A Killer's Wife (Desert Plains)

by Victor Methos

  She looked away, pretending to wipe something from the corner of her mouth so he wouldn’t see how much he disgusted her.

  “You really should take over the case, you know. That Timothy is sloppy sloppy. Prosecuting too many simple drug possession and check fraud cases, I think. Made him soft. That’s one thing I always admired about you: you never took the easy route. That’s why you’re so strong now. You become a good sailor in storms, not in calm seas.”

  Despite the fact that even the thought of it sickened her, she brought the stool close and put her hand on his. His cheek had swollen, and his lip was cut from Ortiz’s blows. A hemorrhage had made the lower portion of the white of his eye black red. As though whatever filth was inside him bled out of his eyes.

  “Tell me where she is, Wesley. If I ever meant anything to you, if in that dead heart you ever felt anything for me, please, let that family have some peace.”

  A gleeful mischief flashed in his eyes when he said, “Kiss me.”

  “No.”

  “Kiss me, and I’ll think about it. Passionately, like you used to.”

  She had to squeeze her free hand so hard that she was certain her nails had drawn blood from her palm. Leaning over, she kissed him. His lips were cracked and tasted like dried blood. When she pulled away, she wiped her lips with the back of her hand, bile rising in her throat.

  “Where is she?”

  He grinned. “I don’t think that was passionate enough.”

  “Wesley, where is she?”

  He lifted the hand that was underneath hers and ran his fingertips up her arm. “Make love to me. Right here, with those marshals sitting outside. Make love to me, and I’ll tell you.”

  The pain that shot into her almost made her fall off the stool. “I can’t.”

  “Then no Emilia. Make your decision. You’re a US attorney, too. You could get us a private room at the jail. That’s my condition. You make love to me, let me do whatever I want to your body, and I’ll tell you where the girl is. Your body in exchange for hers.”

  Yardley withdrew her hand. She stared at him, her eyes burning, her cheeks flushed with the anger she could barely keep contained.

  “I swear to you, I’ll make you pay for this.”

  She left the room and didn’t look back at him.

  55

  Yardley pulled up to the prison early the next morning, the butterflies in her stomach making her jittery. She’d wanted to wait, to take time to set up a meeting between Tara and Eddie, but Tara insisted that it had to be now. Before Wesley was released.

  “I’ll be in there with you. If at any point you feel uncomfortable—”

  “I need to meet him alone.”

  “Absolutely not. I’m doing this because he’s your father and you have a right to meet him, but I will not leave you alone with him. And certainly not when there’s no camera for me to see what’s going on.”

  “He won’t tell me anything if you’re there. He’s got some things he wants to say to me, and it’s not for you to hear. It’s between me and my father.”

  Yardley sighed and looked away. “Tara—”

  “I’ll be okay. I’m stronger than I look, Mom. I get it from you.”

  They held hands until a guard came out and said, “He’s ready for you.”

  56

  Eddie Cal sat on one side of a thick glass barrier. The barrier had holes in it near the top, large enough to carry sound but not large enough to pass anything substantial through.

  His ex-wife stepped inside the room. “If you hurt her, I will make it my life’s mission to ensure you pay for it. Do you understand me?”

  Cal nodded but said nothing, his eyes never leaving Tara.

  Yardley left, and the steel door slid closed with a metallic clang.

  The young girl stood perfectly still.

  “You can pull the wire out of that camera and make sure it’s not recording.”

  He could tell his voice sent a small shock through her.

  She turned toward the video camera in the corner of the ceiling. A black wire looped from it into the wall. She took the chair over and stood on it before yanking the wire out. Then she brought the chair close to the glass and sat down, watching him in silence. Her eyes were bright as sapphires.

  He grinned and said, “You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I wish our first meeting could’ve been somewhere more appropriate. This place desecrates you.”

  “I don’t think there’s anywhere more appropriate we could’ve met.”

