Every Secret Thing

by Laura Lippman

  “Helen Manning’s parents have money.” And Helen would kill herself before asking for it, Sharon knew. That’s why a public defender had ended up representing Alice in the first place. But Sharon would persuade Helen of the importance of not being proud this time.

  “Sharon, you know how I work. I take on cases that I can win, cases with rich clients or ones that are rich in publicity. This lacks the former, and you’ve told me you want to avoid the latter. I’ve wanted you to work for me for years, but why should it be on these terms? To put it baldly—what’s in it for me?”

  “Me. You’d have me, at last.”

  “How old are you now? Thirty-five? Forty?”

  “I’m thirty-four.” Sharon couldn’t help glancing at her reflection in the plate-glass sliding doors. The sky was completely dark now, so she could see herself more clearly, and what she saw was a woman who, if anything, looked younger than she was.

  “Not a comment on your looks, dear, just the sheer number of years I’ve been bumping into you around the courthouse. You were quite the prodigy when you started out. But for my office, you’re long in the tooth. You know that.”

  Sharon did. Rosario ran a farm team, taking passionate young men and women straight out of law school, then working them to death. She reaped the benefits while most of her associates burned out and crashed, some leaving the law altogether. There was always a ready supply of associates because she was a brilliant lawyer. She had a great instinct for cases that looked open-and-shut for the prosecutor, but could be derailed by a little bare-minimum lawyering. People liked to say that Rosario Bustamante drank to level the playing field, and there had never been a complaint filed against her with the state bar, no matter how many nips she stole in the ladies’ room during a trial. If Rosario Bustamante had been Daniel Florio’s legitimate son instead of his bastard daughter, she would have been a power broker in the city, rising high in the judicial ranks or winning elective office. Deprived of her birthright, she took great pleasure in kicking the shit out of anyone with power.

  “Sharon, you clearly have some family money”—Rosario indicated the surroundings with her chin. “You’re one of the few who can afford the dignity of being a public defender without giving up the, um, niceties provided by private practice. And everyone knows you’re a good lawyer. If you’re intent on bailing, find a good firm with a partnership track. You know I’m never going to share the profits of my practice, so why bother?”

  “Aren’t you going to retire someday?”

  Rosario laughed. “Why not just ask me if I plan to die? Yes, I’m going to retire one day, but not for quite some time. What are you planning to do, sit around like a vulture, in the vain hope you can take over my lease and buy my office equipment on the cheap?”

  “I could learn enough from you to set up my own practice. Or I could run for public office.”

  “County council?”

  “State delegate, more likely. County council is still a boys’ club.”

  “It’s a part-time legislature, dear. The jobs don’t pay enough to make it worth your while to spend the three months in Annapolis.”

  “But you would pay me enough. And it wouldn’t hurt you to have an associate who was in Annapolis part-time.”

  “Perhaps.” Rosario paused, and Sharon wondered if she was jealous. “Assuming you got there. But what would you do for me in the meantime?”

  Without realizing what she was doing, Sharon knelt before Rosario Bustamante and took her hands. Rosario’s knees were splayed—she was always careless about how she sat—and her pantyhose were an off shade of amber that made her legs look jaundiced. From this vantage point, Sharon could see the ladder of a run that had opened on the inside of the right thigh, reaching past the hem of the short skirt. Sharon felt as if she were bowing before a queen, waiting to be knighted.

  “I know this doesn’t appeal to you, because, if we do it right, there won’t be any publicity. The best-case scenario is a case that never happens. The cops find whoever really did it, and leave Alice alone.”

  Rosario looked at her keenly. “But you don’t think that’s going to happen, do you?”

  “No. I think they’re going to find a way to put a charge on her—or at least get a warrant to search her mother’s home, which will tip reporters that she’s a suspect. If that happens, Alice and her mother are going to need a strong ally, someone who can hold the press at bay, spin the story in their favor. There’s stuff about Alice that no one knows, stuff that would blow people’s minds if we told. I’ll do the work, you can go on mike. But please, please, Rosario, let’s do this. I’ll sign a personal services contract, give you the next five or ten years of my professional life if you’ll just hire me, tonight, and let me work on this case.”

