Ricochet

Chapter 20

SHORTLY BEFORE NOON DUNCAN RETURNED TO THE VCU.

“We caught a break,” Worley informed him as soon as he cleared the doorway.

He stopped in his tracks. “You found her?”

“I said a break, not a miracle.”

Duncan had left the abandoned house and gone home, ostensibly to sleep for a few hours. He lay down, but he remained awake, half in dread, half in anticipation of a telephone call telling him that Elise had been found…one way or the other.

He’d finally given up trying to sleep. In between a shower and shave, he’d placed a dozen or more telephone calls, phoning every agency taking part in the search. As lead investigator, he’d insisted on talking to the individual in charge. None had anything substantial to report, nor had he expected to hear of a breakthrough. As soon as there was one, he would know of it. But he gave all of them a pep talk, reminding them of Judge Laird’s standing in the community and the priority that Chief Taylor had given Mrs. Laird’s disappearance.

The Coast Guard had several choppers in the air, flying low along the coastline. The beaches were being patrolled. Search-and-rescue craft were patrolling offshore. These activities looked and sounded good, but no one actually expected Elise to reach the Atlantic.

Exhausted dogs and their trainers were still searching the river-banks and marshes. Police boats were searching the river and all its tributaries. Chatham County SO and state troopers were assisting any way they could. The dive team had been in the shipping channel since daylight.

Local TV stations frequently interrupted their programming to recap the story and update viewers on the search. These news bulletins reported nothing except that there was nothing new to report.

“Pardon my saying so, Dunk,” Worley said now, “but you look like shit.”

“And here I was about to tell you how fresh and handsome you look today.”

Worley continued to regard him with concern. “Have you had anything to eat?”

“Grabbed something on my way here,” Duncan lied. “What kind of break?”

Worley went to the door and shouted down the hallway, “Hey, Kong? Dunk’s here.”

Kong appeared carrying an insulated drinking cup and wiping powdered sugar from his mouth with the back of his hairy hand. “Hey, Dunk. You don’t look so good.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“Yeah, well, heard y’all had a late night. Found my guy for me. Just for the record, I’d have preferred him alive.”

“So would I. What’s the break?”

Duncan ’s tone must have conveyed that he wasn’t in the mood for chitchat. Kong said, “Ever since Napoli went missing, we’ve been looking for his car. Turned up this morning.”

“Where?”

“A church parking lot.”

“Last place we’d think to look for Napoli,” Worley said around a chuckle.

Duncan headed for the door. “Let’s go take a look.”

“DeeDee’s already on it.”

“Oh.”

“But that’s not all of it,” Worley said. “I figured that Napoli hadn’t gone to the church to pray. I think he just dropped his car there ’cause it was a convenient place to leave it-and probably because it was the last place we’d look.”

They’d come to the conclusion last night that if Meyer Napoli was blackmailing either of the Lairds, his so-called disappearance of the last few days had been voluntary.

“I checked all the taxi services in the city and guess what?”

Duncan was no more in the mood for Worley’s guessing games than he was for chitchat, but he guessed anyway. “ Napoli called a taxi to pick him up at the church.”

“At twelve sixteen in the A.M.,” Worley declared with satisfaction. “The driver dropped him at his destination at twelve twenty-six.”

“Short trip,” Kong remarked.

“A few miles.”

“What was his destination?” Duncan asked.

Worley consulted his small spiral notebook and read off the address.

Duncan knew the street; he’d been walking up and down both sides of it just a few hours ago looking for a trace of Elise or her car. “That’s a rough neighborhood,” he said, hoping his voice sounded neutral.

“Well, it wasn’t the street Napoli was interested in,” Worley said. “It was the car parked on the street. The car that didn’t fit the neighborhood and stuck out like a sore thumb. The taxi driver said Napoli didn’t want to be let out at any particular house number and tipped him real good to forget he’d ever seen him.

“But when the guy saw Napoli ’s picture on TV this morning, he figured what the hell? What was Napoli going to do to him if he told about it now? So when I called, he was eager to talk. Driving around a murder victim hours before he got popped has made this guy a celebrity among his coworkers.”

