A Killer's Wife (Desert Plains)

by Victor Methos

  A DNA evidence expert had to admit that the DNA testing used on hair could only identify with 100 percent certainty what species the hair came from. As far as matching found hair to the hair of a defendant or victim, the laboratory had a 16 percent false positive rate and a 14 percent false negative rate, in response to which Wesley looked to the jury and said, “Innocent people going to prison and guilty people walking free. We have to wonder what clown college the FBI learned this witchcraft from.”

  The medical examiner’s testimony was better, as he was accustomed to plenty of court time and being cross-examined by defense counsel. Since Wesley wasn’t disputing anything he said, his testimony only took an hour, and the judge decided to call it a day afterward.

  They rose for the jury to file out, and Tim said, “Make sure to clean up all the exhibits and have the marshals lock them up in the jury room. And you might as well toss the garbage.” He said it in a way that suggested it was her job to clean up after him.

  One thing Yardley’s prior boss had told her before retiring was to never clean up or fetch anything or make copies or answer phones for any of the men in the office. They would see her as a secretary from then on and treat her as such.

  Yardley stood rigidly a moment, anger coursing through her. She had to brace herself against the table and close her eyes, picturing a cool stream in a lush forest. The smell of pine in her nostrils and a blue sky overhead. After half a minute, she opened her eyes and removed the exhibits, then threw away the water cups and scraps of paper left behind.

  The main balcony was the part of the house Yardley spent the most time in. It was wide and deep and could’ve held much more furniture than she had placed there. The mountains were the main draw. She could look at them and think about how ancient the land was, how even though humanity somehow claimed it as its own, it had been there for two billion years and would be there another two billion. Long after humanity had gone extinct.

  There was a knock at the door. Yardley shouted, “Come in.”

  Baldwin joined her on the balcony a few seconds later. He tossed a file on the table in front of her and sat down. They watched the moonlight over the desert a moment before he said, “You sure you want to look? It’s not pretty.”

  Yardley opened the file. It was the background investigation for Wesley Paul.

  “Wesley’s his real name,” Baldwin said, “but his surname is Deakins. He changed it to Paul in his twenties. Also, the degree he claims to have from Harvard Law? Doesn’t exist. It’s a forgery, along with his grades and law journal memberships that he used to get academic positions. I can’t find any real academic record for him anywhere. You think it’s actually possible for someone not to go to college or law school and be a professor and lawyer of his caliber?”

  Yardley stared at a photograph of Wesley in the file: a DMV photo from at least twenty years ago. “He earned a perfect score on the Nevada Bar Exam. If he could do that without attending law school, I have no doubt he could fake being a member of any profession.”

  Wesley Deakins had a file with the Department of Child and Family Services. Yardley skimmed the story of a tragic life that had no chance of ending in anything other than horror. Somehow, she had never asked much about his background, and she knew exactly what Wesley would say to her about it now: You didn’t want to know.

  Was he right? She had convinced herself that she could never have a partner in her life after Eddie Cal, but when Wesley had come along, it had felt so . . . good. In her most private thoughts, the ones she never admitted to anyone else, she knew she had realized her relationship with Wesley would somehow be ruined one day, but she’d wanted it to last for as long as possible.

  Wesley had been born in Los Angeles on the date he’d told her, but instead of the generic middle-class parents he’d conjured, he’d been raised by Elaine and Larry Deakins. The Deakinses’ criminal histories started when they were juveniles with shoplifting and expanded to robbery and various drug crimes.

  “Hardcore addicts and dealers,” Baldwin said. “Methamphetamine. They got in right during the craze, when it was really taking off out here. Cheap and easy to make, don’t need a chemistry degree. Looks like they were cooking it in their basement with little Wesley asleep upstairs.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “They’re dead. Sold an extremely toxic batch to some biker gang, who weren’t very happy when some of them ended up hospitalized or dead, so they made an example of the Deakinses. Can you guess how they were killed?”

  Yardley stared at him. “In their bed with their throats slit,” she said softly.

  He nodded. “Wesley came out of his room and found them while they were dying. The sons of bitches made him help clean up the blood and bodies.” He shook his head. “Can you imagine helping to clean up the dead bodies of your parents?”

  “That’s why he became fascinated with Eddie. Eddie killed his victims in the same way Wesley’s parents were killed.”

  Baldwin nodded. “Probably his way of trying to gain control over it. Why start now, though? Why when he’s over forty?”

  “There’s two possibilities. Either he’s been doing it awhile and we don’t know about the other couples, like we didn’t know about Jordan Russo. Or”—she met his gaze—“he started now at Eddie’s request.”

  Baldwin looked shocked. “Why would Eddie want that?”

  “His last appeal is almost decided. He’s running out of time. You’ve seen the fun he’s had inserting himself into this. Maybe it was his way to see me and Tara. Or maybe he has bigger ambitions. He could be hoping to file an appeal based on new evidence, arguing that we convicted the wrong man and the Dark Casanova has always been Wesley.”

  “No way that works.”

  “Probably not, but it’d buy him some more time at least.”

