Текст книги "Compelling Evidence"

Автор книги: Steve Martini

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Stone waits for me to be dismissed.

“Call my office for an appointment, next week. We’ll have more time to discuss the thing then, the thing with your client.”

Standing here with nowhere to go, I have but a single thought on my mind-“What an asshole.”

“I’ll have to check my calendar. It’s pretty full next week.”

“Well, make time.” It’s the imperial Greek command. He turns before I can say anything, putting distance between us, Stone in tow.

“I’ll see what I can do.” My words are delivered down into the nape of his neck as he walks away.

I move away, abandoning a full drink on the table behind me, the price of salvaging a little pride, of saying “I was leaving anyway.” For the first time I realize that perhaps my departure from Potter, Skarpellos was preordained, for even had I survived my affair with Talia, pride would surely never have allowed me to weather Ben’s death and the compulsory primping and preening of Tony Skarpellos, the price of all success in the firm after Ben’s passing. It is, after all, a considerable consolation.

CHAPTER 8

I’ve picked the Golden Delicious from the tree behind the house, a whole bag, and brought them with me, a kind of peace offering for my regular visitation at Nikki’s.

Sarah, my three-year-old, is standing on a chair at the countertop by the sink, turning the crank on the little apple peeler. She is an endless litany of “whys?”-“Why is the apple round?” “Why is it yellow?” “Why does it have seeds?”

I tell her the ultimate imponderable-“Because God made it that way.”

She says, “Why?”

I catch Nikki looking at me from the sink.

It’s in moments like this, though increasingly when I’m alone in the big house, that the pain is greatest. The realization settles in that Sarah, this oblivious, energized innocence will never have a childhood like my own, two loving parents together with her. My daughter is rapidly becoming the product of a broken home.

“I have to go to the store for a few minutes. I may not be here when you two get back.” There’s an edge to Nikki’s voice. Watching Sarah and me, she’s caught herself teetering on the precipice of happiness in my presence. But my wife is nothing if not resilient. Quickly she recovers her balance and is again the image, the very soul, of indifference.

“I was just going to take her to the park. I thought you might want to come along. We could have lunch out.”

“I don’t think so.” The apathy of her voice is overshadowed only by the aloof language of her body huddled over the sink, her back to me. “The two of you should have some time alone.”

“I think she’d enjoy it.”

“No. I have some things to do.” Nikki is now emphatic.

I don’t pursue it. She is painfully civil toward me. But increasingly I sense that any relationship that remains between us now revolves around Sarah, locks of auburn hair, pink pudgy cheeks, and dark brown eyes like olives. She is the link that binds us.

I have tried on numerous occasions to have Nikki take the house. I have offered to move into her apartment. But she will have none of it. This is a point of stubborn pride with Nikki: It was her decision to move out.

She’s priming the dishwasher with soap now. “Tell me,” she says. “How’s the practice going?”

“Haven’t missed any support payments, have I?”

“That’s not what I meant.” She turns to look at me, a pained smile on her face. “You always manage to twist what I say.”

I can’t tell whether she’s angry or embarrassed.

“Just a joke.”

“No, it was a dig.” She is hurt, silent as she looks at me. They’ve become like deadly clouds of cobalt between us, these monthly payments mutually agreed upon to keep the lawyers out of our lives, a form of alimony to keep the wolves away from her door. Without intending it, I have unleashed Nikki’s perpetual nemesis. It’s a demon I have never managed completely to comprehend. She will stand her ground in arguments on the most meager point or principle until more timid minds capitulate. But place her in circumstances where she is required to ask for money and she becomes an instant, stammering wreck. I suspect that if I ceased my support payments she would suffer silently until the county, in a miasma of welfare payments, hunted me down and hung the collar of contempt about my neck. It’s as if the creator of all things dependent had omitted some vital element in Nikki’s makeup that permits her to ask when there is a need.

For the moment she has reclaimed the soul of her autonomy. Nikki now works for a small electronics firm, programming computers. Logic, it seems, is her second love, after Sarah. She would have me believe this is a position she secured as a result of fortunate last-minute training before our separation. But I know now that it was more the product of design than fortune.

Her return to academia revealed a certain master plan, a plot to leave me long before she actually stepped out of the marriage and pulled the rip cord. I’m now afflicted by a sort of melancholia on these visits whenever I am reminded of how obtuse I’d been not to see the signs. Still, I am sure in me deep recesses of my soul that had I known, it would not have changed the ultimate result.

