Chasing The Dead (An Alex Stone Thriller) (17 page)

Kalena grinned. “He’s starting a trial on Monday. He’ll love it when you show up in his chambers.”

“Why not? Who wouldn’t be glad to see me?”

**

Alex had no doubt that Kalena and Rossi would talk to Judge West about Mathew Woodrell and use that pretext to get the judge’s version of his conversation with her. She picked up her cell phone as soon as she rounded the corner heading away from the jail, intending to call him so they could get their stories straight, dropping her phone in her lap when she realized making that call would leave an electronic trail leading back to her.

Heading south on Main Street, she pulled into the parking lot of a convenience store and bought a prepaid cell phone, worrying that she was becoming like one of her drug-dealer clients, glad to have learned a few of their lessons. Keeping her face down to avoid security cameras, she handed money to the cashier, pocketing the change and the phone.

Back in her car, she drove further south. Months ago, Judge West had given her his unlisted phone number, telling her that it rang only in his home office and instructing her to use it only in emergencies. She clicked on the burner phone and tapped in the number. A woman answered on the fourth ring.

“Who is this?”

Caught off guard because no one other than the judge had ever answered her calls, Alex hit the brakes and was almost rear-ended by the driver behind her, who hit her instead with a blast of his horn and a raised middle finger. Waving her apologies, she drove on. The woman was agitated, her voice sharp and demanding. Though Alex had never spoken with the judge’s wife, she had no trouble imagining that this was how Millie West would sound.

“Mrs. West?”

“Yes. This is a private number. Now, who is this? If you’re selling something I’m hanging up.”

“It’s Alex Stone. I’m calling for Judge West.”

Millie didn’t respond, her silence making Alex wonder whether the call had been dropped.

“Mrs. West? Are you still there?”

“Yes, but my husband isn’t.”

“Can you give me his cell phone number?”

“If he wanted you to have it, you already would,” she said and hung up.

Alex smacked her palm against the steering wheel, her attempt at clandestine communication an utter failure. She’d squandered the anonymity of her burner phone. Its number was now included in the call records of the judge’s phone, and his wife could identify her as its owner. She was reminded again how easy it was to make the stupid mistakes that landed her clients in prison.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

BONNIE WAS WAITING FOR ALEX when she got home, dressed, pressed, and ready to go in a pair of dark-wash skinny jeans, a coral open-front blazer over a white silk blouse buttoned at the neck, the tail hanging over her jeans, and three-inch heels showing off her legs, as if they needed any help. Hands on her hips, she took one look at Alex and shook her head.

“I’m not going anywhere with you looking like that. Where have you been? Never mind,” Bonnie said, raising a palm. “I don’t want to know. Take a shower and put on something clean. We’ll pay our respects to Robin’s family and then we’ll get something to eat. I’m famished, so get moving. Chop, chop,” she added, clapping her hands.

Alex grinned, enjoying Bonnie’s dismay at her appearance. It was one of their rituals, Bonnie pretending to be annoyed, Alex pretending to be sorry, both of them keeping their tongues firmly in their cheeks.

“On my way. I’ll be ready sooner if you lotion my back when I get out of the shower.”

“Oh, no. If I do, the only thing we’ll be having for dinner is each other. Now, get moving, sister.”

Standing in the shower, hot water pulsating on the back of her neck, she thought about the little game they’d played when she walked in the house. Their relationship was made of such moments. They were familiar and easy, like muscle memory, only for lovers. But this one was so out of sync with the day she’d had that she didn’t know what to make of it or Bonnie or them. She was absent the day they taught how to integrate murder and death threats into a quiet home life.

She and Bonnie had always shared whatever was going on at work, dancing around client and patient confidentiality like most couples who swore their mates to secrecy, picking one up when things went wrong, patting the other on the back for a job well done. Intimacy wasn’t just about sex or just about their private life. It was about intertwining everything, blurring the line between where one of them ended and the other began.

Alex worried that her life was becoming compartmentalized, Bonnie in one box, Dwayne Reed and Judge West in another, their box getting crowded with the additions of Hank Rossi, Jared Bell, Mathew Woodrell, Robin Norris, and her killer. She had tried convincing herself that Judge West was building this wall between her and Bonnie, but she knew that she was the one laying the bricks, each made of the secrets she was keeping from the woman she loved.

