Identical, Page 5

  Evon asked the status of the investigation when he got involved.

  “They were chasing their tails. The operating theory was that the bad guy crawled in thinking she wasn’t there, caught her unaware and he grabbed her like that to keep her from screaming, then he took off, afraid somebody had heard the commotion. But each department had its own spin. The locals are thinking it was a burglary gone bad. State police are talking to everybody at the picnic, hoping somebody noticed Mr. Stranger Danger. Zeus is still pretty much a mess, and blaming himself. Why didn’t he hear her getting beat? And he’s convinced she’s been killed by his enemies to get even with him.”

  “Enemies?” Evon asked.

  “Turned out Zeus had a passel. Pretty sharp elbows when it came to business. There was the Greek mob, too, not to mention the husbands and boyfriends of the girls he was always after. Even turned out that some of the boys from the North End warned him not to run against Rafe Demuzzio in the primary. FBI was looking at that.”

  “And when did Cass come into the investigation?”

  Tim said the police had spoken to Cass as part of the initial canvass, but he claimed to know nothing. At the start, Zeus was sure Cass was uninvolved, and cops being cops, they were reluctant to suspect a police cadet. About three weeks in, the phone company produced the toll records from Dita’s phone and Cass was reinterviewed briefly, but Cass said he and Paul weren’t home and Dita had merely left a short message on his answering machine, which he erased that night.

  “Cass, he would have been the last person I’d have thought of, to tell the truth. Him and Paul were in high school with my middle daughter, Demetra, and I knew them from church. Solid kids, in my book, both of them. But you know,” he said, “it’s the ones you think you know that fool you.” Tim thought about that and squeezed his lips with his hand.

  “About a month along, we had a big meeting, every investigator, just to see what we’d missed, which was quite a bit. By then two, three of Dita’s girlfriends had said she’d made up her mind to drop Cass, she was sick of all the trouble with his family. So I go over and take a peek at Cass’s employment file in McGrath Hall,” said Tim. “Blood type B. His prints are on file, too. I ask the Greenwood PA for a subpoena and sure enough, the prints match out with the doorknob and a lot of other lifts around the room. So now we’re thinking, maybe the call at 10 was to whistle his butt over there so she could tell him adios.

  “Anyway, the Greenwood prosecutor, he wants to question Cass in the grand jury, but Cass hires Sandy Stern who won’t let him talk. There’s a lot of cat-and-mousing for a month. Stern is like, ‘Those fingerprints mean nothing. Cass was climbing the drainpipe every night to tickle her fancy.’ And the same girlfriends who said Dita was going to eighty-six Cass, when we push, they give that part up, too.”

  “Cass was jocking Dita right down the hall from her parents? Doesn’t sound like my idea of fun,” Evon said.

  Tim closed his eyes and let his head revolve loosely, like a leaf in a breeze. Who knew what folks thought of as fun, especially in that department?

  “Zeus, of course, that was the one thing he went off about, when I told him that part. No boyo was making time with his little petunia right in his casa. But I’m suspicioning it’s probably true.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure, cause if Cass was climbing up there to make whoopee, that meant he knew how to get in there the night she’s killed. So I get the PA to subpoena his credit card records, and we put together a little task force to check out every pair of shoes he bought in the last year, and sure enough, about a week into that, we find he got himself a pair of Nikes whose tread matches the impressions in the flower bed. Those tracks down the hill could have come from the Bridgestones on Cass’s old Datsun, too, except there’s ten thousand cars in the Tri-Cities with the same tires.

  “But we issue a search warrant, for his clothes and shoes and vehicle, and for a physical exam, to see if we can find the scar where he was cut. We get the shoes we’re looking for. Nothing turns up with the clothes, but Luminol in the car shows blood traces, type B again. By now, Stern won’t produce Cass for the physical exam, instead files a bunch of motions, and then when he’s just about run out that string, Sandy comes in and offers to plead Cass. He wants manslaughter, ten years’ minimum security. Zeus and Lidia, the twins’ mom, they go back to smooching in the choir room at church, so he’s heartbroken for her and is fine with whatever, but Hermione, Dita’s mom, and Hal, they wouldn’t hear of ten years. Finally, right before the PA was going to return an indictment, all of them settled at second-degree for twenty-five years, but still minimum security. The judge gave Cass a month before he surrendered so he could stand up at Paul’s wedding.”

