Dead Even Read online

Closing her eyes, Sara was reeling. Take it easy, she told herself. There’re hundreds of logical explanations. But the more she thought about it, the more she realized she couldn’t come up with even one. And when she realized that, she knew it was over. She didn’t know him anymore. The phone rang, tearing through the silence. Sara didn’t pick it up. It rang again. When it rang a third time, she reached for it.

  “Don’t,” Conrad said.

  “Jared, I don’t want to hear your lame excuses,” she answered.

  “I’m sorry,” Jared said. “I shouldn’t have lied to you like that.”

  “So now the story’s changing?”

  “Sara, please, I’m telling you the truth—I spoke to him one time. That was it.”

  Sara covered her other ear and turned away. This was even worse.

  “Sara?” Jared asked. “Sara, are you there?”

  “I’m here,” she whispered.

  “Please don’t be mad,” Jared pleaded. “I know it looks bad, but it was for a good reason.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Okay, here it is. Here’s the story. Here’s how it happened.”

  “Are you going to tell me why you did it, or are you going to make it up as you go along?”

  “Sara, I swear to you, I only called him to get help. That night before your first day, you were so nervous, I had to do something. So while you were packing your briefcase, I went into the bedroom and called Judge Flynn. Now, I know you didn’t want me to call in any favors, but you should’ve seen yourself—the article in the Times had you crazy. There was no way I could just sit on my hands. I told him what was happening and asked him if he had any suggestions. He said my best bet was to make sure you got a case. Then he made a few phone calls and told me about ECAB. He found out Victor was the next day’s supervisor, and he gave me his number. The next morning, I called Victor. I explained the situation and said if he could help us out, Judge Flynn would really appreciate it. He said he’d see what he could do, but that was the last I heard of him. Next thing I knew, you had a case.”

  “Jared—”

  “I know what you’re going to say. I shouldn’t have done it; I shouldn’t have gone behind your back like that. I know it was wrong. I just didn’t want to see you drown. It rips my heart out to see you like that.”

  “Then why didn’t you tell me all this the other night?”

  “I wanted to. I wanted to so bad. But I thought if you found out what I did, you’d slip back into self-doubt. I didn’t want to see you lose that confidence. So I made the worst judgment call of all and decided it didn’t matter. Obviously, I was wrong.”

  “And that’s the truth?”

  “I’m telling you, that’s what happened,” Jared said. “I wouldn’t lie to you again.”

  “Twelve times were enough, huh?”

  “I understand if you don’t believe me, but that’s the only reason I did it. When you called me before, you just caught me off guard.”

  “Then let me ask you one last thing: Why’d you let me suspect Victor all this time? You knew I was running crazy. Why not help me out?”

  His answer was nothing but a long pause. Eventually, Jared stuttered, “I…I don’t know. I just chose not to. I’m sorry.”

  Sara was shaken by his response. “That’s it? You ‘chose not to’?”

  “I swear to you, Sara. That’s the real answer. I didn’t mean to hurt you—I was only trying to help.”

  “Okay,” she said, still attempting to discern if he was telling the truth. “We’ll talk more about it later.”

  “Great, we’ll do it later.”

  Unable to ignore the nervousness in his voice, Sara hung up the phone and looked at Conrad.

  “Well?” Conrad asked.

  She took a deep breath. “I’m not sure. Part of me thinks he’s lying, but part of me really believes him.”

  “Are you out of your head?”

  “You didn’t even hear his explanation.”

  “Tell it to me.” After Sara relayed the conversation, Conrad said, “Oh, c’mon, Sara. He lied to your face, let you hang up, and then called you back as soon as he thought of a good enough cock-and-bull story. I mean, all you did was read an article about budget cuts—do you really think that’s enough to make him call Victor?” Before Sara could argue, Conrad added, “How about letting me do a search on your home phone? If Jared’s story’s true, we’ll be able to see the calls from that night. One call to the judge; that’s all we’re looking for.”

