Strip search sp-2

by William Bernhardt

  "I don't know. I don't think anyone who can do math problems that require over a hundred steps is what I'd call normal." I was watching them both very carefully, or more accurately, watching to see what it was they were watching for. Six months ago, I would've suspected this obviously forced conversation was for the purpose of sniffing my breath, but neither of them were close enough to do that now. For some reason, they just wanted to hear me talk.

  That was it, of course. Darcy told me my voice sounded funny. The Valium must've been slurring my speech. Granger picked up on it, so today they were all out to see if he was right. Thank goodness I'd stopped at one pill this morning. Although the aching in my stomach and the knocking in my knees told me it wouldn't be long before I had another one. But I didn't want to get like I was yesterday-so doped I could barely stay awake, barely assimilate information. Sure, I was an old pro at faking sobriety. But it didn't help me do my job.

  "Well," O'Bannon said, "let's talk about it later." In other words, no way in hell.

  "As you wish. But the woman was even talking about scholarships. This could be a golden opportunity." I turned toward my desk. "Was there anything else?"

  Granger and O'Bannon looked at each other without saying anything.

  "Okay, look." I took a deep breath, then started. "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers…" I went through the whole thing at lightning speed, then did it again, just for good measure. Didn't trip up once. When I'm good, I'm good. "Satisfied?"

  Granger frowned. "How did you know?"

  "How did I know?" I took a step closer and peered into his eyes. "Because I'm a trained psychologist and to me the human mind is an open book. In your case, a comic book. I know everything you're thinking, planning, considering, every seedy, greasy little contemplation." I leaned in closer. "I even know what you were doing in your apartment by yourself last night."

  Granger pulled away, staring at me as if he were ready to re-inaugurate the Salem witch trials. "I-don't know what you're talking about."

  "That's all right," I answered, eyes narrowed. "Because I do. Bwah-ha-ha-ha-ha!"

  It's always a pleasure to see Darcy. Except perhaps on those rare occasions when he gets so excited he throws himself across my desk.

  "Ooof!" I said, dodging, narrowly avoiding a collision of skulls. All the papers on my desk, not to mention my In/Out box, went flying. "Darcy, what are you doing? Are you blind?"

  "You moved your desk forward!"

  "I most certainly did not."

  "It is at least seven inches closer to the top of the stairs than it was yesterday."

  "Look, Spock, I didn't move anything. I-" But of course, I had to look. I stared at the linoleum on the floor and saw square impressions, remnants of where the legs of the desk once had been. About seven inches away from where they were now. Cleaning people, probably. "Do you calculate your trajectory on your way up the stairs?"

  Darcy blinked. "Sorta."

  I didn't bother asking because I knew I wouldn't understand. "What're you so excited about?"

  He leaned across my desk. His face was lively in a way I'd never seen it before. "Can you keep a secret?"

  Darcy had secrets? Since when? "Sure."

  "Scout's honor?"

  I gave him a long look. "Were you ever a Scout?"

  "For two meetings. Till the Scoutmaster got mad at me and threw me out. My dad said it was my fault but it was not my fault because this other boy was making fun of me and he said that Saturn was larger than Jupiter bu-"

  I held up a hand. "Periods, Darcy. Periods."

  He took a deep breath. "Right."

  "So tell me the secret before I burst already."

  He came so close his lips brushed against my ear, which was pretty unusual for a kid with severe tactile defensiveness. "I went to the crime scene."

  I pulled away, my eyes wide. "Darcy, I told you-"

  "I know. But I thought that I should so I went anyway."

  "I-But-" I didn't know where to begin. "Which scene?"

  "The movie studio."

  I looked him straight in the eye. "Darcy, I know for a fact that CS is still restricted. How could you get in?"

  Darcy looked to his right, then his left. When he was certain no one was watching, he pulled something out of his underpants and flashed it at me. Something shiny. A badge.

  "Where did you get that!"