  Baldwin got a text and checked it quickly. He gestured at the DCFS file and said, “Well, anyway, after all that, he bounced around from foster family to foster family. There were some allegations of sexual abuse against one foster father, a Roxley Hayes. Looks like Hayes disappeared about fifteen years ago. No trace of him ever found. I have a pretty good guess what happened to him.”

  Yardley read in silence awhile before closing the file and setting it down. “His life never had a chance.”

  “You sound sorry for him.”

  “I’m sorry for the child that had to watch his parents die. I’m not sorry for the man who’s now inflicted that on other children.” She stared at the closed file. “I should’ve looked into his past before.”

  “Hey, no one does deep background checks on their boyfriends. It’d be weird if you did.” He was quiet a long while and then said, “If you don’t want to be alone right now, I can stay.”

  She looked at him and smiled sadly. “If you were to stay . . . I think that would be bad for both of us.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She nodded. “One day. But not today.”

  He rose and approached her. Gently, he kissed her cheek, then left. When she heard the door close, she opened Wesley’s file and read it again.

  67

  At eleven, Yardley knew sleep wouldn’t be coming. She had Ambien in her medicine cabinet, but there was something she had to do first.

  This time, instead of guards, the warden herself was at the prison gates waiting for her.

  “You didn’t have to come yourself,” Yardley said.

  “I was here anyway. Taking off for a few days tomorrow and just needed to finish up a few things.”

  Gledhill led her inside, and they walked the corridors, their footsteps echoing in the silence.

  “How you holding up?”

  “As good as can be expected, I guess.”

  Gledhill was silent a moment as she scanned her key card on a door. “Jessica, I’m going to be honest with you. As your friend, I don’t think this is healthy for you. Coming to see him all the time. He plays games with people. I’ve had more guards transfer out of his unit than
anywhere else, because he knows exactly what to say to hurt people. Just little comments here and there that stick with you.” She held the door open for her. “When my boy was in the hospital for those few days and his fever just wouldn’t go down, everyone here found out. Eddie asked me how much cheaper smaller coffins were compared to full size. I ignored him, but I kept thinking about it all day. By the end of the day, I was sitting at my desk crying.”

  Yardley kept her eyes forward. “I don’t have a choice.”

  Yardley arrived in the room first. She waited until Cal was brought in to tell the guard to turn the cameras off. Cal watched her with a mischievous grin until the camera was off and the guard left.

  “Thank you for letting her come see me,” he said.

  “It was her choice.”

  “She’s . . . astonishing. She has your strength. I think it would be amazing to get to watch her grow up . . . but I’ll likely have a needle in my arm by the end of the year.”

  Yardley took him in, trying to remember the man she had fallen in love with, and couldn’t. Like a portion of her memories had been destroyed by her consciousness in order to protect her mind from the pain it wasn’t sure she could handle.

  “What did you say to her?”

  “She asked me for something, and I gave it to her. I owed her as much.”

  “What did she ask for?”

  “That’s between me and her.” He grinned. “Does it bother you that she and I have secrets?”

  She leaned back and folded her arms. “Tara told me about Jordan Russo. Is that what she asked for? Something else we could prosecute Wesley for so he doesn’t get out?”

  He said nothing.

  “We’ve filed charges against Wesley and are in trial. But he’s doing well. Even with what we have, I’m not sure we can get a conviction.”

  “Are you prosecuting him yourself?”

  She shook her head. “They won’t let me because they think it’s too much of a conflict.”

  “There’s no way around it?”

  “There is. If he signs a full conflict waiver saying that he agrees to let me do it and he won’t appeal anything that comes about because of the conflict. But even if he were willing, my office wouldn’t allow it. I think they’re nervous that if I lost, people would think I did it on purpose.”

  “If you were a man, you’d already be prosecuting this case. You know that, right? They think you’re too emotional. They don’t see in you what I see. That fierceness. The ability to take pain others would find unbearable and still keep fighting. It has to be you that prosecutes him, or he will get away with it.”

  Yardley felt the air from a vent in the ceiling turn on; it was cool and smelled slightly sour, like the recycled air in the cabin of a commercial plane. “What else did he tell you about Russo?”

  He shrugged. “What will you give me if I tell you?”

  “I don’t have anything else to give you, Eddie. I already let you see her. I can’t do anything about getting your execution stayed. The only motivation I can offer is that I think Wesley might kill me and Tara if he’s released from custody. I don’t know if you care about that or not.”

  He reached out, his shackles rattling lightly, and touched the glass barrier between them. “Do you understand him yet? His psychology? What type of stalker is he?”

  She crossed her legs and placed her hands on her knee. “There’s five categories of stalkers. I think he falls into what’s called the intimacy-seeking stalker. They’re typically extremely isolated, with accompanying delusions of nonexistent relationships with their victims. In a very real sense, I’m not the target of his behavior. You are. He’s formed what he thinks is a close bond with you, and he believes you reciprocate that bond. That’s why he’s willing to kill for you. Many members of death cults that murder or commit suicide at the request of their cult leader are actually intimacy-seeking stalkers.”

  He nodded. “You haven’t given me any of Jordan Russo’s reports. How did she disappear?”

