Chasing The Dead (An Alex Stone Thriller) (8 page)

“What was your rank when you got out?”

“E-4.”

“Like a corporal except you weren’t a junior noncommissioned officer.”

His eyes got wide. “You know your ranks.”

Alex smiled. “I’ve represented my share of vets. How long were you in the service?”

Jared swirled his hands on the table’s Formica surface as if he was making patterns in the sand. “Two tours, four years.”

“Did you see a lot of action?”

He ducked his chin, looking away. “Everybody did. That’s how it was in the sandbox.”

Alex shook her head. “Boy, I can’t imagine what that was like.”

“No, ma’am, you can’t. I can promise you that,” he said, tugging at the sleeves of his jumpsuit, the fabric hanging on him, the outfit at least a size too big.

She nodded. “I believe you. Thank you for your service.”

His voice rose as he hunched his shoulders to his ears. “Everyone’s always thanking us for our service, ’cept that doesn’t mean much, ’cause they don’t know what it’s like over there so they don’t really know what they’re thanking us for, you know what I mean, ma’am?”

It was Jared’s first show of anything approaching anger, making Alex wonder what might be boiling beneath his soft-spoken façade.

“I guess I do, Jared. I suppose it’s hard for anyone who hasn’t been through it to understand what it was like, so I won’t pretend that I do.”

His face softened again. “Thank you, ma’am.”

“But when I get to know you, I’ll have a better idea what it was like and I’ll thank you for your service then. In the meantime, I want you to know I’m glad to represent you.”

He furrowed his brow. “Why’s that? I’m a homeless nobody.”

“Because I know what it’s like when your life is on the line and you feel outnumbered.”

“How you know what that’s like?”

“I’ll tell you when we’ve got more time. When you were in Afghanistan, you looked out for your buddies and they looked out for you, right?”

His eyes fell, his voice dropping to a whisper. “Tried to.”

“Well, this is a different kind of war and I’m going to look after you,” she said, wincing inside, hoping to make good on the promise, knowing she might have to break it.

Jared thought about what she said and smiled. “Then I guess I should be the one thanking you for your service.”

“You’re welcome,” Alex said, pleased that she was building rapport. That was the key to building trust, and trust was the key to finding out what she needed to know. “Have you ever been charged with a crime before?”

“No.”

“Okay, so here’s how your case is going to play out. Your initial appearance is Friday morning at nine. I’ll meet you in the courtroom. That’s when the judge will set bail. It will probably be too high for you to get out, so I’m afraid you’ll be here for a while.”

“That’s okay. Been on the street a long time. Like they say, three hots and a cot.”

Alex grinned. “Not many of my clients see it that way. You’ve been charged with forcible rape and first-degree murder. In a month or so, the prosecutor will ask the grand jury to formally indict you on those charges. If you’re convicted, you could get life in prison without parole, or the death penalty.”

She paused, gauging his reaction. Jared’s face slackened, and what little color he had melted away, his eyes fluttering. She expected that, but not the small smile that leaked from the corners of his mouth, as if he was telling himself,
I told you so
. He was revealing pieces of himself, but she didn’t know what they meant.

“And a few months after that, we’ll have a preliminary hearing. That’s when the prosecutor will put on enough evidence to convince the judge that you should stand trial. And six months to a year from then you’ll go to trial unless we make a deal.”

Jared perked up. “What kind of deal?”

“Too early to say, but it would probably mean pleading guilty to a lesser offense to avoid the death penalty or life without parole. Something that would give you a shot at eventually getting out.”

He shook his head. “They ain’t ever lettin’ me out.”

Alex cocked her head. “Why do you say that?”

“’Cause that’s the way it is.”

“Innocent people confess to crimes they didn’t commit more often than you could guess. It happens for all kinds of reasons. And someone who’s been to war and who ends up living on the street may be even more likely to do that just because of all the stress you’ve gone through. I’ll come back after court and we’ll go over everything that happened. And I’ll dig into everything the police did to get you to confess. If there’s a way to keep your confession from the jury, I’ll find it.”

“I hear you,” he said, his chin down. “But . . .”

Alex leaned toward him, holding her breath, waiting to see if he would recant his confession. Jared looked away, saying nothing. Alex pressed him. “But what?”

