Читать книгу Let Justice Descend - Lisa Black - Страница 14

Chapter 6

She invited them into the conference room, but Riley told her they preferred to conduct individual interviews—meaning her and her alone. She led them to a tiny room with no window, which she said served as her office when she and Diane were in town. Kelly had lost the discombobulation of the morning but also any last bit of patience.

“What are you guys doing here? I mean, I want to find whoever did this to Diane, obviously, but I don’t see how I can and I have an awful lot to do and it all needs to be done immediately.” She slumped into a swivel chair and didn’t seem to notice that the two cops had no choice but to stand. Or maybe she did, but in either case nothing could be done about it, as the space had no room for more chairs. “And on top of everything else, I’m technically out of a job.”

None of this made Jack feel sympathetic. “Like it or not, you seem to have been the closest person to Diane Cragin. We have no choice but to start with you. First of all, we need the passcodes to her laptop and phone.”

He flipped open his notebook, pen at the ready, all business with no room for bullshit.

She said, “I don’t know.”

“Really.”

“Seriously, I don’t know. Why would I? I have my own laptop, I never used Diane’s for anything. If she wanted me to have a document or a file or an e-mail, she would forward it.”

“She never wrote those passwords down? Had no contingency plan for if she forgot them?”

“A, Diane never forgot anything”—Yet she wrote down the safe combination, Jack thought—“and B, she had me. If she wanted an e-mail sent, she would dictate it to me. If she needed to read a bill, I would forward it to her phone and she’d use the audio feature. Frankly, I don’t think she was too computer savvy. . . . I doubt she used her laptop for much, and mostly made calls with the phone.”

“Imagine that,” Riley said.

“But she was also supersensitive about privacy. That’s why I don’t have a key to her house or a password for her phone. I don’t think I’m even on her Christmas card list. She tormented poor Devin, always trying to get rid of him for an hour or two. She regarded both of us as necessary evils instead of vital helps—Hey, wait! I think she may have used one of those online programs for passwords, something called Dashlane? I remember because the annual charge came up on her Visa bill and I asked her about it.”

“You opened her Visa bill?”

The woman laughed out loud. “I paid her Visa bill. With her online banking. You think Diane would have had time for that?”

“I thought you just said she was a privacy nut.”

“About her personal time and personal thoughts, yes. She couldn’t care less about her bank balance.”

Of course not, Jack thought, since she kept her real bank account in a safe in her bathroom.

Riley said, “Fine. Open this Dashlane and give us the passwords.”

She looked a bit sorry for him, as if his advanced age made understanding this sort of thing difficult. “I don’t have it—the actual app. It’s on her phone. I can’t guarantee she even used it, only that she paid for it.”

“She only had the one phone?” Jack figured they might as well make sure of that.

“I guess. She could have had a pile of burners for all I know.”

Jack knew all about burner phones, ones bought from convenience stores for cash with no identification. He had one at the bottom of his pocket as they spoke, fully charged in case he got a call from his cousin in Phoenix to let him know that Rick Gardiner—or maybe, now, Lori Russo—were at the police department asking about a cop who used to work there. It had not rung in a while, and he hoped it wouldn’t.

“What’s that?” Riley asked abruptly. He had been staring at a long list of names and titles, blown up to poster-size and hung on the wall. Jack didn’t know if he asked the question to throw Kelly off, a standard interrogation technique, or felt curious. Riley got curious about the strangest things. Jack only hoped he never got too curious about Jack.

The list started with the chairman, committee members, general counsel, regional political director, regional political coordinator, down to directors of the Faith Initiative and the Veteran Outreach and Hispanic Initiatives programs. Plus one that sounded confusing, Chairman of the State Chairmen. “That’s the organizational chart of the party. Why?”

“Surrogates and Media Training? What’s that about?”

She smiled wearily. “That does sound funny. I assure you it’s not some sci-fi androids or something. Surrogates are volunteers who work in their localities to provide expertise and commentary on TV shows, attend speeches or rallies of our candidates and their opponents, ask good questions, and generally coordinate with us to help out in the field.”

Sounded like sci-fi androids might be more accurate than she thought. “Plants, in other words,” Jack said. “Ringers.”

