Chapter Six-Corpus Delicti

 

 

Marsh called Adrian a little after seven, and Adrian called Julian four minutes later, which either one of them would have called an accident and neither of them believed.

"They found something," Adrian said. "Not him. Something."

The trail cut through second-growth oak a half mile from the parking lot, and by the time Julian got there, a dozen people in CPD windbreakers had already roped off a stretch of it with tape gone limp in the damp morning air.

Marsh met them at the tape line, her face doing nothing to soften what came next. "Forty yards off the marked trail. K-9 hit on it inside twenty minutes."

She walked them close enough to see, not close enough to touch. A patch of disturbed ground beside a shallow ravine — leaves kicked up, a low branch snapped clean at shoulder height, dark ground beneath it that hadn't dried the way the rest of the clearing had. A scrap of navy wool caught on a bramble a few feet off, the kind of fabric that came from a coat, not a jacket.

"Blood," Marsh said. "Not a lot. Enough."

"Enough for what," Adrian said, though his voice suggested he already knew.

"Enough that I'm not calling this a voluntary disappearance anymore." Marsh crouched at the tree line, studying the snapped branch without touching it. "Somebody was here with him. Somebody who didn't leave on the trail cam either."

Julian looked at the scrap of fabric a long moment. "Is it his."

"We'll know for certain by tonight. I'd bet the mortgage on it now."

§

Julian felt something shift into place, cold and clean, the way it always did when a case handed him an angle he hadn't gone looking for.

"Whatever happened here," he said, "happened last night. Eleven p.m., maybe later."

"So?" Adrian's jaw was tight, his eyes still on the disturbed ground.

"So Daniel Hale has been in Cook County Jail for three weeks straight, Adrian. No furlough, no work release, no unsupervised anything." Julian looked at him. "If someone did this to Marcus Aldridge last night, it categorically was not my client. And whoever it was is very likely the same person who's been three steps ahead of both of us since the day Preston Hale died."

Something crossed Adrian's face that looked almost like relief, quickly buried under professional caution. "That doesn't clear Daniel of the original murder. He could still have hired someone."

"He's got eleven million reasons to want a legal team, not a hit man, Adrian. Guilty men who can afford lawyers like me don't usually also spring for a second crime scene." Julian kept his voice even, watching it land. "You know that."

Adrian didn't answer right away, which was, Julian had learned, usually the sound of him deciding whether to say something true.

"I know that," he said finally. "I've known it for about a week and I haven't said it out loud to Rachel yet, because the second I do, this case changes shape completely, and I don't know what's underneath it."

"Neither do I." Julian looked back at the ravine, at the tape flagging in the wind. "But I think we're both about to find out."

§

They ended up away from the tape, past the tree line, in a spot where the morning light came down thin and gray through the canopy and neither of them had to watch the technicians work anymore.

"If he's dead," Adrian said, "it's because of something Preston did. Something I'll never get to prosecute, never get to explain to anybody, never get to make right."

"You can't carry that."

"Can't I?" Adrian looked at him, and there was none of the courtroom precision left in his face, just the raw, tired shape of a man who'd built his whole life around the idea that the system, imperfect as it was, eventually got somewhere close to true. "Three weeks ago I thought I understood exactly what this case was. A jealous husband. A judge with a fortune and worse judgment about who to marry. Clean. Almost simple."

"Nothing's ever that clean."

"You'd know." But it wasn't sharp, not really. Adrian exhaled, some of the fight going out of his shoulders. "I keep ending up standing next to you in places I have no professional reason to be."

"I've noticed."

"I don't know what I'm supposed to do with that."

Julian could have made this easy — a joke, a step back, the practiced deflection that had gotten him through three years of not thinking about Milwaukee in any way he had to admit to out loud. He didn't reach for it.

"You don't have to know yet," he said instead. "You could just stand here."

Adrian looked at him for a long moment, something finally giving way behind his eyes — not surrender, not exactly, but the specific exhaustion of a man who'd run out of reasons to keep pretending the distance between them meant anything anymore.

He closed it himself.

It wasn't long, and it wasn't careful, the way three years of almost never is when it finally stops being almost. Julian felt it land somewhere he'd spent a very long time keeping empty on purpose.

When Adrian pulled back, he didn't apologize for it, which Julian counted as its own kind of victory.

"That doesn't fix anything," Adrian said, low.

"Didn't ask it to."

"Rachel would have my badge."

"Rachel's not here." Julian's hand found the collar of Adrian's coat, not pulling, just resting there, some old habit of wanting to keep something from leaving the second he'd finally gotten it back. "Neither is Marcus Aldridge. Neither, as far as I can tell, is anyone who gives a damn what either of us does about this except the two of us."

Adrian almost smiled — the first real one Julian had seen from him in three years, small and startled, like it had snuck up on him. "You're going to use this against me in court somehow."

"Absolutely not." Julian let him go, stepped back before either of them could decide to test that theory against the nearest tree. "I'm saving it for somewhere with better lighting."

§

Marsh found them on her way back to her car, unsurprised in the specific way of someone who had already clocked exactly what she'd interrupted and decided not to comment on it.

"One more thing before you both go back to your respective corners." She held up her phone, a photo on the screen — twin tire impressions in softened mud, twenty feet from where Aldridge's car had been parked. "These aren't his. Wrong tread pattern, wrong wheelbase. Whoever left these was here around the same window we're estimating for whatever happened in those woods."

Julian looked at the photo a long moment. "He wasn't alone out here."

"No," Marsh said. "He wasn't. And unless your mystery guest walked eleven miles home afterward, somebody drove away from this trailhead last night who wasn't Marcus Aldridge."

She pocketed the phone, already turning for her car. "Find out who owns a set of tires like that, Voss, and you'll have your reasonable doubt served up gift-wrapped. Find it before I do, and it becomes a very different conversation. I'd move fast, if I were either of you."