Dead Last

by Amanda Lamb

  The boyfriend who pimped Maria, Raymond Fischer, was arrested after Tanner went to the police and showed them Fischer’s postings online advertising her services. An undercover officer did a sting where he pretended he was meeting Maria for sex, and when Raymond asked the officer for the money, they arrested him on the spot. After this incident, Tanner stayed involved with Maria and her family, visiting her frequently. He connected her with good prenatal medical care once she found out she was pregnant with a child that was presumably Raymond’s.

  One thing that still stumped me was the alleged text Maria had sent to Tanner under the name G6. I recalled Suzanne taking a screen shot of it and showing it to me. I also remembered that the text Suzanne showed me was followed by several heart emojis. That did not seem like the text of someone who was just friends with Tanner. But the prosecution never presented any illicit texts between the two during the trial, even though Maria’s phone and text records were subpoenaed.

  The Raymond Fischer story negated the state’s entire case, which was based on the narrative that Maria and Tanner were romantically involved, that he left her right after she had the baby, and that she became so angry, she killed him, or had him killed. The state kept this last part vague on purpose, I suspected because it was unlikely that she could have done it by herself.

  The only evidence linking Maria to Tanner the night he disappeared was a female witness at a Food Stop grocery store, who believed she saw Tanner and Maria get into a car together in the parking lot. She told investigators what she saw, but she had recently left the country to take care of her sick mother and was not available to testify. Another grocery store employee, Claude Roper, who was bringing the carts inside that night from the parking lot, corroborated this sighting after he was shown a photograph of Maria. He did take the stand.

  “Yes, that’s her.” Claude nodded as the prosecutor asked him to identify Maria in the courtroom by pointing at her.

  Maria looked down at her hands folded in her lap when the Claude’s finger zeroed in on her from the stand. He quickly pulled his hand back and nervously readjusted his thick, brown glasses, which tilted awkwardly on his nose during his testimony.

  Claude wore a plaid shirt buttoned all the way up to his neck. His pimply face was framed by a tangled mass of brown curls that looked like they had never seen a comb.

  “I remember her long black hair. It was shiny. I could see it under the light in the parking lot.”

  Defense attorneys said the sighting was not credible because Claude was only shown one photo, a photo of Maria, not a lineup containing photos of Maria along with other people. Prosecutors admitted this was not an ideal way to make an identification, but that the officer in charge of meeting with Claude was a rookie and didn’t know the proper procedure. Normally a gaff like this would cause the judge to throw the evidence out, saying it was obtained improperly, but Judge Wemberly allowed it after questioning Claude. The judge did this out of the presence of the jury to determine if Claude was improperly influenced to identify Maria by the photograph.

  “No, sir. I knew it was her immediately when I saw that photo. There’s no doubt in my mind it was the same woman.”

  This sighting would have been sometime in the evening, after Juan claimed Tanner had come for a visit, run out to pick some things up, and never returned. When Juan took the stand, he said Maria never left the family’s residence behind the restaurant that night. She stayed there with her newborn baby, and therefore could not have been at the grocery store.

  “No way. She never left the baby’s side, not for a minute,” Juan looked directly at the jurors as he made this statement.

  He was all cleaned up in a starched white dress shirt. His jet-black hair was slicked back behind his ears. I still wondered if Juan was the real killer. He came across as a combination of a loving brother who would defend his sister to the end of the world, and a gritty hustler who may have acted on that desire.

  While it was up for debate whether Maria was at the Food Stop, there was no doubt that Tanner was at the grocery store that night. Or at least his car was. Both Claude and the female tipster noticed a personalized license plate on the car with the letters TJP. This could not be a coincidence.