And now Bonnie wanted to bring a baby into their lives at the very moment that Robin’s killer might have set his sights on her. Overcome at the image of Bonnie standing at her grave, holding their baby in her arms, she began to cry, pounding the shower walls with both fists, turning her back to the wall and sliding to the floor, letting the water beat down on her.

“Are you drowning in there?” Bonnie said, knocking on the bathroom door a few minutes later.

Alex pulled herself up. “Not yet. Be out in a second.”

She put on faded denims, a untucked pale blue checked shirt beneath a gray and blue wide-striped sweater, and a pair of black Kick Hi boots, ran her fingers through her damp hair, applied ChapStick to her lips, and pronounced herself ready.

Minutes later they were in Bonnie’s Audi, the satellite radio playing Billy Joel’s “Just The Way You Are,” a song they claimed as theirs, repeating the promise not to change they’d made to each other when they fell in love. Settling back in her plush leather seat, inhaling Bonnie’s perfume and surrounded by tons of high-performance German engineering, Alex felt cocooned and safe. For the first time all day, she thought they would survive all of this, though she had no rational reason to think so, only that she would find a way. When they stopped for a traffic light, she leaned over and pulled Bonnie toward her for a long, deep kiss.

“Boy!” Bonnie said when Alex let go. “I guess I’m buying dinner.”

**

Robin had lived in Overland Park, which was on the Kansas side of the Kansas City metropolitan area. The state line was a convenient geographic demarcation that allowed Kansas residents to claim the attractions on the Missouri side—professional sports teams, high-end stores and restaurants, art galleries and museums—as their own while disavowing Kansas City’s failing public schools, persistent crime rate, and gangs as someone else’s problem. Except for Robin, who’d taken the good with the bad, dedicating herself to representing the dropouts, drug addicts, and gangbangers who’d found their way to her public defender’s office.

She’d lived on a quiet, tree-lined street in a modest stone and stucco house with a two-car garage, a semiparched lawn, and a basketball net mounted on a steel post on the side of the driveway. Four cars were parked in front of the house, two others in the driveway.

Bonnie slowed as they approached the house. Two men got out of one of the cars in the driveway, one of them limping.

“Don’t stop. Keep going,” Alex said.

“Why? What’s the matter?”

“That’s Rossi,” she said, pointing at the men, “and the one with the limp is a detective named Wheeler.”

“So? I’m no fan of Rossi, but why should we let him keep us from offering our condolences to the family? If they can, we can too.”

“Just keep going. I’ve had enough Rossi for one day, and they aren’t there to offer their condolences.”

Bonnie drove past the house, glancing at Alex. “How could you know that?”

Alex took a deep breath, her stomach churning. “Because Robin was murdered. It’s Rossi and Wheeler’s case. They’re probably there to tell the family, which makes it the wrong time for visiting.”

Bonnie stopped the car at the end of the block, turning to Alex, her eyes narrowed, her mouth tight.

“And you were going to tell me this when?”

“Soon,” Alex said, her face reddening. “Tonight, okay? I just found out this afternoon, and when I got home, you were ready to go and you told me to jump in the shower and then next thing I know, here we are.”

“No. There’s no ‘next thing I know here we are.’ Not after we’ve been in the car for twenty minutes. You couldn’t have mentioned it?”

“I know. I know and I’m sorry. It’s just that . . .” She stopped, blinking, shaking her head and then staring out the window. “This has been . . .” She hesitated again, turning back to Bonnie, swallowing hard, and letting out a deep breath. “Some kind of day.”

Bonnie eased up, putting her hand on Alex’s shoulder. “There’s more, isn’t there?”

Alex nodded.

“About Robin or something else?”

“Both.”

“Are you in trouble?”

“Maybe.”

“Are you going to tell me, or do I have to worry without knowing what I’m worrying about?”

Alex looked at her, torn between adding another brick and knocking down the wall. Her eyes filled; a tremor rattled outward from her belly. She’d been holding so much back, and all she wanted was to let it go.

“Yeah,” she said, her voice thick. “I’ll tell you everything. Let’s go home.”

Chapter Thirty

“WHO’S GOING TO TELL THEM, you or me?” Wheeler asked Rossi as they walked toward Robin’s house.

