John Lescroart - A Certain Justice

And then the coroner had called, and Elaine realized that she had had enough. The walls were closing in. She needed time to let her emotions flow, to be alone. The room outside Strout's lab gave her that opportunity.

Suddenly – any movement in the dead room appeared sudden – the big door swung open and Strout's lanky form was pulling up a chair next to hers. Strout had a strong deep-south accent and no enemies on the police force or in the DA's office. A true professional, he lived for his forensics. He also had a sly humor and a skeptical eye that had many times discovered a homicide in what at first appeared, even to the police, to be an accidental or benign death.

'I'm gettin' real tired of lookin' at dead people,' he drawled. He had his latest ME forms on a clipboard that he held on his lap. 'Couple a day seems to be my limit. Get up to four, five, gives me a sour stomach.'

Elaine didn't react. This was how Strout always was. It wasn't personal. 'Is that Arthur Wade?' she asked, motioning to the clipboard.

He nodded, enough with amenities. 'No surprises, not that I expected any. Cause of death was asphyxiation, which you'd expect gettin' pulled up – must have taken some minutes. Poor man. Long time to hang. Hey, let me get you some water.'

'No, I'm all right.'

But she found herself resting her head back against the wall, closing her eyes. This was too much. She couldn't sit and listen to someone talk about Arthur Wade hanging for a long time like this – at Boalt, Arthur had seemed one of those wonderful people, not that she'd known him all that well. And now, four years later, his future was the past and that was all.

And Chris Locke… no, don't start, she told herself. Don't open that up.

More time had gone by. Strout was back with lukewarm water in a paper cup. 'Y'all want to lay down a minute, there's a couch in my office?'

But she couldn't help herself. 'Chris Locke is in there, isn't he?'

'Yes, ma'am.' Strout sucked some air between his front teeth. 'Sometimes…' His voice, with a sudden guttural quality, trailed off.

She put a hand on his knee, took it away. 'I know.'

Back in her office – ancient desk, stacks of files, smell of paper and dust – she closed the door behind her. Since an hour ago when she 'd left to go to the morgue, someone had come by and dropped a large yellow envelope in the center of the desk. She sat, dropped her Arthur Wade files on the floor by her feet and opened the envelope.

It was another copy of the original Paul Westberg photo that was in the newspapers and everywhere else. But then, about to slip it back into the envelope and throw the whole thing into the file folder, she stopped. Something had caught her eye and she pulled the photo all the way out.

With everything that had happened since then, she had forgotten that she'd asked the photographer – a request, not a demand – to send her the other picture that he had developed. Which he had now done.

It was very close, as Westberg had said, and he had been right, too, that the likeness of Kevin Shea was a little better in the picture everybody had seen. It was obvious why he had gone with the one and not the other.

But there was something strange about the second one. She picked up the file folder, dug for the first picture, and held them side by side. She was struck by one detail – in the second photo Arthur Wade was clearly holding the knife that, in the other picture, was in Kevin Shea's hand.

Well, so what?

Lots of people – professionals even – carried small knives in their pockets. She herself had a penknife in her purse.

She closed her eyes, trying to imagine the moment, the threatening crowd, Shea in the center of it, deciding – now that Arthur was hanging and helpless – that he would take a stab at him as well, put a knife in his ribs, and Arthur had somehow managed to see it, to reach down with one hand, grab for it, a last moment of struggle, captured here in Westberg's photo.

Or another explanation – weaker but, she considered, still possible. Arthur had somehow managed to pull a knife of his own before they had lifted him from the ground, realizing he'd have to try to cut the rope. It would be his last chance to survive. And then Shea, reaching up, had grabbed it from him, wresting it away. It didn't change any of the basic facts of what had happened – fact, it made the picture clearer.

But something else.

And it came on her in a wave of revulsion that nearly doubled her over, then straightened her back up with rage. There was Kevin Shea, grimacing with the efforts to pull down on her old classmate, setting off the chain of events that had killed Chris Locke, her boss, her lover…

It was intolerable that this man – this bigoted southern schoolboy – was still at large. Her mother was right – so were the supervisors, the mayor, even Philip Mohandas. One man was responsible for all this. It may have been a mob, but this one man had led it. This one man had driven the city to its knees – and he had to be taken. He had to be taken now. The madness wouldn't stop until he was. He had to be found.

Elaine pushed out from her desk. She had to make people see this, she had to make them hate Shea for what he'd done the way she hated him.

There were procedures and there were levels of hierarchy, but she also knew who she was. She could go outside channels, direct to the people. Art Drysdale might reprimand her but the reprimand would have no teeth. No one would dare to touch her.

The city provided the media with two rooms – one for print and one for radio and television – on the third floor of the Hall of Justice, both of them just outside the frosted doors that led down the hallway to the District Attorney's office. Both of these were now full to overflowing, with tables set up in the hall – coffee containers, donuts, half-eaten sandwiches.

Over the past days Elaine and most of the other assistant district attorneys had avoided this hallway in an effort to skirt the schools of piranha journalists who had been in a perpetual feeding frenzy over any scraps that fell into their waters. She had ascended and descended by any of the several internal stairways that connected the floors of the Hall.

Now, her anger high and clear and overlaying the exhaustion in her face, she was hip-deep in the main hall, laying a trail of chum.

'I don't believe this.'

'I do,' Wes Farrell replied. He had not moved. He looked typically slob-like in his khaki shorts and his 'On Strike From Major League Bull-' T-shirt, bare feet up on a milk crate, another can of beer in his hand, Bart's head in his lap.

They were all fixed on Elaine Wager's live interview. 'This is how they do it. Get it on the tube, it becomes fact.'

'How do they find out all this stuff?' Kevin whispered. Talking in his normal voice was painful. He couldn't shake the feeling that he was getting weaker rather than improving. His left arm had a constant throb, and at every breath his ribs pinched at him. When he had gotten up, the consensus had been that what he needed was a hot bath. He'd taken one but it had seemed to make everything hurt even worse.

He was drinking coffee. 'What is she talking about, "unstable"? "Despondent over the death of his brother?" "Liable to do anything?" Where does all this come from?'

Melanie was – force of habit – cleaning up in the room behind the men. She had already washed two loads of dishes and now was stacking the piles of newspapers, arranging the paperbacks in the brick-and-board bookcase in alphabetical order by author – she stopped moving for a moment.

'Cindy,' she said. Then, to Wes: 'One of Kevin's earlier conquests that didn't work out so well.' But then she quickly softened it, coming up behind Kevin, planting a kiss on the top of his head. 'A lesson for us all.'