  My gut told me that Maria was not going to be convicted of Tanner’s murder. It was a circumstantial case with no direct forensic evidence pointing to her. Sure, they had the gun and the severed hand connected to the restaurant, but one could argue, as defense attorneys did, that hundreds of people had access to that restaurant and could have planted the evidence. With all the traffic in and out of La Fiesta daily, anyone could have stolen the gun and then hid it in the salsa. Hiding Tanner’s hand in the freezer was more problematic to explain for Maria’s team, but they threw out the possibility that Maria’s brothers may have been involved in his death without her knowledge. It was enough of a red herring to raise reasonable doubt.

  The other problem with the state’s case was that they gave the jury no plausible motive for Maria wanting Tanner dead. Even if she was upset with him, even if they were romantically involved, it made no sense that she would want to kill him, especially if he was the father of her child. To date, no DNA test had been done on the child to determine who the father was. It could have been the child of any one of the number of men Maria was forced to sleep with before Tanner intervened in her life. I guessed she didn’t want anyone else laying a legal claim to her baby. So she preferred not to know.

  The jury deliberated for four days before telling the judge they had done their best, but they were hopelessly deadlocked. I learned about this from a breaking news alert on my phone. I had opted out of them for several months, preferring to be blissfully unaware of the gloom and doom. But I had recently turned them back on when I felt like I was missing too much. The headline on my phone read: Judge declares mistrial in case of murdered doctor after jurors tell him they cannot reach a unanimous decision.

  As I sat in the parking lot outside the drycleaner, I watched the live courtroom reactions to the judge’s decision. I could hear the sound through my car speakers thanks to the magic of Bluetooth. Maria shrieked and then turned to one of her attorneys, a pale redheaded woman, who hugged her and then whispered in her ear. The camera then panned to the other side of the courtroom and zoomed in on Suzanne. The angle was from the side. I could barely see her face, but I could tell her lips were pursed and she was shaking her head. Jessie rubbed her back and laid her head on Suzanne’s shoulder. I couldn’t see Suzanne’s expression. Was it anger? Despair? Disappointment? Finally she turned and looked right into the camera lens, and I saw it. Disgust. She obviously wanted someone to pay for Tanner’s murder, but Maria was not going to be that person.

  O

  In the days following the trial, I decided it was time to let go of my grief. I realized I was still living in a suspended state of reality where I expected Adam to walk through the door at any moment. It was time to let the pain go.

  I sorted through his clothes and gave most of them to charity. I packed up his memorabilia—photos, awards, favorite books, and put them in boxes in the attic for the kids to have someday. I threw away his ratty flip-flops, his razor, and his threadbare robe.

  Right after Adam died, I held onto the most bizarre reminders of him—the last towel he showered with, his favorite orange juice, a tinfoil-wrapped piece of used gum discarded at the foot of our bed. It wasn’t until I noticed that the bloated container of juice in the refrigerator was full of mold that I threw it away. I continued to smell that shower towel, to bury my face in it every time I needed a good cry in my closet. Finally, the familiar comforting smell of Adam on the towel gave way to the stench of mildew. So I pitched it. Every time I walked by the gum wrapper on the floor, I ignored it against all my obsessive-compulsive inclinations, like it was a literal shrine to my dead husband. One day, I reached down, scooped it up, and threw it in the trashcan like it meant nothing.

  Once I moved Adam’s belongings out, the house felt l
ighter, and so did I. I knew he would not want our house to be an altar dedicated to his memory. He wanted to be remembered, of course, but he wanted us to go on living.

  He told me when he was dying not to feel obligated to visit his grave.

  “I won’t be there,” he said, on more than one occasion. “I will be with you wherever you are.”

  “That sounds a little creepy,” I replied, through smiling tears and squeezed his hand as I sat in a recliner at his bedside, in our den, where I slept most nights.

  Shortly after the trial, I decided it was time to pay Adam’s grave a visit for the first time since his death. The lush green canopy of the North Carolina springtime was just beginning to pop. It took over the landscape like a plush blanket in every direction as I drove on the windy country road to the little cemetery.

