Thicker Than Water

Chapter Forty-Four

Louis examined the knuckles of his right hand. The skin was broken and something hurt, like he had cracked a bone. He glanced up at the wall clock. It was after one; he had been here since seven this morning.

After leaving the cemetery, he had gone right to Mobley. He told him what Brian and Scott had said, but not what happened afterward. Mobely had looked long and hard at Louis’s swollen hand but had not asked the obvious questions. Then Mobley had called Scott, asking him to come in for questioning. Scott had come willingly, bringing Brian. They had been in the interrogation room for more than an hour now.

A door opened and Louis looked up as Mobley came out. He saw Louis sitting there and came over.

“You look like hell,” Mobley said.

Louis realized Mobley had the same beaten look he had the last time Louis had seen him at O’Sullivan’s. Something hadn’t gone right in that room.

Mobley sank down onto the bench next to him. “They’ve denied everything,” he said. “Scott says they were at the cemetery mourning their poor dead father and you just appeared and started harassing them.”

“Did he tell you the rest?”

“No. Why don’t you give it a shot?”

Louis drew in a deep breath. “I tried to walk away, but Scott kept talking. He laughed about her. He said it was ironic that he was hired as Cade’s lawyer. Ironic, for chrissake.”

“So you beat the shit out of him.”

Louis nodded, flexing his hand. “I lost it. And he just stood there while I beat the crap out of him. Just stood there with that fucking smile on his face like he wanted me to keep hitting him.”

“He did.”

Louis started to ask Mobley what he meant, but suddenly it hit him. Scott knew exactly what he was doing; it had been part of his game strategy. He knew that if Louis attacked him, Louis would lose all credibility and any testimony that might get admitted wouldn’t be believed. That why he was so willing to show up at the station; he wanted everyone to see his face.

Louis leaned his head back against the wall.

“If you push this so-called confession,” Mobley said, “I get the feeling he’ll counter with assault charges. And we’re not talking thirty days here, Louis.”

“I don’t care. I’ll tell it to anyone who will listen.”

“I don’t think it’s going to do you any good.”

Louis stared at the closed door to the interrogation room. “So Scott was right? It’s all privileged?”

Mobley shrugged. “I don’t know about that, but between the privilege, hearsay and coercion issues, I do know we got one big fucking legal cesspool that will take years to clean up.”

Louis sighed, dropping his gaze to the floor.

“It gets worse,” Mobley said. “They’ve hired a big time lawyer from Miami who’s already on his way here to file a motion to try Brian as a juvenile. Sandusky says we’ve got to go by the 1966 laws, and it was general practice back then to try kids as kids. If they do that, Brian will walk away completely because he’s already over the maximum age you can punish juveniles for.”

Mobley hesitated, watching Louis. “And without Brian facing charges, we got no leverage to ever turn him against Scott.”

“I don’t believe this.”

“And even if the juvenile thing doesn’t work, Scott’s claiming everything we found in the search is inadmissable because the warrants were based on information you gave us-”

“And that makes it privileged,” Louis said.

Mobley nodded. “And without the warrants, we can’t even use Brian’s statement.”

“That’s fucking crazy. There’s no way a lawyer can claim privilege when one of his employees discovers he’s committed a crime.”

Mobley sighed heavily. “I don’t know about that, but I do know this case is going down the toilet real quick. Even if we could use the evidence, what else do we got?”

Louis didn’t answer. He knew what was coming.

“Hell, we got a shaky statement by Brian that some lawyer will get thrown out because we didn’t Mirandize him when he showed up or some shit like that,” Mobley went on. “And we have no way to put Scott at the house when either girl disappeared.”

“We can look deeper,” Louis said. “We can find witnesses, housekeepers-”

“All the housekeepers were illegals. Long gone, Louis.”

“What about the cabana itself. Prints, blood-”

“We got some preliminaries on the cabana and we’re still looking, but the drywall was clean. Not a single print. Nothing on the wood behind it or on Lou Ann.”

Louis felt suddenly very tired.

“What about college friends?” Louis asked.

“Can you remember which holidays your college friends went home and when they didn’t?” Mobley said.

“Okay, then, what about Brian’s red Corvette? People keep cars like that. It still might be around, there would have to be blood in the trunk somewhere.”

“We checked. He wrecked it in sixty-eight. It was scrapped.”

Louis rubbed his face, and spoke softly. “Maybe Scott told someone else over the years.”

“He didn’t and you know it,” Mobley said. He let a few seconds go by. “He’s probably going to walk, Louis. I’m sorry.”

The hallway fell quiet. Louis stared at the floor, the pit of anger in his stomach now an ache that he was dangerously close to getting used to. He knew he needed to let her go. But not yet. “Lance, Scott is a killer.”

“I know that, Louis,” Mobley said, exhaustion in his voice. “But what do you want me to do? There’s nothing to even hold him on until we finish processing the cabana.”

“He’s got a plane ticket to France in his pocket,” Louis said.

“Fuck,” Mobley muttered.

A deputy came up. “Sheriff, Detective Jensen said to give this to you asap.”

Louis watched as Mobley thanked the deputy, then he leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. He could hear voices behind the interrogation room door, voices that sounded almost like laughter, but he knew his head was playing tricks now, that it was probably only his own anger he was hearing, something he knew he was going to hear for a long time.

“I’ll be a motherfucker.”

Louis looked over at Mobley.

Mobley was reading something in the file the deputy had given him.

“What?” Louis asked.

“Remember all those prints I told you we took out of Duvall’s office?” Mobley said. “Guess whose name showed up? Our boy Scotty.”

“He’s a lawyer, Lance. He must have been in that office at some time.”

