The Library at Mount Char Page 11

  “I will, sir.” He hesitated. “Could I…could I maybe get your autograph?”

  Erwin weighed his options. One of them was to beat the guy a little bit unconscious. That worked sometimes. Usually after they get a autograph they let me go, though. Plus the lobby was full of security cameras. “Yeah. Sure.”

  The deputy passed out a clipboard with a blank sheet of typing paper. Erwin signed it, passed it back. Rogers’s brother took the autograph and put it in a drawer with trembling hands. “I’m gonna have to put you in the chapel.”

  “The chapel?”

  “Yeah. Visitation room is full, unless you want to wait.”

  “The chapel’s fine.” The toilet would have been fine. He just wanted out, away from Rogers’s brother and the endless parade of awful shit that lurked, trembling and eager, just beneath the surface of his babble.

  III

  Rogers’s brother searched Erwin’s bag and took his weapon, but let him keep the laptop and manila folders. As they searched, another deputy skittered around whispering. So Erwin wasn’t surprised when a different guy—a sheriff’s lieutenant, no less—handed him his guest ID and walked him down the long hall to the chapel. He’s probably the highest-ranking guy in the building, Erwin thought, bracing himself.

  Sure enough, when they got to the steel door: “I, uh. I read. I read that book they wrote about you. Well, mostly. About what you did in—how do you pronounce that place?”

  “Natanz,” Erwin said.

  “Is it really true that—”

  “Nope,” Erwin said. He could go weeks at a time without anyone recognizing him, but there were also days where it seemed like everybody he ran into with even the tiniest connection to the military turned out to have read the book, or seen the movie, or that thing on the History Channel. Today was shaping up to be one of those. “It’s total bullshit.” Maybe I should grow a beard?

  “Oh. I don’t read much, but—”

  Erwin strode into the chapel, shut the door behind him. Inside, he looked around. His job carried him into the occasional jail, but this was his very first jail chapel. It was maybe twenty feet on a side and windowless. It smelled of paint. He had expected rows of metal folding chairs—it was that kind of building—but instead he saw six concrete benches set into the floor, each wide enough for three or four guys. Interestingly, there were no crosses in sight. Political correctness, maybe? The only real features were a plain pine podium at the front of the room and a framed painting on the wall.

  With nothing better to do and not eager to settle his middle-aged ass onto the concrete bench, Erwin walked over to check the painting out. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good, either. It had the simple, blocky representationalism of medieval iconography and prison tattoos. A small man with nut-brown skin—Jesus? Mohammed? Other?—stood in the center of the picture. The sun burned down behind him, leaving his face in shadow. He held out his hands, blessing a motley array of people and animals gathered in the light. The holy dude and his supplicants were surrounded by darkness.

  The chapel door opened. A middle-aged guy in khakis and a grease-spotted Izod walked in. “You Leffington?”

  “Call me Erwin. Yeah.”

  “I’m Larry Dorn.”

  “Yeah, hi. Where’s the kid?” Dorn was Steve Hodgson’s public defender.

  “He’ll be along. I asked them to give us a minute first. I wanted to talk to you.”

  “Sure,” Erwin said. “Be happy to.” This was a lie. They had spoken on the phone a couple of times. Dorn came across as sort of a sack of shit, in Erwin’s opinion. But he controlled access to the Hodgson kid.

  While Dorn looked the papers over, Erwin occupied himself with staring at the painting. At first glance the surrounding darkness was completely black, but from the right angle you could see that it wasn’t, not really. The paint was layered. If you looked at it right you could see figures in the darkness, devils maybe, and—

  “Everything looks in order,” Dorn said.

  “Yeah. For what it’s worth, I don’t give much of a shit about your boy. Only reason I’m talking to him is that he might know something about another case.”

  “What a relief,” Dorn said. His voice fairly dripped with sarcasm.

  “Not real fond of him?”

  “Nope. I knew Detective Miner. Our daughters played together sometimes.”

  “That gonna be a problem for you, defending him?”

  Dorn shrugged. “What’s to defend? They found him passed out drunk on Miner’s dining-room table. The gun that killed Miner was in his hands. It had his prints on it.” Dorn looked like he wanted to strangle his own client. It ain’t looking real good for the defense.