  “And were you OK with that result?”

  “Depends how you mean. The sentence, I never thought that was my business. Minimum security irritated some of the other cops, but I’m like, ‘It’s prison, not torture, any nice college boy would get torn apart at Rudyard, especially a former cadet.’ The thing that bothered me was he wouldn’t answer questions. Never did. He pled, said he done it, that was it.”

  “Well, what questions were there to answer?”

  “The windowpane just for one. The glass is all outside, on the little concrete balcony under the French door. Meaning the window was broken from the inside. So how’d he get in?”

  “You already told me. He’d climbed up there before. What was your term? ‘Making whoopee’?”

  “That’s OK. Maybe he arrives hoping for romance, or knowing what’s on her mind. Either way, she says, ‘No, I’m done with this,’ and he loses it and smacks her. When she passes out, he panics and flees. But if you’re inside already, why not just open the latch and leave?”

  “Maybe he’s trying to make it look like a break-in. Only he really doesn’t know much about crime scenes. So he cracks the glass the wrong way.”

  “Nice.” Tim chuckled and pointed a thick finger at her with true admiration. The knuckle was crooked and swollen with arthritis. “Only Cass Gianis is a police cadet. And the other thing is, breaking glass, that makes noise. If you want to escape, why raise that kind of ruckus? What sense does that make?”

  “So you didn’t like him for the crime?”

  “No, I’m not saying that. I’m saying I had a few questions. There wasn’t any couch in my office for the defendant to lay down on and explain what was in his head or his heart, assuming anybody ever knows. But we had his fingerprints in her bedroom and on the door. Blood was his type. Shoes match. And there’s motive because she was going to drop him. And he gave a shit-ass alibi when he was first questioned right after the crime, said he was with his twin brother—”

  “Paul?”

  “Right. Said they were larking around that night, drinking beers over the river. Course nobody saw them. Cass couldn’t even name the liquor store where they bought the six-pack, said Paul got ’em.”

  “And did Paul back that?”

  Tim scratched his chin while he looked at the beamed ceiling of what had once been a porch.

  “Seems to me he might have, now that you mention it. You know, it was just part of the initial canvass. Troopers talked to everybody who’d been with Dita at the picnic. Report couldn’t have been more than a paragraph. I would probably still have it.”

  “Really?”

  “Down in the basement. I didn’t have any staff, and I was in a different office every couple of days, so I figured I’d rather keep all the reports at home. Show you if you like.” Tim used a chair arm to hoist himself to his feet and wobbled a bit with the first step. Evon watched him. He was somewhat stooped now behind the shoulders, but he remained a big man, well over six feet, with the proportions of a tight end. In the day, he must have commanded a lot of attention on the street. He motioned for her to follow, and then opened a door in the kitchen and descended unevenly toward the cellar. The old wooden steps were steep, and Tim held on to the rail and kept his other hand on the brick wall t
o steady himself. His twill pants were halfway down his butt.

  The basement, when they reached it, was even more crowded than the upstairs. There was a distinct cellar reek, a combination of mildew and dust, and all manner of things crammed in—grimy bicycles with flat tires, garden hoses, racks of clothes, hickory-shafted golf clubs, old TVs, broken furniture. The light from a cellar window slanted over some of the mess.

  “Did you ever hear of a rummage sale?” Evon asked him.

  “My daughters are even worse than me. Don’t want to part with anything Maria touched. Let them figure it out when I’m gone,” he said, and laughed, utterly cheerful about his own mortality. He turned sideways to get past an old chifforobe and reached a metal filing cabinet, a beige box from which the paint had rusted off in uneven blots. He seemed to know at once where everything would be. He crouched over the bottom drawer and pulled out a file, then went to pull the chain on a bulb. He turned the pages with some difficulty, his fingers stiff, licking the tip of his thumb now and then.