  Rosario patted Sharon’s hair with a gesture that was somehow more fatherly than motherly. “Okay. Let’s see where this goes. I hate to say it, but it could be fun. Now”—she shook her glass—“more Scotch, less scooch this time.”

  “One more thing—”

  Rosario scowled, skeptical of being taken.

  “The last time around, there was a sort of gentlemen’s agreement that the two girls would, um—”

  “Hang together?”

  “Yes. In a manner of speaking.”

  “And who were the ‘gentlemen’ who made this agreement?”

  “Me, I guess,” Sharon admitted. “Me and the PD for Ronnie Fuller, the other girl. But it was at Helen Manning’s behest. She wanted things to be fair.”

  Sharon slumped on the floor, remembering Helen’s bizarre insistence that the legal proceedings must not escalate into a welter of finger-pointing and blame. I don’t care who did what, who thought of what, Helen kept saying. The important thing is that they be treated equally. It’s only fair.

  “Sharon?” Rosario actually extended her high heel and prodded Sharon’s midsection with the toe.

  “What?”

  “My drink?”

  The doorbell rang while Sharon was at the bar. She all but ran to it, eager to introduce Rosario to “their” client. But as always, Sharon needed a moment to reconcile the wide-eyed little girl in her memory with the hulking almost-woman with the impenetrable ice-blue eyes.

  She hugged her anyway. “Alice, we’ve got something wonderful to tell you. Rosario Bustamante is going to be your lawyer, pro bono, and I’m to help her. The Baltimore County Police won’t be able to harass you now. They won’t dare. You’ve got the best criminal lawyer in the area working for you for free. For free!”

  Helen clapped her hands in delight. Alice looked to Helen, as if she couldn’t be sure what to think until Helen showed her the way. And in that moment, in that lumpy moon of a face, Sharon saw the child she remembered, the bewildered little girl who simply could not make sense of what had happened to her life.

  Monday,

  July 6

  28.

  Midnight had barely come and gone when a fourteen-year-old boy in the county due west of Baltimore crept from his bed, took his father’s gun from an unlocked drawer in the kitchen, and used it to kill his parents and his older sister. He then lifted the keys to his sister’s Jeep Cherokee from the hook next to the kitchen door and managed to drive perhaps thirty miles before he was pulled over on I-70. Thin and small for his age, with large, owlish glasses that gave him a pronounced resemblance to a young actor best known for a series of fantasy films, the boy was still wearing his pajamas. Once the state police made it clear that they did not believe his story about his intrepid escape from a trio of crazed killers who had executed his family—a story taken, more or less, from a cop show he had watched Saturday night—the boy was asked why he had done it.

  “I’m not sure,” he said with a small sigh. “I didn’t really have a plan per se.”

  “Per se,” Lenhardt repeated, after relaying this privileged piece of gossip to Nancy and Infante, who did not look much refreshed despite having devoted their last sixteen hours to attempted sleep. “Per se
. ‘I didn’t really have a plan per se.’ I guess that explains the pajamas. My friend in the state police can’t get over it. He shot Mom and Dad while they slept, but big sister heard the shots and made a run for it. They found her in the hallway outside her room.”

  “Did something set him off?” Nancy asked. “A quarrel, a disagreement, some kind of abuse?”

  “His statement at the scene is the only thing he’s going to say for quite a while. He’s being charged as an adult, and his lawyer is already hinting that he’ll have all sorts of fascinating revelations to make, when the time comes. The important thing is, come tomorrow, no one’s going to care what we’re doing. We’re already B-3.”

  “Be what?” Infante asked on a yawn.

  “B-3,” Lenhardt said, pointing out the page of that number in that day’s Beacon-Light. “Eight paragraphs on the search, nothing more. Now we can fly beneath the radar for a couple of days at least, try to do some police work. Kid who kills his family trumps missing-and-presumed-dead kid.”

