Ricochet

Chapter 17

DUNCAN FELT AS IF THE BRIDGE HAD GIVEN WAY BENEATH him and he was falling through thin air. He stared at Worley.

“Did I hear you right?”

“You heard him right,” DeeDee said, grinning. “You owe me a hot fudge sundae.” Then she asked Worley if he’d been in contact with the judge yet.

“No one answered their house phone, but Captain Gerard had the judge’s cell number on account of the Trotter thing. Found him at Silver Tide Country Club, where he was playing poker with some of his legal eagle buddies.”

Duncan had thought it preposterous when Elise had told him about it earlier. Apparently DeeDee thought so, too. “He’s out playing poker the night before his wife is interrogated about a fatal shooting?”

Worley shrugged. “He must be confident of her innocence. Or cocksure of his influence. He was playing ante-up with the DA. Anyhow, he confirmed the car is his, said it’s the one his wife drives.”

Duncan ’s heart had been ranging from a dead stop to full-out ramming speed. He continued to experience the sensation that he was falling.

“Mrs. Laird’s purse was in the passenger seat,” Worley told them. “We’ve bagged it as evidence.”

“Of what?” DeeDee asked.

“Of whatever.”

Duncan needed to sit down. He needed to vomit. But he had to keep it together, had to appear personally detached, interested only insofar as he was a homicide detective and Elise Laird was a key player in a fatal shooting.

Now two.

He managed the language sufficiently to ask Worley if anybody had seen or heard anything of Mrs. Laird.

“Negativo. Last time the judge saw her was between nine thirty and ten. He said she was gonna take a sleeping pill and go to bed.”

But she hadn’t taken a pill and gone to bed. She’d met Duncan. He’d seen her since her husband had, tear tracks on her cheeks, holding her tank top against her breasts, looking ravished.

“Soon as Gerard notified the judge of this,” Worley was saying, gesturing toward the body, “he tried to reach her at home. When he didn’t get an answer, he called the maid, asked her to go to their house, see if the missus was all right. He, the maid, Gerard-who told me all this by phone-converged at the judge’s house. The lady of the manor wasn’t there, and her bed hadn’t been slept in.”

“Cell phone?” DeeDee asked.

“It was still in her purse,” Worley said. “So either she got separated from it before she was called, or she didn’t answer when it was called.” Looking beyond DeeDee and Duncan, he said, “Here’s Dothan.”

As the medical examiner approached, he was breathing heavily from the exertion of walking up the gradual incline from where he’d left his car. Sweat was rolling in wide streams down his fat face. “ Napoli ’s turned up, huh?”

They moved aside and gave him room to inspect the body, although he could barely wedge his bulk into the open car door. “Bullet’s well placed. Probably bled out.”

“Told you,” Worley said, casting DeeDee a smug glance.

“I never said he didn’t.”

“Hard to tell until we move him, but I don’t think there’s an exit wound,” Worley reported. “No blood leaking around the seat behind him.”

“Bullet must’ve ricocheted off a rib in the rear,” the ME observed. “Got the stomach for sure. Could have also hit the liver, spleen, and an artery or two. No telling what all was nicked or busted.”

“His pistol is missing from his ankle holster and there’s no shell casing,” Duncan said.

Brooks took a flashlight from his pocket and directed it toward Napoli ’s bloody hands, then bent down and sniffed both of them.

“Looks like you’re giving him a blow job,” Worley remarked.

“You’re a pimple on a pig’s ass, Worley,” DeeDee said.

The ME ignored them. “Don’t smell gunpowder, so he didn’t shoot himself. Was he in a fight?”

“A struggle of some sort, we think.”

“I’ll bag his hands. He could have tissue underneath his fingernails.”

“That would be a break,” Worley said, “if we could nail Elise Laird with a DNA test.”

“Hey, y’all?”

The shout came from Baker of forensics. He was standing near the wall of the bridge, quite a distance from the car. He motioned toward something on the pavement. Duncan was the first to reach him, but when he saw the object, he stopped suddenly, forcing Worley and DeeDee to eddy around him.

DeeDee knelt down. “My gosh. Duncan, do you recognize this?”

He shook his head, but he was lying. A few hours ago, the sandal had been strapped to Elise’s right foot.

“I do.” DeeDee stood up and faced him. “Mrs. Laird was wearing a sandal like this the other day when we interviewed her and the judge in their sunroom. I remember the turquoise stones. I started to ask her where you can buy sandals like that, but figured it wasn’t any place I could afford.”

The three detectives moved aside so Baker’s photographer could take his pictures of the sandal before it was placed in an evidence bag.

“What do you make of it, Dunk?” Worley asked.

He roused himself from his daze. “Don’t know.”

“You think she did Napoli?”

“Have you ever known a perp who gut-shot a man, then left her recognizable sandal behind?”

