The Last Precinct

"Whose goddamn side are you on?" I say to him. "You believe this Righter bullshit? Jesus. I can't take any more of this."

"This isn't about sides, Doc," Marino grimly replies as Berger looks on.

We are back to there being only one hammer: the one with Bray's blood on it found inside my house. Specifically, in my great room on the Persian rug, exactly seventeen and a half inches to the right of the Jarrah Wood coffee table. Chan-do

I lean against the wall inside my entry hallway and feel lightheaded. It is as if I am having an out-of-body experience, looking down on myself after something terrible and final has happened. My undoing. My destruction. I am dead like other people whose brown paper bags end up in that evidence room. I am not dead, but maybe it is worse to be the accused. I hate even to suggest the next stage of my undoing. It is overkill. "Marino," I say, "try the key in my door."

He hesitates, frowning. Then he slips the clear plastic evidence bag out of the i

"The number written on it," I quietly tell Marino and Berger. "Two-thirty-three. That's my burglar alarm code."

"What?" Berger, for once, is almost speechless.

The three of us go into my great room. This time I perch on the cold hearth, like Cinderella. Berger and Marino avoid sitting on the ruined couch, but situate themselves near me,

T H E L A S T F R E C I N C T looking at me, waiting for any possible explanation. There is but one. and I think it is rather obvious. "Police and God knows who else have been in and out of my house since Saturday," 1 begin. "A drawer in the kitchen. In it are keys to everything. My house, my car, my office, file cabinets, whatever. So it's not like someone didn't have easy access to a spare key to my house, and you guys had my burglar alarm code, right?" I look at Marino. "I mean, you weren't leaving my house unarmed after you left it. And the alarm was on when we came in a little while ago."

"We need a list of everybody who's been inside this house," Berger grimly decides.

"I can tell you everybody I know about," Marino answers. "'But I haven't been here every time somebody else has. So I canl say I know who everybody is."

I sigh and lean my back against the fireplace. I start naming cops I saw with my own eyes, including Jay Talley. Including Marino. "And Righter's been in here," I add.

"As have I," Berger replies. "But I certainly didn't let myself in. I had no idea what your code is."

"Who let you in?" I ask.

Her answer is to look at Marino. It bothers me that Marino never told me he was Berger's tour guide. It is irrational for me to feel stung. After all, who better than Marino? Who do I trust more than him? Marino is visibly agitated. He gets up and strolls through the doorway leading into my kitchen. I hear him open the drawer where I keep the keys, then he opens the refrigerator.

"Well, I was with you when you found that key in Mitch Barbosa's pocket," Berger starts to think out loud. "You couldn't have put it there, couldn't have planted it." She is working this out. "Because you weren't at the scene. And you didn't touch the body unwitnessed. I mean, Marino and I were right there when you unzipped the pouch." She blows out in frustration. "And Marino?"

"He wouldn't," I cut her off with a weary wave of my hand. "No way. Sure, he had access, but no way. And based on his account of the crime scene, he never saw Barbosa's body. It was already being loaded into the ambulance when he pulled up on Mosby Court."

"So either one of the cops at the scene did it…"

"Or more likely," I finish her thought, "the key was placed in Barbosa's pocket when he was killed. At the crime scene. Not where he was dumped."

Marino walks in drinking a bottle of Spaten beer that Lucy must have bought. I don't remember buying it. Nothing about my house seems to belong to me anymore, and A

"You got that right," Marino fires back in the aggressive, angry tone he seems to wear like his own skin these days.

"Look," I say to him, "don't bark at me anymore, Marino. We're all angry, frustrated, worn out. I don't understand what's happening, but it's clear someone co

"I think it's a warning," Marino says.

And where's Rocky these days? I almost ask him.

"Your dear son Rocky," Berger says it for me.

Marino takes a slug of beer and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. He doesn't respond. Berger glances at her watch and looks up at us. "Well," she says, "Merry Christmas, I guess."

Chapter 30

ANNA'S HOUSE ISDARK AND STILL WHEN ICOML IN at nearly three A.M. She has thoughtfully left on a light in the hallway and one in the kitchen near a crystal tumbler and the bottle of Glenmorangie, just in case I need a sedative. At this hour, I decline. A part of me wishes A

A

Dearest Kay,

As a child of the war, I learned that truth is not always what is right or good or best. If the SS came to your door and asked if you had Jews inside, you did not tell the truth if you were hiding Jews. When members of the Totenkopf SS occupied my family home in Austria, I could not tell the truth about how much I hated them. When the SS commander of Mauthausen came into my bed so many nights and asked me if I enjoyed what he did to me, I did not tell the truth.

He would tell vile jokes and hiss in my ear, imitating the sound of the Jews being gassed, and I laughed because I was afraid. He would get very drunk sometimes when he came back from the camp, and once he bragged he had killed a 12-year-old village boy in nearby Langenstein during an SS hunting raid. Later I learned this was not so, that the Leitstelle_Chief of Staatspolizei in Linz_was the one who shot the boy, but I believed what I was told at the time and my fear was indescribable. I, too, was a civilian child. No one was safe. (In 1945 that same commander died in Gusen and his body was displayed to the public for days. I saw it and spat. That was the truth about how I felt_a truth I could not tell earlier!)