“I’m sorry about Ben Potter. I know you’ll miss him a great deal.” It’s delivered with meaning. But I’m reminded of Clarence Darrow, who admitted that while he never wished for the death of another man, there had been a few obituaries he had read with some pleasure. I think that Ben’s passing is such an event for Nikki.

“The two of you spent a lot of time together,” she says.

More time, she means, than I spent with her.

Nikki still does not know the reason for my abrupt departure from Potter, Skarpellos. Whether she doesn’t care, or simply hasn’t mustered the brass to ask, I’ve yet to discern. She is packing a considerable burden of pain these days, masked by a cool indifference that I know is only skin deep. With our separation I have finally come to concede, at least in my own mind, that I had relegated my family, Nikki and Sarah, to some secondary place in my life. Nikki could not win in this war with my career, and she has always taken that as her own special failing in life.

“The firm was a busy place. It’s the nature of law practice.”

“I know. But if it means anything, I just think that he appreciated the fact that you never let him down.” She locks on my eyes for a fleeting instant, reading the pupils like tea leaves. “All those long hours, briefs to write, prepping for trials into the early hours of the morning. Whenever he called, you were there. It was a little more than just work,” she says. “It mattered what he thought of you. It mattered to you. That was important.”

She’s right. I’d come to realize too late that a single psychic “attaboy” from Ben was worth any endless number of long hours locked in the mental drudgery of the fluorescent cave that was my office at P amp;S.

For at least forty of his sixty years Potter was a human dynamo, the closest thing to perpetual energy this side of the sun. He worked seven days a week. In addition to his law practice and academic pursuits, he served on a dozen government and private panels. He was the penultimate blue-ribbon commissioner. Work was his life. It was his addiction.

Perhaps it was because of this that Nikki never trusted him, nor for that matter liked him much. He had made particular efforts to be gracious in her company. But for some unstated reason she treated these gestures with the skepticism one might reserve for alchemy. I knew almost from the beginning mat my marriage and my continued association with Ben were relationships destined to produce friction-that one would ultimately devour the other. I suppose I also knew which was likely to fall victim, for I’d contracted the disease of my mentor. I’d become afflicted with a compulsive and purposeless need for work. That is what ended our marriage.

“Your work was important to you,” she says. Nikki’s now making justifications for me.

I leave it alone, let it stand, as a truism.

“What about her?” asks Nikki.

“Who?”

“Ben’s wife-what’s her name-Tricia?”

I pause for an instant, as if I have to search the dark recesses of my memory for the name of some fleeting acquaintance.

“Talia,” I say.

“That’s right, Talia. How’s Talia doing?”

“I haven’t seen her. I don’t know. I suppose she’ll cope.”

“Yes, I suppose,” says Nikki.

I can’t believe we’re having this conversation.

“What will happen with the firm now?” Nikki speaks while she mops the countertop.

“I don’t know. I suppose it will go on.”

“The papers are treating the whole thing with a lot of sensation, Ben’s death and all,” she says. “A lot of speculation.”

“Newspapers always speculate. That’s their job,” I say.

“It could be embarrassing for her.”

“What do you mean?”

“Talia. The suicide, all the controversy, you know. It can’t be pleasant.”

“I suppose.”

“Has she offered to give you any help?”

“What?”

“Talia. Has she offered to help you get back in with the firm?”

I am psychically coldcocked. But I do not stammer. I carry the farce to its conclusion, almost as a reflex. “What makes you think I want to go back to the firm? Why would she want to get involved?”

Nikki turns from the sink and gives me a look, a “what am I, dogshit?” expression. She knows about Talia and me. It’s written in the smirk mat envelops her mouth. I am certain that wonder has crept across my face. It pains me that she may know only half the truth, that she may not know that Talia and I are no longer an item. But I can’t bring myself to say it. The careful shield of discretion that I had erected had been so transparent that Nikki has seen through it, and I am left to wonder, how many others? I stare back for several seconds. She blinks and breaks eye contact. She is bluffing-I think. A deft exercise in female intuition. But I take no chances. I avoid confrontation on the point.

“It’s only natural mat there would be speculation and talk. It’s not every day that a nominee to the United States Supreme Court kills himself. Ben’s death leaves quite a hole in the firm,” I say.

“Yes.” She pauses as if for effect. “That’s what I was talking about,” she says, “filling the hole.” The words are delivered with biting sarcasm.