  “I don’t know,” Sara said. “Except for one part, he gave me a good explanation. I think I have to trust him.”

  “Sara, don’t be stupid. He didn’t even—”

  “Don’t call me stupid! I’m not a moron, Conrad. And while you think you know everything about love and law, there’s a chasm between the two. If I start searching our phone bills, I’ve train-wrecked the only thing we have left.”

  “So you’d rather be blind to reality?”

  “Are you really that jaded? Is that what all those years here have done to you? This isn’t about being blind. It’s about having faith.”

  “I know what faith is, I just don’t—”

  “He’s my husband.”

  Without knocking, Guff entered the office holding a thick manila envelope.

  “Why don’t you ask him?” Conrad said. “It’s just another leap of faith, right?”

  Sara didn’t like Conrad’s tactics, but she had to admit that Jared’s story took the suspicion off of Guff. Favoring friendship over fear, she explained the story to her assistant. When she was finished, she was surprised to see Guff laughing.

  “Me?” Guff asked. “You suspected me? That’s the most absurd idea since Elvis carpeted his ceiling.”

  “So you’re not mad?”

  “Sara, I’m not in this because you’re my boss. I’m in it because you’re my amigo. If I got all huffy and puffy on you, I’d just be taking time away from that.”

  Sara couldn’t help but smile. “Guff, if only everyone else were like you.”

  “The world would be a beautiful place, don’t you think?” Guff said. “Now what’re you going to do about Sunken Cheeks? The trial starts tomorrow.”

  “Forget about Sunken Cheeks,” Conrad interrupted. “What’re you going to do about Jared?”

  “Conrad, can you please drop it already? I know it’s under your skin, but it’s not your life, it’s mine. And if I plan to save it, I have to find out who this guy is in the next few hours.”

  Guff shook his head at Conrad. “Don’t do this to her. She’s running out of time.”

  Conrad crossed his arms and studied his colleagues. The conversation about Jared was going to have to wait until later. “Tell me what’s in the folder.”

  Guff held up the manila envelope. “You want phone numbers? I got phone numbers. I got local, long distance, international, interstate, by the aisle, by the window.” He threw the envelope on Sara’s desk.

  Flipping through dozens of photocopied pages, Sara struggled to read the dense report. “How do you—?”

  “The calling log is in the back,” Guff said.

  When Sara read the log of Rafferty’s phone line, she saw Claire Doniger’s home phone number circled in red pen every time it appeared.

  “If it makes you feel any better, Jared was dead on the money—there’s no question there’s a connection between them,” Guff said as Sara continued to flip pages. “Rafferty may’ve said that they only spoke a few times, but there are almost forty calls made during the week of the murder. Four on the day of the burglary, when we think Arnold Doniger was murdered, and five on the day Claire says he died. Either way, these two are talking more than Lucy and Ethel.”

  “Good. Next up, where are we on Sunken Cheeks?”

  “Same place we always were,” Guff said. “Lost.”

  “When are the photographs supposed to get here?” Sara asked.

  “Right about now,” Conrad said, looking at his watch.r />
  “Can you—”

  “I’m on my way down.” Conrad got up from his seat and headed for the door. “As soon as they hit the mail room, they’re ours.” Seeing that Sara looked more antsy, he added, “It’s okay. It’s going to work out.”

  “I don’t know,” Sara said. “What if they know about me and Jared?”

  Conrad looked back at her. “Don’t worry,” he said. “They don’t.”

  As he turned the corner and walked past the funeral home, Elliott noticed that a dark blue Town Car was waiting in front of his apartment. He headed straight for the car, and the window rolled down. When he leaned inside he saw Rafferty.

  “Everything okay?” Rafferty asked.

  Elliott didn’t like the tone of the question. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “No reason. Just wanted to know if you heard anything new about Sara.”

  Now Elliott knew something was wrong. Rafferty either had something, or he was fishing for something. “Nothing out of the normal,” Elliott said. “Why? You seen anything?”

