For the Defense (18 page)

She also understood that Jack was avoiding her.

“Do you want me to come there?” he asked.

“Be easier than my trying to lug all the paperwork elsewhere. We can use the conference room here to sort through them. It’s free today. What’s your schedule like?”

“I’ll be over in fifteen minutes.”

Diana hung up the phone, trying not to be excited at the thought she would soon be seeing him.

No, I don’t want to be just friends with your mom. But I’m going to try.

That’s exactly what he was doing, too.

Diana had overheard everything Jack had said to Mel on the porch steps. His kindness and consideration for her daughter had touched her heart. The fact that his words had not been empty but that he was living up to them meant a lot.

And made her wish he wasn’t living up to them quite so well.

Shaking her head at her confusing emotions, she stacked the questionnaires onto the mail cart she’d borrowed from Kelli and wheeled it down to the conference room, trying not to spill the two cups of coffee on top.

Jack arrived a few minutes later wearing light blue jeans, a sleeveless dark blue T-shirt, a baseball cap and dark glasses. Other than the loose sweats he’d worn to help her move, Diana had only seen him in suits.

Unfortunately, these formfitting clothes gave him an even sexier look. After an appreciative moment in which her stare traveled from his flat stomach to the well-defined muscles in his exposed arms, she finally managed to lift her eyes to his.

“Casual day at the office?”

He smiled in response. “I had an early breakfast with one of Bruce’s old girlfriends this morning.”

Diana didn’t like her reaction to that news. She sat down, infused her tone with a professionalism she did not feel. “Have a seat. Tell me all.”

Taking a chair two down from hers, he removed his sunglasses and immediately reached for the coffee. Since he claimed to have had breakfast, she would have thought he’d already gotten his caffeine fix for the morning.

Then it occurred to Diana that food and drink might not have been on the breakfast menu—inasmuch as it involved
one of Bruce’s old girlfriends. Unaccustomed jealousy clouded her heart.

How foolish she was to feel this way. All she and Jack had ever shared was a kiss. She had no claim on him. No woman would ever have a claim on him.

“This is the ninth old girlfriend of Bruce’s I’ve met with outside of Tina Uttley,” he said. “Four of them were from the days in which he barhopped, five after he joined AA. Each tells the same story. Although he diligently pursued them, once the conquest was over, so was his ardor.”

Was Jack like that as well?

Diana gave herself a mental kick. Her preoccupation with Jack’s love life wasn’t only stupid. It was distracting her from the case.

“Two of the women from his drinking days were married,” Jack went on. “They were the most bitter when the relationship ended since they felt they had taken a big risk to be with him. Still, married or not, they both struck me as women with wandering eyes. And not even they accused Bruce of being cruel, merely emotionally uninvolved.”

“Are you saying you don’t think he was being cruel when he went after Connie?”

“His pursuit of Connie was cruel, but I’m beginning to doubt he meant it to be. You remember my telling you last week about Edgar Pettibone and his parrot?”

Diana nodded. “Bruce tried to give Edgar another parrot as an apology for having killed his.”

The implication of what Jack was getting at hit Diana. “You can’t think that Bruce intended to marry Connie as some sort of apology for having killed her child?”

“As wild as that sounds, I’m beginning to wonder. I’ve talked to several AA counselors while trying to track down where Bruce attended meetings. I’ve learned that one of
the Twelve Steps in the program is to list all persons you’ve harmed and make amends to them.”

“But to pursue and propose marriage to Connie without loving her and with no intention of ever being faithful to her…that wasn’t making amends, Jack. That was sick.”

“I agree. But Bruce might have seen it as atonement. You read Mel’s paper on the character I played. Remember how she characterizes him as totally oblivious when it came to understanding the impact of his actions on others?”

“You think Bruce was like that,” Diana guessed.

“I believe he could have been. Ever since reading Mel’s paper, I’ve been seeing a correlation between the character I played and Bruce. Bruce may have followed the Twelve-Step program’s precepts, but I seriously doubt he internalized them. He was too emotionally distant from the feelings of guilt, compassion and love to understand the impact of his behavior on others.”

