A Killing in the Valley (55 page)

“Last September 14, at Chico’s Restaurant in Santa Barbara,” Jeremy answered. His voice was flat and low.

Luke led Jeremy through the series of events that had occurred after the boys met Maria, up until the time when they brought her and Tina Ayala back to town. His account corresponded closely with Tina’s, the only difference being the spin he put on the interaction between the two of them. His version was that they hadn’t done anything because
he
didn’t want to, not because she stopped him. He hadn’t been the least bit interested in her, he claimed; he went along to help his friend Peter out. Salve for his ego.

“Okay,” Luke said. “You got back to town around when?”

“Around one-thirty,” Jeremy answered.

“What did the girls do then?” Luke probed.

“The one I was with headed back toward where we met her,” Jeremy said. “Maria went to the mall.”

“Before Maria went into Paseo Nuevo, did she and Peter spend any time together that you weren’t part of?”

Jeremy nodded. “They talked off to the side, away from me.”

“For about how long?”

Jeremy shrugged. “A minute? Not long.”

“Did they exchange any information? Phone numbers?”

“I couldn’t tell,” Jeremy answered.

Luke stared at his notes for a moment. “After the girls left, what did you and Peter do?”

“We drove back to our apartment.”

“In Peter’s car. His BMW convertible.”

Jeremy nodded. “Right.”

“Then what? After you got back?”

“We started setting things up. We’d just moved in, so stuff was all over the place.”

“And that’s what you did for the rest of the day, you and Peter? Worked on your apartment?”

The tip of Jeremy’s tongue played with his upper front teeth. “That’s what
I
did.”

“What you did?” Luke repeated. “What did Peter do?”

“He went out to buy stuff we needed.”

For a moment, there was a sense of suspension in the courtroom. Luke filled the void. “Peter went
out
?” he repeated. “To get things for your apartment? What did he get?”

Jeremy twisted uncomfortably in the hard chair. “Sheets, towels, dishrags. We had plates and utensils from his mother, but we needed garbage bags, dishwash detergent. A spaghetti pot.”

“Small household items,” Luke certified. “How long was Peter gone on these errands?” he asked.

“A couple of hours.”

“A
couple
?” Luke said doubtfully. “Could it have been three? Four?”

Jeremy face’s contorted as he recalled. “I don’t know if it was that long,”

“A few hours, does that sound right?”

“That’s about right,” Jeremy confirmed.

Luke stopped for a moment to steal a look toward the jury box. This startling disclosure had captured their attention, as he had hoped it would. He turned to Jeremy again. “Besides these basic household things, did Peter buy anything else for your apartment?”

Jeremy waited a moment before answering. “Yes.”

“And what was that?”

Jeremy paused again. “A kitchen table,” he told Luke. “One of those square butcher-block jobs.”

Luke’s face showed confusion. He was sure everyone else in the courtroom was manifesting the same expression, especially Alex and Elise. “A kitchen table?” he repeated back.

Jeremy nodded. “From the Pottery Barn. It’s next to Robinsons, at La Cumbre Plaza. They were having a sale, so Peter bought it,” he explained. “And a couple of chairs that went with it. We already had our beds, a couch, TV. That was the last thing we needed.”

“So besides the small items you’ve told us about, Peter also bought a table and chairs,” Luke catalogued. “When did the Pottery Barn deliver it?”

“Nobody delivered it,” Jeremy answered. “Peter brought it back with him that afternoon, with the rest of the stuff.”

Luke left the podium and walked a few steps closer to Jeremy. “Peter came back to your apartment with the pots and pans and sheets and the other stuff he had bought.
And
the table and chairs?”

Jeremy was getting more and more nervous. He could feel his underarm sweat dripping down his sides. “Yes.”

Luke nodded slowly, as if something wasn’t computing, and he was trying to figure out what it was. He glanced at his notes again. “How did Peter get a table and chairs into a BMW convertible?” he asked Jeremy.

Jeremy’s throat was dry from anxiety. “He didn’t take the Beemer.”

Luke took another step forward. “He didn’t drive his BMW? Then what car did he take?”

“His mom’s Lincoln Navigator.”

Luke took a short pause to let that depth-charge sink in. Then he asked: “His mother’s Lincoln Navigator? That’s an SUV, right? Pretty big, isn’t it?”