  “Just his prints?”

  “No. Miner’s too. And a thumb print on the light switch from a third party we haven’t made yet.”

  Yeah, we have, Erwin thought. You just don’t know it yet.

  “Anything else?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like anything.”

  Dorn pursed his lips for a moment, considering. Then he shrugged. “Yeah. There was this.” He rooted around in a folder and handed over a stack of 8 × 10 glossies of the crime scene.

  “Lotta guts on that china cabinet,” Erwin said. “We know who they belonged to?” Carolyn, maybe? Or maybe Lisa?

  “We’re still waiting on the lab work.”

  “It was a shotgun what did it, though. The same one?”

  Dorn popped an eyebrow. “Good eye. You in forensics?”

  “Not really.” He had killed a lot of people with shotguns. “That there’s a piece of lung, looks like. It ain’t the victim’s”—his lungs were mostly in the kitchen—“and this Steve kid is up and walking around, so it probably ain’t his either. You guys wonder about that?”

  “Not really, no. What are you getting at?”

  Erwin sighed. How’d this guy make it through law school? “Anybody gone looking for this mystery chick of his?”

  “Who?” Dorn said. “The one at the bar? He made her up.”

  “I thought you had witnesses who saw the two of them together.”

  “We do. But that’s all we have. If she was ever at Miner’s house, she didn’t leave any fingerprints, any footprints, not so much as a stray hair. Do you know how hard it is to walk through someone’s house and not leave any trace?”

  “I dunno. Pretty hard, I guess. Thing is, though, she did leave a print.”

  Dorn’s face clouded. “You’re kidding me.”

  “Nope.”

  “Which, the one on the light switch? It wasn’t in IAFIS,” Dorn said, meaning the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System.

  “That’s right,” Erwin said. “It wasn’t.” He was going to let the phrase hang there, pregnant with all sorts of sinister implications about the information he had access to, but just then the door to the chapel clanged open. This disappointed Erwin. It spoiled the fucking moment.

  A different deputy walked in clutching a skinny white guy with short brown hair. Erwin recognized Steve Hodgson from his mug shot. The deputy shoved him at Erwin the way you’d push a sack of trash into a landfill.

  Erwin looked him over. Is that him? Is that all there is? He wasn’t quite a kid, not anymore. Early thirties, maybe? He was in an orange jail jumpsuit, faded and fraying at the edges. No visible tattoos. He didn’t look like a junkie, but his eyes jumped around, alert and maybe a little shell-shocked.

  Dorn nodded at the guard. “Thanks.”

  “I gotta lock you in Mr. Leffington, sir,” the guard said. “I’m real sorry. I gotta say, though, it’s a honor to—”

  “It’s no problem,” Dorn said. “Thanks.”

  Looking thwarted, the guard shut the door.

  The Hodgson kid immediately started asking Dorn about someone named Petey, whether Dorn had heard anything about him. Who the fuck is Petey? He made a mental note but didn’t interrupt.

  Dorn looked at the guy like he was a fucking idiot. �
�Don’t you have bigger things to worry about?”

  Erwin could see desperation in Steve’s eyes, but he kept it out of his voice. “Yeah. I know. I just wondered if—”

  “Yeah. OK. Fine. Your friend called. He said he picked up your dog. That’s all I got.”

  Hodgson nodded, smiled a little. Tension visibly slid off him. He shuffled over to one of the concrete benches, his thin blue prison slippers scuffing against the shiny linoleum. The manacles didn’t leave him much room to move.

  Up for murder one and all he cares about is his dog? When he got close enough Erwin stood up and held out his hand. Steve looked startled, but after a moment he reached out to the length of the chain and gave Erwin a little shake.

  “I’m Erwin,” Erwin said.

  “Steve Hodgson.” He thought about it for a second. “ ‘Pleased to meet you,’ isn’t quite right, but I’ll admit I’m curious. What can I do for you, Mr.—”

  “It’s Erwin,” Erwin said. “Always call me Erwin.” Steve’s eyes narrowed at this. Probably wondering if I’m playing “good cop.”