“Well, we’d better be hitting the road.” I have suddenly lost my desire for meaningful dialogue. “Come on, kiddo.” I scoop Sarah off her feet and balance her on my shoulder.

“Be careful of her.”

“What?” I turn to look at Nikki, waiting for some last-minute motherly admonition. She has dropped the sponge into the sink and now stands staring directly at me.

“Watch yourself. She’s not to be trusted.”

Her words strike like a thunderbolt when I realize that Nikki is talking not about our daughter, but about the woman, whom to my recollection she has met only twice in her life-Talia Potter.

My Saturday-morning sojourns to the park with my daughter do double duty. As she scampers up the ladder and down the slide I do pull-ups on the monkey bars, and push-ups in the sand. It’s a cheap stand-in for my canceled membership at the athletic club, one of many luxuries now gone, the price of contributing to the support of two households. We move through the ritual, twenty minutes on the swings, five or six trips up and down the slide, and then it’s off to the ice cream parlor a dozen blocks away.

I usher Sarah out of the playground and close the Cyclone gate to keep the other little inmates from escaping. As I turn, I see her.

“Damn it.”

Sarah’s wandered off the concrete and is up to her ankles in mud, an adventure spawned by a leaking sprinkler head.

“Your mother’s gonna kill me.” I’m on her, but it’s too late. Her legs and lower torso are a thousand points of mud, courtesy of the hydraulics of two stamping little feet.

“-I told you once, Madriani, a long time ago, a little more light, a little less heat. You’ll live longer.”

It’s a voice from the past, lost in the tangle of a towering fern. I crane my neck. There, behind the plant, I see a ghost seated on a bench; he has a familiar smile, but the face is pale and drawn. Marginally recognizable, Sam Jennings, the man who hired me a dozen years ago to be a prosecutor in this county, looks up at me, a twinkle in his eye.

He rises from the bench.

“Good to see you again, Paul. Yours?” He nods toward Sarah.

“Yes.”

Her condition by now is hopeless. She has smeared the mud on her upper legs with her hands.

“How old?” he asks.

“Three.”

“And a half,” Sarah chimes in, holding up three fingers.

Jennings laughs. He stoops low to look her in the eyes. “I once had little girls just about your age.”

Sarah is all round eyes. “What happened to them?”

“They grew up.”

I’ve missed this man greatly since leaving his fold and joining Potter, Skarpellos. I have on more than one occasion since my ouster from the firm considered calling him, but have thought better of delivering my problems to the doorstep of a sick man. When he called to ask me to attend Danley’s execution in his place, I knew how ill he really was. Sam isn’t the kind to ask people to do something he’s unwilling to do himself.

His skin has the pallor of paraffin. Radiation and the ravages of chemistry have taken their toll. I tower over this man who was once my equal in physical stature. He is stooped and withered like straw following a rainstorm. A condition, I suspect, rendered not so much by the cancer that invades his body as by the clinical horrors that pass for a cure. It is, by all appearances, a losing battle.

Our eyes follow Sarah, whose attention has been caught by a gray squirrel making for one of the trees. Her condition is hopeless. I let her go. I will simply have to absorb Nikki’s tongue-lashing later.

Sam Jennings is, by nature, an affable man. His countenance has all the appearances of a face well stamped from birth with an abiding smile. But there are those who learned too late that this is an aspect of his character that belies an acquired predatory sense. For in his thirty years as chief prosecutor for this county and in the early decades of his tenure, Samuel Jennings, for crimes well deserved, sent a half-dozen men to their final peace in the state’s gas chamber.

“See any of the old crowd?” I ask.

“I suppose that’s one of the benefits of leaving voluntarily instead of getting your ass kicked in an election. You can stop by the office every once in a while. Even so,” he says, “Nelson doesn’t exactly roll out the red carpet.”

“What’s the problem?”

“Who knows. Maybe he thinks my being there is going to crimp his management style. Hell, look at me. What’s he think, I’m gonna run against him?”

“Maybe he thinks you might plant the idea elsewhere,” I say. “Maybe with one of his deputies.”

“Who, me?” he says. There’s a lot of feigned innocence here. I can tell that this scenario is not original with me, unless I’ve misread the twinkle in his eye. He’s probably been solicited for an endorsement. I wonder who in the office it is, who will be fingered to step out on the ledge with Nelson on election day, to try to nudge him off. Nelson was appointed to fill the vacancy left when Sam retired. Now he has to earn his spurs in the next election.

