Identical by Scott Turow Read Free Book Online Page A

his big raw hands to force his memory back into it. “Zisis,” he said finally. “That’s what he was baptized. But of course he wasn’t in school long with American kids before they were calling him ‘Sissy.’ So by high school he was saying ‘Zeus.’ Can’t blame him, I guess.”
    She asked again how it was Zeus had gotten Tim involved and he laughed once more, a phlegmy, geezy sound.
    “See,” said Tim, “that investigation wasn’t any more organized than a barroom brawl. Nobody had taken control of the crime scene. Zeus and Hal and the mom had been in there twenty times before the first cop arrived. The Kronons had actually cleaned up a little bit, the mom had, even arranged the body, before anybody thought to call the police. Not that there was any real point in bringing that bunch in anyway. Out there in Greenwood County, they hadn’t seen a murder in eighteen years, and probably hadn’t known what to do then. Which didn’t keep them from mucking around for a day or two. Then they asked for the state police, but there was too much politics with Zeus running for governor. Every trooper was out there to watch somebody else. Meanwhile Zeus is a basket case, he starts in screaming he wants the FBI. He gets them, too, for all they know about murders. So now you got three sets of nincompoops.” Tim’s eyes popped up when he realized who he was speaking to. “No offense,” he added.
    “None taken,” she said. The Feds and the locals-that was like the Civil War, a battle to be fought in a different form in every generation.
    “You had three different teams of evidence techs go through there,” Tim said, “each with different samples. Some tests get performed three times, some don’t get done at all. Everybody thinks somebody else is running leads. It was an unholy mess. So about a week along, Dickie Zapulski calls me. Zeus has asked the state police to hire me as a special to lead the investigation. Zeus got on the phone next and pretty much begged. Truth told, I wasn’t loving the heating business, or my brother-in-law, but I didn’t actually miss the street. But I felt for Zeus. I’d lost a daughter. So I said, OK, put me in charge. Not that anybody was actually willing to listen to me.”
    When Evon had found out, not long after taking the job, that Hal had a PI on retainer, she’d gone in to see Collins Mullaney, who’d stayed on a month for the transition. He reassured her about Tim, who he said was maybe the best homicide dick in Kindle County in his time. ‘What was great about Timmy was he didn’t get distracted,’ Collins had told her. ‘He didn’t care who was humping who this week in McGrath Hall,’ referring to the headquarters of the Kindle County Unified Police Force. ‘And he didn’t get caught up hating the perps either. He’d smack a kid who spit on him, just like the rest, but he always said the same thing, no matter how big a shitbum. “Didn’t have a soul who cared enough to teach ’em how to behave.” Kind of “there but for the grace” with him. I think he grew up in an orphanage himself.’
    The crime scene, Tim said, didn’t point in any particular direction. The first police to arrive had found the French door to the balcony open. It had rained hard that evening, right at the end of the St. Demetrios picnic, and there was a set of deep shoe-prints in the flower bed under Dita’s window, which made it look as if somebody had dropped from above. There were some tire impressions, too, down the hill, where you’d hide a vehicle, but there’d been two hundred cars there earlier in the day, so you couldn’t make as much from that. Upstairs, one of the panes in the French door was broken out between the mullions, with the glass scattered on the tiny balcony outside, and quite a bit of blood painted on the jagged glass, and the inside of the door and the carpet below. The blood trail ran into Dita’s bathroom, where, by simple count, there appeared to be a