Worley straddled the nearest chair and asked Kong if he had any more doughnuts. Kong apologized for having eaten the last one.

Duncan asked, “Did the cabdriver describe the car parked on the street where Napoli was dropped?”

“Elise Laird’s,” Worley replied as he frowned at Kong for hogging the doughnuts. “He didn’t get the license number or anything, but he described it to a T. So, I guess that solves the mystery of where they linked up. Oops. Don’t tell His Judgeship I used that ‘vulgar’ phrase again.” He explained to Kong how Judge Laird had jumped him for suggesting that his old lady’s meeting with Napoli had been prearranged.

“We haven’t confirmed that it was prearranged,” Duncan reminded him.

“No,” Worley replied a shade irritably. “That hasn’t been confirmed, but what else would Mrs. Laird be doing in that neighborhood?”

Screwing a cop, Duncan thought.

He had left Elise around eleven forty, eleven forty-five. Had she stayed there, waiting for Napoli to join her at twelve twenty-six? Why? To enlist his help, since Duncan had refused his? Or to solve her problem once and for all? If it hadn’t been a prearranged meeting, how had Napoli known where to find her?

Struck by a sudden thought, he asked, “Where’s her car now?”

“In the pound.”

This time he made it to the door, saying over his shoulder, “Call me as soon as anything else breaks.”

An hour later Duncan upended the brown paper evidence bag and dumped the small, round object onto Bill Gerard’s desk. “A transponder.”

“ Duncan found it under Mrs. Laird’s car,” DeeDee explained.

She and Duncan had met at the car pound. She had accompanied Napoli ’s car when it was towed from the church parking lot to the garage. Duncan had given her a Cliffs’ Notes rendition of Napoli ’s taxi ride.

“So what are you doing here?” she’d asked.

“Looking for a tracking device.”

Napoli had been sloppy about hiding it, and in under a minute Duncan had found it. He’d wasted no time getting it back to the Barracks.

“She didn’t meet him there,” he told Gerard, DeeDee, and Worley, who were grouped around the captain’s desk looking at the transponder as though it were a specimen of some foreign matter. “He tracked her there.”

“How’d he get this gizmo on her car?” Worley asked.

“He did stuff like this for a living. You can order surveillance equipment off the Internet. He could have put it on her car while she was parked outside the hairdresser’s. He could have got a flunky like Trotter to do it while she was having lunch with her husband. It wouldn’t have been hard. Couple of seconds and the deed was done.”

“Okay, that bug is pretty incriminating. Napoli was tracking Mrs. Laird. But what was our esteemed judge’s wife doing in that run-down neighborhood last night?” DeeDee tossed out the question, but no one picked it up, especially not Duncan.

Finally Worley said, “The first thing we need to do is ask the judge was he having his wife followed again.”

“Even if he was, he’ll deny it,” DeeDee said. “And how can we prove it now?”

“Is the neighborhood being canvassed?” Gerard asked.

“As we speak,” Worley said. “I’ve got two uniforms working it.”

DeeDee said, “Maybe you should have used plainclothes-men.”

“In that neighborhood it wouldn’t matter,” Duncan said. “Whoever we sent would be marked for cops.”

Without saying it, the three veterans knew that the canvass would be a waste of time and manpower. In that part of town, anyone who was friendly with cops today could be the victim of a seemingly random drive-by shooting tomorrow. No one was going to talk to two uniforms going door-to-door asking questions.

Gerard’s desk phone rang. He answered with a brusque, “Gerard.” He listened for a moment, then said, “I’ll tell ’em, thanks.” He hung up and said, “ Dothan ’s ready to perform the autopsy on Napoli.”

“I’ll go,” Duncan offered. If Napoli ’s corpse produced any of his assailant’s DNA, he wanted to be the first to know. Carefully he picked up the transponder and returned it to the evidence bag. “I’ll drop this at forensics.”

Gerard said, “Worley, let’s get the names of residents for each address on the street where Mrs. Laird’s car was found. See if we can connect her to anyone.”

“I’ll get somebody on it. Then I’ll pay the judge a visit. Tell him about the transponder, hint that in all probability his old lady was being followed by Napoli, see what his reaction is.”

