Sleight of Hand - By Phillip Margolin Page 0,42
down to the parking garage. Blair led the detectives to his car. The detectives slipped on latex gloves while Horace used his key to open the trunk. Robb angled the beam of a flashlight around the interior. The light reflected off the irons in a bag of golf clubs. A baseball cap and a pair of golf shoes had been shoved in a corner. Robb had almost decided that she and Santoro were on a wild-goose chase when she played the beam along the edge of the trunk and saw a brown smear. She looked up at Frank, who was leaning over her shoulder.
“Is that blood, Mr. Blair?” Frank asked.
Blair bent over and examined the area illuminated by the flashlight.
“I don’t know.”
“Can you think of any reason why there would be a bloodstain in the trunk of your car?”
“No.”
Blair sounded genuinely puzzled, but Santoro had dealt with criminals who were great liars, so he drew no conclusions.
“Frank,” Robb said. She had shifted the flashlight beam and it now shone on two blond hairs. Frank focused on them.
“Your wife is blond, isn’t she?” Robb asked.
“Yes.”
“Mr. Blair, I’d like to have someone from our crime lab examine the trunk. It could help us find your wife. Would that be okay with you?”
Blair looked confused. He hesitated and the detectives waited.
“You think this will help you find Carrie?” he asked.
“It might.”
“Then I guess it’s okay.”
“Thank you,” Robb said.
While Santoro stepped away and punched in the number of the crime lab on his cell, Robb took another look in the trunk. She leaned in and moved the golf bag to see if there was anything under it. This dislodged the golf shoes, which had been leaning against the bag. Robb tensed. Her back was to Blair, and what she saw in the beam of the flashlight set off alarms.
Robb stood up casually as if she were through with the search. Then she turned away from Blair to shield her gun from him. When she turned back, she was pointing her service revolver at the millionaire.
“Mr. Blair, please raise your hands and take a step back.”
Blair stared at the gun. “What the hell’s going on here?”
Santoro looked at his partner as if she were crazy. “What are you doing, Steph?”
“Raise your hands, now!” Robb commanded.
Blair raised his hands. He looked confused and frightened.
“There’s a gun hidden behind the golf shoes,” Robb told Santoro.
Santoro leaned into the trunk and saw the gun. He picked it up by the trigger guard and dropped it in an evidence bag. Then he held up the bag so Blair could see what was in it.
“Is this your gun?” Santoro asked Blair.
Blair started to answer. Then it dawned on him that a homicide detective was holding a gun on him and a gun he’d never seen before had just been removed from the trunk of his car where bloodstains had also been found.
“I think I should confer with an attorney before this goes any further,” he said.
“That’s your right, Mr. Blair, but this is very suspicious. It would help if you explained what this gun was doing in your car,” Santoro said.
“I want to speak to a lawyer before I answer any more questions,” Blair said firmly.
“And I think we should continue this discussion at police headquarters,” Robb said.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Horace Blair’s panicked call to Charles Benedict had come in right on schedule. Benedict was certain Blair would call him as soon as the police followed up on the anonymous tip he’d phoned in to Stephanie Robb, and he was not disappointed. The ability to steer a mark toward a particular choice was a critical skill for a magician, and Benedict had perfected it. After he gave Blair the DVD, Horace had offered him a drink, and the two men had engaged in a lengthy conversation about Carrie and other topics, including Benedict’s vast experience in criminal law. Normally, Blair would call upon one of his corporate attorneys when he had a legal problem, but Benedict had been certain that his emphasis on his criminal-law specialty would subliminally influence Blair’s choice of an attorney when the police came calling, and he had not been wrong.
Benedict spotted Santoro and Robb when he stepped out of the elevator and into the Homicide Division.
“Hey, guys, what’s happening?” he asked.
“What are you doing here?” Robb snapped.
Robb disliked Benedict because he’d skewered her during cross-examination in an armed-robbery trial involving muscle for the Orlansky mob. Benedict took Robb’s bad manners as a compliment.
“Mr. Blair asked me to