Chasing The Dead (An Alex Stone Thriller) (27 page)

He smiled. “Then take your time. Maybe we should sit down somewhere.”

“Of course. The kitchen. We can sit in the kitchen.”

He followed her through the house, admiring a photographed portrait of Bonnie, Alex, and their dog, struck by the joy in their faces. He glanced at the den, noting the matching easy chairs with crocheted throws on the ottomans and the stack of books and magazines on a table between the chairs.

Though the kitchen blinds were drawn, the room was still bright and cheery, with artsy knickknacks adorning shelves, painted plates mounted on the walls, wineglasses hung from a rack above an island, and a red-framed sign handwritten in shades of red and blue on one wall that read:

WELCOME

If your shoes are real dirty—

Please remove them.

If your socks are real dirty—

Please take them off.

If your feet are real dirty—

Please leave.

Rossi sat at the table, pointing to the sign. “I like that.”

“So do we.”

Bonnie sat across from him, forearms on the table, rubbing her hands together. Quincy trotted to Rossi, sniffed, turned around, and lay down at Bonnie’s feet. Rossi waited for Bonnie to take the lead, but she didn’t.

“Why am I here, Dr. Long?”

Bonnie took a deep breath, letting it out. “I want you to leave us alone.”

Rossi cocked his head to one side. “I’m sorry?”

Bonnie straightened, shoulders back. “I want you to leave us alone. I want you to quit coming to the hospital to ask me about Alex. I want you to quit harassing Alex, trying to make her out to be some kind of criminal when all she was doing was protecting herself and me.” She paused, drew another breath. “I want you out of our lives forever.”

Rossi sat back in his chair. Bonnie had set him up, only not in the way he had imagined, taking advantage of his cockiness, letting him think this was going to be his big breakthrough. But she had to know he wasn’t going to go away, which meant he still had a play to make.

“You know I can’t do that.”

Bonnie smacked her hand on the table. “Why not? Alex told me she can’t be retried even if she were guilty.”

“Then what do either of you have to be afraid of? Why not just tell me the truth?”

Bonnie paused, nodding. “What if we told you that you were right? What then? What would you do?”

It was a question Rossi had asked himself many times. The answer varied. Sometimes it was that he’d take it to the U.S. attorney’s office and the Missouri Bar Ethics Commission and let them sort it out. Other times, he wasn’t so certain, thinking just knowing he’d been right would be enough. That was before he suspected that something was going on between Alex and Judge West, raising the possibility that Alex could go to jail for obstruction of justice if nothing else.

“That depends on how much both of you tell me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know what Alex has told you, but she may have done more than kill Dwayne Reed. She may have also obstructed justice in order to get acquitted. And, if she did, she can go to jail for that even if she can’t go to jail for murder.”

“You would destroy our lives for that?”

“It’s not me who would destroy your lives. It’s Alex and you, if you helped her in any way.”

Bonnie rose, went to the small desk in the kitchen, and took a sheet of paper from a drawer, reading from it.

“Marcus Ramsey. Julio Estevez. Rolando Chism. Frankie Meadows. I assume you recognize those names, Detective, since you killed each of them. Shot them to death, from what I understand.”

Rossi blanched. He knew those names by heart and couldn’t forget them if he tried. The better question was how Bonnie knew them.

“What’s your point? Each of those shootings was in the line of duty. And where did you get those names?”

“From a lawsuit.”

Rossi planted his hands on the table, leaning in at her. “What lawsuit?”

“The lawsuit that the families of those men are going to file against you and the police department and the city.”

“That’s not happening. Those incidents go back fifteen years. The statute of limitations ran a long time ago.”

“Except for Frankie Meadows. You gunned him down less than two years ago. His wife consulted a lawyer I recommended to her who thinks she’s got a pretty good case. Now, I don’t understand the law, but it has something to do with you and the department engaging in a persistent pattern of denying the civil rights of minorities through the use of excessive force and intimidation. All the men you killed were either black or Hispanic, but you knew that.”

