Sleight of Hand - By Phillip Margolin Page 0,50

he did, indeed he did. Now it’s your turn to come through for him,” the lawyer said.

“You know that only a prosecutor can make that call, but I’ll tell him to do the right thing.”

“If he does,” Lester said, “I’ll sweeten the pot by telling you why Blair popped his wife.”

Robb had been listening to the conversation. She turned quickly and stared at Lester menacingly.

“You’ve been holding out on us?” she asked.

“Not at all,” Lester said, holding up both hands to placate the angry detective. “I promised to tell you where Blair buried the body, and that was all I promised. This info is a bonus. If you come through for me.”

Chapter Thirty

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Christopher Rauh said as he stomped around his office.

“I know exactly what you mean,” Rick Hamada said. “But there is definitely enough to go to a grand jury. Especially now that we have the ballistics report on the bullet that was found during Carrie Blair’s autopsy.”

Robb and Santoro were smart enough to say nothing. They had already laid out their case and it was up to their superiors to decide what they wanted to do with it.

“Arrest Blair for murder and there is going to be a shit storm,” Rauh said.

“Which I am going to have to weather,” Hamada reminded him. “I’ll be prosecuting, which means I’ll be hit with the fallout if Blair walks.”

“So you’re okay with going for a murder indictment?” Rauh asked.

“We have a body, a motive, strong forensic evidence, and the murder weapon. Yeah, I’m good to go,” Hamada answered.

Rauh looked down at his desk. Then he looked at Santoro and Robb.

“You did good work. I’m proud of you. You didn’t let me stop you from going after Blair.”

“Thanks,” Santoro said. Robb didn’t say anything. She was still pissed off at Rauh.

“Okay. You two work with Rick to get the case in shape for the grand jury. If we get an indictment, you get to make the collar.”

The meeting broke up and Hamada followed the two detectives into the hall.

“I second what Chris said,” Hamada told them. “Let’s meet tomorrow morning and work up this sucker.”

Robb smiled but Santoro didn’t. Stephanie had pushed to go to Rauh and Hamada as soon as they received the ballistics report. On paper, the case looked solid. But Santoro wondered if the case wasn’t too solid. He hadn’t voiced his doubts because Robb’s arguments for going after Horace Blair were based on solid evidence, and his doubts were based on a queasy feeling.

Stephanie had a meeting with an assistant commonwealth attorney, so she walked with Hamada to the prosecutor’s office. Santoro went to the jail and asked the officer who was manning the reception desk for the visitors’ log for the time Barry Lester was incarcerated. Arthur Jefferson had visited several times. Most of those visits had been in the past few days, which was not surprising. Lester’s only other visitor was a woman named Tiffany Starr. That sounded like the type of phony name a stripper or hooker would use, which meant that Miss Starr probably had a rap sheet.

When he returned to his office, Santoro ran Starr’s name and discovered that she was on parole for a narcotics offense. Parole and Probation was on the floor below the Homicide Bureau. Half an hour later, Santoro returned to his office with a copy of Tiffany Starr’s pre-sentence report. Reading a tale of another wasted life was depressing.

Tiffany’s given name was Sharon Ross and she was the daughter of Devon and Miranda Ross. The Rosses were well off, and Sharon had gone to private schools, where her grades were mediocre. Her first brush with the law came as a juvenile, when she ran away from home. Shoplifting charges soon followed. The pre-sentence writer suspected that Sharon was using cocaine as early as the eighth grade and was stealing to finance her habit.

In her sophomore year of high school, Sharon spent two months at a fancy clinic, but rehab didn’t take and she was readmitted in her junior year. She dropped out of school at the beginning of her senior year and married Fredrick Krantz, an auto mechanic who was also a drummer in a rock band that played in one of the clubs Sharon frequented. They ran away to Oregon, where the marriage unraveled. Sharon returned to Virginia, where she faked a résumé and got a job as a bookkeeper. She was fired soon after for embezzling money.

Sharon received probation with a requirement that she