He leaned back in his chair, took a deep breath, and let it out. “It don’t really matter anymore.”

“What doesn’t matter?”

His eyes were red and wet. “All of it. Everything. I been headed here a long time, and now that I am here, it don’t matter anymore.”

Her clients rarely told her the truth, especially the first time she met them, even when they were confronted with persuasive physical evidence, like DNA and fingerprints. The street-smart ones who’d spent their lives perfecting the arts of deception and denial would tell her without flinching that they knew it looked bad but it wasn’t them, that the eyewitnesses were liars and the lab tests were wrong, that they’d been at their mother’s house watching television when the crime occurred. When she’d tell them to get real, they’d ask what kind of deal they could get, not admitting their guilt but offering to testify against somebody.
Who?
she’d ask.
Anybody,
they would say. Whatever it took.

Jared Bell told her something she didn’t hear very often from her clients. He was where he belonged. Maybe because he was guilty and nothing he could do would change that or maybe because he was innocent and nothing he could do would prove that.

“Well, it matters to me,” she told him.

On her way out, Alex stopped to talk to Calvin Lockett, one of the corrections officers. Alex had cultivated a friendship with him, making it a point to ask about his family, sharing news of hers. It had paid off more than once when Calvin let her know about an inmate too eager to testify against one of her clients.

He had worked the jail for twenty years, using the time to become an unofficial jailhouse psychologist, adept at diagnosing what he called an inmate’s roots, the tangle of bad breaks, bad judgment, and plain meanness that put them in his charge. He grew up poor and black like many of them, puzzling about how he ended up on the other side of the steel bars. Rail thin and graying, he watched over the inmates, shaking his head and clucking his tongue.

“Hey, Calvin,” Alex said. “How’s it going?”

“Same old, same old.”

“I’ve got a new client, Jared Bell. What’s your take on him?”

“Boy’s a midnight screamer. Wakes everybody up with all his racket.”

“Nightmares, huh? Any idea what they’re about?”

Calvin shrugged. “Some people say dreams don’t mean a thing. I don’t buy that. Man dreams of making love to a beautiful woman, that’s what he needs. Man dreams he can fly, he’s trying to escape his troubles. Man that’s a midnight screamer, well, that’s his demons trying to get out.”

“You talk to him about his nightmares?”

“Don’t need to talk to him. I heard enough.”

“What did you hear besides his screaming?”

Calvin paused, looking around to make certain they wouldn’t be overheard. “Whoever that girl, Ali, is—or was—you ask me, he killed her. That’s what’s waking him up. He’s calling her name, saying he’s sorry.”

Alex’s heart picked up a beat. According to Rossi’s report, Jared said he didn’t know the victim’s name and Rossi hadn’t identified her. Knowing her name would jump-start Alex’s investigation.

“What, exactly, did Jared say?”

“He kept calling her name, saying ‘I’m sorry, Ali, I’m sorry.’”

“I don’t suppose he mentioned her last name.”

Calvin smirked. “You ever hear of a demon with a last name?”

Alex thought about her recurring nightmares, the ones in which Dwayne Reed appeared out of the darkness, reaching for her with one hand, the other clamped around Bonnie’s throat.

“I can think of at least one,” she said.

Chapter Thirteen

ROSSI GOT BACK TO HIS DESK in the homicide unit, playing out in his head his next visit with Alex Stone, wanting that encounter to appear as accidental as the one at the Zoo actually had been. He was trying to figure out how to make that happen when his boss, Mitch Fowler, hollered at him from the door to his office.

“Rossi! My office! Now!”

Fowler was the commander of the homicide unit. He yelled at Rossi because he could and because it was his idea of strong leadership. Fowler lived in and by the book, while Rossi used the book as a doorstop. Fowler spent his days crunching numbers on overtime and closed cases, his hair thinning as his waistline swelled, frustrated that Rossi’s name was always at the top of both lists. Rossi’s overtime cost their unit too much money, but his closure rate made it impossible for Fowler to dial him back.

Rossi grabbed his cell phone, holding it to his ear, pretending to be talking to someone on the other end, one finger in the air signaling to Fowler that he’d be there in a minute. No one was on the other end, but he couldn’t resist pimping Fowler. He watched Fowler from the corner of his eye, waiting until Fowler’s face blossomed red before he pocketed his phone, slow walking to Fowler’s office. By the time he got there, Fowler was behind his desk, thumping a pencil against his belly. There were two chairs on the visitor’s side of the desk, one of them occupied.