  "I borrowed it from my dad's desk."

  "You-borrowed it! What's going to happen if he notices it's gone?"

  "He already did. He thinks he lost it. He got tired of looking and went back to making pottery ashtrays."

  "But-he's bound to suspect-"

  "He will not suspect me. He does not think I am smart enough to do anything smart."

  "And he never will if you keep doing crazy stuff like this! Darcy, your father told you to stay away!"

  "But I wanted to go." His face sagged. "I wanted to help you, Susan."

  I closed my eyes and blew out my cheeks. What could I say? It was impossible to be mad at him. "The uniform posted outside must've recognized you."

  "I think that he did. But who is going to stop the son of the chief of police?"

  Good point. "But Darcy-why did you want to go there?"

  "Because I wanted to find something that would help you, so you could solve the case and not be so nervous and shaky."

  "Darcy-"

  "And I did."

  My mouth closed. Then reopened. "You found something?"

  He shook his head wildly up and down. He looked both ways, making sure no one was watching. Then he reached inside his coat.

  It was only a scrap of paper, but Darcy'd had the foresight to enclose it in a plastic evidence Baggie. I held it up to the light.

  It was another equation:

  "Swell," I murmured. "What's this one do, prove the existence of Santa Claus?"

  "Wrong!" Darcy said. He made a snorting noise, then began jumping up and down. "I know what this one does! I know what this one does!"

  He was bouncing like Tigger on speed. "So, does that mean you know what this one does?"

  "Yes! It's a test for determining primes!"

  "Huh?"

  His voice changed. I'd been around him long enough to understand that this meant he was in his mimetic recitation mode. "The theorem for determining primeness was discovered by Cambridge mathematics professor Edward Waring, the author of Meditations Algebraicae, in 1784. He named it for his good friend John Wilson, who left mathematics to become a lawyer and later, a judge. He was knighted in-"

  "Stop. I get the idea. Periods, remember." Maybe it was the mellowness induced by the Valium, or maybe I've just lost all self-respect, but I didn't try to pretend I understood. "What the hell is primeness?"

  "Prime numbers! Numbers that are only divisible by themselves and one."

  "Oh, right, right. So you use this to find primes?"

  "No. To test a number to see if it is prime. There is no way to find primes."

  "Really?" I tried to act cool and nonchalant. "What about the Reimann hypothesis?"

  He couldn't mask his surprise any more than he could mask any of his other emotions. "Y-Y-You know about the Reimann hypothesis?"

  "Of course," I said offhandedly, declining to mention that the only reason I knew anything about it was that Dr. Goldstein had mentioned it and I'd written it down in my report. "What do you take me for, some kind of stooge?" I stared at his new piece of evidence. "Why would the killer think this was important?"

  Darcy might be able to sniff out evidence, but when it came to questions that required an understanding of human motivations, he was useless. "I do not know. Maybe the killer thinks math is fun. I think math is fun. Lots more fun than killing people."

  Personally, I didn't care for either. "Where did you find this?"

  "In the dead lady's computer."

  My forehead creased. "I remember watching the computer CSIs scanning the hard drive."

  "Not inside the computer's memory.
Inside the computer. In the hard shell case of the CPU."

  "You opened the computer itself?"

  He nodded eagerly. "And I found this!"

  I assumed this scrap of paper was too small to prevent the computer from functioning. "What on earth would inspire you to open the computer case?"

  "Because the bad man did."

  "You mean the killer? How did you know?"

  "I could see the traces of him on the outside. When I got close, I could smell them."

  "Are you talking about blood? Because I know that Tony went over everything in that studio with luminal and ultraviolet light."

  "Not blood. Sweat. He sweated on the computer."

  "And you could tell? No way." But I had the evidence in my hand, didn't I? And I knew darn well Darcy was not capable of lying. "Why would he be sweating? The studio was at normal room temperature. All the big camera lights were shut off."

