Free The Deep Blue Alibi by Paul Levine Page A

have an alibi witness?”
    Junior laughed. “Only the barracuda who likes to tail me.”
    “Cool,” Bobby said.
    “Look, Solomon. I had no motive to kill Stubbs.”
    “No apparent motive,” Steve corrected him.
    “Don’t be a dick, Steve,” Victoria said.
    “It’s okay, Tori,” Junior interposed. “I know you guys have a job to do.” As they started up a maple staircase to the second floor, he said: “If you’re interested, I’ve got a theory about what happened.”
    “What is it?” Victoria asked. Eager now.
    Yeah, Steve thought. Show us something besides your fast-twitch muscle fibers.
    “I think Stubbs might have found the speargun and started fooling around with it,” Junior said. “It’s an old pneumatic model. The Poseidon Mark 3000. Works on air pressure instead of bands. If he tried to jam a shaft down the barrel and did it wrong, the spear could fire.”
    “Why would Stubbs even handle the gun?” Victoria wanted to know.
    Junior shrugged again, his lats joining his delts in a little muscle dance. “Why do kids take their fathers’ revolvers out of nightstands?”
    “So if Stubbs shot himself, who slugged your father?” Steve asked, before Victoria could slip in another question.
    “No one. After Dad found Stubbs, he rushed up the ladder to get back to the bridge. Dad had been drinking—they both had—and he was excited. The ladder’s wet from spray. He slips and falls, conking his head.”
    They stopped in front of a wide set of double doors, Junior fishing for a key from a pocket of his shorts. Junior didn’t lock up his spearguns, Steve thought, but he needed a key to get into whatever room he was going to show them.
    “I can sell swampland to alligators,” Steve said, “but that story stinks like old mackerel. The problem is, you’re compounding multiple improbables.”
    “The hell does that mean?”
    “Tell him, Vic.”
    She nailed Steve with a look that said she didn’t like being ordered to perform. Then said: “One of Steve’s theories.”
    “Not just a theory. A law. The Solomonic Law of Compounding Improbables. Vic, you do the honors.”
    Again, she shot Steve a look. “Stubbs shooting himself,” Victoria said, “that’s one improbable event. Your dad falling down the ladder and knocking himself out, that’s two. A boat without a driver crashing on the exact beach where it was supposed to dock, that’s three. There’s a multiplier effect. Each improbable event makes the others harder to believe.”
    “And easier for a jury to convict,” Steve said.
    “Say a man takes his boat out fishing on Christmas Eve, though he has virtually no history of fishing,” Victoria said. “And his pregnant wife disappears the same day. Months later, her body and the baby’s body wash up onshore in nearly the same place as the guy went fishing. A place the guy went back to when he claimed he was somewhere else.”
    “The Scott Peterson case,” Junior said, unlocking the doors.
    “His defense compounded too many improbables,” Victoria said, as they walked into a darkened room that seemed cooler than the rest of the house.
    Steve smiled to himself. As much as Victoria complained about his lawyering, she was picking up his techniques.
    Why doesn’t she realize what a winning team we are?
    “Steve’s created a mathematical formula around the theory,” she continued.
    “One of Solomon’s Laws,” Steve said. “I call it squaring the improbables: ‘If you have one chance in three of convincing jurors of an improbable event, you have one chance in nine of convincing them of two, and—’ ”
    “One chance in eighty-one of convincing them of three,” Bobby calculated.
    “Exactly. In other words, no chance in hell.”
    Junior flicked on a light switch, and a tiny spotlight in the perimeter of the ceiling came on. They were in a huge, windowless room, bathed in shadows. “What I’m going to show you,” Junior said, “only a few people have seen. Stubbs was one of