Twenty
One more devils’-triumph and sorrow for angels,
One wrong more to man.
The Lost Leader, Robert Browning
 
 
 
 
Bree was arrested the minute she stepped out of the clinic doors. It was two o’clock in the morning. She didn’t know if Hunter had waited outside for her all that time—it seemed unlikely—or if the vet assistant had called the police station the moment Sasha woke. Whatever. But she had had a lot of time to think. And she knew now who had killed Probert Chandler on that lonely bend of Skidaway Road. The syringe. The blood test. The keys. The Marlowe’s paperweight. And the photograph from years ago.
Hunter was there, grim-faced and grouchy. Sergeant Markham read Bree her rights, handcuffed her, and pushed her into the backseat of the police car with a certain amount of purposeful glee. They drove off to the Chatham County Courthouse. Bree argued with Hunter all the way. Hunter grunted. She hoped he was listening. Markham set her jaw and muttered, “Bullshit bullshit bullshit” all nineteen miles back to town.
Bree spent five hours in the holding pen, dying for a toothbrush. She made one phone call, to Antonia, and made three requests. Her sister had no problem with the food and coffee—and too many questions about the second and third. “But where,” she said, “am I supposed to find something like that?”
Bree told her.
“And you want it for what?”
“I’ve got a murderer to catch—and I’ve got to do it before two P.M. today.”
When she was released on her own recognizance at nine thirty, Antonia waited outside the courthouse with hot coffee and a lox-and-cream-cheese-stuffed bagel.
“The other thing’s all set up,” she said. “Jeez. The guys at the garage think I’m nuts, by the way. But I gave them a hundred bucks each and a deposit on the thingummy . . .”
“Jackhammer,” Bree said.
“In case it gets wrecked or whatever. And the one guy, Manny, wants to be sure you’ve got a court order to do this. Do you have an actual real court order, Bree? Or is that official piece of paper Ron dropped off for me a crock? I think it’s a crock. I don’t see how you could have gotten a judge to sign the thing at three o’clock in the morning, or whenever it was that you asked Ron to do this. I think,” she said dramatically, “I just pulled a fast one on the guys who do our lube jobs. And I don’t feel good about it.”
“You’ll get over it,” Bree said unsympathetically. The hot coffee tasted wonderful. The bagel tasted even better. “How’d you get the car back from the clinic?”
“I took it back to the theater when I left the clinic. Hunter said you weren’t going to need it for a long, long time. As I make it, it was only a couple of hours.”
“He’s mad at me,” Bree said. “Or was. I think he’s on his way to a little forgiveness, if things turn out all right this afternoon.”
“You’ve got hope. I’m telling you, sister, you start messing around with the guy’s job, he’s not going to feel real good about it or you.” Antonia pulled the car away from the curb with a cheerful lack of interest in what the rest of the traffic on Montgomery was doing. Since this was Savannah, and not Manhattan, nobody honked or swore or even made rude gestures out the driver-side windows. “I’m taking you back to the town house.”
“I really need to go to the office,” Bree said. “I’ll drop you off.”
“No, you really need to go to the town house.” She sniffed the air in a pointed way. Bree looked down at her wrinkled suit and her filthy shoes. Her shirt felt like it was glued to her shoulders. “Shower,” she said wisely. “I guess I need to clean up.”
“I guess you do.” The drive to Factor’s Walk was short. Antonia pulled up to the town house. “So how was it? Jail, I mean. This is the first time any Beaufort’s been in the slam since the pirate Beaufort in 1763.”
“The holding pen,” Bree corrected her. “Not jail. And it wasn’t too bad, considering. Smelly, due to the unsettled stomachs of the lady drunks. Rowdy, due to the irritable tempers of those same lady drunks, who’d been deprived of their gin. But not too bad.” She heaved herself out of the car, wanting to sleep for a week. “To be honest, I’d rather not do it again.”
Antonia followed her into the house. In her room, Bree stripped off her clothes and headed for the bathroom. She turned the shower water on, as hot as she could stand it, and stepped in. She let the water run over her for a long moment, without moving.
“. . . back here!” Antonia called from the other side of the door.
Bree dumped shampoo on her head. “What?!”
