Justice Served: A Barkley and Parker Thriller (2 page)

Meanwhile the defense had produced witnesses
who would testify that the defendant was seen at work at the
alleged time of the assault. It was a shaky alibi at best that left
a window of opportunity for Roberto Martinez to have committed the
offense and returned to the job. But given that the victim was
unwilling to refute this, the prosecution had little choice but to
go along with George McArdle’s request that the charges be
dropped.

And neither did Carole, though this pained
her more than she was willing to admit. The thought that a scumbag
batterer like Martinez should get off so easily was disturbing. But
then, that was the system for you. Justice often needed help to be
dispensed properly.

Looking Roberto Martinez straight in the eye,
Carole announced unaffectedly: “The charges have been dropped.
You’re free to leave, Mr. Martinez.”

He grinned lasciviously, gave his attorney a
hearty bear hug, and headed for the door without so much as a slap
on the wrist.

Growling at Julian Frommer, Carole snapped:
“I would strongly suggest that in the future you not waste the
court’s time—or mine—with a case you were clearly unprepared to
make!”

On that note and without giving him a chance
for a lame response, she headed for her chambers, disappointed that
another woman beater, who was obviously guilty, had found a way to
beat the system. Much in the same way he had his lover.

* * *

At Portland General Hospital, Lucie Garcia
winced from the pain that wracked her entire body like it was being
assaulted all at once. This in spite of the painkillers she had
been given. They told her she was lucky to be alive. She didn’t
feel so lucky.

The Hispanic twenty-three-year-old rolled her
large ink-black eyes, as if to ward off danger. Her brunette hair
splayed across the pillow soaked with perspiration. An irregular
line of blood had seeped across it from her mouth, which had been
cut and was swollen to twice its normal size. A tube was helping
her to breathe. Her fractured bones were held together with pins
and casts. The rest of her was held together through sheer
willpower.

She thought about Roberto. She’d been told he
had been released from custody. Without her testimony, the case had
gone out the window. Like a parakeet freed from its cage.

When it came right down to it, Lucie knew she
couldn’t testify against Roberto. Though she was afraid of him, and
the beatings had become more frequent and more violent in recent
months as his alcohol abuse grew worse, she loved him. She couldn’t
help it anymore than a mother could help loving her son, no matter
what he did to hurt her.

Roberto was the only man she had ever loved.
The only one who didn’t run away at the first opportunity another
piece of ass came into view. For that she was grateful. The rest
just came with the territory as far as she was concerned.

Still, Lucie wondered what awaited her when
she got home. Would Roberto take it out on her because he had been
in police custody? Would he want her back now that she was badly
bruised and broken and didn’t look anything at all like the pretty
Latina who had captured his attention in the beginning?

Lucie winced again before the sedative began
to take effect and she drifted off into a restless sleep. Her last
thought was that maybe she would awaken and find it had all been an
awful dream.

Deep down inside she knew otherwise.

CHAPTER TWO

Roberto Martinez was counting his blessings
as he sat in the bar getting drunk. He had been staring at twenty
to life, according to his Afro American public defender. He figured
that he’d be lucky if he ever saw the light of day again while he
was young enough to be able to appreciate it.

But the devil must have been watching over
his shoulder. Here he was out amongst the living again, and there
wasn’t a damned thing anyone could do about it.

He thought about his old lady. Yeah, he’d
beaten the hell out of her. But, dammit, she deserved it. They all
did. Especially when they opened their big mouths too much and
their legs too little. It was the only way to keep them in line.
All whores needed to be kept in line, one way or the other.

Roberto Martinez finished off his last shot
of whiskey before winking at the sweet looking black broad wearing
shades in the corner while imagining what he could do with her,
then moseying out of the bar. The night was cool for this time of
year and darker than most. Stars seemed to have disappeared, as if
relinquishing their place in space for other solar systems.

Roberto had half staggered about a block when
he heard footsteps behind him. He turned and saw a tall, stacked,
dark skinned woman with a blonde wig of box braids almost on top of
him. He remembered she was the broad in the bar sitting all by her
lonesome at the end of the counter. Only she was without the
sunglasses, so he could see her eyes. They were deep, dark,
enchanting. Just like the bitch herself.