  He shifted in his seat, and his metal restraints rattled. He recognized his voice in hers, like a distant echo he couldn’t quite make out but knew was his own.

  “I was told you’re something of a math prodigy.”

  “Told by Wesley?”

  He hesitated. “Yes.”

  Her eyes fascinated him. A blue so deep and bright they appeared otherworldly—he had never seen eyes the same hue as his until right now.

  “I know you would’ve eventually killed my mother if you hadn’t been caught,” she said. “I don’t know if she realizes that, but I do. I’ve studied your art. They have photographs of a lot of your paintings and sculptures online. Your art’s an escalation. Each piece is more violent than the one you did before it. An article I read said you were working on performance pieces when you were arrested. With how quickly you were escalating, you eventually would’ve had nowhere else to go. You would’ve decided killing someone you love would be the highest form of expression. A sacrifice to your art. And that you were somehow making her immortal. Tell me I’m wrong.”

  He said nothing. Then he shook his head, a shy grin on his face. “All those years hoping to find just one person that understood what I was trying to do, and it turned out to be my daughter.”

  She looked down to her nails as she softly picked at dried skin on a cuticle. “I’m full of surprises, just like you.”

  “I can see the strength in you. It radiates off your body like fire on a phoenix. Your mother told me a little about the troubles you faced from your classmates in school. Everything that happened to you made you stronger. You shouldn’t regret it. But if it helps at all, I am sorry.”

  She leaned forward. “You know, it felt like my entire life I had this missing piece. A large hole where my father should’ve been. We would go years without even mentioning you, but your absence was like this . . . ghost, always in the room with us. I thought if I met you, maybe that ghost would leave. Now I know it’ll never leave, will it?” She sat back. “You can never be sorry enough, but there is something you can do. You owe me for what me and my mother had to go through, and I want payment.”

  He chuckled lightly. “It seems you have more of me in you than your mother let on. What payment?”

  “First, I want some of your paintings. I can sell them, and they’re worth a lot.”

  “Your mother burned them all.”

  “Bullshit. You’re someone that loves secrets. There’s no way you let any person, not even your wife, know where all your work is. Especially if you thought you might get caught one day. I want those paintings, and you’re going to give them to me.”

  An unfamiliar warmth tingled his skin then, and he wondered if it was pride. Something another parent might feel watching their child hit a baseball or win a spelling bee.

  “What else?” he said with a smile.

  Yardley paced the corridor at death row for over two hours. Her thumbnail had been chewed down to nothing, ruining a manicure she had gotten a few weeks ago. The guard by the door watched something on his phone and would laugh every so often, and Yardley wanted to scream at him to shut up.

  Finally, there was a knock on the steel door. The guard put his phone away and slid the door open. Tara stood there. Yardley looked at her eyes to see if they were puffy and red from crying, but there was nothing. She didn’t appear shaken or nervous in any way. It was like she had just gotten done with a conversation that bored her.

  “I’m rea
dy to leave,” she said.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” Yardley said, putting her hand on her daughter’s shoulder.

  Tara waited until they were on the road.

  “Wesley killed someone else,” she said, not moving her gaze from the window.

  “What?”

  “He killed someone else that you don’t know about. Eddie said it was the first person he killed. It was a woman he was obsessed with.” She looked at her mother. “Like he’s obsessed with you.”

  It felt like Yardley’s heart skipped a beat. “Who?”

  “Eddie said her name was Jordan Russo. It was nineteen years ago. Wesley lied about being born in Tennessee and living on the East Coast. He’s from California. And his name’s not Wesley Paul. Eddie didn’t know what his real name was, but it’s not that.”

  Yardley was quiet a moment. “Did he say anything else?”