“I’ll take the lead,” Rossi said, “then you can fill in the details. What do we know about the family?”

Wheeler shrugged. “Five kids, bunched together, ages sixteen to twenty-one, I think.”

“Father?”

“Out of the picture. They’ve been divorced for years.”

Rossi rang the bell. A young man wearing jeans and a Kansas Jayhawks T-shirt answered the door. He was average height with an average build and light brown, almost blond, hair, a round face, and soft features, his connection to his mother apparent.

“Yes?”

Rossi and Wheeler showed their badges. “I’m Detective Rossi. This is my partner, Detective Wheeler. Are you one of Robin Norris’s children?”

“I’m Donny, the oldest. What’s this about?”

“We want to talk with you about your mother’s accident. May we come in?”

He furrowed his brow, hesitating. “What’s going on?”

“We’d rather talk about it inside, if that’s okay with you.”

He nodded. “Sure. Sorry. Come on in.”

Donny led them into the den. It had a high ceiling and was furnished with comfortable, overstuffed chairs and an L-shaped sofa. There was a fireplace on the back wall flanked by windows and surrounded by inlaid stone rising to the ceiling. The lighting was soft, the fabrics warm, the ivory carpeting accented with a maroon oriental rug beneath a mahogany coffee table, the top of which was covered with two large pizza boxes and a half-empty carton of Coke.

A couple Rossi guessed to be in their late fifties or early sixties was sitting on the long side of the sofa. He had silver hair, blue eyes, and a ruddy complexion and was wearing a navy blazer, gray slacks, and a blue oxford-cloth shirt. Her blond hair was cut in a shiny bob. Her short-sleeved lavender dress showed off her toned arms and well-defined calves. They were a handsome, prosperous-looking couple.

An unshaven man around their age wearing Dockers and an untucked polo shirt leaned against the wall by the fireplace studying his smartphone. A boy and two girls who looked to be in their late teens stood in the middle of the room talking while juggling slices of pizza and sodas. A fourth child, a girl closer to sixteen, was leaning against a wall near the unshaven man, pecking away on her smartphone.

“Everybody,” Donny said, “this is Detective Rossi and Detective Wheeler. They want to talk to us about Mom’s accident.”

“Well, actually,” Rossi said, “we’d like to talk to Ms. Norris’s children.”

Donnie and the older kids formed a line, shoulder to shoulder, as if they were used to being introduced as a group or answering roll call. They all shared the same features gifted to them by their mother. The youngest girl had dark hair and angular features similar to the man at the fireplace. Donny made the introductions.

“These are my sisters Carrie and Rachel and my brother Josh. And that’s Kim over by the fireplace.”

Carrie, Rachel, and Josh shook their hands. Kim stayed where she was, silent, grim faced, and sullen.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Rossi said, all the kids nodding except for Kim, who shook her head and disappeared into the kitchen.

“And I’m their dad,” the man at the back of the room said as he walked toward them, chest puffed out. “Ted Norris,” he added, shaking both Rossi’s and Wheeler’s hands.

He was half a head shorter than Rossi, his nose crooked like it had been broken at least twice. His hair had once been dark like his daughter’s but now was a slicked-back muddy gray. He had the red-speckled cheeks and rheumy eyes of a man who’d spent a lifetime getting the last drop out of the bottle. Rossi could smell the whiskey evaporating through his skin along with the stench of cigarettes in his clothes.

“Helluva thing,” Norris said. “Robin was a great gal and these are great kids. Gotta give her credit for that. Everybody knows I didn’t have anything to do with it, not that I didn’t want to or didn’t try. We had five kids in six years before she gave me the boot. My little Kimmy was only five years old, but she turned out okay in spite of her no-account old man.”

He flashed yellow teeth in an expectant grin, waiting for his kids to contradict him and tell him he wasn’t so bad after all and that he deserved some of the credit, but none did. Instead, they shifted their weight from one foot to the other, heads down or turned away, avoiding eye contact with their father.

The couple on the sofa rose, the man clearing his throat. “Ted, why don’t you get going and let the detectives do their job.”

Norris shot a hot look at him, eyes flashing, teeth bared. “Why don’t you hit the road, Tony? You’re not family.”