Thomas Prescott Superpack (56 page)

I said, “That’s a pretty good story.”

He furrowed his brow. “It’s the truth. Honest to God. It’s what happened. I swear to God I didn’t kill my wife. You have to believe me.”

Before I could answer, he said, “I thought this was all over.
That crazy Professor killed her. Because she wouldn’t let those wolves live here or something. I mean, this is all over and done with.”

No.
It just started.

He looked at me.
Then, almost shouting, he said, “You have to believe me, I didn’t kill my wife.”

“I know.”

He cut his eyes at me. “You know?”

“I know you didn’t kill your wife.”

“Because that crazy Professor did.”

“The Professor didn’t kill your wife.”

The Professor had just been unlucky. A final unfortunate event to add to a long list of unfortunate events that had plagued his life. 

There was a rattle at the door.
A second later the doors burst open and a man entered. Daniel Proctor. He looked at Gray and said, “This better be fucking good.”

I smiled and said, “He did.”

Chapter 55

The right side of Daniel Proctor’s mouth went up, the sneer running up the side of his pointy nose and into his slicked-back hair. He gave me the once-over, then said, “What the fuck are you doing here?”

I smiled and said, “I missed you too.”

Adam took a step forward. “You two know each other?”

“I put him in intensive care for a couple weeks about eight years ago.”
I turned to Proctor and said, “They put your face back together nicely.”

Proctor scoffed and I could tell he was envisioning me getting eaten by a shark or something.
He moved his sneer from me to Adam and said, “All right, you want to tell me what the fuck you called me for? And what are these new charges against me?”

Adam appeared to be fighting down a smile.
He said, “I didn’t call you.” He let that sink in, then added, “Listen closely to me, you despicable piece of shit. I no longer represent you. I told you that. I hoped to go the rest of my life without having to listen to another syllable that came out of that deplorable, retched, fecal hole you call a mouth. A day hasn’t gone by since your trial that I haven’t felt dirty. Dirty, because I let you loose. Might as well run around the city with a can of anthrax. You fucking piece of shit.”

If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought Adam wasn’t too fond of Daniel Proctor.

Proctor ignored his rant and said, “Then who called me?”

I smiled. “I did.”

“You?”

“Me.”

“What the fuck do you want?”

“I wanted to apprise you of the new charges against you.”

“New charges my ass.”
After a second’s pause, he added, “What new charges?”

“Three counts of first-degree murder.
Ellen Gray, Riley Peterson, and Julia Zadiez.”

I saw a thin smirk flash across Proctor’s face, an instinctive flinch of pride.
In that moment I was certain.

I turned to Adam.
His face had gone white at the sound of Julia’s name. I said, “Yeah, the secretary you were having an affair with. He killed her.”

Something had always been missing.
Ellen Gray, the yacht, the timeline of her death, it never did quite add up. It had always been like thunder trying to catch up to a lightning strike. That’s because everyone had been looking at it all wrong. Adam Gray hadn’t been framed for his wife’s murder. He’d been framed for his mistress’s murder.

Proctor laughed and said, “This is complete bullshit.
I’m out of here.” He took a couple steps in the direction of the door. “You want to talk to me, direct all questions to my lawyer. Saw two other firms in this building. In fact, I’ll have them call you. This is fucking harassment.”

I was standing right next to the door, leaning my shoulder against it.
My left hand was hidden behind my back.

Proctor looked at me and smiled.
I read the smile as, “You’re a dead man, Prescott.” He reached out his hand and pulled on the knob. The door didn’t budge and he said, “What the fuck?”

About halfway through Adam’s rant, I had taken the liberty of turning the deadbolt on the door.
I raised my left arm and stuck the gun up to his temple. “Sit the fuck down. You aren’t going anywhere.”

. . .

I walked him over to the couch. It was a different couch—nearly identical, but a soft tan as opposed to the cinnamon of earlier. 

Proctor didn’t look quite as fearful as I would have liked.
I nearly pulled the trigger. But I wanted to get a couple things straight before I sent him to the great beyond. His seat in the fiery pits wasn’t going anywhere.