  “Nothing out of the normal,” Rafferty said, his answer smothered in sarcasm. “But once the trial starts, I’m expecting a hurricane.”

  “Should be exciting. You have to let me know how it goes.”

  “Of course I will. I’d never cut you out.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing,” Rafferty said. “Just making sure we understand each other.”

  “Always have and always will,” Elliott said. “So I’ll see you when it’s over?”

  Rafferty nodded.

  As Rafferty’s car pulled away from the building, Elliott turned back to his front door. Don’t let him rattle you, he told himself. It’s all coming together. When he reached his apartment, he headed straight for the living room and unlocked the padlock on the storage trunk that served as his coffee table. Carefully, he lifted a box from the trunk and put it on the couch. He opened the box and pulled out one of six sets of plastic mannequin hands. At the base of the hands, written in thick black ink, was the name WARREN EASTHAM.

  Elliott carried the hands back to the kitchen and stood them upright on his table. Then, carefully, he rolled up his sleeves and removed from his own hands the transparent, skintight latex gloves that held the sculpted fingerprints of a man who had been dead for almost eight months. And in that moment, as he slipped the gloves back on to their plastic holders, Warren Eastham once again returned to the dead and Elliott came back to life.

  “Where the hell is he?” Sara asked, looking up from the outline of her opening statement. “It’s been almost twenty minutes.”

  “You ever been in the mail room?” Guff asked as he assembled the witness files. “Pulling a package early takes at least a month and a half.”

  “I don’t have that long—we’re running out of time here.”

  “We’re doing the best we can, Sara. You know that.” Changing the subject, Guff picked up the wedding photo that was perched on the corner of Sara’s desk. “Did you and Jared have a big wedding?” he asked.

  “Monster. Jared’s family doesn’t do anything small.”

  “So you know all of his family? It’s not like there’re any secrets between you two?”

  Sara stopped reading her outline and looked up at her assistant. “You’re having second thoughts, aren’t you?”

  “They’re not second thoughts—it’s just that Conrad usually has a good hunch about this stuff. Plus, Jared’s story…”

  “I admit, it has a couple of holes. But each of them can be explained.”

  “No, you’re right. Forget I said anything. You have to trust him.” Turning her attention back to the outline, Sara asked, “What about Conrad? You think I can trust him?”

  “Don’t even start with that. Conrad would never—”

  “It’s just a question. I mean, if we’re going to raise the microscope, we might as well examine everyone.”

  “So you think Conrad’s involved with Victor?”

  “Actually, I don’t think anyone’s involved with Victor. But you do have to wonder why Conrad’s so anxious to keep me and Jared from talking.”

  “I think we all know the answer to that one.”

  “Maybe,” Sara said. “It’s still something to think about. And speaking of which…” She flipped through her Rolodex and picked up the phone.

  “Who’re you calling?”

  “Our favorite medical examiner,” she explained as she dialed.

  “Great,” Guff said. “While you do that, I have a few more phone calls to make.” Sara nodded to her assistant, and Guff left the room.

  “This is Fawcett,” he answered.

  “Hi, Dr. Fawcett, it’s Sara Tate, from the DA’s office. I just wanted to remind you to send over a clean copy of the autopsy report before the trial—I need to submit it as evidence and mine’s all marked up.”

  “Are you sure you haven’t gotten it yet? I sent my final version over weeks ago. Messenger and all.”

  “Really,” Sara said suspiciously.

  “Yes, indeed. Of course, it’s easy to make another copy, but—”

  “Guff, did you send a messenger to Fawcett’s office?” she called out, covering the phone.

  Guff stuck his head back in the office. “Not me, boss.”

  Sara shook her head. “Let me ask you another question,” she said, turning back to the phone. “Is it possible to fake a fingerprint?”

  “Define ‘fake.’”

  “Do you need someone’s actual hand to leave their fingerprint on something?”