  “I was hoping I could ask you a couple of questions. You mind if I call you Steve?”

  “Sure. Whatever.” Steve sat on one of the benches. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a cigarette, do you? I’d drop-kick the baby Jesus for a Marlboro.”

  “Sorry. Don’t smoke. Want a dip?” Erwin noticed that Steve took a couple of extra steps so that he could sit with his back to the wall. Erwin had done the same thing.

  Steve considered. “I’ll pass. Thanks, though.”

  “I’ve read your case file,” Erwin said. “If what you say is true, sounds like you got well and truly fucked over.”

  Steve gave him a wry smile. “Yeah. Oddly enough, I had that same thought.”

  “Any idea why she’d want to do such a thing?”

  Again, Steve looked startled. “You believe me?”

  “Dunno yet. You ain’t said much.”

  Steve gave Dorn a resentful look. Dorn hadn’t made a secret of the fact that he thought the woman, if she existed at all, was awfully convenient. “Up until now no one seemed interested. But to answer your question, no. I have no idea why she’d want to do something like this to me. Or anyone else, for that matter.” But something flickered in his eyes as he said it.

  “You got a clean conscience, do ya?”

  Steve gave him a long, appraising look. “You don’t miss much, do you? No. I don’t have a clean conscience. I did something a long time ago. A friend of mine got hurt. Probably his parents hated me enough to do something like this, if they would have thought of it, but Celia died of a heart attack seven years ago and Martin shot himself the year after.”

  “That’s a sad fucking story,” Erwin said.

  “You making fun of me?”

  “I am not,” Erwin said. “For what it’s worth, I get it. I’ve got plenty of shit I wish I could take back. Keeps me up some nights.”

  Steve studied him for a moment, then relaxed a little. “OK. Sorry.”

  “You think this Carolyn chick has anything to do with that?”

  Steve’s brow wrinkled. “I don’t see how she could,” he said. “But there’s a whole lot about her that I don’t understand at all.”

  “Why don’t you start at the beginning,” Erwin said. “Tell me everything you remember. Take your time. I got all day.”

  IV

  “Then I heard a guy behind me,” Steve was saying. He had been speaking for almost an hour. He had a good memory for visual detail, less so for the exact wording of conversations. His description of the woman’s funky attire—bicycle shorts and leg warmers?—was both interesting and surprisingly detailed. Also in Erwin’s professional opinion, it had the ring of truth. If this guy is lying, he doesn’t know it. He simply had no idea what had been done to him, or why. It made Erwin feel fucking sad.

  “Then the guy—Miner—he said something along the lines of ‘You’re under arrest.’ He said it at least twice. He acted kind of weird, like he wasn’t sure what was going on. In a daze, you know?”

  “What happened next?” Erwin asked.

  Steve looked down. Erwin noticed that he avoided looking at the chain around his ankles. “I honestly don’t remember. I remember thinking, Oh, shit, he’s got a gun, and I can kind of picture his face, so I must have turned around. But my next clear memory is waking up on the floor. I had no idea where I was, and some guy was hollering at me.”

  “That would be Detective Jacobsen,” Dorn said. “He and Miner were friends. They were supposed to go out fishing that morning. He discovered Miner’s body, and performed the initial arrest.”

  “Thanks,” Erwin lied. He didn’t give a fuck about Jacobsen. He tapped his pen against the concrete bench, thinking. “So you deny killing him? Miner?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Prolly not,” Erwin said. “But I’m curious.”

  “I guess I do. Deny it, I mean.”

  “You guess?” Dorn said, incredulous.

  Steve shrugged. “Like I said, I don’t remember. The last clear memory I have, he was alive. When I came to the next morning he was dead. I had no grudge against the guy.” He sighed. “I really wish I’d just gone home and gone to bed. Dunno if it would’ve helped him much, but I’d probably be at home with my dog.”

  “You think she’d have killed him anyway?”

  “Dude,” Steve said with truly epic sincerity, “I’ve got no fucking idea.”