  “Here you go,” he said finally. He read the report for a second, then handed it to Evon.

  It was just as he recalled, too. Short interview, two days after Dita’s death. Paul said Cass was with him all night after the picnic, hanging out at Overlook Park on the river. A stone lie. Cass couldn’t have been with him, because, as Cass acknowledged subsequently, he’d been with Dita, punching her around and killing her.

  “This is gold, you know,” Evon told him.

  “It is?”

  “This man wants to be mayor. Leader of the police. But he lied his ass off to the cops to keep his brother out of trouble. Even after he’d been hired to be a deputy prosecuting attorney.”

  “Who wouldn’t? I’m not sure I’d want to vote for a man who wouldn’t save his brother. Besides, that’s all politics. Hal can keep his crazy politics. That’s not my concern.” Tim waved a hand past his big nose.

  “But it proves what Hal’s been saying. That Paul was involved from the start. He covered up for his brother. And maybe there’s more to it. Those shoes? They’re identical twins. So the Nikes could have fit Paul. I bet they always shared clothes. Were they still living together?”

  “You kidding? Greek family? Hal was still with his parents and he was forty. Yeah, the Gianis twins were both of them at Lidia and Mickey’s. Paul, I think, was about to move out.”

  “What about fingerprints? Do identical twins have the same fingerprints?” Evon was feeling some excitement. She always did the job and her job was to make Hal right. She was surprised about the velocity with which she was willing to suspect Paul, whom she’d always liked, even admired. But there was an elusive quality to him that had never sat quite right with her. You could spend lots of time with Paul Gianis, as she had, and still come away feeling he was guarding something essential about himself.

  But Tim moved his head from side to side.

  “Seems as I remember, twins’ prints look somewhat alike, but when they’re in the womb and they reach out and touch the whoosywhatsit—” He stopped to find the word.

  “Placenta?”

  “Right. No, they have different fingerprints.”

  Evon absorbed that, then reread the report.

  “Can I take this?”

  Tim shrugged. “Public record now. PA in Greenwood did what they always do when Cass was indicted, threw all the police reports in the court file to prove the defendant had had full discovery before he pled guilty.”

  Evon strayed a hand to the filing cabinet.

  “What else have you got in there, Tim? Any chance I can pay you to look through all your files and see if there’s any more about Paul?”

  He laughed. “No need to pay me. I’m on the long end with the Kronons. I’ve been getting a check every January first for twenty-five years.”

  “I know,” she said. “It comes out of my budget.” She smiled, though. “Nobody’s ever really explained it.”

  “It was just Zeus’s way of thanking me for dropping everything and taking over the investigation. When this here was done with, I wasn’t too keen to go back to the heating business. Zeus wanted to hire me at ZP, but I’d had enough bosses as a cop to last me a lifetime. So I decided to become a PI, and Zeus was like, ‘OK, we’ll give you a retainer every year.’ I won’t lie either. Helped plenty, especially when I was getting started.” Mullaney had told her that these days Tim worked principally for criminal lawyers, turning up stuff the cops had missed, and also for a number of insurance defense lawyers. Tim was the guy who’d debunk a workman’s comp claim with photos showing the guy who said he was injured lifting weights. Brodie could also write a good report and was relaxed on the witness stand. He’d always had as much work as he wanted, although that had to be petering out at his age. “’Tween Zeus and Hal, they haven’t called me ten times. This thing I did last week, with Corus, must have been the first in five years. So yeah, you want me to look at the files, I’ll look at ’em. I’ll keep track of the time, but it’ll be a long while before you owe me anything.”

  Upstairs, she collected her parka, which had ended up on the sofa next to his heavy book. There was a faint odor in the kitchen of last night’s dinner, which she hadn’t noticed when she came in.

  “You keep going with those myths,” she said.

  “Oh, I will. Was just reading about the myth of love when you rang the bell.”

