Jamison no longer looked disdainful. She looked frightened, though trying hard not to show it.
“And who would that be?” She tried to say this flippantly but her voice cracked halfway through.
“That would be me.”
Chapter
32
ALEXANDRA SCOOPED UP her recorder, pad, and pen and put them back into her bag and rose. She wouldn’t look at Decker.
“Okay, if it makes you feel better, you have officially scared the shit out of me,” she said.
“Did you see Leopold leave the bar?”
“What?”
He tapped the newspaper. “The bar where this picture was taken?”
Now she looked at him, her features wary. “I’m not going to answer that.”
“You just did. Okay, I have one more question for you.”
“What?”
He held up the newspaper. “Where did you get this photo of me and Leopold at the bar? There’s no attribution for the photographer. I know the profession is a stickler for that, so I’m wondering why there’s no name there.”
“I took it.”
“No you didn’t.”
“How do you know that?”
“I’m pretty observant. And I happen to know you weren’t in the bar. Whoever did take the picture was watching Leopold and me. Which means he followed us both there though I was following Leopold too.” He paused. “I wouldn’t be asking if it weren’t important. How did you get the photo?”
“I got it from an anonymous source,” she finally admitted.
“And did this anonymous source also supply you with elements of the story you wrote?”
“I really can’t get into that.”
“If you don’t know the name of the source, you don’t have to worry about protecting his identity.” Decker let the paper fall to the table. “Did it come by email, text? Surely not snail mail. You wouldn’t have had time to write the story.”
“Email.”
“Can you send me the email trail?”
“Why is this so important to you?”
“Because the person who sent you the email is also the person who killed all those people.”
“You can’t possibly know that.”
“I know it absolutely. And I would assume that the email said that you should write this story because things smelled bad on this. That here I was meeting with the man accused of killing my family. There must be more to it, right?”
As he had spoken, Jamison’s eyes had continued to widen. “Did you send the email to me?” she hissed.
“You mean so I could see a story plastered in the newspaper basically accusing me of conspiring to murder my own family?”
She bit her lip. “I’m sorry, that was stupid.” She swallowed with difficulty. “Do you really think it was him?”
“He was there. He was within ten feet of me and I never saw him. And I’m just not sure how that’s possible.”
“You said he was cunning.”
In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote.
The story was both simple and complex. Decker had read it years ago and, as with everything else, had every page of the book neatly stored in his mind.
A guy in prison gets a tip from another inmate that a farmer named Clutter in rural Kansas keeps a lot of money in a safe. The guy gets out of prison, hooks up with a former cellmate, and they head to the farmer’s home. They break into the house, only to find there is no safe and no money; the tip was bullshit. It should have ended there, but unfortunately for the Clutter family, it didn’t. The more timid, though unstable, of the two crooks decides that they must kill the family. His partner, who had been the leader of the pack and the one who had gotten the tip, reluctantly goes along. One by one the family is murdered. The killers are not smart. They are pursued and caught. After their respective trials and lengthy appeals they are both hanged at the Kansas death house.
Tragic all around. Both killers had issues in their backgrounds, problems, troubles, bad stuff. But nothing to justify what they had done, not that anything could.
That part of the story did not interest Decker very much at the moment. What did interest him was the possibility of two men from very different backgrounds coming together at just the right moment and forming a partnership that would lead to the slaughter of so many people. He didn’t know Leopold. He had never met the man until he sat in that prison cell. So it wasn’t Leopold who had the vendetta against him. It had to be the person whom Leopold had hooked up with. But who was he?