  "I think that maybe he did not like what he was doing or he knew he should not do it or the lady made it hard for him and it made him upset so he started sweating. Do you sweat when you are doing something you do not want to or you know you should not do? I know I was sweating when I snuck into the crime scene and I remember once when I was five that-"

  "Periods!" I fairly screamed. "What makes you think the killer didn't want to do what he did?"

  "The blood. In all the wrong places."

  As usual, I had no idea what he was talking about. I opened the file on my desk and pulled out the crime scene photos. "Show me."

  Darcy rifled through the photos like a computer scanning its files. He pulled one out and thrust it toward me. "See the blood?"

  "Yeah, I see tons of blood. The man chopped off her head."

  "No, there." He pointed away from the main pool, near the top of her pillow. "See?"

  I didn't. I had to pull out a magnifying glass. Eventually I was able to spot two drops of blood that were distinct from the pool. "Splatters, I suppose."

  "Splatters would be elongated," Darcy said. "These drops are round. That means they fell straight down."

  I didn't have to be a forensic scientist to know he was right. "When did it happen, then?"

  "When he started to hurt her the first time. This-" He raced through the pics till he found the one he wanted. "And this is from where he tried to hurt her the second time."

  I examined the picture and nodded. "And the third?"

  "There is no third. So it must be covered with the other blood."

  "So after two false starts, he finally managed to do it." Was it possible? The victim put up a fight? Our homicidal maniac was reluctant to kill? If that was the case-why do it? It didn't make any sense. What's more, it was totally at odds with the typical profile of a serial killer. And it threw my narcissistic personality disorder theory out the window.

  "This is good work, Darcy. Very good work." If only I knew what it meant.

  "But you will not tell my dad, will you?"

  I pulled my nose out of the pictures. "I think he should know. If he understood how good you were at this, maybe he wouldn't be such a pain in the butt every time I want to take you somewhere."

  Darcy rubbed his hands together, as if he were washing them with invisible soap. "I do not think that you should tell him."

  "Why? Are you afraid he might punish you?" But even before I said it, I had already sensed that wasn't the problem. But if not Of course. This was Darcy we were talking about, not every other self-centered male on the face of planet earth. He wasn't afraid his father would punish him.

  He was afraid his father would punish me.

  "Darcy, I've got to bring this evidence to the attention of the detective squad."

  "Tell them you found it."

  "Take credit for your work? That's just wrong. Goes against everything I believe in."

  "Would you do it…" His awkwardness was so apparent it was painful. "Would you do it for me?"

  Well, if you'd been looking at his pathetic puppy dog face, you would've agreed too, right or wrong. "All right, Darcy. For now. But as soon as I think it's…safe to give credit where due, I will."

  "That's okay." He cocked his head to one side. "Are you going on more interviews today?"

  "I sure am."

  "Can I…Maybe…I was thinking…"

  I clapped him on the shoulder. "I'd be honored if you'd come with me."

  His face lit up like the spotlight on the Luxor. "Oh, boy. Oh boy oh boy oh boy!"

  "Hey," I said, grabbing my coat, "you're the one who's doing a favor here. At the rate you're going, you'll have the case cracked by midnight."

  19

  Dane Spencer was almost afraid to look at his watch. He knew he was working well past midnight; it was only a matter of how much. It was always like this, the night before a big trial. No matter how early he started, no matter how hard he worked, there were always a million things left to be done at the last moment. This time was no exception. Now it seemed clear he wouldn't be going home at all. That, too, had occurred before, which was why he always kept a spare suit and a grooming kit in his office. He didn't even need to call. Jenny knew he had a trial coming up; she wouldn't be expecting to see him anytime before she went to bed. And when she woke up and saw the other side of the bed still empty, she would just shrug and say, "Good luck."

  Least it paid the bills.

  Karen Dutoi was still sitting at her desk outside his office, typing each new revision of his witness outlines as soon as he slid them into her box. It was an endless process; every time he went over them he thought of something new. Thank God trials had a start date; otherwise, you could revise your strategy until the end of time.

