Animal Instinct by Rosenfelt, David (novels for students TXT) 📕

He thinks about it for a while. “Maybe insurance?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if you’re trying to get medical insurance, your ability to get it and the size of your premium would depend on your medical records. If the company could manipulate those records, you might look healthier to the insurance company than you really are.”

“So how does Ardmore benefit from that?”

He shrugs. “Beats the hell out of me; cancel that idea. What about blackmail?”

“What about it?”

“This is personal information they are dealing with, you know? Maybe there are things that people don’t want their employer, or their spouse, or whoever, to know. Maybe you’re applying for a job as a minister and you want it kept secret that you’ve had thirty-eight cases of the clap. There’s also mental health stuff in there. Maybe you don’t want your future employer to know that you were arrested for dancing across the George Washington Bridge singing the score from Hello, Dolly! Or maybe you’re a politician who doesn’t want the voters to know that you get electric shock treatments every Tuesday and Thursday.”

“You think that’s really possible?”

“Those bastards would do anything. They could scour through the information, match something embarrassing up with someone they know has a lot of money, and there you go. And the suckers wouldn’t even know that the bad guys were at Ardmore or Midwest; they’d have no way of knowing how they got the information.”

“Would the CEO, Musgrove, have to know about it?”

“He wouldn’t have to, but I’d bet he does. He’s a slimeball.”

“How could I confirm this?”

Crystal shrugs. “Maybe find some of the victims? That’s your job, not mine. By the way, did you ask your former cop friends if they need a computer guy? I could be in charge of the union stuff. And if any bad things came up, like a cop took a payoff, I’d bury it in a cyber file where no one would find it.”

“I’ll talk to them. Sounds great.”

“Bullshit; you’re not going to talk to them. All you cops lie through your teeth. Just for that, I’m gonna have the tartuffo; it’s unbelievable.”

“THESE guys are really good,” Sam says. “I ran into a dead end on the phone.”

He’s talking about the phone I lifted off Carlos, the guy whose brains I spent the morning wiping off my door and wall. If I have ever spent a more disgusting hour, I can’t remember when.

Dani was at work and even Simon left the room; his attitude was that all he did was chew on the guy’s arm. He had nothing whatsoever to do with the brain spatter; that’s my problem.

“What does that mean?” I ask, although dead end is a pretty obvious visual. I just want a sense of what Sam considers really good.

“Well, Carlos made very few calls from that phone, only eleven in the last three months. They were all made to one particular number. Unfortunately, that number was just a routing device to another phone, or phones. So the phone he actually spoke to was hidden.”

“No way to get to it?”

“No way. Like I said, these guys are good.”

This conversation has not been a good way to start the day. It’s about to get even worse; I’ve asked Andy to update me on where we stand heading into the trial.

Simon and I head over to Andy’s. He and Laurie don’t know it yet, but I’m going to ask them to take care of Simon if I wind up in prison. I can’t think of better people to adopt him, especially since he’s such good friends with Tara.

So far I haven’t been able to bring myself to have the conversation; it’s as if verbally recognizing the possibility makes it more likely to happen. But my head is not so far buried in the sand that I’m able to completely shut reality out. Over 90 percent of jury trials end in conviction on at least some of the charges; maybe I’ll be the exception, but more likely not.

Andy and I go into his den; at the kitchen table Laurie and Ricky are playing some kind of board game that is bewildering to me. She keeps moaning and Ricky keeps laughing, so my guess is that he’s winning. Laurie shows no inclination to join us in the den; maybe she doesn’t want to face the bad news either.

“So where are we?” I ask, as soon as we’re seated.

“I wouldn’t say we’re in deep shit. Probably waist-high. Dylan has two main things going for their side. One, you hated Kline and believed that he was a killer. You felt that you let Lisa Yates down by not arresting him the night of the domestic violence call, and you wanted to ease your guilt by nailing him.”

“That’s a little strong.”

Andy nods. “It’s their characterization, not mine. But you did basically say that out loud, and to a cop, no less. The second and more important piece of their case is the murder scene itself. You were there, obviously, and your bloody clothes were found not far from the scene.”

“Both of those things are true.”

Andy nods again. “Yes, they are, and they are going to have to be explained by us.”

“Can we do that?”

“Maybe, maybe not. But whether the jury will buy it is another matter.”

This is depressing, but no more so than what I expected. “So that’s their case; what is ours?”

“We have to be able to point to the chaos going on around us. Lisa Yates, Jana Mitchell, and now Carlos Evaldi have all been killed, in addition to Kline. We have to show that there is some unseen killer out there operating in service of some unknown conspiracy. One problem is that unseen and unknown are not words that juries like. They want to make someone pay for the crime, in this case Kline’s death. You are their only tangible choice right now.”

“You said one problem.…”

Andy nods. “Right. The other problem is that we need to be able to get