John Gilstrap - No mercy

“I gather from your tone that you don’t like him much?”

Jonathan snorted. “Understatement of the decade. I can’t stand the son of a bitch. A quick hike to the courthouse will right to own.”

Weatherby scowled. “So there really is bad blood between you all.”

“Run into a lot of friendly divorces, Detective? Of course there’s bad blood. But I assure you there’s no homicidal blood.”

Weatherby regarded his prey with slit eyes, then gestured toward the front door with a toss of his head. “Come on inside.”

On a different day, the first thing a visitor to the Rothman home would have noticed was the splendor of the hardwood floors and the intricacy of the moldings and wainscoting. It was a home designed to dazzle visitors, and it rarely failed in its mission.

Today, though, the intricate architectural details were invisible against the savage dismemberment of the place. Inside the front door to the left, every book had been pulled from the shelves of Tibor’s library, his pride-and-joy collection of first editions of French and English literature. Pages were torn from the bindings and the cushions of the dark leather furniture had been slashed, with feathers and stuffing erupting from massive wounds. The same level of damage pervaded everywhere. It was as if someone had turned the house upside down and shaken it.

Weatherby led the way as if he owned the place, marching Jonathan down the main hall into the kitchen and then a hard right into the dining room, where the police had established a makeshift command post. The detective pointed to an upholstered hardback chair. “Take a load off,” he said.

Jonathan continued to stand, not so much on principle as a need to keep examining the house. “Where did you find Ellen?”

“Upstairs. In the bedroom.”

“I want to see.”

“I don’t think you do.”

The gravity of Weatherby’s tone made a connection. “Jesus, Detective, what did they do to her?”

The cop took a long, loud breath through his nose. “Start with the worst you can imagine, and that would be only the beginning. Twenty-three years on the force, Mr. Grave, and this is the worst I’ve seen. Sorry to put it to you that way, but I’m shocked that she survived.”

Jonathan’s mind whirled out of control. The worst he could imagine was pretty goddamn awful. His brain conjured images of Rwandan women with their breasts sliced off, and of Croatian women raped by bayonets. Surely, Weatherby assessed “the worst” on a different scale than that. “Was she raped?”

Weatherby answered with his eyes the instant he looked away. “Savagely. Repeatedly, I would guess. And there was some torture, though I’d rather not go into the details. She was also stabbed.”

Now it was time to sit. Jonathan helped himself to the offered chair. “Who would do something like that?”

“That’s why we called for you.”

“For Christ’s sake, Detective, you couldn’t possibly think I had something to do with that.”

Weatherby let his guard drop an inch. “As I mentioned outside, I sort of have to, but in my gut, no, I don’t believe you did. Can you account for your whereabouts last night?”

“I was downing beers with a buddy. A priest, in fact. Father Dominic D’Angelo, pastor of the St. Katherine’s parish in Fisherman’s Cove.” Responding to the cop’s confusion, he added, “It’s a community down in the NortheActually, she didn’t call me, she called my office and spoke with one of my managers. At the time of the call, he hadn’t been missing for more than twenty-four hours, and, frankly, I didn’t much care if he was missing or not. I told Venice, the manager, to do a quick credit card trace to see what she could turn up.”

“And?”

Jonathan shrugged. “I don’t know. I woke up to the call to come here, so we haven’t discussed any of it this morning.” Jonathan was in the business of parsing information, and he determined that this much was easily traceable and therefore safe to relay. If he was less than forthcoming, Weatherby would know it within hours if not minutes. The rest of it-his ride home with Ellen-was nobody’s business.

“Does Mr. Rothman have any enemies that you know of?”

Jonathan scowled. “You know what he does for a living.”

“I know he’s a writer.”

“But you don’t know what he writes?”

Weatherby shook his head. “I’m pretty much a sports page guy.”

“Well, you won’t find Tibor Rothman articles there. He’s a syndicated columnist. A muckraker. A career killer. He’d call himself an ‘investigative reporter,’ but that’s just code for legitimized gossipmonger. He says whatever he wants, then hides behind the First Amendment when he gets the details wrong. If you could line up every person with a reason to harm Tibor, I imagine it would take you three weeks to get through the interviews.”

“Is he political?”

“Aren’t they all? They wake up every morning and proclaim themselves to be the smartest guys in the room. If you disagree, you get hammered in their column.”

Weatherby’s eyes narrowed, and Jonathan caught the subtext.

“Oh, relax, Detective. I freely admit to motive and means. And probably opportunity, too, if you stretch far enough. What I don’t have is the desire. If you want me to speak frankly to you, then you need to suspend your suspicion for a while. Otherwise, I’ll call for a lawyer, and give you nothing. Which will it be?”

Weatherby took his time answering. “You can speak freely,” he said.

Jonathan studied the man’s face. Weatherby could be lying through his ass, and none of it would matter. The cops were going to check out everything he said anyway. As long as he stayed as near the truth as he could afford, he’d be okay. And the more cooperative he was, the sooner he’d get the hell out of here and on to the hospital to be with Ellen. “Thank you,” he said.

“Let me ask you one other thing, Mr. Grave. Is it at all likely that the person who ransacked the house was in fact looking for you? ”

The question shocked him. “I don’t see how.”

Weatherby recrossed his legs. “Well, you’re in the window-peeping business, right? Private detective? Isn’t that what ‘security’ really means in Security Solutions?”

That was a gratuitous shot. “My clients include insurance companies and Fortune 500 firms who need to gather intelligence data for one reason or another. I’ve never thought of it as window-peeping. Do you think of yourself as a child-shooter?” His own gratuitous jab recalled a recent incident in which an off-duty county cop shot an that it was all going to hell, and that he was going to prison, he transferred most of his holdin’t want to know.

“Broken bones in her fingers and toes. Broken tibias in both legs. Bruised liver and kidneys. Broken ribs. There’s really quite a lot wrong, sir.”

“Any head trauma?”

Malstrom broke eye contact as he nodded. “Yes, sir. One really solid strike to the head.”

“Jesus Christ,” Jonathan breathed, and then he shot a quick apologetic glance to Dom. “This is inconceivable to me.”

Malstrom said nothing. What was there to say?

“So, what’s next?”

The doctor launched a soliloquy about treatment strategies and possible surgeries. He talked about Ellen being “in the woods” for a long time, by way of explaining that it could easily be weeks before she would be “out of the woods.” Throughout the speech, Jonathan’s head was in a different place entirely. What the hell had Tibor Rothman done to bring this kind of evil into his home?

Finding Tibor was the key to everything. Suddenly he wanted the doctor to be done so that Jonathan could call Venice and discover what she’d found in her search. As if on cue, Jonathan’s cell phone rang. It was Venice. Malstrom seemed offended that Jonathan took the call.