  "Go home, Karen," Spencer said, leaning against her desk. "It's late. You have a family that needs you."

  "Oh, no," she replied. "If you can stand it, I can."

  "I have to do this. You don't."

  "But all these revisions…"

  "I don't mind going into court with a little ink on my outlines. It's not as if anyone's going to see them but me."

  "I appreciate the offer, Dane, but I know there'll be more work than this before you get to the courtroom. You're going to need me. I'm staying."

  "But your kids-"

  "Are fine. I'm staying. Besides, aren't you still waiting for that expert witless?" It was a little joke they'd told each other at least a dozen times.

  "Yes, but that still doesn't mean you have to be here."

  "What kind of joker wants to meet in the dead of the night?"

  "The kind who doesn't want his employer to know he's turned quisling until he's in a room surrounded by federal marshals. Seriously, Karen-"

  "Forget it. I'm not going home."

  He sighed, pretending to be annoyed. In reality, it was impossible to be annoyed with her. Among other reasons, because he went for her page boy cut and button nose in a big way. If she weren't married, he would've made a move weeks ago. Of course, technically, he was married himself. Not that he'd ever let that stop him before. Who knew? Maybe if he finally got all this work done before the sun rose, and they weren't both unconscious…

  "Well," he said with resignation, "if we're both staying, someone's going to have to make another pot of coffee. And the unsexist, egalitarian thing would be for me to make it. The only problem with that being-I don't know how."

  She laughed. "I'm right on it, boss. Just let me finish-"

  Karen was cut off by a pounding at the door, so sudden it made her jump. She slipped out from behind the desk, peered through the peephole.

  Must be the expert witness. A short burly man in torn jeans and a tight T-shirt. What field could possibly be his expertise? Karen wondered.

  "You gotta help me!" the man said after she let him in. He was wide-eyed and panicked, looking from one of them to the other. "I spotted one of my bosses' goons in the parking garage. They know I'm here!"

  Spencer stepped forward. He wasn't sure what to say. This witness could be crucial to winning a multimillion
dollar case. But looking at him, it was hard to believe he had ever been part of a professional industrial firm. "I'll call Barney, down at the security booth on the first floor lobby. He'll make sure no one gets in who isn't on the list."

  "There's three of them," the man said, "against one old guy? They'll slaughter him."

  "Please. Try not to be melodramatic."

  "You don't get it," the man said, flailing his arms. "I left my girlfriend in there."

  "What?"

  "I'm not kiddin'. She's sittin' in my car. They're gonna kill her!"

  "But why-"

  "Please, mister, I'll explain later. But first we gotta get her out of there."

  Spencer didn't know what to do. He did not trust this man, not at all. But if there really was a woman in danger, he had to help. He'd just make sure he collected Barney before he followed the man into the garage. And make sure Barney was armed.

  Karen was frantically rummaging through her top desk drawer. "I know I put my passcard in here somewhere," she muttered, forehead creased. "Why is it you can never find things when you need them most?"

  "I'll get mine," Spencer said, disappearing into his office. No way he was letting Karen go off with this man by herself, anyway. He walked back to his office, took his coat off the hook on the back of the door, retrieved his passcard, then returned to the lobby.

  Karen was sprawled on the floor, her legs bent back, her dress bunched around her waist, a white cloth across her mouth.

  "What in the hell-" But before he could finish the sentence, much less understand what was happening, he felt his left arm being jerked behind him.

  The man from the hallway was holding a pair of handcuffs, and before Spencer knew what was happening, he had slid the cuffs over one wrist and snapped the other end to the doorknob.

  "What is the meaning of this?" Spencer barked. "Are you working for the defendant? Because if they think they're going to bully me into giving them a settlement, you can just tell-"

  "This ain't got nothing to do with your case, mister. Your number came up, that's all."

  "Number? What are you talking about? Did you hurt Karen?"