Bone Deep

29

Becker found Tee in his office, the map of Clamden spread on his desk with a plastic grid atop it. The grid was marked with concentric circles widening out from the center point and overlaid with Tee's markings in red, blue, and black. Tee looked up cautiously as Becker entered "I brought you something," Becker said, offering a white paper bag.

"Does it bite?" Tee asked coolly.

"No, you bite it."

Tee took the bag and set it gingerly on his desk, as if it might explode. He did not look inside. The two men had not spoken since the incident in the Marriott lobby when Becker jammed his fingers in the big man's throat.

"This official business?" Tee asked brusquely. "Yes and no."

"Which?"

"First, I came to apologize. I shouldn't have done that, you did nothing to deserve it."

"You got that part right."

"I'm sorry. I lost control."

"I guess I'm lucky I wasn't in the elevator," Tee said.

Becker sighed. "You're not going to make this any easier for me, are you?' "What do you want me to do? You apologized, I accept. Case closed."

Becker shook his head. "You were saying some things I asked you to stop-you didn't…" 'My fault for not following orders."

"Tee, I said I'm sorry."

"Oh, all right then, that takes care of everything. My fault for not shutting up when you told me to."

"Look, I'm not excusing myself. I'm trying to explain, which isn't easy. I've been… I'm having some trouble with Kom."

"Some of us gathered that. I think Kom realizes it too."

Becker sat in the chair pulled up alongside Tee's desk. He studied his hands for a moment before speaking. "Do you remember how you wanted to kill McNeil because of Ginny?"

"I think I vaguely recall that. You saved my ass. Duly noted.

"That's not what I mean. I feel that way about Kom… He's having an affair with Karen."

They were both stunned into silence. Becker realized it was the first time he had said it aloud. Perhaps the first time he had even thought of it as an unequivocal reality. He felt his stomach fall in despair.

It was so much worse to have said it.

"John, I'm so sorry," said Tee. "I'm just… I can't… I'm so sorry."

Becker nodded, unable to speak just yet.

Tee ran through all of the things he might say, the protest ations of surprise, the refusal to believe such a thing of Karen, his outrage at Kom. None of them would make things better and he could see that Becker was having trouble enough as it was.

"I'm telling you this to explain my bias," Becker said at last. "You should know that up front. I am suffering extreme prejudice in this case. I am not and have not been acting like a disinterested agent in this matter..

"Agent?"

Becker looked hard at Tee. "I want to tell you a story. One cop to another. I can't tell anyone in the Bureau because of Karen. I trust you to keep this to yourself." Tee nodded, confused but loyal.

"I want to run some things past you, you tell me what you think."

"From a legal point of view?"

"No, legality has nothing to do with this. I've got nothing to take to court. There is no case as far as the law is concerned-any attorney in the country would rip me to shreds. I have demonstrated my bias rather publicly, as Kom understands, of course. You're a cop, you have instincts, tell me if I'm crazy. Okay?"

"Go," said Tee.

"I think Kom is Johnny Appleseed… No reaction? Don't you want to tell me I'm out of my mind?"

"I'm the man who thought McNeil was Johnny. Tell me what you've got."

"The bodies were cut up by an expert, a point that Grone made from the beginning and that Kom initially denied. Kom is an orthopedic surgeon-an expert."

"Doesn't mean much by itself, but go ahead."

"The Chevy Caprice was registered to Schilling, right? Schilling wrote a check to Kom after a visit about golfer's elbow three years ago. He wrote his driver's license ID number on that check, so Kom had access to the number which was used to register the car in Schilling's name."

"How many other checks had his driver's-license number on them?"

"Dozens. But one of them was to Kom."

"Okay, noted. Is there any physical evidence at all linkin Kom to the Caprice?"

"None… except that I saw him in it."

"When?"

"The night that it drove by us."

Tee thought for a moment. "The night that I thought I saw McNeil driving it?"

"Yes."

"I was wrong, which doesn't mean you were right."

"I know it."

"I thought I saw McNeil because I wanted to see McNeil, just as you suggested. You wanted to see Kom."

"Granted. I said it won't hold up in court."

"Okay, next point."

"Kom has been having affairs for years-I mean lots of affairs. I have this from two sources. His wife has told me so… and I had him followed by a P.I."

Tee winced in sympathy. He could imagine how embarrassing that would have been for Becker.

"He was seeing three different women as recently as this week," Becker said. One of them, Tee realized, must have been Karen. "He's a compulsive philanderer," Becker continued.

Tee nodded. It was a topic that they would normally have joked about, but now the topic was dangerous.

Becker said, "I imagine he used the Caprice to meet most of them, so his own car wouldn't be recognized in unusual places. With those tinted windows he could drive around at night pretty freely. This doesn't make him a killer either, but it does give him access to a lot of women, some of whom may have been the bodies in the orchard. We know that he knows the Hills socially, he's been to their house once or twice, so he would have met Inge Schrag. Several of the women had had broken bones at some time in their lives; they might well have used him as a doctor, but we won't know until we can identify them."

"What about this new one, the one they found at the Marriott?" Stamford was not in Tee's jurisdiction, but he had been informed out of courtesy of the Lawson case.

"Denise Lawson."

"Any evidence to connect him with that?"

"Not yet. Maybe not at all. He's very careful. We can't even get someone to testify that they saw him at the hotel at the right time, because he was in and out of the hotel a lot-supposedly arranging that dinner for me."

"He was standing in front of all of us about the time she was supposed to have been killed, wasn't he?"

"They don't know when she was killed, they can only tell within a couple hours. The girl hadn't eaten anything in twenty-four hours, she was probably nervous as a cat going to meet him there, it was some kind of big rendezvous-we know that the teddy she was wearing was brandnew.

There was nothing in her stomach to let us put a time on the death. He could have been there three hours before we saw hi@, or an hour or two later."

"I heard there was a watch or something..

"Easiest thing in the world to fake. It was a farce, the whole thing.

He was laughing at us, using us as his alibi."

"A jury would like that broken watch business."

"I know they would," said Becker. "It's worse. The P.I. who was supposedly watching him said he never left the hospital. Which means that he never drove his car, but the hospital has several exits, he could have left whenever he wanted to."

"I hope you've got more than any of this. This is worse than thin, John."

"Yes, I have something else. He told me he did it."

Becker told Tee of his conversation in the elevator, and of his interpretation of it.

"To anyone else it would look like you were beating a confession out of him, you know that."

"I don't have a prayer in court. I can't even justify fur there FBI inquiries. I sure as hell can't talk to Karen about it-not that we're speaking to each other anyway. All I can do is tell another cop what my gut feeling is. So I'm telling you."

"You want more than to just tell me though, don't you, John?"

"A little more."

You want me to help you." 'Yes," Becker said. Tee was silent for a moment. Becker added,

"Please."

Tee studied his desk for a moment as if to find his decision there.

"I'll need some help during the day," Becker said. "I'll be up with him at night, but I need a chance to sleep-I don't want him to."

Tee looked up from the desk, drummed his fingers on the surface. He reached over to the white bag Becker had brought him and peered in.

"Did you tell them the bagel was for me?" he asked. "They usually give me more crewn cheese."