Antonia cracked the door. “I said I talked to Ron, and he’ll pick Sasha up as soon as the clinic’s ready to let him go. And he’s really glad we seem to have solved the case.”
Ron’s picking up Sasha on his bicycle? Bree decided not to worry about how the carless Ron was going to retrieve the dog. Or why sometimes people could see him, and sometimes they couldn’t. It appeared to be up to Ron.
“Those two monster dogs showed up at the Angelus office, he said.”
“Ron said Miles and Belli are there?”
“Yes. And they’ve got to stay there, he said. Since the law wants to lock them up the way they just locked you up.”
Bree scowled to herself. “They didn’t bite anybody.”
“They menaced, Ron said, which is enough to get them quarantined, these days, I guess. They scare me to bits, Bree, but I’d hate to see them end up in custody and then get put down, the way they do with those poor pit bulls.”
“Fat chance.” Bree would like to see those county officials brave enough to attempt to euthanize either one of the pair.
“Don’t be too sure. And Ron said George Chandler has apparently called you about forty-two times.”
Bree scrubbed herself down with the loofah, twisted the faucet handle from hot to cold, endured the spray of icy water for all of thirty seconds, and jumped out of the shower. She wrapped the first towel Antonia handed her around herself, and the second around her hair. “I’ll have to get back to George later. One way or the other, he’s not going to be happy with what I’ve found out. So I’d just as soon it was later.”
“So now what?” Antonia said brightly. “You want some more breakfast? I think you should go to bed and sleep for the next twenty-four hours.”
“Not yet.” Bree looked at herself in the steamy mirror. She didn’t look too bad, considering. Chandler’s hearing was today, which was totally outrageous. Petru had filed the appeal the day before yesterday. She’d have to speak to someone about the timing thing. It gave Beazley and Caldecott a grossly unfair advantage. She couldn’t remember much about Einstein’s theory of time as the fourth dimension, but the Celestial Courts were on the seventh floor of the six-floor Chatham County Courthouse—not far enough away to make a significant difference in the passage of time for Them, as opposed to the temporal. She’d have to ask Goldstein about filing a petition of some sort if days were going to be months long instead of twenty-four hours.
“You’re dead on your feet. Whatever you’re planning to do, you’ll do better if you get some sleep.”
“No time,” Bree said, “no time.” She looked at her watch. Ten o’clock. She had less than four hours to get enough evidence to reverse the judgment against Probert Chandler.
She had one last chance.
She called Chad Martinelli at Marlowe’s. And when he found what she needed, she picked it up from the store. Then she called Hunter.
020
The concrete mixer in front of Marlowe’s research center was gone and the base was smooth and dry. The day was hot and sunny, unseasonably warm for November. Manny and Gustavo stood at the base of the Marlowe’s sculpture, just as they’d promised. Manny leaned on the jackhammer, his forearms draped over the handle.
“Hey,” Bree said, as she walked up to them.
“You got that warrant?” Manny said instantly. “You don’t know these guys, Miz Beaufort.” He waved one hand in the general direction of the Marlowe’s building. “I been checking around. They don’t make a lot of noise about it, but they carry some big weight around town. I don’t want no trouble.”
Bree set her briefcase down on the concrete and pulled out the document. It looked official. The signature looked valid. It’d been notarized; there was Ron’s signature next to his notary seal. She didn’t look too closely at the judge’s signature—it might have read Alvarez, who was a circuit court judge for the surrounding area—and it might have read Azreal. She wasn’t sure. And she didn’t want to know. “Here it is, Manny. I thank you. And the citizens of Chatham County will thank you.”
Manny looked pleased. “So,” he said expansively, “where do you want us to dig?”
Bree walked around the base of the sculpture. The diameter of the circle was perhaps twenty feet. The circumference, of course, over three times that. The concrete was smooth and unmarked. She walked around it again. Manny and Gustavo waited patiently in the sunshine. Above them, faces appeared at the office windows on the second and third floors. Bree walked around the circle one more time, then stopped and sank her chin in one hand, considering. The other held the warrant.
