He turned and growled, “How dare you?”
Reilly stepped in front of Minorini and said, “We’re investigating a murder, sir, and you’re a material witness at the very least. If you won’t talk to us here, we’ll have to take you downstairs.”
“Why should I talk to you?”
“You shouldn’t,” Minorini said, “if you had anything to do with Dossi’s murder.”
The old man snorted and trembled his way to the chair behind his desk. The chair rattled from the vibration as he pulled it out. He fell into it with a thud and leaned his elbows on the desk, grasping one hand in the other until the tremors seemed controlled. He nodded jerkily at the chairs on the other side of the desk.
“What were you doing at Dossi’s house?” Reilly asked.
“What makes you think I was there?”
“Your fingerprints.”
“Ah. Well, I was invited. I knew him, you see. His wife’s a distant cousin of mine. I didn’t make the connection at the wiretap hearing or I would’ve recused myself. But when he called—he called me himself—and asked as a family favor if I would come see him…” The judge shrugged.
Minorini said, “What did he want?”
“He wanted to know on what legal grounds I could rescind the wiretap order. At least that’s what he said. He hinted that if I didn’t reverse myself, he’d arrange to destroy my reputation, then get another judge to do it. Either way, he’d be off the hook.”
“What did you tell him?” Reilly said.
“As soon as he made his demand, I put in my request for senior status and left it with the chief judge’s secretary.”
“Why?”
“The public’s perception of a court’s integrity is more important than a judge’s impartiality, or legal expertise, or intelligence. I’m sixty-seven years old—not ready to die yet, but I’m not about to let anybody blackmail me.”
“You went to see him, though,” Minorini said. “Why?”
“Out of curiosity, mainly. One of the reasons our system requires direct testimony is so that the triers of fact can judge a witness’s veracity for themselves. I’ve been on the bench a long time. I wanted to see what Mr. Dossi had to say for himself.”
“Why go to the trouble of getting a federal judge involved? What was he really after?”
“I’ve been thinking about that. Maybe an alibi.”
“How’s that?”
“I understand an attempt was made on Ms. Lessing’s life. Maybe Mr. Dossi wanted an unimpeachable alibi witness to his whereabouts when the assassin struck.”
“And someone killed him instead. Why, do you suppose?”
“I’m sure he had enemies…When he was shot, I had just looked out the very window the bullet came through.
“I suppose I didn’t really expect to avoid getting involved…
“There wasn’t anything I could do for him. I called the police, but apart from what I told the 9-1-1 operator, there wasn’t anything I could tell them. So I left.”
By that time, Minorini knew, the cops already had a car on the way. Something—either the sniper or the fatal bullet—set off the security alarm.
“Your chauffeur hasn’t accounted for his whereabouts when the shooting occurred.”
“I didn’t tell my chauffeur not to talk to the police.”
“But he didn’t,” Megan said. She was leaning forward in her chair.
“He’s worked for me for years. I’m sure he feels—Out of loyalty…”
Reilly persisted. “He loyal enough to shoot Dossi for you?”
“Of course not!”
“We’ll be asking him.”
The judge nodded. “I’ll have him drive me to the police station to make my statement. I’ll ask him to tell them what he knows.”
Minorini believed him, but he checked the story anyway. The judge was an old man with a distinguished career. He’d been married to the same woman forty-seven years, had children—none with obvious financial or legal problems—and grandchildren. No one had anything bad or even mildly scandalous to say about him. His credit was good, his bank balance healthy. The Parkinson’s might have suggested financial problems ahead, but the judge had a great insurance policy.
The more digging Minorini did, the more he was inclined to believe the judge had guessed right when he said Dossi wanted him for an alibi.
So Dossi had sent the hit man. No surprise there. Too bad they couldn’t question him. Convenient for someone that he was dead. Who had they leaked the fake safe house location to? Who in the Bureau knew about the trap? Who in the Marshal’s office? And who killed Dossi?
Forty-Three
As soon as the Marshals let her, Joanne called Sean with the news that they’d been reprieved. He was ecstatic, then very quiet.
“What’s wrong, Sean?”
“I was wondering—Would you mind if I stayed a while longer? I mean—Will you be okay?”
“Having fun in spite of yourself?”
“Well, yeah.”
“I’ll be fine. The Marshals said they’d arrange to fly you back. We’ll just ask them to make it a week later.”
“Thanks, mom. Are you at home?”
“Not yet. This afternoon.”
The Feds had been diverting her mail so, on the way home, Carver took her to the post office to get it redirected. And since ATF still had her car, he drove her to the grocery store to stock up.
When they got to her house, Carver insisted on going through it and the carport to check for booby traps or bad guys. Feeling guilty, she supposed, for leaving her alone. If he only knew!
Before she sent him on his way, she made him coffee and asked to see his pictures.
When he left, the house seemed empty. And it was dirty—three weeks accumulation of dust. She swept and vacuumed and mopped. She took down the drapes and walked them to the cleaners to be dry cleaned. One room at a time, she washed the curtains and, while they were drying, the ceilings, walls and floors. When she’d emptied the refrigerator, defrosted the freezer, and cleaned the oven, she tackled the darkroom, moving everything out to scrub the walls and sink.