  Nancy felt equal parts relief and dismay. “What? The Baltimore metro area can’t stay interested in two crimes at once?”

  “They can barely stay interested in one,” Lenhardt said. “Nobody can, anywhere. The whole country’s got attention deficit disorder, but the kids are the ones on Ritalin. You know, I bet this kid was on Ritalin.”

  “C’mon, Sergeant. You’re not suggesting Ritalin made him kill his parents and his sister.” Nancy’s reproof was simply chatter, something said to keep her end up while her morning-numb brain was still trying to clear. She loved the way cops talked to one another when alone, the certitude, the absolute conviction. In public, they had to speak of suspects, of allegations and beliefs and evidence, then wait for juries and judges to validate their work. Here, among themselves, they could speak the truth as they knew it. This boy had killed his parents. H. Grayson Campbell, the rich guy who had eluded Lenhardt, had managed to arrange his wife’s death and disappearance. Alice Manning and Ronnie Fuller were liars. What they were lying about remained to be seen, but they were definitely lying.

  “No. I’ll let the lawyer who rushed out to the Westminster barracks to offer his services connect those dots. He’s got a great case. After all, he can always ask the jury for leniency on the grounds that his client is an orphan.”

  He popped his eyes, prompting Nancy and Infante to laugh dutifully at the old joke. Chain of command—detectives laughed at the sergeant’s jokes.

  “Now,” the sergeant said, hitching his chair closer to them and lowering his voice. “Let’s talk about blood.”

  “We don’t have any,” Nancy said, worried that this was her fault. “I couldn’t trick Ronnie into giving us a drop, and Alice has that pit bull of a lawyer now.” She pushed him the fax that had been waiting for them when they arrived this morning, the announcement that Sharon Kerpelman had resigned from the public defender’s office and would be representing Alice Manning in conjunction with Rosario Bustamante.

  “Pit bull? You mean bull dyke,” Lenhardt said.

  “I think Bustamante might go that way, but not the young one,” Infante said quickly, as if he had spent some time thinking about this.

  “Anyway,” Nancy said, “we don’t have blood samples and we’re not going to get them unless we’ve got probable cause for a warrant. Which we don’t.”

  “These girls were the state’s guests for seven years,” Lenhardt said.

  “Right. So?”

  “So, you know anyone who goes seven years without going to the doctor?”

  “I haven’t been to the doctor for ten years,” Infante said.

  “I’ll rephrase the question: You know anyone normal who doesn’t see a doctor? Especially in lockup, where it gets you out of stuff? Let’s get the medical records for both of them, see what we find. At the very least we could get a blood type.”

  “Blood type’s only good for eliminating, not verifying,” Nancy said.

  “I’d be happy to eliminate someone at this point,” Lenhardt said. “I’ve still got Bates from Family Crimes looking into the boyfriend’s priors, shaking his tree. The sooner we figure out which road we need to travel, the better off we’ll be.”

  “Will Juvenile Services give us the records just by asking?”

  “Maybe. But let’s get a subpoena, just to be on the safe side.” Lenhardt checked his watch. “It’s almost nine. Get the paperwork done, and try to catch Judge Prosser about eleven-thirty. He’ll sign anything that’s standing between him and lunch.”

  Mira Jenkins had to stifle a whoop of triumph when she read the e-mail from the library staff: The SUV she had seen outside Maveen Little’s apartment was registered to Warren Barnes of Hillside Drive. She knew from reading the clips that Barnes was the name of the girl who had died, that Warren was the father and Cynthia the mother. And although the electronic database didn’t provide photographs, how could the woman she saw outside Maveen Little’s apartment be anyone but Cynthia Barnes? The two crimes must be connected, just as her caller had promised.

  So how to proceed? If she asked the county cop reporter for help, he’d want in on the story, might even steal it from her, only to have downtown take it away from both of them. If she didn’t ask him and tried to work the cops herself, the information might circle back to the beat reporter, and then she’d be guilty of breaching protocol.