“How’s it going with you? The solo practice and all?”

I make a face. “Enjoying it enough. Now ask me if I’m making any money.”

“Money’s not everything.” He smiles.

“This from a man with a fat county pension.”

“You could’ve stayed there. Didn’t have to go chasing the rainbow,” he says.

“Hmm. Not a very happy place right now. Not from what I hear.”

“Maybe a little more political than when I was there.”

“Now who’s minimizing things?” I say.

He laughs. “No worse than some firms I could mention.”

There’s an instant of uncomfortable silence as he eyes me, looking for some sign, a hint of willingness to talk, some revelation as to the causes for my departure from the firm. He comes up empty.

“One of life’s true tragedies,” says Jennings. “Ben Potter. Guy had a veritable flair for success. Would’ve put this town on the national map, his appointment to the court.”

“I suppose.” National life goes on. The papers had it that morning. The President had made another nomination to the court. The administration’s playing it coy, refusing to confirm that it had ever offered the position to Ben.

I try to kill the subject with silence. Jennings has never blessed my move to the firm. Like Plato, he defines ultimate justice as each man’s finding his proper niche in life. And from the beginning, he never believed that I would fit in with Potter, Skarpellos.

“It’s hard to figure,” he says.

“What’s that?”

“Why anybody would want to kill him.”

I look at Sam Jennings, this paragon of sober intelligence, in stony silence. I know his words are not the product of some wit that has missed its mark.

“What are you talking about?”

“People in Nelson’s shop tell me they’re getting vibes, something strange about the whole thing from the cops. Not the usual stuff following a suicide.”

“Like what?”

“Seems Potter’s office and an elevator down the hall have been taped off for more than a week now. Forensics has been camped there.”

“Probably just being careful,” I say. “The feds are involved.”

“You think that’s it, a little bureaucratic rivalry?”

I make a face, like “Who knows?”

“I don’t think so,” he says. Jennings has a shit-eating grin. The kind that says he has inside information.

“The service elevator on Potter’s floor.” He looks at me to make sure I’m following his drift. “It’s been sealed by the cops and out of commission for almost a week. The janitors and delivery people are raising hell, I’m told. I think the cops are reading more than tea leaves or the entrails of a goat.”

I make another face. I’m waiting for the punch line. It wouldn’t be the first time Capitol City’s finest have wasted taxpayers’ dollars shadow-boxing with illusions.

“If Potter killed himself in his office, I can understand combing his desk, vacuuming his carpet. But why the elevator?”

I give him my best you-tell-me expression.

“Conventional wisdom has it,” he says, “he didn’t.”

“Didn’t what?”

“Didn’t die in the office.”

“That’s where they found the body.” I bite my tongue, on the verge of disclosing part of my conversation with George Cooper outside of the Emerald Tower that night.

“Word is,” he says, “cops found traces of blood and hair in that service elevator. It appears that if he shot himself, somebody took the time to move the body after the event.”

“Where did you hear this?”

“Not from Duane Nelson,” he says. His smile is all teeth. Jennings is not revealing his source. Clearly this is a matter of someone’s survival. Leaks from a prosecutor’s office in a case like this are sure career killers.

CHAPTER 9

To find George Cooper on this Monday morning I have to crawl like a mole under the dismal seven-story county jail. Built to house a thousand trusties and inmates, it now overflows with 2,500, the best of whom are furloughed during the day on work-release programs and pressed like dehydrated fruit back into overcrowded cells at night. The metal monolith is a monument to the bankruptcy of modern government. The building’s facade presents the incongruous appearance of cheerful orange metal panels more appropriate to a day-care center. The roof is enclosed behind Cyclone fencing topped by razor-sharp rolls of concertina wire, sealing off the sky-high exercise yard and preventing possible escape.

Given the office’s low status on the law enforcement pecking order, it’s the best the county coroner can do. Stiffs don’t rate high as a voting constituency with the county supes at budget time. So in a cavern originally designed for parking under the jail, Cooper and his seven companions toil beneath the ground in the blistering heat of summer and through the dank oppression of winter’s tule fog.

He sits staring at me. Fluids of unknown human origin streak his neoprene apron, for by nine in the morning he’s been hard at it for more than an hour. Genuine concern registers in his eyes, for George Cooper doesn’t like to say no to a friend.

