Due Justice

Chapter 18

I don’t know what came over me. My response was as cold as winter in Alaska and just as outrageous. “Ben Hathaway, there is no possibility that Carly murdered this man. I want you to put that thought out of your mind right now. If you persist in pursuing her as a suspect, I will personally issue a restraining order against you.”

He flinched. But his response was controlled. “If you did that, Judge Carson, it would be a gross abuse of your judicial authority. There’s a limit to your power.”

I waited.

More reasonably, he said, “Interfering with the investigation of a crime was enough to bring down Richard Nixon. It’s not something you want to get involved with.”

“Maybe so,” I replied, unable to back off. “But, I’ll do it nevertheless.”

We stared each other down for a few minutes. Whether he concluded I would be true to my word and tie him up in red tape for a month, or simply recognized we wouldn’t get anywhere tonight by testing me, I don’t know.

He adopted a much more conciliatory tone. “Okay, let’s abandon that line of thinking for now. But consider this: If she’s not involved now, she soon may be.”

“What do you mean?”

“You said she’d been talking to Dr. Morgan regularly before he disappeared. Then, you told me that when she went to his home, someone had searched it. If they found what they were looking for, and then killed him, you better hope what they found didn’t implicate your little rabbit. As near as I can tell, just about every woman ‘of a certain age’ in Tampa would have a motive to kill him, not to mention their husbands. And that doesn’t even count the business enemies.”  He ticked off the possibilities like reading a grocery list. No one was above suspicion as far as he was concerned.

“Well obviously, that makes it that much more important that you find Carly, and that you find out immediately if Dr. Morgan is the body in the water and, if he’s not, where he is and who is after him.”

“I don’t need you to tell me how to do my job,” Hathaway snapped at me. “I’ve been doing this a lot longer than you’ve been a judge. If you’ll just keep your nose out of it, I’ll take care of my end. If you think of anything else that might be helpful, call me and talk only to me. Here’s my private line.”  He threw his business card down on the coffee table between us. “And then you better spend some time finding your friend a good criminal lawyer. She’s going to need it. If she doesn’t end up dead first.”

He walked out. I refused to go after him, and I was more than a little annoyed at the arrogant way he treated me. But I was scared, too. He was right to be pissed off that I had knowledge of a potential crime and, as far as he knew, didn’t advise the police. On the other hand, Carly certainly did not kill Dr. Morgan and, if he focused his energies on making her the murderer, he wouldn’t be finding Morgan’s real killer. If Morgan was dead. I kept hoping he wasn’t.

Come to that, how many missing persons reports would he have to consider when he was looking for the identity of a dead body, anyway?  There can’t be that many people disappearing from the city of Tampa without a trace.

I had one of those “ah ha” moments Kate’s always talking about: I realized there was no information on Morgan’s identity in the press before Carly went to the house because Hathaway knew who the body was. Morgan didn’t have any relatives to notify, so they felt comfortable keeping it quiet, waiting for someone to do just what I did. Identify him.

Hathaway must have believed that the killer would be more likely to make mistakes the longer it looked like the police hadn’t identified the body. Now, I had given them Carly and confessed that I’d known about Morgan for two weeks. Carly and I might not need a lawyer, but we needed advice from someone who was thinking a lot clearer than George and I were. I decided to talk to a criminal lawyer tomorrow. In the meantime, I picked up the phone and called Kate. It was time to come clean with her. She wasn’t home and I got her machine. Shit!  Doesn’t anybody ever answer their telephone anymore?