“Hey, Rossi,” Charlie Wheeler said. “How’s it hangin’?”

Wheeler was Rossi’s first partner when he joined the homicide unit. His parents were wealthy physicians who sent him to Pembroke Hill, Kansas City’s private prep school, and to Princeton, where he got an engineering degree. He’d disappointed them when he enrolled in the academy the day after he graduated, telling Rossi he never grew out of playing cops and robbers. Rossi nicknamed him Mr. Mayor since he shared the name of a popular former holder of the office.

He was black, which would have given him a leg up with the brothers on the east side if they trusted the cops and if they couldn’t sense his upper-class, Ivy League background a mile away. Despite the badge, he was an engineer at heart, more pen-and-paper problem solver than throw-down motherfucker.

One day they chased a suspect into an abandoned house, Wheeler taking the front, Rossi going in the back. The suspect put a bullet in Wheeler’s left leg before Rossi took him out. His wife, Lorraine, reminding him that their two kids needed their father, convinced him that it was time he stopped chasing bad guys and used his engineering degree. Wheeler didn’t want to quit the force, so they compromised and he transferred to the traffic investigation unit and started reconstructing accidents.

Rossi occasionally used him as a sounding board, appreciating how Wheeler could deconstruct a case, finding the flaws and pointing him in the right direction. Rossi bought him a beer after Alex Stone was acquitted, running the case past him. Wheeler told Rossi he agreed with him but since Alex had been acquitted, he had no choice but to let it go. Rossi said he couldn’t, and Wheeler said that was the difference between an engineer and a homicide cop.

Rossi shook his hand. “Free and easy, Mr. Mayor. How’s the leg?”

Wheeler patted his thigh. “Still got a limp, but Lorraine says it’s not enough to get me out of mowing the lawn.”

Rossi laughed. “I hear that. What brings you over here?”

Wheeler pointed at a file on Fowler’s desk. “Like I told the commander, I’ve got a case I’d like you to take a look at. My boss said your boss would have to okay you doing that.”

Rossi turned to Fowler, whose perpetual scowl notched another downturn. “He said take a look, not take it over. Are we clear?”

“Clear as ever, boss,” Rossi said. “Follow me,” he said to Wheeler.

Rossi pulled a chair next to his desk, motioning to Wheeler to take a seat, Wheeler sighing as he did, rubbing and stretching out his left leg.

“Just a limp? Looks like it feels worse than that,” Rossi said.

“Depends on the day. Sometimes I get pins and needles that won’t quit. Sometimes it gives out on me and sometimes I can mow the lawn.” He patted his stomach. “But it’s a good excuse for packing on the weight.”

Rossi grinned. “And what’s your excuse for the bald head and glasses? You didn’t have those the last time I saw you.”

Wheeler smiled and nodded. “That, my friend, is just me getting where we’re both going, only I’m getting there first. But it makes me glad you killed the prick that shot me so he could get there ahead of both of us.”

“Makes me glad too. What’s with your case?”

Wheeler spread his file on Rossi’s desk, separating the photographs from the accident report and a diagram of the scene. “One-car accident last night north of the river, way west on Barry Road. Westbound car goes around a curve where the road turns to the south, driver loses control, goes down an embankment, and smacks into a tree. The driver is dead at the scene due to massive head trauma.”

“So? Happens all the time. What do you need me for? Maybe she fell asleep at the wheel or maybe it was suicide.”

“Maybe, but she didn’t leave a note and the family says no way. She was happy, wasn’t in debt, wasn’t on drugs, and as far as anyone knows, wasn’t in any kind of trouble. And, there’s one more detail.”

“What’s that?”

“The accident location. According to her oldest son, who’s a senior in college at UMKC, his mother never went north of the river unless she was going to the airport, and this location is a long way from KCI. He had no explanation for why she was where she was.”

Rossi took sip of cold coffee. “Which leaves you where?”

“Suspicious. I won’t know more until we get an autopsy report to rule out drugs and alcohol and until I get a chance to flyspeck the vehicle and do a complete reconstruction of the accident.”