City of the Dead (Alex Delaware, #37)(89)

Tentative entry.

Flashlight sweep over a sparsely furnished living room.

No one.

Same for an open-view kitchen/dining area.

Several flashlights beaming, searching. A few books on the floor, a folding bridge table hosting additional volumes and a bottle of wine.

Two cheap folding chairs.

Acid-green beanbag in the corner.

Your basic lonely-guy setup. But I doubted Deeb had the capacity for loneliness.

Sean’s gun-arm continued leading him through the front of the apartment then right.

Heading toward a closed door.

As he reached for the knob, the door swung open and the momentary shift in balance twitched the Glock.

When you’re not prepared, bad stuff can happen.

Sean was ready. Motionless gun-arm, rigid as a length of rebar.

Aiming at Conrad Deeb. On his feet, wearing an Oxford T-shirt and sweatpants.

Positioned just inside the door.

Wide awake.

Smiling.

Not a trace of surprise.

Welcome to the party.

Sean: “Mr. Deeb, you’re under arrest. Put your hands at the back of your head.”

Deeb: “Of course, Officer.”

“Turn slowly.”

“My pleasure, Officer.”

Deeb appeared to comply as Sean got close enough to cuff him. Then his right hand dove into the waistband of the sweatpants.

Out came something brown.

It rose, arced downward toward Sean’s head.

Sean’s left hand grabbed Deeb’s wrist and twisted hard, evoking a cry of pain from Deeb.

Blur of scuffle as Milo and the others moved in.

Before they got there, the brown thing thudded on carpeting.

Wordlessly, his breath unchanged, Sean spun Deeb around and cuffed him.

Deeb said, “Very impressive, Officer. You must be a ninja. Or maybe a ninja turtle.”

Then threw back his head and laughed.

A terrible sound.





CHAPTER


    40


Any experienced felon or intelligent rookie criminal knows enough to utter the magic words: “I want a lawyer.”

Conrad Deeb made his request within moments of his arrest, sitting in the back of the cruiser that took him to County Jail and repeating himself for emphasis.

And that was it interview-wise.

The county rarely contests pleas of poverty and Deeb’s plea led to the assignment of a public defender named Samantha Bowers. His arrest had led to his divorce lawyer dropping him and the custody dispute was settled a day later: full legal and physical to Antoinette McManus.

Bowers, eighteen months out of law school, stepped in full of zeal, creating paper-storms and dashing off aggressive emails to John Nguyen.

He told Milo, “You know that basket over my desk? My long shot’s improving.”

Then came the information sent to Samantha Bowers.

DNA from the kitchen at the Gannett/Delage crime scene matched to Deeb.

Milo sent shots of Cordi’s wounds of “probable” to Rochester and Columbus and received appraisals regarding the murders of Christa Wurtz and Randi Walenska. No DNA existed in the Wurtz file, but detectives in Columbus had retrieved a mixed victim/offender sample from Walenska and expected results within six weeks.

The brown thing with which Deeb had tried to brain Sean was a hickory stick an inch and a quarter in diameter, hollowed out and filled with a steel core. No confirmation as to where Deeb had obtained it but Alicia had found something similar in a photo at Scotland Yard’s Black Museum: one of several weapons in a stash taken from soccer hoodlums.

“So, maybe,” she said, “he got it in Oxford.”

Milo said, “Higher education.”

The bludgeon had been polished and varnished but wood’s rarely impermeable and microscopic bits of blood obtained in the center of the cylinder matched Caspian Delage’s DNA.

Next: the findings in a Studio City storage locker rented by Deeb.

Five feet by ten, the smallest unit available at that facility, vacant except for an army-surplus footlocker.

Inside the locker were stacks of loose paper. Milo was hoping to find newspaper accounts of Deeb’s crimes but found only Deeb’s master’s thesis, some Oxford-based ramblings praised by Deeb’s tutor, and four drafts of Deeb’s doctoral dissertation.

All of which he termed, “Gobbledygook.”

Below Deeb’s writings, stashed in a myrtlewood box with the sticker of a Portland gift shop on the bottom, was a fake pearl necklace Randi Walenska’s sister was “pretty certain” had been Randi’s, a pair of gold-framed eyeglasses confirmed to be Christa Wurtz’s, and a turquoise bracelet identified as Cordi Gannett’s by her mother, now, per her husband, emotionally shattered after getting in touch with her “true feelings” about her daughter.

At the bottom of the wooden box was a rainbow pride key chain minus keys linked to Caspian Delage.



* * *



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Faced with all that, Samantha Bowers morphed from righteous indignation to damage control, informing Nguyen that she’d be “aggressively and assertively” pursuing a diminished capacity defense.

John said, “Go for it, I love comedy,” and phoned me.

“You ready to help me dispel that bullshit? I’ll even pay you.”