  When I pulled in, the sun was just beginning to dip its pink and orange hues casting a gentle glow across the shiny gray and white granite headstones. To my surprise, someone had put fresh flowers on Adam’s grave, a bouquet of white lilies. They were slightly wilted and carefully tied together with a bright purple ribbon.

  I got down on my knees and ran my hand across the smooth, damp gravestone, feeling the grooves of the words etched in it with the edges of my fingers. The engraving came from Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, a book I read when Adam was dying: A rocket science brain with a rodeo spirit. It perfectly explained my nerdy husband with his throw-caution-to-the-wind tendencies. It was an unconventional grave marker, but I’m sure he would have liked it.

  “I’m okay now. We’re okay. All three of us. You can get on with whatever you’re doing, wherever you are. You don’t have to worry about us.”

  I closed my eyes, and for just a moment, I could smell Adam’s scent. For a second he was there with me again. And then—just as quickly, he was gone.

  O

  One of the jobs I had Miranda do to earn her allowance was to sort my pictures into photo boxes for everyone, as keepsakes. I was so paranoid about technology changing and losing all my pictures in the damn iCloud, that I still printed them, just to be on the safe side. As the self-proclaimed historian of the family, I wanted to not only preserve our family’s history, but I also wanted to make sure that my kids knew I was a good mother, as supported by ample photographic evidence. They went on vacations, they had birthday parties, they had a mother who documented their activities and attended their special events. This would be their visual legacy of my love for them long after I was gone.

  I had eschewed real cameras when I discovered the iPhone’s built-in camera was good enough to compliment my mediocre photography skills. To save time, I uploaded all my photos to a photo printing website. Often I failed to take the time to sort them and delete the work photos from the mix.

  “Mom,” Miranda would say, “what do you want me to do with all the pictures of bad guys and pictures of where they did bad stuff?”

  “Just throw them away, honey,” I would call, from a twisted yoga position on my mat in the den, my voice muffled as my head was facedown. Mother of the year, allowing my ten-year-old to view mug shots and crime scene photos. This was life growing up with a crime reporter for a mother.

  Like many other tasks, this one often got away from me. Months would go by where I would forget to get my pictures developed, and then I would upload whatever was in my phone, hundreds of photos, mugshots and all, and a big box would arrive a few days later, ready for Miranda to sort.

  Shortly after Maria’s trial, I uploaded a bunch of photos from the case. Many of them were pictures I had taken in the courtroom during my short stint—Maria sitting stoically at the defendant’s table with her attorneys; Juan and the rest of her family sitting in the audience; Suzanne sitting on the other side of the courtroom just behind the prosecutor, nestling with her sister, Jessie.

  Some of the photos were of the state’s evidence presented in the courtroom during the trial: the clothing Tanner was wearing when he was found, including his white doctor’s jacket; the gun police found hidden in the bin of salsa; the freezer with the grisly discovery inside—Tanner’s hand.

  I also took pictures of the photographic exhibits: photos of the crime scene, of places investigators searched, like the restaurant, Maria’s apartment, and Tanner and Suzanne’s home. Most of these pictures, I uploaded to my social media posts during the trial to augment people’s interest in the case, and to push them to our television coverage. Not everyone could be in the courtroom during a trial, but we knew how to make them feel like they were there.

  During the trial, prosecutors showed the jury autopsy photos with Tanner’s missing left hand, his arm with a clean cut to the wrist—something defense attorneys pointed out would be a difficult thing for anyone, especially a woman, to achieve with a hand saw. It had to have been done with a power saw, and there was no evidence Maria had ever owned one or had access to one.

  The state explained this away by saying that Maria’s brothers probably did this after she killed him, as a symbolic gesture, taking away the surgeon’s dominant hand to remove his power once and for all. He was a lefty just like Adam. I remembered that from the day he put his cell phone number on his business card and handed it to me.