The glass doors at the front of the building burst open. First out of the door was a harried security guard. John Allen Lindquist was right on his heels. Lindquist was white with anger. He grabbed Bree by the upper arm and shook it. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Bree watched his eyes. They darted to the left, then back again. She followed his gaze. She looked at Manny and pointed. “Right there,” she said. Then, as the noise of the jackhammer cut through the air, she leaned close and said into Lindquist’s ear: “You, Chandler, and Hansen were chemists at the University of Oregon together. Probert went on to found Marlowe’s and took you with him. Hansen was ruined and went on to seduce your sister. You’ve been protecting her—and your own job—for years by paying Hansen off with money and drugs from the warehouse, so he wouldn’t tell Probert that Lindsey wasn’t his own child. Probert found out about it. You killed him. To protect yourself. To protect your sister. I don’t think you gave a damn about Lindsey.”
She pulled the sales receipt out of her briefcase. It was in an evidence bag.
“Your inventory system’s just about perfect. You can track anything—anything—in those stores. Including the purchase of a two-hundred-watt searchlight. By you. And the dents in the metal, Mr. Lindquist, are going to match the dents in poor Probert Chandler’s head.”
Manny gave a shout of triumph. The concrete was only three inches thick. The flashlight was buried in a shallow pit. Manny reached into the dirt and held it up in one gloved hand.
Hunter, who’d just shown up with Markham, had told her once there were only three things a criminal could do when confronted with the evidence. Run. Lie. Or lawyer up. Lindquist ran. Hunter and Markham tackled him a hundred feet from his Lexus.
021
“If it was anything like the last time, I’ll be back in time for a nice cup of tea.” Bree shook the folds of her red velvet robe free of the box it was stored in and held it up against her. She, Petru, and Ron stood on the seventh floor of the six-floor Chatham County Courthouse.
“Ke-vite different, this Court of Appeal,” Petru said glumly. “This is not traffic court, dear Bree.”
Ron draped the robe around her and twitched a sleeve into place. Bree was getting quite fond of it. Lavinia had worked the lapels in fantastic gold embroidery. The velvet itself was whisper thin, and shimmered with sunset-light. Ron folded the high collar into place. The wall that held the great gold seal of the Celestial Courts reflected her image back to her. She looked a stranger. Her silvery hair was piled high in elaborate braids. The gold collar surrounded her face like a stiff halo. The robe flowed around her feet. She looked eerily like the defending angels on the stairs leading up to Lavinia’s rooms in the office on Angelus Street.
“Your pleadings,” Petru said. He handed her a stack of vellum, elaborately inscribed. “The case summary is rationally well argued, if I do say so myself. Mr. Probert Chandler discovered Lindsey was Hansen’s daughter and his partner was allowing Hansen access to the drugs in the warehouse. He confronted Lindquist, and intended to stop him, even though it would mean the ruination of all he’d built up. This should weight the scales in his favor. He did not betray the child he raised. He was trying to save her.” He sighed heavily. “This case can go any way at all. There’s no hope of Heaven, I would say; I would cross my fingers and hope for Purgatory.”
Bree drew a deep breath, tapped at the bronze door labeled NINTH CIRCUIT COURT OF APPEALS, and stepped inside.
She froze.
She’d defended Benjamin Skinner in a quiet, cloud-drenched room with no ceiling. There had only been one angel present, a delightful, puckish old guy who’d har rumphed as she’d entered her pleadings, and dismissed her with an avuncular wave of his hand.
This place was entirely different.
She stood in a gallery built around the top of a huge expanse. The place was suffused with an indirect, blue-tinged light. There was no ceiling above her—just a dark, cloudy mass of roiling air. Below her was a large wood-paneled expanse. Painted murals lined the wainscoted walls. At first glance, the murals resembled the angels marching up Lavinia’s stairs. But then Bree saw that the brightly painted figures moved, and that the scenes were of the cases cited in the documents she held in her hands.
The expanse below was set out in the familiar pattern of courtrooms everywhere. The prosecutor’s dais was on the right; the defense was on the left. And on the judge’s stand in front sat a huge pair of golden scales. The bowls tipped gently back and forth in the currents of air.
Caldecott and Beazley took their places on the right.
A broad staircase led down to the floor.
And Bree descended.