The Devil Went Down to Austin (Tres Navarre #3)(94)

"You decided the odds on that," Lopez told him. "Soon as you eloped with Clyde Simms."

Garrett grunted. "Yeah, Lopez. I should've stayed and taken the rap for another murder—with my kid brother finding all the evidence against me, my counsellor telling me to pleabargain, your deputy friends treating me to some of that countystyle justice. At least with Clyde, I know whose side he's on."

The jail guard yelled, "Heads up, Navarre."

He threw Garrett the ball.

Garrett caught it without much enthusiasm, dribbled it a couple of times in front of his wheelchair.

"Lopez was pulled off your case," I told him, "mostly because he stopped believing you're guilty. He wants to help."

"He wants to help," Garrett repeated. "He'll have to queue up, won't he? Whole f**king world wants to help me."

Maia told him about the tox reports, the ties between the murders of Clara Doebler, Jimmy, and the woman in the lake, the woman we assumed was Ruby.

Garrett's face reminded me of a wall I'd been trying to repair at the family ranch—crumbling stone washed over with plaster so many times I was afraid to scrape away the outer layer, for fear the whole structure would collapse. "It wasn't Ruby down there."

"We should know in a few days," Lopez said.

"It wasn't her. Clyde and I—we've had time to talk. Ruby wouldn't let her guard down like that. She can't be dead."

For a moment, his eyes softened with the same sad, broken hopefulness I'd seen downstairs, in the face of a polite young inmate who severed body parts.

"Garrett," I said, "the murders are connected. There's a poisoner at work. Adrienne Selak, Pena's girlfriend—she was probably drugged the same way as the others."

"If that's true," Garrett said, "why am I still in here?"

"Because," said Maia, "the DA can still make his strongest case, his only case, against you. You might be ruled out of Selak's murder, but the link between her and the other murders is the most speculative. To satisfy the public, give the press a good story, the DA's simply got to get you out of circulation—convict you on one murder, Jimmy Doebler's. The DA had a strong hand to begin with. When you ran, his hand got even stronger."

Garrett gripped the basketball tight enough to squeeze juice out of it. "You come here to tell me I should pleabargain?"

"I don't think that's possible anymore," she answered. "But there might be something you can do, assuming you give us some straight answers. Have you been getting email from the killer?"

He hesitated. "I've been getting—emails."

"From Pena," she said.

"They come from different addresses, different Xmailers. They're embedded with some kind of textbased virus—damnedest thing I've ever seen.

Freezes the computer if you try to print it, save it, screen capture it—anything."

"What did they say?"

Garrett shook his head at me. "I'd rather not— Look, it was just sick shit. Most of it was about me. Some about the company. The only one that really bothered me, the one I didn't understand—the bastard talked about some kid who almost got drowned in a tub."

Lopez stared out the chain link fence. "A kid?"

"Like I said. Sick shit."

"Second confession," Maia said. "You wrote the back door in Techsan's security program."

Garrett's eyes darkened. He looked past me, toward the prison doors.

"Dwight Hayes found the glitch," I told him. "It took him a while, but he's sure you wrote it."

"I don't have anything to say about that," Garrett told us. "With or without my lawyer."

"Look," Lopez said. "This could be real bad news for you, Navarre. Or it could be a break. If you wrote this back door in the program, I want to call a friend in the High Tech Unit, get him 'over here to talk with you. You know the program better than any

body. Maybe if you two get together, you can trace the leaks. If you can tie the sabotage to Matthew Pena—well, it may not pin him to a murder. But it might be enough to sweat him, maybe even get a search warrant issued for his computer. That would be a very good start."

Garrett kept digging his fingertips into the black lines of the basketball.

Behind him, on the court, the jail guard did air threepointers.

"Get me out of here first," Garrett said.

"Can't do that," Lopez said. "We got to clear you before you go anywhere."

"You'll screw me around," Garrett said. "You can't help it. You're a cop."

"You want to talk alone?" I asked.

Garrett hesitated, then nodded.

"Buckley," Lopez called to the jail deputy. "I'll be inside."

"One on one?" Buckley offered.

Lopez dismissed the offer with a wave, then went through the door.

Garrett said, "You, too, Maia."

She started to protest? the look in his eyes stopped her. She followed Lopez inside.

Garrett held my eyes long enough to count to twenty.

"I wrote the back door," he said. "It was a diagnostic tool. I used it to check the integrity of files."