I stare at him and imagine this as part of the trail of blood that has been following me around since I first decided to represent Rob Jacobson.
Carlos Quintero shows us the note on the butcher-block table.
Just two words.
Judgement day
By now Jimmy Cunniff is inside the house, and has taken his place next to me.
“Judgement with ane,” he says. “Isn’t that the way the English spell it?”
He never ceases to amaze me with things he knows that I’d never think he knew.
“Or it can be spelled that way in a legal context,” Welsh says.
She turns to Carlos Quintero and says, “You believe it’s a match? The handwriting?”
He walks her over to the table where the grocery list is.
“My wife calls it cop cursive,” Quintero says. “We’ll have to have it analyzed by an expert, of course. But to the naked eye, yeah.”
Welsh looks at me. “Do you think he suddenly got guilty enough about all the things you say he’s done and did this to himself?”
“Pardon my French, Katherine, but fuck no,” I say. “I do, however, think somebody may have staged this whole thing to make it look like he did.”
“A guy who thought he was above the law suddenly handing himself a death sentence?” Jimmy says. “Somebody might be trying to sell that here. But, sorry, I ain’t buying.”
“He wasn’t the type to commit suicide,” I say.
“There’s a type?” Welsh asks.
“Ones who think the Grim Reaper will never find them,” I say. “And would never punch their own ticket in a million years.”
Jimmy moves closer to the body, staring down at it.
“Or not,” he says.
EIGHTY-NINE
DANNY ESPOSITO SAYS HE’S heading back to his office and will check in with Jimmy and me later. Katherine Welsh is still inside the house. Jimmy and I are standing on Harrington’s front lawn, waiting while the techs from the mobile crime labs are swabbing Harrington’s gun with their nitric acid solution, and checking his hand for gunpowder residue.
It’s nearly forty-five minutes later when Carlos Quintero comes out to tell us that there was indeed GSR on Harrington’s right hand, as they suspected there would be, and that by now they pulled a single bullet out of the kitchen wall.
In addition, they said, the only set of fingerprints on the handle of the Glock belonged to Harrington.
Jimmy says, “Anything to indicate that some bastard who knew what he was doing could have wiped it?”
“Without wiping away Harrington’s prints?” Quintero asks. “How would that work?”
“Somebody who wanted to make a murder look like a suicide, somebody who Harrington probably knew, could have come up from behind him, pulled the trigger, wiped the gun, put it back in his hand and then fired it again,” Jimmy says.
“Sure, and maybe it was the second shooter from the Kennedy assassination,” Chief Carlos Quintero says, “even though he’d have to be really, really old at this point.”
“I’m telling you, this guy didn’t kill himself,” Jimmy says.
“Then where’s the other bullet, if it happened anything like you say it did?” Quintero says.
“A pro would know how to fire it into something, collect it, and leave with the evidence,” I add.