  She studied her e-mail again. The librarian on duty had provided not only the registration, but also a thorough AutoTrack of the car’s registered owner. People would be shocked if they knew what computers kicked out about their lives. Here was Warren Barnes’s address, his driving record, and even information on his mortgage. The AutoTrack could also find boat ownership, pilot licenses, and years of old addresses and phone numbers. But the Barnes home phone was unlisted, and unlisted numbers were stubbornly elusive. To talk to Cynthia Barnes, Mira would have to drive to her home, an out-of-the-way errand that would be difficult to conceal within the framework of her day. Maybe she could find a feature down there, claim she was going to Woodlawn or Catonsville to chat up neighborhood sources, see what stories she could develop.

  Her editor, a short, rotund man who moved too stealthily for Mira’s taste, suddenly loomed over her shoulder, thrusting a press release in her face. Reflexively she closed her e-mail, not wanting him to see what was on her screen. Not that it would mean anything to him. Her editor had worked at the paper only three years. The name Warren Barnes wouldn’t resonate as anything more than that of a well-known attorney.

  “We need some dailies to get downtown off my ass,” he said. “See what you can do with this.”

  This was a press release announcing that the library system had contracted for a special translation program that provided help for patrons in hundreds of languages, via a phone bank in California.

  “It could be more than a daily,” Mira said, seeing an opportunity to get out of the office, slip the short leash on which he tried to keep her. “Instead of just doing a talking heads piece, why not make it a centerpiece feature? I could go to one of the libraries in northwest, where they have a lot of Russian immigrants, see the system at work. Talk to librarians, see if other library systems have used this program. Plus, we need census figures, don’t we? How many foreign-speaking library patrons does Baltimore County have? Or maybe I should try the Catonsville branch—”

  “Do whatever you like,” the editor said. “Just make sure I have ten to twelve inches by four P.M. My kid has a T-ball game tonight and I need to get out of here by six.”

  Mira glanced at the clock in the upper right-hand corner of her computer. It was almost eleven. Even if she reached the bare-minimum sources on the first try, she would probably be reporting the story until two, and she would need another two hours to write because she wasn’t very fast on bureaucratic stories. Give her a straight narrative line and she could pound it out. Her infamous story on the civil rights park may have been bogus, but no one ever said it wasn’t well written. Feature
stories flowed out of her. So would the Barnes piece, once she nailed it. Now she would have to resign herself to eating lunch at her desk, knocking out ten to twelve inches by four, then spending another tedious hour answering whatever inane, trivial questions the editors raised. But if her boss really left at six, she could be out of here by six-thirty. A high-powered woman like Cynthia Barnes probably had some big job in the private sector now, and wouldn’t be home during the day anyway.

  Mira dialed the number to the county library flack and got voice-mail. Sighing, she left a message, then flagged down a colleague and asked him to bring her a Greek salad and Diet Pepsi from the deli.

  Nancy and Infante caught Judge Prosser before lunch, as Lenhardt had recommended, which made him impatient and grumpy. They could have done it with a state’s attorney, but the state’s attorney said he’d rather the judge sign off on it, given that another state agency was involved. Nancy wondered if the state’s attorney was setting them up. Prosser, a short, fat man with a left eye that wandered when he removed his thick glasses, was picking apart their request, stabbing at typos with the earpiece of his horn-rims.

  “All their medical records? Why should you get access to all their medical records when all you want to know is their blood type?”

  “If we specify blood type and it turns out they actually have DNA samples on file, for whatever reason, God forbid that a smart attorney says we overstepped,” Infante said, adding a beat late, “Judge.”

  “Is that the real reason or a glib, cover-your-ass reason that you just made up on the spot?”

  “Can it be both?” Infante asked.

  Another judge might have smiled, but Prosser trained his right eye on the document in front of him while his wandering left rolled toward the window. Nancy, whose stomach growled when she was standing over a corpse, found herself mildly ill watching the judge’s eye.