Remembering Bruce’s callousness toward women both drunk and sober and his ruthlessness in business, Diana thought Jack might be right.

“Did you ever find out about a history he might have had with Tina prior to her coming to work at Weaton Real Estate?” she asked.

“When I retrieved my keys. Audrey Weaton was correct. Tina and Bruce did meet in school and both got kicked out and lost their tuition when some drunken practical joke Bruce pulled misfired. Wasn’t a big deal for Bruce. His parents coughed up the fee and got him into another class. But Tina had to wait tables for another year to get enough money to reapply.”

Diana shook her head. “Then he sobers up years later and gives her a job at his company where she becomes his handy mistress. And that’s how he apologizes to her for getting her kicked out of school?”

“In his warped way, that might have seemed perfectly fine to him.”

“Warped is putting it mildly.”

“Diana, if you give the facts we’ve uncovered about Bruce to psychologists with even half of Mel’s mental acuity, I think they’re going to come up with the same conclusion and be able to testify to Bruce’s twisted psyche on the stand.”

“Your brother, David, recommended a very good psychologist to me a year ago. I’ve already put his name on my witness list and sent him what you’ve given me so far on Bruce. I’ll pass along the rest and see what he says.”

Jack smiled. “Should have known you’d already be on top of it.”

Trying to ignore his smile and light compliment, she pushed on. “I assume you have written documentation on your interviews with Bruce’s ex-girlfriends in case we need to call them to the stand?”

“Harry is typing my notes as we speak. They should all be in your hands by the end of the day.”

She couldn’t resist repeating his words back to him. “Should have known you’d already be on top of it.”

What she read on his face made her heart race. She broke off eye contact, telling herself that he’d probably spent the night and morning with another woman.

Reaching for his coffee cup, Jack downed its contents. “Anything interesting in the returned questionnaires?”

She pushed the stack she’d already seen toward him. “I’ve reviewed about thirty of them. Their responses to the questions we asked about what character they’d like to play on TV or in the movies and what they would do if they won a million dollars are the most interesting.”

“Any concerns?”

“The thirty-two-year-old guy who picked Hannibal Lecter as the character he’d most like to be. He didn’t elab
orate on the reason, but his selection of a flesh-eating psychopath is enough for me to want to disqualify him.”

“What’s your favorite answer so far?” Jack asked as he picked up the first and started to flip through it.

She sent him a grin. “The seventy-year-old widower who says he’d like to be Derek Dementer because he got to sleep with every gorgeous female character on the show.”

Jack laughed, a wonderful hearty sound filled with such good nature it could only have sprung from a very good heart. And suddenly Diana found herself laughing along with him, no longer caring with whom he’d spent the night or morning.

She was in serious trouble.

W
ORK WAS
what Jack needed to concentrate on for the next few weeks—if he had any hopes of keeping his cool around Diana. Seeing her after seven long days of diligently staying away made him realize how much he’d missed her.

And after seeing the way she looked at him when he arrived, it was all he could do not to take her into his arms and make love to her right on that conference table.

But he couldn’t make love to her. What was nearly as depressing, he had absolutely no desire to make love to anyone else and hadn’t in weeks.

“You haven’t been your scintillating self lately, Jack.”

He looked over at his dad, sitting to his right at the Sunday dinner table. “Damn. Don’t tell me I forgot to take those scintillating pills again.”

Charles Knight chuckled. “The murder case getting you down?”

Jack hacked off a piece of his steak and stabbed it with his fork. “You kidding? This criminal stuff’s a breath of fresh air. A victim I’ve no desire to mourn. An accused
who should be getting off. It was all those civil cases you had me on that lacked civility.”

Charles watched Jack while he chewed. “And, yet, something’s turned down the dimmer switch on that lighthearted repartee you’re normally regaling us with.”

“Comes from putting in a lot of hours,” Jack said after swallowing.

“Good try, but not going to fly. You’ve kept me laughing through an entire dinner after twenty hours of standing out in the freezing rain filming a scene. Is it Diana Mason?”

Jack shoved more food into his mouth as a way of stalling for time.

His dad’s eyes didn’t move from his face. “Richard told me she spent the day in your office.”