Jeremy nodded. “Yeah, it’s almost as big as a Suburban. His mom lent it to him for a couple of days, so we could haul our big stuff up from L.A.,” he explained. “Beds and dressers, those things.”

Luke scanned the room. He had everyone’s undivided attention now. Judge Martindale was leaning over his perch at an angle so severe it looked like he might topple off. Alex and Elise, too, were literally on the edges of their chairs.

“So that afternoon,” Luke went on, “
after
you and Peter came back to your apartment,
after
you dropped Maria Estrada and the other girl at Paseo Nuevo, Peter went out again in a Lincoln Navigator SUV, rather than his BMW convertible? Is that right?”

“Yes,” Jeremy answered.

“Alone?”

Again, “Yes.”

At the prosecution table, Alex and Elise looked like they had been nuked. Alex’s face was purple in rage. He leaned over and said something in Elise’s ear. She shook her head. Then he turned to Watson and Rebeck, sitting in the row behind them. They were frozen in stunned disbelief.

Luke returned to the podium. “So for a few hours that afternoon, after you and Peter and those two girls parted company outside the Paseo Nuevo mall, your roommate Peter Baumgartner was driving around Santa Barbara in a Lincoln Navigator Sports Utility Vehicle. By himself.”

“Yes,” Jeremy answered. “That’s correct.” He backtracked. “I don’t know if he was alone,” he clarified. “I know that I wasn’t with him.”

Luke left the podium and walked over to the defense table. He took some eight-by-ten photographs out of a manila envelope. Looking at them, he smiled.

Months earlier, when Jeremy had dropped this bomb in their laps, Kate hightailed it back to Los Angeles and shot a roll of film of Angela Baumgartner’s Navigator. Now Luke held a stack of them in his hand. He handed a photo to Judge Martindale, dropped a second on the prosecution table, and crossed to the jury box, where he passed several of the pictures out to the jurors. Then he walked to the stand and held one up to Jeremy.

“Is this the vehicle Peter Baumgartner was driving that afternoon?” he asked his witness.

Jeremy looked at the photo. “Yes, it is.”

Luke leaned forward on the railing. “Tell me, Jeremy. What color is this Lincoln Navigator SUV that Peter was driving that afternoon?”

Jeremy didn’t have to look at the picture again to know the answer. “Charcoal gray,” he stated in a clear, emphatic voice. “Dark gray. Almost black.”

Court was adjourned for the day. Luke and Kate had gone back to his office. Luke was nursing a Laphroaig over ice. Kate sipped a half-glass of sauvignon blanc.

“I wonder how Alex’s mood is right about now,” she mused gleefully.

“The same as Elise’s and all the rest of theirs,” he answered with equal relish. “Terrible. It’s a bitch when you’re blindsided. I know, I’ve been there. Nice to be on the other side for a change,” he gloated.

Alex hadn’t done a stellar job on Jeremy’s cross-examination. Off-balance, and lacking any damaging factual information, he had tried to bully Jeremy into making a mistake. Jeremy had held firm—Luke had thoroughly prepped him for rough tactics. By the time Jeremy was excused you could almost see a black cloud forming over the prosecution’s side of the courtroom.

“Alex took too much for granted,” Kate said. “Once he had his bird in hand, he didn’t keep on digging. You wouldn’t have stopped there,” she told Luke.

“Thanks for the support,” Luke said appreciatively, “but I would have prosecuted this case in a heartbeat, just as it was.” He sipped some whiskey. “We caught a one-in-a-million break with Tina connecting Sophia up with Jeremy. Without that, and Tyler’s turning around out of the blue, we’d be the ones with acid in our stomachs.” He stirred his drink with a finger. “We’ve been luckier than anyone deserves.”

“Steven McCoy,” Kate corrected him. “He’s the lucky one.”

Angela Baumgartner, reluctantly testifying under subpoena, stated that she had lent her Lincoln Navigator to her son Peter at the beginning of the fall term. She also grudgingly admitted that she and Peter had visited Rancho San Gennaro six months before Maria Estrada’s body was found there.

Warren Baumgartner didn’t show up for his ex-wife’s testimony. Kate had been on the lookout, hanging back in the corridor outside the courtroom until the last possible moment. Either he didn’t want to be in the same space with Angela, a reasonable assumption, or he didn’t want to be in the courtroom at all, given the thunderstorm that had started to gather over his son. Or, Kate dolefully thought, he doesn’t want to be near me. He had to be harboring resentment toward her for bringing Peter into this mess.

