“Ladies and gentlemen, please give a warm welcome to today’s guest speaker, Mr. Harlan Coben!”
From the wings strode a bald gentleman so tall that when he bent to shake hands with Ms. McDermott, he looked like a guy greeting a child in a grown-up’s dress. Channel 81 had deemed this event interesting enough to spring for two cameras, and the picture now switched to the audience, which was giving Coben a standing O. And there, at a table near the front, were three men and a woman. Ralph felt his stomach take the express elevator down. He tapped the video, pausing it.
“Christ,” he said. “It’s him. Terry Maitland with Roundhill, Quade, and Grant.”
“Based on the evidence we have in hand, I don’t see how it can be, but it sure as hell looks like him.”
“Bill . . .” For a moment Ralph couldn’t go on. He was utterly flabbergasted. “Bill, the guy coached my son. It doesn’t just look like him, it is him.”
“Coben speaks for about forty minutes. It’s mostly just him at the podium, but every now and then there are shots of the audience, laughing at some of the witty stuff he says—he’s a witty guy, I’ll give him that—or just listening attentively. Maitland—if it is Maitland—is in most of those shots. But the nail in the coffin is right around minute fifty-six. Go there.”
Ralph went to minute fifty-four, just to be safe. By then Coben was taking questions from the audience. “I never use profanity in my books for profanity’s sake,” he was saying, “but under certain circumstances, it seems absolutely appropriate. A man who hits his thumb with a hammer doesn’t say, ‘Oh, pickles.’？” Laughter from the audience. “I have time for one or two more. How about you, sir?”
The picture switched from Coben to the next questioner. It was Terry Maitland, in a big fat close-up, and Ralph’s last hope that they were dealing with a double, as Jeannie had suggested, evaporated. “Do you always know who did it when you sit down to write, Mr. Coben, or is it sometimes a surprise even to you?”
The picture switched back to Coben, who smiled and said, “That’s a very good question.”
Before he could give a very good answer, Ralph backed up to Terry, standing to ask his question. He stared at the image for twenty seconds, then handed the iPad back to the district attorney.
“Poof,” Samuels said. “There goes our case.”
“DNA’s still pending,” Ralph said . . . or rather, heard himself say. He felt divorced from his own body. He supposed it was how boxers felt just before the ref stopped the fight. “And I still need to talk to Deborah Grant. After that I’m going up to Cap City to do some old-school detective work. Get off my ass and knock on doors, like the man said. Talk to people at the hotel, and at the Firepit, where they went to dinner.” Then, thinking of Jeannie: “I want to look into the possibility of forensic evidence, as well.”
“Do you know how unlikely that is in a big city hotel, the best part of a week after the day in question?”
“I do.”
“As for the restaurant, it probably won’t even be open.” Samuels sounded like a kid who’s just been pushed down on the sidewalk by a bigger kid and scraped his knee. Ralph was coming to realize he didn’t like this guy very much. He came across more and more as a quitter.
“If it’s near the hotel, chances are they’ll be open for brunch.”
Samuels shook his head, still peering at the frozen image of Terry Maitland. “Even if we get a DNA match . . . which I’m starting to doubt . . . you’ve been in this job long enough to know that juries rarely convict based on DNA and fingerprints. The OJ trial is an excellent case in point.”
“The eyewits—”
“Gold will demolish them on cross. Stanhope? Old and half-blind. ‘Isn’t it true you gave up your driver’s license three years ago, Mrs. Stanhope?’ June Morris? A kid who saw a bloody man from across the street. Scowcroft was drinking, and so was his buddy. Claude Bolton’s got a drug jacket. The best you’ve got is Willow Rainwater, and I’ve got news for you, buddy, in this state people still don’t care much for Indians. Don’t much trust them.”
“But we’re in too deep to back out,” Ralph said.
“That happens to be the dirty truth.”
They sat silently for a bit. Ralph’s office door was open, and the station’s main room was almost deserted, as it usually was on Sunday mornings in this small southwestern city. Ralph thought of telling Samuels that the video had jolted them away from the elephant in the room: a child had been murdered, and according to every bit of evidence they had gleaned, they had the man who’d done it. That Maitland appeared to have been seventy miles away was something that had to be addressed and clarified. There could be no rest for either of them until it was.