A Killer's Wife (Desert Plains)

by Victor Methos

  He’d said it with a smile, as though it was a secret shared between them. It had given her chills, a frigid unease that grew the more she thought about it.

  It was the she that made Yardley uncomfortable.

  She pulled over onto the side of the road and sat there with her hazard lights on. She could go to the ranch tomorrow and never think about this again, or she could follow through with the thought that wouldn’t leave her alone.

  Yardley pulled back onto the road and flipped a U-turn.

  Isabella Russo worked as a schoolteacher in an elementary school near her home. It was a flat building surrounded by palm trees and a soccer field with fake grass. Yardley waited in her car in the parking lot for a long while, her stomach in knots, a lump in her throat that made it hard to breathe.

  What are you doing here, Jessica?

  It would take five minutes, and the unease would go away. It was worth five minutes to know for certain.

  Inside the school, the ceilings were low and the walls plastered with announcement flyers, art projects, posters, and class photos. She asked the main office where Isabella’s class was, and the receptionist directed her to the end of the hallway.

  Yardley stood at the door and watched. The third graders were practicing multiplication tables. A sea of young faces with innocent, glimmering eyes. Isabella saw her and smiled.

  “I’ll be right back,” she told the class, then asked her teaching assistant to take over. She came out into the hall and gave Yardley a hug.

  “How are you?” Yardley said as they hugged.

  “I’m doing good. I saw you on the news the other night. They had a story on about you and that missing little girl. I’m so glad she was found.”

  “Me too.” She glanced to the classroom and saw that several children were watching them. She took a few steps back so no one could hear, and Isabella followed. Yardley folded her arms.

  “I hate to even ask this, but I just want to get it out of the way, and you will never see me again.”

  A look of concern came over Isabella as she said, “What is it?”

  “When you identified Wesley in the lineup . . . you were so certain. There was no doubt in your mind.”

  “You don’t forget the face of your daughter’s murderer.”

  “You didn’t know he was her murderer when you saw him back then. And it’s been twenty years, Isabella. No one can be that certain of a face they saw for a few seconds after twenty years.”

  Isabella looked away. “It’s him. We both know it’s him.”

  Yardley watched her in silence until she looked up again and their eyes met. “Did someone show you a picture of Wesley before the lineup?”

  Isabella swallowed. She looked back toward her classroom. “I need to get back.”

  “Was it Agent Baldwin? Isabella, look at me . . . this is really important. Did Agent Baldwin show you a photograph of Wesley before the lineup and tell you he was the one that murdered your daughter?”

  She shook her head. “No. It wasn’t him.”

  “But someone did.”

  Isabella’s eyes drifted to the floor. “I need to go.”

  Yardley lightly touched her wrist, getting her to look up again. “Who was it?”

  “They helped me remember more quickly. That’s all. I would’ve remembered him whether they showed me a picture or not.”

  “Who was it, Isabella?”

  She debated in silence and then finally said, “If I tell you, you have to promise me it stays between us. They helped me lock away the man that killed Jordan. I won’t let them come to any trouble.”

  Yardley glanced at the teaching assistant, who said something that made the class laugh. She turned back to Isabella, who held her gaze steadily now. She was serious: she wouldn’t tell her who it was unless Yardley promised nothing would happen to them. It was possible she could find out on her own somehow, but it was also possible she would never know.

  “I promise,” Yardley finally said.

  She nodded. “I don’t know her name. She never said. But she came to my house and showed me a picture of Wesley Paul. She said this was the man that murdered Jordan. She said if I told anybody she had shown me the picture, I wouldn’t be able to testify against him and he would get away with it, but she wanted me to know that this was for certain the man . . .” Isabella swallowed, and her eyes began to wet with tears. “That this was for certain the man that killed my little girl.” She took a tissue from her pocket and dabbed at her eyes. “She said he’s killed a lot of people and if I couldn’t identify him, he was going to get out and kill a lot more. Maybe even my daughter, because he might think it would be amusing to kill Jordan’s sister.”

  Yardley felt faint. Weakness in her knees made her aware she might not be able to stand anymore.

  She could leave—say goodbye right now and never know. She could live with it. It would be something unsaid between them, but she could live with it.

  “What did she look like?” Yardley nearly whispered.

  “A teenager. Maybe fourteen or fifteen. She looked a lot like you, actually, but she had really blue eyes. The bluest eyes I think I’ve ever seen.”