  “A few years ago, the answer would be yes. Not anymore. The beauty these days is that everything’s possible. If I want to leave your fingerprint on something, I just need a copy of your print on a piece of paper. If I have that, I can make a photocopy of your print. Then, while the photocopy is still hot, I put a piece of fingerprint tape on the print and lift the tape.”

  “Off the copy?” Sara asked.

  “Right off the copy,” Fawcett said. “The toner from a copy machine is sometimes used for fingerprint powder. Once I have it on the tape, I can put that piece of tape anywhere. Bam—you’re wherever I say you are.”

  “But what if there’s no tape involved? Could someone do it by themselves? Maybe keeping someone else’s fingerprints on top of their own?”

  There was a prolonged pause on the other line. Eventually, he said, “If you wanted to, you might be able to do it with latex gloves. Of course, then you’d have to keep the gloves a little wet, but it’s sufficiently possible.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Real prints usually have remnants of sweat gland secretions or some other contaminant like grease or dust. But if you kept licking the gloves, or just rubbed them with a little bit of oil, you might be able to make it look like a real print. The real trick, of course, is copying the original prints, but as I said, it’s not impossible. Why? Do you want to make a set of gloves?”

  “No, I want to find a set of gloves.”

  Ten minutes later, Conrad returned to the office carrying a medium-sized box, which he dropped on Sara’s desk. “Here’s our new best option.”

  Sara got out of her seat and saw that the box was filled with thousands of neatly stacked photographs. Each of them was a portrait of a man in his army uniform, posed in front of an American flag.

  “Kozlow was stationed at Fort Jackson in South Carolina when he first joined the army,” Conrad explained. “He made it halfway through basic training, got in a fight with a fellow recruit and got the boot soon after. Apparently, he didn’t want to face the consequences that went along with his attitude problems.”

  “So who’s in these pictures?” she asked as she shuffled through the photographs. “Everyone on his team?”

  “Team?” Conrad asked. “Do you know anything about military terminology? A team has two to three people, a squad has nine, a platoon is three to four squads, a company is three to four platoons, a battalion is five c
ompanies, a brigade is two battalions, and a division is three brigades, which is about five thousand people.”

  Sara looked down at the thousands of photographs on her desk. “So is that everyone in his brigade?”

  “It’s everyone who was at Fort Jackson while Kozlow was there. And the first pile is everyone in his basic training company. If you look carefully, you may find Sunken Cheeks.”

  Flipping through the first pile of photographs, Sara said, “This is impossible. Look at these guys—they’re all the same. Square shoulders and a crew cut, square shoulders and a crew cut, square shoulders and a crew cut. After the first bunch, it gets maddening. I might as well be looking through yearbooks or something stupid like that.”

  As Sara picked up the next pile of pictures, Guff came barging into the office, waving a fax. “Start writing your thank-you cards, ladies and gents, because Guff just saved the day!”

  Conrad shot Guff a skeptical look. “This better be good.”

  “Oh, it is, Most Solemn One.” He looked down at his fax. “While you were searching through the military past, I took the other way around and started searching through the present. I took the two names that came up from Sunken Cheeks’s fingerprints and ran them through BCI. Sol Broder and Warren Eastham have almost nothing in common. They weren’t born in the same cities, neither of them was in the military, they didn’t live near each other, and as far as I can tell, they didn’t even know each other. But they did have one thing in common: They were both criminals. So I ran a search on every piece of their criminal records—what their crimes were, when they were arrested, who their lawyers were, where they served their time—you name it, I searched it. Again, nothing came up. Both Broder and Eastham served their time upstate at the Hudson facility, but Broder was there four years ago, while Eastham was there two years ago. They were never there at the same time.”

  “So what’s your great find?” Conrad asked impatiently.

  “My great find is that a closer examination revealed the one thing Broder and Eastham had in common: When Sol Broder left the Hudson facility, Warren Eastham occupied his old cell.”

  “So?” Conrad asked.

  “So that means they shared the same cellmate,” Sara said.