Her professional job had trumped the personal one. Not for the first time or surely the last, but it still wasn’t a happy thought. That it had been inevitable didn’t mean she had to like it. Of course, if she hadn’t been working the case they never would have met at all, and she wouldn’t have had that glorious night.

When she was being honest with herself, something she was loath to do, because she hated introspection, she knew that nothing could happen between her and Warren. He was a multimillionaire who lived a glamorous life. His hangout buddies were George Clooney and Larry David. She was a working woman who struggled to make her mortgage payments. After the giddiness wore off, what would they talk about?

There was a man out there for her; there had to be. But his name wasn’t Warren Baumgartner.

Steven McCoy, finally given the chance to speak in his own defense, was an assured and credible witness. Under Luke’s gentle questioning, he calmly recited his version of what happened that afternoon, and as calmly rebutted Alex’s attempts, during a long and grueling cross-examination, to rattle him.

Alex valiantly tried to stem the tide in his closing summation. But he could tell from the reception he was getting that his efforts were like trying to put out a fire with a water pistol.

Luke didn’t have to break any new ground when it was his turn to address the jury. He reminded them of Steven’s heroics during last fall’s conflagration, and made the compelling argument that if Steven was guilty, that would have been the perfect time to flee—he could have been in Timbuktu by the time his disappearance was discovered. He had stayed right where he was supposed to be, because he wanted his innocence to be validated.

Elise, all electric nerve endings, delivered the rebuttal summation for the prosecution. You could almost see the energy radiating out from her as she paced back and forth in front of the jury box.

“In all my years of prosecuting murder cases,” she said, her heels tap-dancing a fast rhythm to the staccato tempo of her speech, “I’ve never been involved in one that had so much evidence against the accused. Forget all the mumbo jumbo, the last-minute suspects from out of left field. Here’s all you need to remember: Steven McCoy knew where this isolated location was. He could get into it,
whether or not the gate was locked.
And most importantly: his fingerprints are on the murder weapon. That alone convicts him!”

She ran a hand through her hair. “Here’s just one glaring example of how shallow the defense’s case is: their invention of how Steven McCoy returned the murder weapon to the gun cabinet. The defendant’s own grandmother waxed eloquent about how ranch people are almost pathological about gun safety. She’s right, they are. So how in the world can we believe that Steven McCoy, after supposedly finding the murder weapon in a dark house, went right to the gun cabinet and opened the door? He would have known that door was locked.” She shook her head disdainfully. “Only if he had picked that weapon up
with premeditation,
killed Maria, and then taken the time to see if the cabinet was unlocked—in the daytime, when there was enough available light for him to be able to see—would he have been able to put the gun away.”

She came to an abrupt, almost screeching stop. Her look to the jurors was one of primal ferocity, as if she was daring each one of them to challenge her point of view. She pointed dramatically across the room at Steven, her blood-red inch-long fingernail an accusing beacon.

“This man killed Maria Estrada,” she spat out. “He flung her body away in the hot, merciless sun for the coyotes and vultures to pick clean. He has never shown one iota of remorse toward his victim. Even if he hadn’t done it, wouldn’t you think he would have taken a moment when he was on the stand to offer his condolences? Wouldn’t anyone with a heart and a soul do that? A tiny token of sympathy to a grieving mother?”

Elsie shook her head in sad remorse. “Nope. Wouldn’t do it. Because that would be a sign of weakness. A sign of guilt. An admission that he did it. That he killed her. And left her poor broken body out in the sun to be savaged by wild animals.”

As he watched Elsie, Luke didn’t know whether he wanted to laugh, cry, or applaud. Not since Johnnie Cochran had immortally declared, “If the glove don’t fit, you must acquit,” had he seen such over-the-top histrionics.

She had it going, he had to give her credit. But she didn’t have momentum on her side. From long experience, Luke could tell that the jurors were enjoying her performance, but weren’t buying the supporting evidence. He hoped.

Elise wrapped it up. “Steven McCoy was there. The gun was in his hand. The body was dumped on his grandmother’s property. Ladies and gentlemen, if this isn’t conclusive enough evidence that Steven McCoy killed Maria Estrada, then no one is ever going to be convicted of murder in Santa Barbara County.”