I’d forgotten about Adam in the excitement.
He was standing at the bar pouring himself another scotch. I waved him over with the gun. “Come over here. I want you to hear this.”

He made his way over.
The two of us stood, towering over the despondent Daniel Proctor. He didn’t appear to be going anywhere and I lowered the gun. I said, more to Gray than Proctor, “Here’s what happened.”

I took a cleansing breath.
“I don’t think he planned on killing your wife. It was spur of the moment. But when you grabbed your camera and started hiking up the mountain, he decided the opportunity was too good to pass up. He grabs the gun, the gun from your glove compartment, and runs up the trail after your wife.

“I’m not exactly sure what happens here.
He approaches her. Maybe he tries to rape her. But your wife, she’s a strong woman, probably puts up a pretty good fight and he ends up shooting and killing her. He stashes the body somewhere and runs back to the car. He was probably gone half the time you were.”

Gray glanced at Proctor, then said, “When I got back to the car, he had shit all over him.
He had blood all over his face. He said he’d gone to take a piss and had gotten whipped in the face by a tree. I didn’t push it.”

I nodded.

“You get back to the house and go out on the yacht. Proctor runs down to the galley, grabs a rag, and wipes the blood off his face.” This was how Ellen’s blood had made its way onto Adam’s yacht. I doubted if the governor had ever stepped foot on her husband’s prized possession, alive or dead. “You spend the next couple hours going over his testimony.”

Adam amended that.
“An hour at most. He said he wasn’t feeling well so we called it a day.”

I nodded.
Made sense. He wanted to dispose of the body as soon as possible.

I said, “He hightails it back up to the mountains and locates where he stashed your wife’s body, which, sadly, has already been partially devoured.
Devoured by a pack of wolves the Professor had been illegally transporting to the mountains. One had even ripped off her backpack and dragged it several miles to where it was found near the glacial ravine.”

This was slightly ironic, seeing as the very reason Ellen Gray was up there in the first place was that she had a suspicion the Professor was transporting wolves to the North Cascades.

I looked at Proctor. He was sitting rapt, engaged. Like when a third-party tells
your
joke. I may not get the lead in verbatim, but you could be damn sure I knew the fucking punch line.

I continued.
“There’s a river only a quarter mile up the trail and Proctor tosses her body in. The better part of a month goes by. Proctor loves that the tables have been turned. Here his attorney treats him like dirt, like the piece of shit that he is, treats him like the murderer that he is, and now all of Seattle is looking at his attorney, the untouchable Adam Gray, the same way. He loves it. Can’t get enough. But slowly the story dies. There is no evidence against Gray. And it turns out that people believe him when he says that he had nothing to do with his wife’s disappearance.”

I turned to Proctor and said, “That had to burn you up.
When you tell people you’re innocent they scoff, but Gray, everyone believed him.”

Proctor didn’t react.
I think he worried Gray or I, or both of us, were wired. I didn’t expect the guy to say another word. In fact, the only words I expected to ever hear from Daniel Proctor’s mouth were, “Please don’t kill me.”

I said, “So time is running out on Proctor.
He only has a couple more weeks out on bail and then if he is found guilty he will be going away for a long, long, time. He knows his lawyer is good, but he’s pushed his luck. He killed that girl, and he’s going to jail for a long time. Not even the famed Adam Gray can get him out of this one. Besides, he knows Gray hates him, so why would he go to bat for him? No, surely his luck has run out. So he frames his attorney for murder. At worst, his case will be a mistrial and he will have another six months out on bail. At best, Gray will go to jail before he does.”

I looked at Adam. “The night you were attacked, you were with Julia?”

He nodded. For the first time since I’d met him, he looked distraught, sad. He might not have loved his wife, but he loved Julia.

He took a deep breath and said, “I was putting her through law school.
She’d just finished her last final, so I took her out for drinks. We were usually pretty good about not going out in public, but we had a legitimate excuse so we decided to risk it.” He looked down. His mind couldn’t help but play the devil’s advocate. What if they stayed in that night? Or worse, what if he hadn’t been sleeping with her? Would she still be alive?