“You looking for some action, honey?” she
asked in a voice that sounded vaguely familiar.

He studied her. She had on a tight red dress
that hugged every curve of her statuesque body, red gloves, and
stiletto shoes. She was obviously a hooker. Why the hell not? It
wasn’t like his old lady was at home waiting to greet him or
anything.

He grinned. “Yeah, I’m looking for some
action, baby. How much will it cost?” He figured she was worth
maybe twenty. Twenty-five if she was real good to him.

“Keep your money,” she said curtly. “Let’s
just say I’m in a generous mood tonight.”

Roberto regarded her uneasily. Was this some
kind of a setup or something? Were they trying to get him back
behind bars? Trying to trick him into doing something stupid on
account of what he did to Lucie and got away with it?

“You ain’t a cop, are you?” he asked
tentatively.

She placed a hand on her rounded hip. “Do I
look like a cop to you, sugar?”

Roberto grinned again. “Not like any damned
cop I’ve seen,” he had to admit.

“Then why are we wasting time here
jawing?”

He felt at ease again. His libido was
admittedly in need of a quick fix.

“Yeah,” he said. “Why are we? Your place or
mine?”

“Neither.” She pointed toward the alley. “In
there.”

He looked into the darkened alley. It was
hardly the ideal place to get laid. But who was he to argue? He
could get his rocks off just about anywhere.

“Lead the way,” he told her.

He followed the whore to the back of the
alley, where she leaned up against a wall and urged him on.

“Come and get it, big boy,” she teased.

Roberto could hardly contain himself as he
rushed towards her. He only noticed at the last moment that she had
picked up something with lightning quick speed and swung it hard at
his head. He felt the impact as his skull cracked, sending him to
his knees. The pain cut through him like a sharp knife. Make that a
dozen sharp knives.

“How does it feel?” she asked him, a suddenly
wicked edge to her voice. Before he could even think past the pain,
much less respond, she struck him again with what he now suspected
was a wooden bat. This time it connected across his back, smashing
into his spine, paralyzing him. “Does it feel good, asshole?”

She swung the bat like an All Star baseball
player, landing flush against his right cheek, dislodging his jaw
and most of the teeth on that side of his face.

“Isn’t this what you like to do to women,
Roberto?” she spat, clubbing him across the top of the head,
crushing his skull. “Well, how about a taste of your own medicine,
you bastard!”

She swung again and again, each blow
shattering another part of him, sending blood, bone, brain, and
body pieces flying everywhere.

By the time she was finished, he was long
dead. But it didn’t matter, for she received great satisfaction to
see to it that even in death he would never be whole again. Just
like the lover he had beaten to a pulp.

She tossed the bloodied bat atop the corpse.
Then she removed her wig, gloves, dress, and shoes. She put them in
a duffel bag, slipped on some jeans, a sweater, and tennis shoes,
leaving Roberto Martinez’s remains to rot like raw meat.

CHAPTER THREE

The narrow alleyway had been turned into a
crime scene as police rummaged through a dumpster for evidence
while technicians gathered everything they could as standard
procedure in a murder investigation. Portland Police Bureau
Detective Sergeant Ray Barkley recoiled as his stone gray eyes
gazed at the mangled body with more than a few pieces missing. It
was the third time in the past five months a male had been beaten
to death with a bat in the city—the weapon left each time courtesy
of the assailant, as if to make a statement.

Ray Barkley had been in homicide for the last
ten of his twenty years on the force and thirty-seven years of
life. Since then he had seen just about everything there was to
see. But now he suspected he was seeing something entirely new.
What it was he wasn’t quite sure. Except that it scared the hell
out of him and most other men he knew—most of whom generally saw
themselves as invincible.

Till now.

“Looks like someone’s having one hell of a
time bashing skulls in,” remarked his partner, Detective Nina
Parker. At thirty-four, she was a short, but imposing, fit and
tough as nails, brown-skinned lady who had once briefly been his
lover. Until they both realized it was a big mistake mixing
business with intimate pleasure. They had used each other to get
over bad marriages and rotten luck in the relationship department.
In the end, they buried the sexual hatchet and rediscovered what it
meant to be friends off the job and partners on the job.