  57

  Later that morning, Yardley, Baldwin, Tim, and Roy Lieu met in Lieu’s office. It was the largest office on the US attorneys’ floor, a corner office overlooking the Las Vegas Strip a few blocks away. Gray carpets and glass for walls on three sides. Yardley stood with her back toward the men, staring at the massive Ferris wheel on the Strip. The sun’s glimmering rays broke against the steel spokes and fragmented over the valley.

  The men were all sitting down. She could see their reflections in the glass.

  “He had to be taken to the hospital,” Tim said. “What the hell, Cason?”

  “Me? I told you not to call Ortiz as a witness.”

  Yardley said, “It wouldn’t have mattered. Wesley knew that would happen. He would’ve called him if we didn’t.”

  Lieu exhaled and leaned back, his fingers forming a steeple under his chin. “Aggbi granted a continuance of two weeks this morning. We’ll have to go back in there afterward. Mr. Paul will probably call Ortiz to the stand again. I want him in cuffs this time.”

  “Roy,” Baldwin said, “he’s a federal agent with—”

  “He assaulted a defendant in open court.”

  “A defendant that kidnapped his daughter.”

  They sat in silence, those words hanging in the air like poison that stung with every breath.

  “You’re going to lose,” Yardley said, not taking her eyes off the Ferris wheel.

  “You don’t know that,” Tim said.

  Lieu said, “She could be right. You might be able to beat the Franks motion and keep the warrant and Jessica’s testimony in. The warrant affidavit is good. But the confession and storage unit and everything we found there might get suppressed.”

  “It’s worse than that,” Yardley said as she turned around and faced them. “Fruit of the poisonous tree is discretionary. Judges can apply it as far down the evidentiary chain as they feel fit. Wesley will challenge anything, anything, you find, saying it was found solely because of the excluded evidence discovered in his storage unit. You may win on some of the arguments with inevitable discovery, but you’ll lose a lot more of them. He’s going to win this case, Roy.”

  Tim said, “Jessica, save the drama. I’ve never lost a case in this office in over fifteen years.”

  “There’s no cameras here, Tim. You can save it. I know how easy it is to say you’re undefeated when you only prosecute cases you’re practically guaranteed to win. Wesley is smarter than you, and he’s been planning this for a long time. Years. You’re going to lose, and we will never see him again once he’s released. Unless he decides to kill me first, of course.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Tim said, his face now flushing red. “Roy, I can win this.”

  “Did you know he planned to call me to the stand if Ortiz hadn’t attacked him and ended the hearing early?” Yardley said.

  “What? He didn’t give notice. He can’t.”

  “He provided you with a list of witnesses, fifty-four of them. Did you go through each one?”

  Tim shifted in his seat. “I went through them,” he said, uncertainty in his voice.

  “Then you would’ve seen my name in the middle. It was placed between two experts that have the same initials as me, JY, so that your eyes would glance over it. He buried me in the witness list, knowing you would miss it and hoping I would, too. That we’d be unprepared.” She folded her arms and leaned against the glass behind her. It felt warm against her back. “Tim, you can’t handle someone like this. He is going to get this case dismissed. And if not, a jury is going to acquit him.”

  Tim scoffed at her and said, “Roy, come on. I got this.”

  Lieu watched him and then turned to Yardley. “What do you suggest?”

  “Once he wins these motions, he’ll ask for an expedited preliminary hearing. The case will be dismissed then.”

  “Even if that happens, it means we have a few weeks, maybe even a couple of months, to dig up more evidence,” Tim said.

  “No,” Yardley said with a hard stare. His pride had clouded his thinking, and it was beginning to aggravate her. “Anything we find has a taint to it now. The chance of it being excluded is too high.”

  “What do you suggest, then?” Lieu said.

  Yardley rubbed her chin with her knuckle. “I’ve been looking into something. There was a young woman here that disappeared almost twenty years ago. Her body was found a few weeks later in the desert. She’d had her skull crushed.”

  “What does that have to do with Wesley?” Baldwin asked.

  Yardley thought a second, unsure how much to reveal to them. “He told Eddie Cal it was his first victim.”

