The Second Mouse - Archer Mayor [58]
That was followed by a long pause as Hillstrom struggled to maintain her composure. When she spoke next, her voice was tight. “The medical examiner’s office is made up of seven employees and a few dozen part-time death investigators who might as well be volunteers. The law enforcement agencies, the attorneys, the funeral homes, the hospitals, and the public we serve have, year after year, commended us for our efficiency, courtesy, professionalism, and integrity, despite the fact that we are almost continually understaffed, underfunded, and overtasked with responsibilities.”
“Spare me the sob story, Bev,” Freeman interrupted. “Everybody in state government has the same bitch-and-whine, and everybody has had to learn to do more with less. You’ve just been too coddled and spoiled by people who won’t say no to you.”
“That’s because I say no before they can,” she came back. “My office efficiency audits are the best you have. I’ve even heard you quote them when you need to brag. That’s why none of this has anything to do with my abilities. You simply want me gone for personal reasons. You may say it’s not the Turnley case, but we both know it is. You blame me for ending your political rise to fame.”
“That’s nonsense,” Freeman retorted, but in those two words alone, Joe could once more hear the frustration and anger, sharp and hard.
So had Hillstrom at the time of the actual conversation, and it had kept her on track, away from the managerial doublespeak that Freeman kept using as a stalking horse.
“How can you say it’s nonsense?” she asked. “If my performance was as terrible as you claim, you could fire me. It’s not and you can’t. So you’ve retrieved the Morgenthau case in the hopes that political pressure will do what a job assessment cannot. All because you cheated on your wife with a teenager whose blood will be forever on your hands.”
At this point, the present-day Freeman snapped. He took a lunge at the recorder still balanced on Gunther’s knee and sent it skittering across the carpeted floor as Joe half rose, grabbed his wrist, and twisted it to force him back into his chair.
“I want to hear this part,” Joe said, his face inches from Freeman’s.
From near the wall, the thin sound of the recorder still reached them. “Listen, you stuck-up bitch,” Freeman was saying, “that fucking little whore threw herself at me. She spread her legs and I took care of her, something you’d have no clue about. The fact that she was a mental case had nothing to do with me, until you made it your mission to ruin me. I cannot tell you how happy I was when that idiot governor of ours gave me this job. I made it my mission, lady, to fuck you like you fucked me, and I am on top of the world that it’s finally working.”
Gunther had crossed the room and picked up the machine in the middle of this diatribe, placing it carefully on the edge of Freeman’s oversize desk and perching alongside it so that he was now staring down at the other man.
“You think I’m blackmailing you?” the voice was still ranting. “That doesn’t even touch it. I’m giving you the butt fuck of a lifetime.”
At last, Joe turned off the recorder.
Freeman sat motionless, his defeated body language at odds with the furious scowl on his face.
“None of that’s legal,” he repeated, his voice a verbal pout.
“Nobody’ll care, if it gets out,” Joe told him, extracting some documents from his jacket pocket. He handed one of them to Freeman. “It’s a matter of principle, like you said earlier, just like this—it’s a sworn statement from a retired lab tech in Connecticut attesting to the fact that it wasn’t Beverly Hillstrom who cooked the books all those years ago, but her boss, and that she took the blame to protect him. I’ve got a whole case file backing that up.”
Freeman didn’t bother reading it. “Who cares?” he said unconvincingly. “She still broke the law.”
Gunther nodded. “That’s the second time you’ve invoked the law. Tricky instrument sometimes. Can come back to bite you.”
He handed