Crimson Lake Road (Desert Plains)

by Victor Methos

  “Please read the profile starting from the highlighted passage.”

  Baldwin was quiet a moment, his eyes locked to Aster’s, and then he began to read. “A forty-three-year-old African American woman was found at 2:31 a.m. in her single-story home where she lived alone on Maurice Drive. She had been beaten and shot once in the head with a .38 caliber pistol. Her engagement ring was missing and presumed taken by the offender. Her wrists had been bound with duct tape from a roll owned by the victim that the offender left behind. There were multiple postmortem wounds, including lacerations and bite marks.”

  Baldwin stopped reading and said, “I then go into the six stages of profiling generation and the medical examiner’s report, along with a profile of the victim and her whereabouts and actions on the date of her death.”

  “No need to read that, let’s just get to the heart of it. Read the profile you wrote.”

  Baldwin flipped another page. “For the offense to occur in a high-risk area that could lead to detection of a stranger, the offender must’ve been in an area known to him. He quite possibly lives in the neighborhood or on the same street. Since the offense occurred midday during the workweek, he likely either works part-time or is unemployed. A physical description of the male in question would be African American, the same race as the victim, and aged forty to forty-five, in the same general age range as the victim. He would be of average intelligence, and if he did work, it would be in unskilled labor. Narcotics and alcohol likely didn’t play a role since the murder took place before noon.

  “The offender would be sexually inexperienced and—though his hatred of women is clearly present in the scene—shy with women. He would have an extensive pornography collection, particularly violent pornography. The fact that all the wounds were inflicted postmortem suggests an inability to interact with live human beings. The offender will have a history of mental illness, as the sudden nature of the attack suggests disorganization and easy confusion. Interviewing should begin with all African American males who live in the neighborhood, the surrounding neighborhoods, or have relatives that live in the neighborhood or surrounding neighborhoods.”

  “Great, thank you, Agent Baldwin. Please now read about the apprehension of Mr. Nolan in the addendum.”

  Baldwin glanced at Yardley. She rose and said, “Objection, Your Honor. This isn’t relevant to anything in this case.”

  “It’ll become clear why it’s relevant in my next question, Your Honor.”

  “Overruled. Go ahead, Agent Baldwin.”

  Baldwin read, “Nine days after the death of the victim, a suspect was identified. He lived in a home four houses north from the victim and was found to be a psychiatric patient with a history of severe mental illness, living with his parents. He is African American, forty-one years of age, and works as a janitor at a local high school. He is unmarried and has a history of unstable relationships of short duration. His IQ is estimated to be ninety. He has a history of suicide attempts, and an extensive pornography collection was found on his electronic devices.”

  “Let me stop you there, Agent Baldwin. So Nolan meets your profile perfectly, doesn’t he?”

  He exhaled loudly, his face stern. “Yes, he does.”

  “And you garnered a confession from him?”

  “I did.”

  “And he was later convicted of first-degree murder and given life in prison?”

  “He was.”

  “Where is he now?”

  Baldwin’s gaze never wavered from Aster’s. “Last I heard he was living in Rosetta Park, working as a custodian again.”

  “He was let out?” Aster said, faking surprise.

  “He was.”

  “In fact, he was let out because the Rocky Mountain Innocence Center did a DNA analysis independently of the FBI laboratories and found twelve different flaws in the analysis that had matched semen to Mr. Nolan.”

  “It was one lab technician’s error, but yes.”

  “A lab technician who screwed up how many cases?”

  “We’re uncertain.”

  “A hundred? Two hundred?”

  “Probably not that high. Her mistakes were identified quickly, and she was fired after approximately two months of employment.”

  “And someone else was eventually convicted for the murder, weren’t they?”

  Baldwin hesitated. “Yes.”

  “A Mr. Bruce Hooper, the man the victim was engaged to, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “Mr. Hooper had a degree in sociology, yeah?”

  “He did.”

  “He was white?”

  “Yes.”

  “He had no known psychiatric disorders and functioned very well at full-time employment in a city government position, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “And he was caught because he bragged about killing the victim to a friend, and the friend contacted the police, yeah?”

  “Yes.”

  “So Hooper eventually confessed, yeah?”

  “He did.”