“No—” Kelly argued.

“I was thinking of women having babies for other women,” Riley said.

“Not that, either.”

He said, “I’d want to be the War Room Director. That sounds cool.”

“That’s where the core staff of the party can come together so that decisions can be made quickly.”

“Is it healthy for a campaign to be thought of as a war?”

Now she laughed aloud, but not in a happy way. “The truth? Nothing about this is healthy. What you’re looking at is the people who really run the country. Not Congress, not the president—these people. They set the policy directives, focus the resources, put the most useful candidates in place.”

Her candor might have been due to shock, or impatience, or lack of sleep. Or perhaps she had grown weary of the whole charade, because she went on: “It’s like this. They don’t actually make the decisions—the people in Congress vote for the bills, and the citizens of the country vote for the people in Congress. But they decide what’s going to get decided, who’s going to run, what’s going to be law. You can debate for yourself which is the greater power.”

“You sound cynical,” Riley said.

The woman shrugged, dug a bottle out of her pocket, and shook two pills into her hand, swallowing them without benefit of water. “It is what it is, and this is what it’s always been. There are groups with influence and groups with less influence. Say a million years ago you had five people living in a cave and the only word they knew was ugh. I’ll still bet each one could tell you who was top dog of that cave and who was in the number two slot, all the way down to five. That’s not corruption. It’s reality.”

Jack asked, “What about the combination to the safe?” He and Riley hadn’t wanted to mention the safe or the money in it, figuring they would keep that one quiet until someone wanted the funds enough to admit knowledge of them. But they were getting nowhere fast, or even getting anywhere slow in this investigation. They needed to start making things happen.

But Kelly merely blinked at him. “Safe?”

“The one in her house.”

Still, only a mild frown. She gestured with her hands, sketching a square in the air. “You mean like an actual safe? A box?”

“Yes.”

“Huh. I didn’t know she had one.”

And Jack had to admit she didn’t seem particularly interested in the idea—meaning either she had been unaware of the stacks of cash, or she knew of cash but didn’t know where it had been kept . . . or she was a very, very good actress.

An older man whose tailored shirt did a good job of concealing his paunch poked his head in the door. “Morton’s in. He’ll be here by this afternoon.”

Kelly’s face burst into a wide smile, the first genuine one Jack had seen on her. “Fabulous!”

“Taxes look clean, wife has a job. Two kids, though—gotta put them through the wringer. We can’t have any surprises.”

“Ages?”

“Six and ten.”

“No problem. I can do that.”

Riley said to the man, “Excuse me. We’re in the middle of an interview here. Would you mind not disturbing us?”

The guy glanced at the detective, seemed unable to interpret this non sequitur, and continued speaking to Kelly: “Mark will get you the Facebook buys and the video digital pre-rolls in about twenty.”

“Got it,” she said, and the man left. Jack watched his partner’s face flush to a deeper hue. Not since they’d investigated a firm of financial mavericks had the cops felt so disregarded, and at least the mavericks had been somewhat interested in who had been killed and by whom. Former senator Diane Cragin seemed to have been tossed out with yesterday’s newspaper. But, he supposed, they had little choice—the election dictated that work had to be done and done quickly. The staff probably assumed they couldn’t help solve the murder anyway . . . especially if no one there had actually committed it.

Kelly was explaining to them that they had found a replacement for the dead senator, an assistant state treasurer who had shown talent for community appearances and could deliver a killer speech. They weren’t entirely sure of his stand on charter school vouchers, but he seemed willing to listen. He’d been agitating to run for governor and had jumped at the chance to go straight to a national setting. He would be willing to listen to a lot of things.

Riley said through slightly clenched teeth, “Ten-year-olds need a lot of vetting?”

“Are you kidding? Kids and spouses are land mines. Their exes, jobs, finances, hobbies. Did the wife smoke pot in college? Is the kid flunking math? Getting in fights at school? Cutting? You’d be amazed at how many school-age children are on Prozac. We’re starting from scratch with two days to go. They can dig up a lot of dirt in two days.”

Riley didn’t bother to ask who they were. “Well, let’s hope the kid doesn’t pick his nose on camera. If you can’t give us the passcodes to her electronics, then at least give us the account numbers so we can write a search warrant. If you paid the bills, you must have them.”