  Erwin waited for more, but that was it. He’s empty. He considered. “OK,” he said after a moment. “I think you’ve been pretty straight with me. I appreciate that. A lot of the guys I talk to, they lie just ’cause they like the sound of it. So I’m going to spare you my dance moves. I got some information about this woman—not much, but some—that might be of use in your case. Maybe.”

  Steve blinked. “Go on.”

  Dorn looked up from his papers.

  “I’m fairly sure that the woman you met is named Carolyn Sopaski. And what you said dovetails with the little bit we know about her.”

  Steve looked attentive, maybe even hopeful. He didn’t speak.

  “I’m listening,” Dorn said.

  “Like I said, I work for Homeland Security. I’m a special agent. It’s kind of like an FBI special agent, except we ain’t gotta wear a suit if we don’t want to.” Today he was in a gray T-shirt and a navy-blue zip-up hoodie. The jeans he had on were the same size as the ones he wore to his high school graduation thirty years ago.

  “So what do you do, exactly?”

  “It depends. A lot of times I just follow up on interesting coincidences.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, these days Homeland Security is tied into pretty much everything. You know that, right? Phone records, Internet searches, library books, bank stuff…everything. All that goes into this big air-conditioned room that they got up in Utah. What comes out the other end is a pile of weird coincidences that might be of interest to guys like me. So, like, if the same dude buys one bag of fertilizer at fifteen or twenty different Home Depots, this system might notice that. You follow?”

  “I guess.”

  “Or, like in this case, say a cop writes a report. They’re forever writing reports, poor fucks. In addition to all the normal shit that happens with it—prosecutors and lawyers and dust-gathering—there’s also a copy that goes in to these machines in Virginia. And on the last run one of the cases that popped out was—”

  “Mine?” said Steve, suddenly eager. “You found something that clears me?”

  “Nope. Yours didn’t get picked up. Nothing unexplained there. The connection that ended up on my desk had to do with a bank robbery. A really fucking weird bank robbery.”

  “Weird how?”

  “Part of it was the size of the haul,” Erwin said. “Most robberies, the guy gets ten, maybe fifteen thousand. A lot of times it’s not even that much. But this one was more like three hundred thousand.”

&
nbsp; “Three hundred twenty-seven thousand,” Steve said, “-ish?” Quoting the amount his mystery woman had said was in the blue duffel bag.

  Erwin nodded. “Actually, yeah. Same thought crossed my mind. Anyway, that’s a pretty successful robbery. A lot more successful than most of them. It’s unusual. So the computer took an interest, kicked it up to me. One thing that might have explained it was if the people who did it were trained.”

  Steve wrinkled his forehead. “Trained? You mean, like, government trained?”

  “Believe it or not, yeah. KGB ran a course on that very thing back in the ’70s. Insurgent training or some shit. We did too, as part of the Green Beret Q Course. Not anymore, but a lot of the know-how is still floating around. Anyway, that’s why I got called in. We get one like this every couple of months. Usually it turns out to be nothing.

  “That’s true here as well, at least in that we don’t have any reason to think Ms. Sopaski is into any kind of terrorist shit. What’s less clear is what exactly she is involved in. I mean, the bank tellers helped her do the fuckin’ robbery. What’s up with that?”

  “What do you mean?” Dorn asked.

  Erwin shrugged. “Just what I said. At around three p.m., Ms. Sopaski—your Carolyn—and another chick, identity unconfirmed, walked into the Oak Street branch of Midwest Regional in downtown Chicago. We got ’em on the lobby camera. They waited in line like good little customers for just over three minutes. When their turn came the two of them approached the teller, a Miz”—Erwin squinted at his notes—“Amrita Krishnamurti. The unidentified woman spoke with her calmly for thirty-seven seconds. Then—well, never mind. Watch it yourself.”

  Erwin fired up his laptop. He punched up Microsoft something-or-other, spent a couple of seconds closing out porn, then pressed Play. “Security-camera footage,” he said. “From the bank.”

  Steve set the laptop on one of the concrete benches. Dorn watched over his shoulder.

  “Why is she dressed like that?” Dorn asked. Carolyn looked more or less reasonable, if a bit dated—jeans and a man’s button-down, barefoot—but the other woman was in a bathrobe and cowboy hat.