“I’d need a vote of the town council to get Rizzo to stop. I’d basically have to remove him from office,” she said.
“Well,” Robbie said, sitting back in his chair deliberately. “Maybe you should.”
And there was the rub. Robbie wanted Rizzo’s job; he’d always wanted it. Jenny was beginning to see that she’d made a big mistake when she elevated a newcomer whom she couldn’t control to a position as important as chief of police. She needed a reliable source of information inside the department. She needed someone who would follow her lead when it came to big cases. It was becoming apparent that Owen Rizzo would never do that. But Robbie Womack might.
“Chief Rizzo has caused some trouble, lately, Robbie. I agree. But removing him from office is a big step. Even if I decided I wanted to, it wouldn’t be easy.”
“I understand. Things take time.”
“We’d need to build a real case before going to the council. We’d have to show misconduct,” she said.
“He fired Pam Grimaldi for no good reason,” Robbie said.
“True, but it’s not like that was discriminatory or anything. We need something that looks really bad. Misappropriation of funds. Sexual harassment. Something of that nature.”
“I get the picture.”
“Anything you find that might help, I want to hear about it,” Jenny said. “The more I know, the more ammunition I’ll have against Chief Rizzo.”
“Consider it done,” Robbie said.
They made plans to talk on the phone once each night so Robbie could report on the case, then said their good-byes.
As the door closed behind him, Jenny took the scrapbook from her desk and opened it to the photo of Griff and Kate in Jamaica. So Owen Rizzo was focusing on Griff as a suspect in his wife’s murder. To anyone who knew the two of them, that seemed laughable. No man had ever loved a woman so devotedly. But if Rizzo wanted to call Kate’s death a murder and try to hang it on someone, better he look to Griff than start digging into what happened at the bridge twenty years ago.
27
Searching Kate’s house was strangely moving for Owen. He marched around in a paper suit and shoe covers, barking directions at a bunch of guys from the state police. But in the midst of the bustle, he felt a strange communion with Kate. He enjoyed looking at photos of her from when she was a kid, and searching through the clothes in her closet, which smelled of her perfume. (He left no trace on the things he touched, since he wore latex gloves.) It was intimate, a way to get to know her better, since he’d been cheated of the chance to do that while she was alive. She’d been dazzlingly beautiful as a girl, but in the pictures she never looked happy to him. She’d always been unhappy. She’d told him that. There was one picture in particular he loved. In it, Kate was maybe seventeen or eighteen. She was sitting on a stone wall with a big white mansion behind her, wearing riding clothes. It was a bright, sunny day, but the tree beside her cast a shadow across her perfect face, making her seem doomed, like a princess in a story.
What a body, though.
Ah, he was getting sentimental. He needed to get his shit together and focus on making the case against the man who killed her. Owen had been slightly perturbed when they rolled up to serve the warrant, and Griffin Rothenberg was nowhere to be found. Had he cut and run already? That was what the prosecutors called consciousness of guilt, but it was also frigging inconvenient. Owen had Gene and Marv out cruising around looking for Rothenberg now, although if they found him, they were instructed to back off and surveil from a distance because Owen didn’t have enough evidence to make an arrest. Yet.
Owen studied their wedding picture, taken on a beach somewhere. Kate’s smile for the camera seemed fake. Was she ever in love with the guy? Rothenberg’s father had been filthy rich. Maybe she married him for the money. She wouldn’t be the first girl to do that. Owen wasn’t about to judge her for it; she’d paid a big enough price already. He dropped the wedding picture into an evidence bag, sealed it up with tape, and put it on the cart for transfer to the state police lab. Prosecutors loved stuff like that to show to the jury, set the stage, create a little atmosphere. The couple in their happier days, before it all went wrong. The one of Kate in riding clothes he tucked inside his shirt.
The forensics guys were here to handle the technical stuff. They had gone up to the second floor and were working their way down, looking for anything that smacked of crime scene. A murder weapon, obviously, but also—blood spatters, suspicious stains, mud on shoes, cleaning supplies, places that looked staged or like they’d been mopped up or swabbed with bleach. They sprayed their luminol and collected their samples for the lab. Hair strands from Rothenberg’s comb, water glasses that could be dusted to lift his prints. That asshole wasn’t likely to come in and give a DNA sample voluntarily. But there was more than one way to skin a cat.