She opened her laptop and gave him this information without comment. “Oh, and someone here remembered the name of Diane’s niece. It’s Minella, Collette Minella, and they think she lives in Bedford, or maybe Barberton. Also, Diane’s will is at her office in DC. I knew that, and my secretary overnighted it to me. Who do I give that to—you guys? Her executor? I used to be a lawyer, you’d think I’d know this stuff.”

Riley said that probate was not the job of the detective unit, though they would like to know the executor’s name. “But right now we need to talk about the personal side of the senator. As we said, you knew her better than anyone.”

“Happy to help, but full disclosure—I’ve only worked for Diane for a little over seven months. She was demanding but fair, and I’ve learned more in that seven months than I did in three years with the assistant governor of Oklahoma, but it was still a work relationship. We weren’t besties. We spent about sixteen hours a day together, so we didn’t go barhopping afterward or catch a movie on the weekend. If she had regular sex with anyone I don’t know who that might be. If she hated someone—well, besides Joe Green—she didn’t tell me. And if she felt terrified to death that one particular person wanted to kill her, she never mentioned it. That EPA guy is always giving her a hard time, but I’d be amazed if he had the guts to kill somebody. Like, astounded. If that’s what you were going to ask.”

Yes, Jack thought. That’s exactly what we were going to ask.

Riley hesitated as well, then said, “No critics who were especially vitriolic?”

“These days? That’s the only kind there is.”

“Diane was polarizing?”

Kelly shook her head, black locks swishing back and forth over her shoulders. “The audience comes pre-polarized. Conservative and definitely liberal are no longer adjectives, they’re titles. Moderate is an epithet.”

Riley qualified his question. “Any that were particularly credible in some way?”

She appeared to give this some thought, shaking her head no, until a memory came back. “OMG, yes! I mean, not in person, but I know we had a second letter that mentioned being struck by lightning. Hang on, let me find it.”

She bustled into the next office, partly visible through the open door, and dug through a box on the floor. Returning with a yellow sheet of legal-sized paper, she almost made it to the door before a young man came by and thrust a schedule under Kelly’s nose, pronouncing radio spots as the best he could do. She disagreed. He disagreed with her disagreement. She said she wanted the rush-hour times and he should not take no for an answer.

No sooner had she dismissed him than a middle-aged man who looked as if he should have a cigar clamped between his teeth stepped up and unfurled a poster featuring a gap where a photo of the new senatorial candidate would be placed. Bright red letters above the white space screamed VOTE FOR TRUTH IN POLITICS ON NOVEMBER 6. Beneath it in smaller caps: BECAUSE SOMETIMES YOU FEEL LIKE A CROOK, SOMETIMES YOU DON’T. “What do you think?” he asked anyone in earshot.

“It’s not exactly subtle,” Riley said.

The man snorted. “Who the hell has time for subtle? In the last few weeks, much less these last few days—we’re competing for the least informed, the least engaged, and the least intense voters out there. Subtle ain’t gonna cut it.”

“Get them up,” Kelly ordered.

He rolled up the paper and strode off, muttering “Subtle” under his breath as if it were a filthy word.

Kelly handed the piece of paper to Riley and said, “See, right there, it says she will be struck by lightning. I mean, that’s not a new prediction when it comes to politicians, but—lightning? When electricity killed her? That makes sense, doesn’t it, in a twisted sort of way?”

“Yes,” Riley murmured. Jack read over his shoulder and commented on the greeting (“Jezebel”) and the all-caps handwritten font, both similar to the letter they’d found at the victim’s house but with one significant difference—a signature. “We’ll check this out. But Kelly . . . how did you know she’d been electrocuted?”

With a look more pitying than guilty, she said, “Some friend of a friend of a friend called and told us an hour or two ago. There’s no way you were ever going to keep a lid on that detail—it’s too bizarre.”

Riley’s molars made a grinding sound. “We were hoping to. It helps to hold back some facts to weed out the false confessions. We expect a boatload of them in this case.”

One side of her mouth turned up. “This is politics. We have no secrets here.” Then she amended: “Not for long, anyway.”