Trace Of Innocence. Erica Orloff
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who was once his childhood love he had had a determination to do right, using science. But I also knew he and I were both guilty of keeping our universe microscopic and not seeing the bigger picture. Maybe life was easier that way.
“Billie?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you think, if we do this, we’ll be doing God’s work?”
“I thought you didn’t believe in God.”
“I don’t, but I thought…I don’t know. Do you think we’d be doing God’s work?”
“God and I are distant friends, Lewis. But yeah, maybe.” I took the case file and turned to leave his office, and over my shoulder, I said, “She really got to you, didn’t she?”
He didn’t say anything, but Lewis LeBarge, the most rascally man I knew, definitely was doing some thinking.
My desk was piled three inches high with papers and files, and I sighed and looked at my watch. I’d be leaving after dark. The end of daylight saving time the previous weekend guaranteed that. I opened the Justice Foundation’s case file and began poring over every detail. Police reports, evidence analysis, witness interviews. My heart raced a bit. I had to admit, like Lewis, that there was definitely something about piecing together a puzzle that was exciting.
Cammie Whitaker was the suicide king’s victim—his only victim.
I took out a pad and pen and started writing questions as they came to me.
Why the suicide king playing card?
Suicide?
King = Power?
Cammie Whitaker was a beautiful redhead, a former college cheerleader for St. John’s with blue eyes and pale, freckled skin. In her college yearbook photo there was an aloofness, something unknowable to her as she stared at the camera. In the crime-scene photos, her blue eyes stared upward, and a knife was plunged into her temple. Her body was perfectly arranged, and there were thumb-prints and finger marks in mottled red-purple around her neck. She had been strangled, as well. Everything else about her, though, was serene. Her nightgown was beautifully splayed out just so, as if, when the detectives walked in, she had simply been sleeping.
Her apartment was in Ft. Lee, a town that faced Manhattan and was an easy commute from Jersey. Rents weren’t cheap—and her apartment reflected that. The place was stunning. The furniture was all French country, tasteful. If they weren’t actual antiques, they looked like pretty good reproductions. She was twenty-three. Pretty expensive stuff for someone that young.
Old money?
I looked through the file folder. Occupation…bartender. That place would need a hell of a lot of tips, but then again, I tended bar at Quinn’s Pub every once in a while when they were short a bartender on a shift, or to cover for my cousins when they took vacation. I never ceased to be amazed at how much cash I took home.
I read interview after interview, some of them new ones done by Joe Franklin or C.C., about David Falco. Each one focused on how gentle he was, how he always took care of his neighbors—the kind of guy who, when it snowed, shoveled the walkways of the elderly woman next door as well as his own, throwing down rock salt and making sure there was no remaining ice that could cause her to fall. It was hard to reconcile that image with the one of Cammie, knife plunged in her head. Then again, my uncle Sean could regale a roomful of nieces and nephews with stories and amateur magic tricks, help us catch fireflies and give me a quarter for every A on my report card—and then go out and shoot a man in the head. I knew about men who could compartmentalize their family lives with their mob lives, keeping them separate.
I looked at photo after photo of David Falco, from his trial, his mug shot, family photos of him as a boy, as a teen. He was sent away when he was twenty-two. He had worked as a stonemason, and on the side he did restoration projects. He was apparently a very talented painter. Rough childhood, from the wrong side of the tracks, but he had made something of himself. Until he met Cammie Whitaker.
Lewis dropped by my desk. “Want to get a bite?”
“Nah,” I said. “I want to go home and put on my pj’s. I’m really beat. What time is it?”
“Seven-thirty.”
“Ugh. Yet another twelve-hour day. How is it that you manage to work me like this?”
“You’re in love with me.” He winked at me.
“Uh-huh. Yeah, that’s it…. Go on home, Lewis. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“See you, Billie.”
After Lewis left, I shoved the Falco file into my briefcase and grabbed the keys to my monstrosity of a souped-up Cadillac. I headed to the parking garage. My heels echoed on the cement. A few pipes overhead dripped dirty water.
My Cadillac was easy to spot. It even had a little orange pom-pom attached to the antenna that I kept forgetting to take off. I walked to it and inserted my key into the lock when I heard the unmistakable sound of a clip being inserted into a gun. I froze, my back to whoever had the gun.
“Turn around real slow, Billie Quinn.”
Ordinarily, it really pisses me off when someone tells me what to do. However, a gun changes things in direct proportion to how likely it is I think the person might use it.
I turned around very slowly, my arms in the air. Whoever it was knew my name, so it wasn’t a random mugging. When I finished turning around, I recognized the twin brother of Cammie Whitaker. I couldn’t remember his first name. He had sat front and center at the trial and was in photo after photo. And he was the last person I wanted to see with a gun.
I nodded. “Hello,” I said softly, cautiously.
His eyes were bloodshot, and I thought I smelled scotch. “You’re a whore. You know that? You’re a fucking whore.”
I inhaled and tried to exude calm. “I’m sorry…” I struggled to recall his name. Harry. That was it. “I’m sorry, Harry.”
“You’re not.” He started to cry, and the gun shook in his hand. “You’re not sorry. You’re working to free that freak from prison.”
“How would you know that?”
“Those Justice Foundation people have been snooping around. I followed them. And now they’ve got you and that LeBarge guy on the case. Well, I’m telling you to drop it.”
“Look, Harry… I can understand your pain—”
“You can’t understand anything about that!” he snarled at me. He was a good-looking guy, but I could see the toll grief had taken on him. Whereas Cammie was forever twenty-three in death, Harry had grown older, and living without his murdered sister, coupled with, I guessed, alcohol, left wrinkles crisscrossing his face. His cheeks were mottled. His eyes empty.
“I can. My mother was murdered. And putting the wrong guy away for it isn’t the way to peace, Harry.”
“He’s the right guy. The jury found him guilty in under three hours.”
In my mind, I thought that was more a testament to his incompetent counsel than guilt or innocence, but I didn’t say that to Harry.
“He may very well be the right guy—and science doesn’t lie, Harry. People do. So if he’s the right guy, the tests I run will tell us that.”
Part of me understood Harry’s reaction. Cammie’s family, poor Harry here, had to live with the fact that if the cops had caught and maybe sent away the wrong man, then the real guy was out there—somewhere. If that proved true, who did they have to hate, to be angry with? If Falco was innocent, then they needed someone new to despise. That left the Justice Foundation. And now, thanks to Lewis’s ego and his fascination with C.C., that left me.
“Harry…I don’t know who did it. I just know that I want the truth.”
“You