Did You Miss Me? (3 page)

Not that Mitch needed any reminders. He wore his anger like a second skin, his revenge a painful thirst that he could never satisfy. Until now. Everything was finally coming together and furious George here was an important piece of the plan.

Mitch kept his voice mild. ‘What you’re going to be is arrested if you don’t calm down. You look like
you
did the murder, George.’

George’s eyes narrowed. ‘If you didn’t bring my package, I just might.’

Were I not armed, I’d be nervous
. George was a big sonofabitch, yet still smaller than his brother Reggie, who was a fucking King Kong. The jury had seen Reggie that way, too. Which was why George was so anxious to get this delivery.

‘Tsk, tsk, tsk. George, how many times do I have to tell you to hold your temper?’

George ground his teeth. ‘Did you bring the knife?’

‘Of course I did.’ With a few modifications. ‘Did you bring the brace?’

George held out a plastic grocery bag. ‘Yeah. I did.’

Mitch frowned. ‘Have you been wearing it?’

‘
Yes
. Every goddamn day of this trial. Now
hurry
. I need to get to the courtroom.’

Mitch took the wrist brace from the bag and winced. Yep, George had been wearing it all right. Every day. During which he’d never washed his arm. The brace was ripe.

‘Do me a favor, will you, and slip the plastic plate out of the brace. The one that supports your wrist.’ George obeyed, carelessly leaving his prints all over the plastic.
Like taking candy from a baby
, Mitch thought as he produced an identical-looking plate from his pocket. Unlike George, he wore gloves, ensuring the only prints the cops would find would be George’s. ‘This is your knife.’

George’s face darkened. ‘
That?
That piece of shit plastic?
That’s
what you’ve been promising us?’

‘Watch. This plate slides apart – it’s two layers.’ He took the pieces apart, but George was not impressed.
Idiot
. This was top-of-the-line polymer construction.

‘It’s plastic,’ George said flatly.

‘But it’s no piece of shit. The edges of the bottom layer have been sharpened to a fine edge. It will easily slice skin and muscle.’ Which it had done the night before.
Stupid cop
.
Sneaking up on me
. ‘If you use enough pressure, it’ll cut through bone. Connect the pieces like this.’ Mitch snapped them together. ‘This other piece isn’t sharp. Therefore it is the handle.’ He said it like he might to a kindergartner.

Giving him a dirty look, George crossed his arms over his chest. ‘Prove it.’

I should prove it on you
. But that wouldn’t suit his goal. Mitch looked around the alley, spied a bicycle tire. He picked it up and tossed it to George, who dropped the original dull fingerprint-riddled plastic brace so that he could catch it.

‘
What the fuck?
’ George exploded. ‘I gotta go to court. I might be on TV and you almost messed up my suit.’

‘If you hold the tire, you’ll know how much pressure I’m using to cut it.’ The knife easily sliced through the tire and George’s irate disbelief became greedy delight.

‘Give it to me.’ George opened his backpack. ‘Small bills, just like you asked for.’

‘Very good.’ Just to mess with him, Mitch began to count the cash.

George growled. ‘If I miss the verdict, I promise you will be a very unhappy man.’

‘I don’t want to be unhappy.’ Mitch unsnapped the handle from the blade, fitted the plates together and slid them into the brace. ‘There you go.’

‘If I get caught with this thing, you’ll be even unhappier.’ With that, George shoved the backpack at him and took off, fastening the brace to his wrist as he ran.

Actually, if you get caught I’ll be exceptionally happy, you inbred dick
.

Once alone, Mitch emptied the backpack, dumping the cash into the plastic grocery sack. He scooped up the legitimate plastic brace plate that George had dropped, put it in the backpack, and tossed the backpack behind a Dumpster, his plan on track.

The cops would inevitably find the weapon he’d just sold to George, either because George got caught in security or because the Millhouses’ crazy Plan B actually worked and they ended up using it in the courtroom.

Regardless, Baltimore PD’s CSU expert would be so excited – because in the crevice where the handle met George’s blade, they’d find blood that matched a certain dead DC Metro cop. George and the whole Millhouse clan would be on the hook.

