Laura Lippman - To The Power Of Three

Normally Lenhardt didn’t mind not getting overtime. He saw it as proof of his professionalism and rank. When he worked an eighteen-hour day, everyone knew it wasn’t because he was padding his time sheet. Besides, he was already drawing his city pension, so he didn’t need the money as much as the younger guys. But on a brilliant Saturday morning in June, it was hard to leave his wife at the breakfast table and his children in their beds, hard to know that he had to miss Jessica’s swim meet. Harder still to realize that Infante would make buckets of overtime on this case, whereas all he would get was grief. At home and here, if this meeting was any indication of what was to come. A veritable exacta of aggravation.

He looked over his notes, trying to find the holes that his colonel would be sure to highlight, if only to embarrass him in front of the chief. The first day had been hit-and-miss. After the interview with the dead girl’s parents, he and Lenhardt had run the gun through state police and gotten an owner-Michael Delacorte, with a Glendale address. The parents of the girl at Shock Trauma had readily admitted that their daughter baby-sat for the Delacorte family, although that was before Lenhardt explained why it was of interest. Once informed of the gun, they had started backpedaling like hell. The parents, the Kahns, then insisted it was unthinkable their daughter would have stolen a gun, any gun. “She was opposed to violence,” the mother kept saying, as if this assertion could somehow undo the inconvenient fact of one dead and two wounded, and a Shock Trauma doctor agreeing the Kahn girl’s wound appeared to be self-inflicted if poorly aimed-more off the cheekbone than the temple. ER docs were notoriously bad at forensics, having been trained to save live people as opposed to autopsying dead ones, but even a first-year resident should be able to identify the entry wound. All in all, it was shaping up to be a pretty straightforward event. Girl shoots two, then self. So why the meeting?

And, more relevant to Lenhardt’s way of thinking, why this nagging at the back of his own mind, a sense that things were far from right? He was not an instinct guy, more of a context one, so the problem had to be in his notes. What had he neglected to do yesterday, what were they going to bust his balls for?

The chief finally showed up, not that Lenhardt begrudged him being late to his own meeting. The chief was a good guy, solid and long-lived in a job where most achieved longevity through mediocrity. Lenhardt got along with his lieutenant, too, a city refugee like himself. The colonel-the colonel was another story. Tall and lean with reddish hair, he was one of those guys who could score points only at someone’s expense. He couldn’t put himself up, so he settled for constantly putting everyone else down.

“I was on the phone late last night and early this morning,” the chief began, and he looked haggard enough for it to be the literal truth. “It turns out the father of the dead girl, Dale Hartigan, is good buddies with our county executive, and he wants to be as involved as possible. Those were his lawyer’s words-as involved as possible.”

“Shit,” Infante said, and he was only blurting out what everyone else was thinking.

“He wants to know where the gun came from,” the chief continued. “He wants to know if there are federal charges that apply. The lawyer even asked if cases such as this could ever be death penalty-and then insisted his client would never support that, and it’s his understanding Baltimore County won’t go for it without familial consent. Hartigan is, in short, all over the map. But the one message that came through loud and clear is that he’s going to ride our asses for the duration of this investigation.”

“Nothing worse than a good citizen,” Lenhardt said, and every man in the room nodded. You’d think it would be the other way around, but in Lenhardt’s experience middle-class victims were just hell. People who paid their taxes, toed the line-they believed they should be exempt from crime, that it was a constitutional guarantee.

“I think the family’s grief is perfectly understandable,” the colonel said. “They’ve lost a child.”

Lenhardt wished the gathering were large enough so he could catch Infante’s eye, make a face, but he shouldn’t risk it. Instead he said, “We’ve already traced the gun and established that Perri Kahn had access to it.”

This was Lenhardt’s way of saying, We know how to do our job, dickhead.

“I know,” the chief said, “because as of this morning, her parents have hired Eddie Dixon. He called me at home to give me a raft of shit about you guys talking to the parents while their daughter was in surgery. So-good work. Any time Dixon is pissed, I figure that’s a point for our side.”

Dixon had a fearsome reputation as a defense attorney. A thin, light-skinned black man, he dressed in a style that Lenhardt called Park Avenue pimp-beautiful hand-tailored suits in not-quite-right colors. He was particularly partial to a shade of dove gray, for example, which he wore with a rose-colored shirt and matching handkerchief poking out of the breast pocket. His success in the city, where juries were prone to acquit, was understandable. It was harder to explain how Dixon had done so well in the county, where jurors tended to be law-and-order types. Lenhardt, who was three-for-one lifetime against the lawyer, chalked it up to Dixon ’s way with voir dire. He had an eye for the bleeding hearts wrapped in the most unlikely packages-stern-faced White Marsh men, starchy Ruxton women.

“That’s an odd match,” the lieutenant said. “You wouldn’t expect a Glendale family to gravitate toward a city slick like Eddie.”

“ He might have gravitated toward them,” the colonel said.

“More like orbited, circling Shock Trauma like the ambulance chaser he is. Helicopter chaser,” Lenhardt amended, caught up in his own whimsical vision. “I think I saw him hanging from the chopper as it lifted yesterday. It was like the fall of Saigon.”

“Were you there when the girls were taken out?” The colonel was not much for Lenhardt’s brand of humor, which was Lenhardt’s secondary complaint against the man. But then the colonel had never been a murder police, and that was Lenhardt’s primary complaint. The colonel had come up through various property crimes-burglary, auto theft. Want to follow a serial number? He was your guy. Need tips on how to canvass pawnshops? No one better.

But when it came to the simple task of talking to another human being one-on-one, the colonel was in way over his head.

“No, both had been transported by the time we got there,” Lenhardt said.

“First-four protocol,” Infante put in. “And of the first four who went in, not a single one was homicide.”

“So?” The colonel all but bristled at the implicit rebuke for the new policy, which he had helped implement.

“So,” Lenhardt said, “some things didn’t get done. No one thought to ride with the witness in the ambo, keep talking to her. They accepted what she said at the scene at face value and let her go unescorted.”

“Why shouldn’t they?” the colonel asked.

The question so appalled Lenhardt, went so directly to the heart of everything he believed, that he was left uncharacteristically speechless. In his head, however, he had an answer: Because people lie, dickhead . Especially people at murder scenes.

The lieutenant stepped in, all too familiar with the friction between his sergeant and colonel. “Did you get to her later, interview her at the hospital?”

“No, and that’s another thing that bugs me. She was sedated when we finally got there, at her parents’ insistence. Yet her injury is pretty superficial.”