While Worley and DeeDee were mulling that over, sirens signaled the speeding approach of a police vehicle in the opposing lane. When it was even with Elise Laird’s car, the souped-up SUV came to an abrupt stop next to the concrete median that divided the inbound and outbound lanes of the bridge.

As soon as the vehicle was braked, doors opened. Bill Gerard stepped from the driver’s seat. Judge Cato Laird was riding shotgun. Duncan had never seen him looking so disheveled. He and Gerard stepped over the low wall and crossed the two inbound-traffic lanes at a brisk clip, reaching the car on the shoulder just as the trio of detectives returned to it.

“Okay for us to approach?” Gerard asked Worley, fairly barking the question at him.

“Yes, sir. Forensics is done with the car.”

“What about it, Dothan?” Gerard asked.

The ME gave them a brief summary of his findings. “I doubt he lasted long.”

“I don’t give a damn how long he lasted.” Laird elbowed Gerard aside and bore down on Dothan Brooks. “What about my wife?”

“I don’t know anything about your wife.” The ME removed a handkerchief as large as a tablecloth from his hip pocket and wiped his sweating face with it.

Gerard turned to the detectives. “What do you know?”

He was uncharacteristically curt, probably because his responsibilities in the VCU were now mostly administrative. It had been a long time since he’d attended the scene of a murder, and no matter who’d been killed, even a nasty character like Napoli, it was never a pleasant experience.

But mostly, Duncan guessed, his boss was feeling pressure from the judge to get answers quick.

Worley removed the toothpick from his mouth and gave a concise account of the facts. “A few minutes ago, we found a shoe, a sandal with turquoise stones. Way over there.” He pointed to where the photographer was still taking photographs.

“Oh, Jesus.” Laird dragged his hand down his face. “Elise owns a pair of sandals like that. I want to see it.” He struck off in that direction.

“You may be tempted to pick it up, Judge. Please don’t touch it.”

He glared at Worley. “I’m not an idiot.”

Duncan looked after him, and despite his dislike of the man, he sympathized with his situation. If circumstances were different, vastly different, he would be behaving exactly as the judge. He would be frantic with worry, anguishing over possibilities, desperate for answers.

But he wasn’t Elise’s husband. He wasn’t even her friend. He wasn’t her anything except the detective who would probably have to hand her over to the DA for indictment. He couldn’t give vent to the uncertainty and fear raging inside him. He had to do his job.

“Chief Taylor called me,” Gerard was saying, speaking to his subordinates in an undertone. “Ordered me to personally oversee this investigation, which takes precedence over everything else we’re working right now. Give the judge anything he wants, he said. Taylor wants everybody sharp on this. Understand?”

“Excuse me,” DeeDee said. “Is Mrs. Laird considered a victim?”

“Until we know otherwise.” Gerard left them then to rejoin the judge.

“So our investigation just got political,” Worley muttered. “Fucking fabulous.”

Dothan Brooks walked up to them, wheezing. “Can I have him?”

Duncan left the ME with DeeDee and Worley to discuss transporting Napoli ’s corpse to the morgue. Slowly he walked back to the cones that sealed off the heel marks on the roadway and squatted down to study them more closely. They might turn out not to be Elise’s heel marks at all, but interrupted tire tracks or someone else’s heel marks. Any number of things could have made those black smudges on the pavement of a highly trafficked bridge that merged with several major boulevards of downtown Savannah on one end, and with South Carolina state highway 17 on the other.

He looked back at the car, gauging it to be about fifteen feet away from the marks. The sandal had been found at the wall, still farther away. All were within the narrow shoulder of the roadway. Duncan stood up and retraced his footsteps to the car, searching the pavement carefully.

“What’re you looking for?” Worley asked, noticing him.

“Blood.”

“He was shot in the car.”

“Maybe. Or maybe he was shot during a struggle, over there where the scuff marks are. He staggered back, managed to get into the driver’s seat and close the door.”

“Thinking maybe he could drive himself away.”

“He could have been gushing blood on the inside, but there was only a trickle on the outside,” Duncan said. “He didn’t drip any, especially if he was clutching the wound, as the smears on his hands and shirt indicate.”

“He could also have been shot right where we found him behind the steering wheel of Mrs. Laird’s car.”

“Dammit!” Duncan said, acknowledging that what Worley said was true. “What was a slug like Meyer Napoli doing behind the steering wheel of Mrs. Laird’s car?”

“Beats me,” Worley said.

The ambulance had been motioned forward. The driver wove it between squad cars that had the inbound lanes of the bridge temporarily blocked to traffic, which at this time of morning was light. Worley wandered back to where DeeDee was conversing with Dothan Brooks.

Left alone, Duncan returned to the area blocked off by the traffic cones and cautiously peered over the nearby wall of the bridge. He didn’t look at the flowing river this time, however, but at the bridge itself.