Sweet
. One more thing to do and he could go home. Mitch took Ford Elkhart’s iPhone from his pocket and slid the SIM card he’d removed the night before back into place. Turning it on, he checked Ford’s texts. There were several, including two from somebody who appeared to be Ford’s boss, asking why he hadn’t shown up at his job.

Mitch had been surprised to find Ford had a job at all considering he was mega-rich. Granted, it was a nerd desk job, but the kid put in twenty hours a week. On top of his studies and sports and his girlfriend, he kept busy. Hard to find time for his mama.

Who would be in court, waiting for that jury verdict.
I’m so damn tired of hearing about that verdict
. But the Millhouses couldn’t have come along at a better time. All the trash talk aimed at the prosecution gave him one enormous decoy to hide behind.

I want Montgomery to suffer
.
I want her to die
.
But I won’t get caught
. Prison was not for the faint-hearted, which he knew first-hand. Much better for the cops to think the Millhouses were behind his evil deeds.
Much better if no one suspects me at all
.

Except for Daphne, of course.
She needs to know that I’m the one holding the gun to her head
.
Just like she held the gun to my mother’s
.

Ford’s phone held no new texts from his mother. Old texts asked how he was, how was school. Ford’s responses were brief, so the text Mitch had in mind would fit right in.

Good luck, Mom!
he typed, then removed the SIM card and turned off the phone. The cops would soon start hunting for Ford. When they checked his phone records, they’d think he’d sent a text from this very spot.

Unfortunately, all they’d find when they got here would be George Millhouse’s backpack – and one plastic wrist brace plate with George’s fingerprints all over it.
The same shape as the blade George is smuggling into the courthouse at this very moment
.

I love it when everything comes together
. Now he could go home. He’d first check on the girls, make sure they hadn’t died from exposure or blood loss during the night.

Then I have to sleep
. He should feel tired after driving so many hours, but he didn’t. He felt juiced. On the verge. The plans he’d spent months constructing in painful detail were about to come to fruition. It was as if he’d spent months setting up dominoes in intricate designs and now stood poised to nudge the first one down. It was going to be one hell of a show.

And so even though he wasn’t tired, he’d make himself sleep. He needed to be well rested so that he didn’t miss a single moment.

Tuesday, December 3, 10.10
A.M.

Assistant State’s Attorney Daphne Montgomery glanced at the clock on the wall for the tenth time in as many minutes. The door to the jury deliberation room remained firmly closed and the tension in the courtroom seemed to double with every sweep of that slow-moving minute hand.
What the hell is
taking
them so long?

‘What the hell is
taking
them so long?’ a male voice muttered over her shoulder. Daphne looked up to see her boss pulling out the chair next to hers. ‘Just a little moral support before the party starts,’ Grayson added in a murmur. ‘This is always the hardest for me. Waiting those last few minutes for the jury to file in.’

‘Assuming they’re even still back there and haven’t all fled to Tahiti or something,’ Daphne murmured back. Which would be par for the course for this case, a three-ring circus even before jury selection had begun, thirty very long days ago.

Grayson frowned. ‘What do you know?’

‘Only that the jurors saw the protesters this morning, just like we did.’ The crowd had more than doubled that morning, their collective energy increasing by far more. ‘And the Millhouse contingent is smiling like canary-eating cats.’

The Millhouse contingent included Bill and Cindy – parents of the accused – and a half dozen of their saner family members. ‘Saner’ being relative, of course.

‘More like vultures,’ Grayson said with contempt. ‘Circling.’

Reggie sat at the defendant’s table with an arrogant smile.
He expects to be acquitted
. The eighteen-year-old had beaten an African-American couple to death after finding them stranded on the road. His lawyer had the nerve to present a self-defense plea, claiming the couple lured an unsuspecting Reggie to their aid and struck him first.

The media had stirred a frenzy in the city. Reggie’s father, Bill, had worked the talk-show circuit, presenting his family as ordinary, hard-working, and middle-class, struggling to make ends meet and pay the rent – just like everyone else. Bill Millhouse had made numerous pleas for support – and dollars – for Reggie’s defense.

