Free Identical by Scott Turow Page A

in his basement was now made to look like holy writ. The camera zoomed in sideways on the police report, then jumped first to the header that read “Greenwood County Sheriff’s Police,” then the date and finally “Paul Gianis” in the box for “Witness.” The words attributed to Paul blackened to boldface and then rose off the page, all while some unseen woman with a scolding voice asked if we wanted a liar for mayor. Tonight the commercial was shown again a minute later as part of the news. Tim turned away from the screen with a small turmoil in his gut. Not a word in the ad was untrue. But he still didn’t feel quite right about it.
    Tim was reconsidering all of this as he looked between the little leaded darts of stained glass in his bayed front window, already bundled in his woolen overcoat and wearing a felt hat. The BMW pulled up to the curb and he locked up and lumbered out.
    “All of four blocks,” he told Evon, putting on his seat belt, “but the newcomers don’t shovel their front walks. I’m too damn old for mountain climbing.” There had been a serious snow last week, the first in a couple of years. When Tim grew up here, it got to twenty below for days in the winter and snowed like hell whenever it warmed up. No more. Right after the flakes stopped falling, young Dorie Sherman across the street had been out with her little guy, showing him the drifts, which he’d never seen.
    Evon asked for more detail on the woman they were going to see.
    “Not a lot to say,” Tim answered. “Georgia Lazopoulos. Georgia Cleon now. Paul’s girlfriend back then. Her dad was the priest at St. D’s.”
    “The Greek priests marry?”
    “Orthodox, right. But only before they’re ordained. Sometimes makes for a slow course through the seminary.”
    “Where I came from, the ministers’ kids were mostly crazy.”
    “She was a nice girl, so far as I remember. Sincere. You read the report I sent?”
    “I tried. But it was hard to make out much on the fax.”
    “She talked her head off on the initial canvass. Said Dita and Paul seemed to have words the day she was killed. That’s the kind of stuff you wanted me to dig up, right?”
    “Exactly. Did she tell the cop that because it seemed odd?”
    “Not hardly. Cop said to tell him everything she remembered and she did, even how many pastries she ate. But I thought may as well talk to her. Given I’m billing hourly and trying to work off that retainer.”
    Evon slapped his hand, and Tim laughed.
    “Turn here,” he told her. Georgia was in the same little bungalow she’d bought with her ex-husband, Jimmy Cleon. Jimmy had been her rebound after Paul, glib and good-looking, but he’d been on drugs all along and she didn’t know it until the wedding silver disappeared, not much after the honeymoon. At least that was the story. Since Georgia was the priest’s daughter, everybody talked about her.
    When her father had been pushed out at St. D’s, he’d lost the parish house and moved in with her. Father Nik had gone odd. Brain tumor, as Tim remembered. The surgery had saved him, but he was never quite the same, and he’d had a stroke by now, too. Georgia’s mom had passed while she was in high school, so it was just her and her loopy old dad, exactly the fate Tim was still hoping to save his daughters from, who were always on him to move out to Seattle where they were.
    “Does she know I’m coming?” Evon asked when they parked. He’d motioned her into a space down the street, where they could maneuver over the black ruts driven into the snow. In this neighborhood, parking in the winter could be a perilous act. The city plows never got to these small streets and homeowners spent hours shoveling their spaces, protecting them with lawn chairs or those orange cones filched from road crews. The last fistfight Tim had gotten into, more than forty years ago, was when some joker pulled into his space as soon as he went to put away his shovel. But it was 3:30