“I’d like to help you out, Paul. I think you know that. But on this thing Nelson’s got the lid on-tight as a drum.” George Cooper speaks with a slow Southern drawl, the kind that pulls every vowel in the alphabet over his tongue like cold syrup.

By all accounts, George Saroyan Cooper, “Coop” to anyone who has known him for more than a week, is a handsome man. A shock of coal-black hair parted neatly on the left, tempered with specks of gray at the temples, outlines the fine features of his face-a gentle well-proportioned nose slightly upturned at the tip, deep-set brown eyes, and thin lips curled in a chronic grin convey the good nature of the man. His teeth are pearl-white and evenly spaced, set off by a rich and carefully groomed black mustache, itself peppered with faint wisps of gray where it joins laugh lines at the corners of his mouth.

He’s carrying several glass slides in his hand and slips one of them under a stereoscope on the table next to the counter. “I’ve told ’em to bag the hands,” he says. “Always bag the hands.”

I smile at him, oblivious to his latest frustration.

“N-o-o-o-o,” he says. “They roll the cadavers into this place with the hands hanging free, out off the side of the gurney, like the guy’s gotta scratch an itch or somethin’.” He squints into the microscope. He’s talking to himself now, his back to me.

Coop hails from South Carolina, an old Charleston family, of which he’s the black sheep. It wasn’t that Cooper failed to live up to his parents’ expectations. His father and grandfather had been physicians before him. But they tended to the living.

I’ve known George Cooper for seven years. It seems like longer. He possesses the easy nature of the South, a slow, genteel charm. I would guess that if you asked twelve people who knew him to identify their best friend, each in his own turn would name George Cooper. He has worked his magic on me as well, for if asked, I would make it a baker’s dozen.

And yet behind all of the warmth, the hardy good nature, there is the shadow of some baleful quality that sets Coop apart from others in my circle of friendship. The casual acquaintance might credit this ominous phantom to Coop’s occupation, and in a way that would be right. But it’s not the morbid nature of his work that accounts for this schism of demeanor. It’s grounded in the fact that Coop is driven to pursue the pathology of death with a missionary’s zeal. The dead speak to George Cooper. He’s their interpreter, the translator of organic missives from beyond the grave. And to George Cooper, it’s a holy calling.

I lobby him, cajole him for information about Potter’s death. He listens. Like a banker hit for a loan, taciturn. He turns from the microscope, rests his buttocks against the edge of an empty gurney pressed against the wall.

“How’s your little girl?” he asks.

Dealing with Coop can be frustrating.

“She’s fine.”

“I remember Sharon at that age,” he says. “She loved the job, you know. I guess I never thanked you.”

I shake my head but say nothing. In the pit of my stomach I feel a knot beginning to grow. With Ben’s death I wonder what will happen to the law school’s largess, “The Sharon Cooper Trust.” No doubt it will now be dwarfed by another in the name of “Benjamin G. Potter.”

“She would have been a good lawyer,” I say.

He nods. There’s a glaze of water over his eyes. He wipes them with his sleeve. I don’t tell about the limited progress I’ve made on Sharon’s probate. I’ve struck out with Feinberg. After listening to his spiel at the University Club, I approached him cautiously and told him my tale of woe. He declined to take the case-“Too busy,” he said. So I’m back to square one. But it’s my one consolation with Coop: He doesn’t press. Patience is a Southern virtue.

“I’m lookin’ for other leads,” he says, “in Sharon’s death.”

The accident remains an open matter with the police. Sharon’s car had been involved in a single-vehicle accident, careening off the road into a tree. But evidence at the scene revealed that she had not been driving at the time. Coop is on his own quest to find the driver.

“Did you know she wasn’t killed by the impact?” he says.

I shake my head. I’m not interested in feeding this conversation.

“She would have survived. I know it,” he says. “The fire killed her. Whoever was in the car could have saved her.”

“You don’t know that, Coop. Let the cops handle it.”

‘They’re not doing too well right now. They have virtually no leads. I figure anyone walking on that levee road, twenty miles from town, would be seen by someone. Don’t you think?”

I nod to humor him.

My first meeting with Coop came during the prosecution of a manslaughter case, a slam-dunk for the state on which I was putting the final touches. The defendant was a small-time pimp charged with dealing drugs to one of his hookers, who had OD’ed. Coop had already appeared and been cross-examined. But the defense now recalled him, a desperate last-minute fishing expedition. He was ordered to appear and to produce his working papers.

