“I did. Your phone’s off.”
“Oops.”
“I’ve got the mayor breathing down my neck on this one. Three dead lawyers in one night looks bad on the evening news.”
I checked my cell. “Sorry, my battery bit the dirt.” I guess nothing was safe in the Dead Zone.
After I plugged my phone into its charger, Uncle Bob slid the photo across the desk. A bloated face, blue and purple, appeared before me. It had crusts of blood around several puffy wounds, as if the man had been in an accident. Considering the circumstances, I doubted any of his wounds were accidental. Whoever he was, death had not come easily.
“What happened to him?” I asked.
“He was tortured, then killed. But they weren’t after information.” He pointed to the guy’s mouth and throat. “They taped his mouth and kept pressure on his windpipe to keep him from screaming. So he’d either already given them the info they needed, or they knew what he’d done.”
I let my gaze stray, trying not to seem squeamish.
“The assailants wanted to inflict as much pain as possible before he died. If I had to take a street-educated guess, I’d say he snitched on the wrong guy. This kind of torture is usually reserved for traitors, either to a higher-up in a gang or to an entire group or organization. These days, crime syndicates are more hierarchical than English nobility.”
The lawyers gathered around my desk, so I held up the photo, angling it away from my line of sight. Sussman made a face and stepped back. I was right there with him. But Elizabeth and Barber studied it more closely.
“It’s hard to say for sure,” Elizabeth said. “Maybe if he wasn’t so blotchy…”
“It would help if we had a mug shot instead of an autopsy photo.”
“No ID yet,” Uncle Bob said to me before answering his ringing cell.
Sussman stared at Barber through his round-rimmed glasses. “Do you recognize this man, Jason?”
I glanced toward him. Barber looked stunned, struck speechless, pale despite the physiological impossibility. Since they lacked blood and all.
“That’s him,” Barber said. “That’s the guy who asked me to meet him.”
Elizabeth glanced back at the photo. “That’s your mystery man?” she asked.
“I nearly know it is,” he replied.
Sussman stepped forward and studied the photo again. “Are you sure?”
Barber gave a shaky affirmation. “I wouldn’t bet my life or anything.”
“Too late for that anyway,” Elizabeth said, still gazing at the photo, her face morphing into varying degrees of revulsion.
Uncle Bob shut his phone. “Carlos Rivera. He has an arrest record as long as my legendary and much-envied memory.”
“So, no priors,” I said, holding back a chuckle.
He squinted his eyes and tapped an index finger on his temple. “Like a steel trap.”
“Yeah, you seem to be forgetting that time you were supposed to get me out of Dad’s car and put me to bed while he whipped up some margaritas. I woke up at two in the morning almost frozen solid in the backseat while you were making whoopie with Mrs. Dunlop next door.”
He adjusted his tie. “I believe that was an alcohol-related incident,” he grumbled. A strangely flattering crimson spread over his face, making the whole account worthwhile.
Just to add icing to the cake, I shook my head in mock disappointment. “Whatever helps you sleep at night, Uncle Near Negligent Homicide.”
Elizabeth chuckled.
Uncle Bob didn’t. “How ’bout we leave the filing of criminal charges to the DA.” Before I could argue, he said, “We found Mr. Rivera floating in the Rio Grande.”
“Maybe he was thirsty,” I offered.
“Have you ever tasted the Rio Grande?”
“Not lately,” I said, wondering when he had. And why. And if he carried any parasites because of it. “Barber thinks this might be the same guy who asked him for a cloak-and-dagger meeting.”
Uncle Bob leaned forward, intrigued. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.” As Barber explained the incident to me, I relayed the info to Uncle Bob, who, naturally, recorded everything in his notepad.
“This guy calls me,” Barber said, easing onto the seat I’d pulled up earlier. Elizabeth followed suit, but Sussman walked to the window and gazed out at the university campus across the street while we talked. “He wanted to meet in an alley, which I thought was pretty odd. But he sounded, I don’t know, almost desperate.”
“Can he describe his behavior?” Uncle Bob asked me.
“He was nervous,” Barber said, “jumpy. He kept looking over his shoulder, checking his watch. I just figured he was high on the latest jagged little pill.”
“But you listened to him anyway?” I asked, butting into Uncle B’s interview.
“He said he had information on one of our clients,” Elizabeth said. “Jason had no choice but to listen.”
“What information?” I asked, taking note of her knee-jerk leap to his defense. Interesting.
By the time Barber had finished his tale, we’d learned that, according to the deceased Carlos Rivera, there was a man going to prison for a very long time whose worst crime involved the smoking of a little pot in college. Admittedly, he inhaled.
But forensic evidence pointed to a more severe crime. Police found a murdered teen in his backyard and his own sneakers with the kid’s blood on them inside his house. The sneakers were like the final nail in his coffin. Pile on a corroborating witness—an eighty-year-old woman with Coke-bottle glasses and bunions—and the poor guy went down for murder. The woman stated under oath that she saw the defendant stashing the kid in his backyard. Behind a storage shed. On a dark and stormy night. Clearly, she’d read too many mysteries.