Kat had to be careful here. Stagger wasn’t just by the book—he was the book, binding, pages, printing press, the whole deal. If he heard about Nurse Steiner and the twilight sleep, he would throw a fit and then some.
“Okay, I want you to listen to me for a second,” she began. “Just go in with an open mind, okay?”
“Kat, do I look in the mood for games?”
“No. Definitely not.”
“So tell me what’s going on.”
“I get that, but just bear with me. Let’s go back to the start.”
“Kat . . .”
She pushed through it. “Here is Monte Leburne, right? The feds nail him as a triggerman for two hits. They try to get him to flip on Cozone. He doesn’t. He isn’t that type. Too dumb maybe. Or he thinks they’ll hurt his family. Whatever, Leburne shuts up.”
She waited for him to tell her to get to the point. He didn’t.
“Meanwhile, you guys are searching for whoever killed my father. You don’t have a lot, just rumors and a few loose threads, and suddenly, voilà, Leburne confesses.”
“It wasn’t like that,” Stagger said.
“Yeah, it was.”
“We had leads.”
“But nothing solid. So you tell me—why did he suddenly confess?”
Stagger made a face. “You know why. He killed a cop. The heat was ridiculous on Cozone’s operation. He had to throw us something.”
“Exactly. So Monte Leburne takes the fall. And Cozone gets away with it. How convenient. A guy who is already spending his life in prison gets another life sentence.”
“We tried for years to nail Cozone for it. You know that.”
“But we never could. Don’t you see? We could never tie Cozone and Leburne together on that case. You know why?”
He sighed. “You’re not turning into a conspiracy nut on me, are you, Kat?”
“No.”
“The reason we couldn’t tie them to it is simple: That’s the way the world works. It isn’t a perfect system.”
“Or maybe,” Kat said, trying to keep her tone calm, “maybe we couldn’t tie it together because Monte Leburne didn’t shoot my dad. We were able to independently connect Leburne to the other two murders. But we could never do that with Dad. Why? And what about those fingerprints we were never able to identify? Don’t you wonder who else was at the scene?”
Stagger just looked at her. “What happened up at Fishkill?”
Kat knew she had to play this delicately. “He’s bad.”
“Leburne?”
She nodded. “I don’t think he has more than a week or two.”
“So you drove up,” Stagger said. “And he agreed to see you.”
“Sort of.”
He gave her the eye. “What does that mean?”
“He was in the infirmary. I talked my way in. No big deal, nothing shady. I flashed my badge, kept it vague.”
“Okay, so?”
“So when I got to Leburne’s bed, he was in pretty bad shape. They had him drugged up with a hefty dose of painkillers. Morphine, I guess.”
Stagger’s eyes narrowed. “Okay, so?”
“So he started muttering. I didn’t question him or anything. He was too out of it. But he began to sort of hallucinate. He thought the nurse was his dead sister, Cassie. He apologized for letting their father abuse her or something. Started crying and telling her he’d be with her soon. Stuff like that.”
Stagger pinned her with his eyes. She wasn’t sure if he was buying it, but then again, she wasn’t sure how hard she was selling it. “Go on.”
“And he said he never killed the cop.”
The sunken eyes bulged a bit now. It wasn’t exactly the truth, but for the sake of this conversation, Kat figured that it was close enough.
“He said he was innocent,” she continued.
Stagger looked incredulous. “Of everything?”
“No, just the opposite. He said that they already had him dead to rights for two murders, so what harm was there to confessing to one more if it provides?”
“If it provides?”
“His words.”
Stagger just shook his head. “This is crazy. You know that, right?”
“It’s not. It actually makes perfect sense. You’re already going to serve a life sentence. What’s one more murder conviction?” Kat took a step closer to him. “Let’s say you were closing in on the killer. Maybe you were days or even hours from putting it all together. Suddenly, a guy who is already caught and going to serve life confesses. Don’t you see?”
“And who would set that up exactly?”
“I don’t know. Cozone probably.”
“He’d use his own man?”
“A man he knew—and we knew—would never talk? Sure, why not?”
“We have the murder weapon, remember?”
“I do.”
“The gun that shot your father. We found it exactly where Monte Leburne said it would be.”
“Of course Leburne knew. The real killer told him. Think about it. Since when does a hit man like Leburne save the gun? He gets rid of it. We never got the weapons for the other two murders, right? Suddenly, after he kills a cop, he decides to save it, as what? A souvenir? And again, what about those fingerprints? Did he have an accomplice? Did he go it alone? What?”
Stagger put his hands on her shoulders. “Kat, listen to me.”
She knew what was coming. This was part of it. She’d have to ride it out.
“You said Leburne was drugged up, right? On morphine?”
“Yes.”
“So he hallucinated. Your word. He muttered some imaginary nonsense. That’s all.”
“Don’t patronize me, Stagger.”
“I’m not.”
“Yeah, you are. You know I don’t buy into nonsense like”—she made quote marks with her fingers—“‘closure.’ I think it’s crap. Even if we nail everyone involved in his murder, my father is still dead. That will never change. So closure, I don’t know, it’s almost an insult to his memory, you know what I mean?”
He nodded slowly.
“But this arrest . . . it never worked for me. I always suspected there was something more.”
“And now you’ve made it into that.”
“What?”