“Every one of those shootings was investigated by Internal Affairs and the county prosecutor and each one was found to be justified.”

Bonnie pursed her lips. “Well, you know how some people are, Detective. They’re just never satisfied until things turn out the way they want them to. Especially when they suspect that you planted incriminating evidence to cover up what really happened.”

Rossi sat back. “So that’s what this is about. You’re trying to blackmail me with the threat of a bullshit lawsuit so I’ll lay off Alex.”

“Every night for the last year, Alex wakes up, sweating and shaking. The nightmares are always the same. Dwayne Reed coming after us. Raping us. Murdering us. And even when Alex kills him again and again in her dreams, it’s just as terrifying. I hold her and tell her everything is going to be all right, that she did the right thing, but it doesn’t do any good. Tell me, Detective, is it like that for you? Do you see those men in your nightmares? Is that why you spend so much time in bars at night drinking alone?”

Rossi stiffened, trying to keep a lid on his anger, knowing if he blew up, he’d only make things worse.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, I think I do. You see, I hired a private detective, a woman named Lucy Trent. She’s very good at what she does. She found out a lot about you and she found the families of the men you killed.”

“If you think you can scare me off, you don’t have any idea who you’re dealing with.”

“Actually, Detective, I think I do. I think I’m dealing with a fundamentally decent man who did his best under impossibly difficult circumstances and who genuinely regrets taking the lives of those men. If you were anyone else, you wouldn’t drink so much.”

Rossi threw up his hands. “Why do you think coming after me is going to change anything for Alex?”

“Maybe it won’t. But at least you’ll know what it’s like to spend your life defending yourself for having done what you knew was right.”

Rossi set his jaw. “Then have at it.”

He rose and turned to go.

“Before you leave, Detective, come over to the window and look out in my backyard for a minute. There’s something I want you to see.”

Bonnie opened the blinds. Rossi hesitated but joined her. Looking out, he saw four women, three of them black, one Hispanic, along with a dozen others ranging from newborns to young adults. They were on the patio, a few talking in hushed tones, most of them silent.

“Who are they?”

“Those are your widows and their children and their grandchildren. The men you killed were drug dealers and thugs, no better or worse than Dwayne Reed. Maybe their wives and children knew all about them and maybe they didn’t. Either way, they haven’t forgotten that you killed their husbands and fathers and grandfathers. They want justice and peace. Go talk to them. Tell them that they’re wrong. Tell them that you have no regrets. Tell them that the men they loved got what they deserved.”

Rossi stared at them, swallowing hard. He looked at Bonnie.

“I was exonerated.”

“And so was Alex.”

Bonnie waited until Rossi drove away before opening the door to the patio.

“I want to thank you for coming over this afternoon. It’s so nice to get together outside of the hospital and see how all the kids are doing. The pizzas will be here in about twenty minutes. Who wants a soda?”

Chapter Forty-Eight

ALEX DRIFTED TO THE BACK of the courtroom, tuning out Judge Steele’s eulogy for Robin, focusing instead on their brief conversation. He’d been every bit as charming as she had imagined him until she mentioned Joanie Sutherland’s name and the light went out of his eyes. There had to be more behind his reaction than his decision years ago to put Joanie into a diversion program instead of sentencing her for shoplifting. He could have stayed in contact with her, using his position to take advantage of her only for her to turn the tables and blackmail him.

The friendship between Judge West and Judge Steele added another tantalizing element to her speculation. If Steele had killed Joanie, he’d have been ecstatic when Jared Bell was arrested for her murder. He might have talked to West about the case, nudging him to get the right public defender appointed to represent Bell. She discounted that possibility because Robin assigned the cases, not Judge West, leaving her to wonder whether West had somehow pressured Robin to assign Jared’s case to her. She decided that while there were too many moving parts for that to have happened, she had to dig deeper into the relationship between Judge Steele and Joanie.

Alex left the memorial for Robin, brooding about what Bonnie had said, that she didn’t have to go through this alone and that no matter what happened, Bonnie would be there. It was the kind of promise that lovers often made but less often kept because what ended up happening was more awful than either could have imagined. But she wanted to believe that Bonnie was different, that they were different, and that together they were stronger than either could be on her own.