  “She was jogging to a local gym. We think Wesley picked her up in his car on the way. It’s a busy road from her home to the gym, no real alleyways or anything like that. So it’s unlikely she was grabbed in the middle of the street with witnesses everywhere. She got into a car willingly.”

  “Hmm. That’d be rather reckless for him to risk being seen with her on the day she disappears, don’t you think? I would describe Wesley as a lot of things, but reckless wouldn’t be one of them, would it?”

  Yardley’s heart began to race. “No, it wouldn’t.”

  The grin returned to Cal’s face. “Wesley told me he’s only had one friend his entire life, Dominic Hill. A neighbor that grew up with him in Los Angeles. They moved out here together. Dominic helped him with Jordan Russo. Personally, I would’ve killed Dominic after. Why take the chance of leaving someone with that kind of information out there? But I think Wesley was in love with him. Or at least thought he was.”

  Yardley rose to leave, and Cal said, “I’d hurry. Since you’re prosecuting him for Russo, Dominic’s suddenly become a liability, and Wesley doesn’t do well with liabilities.”

  By the time she arrived home, every muscle in her body screamed with fatigue. A deep fatigue that seemed to weigh her down like an anchor around her neck. She made some coffee and quickly drank down a cup.

  She sat in her chair in the home office, pulled up the criminal records database, and searched for Dominic Hill.

  She found three that had lived in Las Vegas for at least twenty years. One was nearly eighty and one deceased. The third man was younger than Wesley by two years and had done a stint in prison for sexual assault. His criminal history before that was mostly voyeurism charges, stemming from going into women’s locker rooms and filming them from shower stalls or hiding in changing rooms at clothing stores and filming women from underneath the doors. He had nearly thirty arrests on his record, going back decades.

  Cal was right: Wesley Paul wouldn’t have picked up Jordan Russo on the day she’d disappeared. That would be sloppy, and all it would take was one witness to identify him. He would, if at all possible, have someone else pick her up, and he would be somewhere with a lot of other people that could testify they’d seen him there at the time Jordan Russo had disappeared.

  A photo of Hill came up in the database. Thick neck, short hair, powerful jaw, and large eyes. Yardley checked the clock on the computer. It was nearly two in the morning. She decided to have more coffee and stay up rather than attempt sleep. She wanted to catch Dominic Hill early in the morning, when he would be unprepared.

  68

  The trial resumed at nine in the morning. When Yardley arrived at court late and took her seat, Tim didn’t look at her. He kept his eyes forward, his thumbs underneath his chin as he stared at the judge’s bench.

  “I expected you here early to set everything up,” he said without looking at her.

  Yardley said nothing.

  The first witness Tim called was a psychologist who had evaluated Wesley before the trial had begun.

  “So what you’re saying,” Tim said after an hour of testimony describing Wesley’s likely mental stability, “is that Mr. Paul is of sound mind and understands exactly the repercussions of his actions.”

  “Correct,” the psychologist, Dr. Jarvis, an elderly man with a long face and glasses, said. “He’s of perfectly sound mind with no noticeable mental disorders, at least not the Axis Two disorders I previously discussed. I didn’t even find noticeable anxiety or depressive disorders, which is rare considering how much of the general population suffers from these.”

  “In other words, he’s normal.”

  “There is no real definition of normal, Counselor, but I understand your meaning. And yes, he does not have any acute mental disorders that make him incapable of understanding his actions.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Jarvis.”

  Wesley rose and said, “Dr. Jarvis, you are being paid three hundred dollars an hour to testify t
oday, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “You make over two hundred thousand dollars per year flying around the country testifying in high-profile criminal cases?”

  “That’s about right.”

  “You’re here because you’re paid to be here?”

  “Well, not the only reason, but yes, I’m paid to be here.”

  “You ever testified for a defendant?”

  “No.”

  “You’ve been retained by Mr. Jeffries and Ms. Yardley’s office on dozens of cases, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “In fact, I believe you and Mr. Jeffries went golfing before.”

  “We did, yes.”

  “He’s your friend.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “If you started losing cases, if you came in here and your testimony started leading to acquittals, Mr. Jeffries, despite being your friend, would be less likely to use you, correct? Just common sense, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Well, I don’t know.”

  “If you came in and started screwing up his cases, you think he’d continue to hire you? Is that what you’re telling this jury?”

  “No, no, I suppose not.”

  “So you’d, naturally, again just common sense, like the prosecution to prevail in the cases you testify in.”

  “I have no incentive one way or the other.”

  “Dr. Jarvis,” Wesley said with a smile, “I would like you to read something from your website.” Wesley stepped from the lectern to the defense table and pulled out a page with Jarvis’s face on it. He held the paper in front of Jarvis and said, “Please read the highlighted quote.”

  Jarvis cleared his throat. “It says, ‘I will help you win your case. Don’t delay, call today.’”

  “‘Don’t delay, call today,’” Wesley said, looking at the jury with a grin. “Catchy little ditty. Frankly I thought it a better slogan for an enema health clinic or escort agency rather than an allegedly respected member of the medical community, but what do I know?”