T. Parker - Cold Pursuit

Grothke handed McMichael a printed sheet with the names and phone numbers of Pete Braga's heirs, as well as the descendants not chosen to receive.

"Why did Pete cut one of his sons out of the will?" asked McMichael.

"I won't speculate," said Grothke.

"And half his grandchildren?"

"I have no idea. All I can say is that Peter Braga was a tempestuous man."

"Over the years," said McMichael, "did Pete amend his will?"

"Yes, of course. Fine-tuned, mostly, as the value of his estate changed."

"Did a person named Sally Rainwater come into it?"

"Rainwater? No. None of the married daughters or granddaughters have that name. It's Irish, isn't it? Or American Indian?"

McMichael stared at him and the lawyer looked away. Grothke meant that no Braga would marry a mick because of the history with the McMichaels. Probably true. McMichael would never forget the quick efficiency with which Pete and Patricia's father had ended his fifth-grade friendship with Patricia- changed schools, forbade Patricia from communicating with him in any way, told McMichael's mother that they'd get a restraining order on her son if she couldn't control him. It was odd, the way his world changed so drastically with Patricia banished. It was as if she had disappeared, though he knew she was still living and breathing just a few miles away.

"When was the last time he changed it?" McMichael asked.

" 'Ninety-four."

"What changes did he make?"

Grothke Junior leaned back and shook his head. "With all respect, gentlemen, I don't feel right discussing those specifics. Talk to Patricia. She was very close to him. If she can't tell you, have her call me and with her permission I'll do so. You understand, I hope. Wills are not really about dollars, they're about people."

"Was he planning to change it again?" asked Hector.

"I have no way of knowing that, Detective."

Old Grothke was sitting at the threshold of his suite again when McMichael and Paz walked by. The receptionist buzzed the door open and stood.

"It was April of last year, Detective," said the old lawyer. "The chamber music. I have the old calendar in my drawer."

"That was it," said McMichael, pausing and bending to shake hands again. "Nice to see you again."

"Can I help you with something?" asked the receptionist.

"Yeah, validate this." Hector dropped the parking ticket on her desk.

McMichael endured the autopsy in the county medical examiner's office that afternoon. He had never gotten used to the grisly theater, disliked the smell of formalin and alcohol, hated the sound of the saws. The butchered corpses with their yawning Y-sections made him feel queasy and guilty and want to crawl into bed with Stephanie and be forgiven.

Hector was off to court on a parole hearing. Barbara and Hatter were checking the notary, then interviewing Pete's allies and enemies on the Port Commission, of which Pete was a thirty-plus-year commissioner.

So McMichael stood amidst the fumes and the instruments and watched Dr. Arnold Stiles perform the act. With a flat and methodical tone, the doctor narrated his findings into a tape recorder.

"I can see sixteen separate blows," said Stiles. "But there were almost certainly more, lost in the bone shatters on the top of the skull."

"Rage," said McMichael.

"Much of it," said Stiles.

"Can you tell right- or left-handed attack?"

Stiles nodded. "He was hit from behind. The blows are concentrated to the right, so right-handed."

"We figured it from behind."

"That makes sense, with no defense wounds."

McMichael took a deep breath and let it out slowly. For the next few minutes he simply watched Stiles. It was hard for him to tell his revulsion from his anger.

"You look white as Pete here," said Stiles. "Why put yourself through this?"

"It reminds me," McMichael said.

"Rawlings used to watch, too. I'm not convinced it makes a detective any more effective."

"I'm not here to convince you."

Stiles dropped his cranial saw into a bloody tub. There was saw mist stuck to his eyeglasses. He was a short, pudgy man who wore the same lucky necktie for every autopsy he performed in a given year. After Christmas he'd have a new one for the coming year's carnage. The ties were always clip-ons, striped and, McMichael assumed, machine washable.

"Cool down, Tom. I know how you feel. I know what you're doing."

Stiles finally pronounced the cause of death as "repeated blunt force trauma to the head, resulting in nervous system and cardiac failure." The approximate time of death was between seven and ten P.M. on Wednesday, January 8.

McMichael left the building feeling like his soul had been cut out, weighed and thrown away.

Back at headquarters he waited in Arthur Flagler's office. He felt the pieces of his soul drifting back into place, roughly into place, as he stared out the window and watched the drizzle falling.

He tried to think of something other than Pete. He let his mind go and up came Sally Rainwater and the terror on her face as she took his wrist. McMichael had never been shot, but he figured if he had, and two strangers drew down on him in a dark hallway, he might not like it either. As he remembered, the fear hadn't stripped her dignity- even standing there in her own pee Sally Rainwater seemed strong and beautiful.

Arthur Flagler breezed in with a package of cookies and a carton of milk.

"The Fish Whack'r was clean," he said. "That's the name of the fish club."

McMichael remembered that Sally Rainwater had known this, too.

"And we didn't get anything promising from inside the house," said Flagler. "Plenty of fingerprints left by Pete and the nurse. But we got prints from the latex gloves. These creeps never think about leaving prints on the inside ."

"That's good news, Arthur." McMichael took out his notebook and pen.

Flagler bit into a cookie, studied what was left. "It wasn't the nurse. I used her CCP to get a ten-set from the county. You can rule her out, as the basher anyway."

So McMichael thought: Rainwater was telling the truth, or at least part of it. He didn't quite know how he felt. He'd had a suspect and now he didn't. He was pleased that he'd read her better than Hector had, but she could still be an accomplice, even the shot caller. Or she could be an innocent young woman who'd drenched herself in an old man's blood, gotten up close enough to smell the death in his nostrils and still tried to breathe life back into him.

"The prints we got off the latex aren't in any register so far," said Flagler. "We've never printed this guy. Neither has the county. We also got blanked by Cal-ID, the FBI and Western Information Network. I'm trying Interpol and the Naval Investigative Service. Nothing yet."

"Good enough for court?" asked McMichael.

"Six points," said Flagler. "Plenty- U.S. versus Plaza or not."

McMichael knew of the recent federal court ruling that prevented fingerprint examiners from testifying that unidentified prints "matched" a suspect's prints. Things were changing in the courtroom, but six points was six points, more than enough to establish a probability beyond question.

"Interestingly, the palm of the right glove had torn out," said Flagler. "Right where you'd expect it to during a beating- all the friction and tension on the palm."

McMichael wondered when. "But no palm prints."

Flagler shook his head. "None that we've found. It might have torn out when he stripped off the glove after."

"That's funny," said McMichael. "A torn-out glove but no prints."

"Maybe he knew it, wiped the club and the door and whatever else he touched."

"He must have known."

Flagler shrugged, then downed the rest of his cookie and took out another. "We got Pete's blood off the warm-up jacket. No surprise. The jacket itself is a common make, available at scores of area stores. A man's extra large. We got an eyelash off it- brown. No flesh attached, so no DNA possibilities. We can determine if it could have come from a certain suspect, when we have such a suspect. And we also got two strands of gray nylon/polyester fiber from the floor, where the basher would have stood. Probably from carpet, maybe car carpet. I can match it up with something you bring in, but I can't do much else with them- too common, too many manufacturers, too many dye lots- and no real records or controls on any of them. The floor in that fish room is hardwood, so there were no shoe impressions. But the blood caught some zigzag sole patterns so we're thinking athletic shoe, maybe work boots or some kind of walking shoe. My guys are tracking down a make and model, but that can take time. There were marks- black scuffs- like you'd leave on a basketball court if you wore the wrong kind of shoes."