She drove around, aimlessly at first, then purposefully, past the places that had meant so much to them. Where they first met, where they had their first date, where they were when Alex told Bonnie for the first time that she loved her and where they had first made love. Each stop along the way restored her faith in herself and in them until there was no place else to go but home.

She turned onto their street, bright-eyed and singing one of their favorite love songs, the words catching in her throat when she saw Rossi’s car in their driveway. She folded onto the steering wheel as if she’d been kicked in the gut, stopping in the middle of the street, staring at her house, the life gone out of her, body and soul.

At first Alex thought Rossi was there to harass Bonnie once again. She hoped Bonnie would tell Rossi that they’d broken up so that Rossi would leave Bonnie alone. Any chance of that happening would be lost if she walked in on them. And then she realized that it might be something worse. Convinced that Alex was going to destroy herself, Bonnie might have invited Rossi in an attempt to broker a deal to save her. It was just the sort of thing Bonnie would do: diagnose the patient’s condition and do the best she could to treat it, unaware that this time the cure was worse than the disease.

Crying, feeling like she’d been cut open from the inside out, Alex drove back to the Residence Inn and crawled into bed. She woke up at nine o’clock, not remembering falling asleep. She was groggy, her limbs felt rubbery, and though she wasn’t hungry, she knew she needed to eat, but first she needed to move, get her body working again, and that meant going for a run. Putting in five miles would perk her up. She changed into her running gear, laced up her shoes, tucked her cell phone and room key into a fanny pack, and went out into the night.

The temperature was perfect, in the low fifties. Standing on Main Street, she looked across at Penn Valley Park. Bonnie was right. The park was one of her favorite places, 176 acres of rolling hills with an off-leash dog park, baseball diamonds and tennis courts, the World War I Liberty Memorial, and, her favorite, the Scout, a ten-foot-tall statue of a Sioux Indian on horseback mounted on a limestone base and overlooking downtown Kansas City. She loved the simple majesty and power of the sculpture and the amazing view.

Alex didn’t share Bonnie’s concerns about running in Penn Valley Park at night but, nonetheless, stuck to Main, trotting north and taking advantage of the long descent down to Pershing Road to loosen up. She turned west onto Pershing, staying with it until she reached West Pennway, where she turned again, heading back south, the uphill grade payback for her downhill start on Main.

She was running easily as she started the climb, her arms and legs working together in a steady, fluid motion, her head upright, her chin level, her core holding everything together. There had been a lot of traffic on Main and on Pershing, but only a few cars passed her on West Pennway. South of Twenty-Sixth, the name of the street changed to Penn Valley Drive, signaling the beginning of its route through the park. She told herself that she wasn’t breaking her promise to Bonnie because, technically, she was running through the park, not in the park. The thought made her smile until she realized it would be a while before they’d have that conversation, if they ever had it.

Passing a small lake on her right, Alex forgot her promise and left the road, cutting across a wide grassy expanse enveloped in darkness, strong, sure strides carrying her up the gradual slope leading to the Scout. Her lungs swelled with each breath in, contracting with each breath out, in perfect rhythm with the beat of her heart. Sweat poured off her, cooled by the crisp night, her body in perfect harmony with earth and air, joyful at their union.

Alex could see the Scout a hundred yards ahead. It was illuminated at its base, the lights making the bronze shine in the dark. She sprinted as she got closer, the horse and rider looming larger and larger, her breath coming in deeper gulps, her heart pounding. An arm’s length away, she reached out to touch the limestone pedestal like she was breaking the tape at the finish line of a race, at once aware of furious footsteps behind her, coming out of nowhere, gaining on her, another runner’s labored breathing causing her to turn her head, but she was too late. She caught a glimpse of a black runner’s face mask, gasping at a flurry of quick, sharp pains in her back and something warm running down her legs, which had somehow given out on her. She dropped to her knees, collapsing facedown at the base of the statue, bewildered and bleeding.