I’ve played that game enough to know it doesn’t help.
It eats at you. Rips at your insides.

I asked, “Did Proctor know?”

“Know?”

“Know you would be with her that night?”

Adam thought for a moment. He looked at Proctor. “Yeah, we were supposed to go over some more of his testimony that night, but I couldn’t stand another second with the guy. I didn’t even want to win the case anymore. I wanted to see him rot. He’d seen the two of us around each other. I think he knew what was going on. He asked me a couple times if I was fucking her. Actually said that he wished he could fuck her. I wanted to kill the sick bastard myself for that.”

Adam’s face was flushed, and he’d barely choked out the last sentence.

I said, “So he follows the two of you.
You leave the bar. He probably waited until you were in the underground garage. He’s got a tranquilizer gun he got off the Net and shoots you in the leg. Shoots her as well.”

They’d found traces of Ketamine in Julia’s system.
 

“I’m thinking that he’d planned on taking you with him, maybe even putting you on the yacht. But you fight him off and get away.
He takes your car. Drives to your house, takes out your yacht.”

I skip the part about what he probably did to her on the yacht.
Hans did the autopsy, and I knew she’d been brutally raped. Three bullets in the stomach.

“He drives to the most highly trafficked waterway in the Sound and dumps the body.
If all goes according to plan, the body would be found within a couple days, Proctor can spill the beans on his lawyer and the secretary’s romance, and Gray will be arrested for her murder.”

But her body didn’t surface.
However, in a twist of fate, Ellen Gray’s body does surface. It has been carried into the Sound by the raging river.

I pulled out a piece of paper I had folded in my back pocket.
Hans had faxed it to me at the library. I handed it to Adam. He unfolded the paper and looked at it. It was a picture of Julia Zadiez’s corpse. The private detective he’d hired had come up empty. But his PI hadn’t been as smart as me.

I said, “I’m sorry.”

I’d had Hans run the fingerprint of the Jane Doe from the yacht against all missing persons or Jane Does in the last six months. He came up with a match on a woman found about thirty miles north of Everest by a fisherman. She was found two weeks after Ellen’s body was found, the very day Adam was arrested for his wife’s murder.

Other than a small blurb in the Everest community paper, the story was all but lost in the shuffle of the governor’s body turning up.
Had anyone looked closely at the two, they wouldn’t have been able to see any connection. One body had been in the water for nearly six weeks, carried into the Sound by one of the North Cascades raging rivers, a bullet in the forehead, and nearly half eaten. The other had been in the water for roughly two weeks, savagely raped, three bullets in the stomach. The only similarities were that all the bullets came from the same gun. A .32. And that both women shared a very rare blood type.

Gray’s eyes had glossed over.

I said, “After Julia went missing, you hired a private detective to look for her. You couldn’t go to the police; it would look too suspicious coinciding with your wife’s disappearance. You didn’t even call the police after you’d been attacked; you thought it would look too conspicuous. So you made up some story about Julia’s mother, hired a new receptionist, and moved all her stuff into storage. You knew nobody would come looking for her or report her missing; her mom was dead and she hadn’t spoken with her father in years.”

Gray looked up from the photo and stared at Proctor.
His lip was quivering.

I looked at Proctor and said, “This asshole might have tipped off the police to the Julia connection, but to his great surprise his lawyer gets him off.
He’s a free man.”

I added, “You recognized me that day in court.
So come New Year’s Eve, you follow me up to the mountains with the idea of either killing me or finding a way to make my life miserable.”

I thought about the small flicker of light I’d seen from Riley’s window.
I looked at the square bulge in the front left pocket of Proctor’s jeans. He’d been smoking cigarettes as he patiently awaited his next murder. I could feel the blood rushing through my temples, and I instinctively brought the gun up and pointed it at his dick. He didn’t appear to like this much and squirmed on the long couch.

I gritted my teeth.
“You waited for me to leave. Then you—”