She kept it up for three days, falling into the dreamless sleep of exhaustion each night until the whole house was spotless, the attic and carport neat, even the crawl space inspected. In all of this—she was aware—there was an element of Lady Macbeth.
When there was nothing more to clean, she took a cab to Helix and maxed her Visa on film and darkroom supplies. Back home, she replenished the spent developer and fix, then developed all the black-and-white film she’d exposed in exile. She took her time printing the resultant negatives, playing with the timing, blowing some up until they looked like grainy abstracts, cropping others, until she was satisfied she couldn’t improve on any of them.
Then she called Rick.
“Do I still have a job?”
“Is the Pope still Catholic? When can you start?”
“Tomorrow. Sean’s out of town, so I’ll take everything you’ve got for me. I don’t have a car, though.”
“No problem. You can use mine.”
Her friend Jane stopped by that evening and they shared a bottle of chablis while Joanne filled Jane in on the last three awful weeks and—the version she’d told the FBI—on the night Dossi was shot. “Murdered,” she told herself. She found it hard to say the word. Harder than pulling the trigger. For all the fantasizing she’d done before the fact, she’d never imagined the aftermath.
“This whole thing’s changed you,” Jane told her. “You seem depressed. Maybe you should see someone.”
“It’s just that it’s brought back all the bad feelings from my divorce—anger and frustration and helplessness. I’ll get over it.”
What alternative did she have?
Forty-Four
In the conference room of the Highland Park Police Station, the city’s Chief of Detectives introduced Minorini to cops from Waukegan, Deerfield and Lake Forest, Lake and Cook Counties, and the State Police.
Gray had also been invited, as a courtesy to Northbrook and on the outside chance he knew something.
Highland Park got things going by summarizing what they had so far: Dossi had been killed with a 30.06 slug. The bullet entered the front of his chest, to the left of his sternum, and exited at the rear, tearing through his heart and leaving a hand-sized hole in his back. Death had been instantaneous. They’d been able to calculate the position of the shooter—inside the property fence, one hundred yards away, and they were pretty sure he’d gotten on and off the property through a storm drain. Other than that—cutting through the BS—they had nothing, no shell casings, no trace evidence, not even any tracks, thanks to the snow. They were fairly certain they’d found where the shooter had parked his car, but they hadn’t found anyone who’d noticed it. Basically, they had zip. The whole thing had been well planned or lucky as hell. But it had more of the feel of a political assassination or a SWAT operation than a mob hit.
The Highland Park detectives were following up on everyone Dossi’s staff could think of who’d contacted him in the last month. And they were going over his phone records.
The state cop wanted to know what Minorini could add. He told them about his visit to the judge and what Haskel had said about the quiet.
“What do we know about the victim?”
Minorini shrugged. “Now that he can’t hurt them, there’s all kinds of vermin coming out of the woodwork to rat on him. He was a top-of-the-line hit man; his investment business just a way to hide his earnings. In light of what’s being said, it’s pretty amazing his name’s never come up in all the years we’ve been watching his associates.”
The Highland Park detective’s skeptical expression gave Minorini the feeling that he suspected him of knowing more than he was telling. Minorini didn’t try to correct the impression. The Bureau’s reputation with local law enforcement wasn’t undeserved.
When they’d wrapped things up, Detective Gray made a point to walk out with him. On the sidewalk in front, he said, “Meetings like this make me ready to kill for a cigarette.” He pulled out a pack of gum and offered Minorini a stick. Minorini shook his head. Gray unwrapped a piece and put the wrapper in one pocket, the rest of the pack in another. Before he put the bare stick in his mouth, he added, “Seems to me, Lessing is the one who benefits most from Dossi’s death.”
Minorini found himself thinking of how sexy Joanne had seemed when she’d said, “I’d be a damned hypocrite if I said I was sorry.” He hadn’t suspected her capable of aggression before that, but as he thought about it, he realized she’d stalked the animals she’d caught on film, from the Canada geese to Dossi himself. She’d stood up on the third floor of the Daley Center with her camera, like a hunter in a blind, and coolly nailed him.
“Nobody ever considers the possibility of the hit man being a woman,” Gray said. “But have you seen her pictures? She has the killer instinct. If I thought she could handle a thirty-ought-six, I’d be showing her picture around at gun stores and gun shows.”
An uncanny echo of his own thoughts. It was the moment to share his own doubts or forever hold his peace. “We’re talking someone who’s been under twenty-four-seven surveillance for weeks, someone who won’t eat lobster because of how it’s killed. And I spoke to her on the phone twice the night of the murder.” He shook his head. “I could buy a female killer, just not this female.”
Gray shrugged. “Well, no statute of limitations on murder. Sooner or later, somebody’ll come forward with something.”
Minorini was halfway back to his office when he remembered that Joanne had spent Thanksgiving at her mother’s farm. And there was that photograph in Schroeder’s office. If not the rifle in the photograph, maybe another…
He would have to check it out.