“Good. Take DeeDee with you. She’s good at reading people.” Gerard paused, then added, “It wouldn’t hurt to check out resident names on the surrounding streets in that neighborhood, too.”

As they filed out, Duncan was hoping that the unnamed owner of the ramshackle house where he’d met Elise wouldn’t easily be flagged as an acquaintance of hers.

One good thing, running down information like that was tedious and time-consuming. It could take days before a comprehensive list of homeowners and current lessees was compiled, especially in that neighborhood, where aliases were as commonplace as cockroaches. Finding the connection to Elise would take even longer. Weeks, perhaps.

Surely she would be found before then.

Surely.

But one week crawled by. The fervor with which everyone began the search for Elise Laird waned a little each day that passed without uncovering a single clue to her whereabouts.

Napoli ’s autopsy proved the initial guess correct: he had died of internal hemorrhage due to the puncturing of several major organs. “Even if he’d made it to a trauma center alive, I don’t think a surgeon could’ve saved him. Blood loss was too quick and too significant,” the ME told Duncan. “The shooter knew where to aim to make it deadly.”

Just like Gary Ray Trotter’s shooter.

Lost in that thought, Duncan almost missed Dothan telling him that the bullet he’d removed was from a.22-caliber pistol.

“You mean a twenty-five,” Duncan said.

“I mean a twenty-two.”

“ Napoli carried a twenty-five.”

The medical examiner shrugged as he handed Duncan the evidence bag containing the bullet. “Not my job.”

“What about his hands? Did you scrape anything from under his nails?”

“They were clean as a newborn’s.”

Back at the Barracks, Duncan shared these two discrepancies with DeeDee and Worley. She said, “I was hoping for some tissue for DNA testing later, if it was needed.”

“None there,” Duncan said.

“Damn! I was sure he’d been shot with his own twenty-five,” Worley said.

“Well, he wasn’t.”

They were stockpiling questions without answers.

They plodded through several more unproductive days.

The public information office issued periodic statements to the press, but only after they were approved by the chief of police and Judge Laird. In every news story printed or broadcast, Elise Laird was portrayed as the victim, Meyer Napoli as her armed abductor. Suggested motives for his forcing her to stop her car on the Talmadge Bridge included extortion, kidnap for ransom, rape, and vengeance for an unnamed grievance.

Worley and DeeDee questioned the judge at length about keeping Napoli on retainer to follow his wife. He denied it. Then Duncan had a heated session with him. Duncan used every interrogation maneuver he knew to try to shake Cato Laird, but at the end of the session, the judge remained steadfast: His dealings with Napoli had ended months earlier, and if Napoli had continued to follow Elise, he had been doing it on his own, and obviously with criminal intent.

“There’s something else,” Duncan said at the conclusion of the taxing interview with Cato Laird. “We requested an inventory of your gun collection.”

“All are accounted for except an old twenty-two-caliber pistol.” Reading Duncan’s reaction, he said hastily, “I’m sure it’s only been misplaced.”

“When do you remember last seeing it?”

“A while back. It was in a box of outdated hunting gear I put up in the attic.” Becoming increasingly agitated, he said, “Surely you don’t think…Look, Detective, Elise didn’t even know I owned that gun.”

“Okay,” Duncan said, feeling anything but okay about this development. “Let me know if you run across it.”

In addition to the department’s press releases, the judge called a press conference nearly every day. They were brief and emotional. His appeals for information into his wife’s disappearance produced nothing except the usual crank calls and chronic confessors.

Then, toward the end of the first week, he surprised the media as well as the PD by offering a fifty-thousand-dollar reward for information that would lead to his wife’s rescue. That increased the number of nuisance calls into the VCU, but yielded nothing useful.

By day seven the investigation had completely stalled.

Then two things happened that recharged it.

Early that morning a maintenance man working on the dock of the Westin Resort spotted Elise’s missing sandal among flotsam sloshing against the pilings.

He recognized it for what it was, because the sandal found on the bridge had been described in detail in every press account. He fished it from the water with a wire coat hanger, but had sense enough not to handle it and called the police immediately.

