‘Go away,’ Leo Tobin said, not looking up, and Jason said, simultaneously, ‘I don’t want to hear it.’
‘What’s the matter with you guys? Sarah, get your head out of the computer and listen to this; it shines a whole new light on Lacey’s motivation.’
‘It does? Let’s see if we can find Delaney then – no use saying it all twice.’
‘He’s in his office,’ Ollie said, ‘on his phone, as always.’
In the end, the insatiable need to know whatever anybody else knows brought all the detectives trooping along behind Ollie. Delaney looked up from the row of stats he was checking with the state budget director and said, with enviable poise, ‘Excuse me, Bernie, I’m afraid the barbarians are at the gate, I’ll have to call you back.’ He took out his ear buds and said, ‘What now, for God’s sake?’
‘I got a call from our very own Animal,’ Ollie said. ‘Ranting. “You left too soon, Oliver,” he said, “while your arrogant medical examiner was still busy pre-judging the results of an autopsy.” Even for Greenberg, it was an unusual show of temper. You know how he hates to be wrong about anything?’
‘Ollie,’ Delaney said, ‘are you going to tell me a bullet in the throat didn’t kill Ed Lacey?’
‘No, no, of course that was the immediate cause of death. But at the autopsy, after Greenberg had shown me how the spinal cord was shattered and said that was the cause of death, well, it looked like there was nothing left to do but get all the bits and pieces ready to send for DNA work and toxicology scans and so forth. And I figured I didn’t need to watch all that slicing and dicing so I said, “Doc, this is pretty much it, isn’t it?” And he said, “Sure, run along – we know what killed Ed Lacey.”
‘But after I was gone, when he was prepping a sample of liver tissue he saw something he didn’t like at all, so he ran it over to an oncologist buddy of his and got the diagnosis back in a couple of hours. Lacey had advanced liver cancer.’ Ollie pulled a slip of paper out of his pocket and read, ‘Hepatocellular carcinoma, if you’re curious. Greenburg says it starts in the cells that filter the bad stuff out of your blood. Which Lacey’s liver has had to do quite a bit of, lately.’
‘I don’t see … he still died from getting shot though, didn’t he?’
‘Goes to motivation for suicide, maybe. I asked the doc if Lacey knew.’
‘That’s a good question,’ Sarah said. ‘He’s been living pretty far off the grid, hasn’t he? He may not have seen a doctor in some time.’
‘Greenberg says liver cancer’s a sneaky bitch, often doesn’t show symptoms till it’s too late for treatment. But with this degree of involvement, he figures, Lacey would have been in so much pain he’d know something was wrong. Question is, did he see a doctor or did he just up the dosage on the meth? Doc said there was no sign of a biopsy, so Ed wouldn’t have known anything for sure.’
Sarah and Ollie took pains with the report they gave the information officer who released the final story to the news media. They made certain Ed Lacey’s long and honorable service with the Tucson Police Department would be cited. At the end of his career, they explained, family problems, traumatic stress and a devastating illness combined to create a loss of judgment and a series of reckless behaviors. ‘Discharged from the police department two years ago, he was interrupted Saturday morning in the apparent perpetration of a burglary. He initiated an exchange of gunfire, in the course of which he was killed.’
‘We wrapped it up in euphemisms and buried it in a puzzling news story,’ she told her family that night. ‘And we hope it stays buried, because the only person who knows the whole truth is dead.’
Delaney had insisted they were not to suggest ‘suicide by cop,’ which they all thought this was.
‘You can’t prove it,’ he said, ‘and it’s a rude phrase nobody wants to hear.’
They murmured it to each other, though, and Sarah said it aloud in private to Jeffries. He agreed, and had a quiet conversation with the County Attorney to supplement his written report.
Spurling went back to work on schedule. The letter absolving him of blame would follow weeks later.
The crew at 270 South Stone, pleased with the quick resolution of a troubling case, went back to their ever-burgeoning backlog, while Sarah tried to put lingering, unanswered questions to the back of her mind.
Two weeks later, on a bright Tuesday morning when Angela Lacey failed to show up on time at the used clothing store, her employer phoned her at home. Getting no answer, she called the manager of her apartments and told her to go up and check number 214. When the manager called back in hysterics, the employer called 911.