Joel Goldman - The Dead Man

"Give me something to wipe them off with," Dolan said.

I stuffed the warrant in his hand. Dolan wadded it into a ball and reached for me when Kent stepped in front of him.

"See what I'm doing," Kent said. "I'm taking my shoes off." A vein in Dolan's forehead throbbed as he faced his partner. "Take yours off and we'll get what we came for and get out of here."

"Goddamn mutts," Dolan said, as he kicked off his shoes, leaving them next to Kent's on the front stoop.

They didn't take long with their search, rifling through drawers and pulling books off of shelves, fanning the pages and waiting for incriminating evidence to fall out. I followed behind them as they went upstairs, Dolan catching Lucy's bedroom door with his chin when she came out while he was going in.

"Son of a bitch!" Dolan said. "Who the hell are you?"

"Who the hell are you?" she asked.

"We're FBI agents," Kent said. "We're executing a search warrant. Please identify yourself."

"It's okay," I said. "The dogs peed on their shoes."

Lucy giggled. "Really? Roxy and Ruby peed on their shoes?"

"Golden rain," I said.

"I love those dogs," she said. "I'm Lucy Trent. This is my house."

Kent looked at me. "That right?"

"She's my landlady."

We finished the search as a foursome, ending in the kitchen.

"That your laptop?" Dolan asked, pointing to my computer sitting on the kitchen counter next to Roxy's dinner.

I nodded. "You can search the dog food too if you want."

He tucked the laptop under his arm. "Warrant covers electronic communications. We'll let you know when you can have it back."

The dogs stayed in the kitchen, letting me escort Kent and Dolan to their shoes.

"What was that about?" Lucy asked after we watched them drive away.

"The envelope Ammara Iverson found on Walter Enoch's body was from my daughter Wendy. She used the initials MG for the return address, which stands for Monkey Girl. That was my nickname for her."

"I didn't know you had a daughter."

"She died ten months ago."

"I'm so sorry. What happened?"

We sat on the sofa in the living den, a dog in each of our laps, and I told Lucy about Wendy, just the broad strokes, how she struggled, how she rallied only to fall back, how her addiction claimed her, and how her mother and I failed her.

"The FBI is convinced Wendy stole five million dollars from the drug ring. They think that whatever was in the envelope had something to do with the money and that I know where it is. They also think I found out that Walter Enoch had stolen Wendy's letter so I killed him when I stole it back."

"How do you know that's what they think?"

I told her about my meeting with Kent and Dolan and Ammara Iverson and my conversation afterward with Ammara.

"Do you know where the money is?"

"No."

"Do you know what was in that envelope?"

"No."

"Did you kill Walter Enoch?"

"No."

"Do you have an alibi for when he was killed?"

"I don't know when he was killed other than it was a day or two before his body was found. I can account for where I was and what I was doing but I don't have witnesses who can vouch for every minute."

"Why didn't you ask Dolan and Kent when Enoch was killed?" Lucy asked.

"It wasn't important to me. I didn't think I was a suspect."

"Yeah, but they may not see it that way. They may have expected you to ask, figuring if you didn't it was because you already knew. That's the way I'd see it."

Her cop logic was sound enough to make me shake. I'd made the mistake of acting like an innocent man, which was the surest way to arouse suspicion. Lucy pressed me again.

"Do they have any proof that you know where the money is or what was in the envelope or that you killed Walter Enoch?"

"Not until they get a look at my laptop. Enoch volunteered for the Harper Institute's dream project. They made a videotape of him describing a nightmare in which he suffocated to death, which happens to be how he died, with an assist from the killer. I found the video today in the dream project computer files and copied it to my flash drive. I had just finished loading it on my laptop when they rang the doorbell. Once they find the video, they'll go nuts."

"Why? You can explain why you had the video and when you got it. The timing has nothing to do with Enoch's murder."

"But the fact that I have it fits with their larger narrative."

"Oh, shit! That isn't all they'll find on your laptop. I e-mailed you the pictures I took of Enoch and his house with my cell phone. They'll love my explanation of that."

I'd seen the pictures. They were no use to me but Dolan and Kent would treat them as further proof that I was guilty of crimes ranging from conspiracy to murder no matter how I explained them. They were the kind of cops that shoved the facts into their theories no matter how square the pegs or how round the holes.

"The video and the pictures are enough to make them keep coming after me. When they see that you e-mailed the photographs to me, you'll be in the soup too."

"So let them keep coming. You're innocent."

"Lucy, you were a cop. You know how guys like Kent and Dolan think. They've already convicted me. Being right matters more to them than the truth."

Frank Gentry called, confirming that he'd deleted Anthony Corliss's alert software and installed it on the desktop computer in my office and that no one else was using the software. I caught Simon while he was still at his office, telling him to bring an additional laptop for me.

Lucy left and came back carrying pads of poster-sized Post-its and a fistful of markers in a rainbow of colors. Her cheeks were red from the cold and her eyes were dancing and bright, fueled by our chase of the dead man.

She stripped the living den walls, papering the empty spaces with blank Post-its. I needed to rest so I sat in the recliner watching her work, genuflecting with intermittent spasms.

"I learned under a great homicide detective," Lucy said. "She taught me that the best way to put a case together is to visualize it. Put it on the walls, let the facts paint the picture."

"I do it the same way. Put each case on a separate wall. Start with what we know about each of the victims and how they died. Then we'll fill in what you saw at each of the scenes. We'll also have to keep track of witnesses, evidence, and questions we need answered, plus links between the cases."

She turned toward me, hands on her hips. "Gee, great ideas. I never would have thought of any of that."

We mirrored each other's grins, both glad to be back in the hunt, realizing how much we had missed it.

"Okay, okay. I get it," I said, the words staggering out of my mouth like drunks leaving a bar at closing time. My neck arched and stretched, shoving my head upward and back, raising my chin like the open end of a drawbridge and locking me in the pose until the spasm passed. "I guess this isn't your first time."

"No. But it's my first time in a while, same for you. We need to check each other's work. Shake the rust off."

"Might as well. I'm shaking everything else."

She stood over my chair, looking at me with soft, sad eyes and laughed, giving me a quick hug. "You are something, you know that. Tell you what. I'll write. You edit."

"This isn't the first essay I've ever written, Dad," Wendy said.

She was applying for college. The application included an essay on the highs and lows of her life and what she'd learned from them. She said her lows were the death of her brother and her addiction and her highs were staying straight and sober for over a year and graduating from high school. She wrote that she learned the same thing from the highs and the lows. You can't always choose what happens to you but you can choose how you deal with it.