  81

  Tara was still six weeks away from having a driver’s license, so she took an Uber to the courthouse. Tomorrow, she would be leaving with her mother for her grandparents’ ranch, the place in the world she loved most. But today, she had something to do. Something she’d been looking forward to.

  She hadn’t wanted to look out of place in the courtroom, so she’d worn a pair of her mother’s heels—they pained her with each step, and she wondered why women put themselves through it—and she’d bought a blouse and long skirt from a thrift store. She wore glasses and had her hair in a tight bun. Glancing into the rearview mirror before getting out of the car, she figured she looked at least nineteen.

  She got through the metal detectors without setting them off and went up to Judge Milton Hartman’s courtroom. The first case on the calendar was Wesley Deakins. A hearing to schedule his appeals.

  Wesley sat at the defense table, waiting for the judge to come out. He appeared pale and had lost a lot of weight. He looked unhealthy. Like someone that had been ill for a long time.

  Tara sat directly behind him in the pews, close enough that she could lean forward and whisper to him.

  “How is prison treating you?”

  Wesley turned around, then chuckled. “The younger Ms. Yardley. What are you doing here? Come to see the first hearing on my many appeals, or did you just miss me?”

  “You’re really pale, Wesley. I used to think you were handsome, but you look sick now.”

  “Prison can do that to you. Not much sleep. Though I’m fortunate to have a cell to myself. One small concession for my services. The guards need legal help from time to time.”

  “Sounds like you’re right where you belong.”

  He grinned. “Did your mother send you? My first appellate brief hasn’t been accepted by the higher court yet. Is she attempting to use you to garner information about it? I know she doesn’t want me free, but using you is a bit excessive, don’t you think?”

  “She doesn’t know I’m here.”

  His head tilted slightly. She could smell him, his body odor and the prison jumpsuit that had soaked up his sweat and hadn’t been washed.

  “Then why are you here?”

  “I’m here because you have hope, Wesley. And you don’t deserve hope.”

  “What does that mean?”

  A bailiff glanced at her, and she stayed quiet until his attention went somewhere else.

  “When my father sent me to Dominic Hill, convincing him to lie about you and Jordan Russo wasn’t the hard part. He’s just some crazy idiot obsessed with my father, like you. If Eddie told him to kill himself, he would ask if he wanted it done with pills or a gun.”

  She watched the realization dawn on his face. “The real tricky part, Wesley, was putting Jordan Russo’s hair and ring with your
stuff my mom put in storage. I didn’t want anybody to see me in there, so I had to take my mom’s keys while she was asleep and go down there. I didn’t want the hair and ring just out anywhere, and then I remembered that cigar box that was on your desk. I had to open it without damaging it, so I was going to take it to a locksmith, but you wanna hear something crazy? The day before, I found a lockpick on my mom’s desk. It was just sitting there. I don’t even know why she had it. Opened the box in a second. It’s like fate, really.”

  Wesley’s face contorted into a grimace, his eyes fixed on her with a growing hatred. It delighted her.

  “You’re lying.” He said it without his southern accent, and Tara could see why he had picked it up. His real voice reminded her of a weasel. It didn’t match his face.

  “Do I look like I’m making this up?”

  He watched her awhile. “How did you get the ring and hair?”

  “Jordan Russo was my father’s first victim. They were going hiking the day she was killed, and my father had left a notebook out in the back seat. She reached back there to get something and saw the notebook. It had a lot of different drawings for torture rooms and what he would do with some of the body parts of the women he killed, addresses of potential victims, things like that. But the page it was open on was a drawing of her bedroom that showed her in bed with her throat cut. You know how amazing an illustrator my father is, so she knew it was her.” She paused and looked out one of the windows. “He said Jordan looked at him, and without them saying a word, she just knew. She knew it with such certainty she actually jumped out of a moving car.”

  Someone came by and said something to an attorney, and Tara waited until they left before speaking again.

  “He kept some of her hair and the ring. He was worried about the police finding out about their relationship, so he snuck into her house and stole her journal, which mentioned his name a bunch of times.”

  Wesley fully turned to her now. His eyes had narrowed to slits. She could smell his bad breath.

