“Well, try some real evidence, then, with some real police work.” My temper was fraying. “Before Renee returns to Chicago as a triumphant heroine who killed a terrorist, it would be great to nail down Calvin Bayard’s nurse and the housekeeper, and find out how much of the nurse’s phenobarb is missing. Whether Renee’s prints are on the bottle. Whether they saw Renee last Monday night when she claimed to be in Chicago. Also, someone might have seen Renee go into Taverner’s place the night Taverner died. Also, someone might have seen Whitby go to Renee’s apartment last Sunday.”
“That’s a lot of mghs,” Bobby objected, adding with heavy humor, “and a hundred `mites’ don’t add up even to a flea.”
“The golf cart is pretty damned concrete.” I tried not to shout.
“Don’t swear, Vicki, it’s ugly in a woman. I told you we’ll look at the cart. We’ll do it today, but for the rest of it, you know I don’t like playing with your theories, especially not when they cross jurisdictions like this. And even more especially not with a wanted man like Sadawi involved.”
“And especially not with a family like the Bayards. But the Grahams will back me up on this. And I’m going to sic Murray Ryerson on it; if the police don’t find evidence, he will. It’s even possible one of the DuPage deputies will have the guts to go to the Bayard house if I tell her what I just told you.”
“I don’t stand for your threats any more than I do your insinuations, Vicki.” Bobby’s temper was also wearing thin. “You know damn well that my work is always by the books, regardless of who or what a suspect is. And you know, too, I’m going to have to talk to Jack Zeelander in the federal
attorney’s office about what happened to Sadawi, and I’m not going to feed him your line about the helpless orphan boy. You hear?”
“Oh, Bobby, if you were here now, if you could see Catherine Bayard, lying like Juliet in the tomb, you wouldn’t-“
“Okay, Vicki, calm down. You’ve had a long day, you’ve seen too much blood, you need to go to bed. I’ll tell Zeelander Sadawi’s dead and we’ll leave the rest until we’ve got some ballistics. Okay?”
“Thank you, Bobby.” His sudden switch to kindness made me want to cry again, which I couldn’t afford right now. “Will you talk to the officer in charge here, see if you can move him along? Ms. Graham’s lying down with this wound in her foot, and she’s ninety-one. She needs a doctor. I need a bed.”
Bobby talked to Officer Blodel. To my face he might poohpooh my detecting, but he would support me-support Tony and Gabriella’s daughter-to an outsider.
After talking first to Bobby, and then to the lawyer Freeman had recommended, the tenor of Blodel’s questions began to change. He stopped addressing me as cop to perpetrator, and began speaking as one law professional to another.
Finally, around six in the morning, someone collected Benji’s body to deliver to the county morgue. It took two officers to move Catherine away from him. When they finally lifted her from the table, she started to follow them to the hearse. One of the deputies picked her up and carried her back into the kitchen. She stumbled over to me, clutching me as an infant would. 1 put my arms around her and murmured those senseless coos one gives to aching children.
An ambulance came to take Geraldine to the local hospital. The EMS techs wanted to take Catherine with them as well, to treat her for shock and check on her wound, but she burrowed deeper into my arms, her cast digging into my breast.
Renee bustled forward, the Cannonball in full throttle. “Come along, darling. Let’s get you checked over by a doctor and then we’ll charter a plane for home.”
Catherine clung to me. “Go away! Don’t come near me. You shot Benji,
you shot him like he was a horse with a broken leg. I don’t want to see you again. Go away, go away, go away!”
I didn’t know if the law would ever catch up with Renee Bayard, but Catherine’s outburst shocked her as nothing else had all evening. For a brief moment, her face collapsed; she looked like a stricken old woman, not the brigadier in charge. This wasn’t retribution that I could offer to Harriet Whitby or Benji’s mother, but it was a small offering on the scales of justice.
Renee tried to argue with Catherine, but her granddaughter began to scream. Two officers hustled Renee away. They weren’t charging her with anything, they said, but they wanted to question her more about her gun.
Blodel saw that he couldn’t possibly take me to the station for a formal statement, unless he was prepared to deal with more hysteria from Catherine. In the end, he talked to me in the living room at the cottage while a deputy took notes. I finally had a chance to recount everything-well, almost everything-that had happened since Geraldine and I left Chicago. I left out the tape we’d found in the Saturn, because I wanted to take that home to Chicago with me.
While Blodel and I finished talking, a woman officer fetched clean clothes for Catherine from her own teenage daughter’s closet. She also roused a local motel owner to get us a bedroom.