“Yeah, tell me about it,” grumbled Ray,
rolling his hand across his shaven bald head. Clad in his usual
cheap on the job dark suit and loafers, he was six-four and
sturdily built, though admittedly having slacked off somewhat of
late with the weightlifting and aerobics. A black mustache
accentuated his square-jawed oak complexion. “On second thought,
don’t. I can see for myself that it doesn’t pay to be the wrong
dude at the wrong time and place these days.”

“Who says it was the
wrong
dude?” Nina
sneered, her brown blonde-streaked Bantu knots bouncing against the
shoulders of her olive blazer. “Or the wrong time and place? Seems
to me that whoever did this knew exactly what man to go after,
when, and where!”

It was an observation Ray could hardly
dispute. Which made it all the more frightening. It suggested that
specific men were being targeted. But by whom?

He looked at the corpse again. Clearly the
perpetrator had battered him long after he was dead. Just like the
others.

As if to say death itself was not enough to
release the rage felt by the killer.

“We got a name yet?” Ray asked of the
deceased, eyeing Nina.

She pulled out a notepad from the back pocket
of her slacks that were tight around her nice ass.

“Name’s Roberto Martinez,” Nina said. “Lives
on 8652 Andover. The killer never bothered to take his wallet,
money, or anything else as far as we can tell. Not that he had all
that much to take,” she added. “Unless you consider twenty-five
bucks and a ring that was worth maybe half that as a king’s
ransom.”

“The man didn’t have to be a king to deserve
a better fate than what he ended up with.” Ray glanced at the
victim. “Roberto Martinez. Why the hell does that name sound
familiar?”

Nina batted big, bold, brown eyes. “Maybe
because a Roberto Martinez was recently charged with assaulting his
girlfriend... Lucie Garcia—”

“Yeah, right.” They’d both heard the call
come in about the domestic disturbance that had become so
commonplace in Portland that many in the department considered them
more nuisance cases than crimes. He imagined they would have to be
taken more seriously as the body count continued to rise.

Ray took a hard look at the face that was so
disfigured it was hard to imagine it was human. “You think this is
the same Roberto Martinez?”

“Let me put it this way,” Nina responded
sardonically, “just this afternoon all charges were inexplicably
dropped against Martinez and he walked.”

“Just like that?” Ray cocked a brow.

“Just like that.”

“How?” As if he had to ask. It happened all
too often in domestic violence cases. Reluctant victims and some
reluctant police and prosecutors who still saw domestic violence as
something that belonged in family court not criminal court.

“Girlfriend refused to testify,” Nina
informed him. “Need I say more?”

“Looks like somebody’s already spoken for the
girlfriend,” he said, taking one final look at the badly assaulted
remains. “Loud and clear.”

Ray signaled the team from the medical
examiner’s office that they could take the body. He had seen all he
cared to of it for the moment.

* * *

During the drive back to the station, Ray sat
in the passenger seat while Nina drove their department issued late
model dark sedan.

“So what are we looking at here, a
vigilante?” he asked, but already knew the answer. The first two
victims had recently been charged with abusing a woman, but had
managed to beat the rap without having to do time. Shortly
thereafter they had been found in much the same fashion as this
latest victim.

Nina glanced at him. “You got a better idea?
It’s obvious someone’s decided to create the justice that doesn’t
seem to be coming from the system.”

Ray’s nostrils flared. “Hell, just what we
need—some bat wielding do-gooder, battering batterers. What’s next,
rapists being raped to death?” The thought made him twitch.

“You’ve got to admit, there’s a certain irony
to the manner of death chosen by the killer.” She rounded a corner
sharply. “Don’t get me wrong, Barkley, I’m definitely not in favor
of people taking the law into their own hands. Especially like
this. But let’s face it, there hasn’t been nearly enough attention
paid to domestic violence in this country. If nothing else, maybe
this will turn some heads.”