  “Do you know how hard it is to copy an entire journal, Wesley? To have to mimic somebody else’s handwriting for that long? I still feel the ache in my hands. Luckily she didn’t write in it that much, and I’m ambidextrous and could switch it up. I think I did a pretty good job, don’t you? All I did was change Eddie to Wes and add a few details about you, but I thought I should redo the entire journal so it all looked the same. Then I had to blot the ink with coffee and heat it in the sun a couple hours to fool lab tests into thinking it was much older than it was. You really should’ve had someone try to date the ink, though. That was just sloppy lawyering.”

  He was silent a long while and then burst out laughing. “Hilarious. What is this? Last little jab at me before you and your mother go riding off into the sunset? It won’t work. Those appeals will be argued, and I’ll subpoena Dominic Hill to—”

  “Dominic Hill is halfway across the country. Actually, that’s not even his name anymore. You will never find him. And without him, the only thing you have is his testimony at your trial saying you killed Jordan Russo.” She glanced around and saw a young couple in the front row across the room, absently staring at the judge’s bench. The woman had bloodshot eyes from recent crying.

  “You know what I do feel a little bad about? Lying to Isabella Russo. She seemed like a nice lady, and now she thinks you killed her daughter. But the real killer is sitting on death row, so what’s the difference, I guess, right?”

  “No,” he said in almost a whisper. “You couldn’t do this.”

  “You have to hand it to Eddie, though. You’re the perfect idiot for him to use. He said you didn’t even hesitate. As soon as he asked you to start killing, you did.”

  “No. Eddie wouldn’t do that to me. He loves me.”

  “He thinks you’re pathetic. He used you. He needed you to start killing so he could argue on appeal that the Dark Casanova was still out there. He didn’t care if you were convicted, but he owed me, and I wanted something to bury you with. He told me where he kept a lot of things the police never found.”

  He swallowed, and his eyes filled with fury as he said, “I will destroy you. I will bring all this out on appeal, and you and your mother are going to be the ones in a cell.”

  “Destroy me with what, Wesley? Hmm? Dominic Hill will never be found. Isabella Russo’s not going to help you. When your investigator reaches out to her, she’ll say she doesn’t want anything to do with the case. You’ll have to subpoena her, and my mom’s office will quash that subpoena because of harassment.”

  She stared off at the judge’s bench and at the seal of the state of Nevada that hung behind it.

  “You did surprise me with the dentist, though. My father said they would exhume her body and find the bite marks they missed last time. I was worried about that, but he said it’d been so long that the comparison would come back inconclusive. I wonder, though, if he actually knew you would kill the dentist? I mean, if you knew the entire case was set up to convict you for something you didn’t do, you had to expect that the dentist would testify that the bite marks were a match to you, right?”

  Wesley said nothing, his eyes cold.

  “I feel bad about that, but how could I predict you would kill him?” She took a deep breath. “All that death because of a pathetic rat like you.”

  The bailiff announced the judge, who came in a second later. Everyone rose except for Tara and Wesley.

  Tara leaned close to him, staring into his pupils, and whispered, “Did you honestly believe I would ever let anyone hurt my mother again?”

  He jumped at her, and she quickly leaned back. Wesley fell across the pew. The rattling of his shackles echoed in the courtroom as the bailiff lunged at him and slammed into his back. Another one sprinted over from the front entrance of the courtroom. They grabbed Wesley’s arms and twisted them behind his back, causing him to howl in pain as they hauled him away. She thought he sounded like a frightened pig.

  Tara casually walked out and left the courthouse. The grin never leaving her face.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I wrote my first short story in fifth grade, and through the decades I have worked with a lot of different people in the book industry. None have been as cool to work with as everyone at Thomas & Mercer and Amazon Publishing. Special thanks to Megha for constantly pushing to make me a better writer, to Kjersti for taking a chance on me, and to Gracie and Sarah for always making me feel welcome and appreciated. I could never thank you guys enough.

  And of course thank you to my readers; you can never know how truly grateful I am to you.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  At the age of thirteen, when his best friend was interrogated by the police for over eight hours and confessed to a crime he didn’t commit, Victor Methos knew he would one day become a lawyer.

  After graduating from the University of Utah School of Law, Methos sharpened his teeth as a prosecutor for Salt Lake City before founding what would become the most successful criminal defense firm in Utah.

  In ten years Methos conducted more than one hundred trials. One particular case stuck with him, and it eventually became the basis for his first major bestseller, The Neon Lawyer. Since that time, Methos has focused his work on legal thrillers and mysteries, earning a Best Novel Edgar nomination for his title A Gambler’s Jury. He currently splits his time between Southern Utah and Las Vegas.