Spanning two thousand feet, it had been built to replace a drawbridge that had become inefficient in handling the traffic on the river as Savannah ’s importance as a seaport increased.

Duncan had driven across the bridge a thousand times, but because of his aversion to heights and suspension, he’d kept his eyes on the road. He’d never studied the structure of the bridge. He’d certainly never been this up-close and personal with its awe-inspiring construction and massive proportions.

He leaned as far over the wall as he dared and studied the infrastructure. As he was mentally gauging the height of the nearest tower, which supported the struts, he noticed a descending metal ladder that connected to a piece of machinery-he didn’t even know what to call it-on the underside of the bridge. And on the floor of that thingamajig, he spotted something fluttering, something that didn’t belong.

He jogged toward the tower, keeping his eyes trained on the spot, hoping that what had captured his attention wouldn’t disappear before he could determine exactly what it was. When he was directly above it, he leaned over the wall and looked down onto the mechanism below.

What he’d seen was a piece of cloth. Light-colored, soft-looking, out of place on this brutally masculine structure of iron and steel and concrete.

Napoli ’s body was being transferred from the car to a gurney. Worley and DeeDee had been cleared by forensics to investigate the interior of the car. They were busy with that. Gerard was catching an earful of abuse from Judge Laird, who was punctuating his tirade with jabs of his index finger.

“Why are your detectives concentrating on what happened to Napoli?” Duncan heard him say. “They need to be searching for my wife.”

Duncan returned to his study of the piece of machinery attached to the underside of the bridge and to the ladder that connected it to the level on which he was standing. Trying to stave off the dizziness assailing him, he switched his focus to the giant tanker gliding beneath the bridge on its way out to sea. However, the movement of the vessel only made his vertigo worse.

Nevertheless, he threw his leg over the wall, stepped onto the small platform at the top of the ladder, and started down. The metal rungs were enclosed by bars that formed a small cylindrical cage, but those bars were widely spaced and he wasn’t sure they would hold him if he was to slip and fall backward against them.

He was about halfway down when he heard Gerard exclaim, “Dunk! What the hell are you doing?”

He glanced up. A mistake. He was blinded by the lights on the top of the tower, shining down on the bridge. In the direction of Gerard’s voice, he shouted up, “There’s something down here.”

“Are you crazy?”

That from DeeDee, practically screeching.

“Probably,” he said under his breath.

“Get back up here!”

Ignoring her, he continued down. Thankfully he had put on sneakers when he’d quickly dressed. Their rubber soles gave him a better grip than dress shoes would have. He had pulled on a pair of latex gloves as soon as he and DeeDee had arrived at the scene. Inside them his hands were wet with nervous perspiration. He didn’t dare look down at the swift current of the river, now churning in the wake of the tanker.

“Bill?” he called up. “Do you know anything about this thing under here?”

“The carrier?”

“I guess.”

“There are three of them. One for each section of the bridge. They connect to tracks on each side of it. They roll along the underside of the bridge so workers have access to the navigational lights. They can do maintenance, conduct inspections. Like that.”

“So no one except maintenance workers would come down here, right?”

“And damn fools!” he heard DeeDee shout.

Maintenance workers didn’t wear clothes made of soft fabric that could flutter when there was no wind and only a negligible breeze.

He risked glancing down and was relieved to see that he had only three more rungs to go. He took them with relative speed and stepped onto the carrier. Solidly built, it was an impressive example of ingenuity and engineering, but he was glad that someone else had the job of working on it. To him, it seemed a hell of a long way to the other side of the bridge. And beyond that, empty air. He didn’t want to think of the nothingness directly beneath him.

Instead he stayed focused on the area immediately surrounding him. The fixtures lighting the bridge from its underside were as bright and eyeball-searing as suns. He tried to avoid looking directly into them as he went down on his haunches. The piece of fabric was snagged on a bolt that secured the ladder to the floor of the carrier.

One edge of the printed material was hemmed. The other had obviously been ripped from a garment…which in this case was the skirt Elise had been wearing that night.

Pinching the fabric between two gloved fingers, he carefully worked it free from the metal on which it had become snagged, then placed it in a brown paper evidence bag. Slowly, he stood up and returned the bag to his pocket.

His colleagues were shouting questions down to him. He was no longer in their sight so they were concerned about his safety. They wanted to know if he was all right. They were admonishing him to be careful. He heard Worley ask if he’d found anything.

Tuning them out, he forgot his acrophobia and stared into the river far below him, where the water at this point was over forty feet deep. He looked at the slow-moving tanker, a floating city, now gliding past the restaurants and bars lining River Street and, on the far side, the docks at the Westin Resort.

His throat became uncommonly tight as he realized the implication of finding only one of Elise’s sandals and this scrap of fabric ripped from her clothing.

Chances were very good that she hadn’t made it off this goddamn bridge alive.