidence. Who knew? They might get lucky and find the knife with the girl's blood all over it, although from the cleanliness of the crime scene, he doubted it. Whoever killed the girl knew what they were doing. A crime scene that clean was almost unheard of.

Bolinger worked up some paper. It was nearly two hours before Farnhorst returned.

"We got him, Bob," he said triumphantly. "Guy was getting ready to take a little trip. He'd booked a ticket to Toronto and was already on his way north on Thirty-five towards the airport when I caught up with the surveillance team to bring him in. When we tried to pull him over, he made a run for it. Wrecked his car, then hopped out and ran into some woods. He didn't get very far. Had a couple bags packed, his passport, and about twenty thousand dollars in cash."

Bolinger stuck a pen in his mouth and started to chew on it. "Shit, good job."

"But this is what you're really gonna like," Farnhorst said, holding forth a plastic bag containing what looked like a woman's underwear.

Bolinger took the bag and looked at it quizzically.

"We found this stuffed into the bottom of his duffel bag…" Farnhorst said. "It's a woman's bra and panties…

"There's blood on them, Bob," he said quietly. "I wanted to show you before I send them to the lab… I think they might be hers."