David Rosenfelt: New Tricks

“So why kill Robinson?”

“Maybe he went off the reservation and tried to screw his partner. I can’t answer that yet. But what if Sykes, Robinson, and Jacoby were in it together? When Sykes was going to go down for the murders, Jacoby thought Sykes would rat him out, so he killed him as well.”

“It’s all possible, Andy. But it’s also completely made up; we just created an entire conspiracy out of our own heads.”

I smile. “But we’ve got two pretty good heads.”

“Sykes could have killed himself.”

“I have to assume he didn’t. Otherwise I have nowhere to take this.”

“You don’t really have to take it anywhere, you know. You won the case.”

I think about that for a moment. The way I do my job, the way I’ve always done my job, is to think of it as a competition, a game. I won’t feel like I’ve won the game unless I’ve figured it out. Laurie already knows this about me, so I smile and say, “The game isn’t over yet.”

“And if you win the game it means a murderer gets caught,” she says.

“That’s what makes it a really great game.”

I CALL AGENT CORVALLIS and request a meeting. He doesn’t seem particularly enamored of the idea, and it takes a veiled threat that I will publicly discuss everything I know about Walter Timmerman’s work, and the FBI’s involvement in it, before he agrees. He says that he’ll be out of town tomorrow, but he’ll give me fifteen minutes the day after.

I file papers with the probate court with my decision to award Waggy to Steven. The court accepts it within forty-eight hours, and of course there is no reason not to. Diana Timmerman and Charles Robinson are no longer around to contest it, and Steven is the heir to the rest of his father’s fortune.

A delighted Steven picks Waggy up, and I see he’s already stopped at a pet store to get dog food, dishes, beds, and toys. I should mention that he’ll also need about a ton of doggy Ritalin, but I’ll let him find that out for himself.

As Steven and his new best friend prepare to leave, Tara looks on fairly impassively. Life for her is going to get more peaceful, but also more boring. I’m not sure how she feels about that, and it’s hard to tell based on her interaction with Waggy. They just sniff each other a little bit, and then Tara decides to lie down.

“Wags,” I say, “it’s been great having you. Feel free to visit anytime. My home is your home.”

I go to give him a hug, but he will have none of it, wriggling free and jumping into the backseat of the car. Waggy has never been much of a sentimentalist.

Steven has thanked me about four hundred times since the trial, but feels compelled to do so even more effusively this time. He adds a hug, not knowing I’m not a fan of guy hugs. Waggy and I have that in common.

“What are your plans for him?” I ask. “Are you going to show him?”

“No. Waggy and I talked about it,” he says. “We’ve decided he’s not going to be a champion. He’s just going to have fun and be a dog.”

I’m glad to hear that, although I’m pretty sure Waggy would find a way to have fun no matter what he did.

I remind Steven to be careful with Waggy, since we can’t be one hundred percent positive that whoever went after him won’t try it again. Hopefully it was Sykes. He promises to be alert, and they’re off to New York. Within a couple of weeks, Waggy will be making disparaging New Jersey jokes like all other New Yorkers.

Once Steven leaves, I head for the city myself, where I’m meeting with Corvallis at the FBI’s Midtown office. I park the car on West 49th Street in one of the ubiquitous rip-off parking lots. If Corvallis really gives me just fifteen minutes, then I’ll be paying about four bucks a minute.

Corvallis starts off the meeting by telling me why he shouldn’t be meeting with me. “You’ve made my life more difficult,” he says. “If not for you, Robinson might still be alive, and we could still be watching him. But hell, you’re just doing your job, and you’re not a bad guy, so…”

I put my hands to my eyes. “Stop it,” I say, “I promised I wouldn’t get emotional.”

He laughs. “All right, what the hell do you want?”

“I’ve got a theory I wanted to run by you. I don’t think Thomas Sykes killed himself.”

“Based on what?” he asks.

I tell him my reasons, or at least Laurie’s reasons, and then add, “And I think Robert Jacoby has been behind this from the beginning.”

“Who the hell is Robert Jacoby?” he asks.

I’m not thrilled with the question. Corvallis really does seem puzzled as to Jacoby’s identity, and given how close he has been to this case, that doesn’t bode well for the accuracy of my theory. “He’s the head of a DNA lab.”

Corvallis nods as if he now remembers where he heard the name, and I continue. “He knew Timmerman, Robinson, and Sykes, and Timmerman sent him his own DNA to see if Jacoby would pick up on the fact that it was synthetic. I think he did pick up on it and saw an opportunity.”

“I can’t help you with that,” he says. “I know very little about the guy. But I can help you with something else.”

“What’s that?” I ask.

“Sykes definitely committed suicide. No question about it.”

“How do you know that?”

He frowns. “You may not realize this, but we do have an idea what we’re doing. And we even have forensics experts. The gunpowder residue on Sykes’s hands shows he pulled the trigger. If somebody else was holding his hand while he did, it would have distorted the pattern. So unless he complied when someone simply instructed him to shoot himself in the head, then it’s a suicide.”

It certainly wouldn’t stun me if Corvallis were lying about this, but I don’t know why he would. “So it’s the considered opinion of the FBI that Sykes blew up the house and killed Diana Timmerman?”

“Could be,” he says.

“Are you actively trying to find out who did it if he didn’t? Or is murder not a significant enough crime for you guys to deal with?”

“In this case it is a local crime unless we get information to the contrary. So it’s up to the local authorities. Our involvement in this matter is over.”

“So you’re not worried that someone might have gotten their hands on Walter Timmerman’s work?”

He smiles. “I think it’s fair to say that we’ve prepared for that.”

I nod my understanding. “You got to Timmerman’s lab in the house first, didn’t you? After he was murdered?”

Corvallis doesn’t respond, so I continue. “When I met Diana Timmerman at the house that day, she complained that the police had already searched the house three times. Yet the discovery reports show only one search. That’s because your people were in there the other two times, without telling the locals about it.”

“You’re quite a fascinating storyteller,” he says. “I’m just sorry the fifteen minutes are up.”

“I’m taking a ten-minute extension. I’d bet that not only did your scientists get up to speed on Timmerman’s work, but once you did you changed it to throw off anybody who got into that lab after you.”

“You’re on a roll,” he says.

“You were sorry when the house blew up,” I say. “Not because Diana Timmerman died, but because you were watching it to see who went in there. And you weren’t worried, because you had gotten to the lab first.

“And because you were all over that house, that’s how you know it isn’t Jacoby. If it was you would have picked him up already. You know who was there every minute, which is why it could have been Sykes. But I don’t buy it. Sykes lost the inside track at four hundred million when Diana Timmerman died. Just because he had access and could have planted the bomb doesn’t mean…”