Duncan and DeeDee felt they should personally convey this portentous news to the judge. He’d been staying at home, within reach of the telephone, surrounded by friends and supporters, waited on by the vigilant Mrs. Berry.

It was she who answered the door. Duncan asked her to notify the judge that they were there and that they needed to see him immediately and in private. She led them into the study where Gary Ray Trotter had died two weeks earlier. Duncan noted that the bullet hole in the wall had been patched. There was a new rug on the floor. Nothing else in the room had changed except for the unopened mail stacked on the judge’s desk.

Cato Laird rushed into the room, breathless and anxious. Their somber expressions brought him to an abrupt standstill. He frantically searched their faces for a hint of why they were there, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask.

“As far as we know your wife is still alive,” Duncan said, eliminating his primary fear. “We don’t have any news of her whereabouts.” Then he told him about the workman finding the sandal.

“Where was it?” Cato Laird’s mellifluous voice sounded raw.

When Duncan told him, his face drained of color. “That’s where…last year…that fisherman who fell out of his boat into the river…”

The man had drowned in the current even as people watched helplessly from the riverbank. His body had disappeared, then surfaced a few days later near the resort’s dock.

“It’s only a sandal,” DeeDee said quietly. “That doesn’t necessarily mean that Mrs. Laird was in the river when it came off her foot.”

Duncan cleared his throat, but it still hurt to say the words. “Nevertheless, the search-and-rescue operation has been reclassified. It’s now a…a recovery mission.”

The judge lowered himself onto the nearest chair, his expression bleak. “Meaning that they’re now searching for her remains.”

Duncan stood mute. DeeDee nodded and murmured, “I’m sorry.”

Laird covered his face with his hands and began to sob. DeeDee and Duncan turned him over to the people hovering in the magnificent foyer of his home and let themselves out the front door. To reach DeeDee’s car, they had to battle their way through a throng of reporters who for a week had kept vigil in the Washington Street median in front of the judge’s home.

“Give me a break, Hatcher,” one of them shouted at Duncan. “What’s the new development?”

“Go fuck yourself.”

“Can I quote you?”

“Please.” Duncan climbed into the front seat and slammed the car door. “Get the hell out of here,” he said to DeeDee as she clambered into the driver’s seat.

They rode back to the Barracks in virtual silence. DeeDee must have sensed his mood, or maybe she had been subdued by the judge’s apparent grief. In any case, she remained blessedly and uncharacteristically mute.

But the day was far from over.

No sooner had they entered the VCU office than Worley sidled up to them. Bobbing a toothpick in his mouth, he said to Duncan, “Get ready for the hard-on of your life, my friend.”

“Bad timing, Worley,” DeeDee snarled. “We’re in no mood for one of your dirty jokes.”

“No joke.”

“Then what?” Duncan asked brusquely.

“While you were out, we got a tip. Someone who saw Elise Laird.”

Duncan ’s heart began to race. “When?”

“Last week. What? Oh, you thought I meant like today?” Worley shook his head. “Naw. Last week. Before his arrest.”

“Arrest? Whose arrest?”

“Gordie Ballew’s.”

“Gordie Ballew!” DeeDee exclaimed, underscoring Duncan ’s disappointment.

“He demanded a meeting with his public defender,” Worley said. “He’s changed his mind and wants to deal. Says he saw Elise Laird the same day he was arrested. Earlier in the day.”

Duncan made a scoffing sound. “Why’s he suddenly remembering this?”

“His lawyer mentioned time served and Laird’s reward of fifty grand.”

“Every lowlife within a hundred miles of Savannah is laying claim to that reward,” Duncan said. “And the lowest of them is Gordie Ballew. Tell him I said to find himself a sweetheart among the cons and enjoy his stay in prison.” He turned toward his private office, but Worley hooked his elbow and pulled him back around. “I’m not yanking your pod, Dunk, and neither is Gordie. This could be a legitimate break.”

Crossly, he pulled his elbow free. “I doubt it, but okay. What did Gordie have to say?”

“Guess who he claims was with Mrs. Laird.”

DeeDee, sharing Duncan ’s impatience, asked, “Who?”

“Robert Savich.” Worley grinned and jabbed Duncan in the gut. “You hard yet?”