  After the testimony about Maria’s ties to Raymond Fischer seemed to negate the prosecutors’ theory of a romance between Maria and Tanner, the defense threw another red herring into the mix, saying maybe the killing was in some way connected to a drug cartel that Maria’s brothers had ties to, and that cutting off his hand was part of their signature because they believed he was about to sell them out. I had looked up Juan’s criminal record, and his brothers'. While there were some minor drug possession infractions, misdemeanor charges for having drugs for personal use, there was no evidence any of them had ever trafficked drugs. For the defense, this strategy was all about creating reasonable doubt.

  It was all so far-fetched, like a movie script. It was an impossible leap of faith for the jury to convict Maria on such circumstantial evidence. For two weeks after the trial, the district attorney, Joan Starr, waffled about whether to try Maria a second time. If she did take the case to trial again, it would not be double jeopardy because the first trial had ended in a hung jury, not a decision. I learned from one of my sources in the district attorney’s office that Starr and her team had done exit interviews with several of the jurors. Jurors told her the group was split eight to four in favor of acquittal. Armed with this information, Starr thought it would be a bad gamble to try Maria again. She dismissed the charge against her.

  Miranda threw the discarded work photos in a trash bag and left them in the corner of the kitchen for me to take outside to the garbage can. Instinctively, I reached in and grabbed a handful. It was probably my last trial, and despite my best intentions, I had more than a little nostalgia for the process.

  I thumbed through the photos of the players in the courtroom—Maria with her long black hair neatly braided to the side, looking exhausted at the defense table; Suzanne with her long, black curly mane, looking predictably pulled together, except for the pained expression on her face. Even now, with the chance to study the fine details of Suzanne’s face captured in the photos, I still couldn’t figure her out. Every time I thought about her, the funeral replayed in my head on a loop. There was her over-the-top warmth towards me and her visible grief—but then I pictured her adjusting her belt and smoothing down her hair. While these seemed like insignificant details, to me, they symbolized an inappropriate attention to self at a time when most people would be drowning in grief.

  Tanner’s best friend and fellow doctor, Tim Horde, delivered the eulogy at the funeral. He spoke about Tanner’s charity work and what a great father he was. The two had attended medical school together and then practiced together briefly. Tim told funny stories about their late nights in medical school, fueled by Mountain Dew, and their first office with its ugly mint-green walls and hand-me-down furniture from Tim’s parents in the lobby. His words brought Tanner to lif
e.

  “Tanner was a man who wore his integrity quietly, but visibly. He made connections everywhere he went, even with the employees at Taco Bonanza, his favorite vice. Don’t judge.” Tim chuckled.

  A ripple of laughter spread across the audience.

  “In fact, the Taco Bonanza employees are here.” Tim gestured to several people sitting in the back row of the stately church.

  They were still in their brown polyester uniforms with their nametags on them. They gave shy waves when Tim pointed them out and bowed in their direction.

  None of this gelled with the heartless philanderer Suzanne had portrayed Tanner to be. The man obviously had many layers. I understood that it was possible for Tanner to be nice to the Taco Bonanza employees and also to be an ass to his wife. But it was still a puzzling contradiction that gnawed at me.

  And that wasn’t the only thing gnawing at me. Soon after his father’s death, Winston had made a cement handprint decorated with brightly colored mosaic stones inlaid around the edge of the mold. Etched in his childish handwriting in the stone were the words, My dad is an angel who watches over my garden.

  I saw Suzanne briefly one time after the funeral and before the trial. She had invited me to her house for coffee. She made it a point to show me the stone in the pristine garden behind her house.

  “I can see it from the kitchen window when I’m doing dishes. It just gives me a strange sense of peace. I really can’t explain it. It’s like there’s still a part of him there in the garden. It’s like we’re still a family, the way it used to be.” She stirred her coffee with a silver spoon, absentmindedly, and looked through the window, out into the garden. “You know what I mean, don’t you, Maddie?”