Jack glared at his oldest brother who was in deep conversation with their mother on the other end of the table.

“Richard’s got sex on the brain, Dad.”

Charles’s eyebrow raised ever so slightly. “I was wondering whether Diana was proving difficult to please. I wasn’t trying to imply there was anything between you. But since you did, there must be.”

Damn. Opened mouth, inserted foot. Guilty conscience will do it every time.

Jack put down his fork, reached for the Cabernet in the center of the table. Normally he never touched red wine because it gave him a headache. Tonight he’d welcome a headache to take his mind off another ache.

He gestured toward his father’s empty glass. When Charles shook his head, Jack filled his wineglass. “For the record, there’s nothing unprofessional going on between me and Diana.”

“And you want there to be,” his dad said without a pause.

Jack took a sip, let the warm wine slide down his throat.
When the game was up, the best thing a man could do was gracefully admit defeat. “Oh, yeah.”

“Good luck, son.”

Jack didn’t know what he’d been expecting his dad to say, but that definitely hadn’t been it. He stared into his father’s quiet face.

“What, no congratulations on keeping things all business?” Jack challenged. “No cautionary tale about the dire consequences of what happens when a private investigator gets personal with a client?”

“You’ve kept things businesslike for your sake, not the business,” his dad said astutely. “As for the dire consequences…”

Charles Knight paused to gesture down the table toward Jack’s brother, David, and his new wife, Susan. “The dire consequences are staring you right in the face. You don’t need me to point them out.”

Jack watched the newly married pair, smiling at each other as only two mindless idiots madly in love could. A shiver shot down his spine.

When a hand clasped his shoulder, he jumped.

“Whoa, Jack,” Jared said. “It’s me.”

Jack made an effort to sound normal. “You’re late. We thought you weren’t coming.”

“Got tied up with a few things,” his twin explained.

“Better get some food while it’s hot, Jared,” their dad said.

“In a minute. I need to talk with Jack first. Let’s do it in the library.”

Jack read his brother’s pointed look and words. He excused himself from the table and followed his twin into the next room, closing the door behind them.

“I faxed the report on all the vehicles belonging to those sixty guys to your office before coming here,” Jared said.
“Wasted effort, Jack. None of them owned an old car that came even close to the one Connie Pearce saw.”

“You know what kind of car it was?”

“The FBI lab found a microscopic fleck of gray paint on Amy’s chain that matched a fleck of paint on the drop cloth found in Bruce’s garage. It’s a rare paint. Only one car in their database was a fit.”

“Come on, Jared. The suspense is killing me.”

“A 1932 Duesenberg SJ. Nothing less than a marvel in its time. A two-and-three-fourth ton bomb that took only seventeen seconds to reach one hundred miles an hour. No doubt about its ability to rip through a flimsy front porch like the kind on Connie’s Pearce’s house.”

“Can’t be many of those cars still around,” Jack said, already planning how he’d go about finding this one.

“There’s more,” Jared said. “Both the chain and locket had minute traces of skin and blood. The DNA matched the sample I sent from Amy Pearce’s forensic evidence file. The locket Connie was holding in her hands on the day of her arrest was definitely the one Amy was wearing when the car hit her.”

Jack’s voice bristled with excitement. “This forensic evidence proves that the car that hit and killed Amy as well as her locket were both in Bruce’s garage. Jared, this is great. We’ve got what we need to tie Bruce to Amy’s death.”

Filled with relief at the findings, it took a moment for Jack to note that his brother’s expression remained solemn.

“What?” he prodded.

“When Ms. Mason puts me on the stand, I’ll be able to testify to everything I’ve told you. But, Jack, I can’t keep this under wraps any longer. I’ve got to tell the sheriff what I’ve been working on come Monday.”

“Why?”

“Because this is no longer an old case that’s going to
be closed and relegated to the solved file because the perp is dead. According to that E.R. doctor, the woman who was with Bruce told a deputy she was driving.”

“But that was a lie,” Jack protested.

“Whether she lied is not the issue. The possibility that she was involved in the hit-and-run means she has to be found. To do that I have to openly question the deputies to see who was called down to the E.R. that day.”