lot of years; he suspected I was in more trouble than I wanted to admit.
“Who done this, doll?” he demanded. “Who wants you dead?”
“I wish I knew. Nothing is coming together for me,” I said.
I was reasonably sure the goons who’d come to the motel were looking for the shell casings, but that didn’t explain who’d shot at me in the first place. Devlin & Wickham, acting for—whom? Surely no self-respecting law firm would shoot someone for even the most important and wealthy of clients. Then I thought of Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort and what they’d been willing to do for their clients. A full-service law firm might do anything for a powerful person with money.
When Mr. Contreras finally was willing to end the call, I phoned Donna Lutas. “It’s V.I. Warshawski. Does Clarence Gorbeck know I’m still alive?”
“I—what are you talking about?” she stuttered.
“Could you let him know that I’ve sent the shell casings to a forensics lab? They’ll test them for prints and DNA and whatnot, but the big point is, I don’t have them, so he doesn’t have to waste valuable resources trying to kill me to recover them.”
I waited a moment for her to respond, but she didn’t seem to have anything else to say.
In the morning, I went back to the county offices, wanting to see the complete ballistics report, not just the sixty-five entered into evidence. The DA’s office told me to go to the police. I gritted my teeth, crossed to the other side of the building, and went in to talk to Chief Corbitt.
Vesna, the dispatcher I’d encountered last week, was behind the front desk. She’d taken my request in to the chief. This time, instead of telling her to send me into his office, he’d emerged to perform for an audience of Vesna, the charge sergeant, and a member of the public trying to weasel out of a speeding ticket.
“You’re like a horsefly at a barbecue, Warshawski. No one wants you but no one can swat you hard enough to make you leave.”
“That’s an interesting image, chief,” I said. “Would shooting up my car be an effort to swat me hard enough to make me leave?”
“Your car got shot up? You report it to the police?”
He knew that I hadn’t: Ellsworth was the seat of the next county over, they surely shared regional crime reports.
“I figure if I let the attorneys at Devlin & Wickham know about it, cops down here would hear soon enough,” I drawled. “Did Clarence Gorbeck think you were important enough to tell you in person, or did he give the job to Donna Lutas?”
That made him frown and change the conversation back to my wish to see the complete ballistics report created by the Kansas Bureau of Investigation’s labs.
“I don’t think you have any legal standing here, Warshawski. Unless you can give me a good reason to open up police evidence to a civilian from out of state, the answer is no.”
It was clear I was never going to have a good reason unless I could find a judge who would issue a subpoena for me, and I could easily imagine how much time that might take.
“One other thing, chief, before I go. The nicotine patches that helped Arthur Morton end his life—I can tell you it’s hard enough to get your hands behind your back to fasten a bra, but to put eight patches there—Morton must have moved like a circus performer.”
“Maybe he was, maybe he was. Jail belongs to the county. You go over there and show them how to fasten a bra.” The chief had chuckled and rubbed his hands together. “Vesna! You can wipe out Harold’s ticket. We got him so many times already it’s like he’s paid for the new coffeemaker.”
The member of the public smiled sheepishly and thanked the chief. I left with what dignity I could.
The trial transcript had included Dr. Markovsky’s name. I tracked her down in the morgue at the Santa Fe Hospital.
“I took out all the bullets, all that I could find,” Markovsky said. “I gave them to the police, who sent them to the state forensic lab. That’s all in the trial transcript, which you say you read. Now you’re trying to say I overlooked some bullets? I’d like to see you in a morgue full of dead babies and mothers, ripped apart by seven-sixty-twos, and see you respect those bodies and remove those bullets. Every bullet went into a bag labeled with the