  The room went silent, until Lieu said, “Who is she?”

  “Jordan Russo. She was seventeen. Left for the gym, and her mother says she never saw her again. The police determined she’d likely been kidnapped, but never had enough evidence to link any suspect. Then they thought maybe she ran away with someone . . . until they found her body twenty-two days later.”

  “Not his MO to kill someone in that way,” Lieu said.

  “It was his first. He hadn’t developed his signature yet. He likely panicked and grabbed whatever was available, in this case a large rock, and hit her with it. It was, in a roundabout way, unintended.”

  Lieu leaned forward, his elbows on his desk, staring at a photograph of him and a senator on the wall across from him.

  “So what do you want to do?”

  58

  The home was clean and quiet, only eight miles from her own. A little two-story house on a quiet street pushed back against the red rocks behind it. Isabella Russo answered the door in workout clothes, her brunette hair pulled back, peering through thick glasses. Without the glasses, Yardley thought, she would look just like Jordan Russo.

  She gathered together the coupons that were out on the coffee table and put them in a plastic container with a lid before sitting down on the couch. Yardley sat across from her on a love seat. Above the fireplace were large framed photos. In the center of them was one of a stunningly beautiful girl. Jordan when she’d been perhaps fourteen or fifteen. Tara’s age. Yardley remembered what she’d thought and felt the night Tara had run away. She wondered if Isabella Russo still felt that every day.

  The other photos were not as prominent. Isabella and a large man with curly hair and two other kids. There were several photos of the children hung up as well, but Jordan’s photos were always in the center between them.

  The man she saw in the photos came out of the kitchen and said hello.

  “Hello,” Yardley replied.

  He turned to Isabella and told her he would be back in a couple of hours. He kissed her on the cheek and left.

  “That’s not Jordan’s father,” Isabella said, anticipating her question. “Her father left us. With my best friend, of course. Isn’t that how it always is? It’s always the best friend.” She was lost in thought a moment before she gave a mournful grin and said, “Jordan once told me that’s why she made sure her best friends were always boys.”

  “She’s beautiful,” Yardley said, glancing up at the p
hoto over the fireplace.

  Isabella turned and looked at it. “She got her father’s good looks. It’s funny—I always thought I fell for her father’s personality, but looking back on it, I don’t think he had any. His looks just made me pretend all those terrible qualities didn’t exist.”

  “I think maybe we’re all capable of that.”

  She turned back around. “Luke’s a good man. I met him five years after Jordan’s death. I told him I didn’t want any kids when we got married. Who the hell would want to bring kids into this world after something like that? But he finally convinced me that having brothers and sisters would be a way to honor her. That it would be like having a piece of her back.”

  Isabella had to stop a moment, and Yardley could tell she was fighting back tears. Even after two decades, the pain seemed as fresh as if Jordan had been killed yesterday.

  “And it really is like having her back,” she continued. “Her sister looks a lot like her. She would wake me up when she was younger, and it would shock me because, for a second, I would think it was Jordan. That maybe her death was just some nightmare I’d finally woken up from.” She wiped a single tear away with the back of her finger. “I’m sorry. You must think I’m such a mess, crying after all this time.”

  “Never. Frankly, you have a strength I wish I had. To have children again after something like that.”

  She nodded and inhaled deeply. “I have a doctor’s appointment soon. What was it you needed, Ms. Yardley?”

  “Jessica. And I’m looking into Jordan’s case. I’m so sorry to have to open this wound back up, but we have a man in custody, and there’s some indication he might have been involved in her death.”

  Isabella’s eyes went wide. Yardley had tried to temper the statement to not get her excited in case they decided not to file charges and nothing came of it, but the pain was too deep, and the hope that they would catch the man that had killed her little girl was too powerful.

  “Who is it?”

  “Have you been reading the news about the man they call Dark Casanova Junior?”