events of the summer that I couldn’t stand the thought of hanging around campus and cramming for exams. There was no way I could focus.
What did Sharon Steele call Murdock about in the days before she was killed? My thoughts drifted back to the cell phone bill. I imagined it sitting in a file in a dusty warehouse for a dozen years. It probably should have been shredded long ago, but corporate laziness had saved it. It was simply too much work to go through all the old files to get rid of them, so they continued to pile up in warehouses all over the country. Box after box of rotting documents memorializing trivial interactions. I wondered what else was out there. I stared at the arrangement of the papers on the coffee table and kept wondering.
And then an obvious thought came to me. If Sharon used her cell phone to make calls she wanted to keep secret, perhaps Steele did too. I picked up Steele’s old bills and flipped right to the page.
There they were, preserved on a single thin sheet of paper. Two parallel rows of text, each identical except for their four-minute separation in time. On the night of the murder, at 8:49 P.M., Steele placed a call on his cell phone. The call lasted two minutes. Then, at 8:53, there was another call to the same number. That call lasted nine minutes.
I couldn’t take my eyes from the two brief lines of information. Steele had called someone at 8:49. He hung up at 8:51, dialed 911 at 8:52, and then, during one of the gaps in the 911 call, dialed his cell phone again at 8:53 and called the same person he’d just spoken to.
Could it be right? Steele told a story of panic, of confusion and uncertainty, of racing around the house, of handling the body, of going out on the lawn and looking up and down the street for the ambulance. That was the explanation for the gaps in the 911 call. But what he had not mentioned, what he had never mentioned, was that he had also called someone else. In the heat of the moment, in the midst of his panic, he had thought to call someone and speak to them. In fact, he had kept them on the phone almost the entire duration of the 911 call and hung up just before the first policeman, Detective Wilson, arrived — probably at about the time he heard the sirens.
I held the phone in my hand. I doubted the number would be good anyway, but still I hesitated to dial. Should I tell someone about this? Would anyone listen if I did? And what was I doing? Steele was my client. We’d won his case. Why keep asking questions? I started dialing the number and stopped, hesitating at the last digit, then hung up. There could be lots of people Steele might call in the midst of panic, I thought. There could be plenty of reasons. He needed help. He was terrified. The police weren’t coming fast enough. I sat on the couch with the phone in my hand, a thousand reasonable possibilities running through my head. And all of them felt empty. All of them felt wrong. The same obvious question remained. Why keep it a secret? If it corroborated his story about the intruder, why would Steele hide it? If there was a “witness” of sorts out there who could tell the same story Steele was telling the police, why the silence?
I took a deep breath, stopped thinking altogether, and dialed again. I told myself the number wouldn’t be any good, and then I heard it ring. I immediately wondered if the number had been given to someone new and tried to imagine who might answer at noon on a late-summer Saturday. It rang again.
I imagined that somewhere within a few miles of my tiny apartment someone was walking to a phone. Someone who believed that the calls they’d received from a panicked Senator Steele on the night his wife was murdered were a dozen years in the past and long since lost into the bottomless abyss of history.
It rang once more and was answered.
“Hello?”
I froze. Adrenaline and fear raced through me. There was a tingling in my neck and I held my breath. I could not speak. I did not want to speak.
“Hello? Who is this?” Garrett Andersen’s voice was unmistakable. “Who’s there? I can hear you. Who the hell