Has this country become so politically correct that a white man can’t defend himself?
had become Bill’s sound bite. His followers had responded enthusiastically, donating a staggering sum through a website set up for that purpose.

Black community leaders responded with rhetoric of their own and the battle spread from television to churches and civic halls, bars and beauty parlors, spilling over into the largely anonymous internet blogosphere like . . . a cancer. Insidious and terrifying.

But defeatable
, Daphne thought resolutely.
This I know for a fact
.

Because she’d beaten cancer herself. It was an empowering thing, beating cancer. It had left her with the feeling of
I stared death in the eye, so hit me with your best shot, asshole
. Earned arrogance, so to speak. Reggie’s arrogance was nothing but a cheap imitation.
Like a ten-dollar Prada knockoff
.

She met Reggie’s eyes across the aisle. Watched his smile fade to a grim snarl.
Too bad his online fan club isn’t here to see it
. Reggie pretended to be a poster child for milk-drinking, clean-living, misunderstood American youth. A frightening number of people in TV and Internet-land had bought his innocent act, lock, stock, and wallet.

And then you met me, you little sonofabitch
.

‘
Well, sugar,’ she said softly to Grayson, ‘those vultures can circle all they want. I’m nobody’s road kill today.’

‘Atta girl,
sugar
,’ he said, mimicking her twang. A glance up at him revealed the approval in his eyes. Because she knew the kind of man he was, his approval meant a lot. But his approval was tempered with caution. ‘Are you wearing your vest?’

‘Every damn day, because either way this jury comes back, there’ll be trouble.’

‘Either way this jury comes back,’ Grayson countered, ‘you’ve done a good job.’

‘I had good evidence.’ The detectives had been meticulous, the ME unshakable. Daphne had presented a solid case while the Millhouse clan stared with blatant malice, trying to intimidate her. That they’d succeeded was a secret she’d never reveal.

‘You stuck,’ Grayson said simply. ‘A lot of prosecutors would have quit. A few did.’

I almost did, too
. Daphne had no doubts that the Millhouses were responsible for the threatening phone calls she’d received, but the police hadn’t been able to prove it. The calls had started months ago, long before the first juror was chosen. At first they’d been annoying but quickly swelled into threats that left her shaken.

She’d started driving a different way home every night and her two newest – and now closest – friends had become concerned. A pair of PIs, they’d taken charge of the escalating situation, providing the kind of personal security that the police simply couldn’t give her.

Clay Maynard had ensured her house was wired with the best security system money could buy. Paige Holden drilled her in self-defense moves and had given her a very big dog. Things had settled for a while, and Daphne redoubled her efforts to build a case that would wipe that arrogant smile off the little bastard’s face.

But when the callers had threatened her son . . . Daphne had come damn close to calling it quits. She’d begged Ford to accept a bodyguard, but her twenty-year-old, testing-his-wings son had point-blank refused and no amount of reason had swayed him. So, being a mom, she’d hired one anyway.
He’d shit a ring if he knew the truth
. But she wouldn’t apologize if he found out.
Because I sleep better
.
A little
.

More important than her sleep, it had given her the strength to stay the course.

She’d been through a hell of a lot in her life and was proud that she’d never given up. There’d been a few times she’d had to hunker down and wait out a storm, but mostly she’d risen to whatever challenge had been tossed in her path. Giving up had rarely even entered her mind. But the thought of the Millhouses touching a single hair on Ford’s head had given her serious pause.

‘I don’t give up so easily,’ she said, grateful she’d had the financial means to make that statement true. If she hadn’t been able to afford protection for Ford, she might have run for the hills. Instead, she’d pushed forward, prosecuting an eighteen-year-old murderer who’d regarded her with chilling contempt from the first day of the trial.

Now the final decision lay with the jury.

‘Miss Montgomery.’

Daphne turned to the quiet voice on the bench behind her. It was Sondra Turner, the daughter of the victims. Barely twenty-one, she’d conducted herself with a dignity far beyond her years. Beside her was her younger brother, DeShawn, who sat slightly bent forward, his eyes closed. His clenched fists rested on his knees.