“There’s nothing I can do to help you find her,” she finally said. “She isn’t with me. She doesn’t have friends here, at least not as far as I know.”
“What about Hector’s friends?” I asked. “Would she have gone to them?”
Elisa hunched a shoulder, said snappishly that she couldn’t possibly know, but eventually gave me the name of a boyhood friend and a college roommate her son had been close to.
I took out my phone and showed her a picture I’d taken of Coop at last night’s meeting. “Does he look familiar? I only know him by one name, but he seems heavily invested in Lydia’s welfare.”
Palurdo took the phone from me and frowned over it. “He showed up at the house one evening. That made me angry, because Lydia had given him my address: she knew I was getting death threats because of my blog posts. I’d stressed to her the need to keep the house a private place.”
“Who is he?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. Someone who’d been at the event where Hector was murdered. He had a strange name, Hawk, Bird, something like that.”
“Coop,” I said.
“Yes, I think that was it. I never knew who he was. Lydia talked to him, but I wasn’t part of the conversation. He took off, with a dog that he’d tied to a streetlamp, I remember that. He came another time, but I’d moved Lydia into her apartment by then. I haven’t seen him since.”
When I got up to leave, I begged her to let me know if she heard from Lydia. Palurdo nodded perfunctorily. She stayed in her seat, rolling the water bottle between her palms, looking at the floor.
13
The Usual Suspects
Arthur Morton had grown up on a ranch in western Kansas, near a town called Salina. In 2009, as the family’s debts mounted in the midst of a prolonged drought, they’d been forced into foreclosure. The loss of land that had been in the family since 1869 was too much for Arthur, Senior: the day after the foreclosure, he shot himself.
At his father’s death, Arthur had dropped out of high school, drifting from job to job with the big agricultural combines that dominate the state. He’d blamed the family’s woes on the usual suspects—Muslims, Jews, gays, feminists. He’d subscribed to websites that fueled his rage, he’d stockpiled weapons.
I thought of Elisa’s comment that Hector had been killed by a nonpolitical mass murderer. She’d been thinking of the government-sponsored death squads of Latin America. I wondered if members of Chilean or Guatemalan death squads were ever as politically passionate as someone like Arthur Morton.
His trial had been held in Salina, Kansas. Sometime between the state police finding him and the start of the trial, his public defender had been replaced by a team from the firm of Devlin & Wickham.
I whistled under my breath: Elisa Palurdo had said they were a big firm, but I hadn’t been expecting one of the mammoths. Devlin & Wickham routinely charge a hundred fifty dollars for six minutes of their expert advice. How had an indigent ranch hand managed their fees? His mother had been working at a bakery in Salina since her husband’s death—not an income that could cover a six- or seven-figure legal bill.
Despite his high-powered counsel, Morton had been found guilty of most of the charges against him—murder, grievous bodily harm, various weapons violations. Morton had been interviewed by multiple psychiatrists, chosen by both defense and offense, and they agreed that he was not mentally incompetent, but that he had been derailed by his life experiences. Lonely and poor, he had been an easy target of the kind of hate messages posted on the dark web.
The jury had taken all this on board; they’d found him guilty but had recommended he be spared the death penalty. However, between the verdict and the sentencing hearing, he’d been found dead in his cell. He hadn’t hanged himself, as I’d assumed, but had overdosed on nicotine patches. Like most states, Kansas had a tobacco-free policy in its prisons. Morton had apparently been a smoker, someone had given him a bunch of patches. Maybe his mother had bribed a guard. Maybe his lawyers had come through for him.
I looked through the list of Devlin & Wickham’s partners. I recognized some of the names but didn’t know any of them personally. I actually did know someone who worked at Devlin, but it was Donna Lutas, my ground-floor neighbor who thought I was a menace to the condo. Maybe if I promised to move out by Labor Day, she’d go through the company files to find information on Arthur Morton for me—like, had his lawyers smuggled a whole bag of nicotine patches into his cell? And who had paid his legal fees? And why had anyone cared?
I called one of the managing partners and spoke to his administrative assistant. I explained that I’d been hired to find Lydia Zamir.
The voice on the other end became so frosty that I wished I’d put on my parka. “We have nothing to say to you.”
I ignored that. “I know Devlin & Wickham had an order of protection against her. Did she come back to your firm in the last day or two? Did you have to call the police?”
The woman put me on hold, which lasted long enough for me to do my hamstring stretches. When she finally returned to the phone, it was to hand me off to the head of Devlin’s security team.
We chatted about who I was and what right I had to involve myself in Devlin’s private business. “I’m trying to locate Lydia Zamir,” I said. “If you can’t tell me whether she returned to your building in the last forty-eight hours, it makes me wonder if you kidnapped her from Provident and are holding her someplace where you don’t want her found.”
The security chief found my suggestion completely outrageous. He also advised me to be careful about committing libel, since Devlin was a firm with a lot of power.
“Slander,” I said. “If Devlin doesn’t know the difference between libel and slander, they shouldn’t be practicing law.”
That somehow annoyed him further. He hung up on me, but I called the managing partner’s office again.
“The defense that Devlin conducted for Arthur Morton—you did some amazing work there.”
“What’s your point, Ms. Warshawski?”
“I’ve handled murder trials,” I said. “They are big time eaters and you bill in six-minute segments.”
“Many firms do.”
“Arthur Morton was technically indigent and had been assigned a public defender when Devlin & Wickham stepped in. I wonder how he came to be a client?”
“We don’t discuss our clients’ business, Ms. Warshawski. If you’ve done death penalty pleadings, then you know enough law to understand confidentiality rights.”
“Of course,” I agreed. “Someone paid those bills. I was wondering who?”
“You cannot seriously imagine we’d share that information with you.”
“Just living hopefully,” I said. “My other question has to do with your client’s death. If you turn me over to the people who actually represented him, then I can ask them. Basically, I’d like to know if they brought him those nicotine patches themselves, or if they, or even his mother, paid a guard to do it for them. I’m betting it was the former, because Saline County wouldn’t be like Cook County, where it’s possible to do a quid pro quo, so to speak, with a guard—”