Forty-Five
Ken Schroeder offered Minorini the same soft, leather chair as on his first visit and said, “What can I do for you today, Agent Minorini?”
“Have you talked to your sister recently?”
“Yeah. She called to say she was okay and that someone killed the creep that tried to bomb her car. So she’s off the hook.”
The scar under Schroeder’s right eye stood out on his face like an accusation. Minorini had seen such scars before, on the faces of hunters who were careless with their scopes. He shifted in his seat. “She say why he tried to kill her?”
“Something to do with her being a witness in a mob killing.”
“And?”
“That’s all.”
Minorini picked up the group photo with gun from Schroeder’s desk and said, “Thirty-ought-six?”
“Hey, you’re good if you can tell from that far away.” He must’ve meant from the point of view of the photographer.
“Lucky guess. Who got the gun when your dad passed away?”
“No idea. After he died we looked for it—we were going to bury it with him—but we never found it. He probably gave it to someone he thought would use it.”
“You’re not a hunter?”
“I never could hit anything unless I was right on top of it. And my brother Allen’s the same. Joanne was the only decent shot but she could never bring herself to kill anything. Maybe that’s why she’s so great with a camera—she can bag her limit without hurting a fly. The lot of us must’ve been a great disappointment to my dad. He loved hunting.”
“So you don’t hunt?”
Schroeder grinned. “Only in the boardroom and the stock exchange.” He seemed too relaxed to be involved.
“Do you own a gun?”
“God, no. I’ve got kids. And my wife’s a city girl. She’s terrified of guns.”
“Where were you the night before last?”
“Why?” Minorini let the question hang until Schroeder answered it himself. “You’re looking for whoever killed the guy who was after Joanne. It wasn’t me. After I left work, I was stuck in traffic until about 8:30. Then I was home the rest of the night.”
“Stuck in traffic’d be pretty hard to prove.”
“No, as a matter of fact. There was an accident on the Kennedy. The police took my name as a witness.”
“What time?”
“I don’t know exactly. Around seven?”
“What department?”
“State Police.”
Allen Schroeder had been having dinner with his in-laws when Dossi was shot. Minorini called on them to confirm, and they were incensed that the FBI would even ask about Allen. Schroeder also confirmed his older brother’s story about the gun. The family Schroeder looked like a genuine dead end. Thank God.
The Marshals had taken Joanne home and given her the green light to go back to work. They hadn’t returned her car. Minorini met her as she was leaving Rage Photo and offered to drive her to the train. He waited until she’d put her seat belt on before he asked her about the gun.
She looked terrified for about seven tenths of a second, then relieved. “Lost, thank God.”
“Thank God?”
“After my dad died, we couldn’t find it.”
“Thank God?”
“If we still had it, my brothers would be on your suspect list, wouldn’t they?”
“Possibly.”
“That’s absurd anyway. I’m the only one who could ever hit anything.”
There was something challenging about the way she said it that brought Minorini’s radar on line. But she had the best alibi in the world, didn’t she, this woman who loved lobsters?
They made small talk for the rest of the ten minutes it took to get to Union Station. He let her out in front and watched until she disappeared inside.
He hadn’t had all that much experience with witnesses suddenly reprieved from banishment, but something about her behavior didn’t ring true. She seemed too depressed and edgy, or not relieved enough—something. He didn’t have a clue about what it meant.
But there wasn’t a hint from any of his sources of there being a contract out on Dossi. And if there had been, Joanne wouldn’
t be someone with the money or connections to arrange it. She was the only one he knew of with a motive. But then, he knew so little about Dossi that he really had no idea who else would want to kill him.
Still, Joanne’s photos of Dossi, and her curious depression, and the amazing lack of other suspects kept coming back to mind. Maybe she had done it!
The idea materialized like a movie ghost, then solidified until he began to feel he’d been poleaxed. It was too out of sync with his image of Joanne, the soft touch who wouldn’t eat veal. Impossible! How could a lone female outwit the mob, the cops, and one of the best security systems out there? The more he thought about it, though, the more he realized that anti-female prejudice was the chief obstacle to making a case. Her sex was irrelevant. He knew plenty of female cops who’d have had the guts and the ruthlessness to do it, given the provocation she had. She had motive. That left means and opportunity. She’d gone home to her mother’s farm for Thanksgiving. It was conceivable she’d picked a gun up there. Lots of farms had guns, sometimes so many that one wouldn’t be missed. But, of course, even if she’d had the nerve and the gun, she had the best alibi in the world. Carver was with her the whole time. Wasn’t he?
Forty-Six
John Carver was at his desk in the Marshal’s office, on the twenty-sixth floor of 219 South Dearborn. He waived Minorini to a chair and offered coffee before he said, “What’s up?”
“Just trying to clear up a few odd points. Got a couple questions.”
“Shoot.”
“You get any odd calls the night Dossi was killed, or hangups? Anything like that?”
He thought Carver hesitated before he said, “No.”
“What time did Lessing go to bed?”
“Early I think, but I didn’t take notes. Why is it important?”
Minorini shrugged and shook his head. “What time did they shovel the drive?”
“About 4:15 A.M.”
“That exact?”
The Fall Page 16