When Coop arrived at the courthouse, I could sense that beneath the thin veneer of professionalism he was seething. The subpoena had been delivered that morning, followed closely by a telephone call from Andy Shea, a fire-breathing counsel for the defense, and mouthpiece of the month among petty junkies and drug dealers. Shea, as was his custom, had bullied and berated half the coroner’s staff over the telephone in an effort to coerce compliance with the subpoena he hadn’t served on time.

In the period of three minutes as I counseled Cooper outside the courtroom, I observed a bizarre metamorphosis overtake the man. As I raced against the clock to explore the legal issues embraced by the subpoena, Coop appeared distracted. Then a strange calm came over him. I was gripped by a gnawing fear that fate had delivered to me the scourge of every trial lawyer-a witness who could not be controlled.

Inside, Cooper took the stand. He seated himself two feet below Merriam Watkins, judge of the superior court. Shea arrogantly demanded Cooper’s working papers. The coroner reached into the manila envelope he was carrying and handed a disheveled pile of documents to the lawyer.

He apologized for the disorganized state of the papers. He was solicitous. He did everything but rise from his chair and bow from the waist.

Shea took the stack and, shaking his head with disgust, retreated to the counsel table to place the prize in some usable order.

Coop turned his soulful eyes toward Judge Watkins, pumped up a little Southern humility, and apologized for failing to make copies for the court. He offered an explanation to the judge, his way of making small talk. Shea was too busy shuffling pages to take heed of the colloquy at the bench.

With no objection from Shea, Coop was free to ramble on. A rakish grin grew under his dark mustache and just as quickly disappeared behind a blanket of courtly charm.

He told the judge how the subpoena had been served at eight o’clock that morning and how five minutes later Mr. Shea had telephoned the office. With the mention of his name, the defense attorney looked up from the table for the first time-it was too late. Coop was on a roll.

He told about Shea’s insistence, and asked if he could quote the lawyer. By this time the judge’s expression was a quizzical mask. She shrugged her shoulders.

“Mr. Shea said, and I quote: ‘If you don’t have your fuckin’ ass in court by nine o’clock this morning, you’d better be packing a toothbrush, cuz I’ll have your worthless, worm-eaten dick jailed for contempt.’ ”

Two jurors, women in their sixties, nearly slid out of their chairs. The only thing matching the blush on Watkins’s face were Shea’s ears, which were a perfect hue of crimson as he sat slack-jawed at the counsel table while Cooper drove the sword all the way home.

“Your Honor, I’m at a loss to explain where Mr. Shea learned his anatomy, but I don’t think that’s any way for an officer of the court to talk to the public servants of this county-do you?”

Watkins stammered, covered a cough with her hand, and after several seconds finally issued what would have to pass for a judicious comment.

“I think Mr. Shea is properly rebuked,” she said.

“If you say so, Your Honor.” Coop grinned broadly at Shea. The attorney sat like some miser, hoarding a ream of paper that may as well have been confetti, for the good it would do his client.

At Shea’s insistence the court later instructed the jury to disregard Coop’s testimony concerning Shea’s own out-of-court blunder. But as Cooper remarked under his breath as he exited the courtroom, “Only when pigs can fly.”

An intern, a young kid in a white smock, has entered the room with us. He hands Coop a clipboard with several forms. Coop quickly scrawls his signature at the bottom of the appropriate form and delivers the clipboard and papers back to the assistant, who leaves the room.

“So what gives with Potter?” I ask.

“You know better than that. I can’t tell you anything. I told you more than I should have that night outside his office. I may come to regret it.”

I am a bit stung by his rebuke, the hint that he may not be able to trust my discretion. Still I press.

“I understand your situation. Coop. It’s just that I hear things. People tell me that the DA’s investigators have been questioning everybody in sight at Potter, Skarpellos. Forensics has been over the place with white gloves a dozen times.”

“I hope they did better than this lot.” He taps the slides in his hand. “Victim looks like he’s been plowing the back forty with his fingernails.”

“What the hell’s going on, Coop?” I get more serious, my tone insistent.

“If Nelson ever found out we talked outside Potter’s office that night, he’d peel the skin off my dick with a dull knife. You didn’t tell anybody you were coming to see me?”

“You know me better than that.”

“Thank God for little favors,” he says.

He walks to a Bunsen burner on a table a few feet away. A thick black goo is bubbling in a clear glass container over an open flame. Coop lifts the large glass beaker and swirls the vile substance a bit, replacing it over the burner.