  “Myth?” said Evon. “You mean love’s not real? I wish somebody had told me that before I moved in with my girlfriend.”

  She rarely said anything so personal, but she couldn’t pass on the joke. Not that it was all a joke in Heather’s case. But Tim was mightily amused. He laughed in his husky way for a long time.

  “No,” he said, “Aristophanes says we were all four-legged creatures to start, some the same sex, but most half man and half woman. Zeus was afraid us humans would get too powerful so he sliced us right down the middle, and everybody spends their life looking for the matching piece. What do you think of that?” He laughed again, tickled by the idea.

  “I think it makes as much sense as any other explanation.”

  Tim found her response amusing as well, then limped ahead to show her out. When they got to the foyer, he lingered to face her.

  “You don’t really think Paul Gianis had a hand in murdering Dita, do you?”

  “What was he lying for?” Evon asked. “He knew what to say, and more important, he recognized that he had to lie for Cass’s sake. Which means he had a lot of information by then, Tim. Maybe they were together that night. Maybe that’s why Cass never wanted to answer questions.”

  Tim pondered, but an unhappy thought seemed to pull at his face.

  “Don’t like thinking I missed the boat like that,” he said. He considered the prospect for a second, then opened the heavy door.

  5.

  Heather—January 12, 2008

  Her given name was not Evon Miller. She had been born DeDe Kurzweil, in the Kaskia Valley in Colorado, and grew up on a family farm, where her father planted alfalfa, pinto beans and corn. He was a quiet, bowlegged man, a Jack Mormon, who’d left the church—and his parents and sibs with it—to please his wife, who said, only after their wedding, that her LDS conversion simply had never taken root in her heart. DeDe was the fifth of seven children, right about the place you’d expect the kids to start getting lost, and she was lost, aware, long before she understood why, that she did not seem to fit. She never knew when to smile, or how to make people like her, especially her mother.

  But on the playing field, with a field hockey stick in her hand, she made herself real. Her father had been a baseball star, who’d signed with the Twins after his mission and played A ball until his family needed him on the farm. All her father’s athletic ability had lit in her—at least that was what both she and her father believed. She fell asleep a hundred times with a stick in her hand, thinking over her moves. She was runner-up for Female Athlete of the Year in Colorado, went to Iowa on a full ride, and in
1984 was selected for the US Olympic field hockey team. She came home with a bronze medal and no idea of what would happen next. It was like coming into the daylight after a dozen years in a tunnel of ambition and competition. At a college jobs fair, she signed up to get more info about the Bureau and was at Quantico three months later. She loved the FBI, every day, for twenty years. The bureaucracy, the paperwork, the regs could make you buggy, but to a person, everyone she worked with was incandescent with pride in the mission, and gripped by a zeal to do right. It was the same kind of striving that had been so central to her life in sports.

  In 1992 she’d accepted an assignment to leave the Des Moines RA, resident agency, and go undercover here, pretending to be Evon Miller, paralegal, actually serving as the watchdog over a dirty lawyer who’d turned and was secretly recording his payoffs to various judges. She chose the name Evon herself, borrowing it from a second cousin whose parents had intended a country spelling of Yvonne. But nobody, not even her cousin, pronounced the name that way. ‘Like “even better,” ’ her cousin customarily explained. DeDe longed for the same self-confidence.

  Petros, the undercover project, was a far-reaching success—six judges, nine lawyers and a dozen court clerks and sheriff’s deputies were convicted—and after the last trial Evon had been called to D.C. to receive the FBI Medal, the greatest honor bestowed on agents. Even her mother sat there with her chest puffed out, accepting everybody’s congratulations.

  But by then, there had been a bigger reward. The chance to be someone else had made her someone else. She came out, for one thing. But far more important, she began to understand what it would feel like to enjoy being herself. The thought of going back to DeDe was as unwelcome as returning to prison. She changed Kindle County to her OP, office of preference, and received permission from D.C. to continue to be known as Evon Miller, the only name anybody here had ever called her. By now, even Merrel, the sister Evon had always been closest to, had taken to referring to her that way.