“Yeah, but no one can ever remember seeing him there. Not even that old bag Ellie. Jensen double checked.”

Mobley was reading something else.

“And we’ve got a phone call from Duvall to Scott’s direct line in the Brenner law office that afternoon, just after Cade left.”

Louis waited, while Mobley read more.

“And get this. . that old trial Redweld that we thought was taken by Duvall’s killer? Guess where we found it?”

“Scott’s office?”

“Yup, in a search we did this morning of Scott’s office. Scott’s prints are all over it and on damn near every paper inside it,” Mobley said. “Plus, that AB-negative report you were looking for was found in his desk drawer.”

Mobley was grinning.

“What else?” Louis asked.

“Our homeless witness, Quince? He was shown a photo line-up this morning. He identified Scott as someone he saw going into Duvall’s building just before nine P.M. Said he remembered him because Scott gave him a buck.”

Louis was dumbfounded. “How’d you get all that together?”

Mobley closed the folder. “After I left you at O’Sullivan’s, I got to thinking. So I asked Jensen to poke around, see if he could connect Brian to Duvall’s murder. We got Scott instead.”

“They can’t suppress that, can they?” Louis asked.

“Not a chance. This was information we had all along, none of it came from you.”

Louis looked up at him, knowing that wasn’t entirely true.

“At least that’s how I remember it,” Mobley added.

“Did you find the Tokarev?”

Mobley shook his head. “We’re still looking. When they sold off the gun collection after the senator died, the old guns got scattered across the country through antique dealers. It would be nice, but we don’t need it. We know Charles Brenner had a collection, we can put Scott in Duvall’s office and we know he had motive to protect his brother.”

“Scott shot Spencer Duvall,” Louis said quietly. “Jesus.”

Mobley nodded. “Guess Scott isn’t going to make his plane.”

A strange feeling came over Louis, something faintly resembling satisfaction, but it was dull. He had found Duvall’s killer, brought Bob Ahnert home his lost daughter and he even knew what happened to Kitty. But there was one thing missing.

“It’s not enough, Lance,” he said quietly.

“It has to be.” Mobley closed the file. “Scott’s still in there with Brian. I think I’ll arrest him while he’s here. Want to watch?”

“Yeah, I do.”

Mobley rose and opened the door. Scott was just coming out, Brian trailing. Scott’s face was purple and patched with two butterfly bandages. He had a thin red split in his lower lip.

“We’re going now,” Scott said.

“You’re under arrest,” Mobley said.

Scott’s swollen eyes moved from Mobley to Louis. “You’re kidding, right? What for?”

Mobley turned Scott around. Scott didn’t resist as he looked back over his shoulder.

“Hey, come on, Lance. What’s this about?”

“Scott Brenner, you’re under arrest for the murder of Spencer Duvall.”

Scott tried to spin around, but Mobley jerked him back, pressing him against the wall.

“Christ, Lance,” Scott said. “Ease up here. I barely knew Duvall. I had no reason to shoot-”

Mobley spun Scott around to face Louis. Louis expected to see at least some flicker of fear on his face, but there was nothing.

“Tell me what you got,” Scott said. “The old file, right? Okay, I had it. Duvall called me over there after Cade’s visit. He wanted me to take a look at what he was up against-”

Mobley yanked on the cuffs.

Scott’s face suddenly went cold. “Hell, I’ll be out in an hour.”

Mobley reached in Scott’s jacket and pulled out the Air France ticket. “No, you won’t. You’re a flight risk.”

Scott jerked his face toward Louis. “You just won’t let it go, will you?”

Mobley stepped between them quickly. “Wait outside, Louis.”

Louis didn’t move.

“Outside. Now.” Mobley said.

Louis walked stiffly down the hall to the lobby. He shoved open the door and stepped into the sunlight.

He stood for a minute, forcing himself to breathe slowly. Then he walked over and sat down on the edge of a concrete planter. He looked down at his hand, flexing it slowly.

It wasn’t near enough, but it was all he had.

A strange image to came to him. A child killer cornered in the dark and his friend, Dan Wainwright, pulling a trigger, making his own kind of justice.

It was the only way I knew it would happen.

A few weeks ago, Louis had condemned Wainwright for it. Cops didn’t make their own justice. Not good cops. But sitting here now, knowing Scott would never be punished for what he did to Kitty and Lou Ann, he understood. And he wondered, had he known last night what he knew now, would he have been able to walk away from the graveyard?

“You okay?”

Louis looked up. Mobley was standing over him, a silhouette against the sun.

Louis nodded. “Just thinking.”

“Sorry I threw you out. One dead prisoner a month is enough.”

Louis suddenly remembered the Haitian prisoner. “You ever find out who killed that Haitian guy?” he asked.

“Yeah, another prisoner. They were fighting over cigarettes. The guy admitted it.”

Louis was staring at the ground. Another assumption about Cade he had gotten wrong.

“The Duvall charges will be dropped against Cade,” Mobley said.

Louis still said nothing.

“Why don’t you go get some sleep.”

Louis shook his head slowly.

“Then go call Tonto. Give her the good news.”

Louis looked at Mobley. “Yeah, okay.”

Mobley was standing there, hands in his pockets. Louis wanted to say something to him, to thank him for coming along on this, for putting his ass on the line. But they both turned at the sound of a van pulling up to the curb. The side read WINK-TV FORT MYERS.

Mobley watched the cameraman get out. He reached in his pocket and pulled out an Altoid tin. “I guess I better go do my thing,” he said.

Louis nodded.

Mobley started toward the van, then turned back to Louis. “Next time you’re in O’Sullivan’s, I’ll buy you a drink.”