  “And Nolan was let free?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nolan was innocent?”

  “He was. Yes.”

  Aster approached Baldwin, close enough that he almost touched the witness box. It was apparent that this was a sensitive subject for Baldwin, and Aster seemed to be deliberately trying to upset him. “You sent an innocent man away to prison for life.”

  “That’s not what—”

  “In that case, you had a confession. Did Michael Zachary ever confess to this crime?”

  Baldwin glanced at Yardley. “No. He did not.”

  “You had the killer’s bite marks. Are there bite marks in this case?”

  “No.”

  “You had DNA. Was Dr. Zachary’s DNA at either crime scene?”

  “No, we did not find his DNA at either scene.”

  “But he fits the profile?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nolan fit the profile, too, right?”

  Baldwin hesitated. “Yes, he did.”

  “Agent Baldwin, you have less compelling evidence in this case against Dr. Zachary than you did against Nolan, correct?”

  Baldwin ran his tongue along his cheek. “I suppose you could say that.”

  “Then he may be innocent, and you would have no idea, would you? Because he fits the profile?”

  “That’s not how profiling works. You’re making it seem like—”

  “Could an innocent man be sitting right there, Agent Baldwin?” Aster said forcefully, pointing to Zachary. “Could he be innocent, and you wouldn’t know it because he fits your profile?”

  “No, that’s not—”

  “Were you convinced of Nolan’s guilt when you testified against him?”

  Baldwin let out a breath. “Yes.”

  “Hundred percent convinced?”

  “Yes.”

  “How convinced are you, then, that Dr. Zachary committed these crimes, considering all you got are some syringes and a roll of bandages found by a detective who’s planted evidence before?”

  “Objection,” Yardley said.

  “Withdrawn.” Aster stepped away from Baldwin and leaned on the lectern. Yardley couldn’t tell from looking at the jury how successful he’d been at painting a picture of a federal agent relying too much on pseudoscience and a detective who, for whatever reason, set Michael Zachary up.

  “Agent Baldwin, you were a hundred percent certain Nolan was guilty of murder. If you had to put a percentage on it, how certain are you Dr. Zachary is guilty?”

  “I couldn’t put a number on it.”

  “Sure you can. Try. Ninety? Eighty? Five?”

  The two men glared at each other. Baldwin took a breath and said, “I’m a hundred percent certain he committed these crimes.”

  “A hundred! Wow. The exact certainty as when you got an innocent man convicted. Well, I hope for the public’s sake we can go up to a hundred and ten percent at some point before you destroy more inn
ocent people’s lives.”

  “Objection.”

  “Withdrawn. No further questions.”

  Weston called it a day in the late afternoon, citing personal reasons, and said they would continue in the morning. Aster came over to Yardley’s table and said, “We’ll still take manslaughter.”

  “I don’t see much has changed, Dylan.”

  “You kidding me? That jury thinks your detective is an evidence-planting machine, and Baldwin’s profile might as well have described Bugs Bunny. And just wait until I get Tucker Pharr up there and go into how he kidnapped and tried to rape a fourteen-year-old girl.”

  “It’s not that clear cut.”

  “That’s not the question. The question is, Is it clear cut enough to get to reasonable doubt? You sure you wanna risk that? They could just let Zachary go.”

  Yardley slung the strap of her satchel over her shoulder. “I’ll think about it.”

  58

  Yardley left the courthouse, but she didn’t want to be at the office. Everyone there had been friendly enough, but it was apparent that she was an outsider. There for one case and gone. She was never invited out to lunches or told about poker games or outings, and sometimes she would turn a corner and hear the conversations stop.

  When she got home, she made a quick dinner of quiche and fried potatoes and set the table. Tara got home a little past seven and stripped off her backpack and let it hit the floor. “OMG, I am so freaking exhausted.”

  Yardley watched her, wondering how to bring up her father and what she’d done with the paintings. Instead, she said, “Rough day at the office?”

  Tara grabbed a piece of fried potato and tossed it into her mouth before sitting down at the table. “We’re working on this algorithm to help with diagnosis of medical conditions, right? But Jared is like, people will hate this because they don’t want a machine to diagnose them.”

  “You’re working on something that complex?”

  “Well, I’m helping with the back end. Just, like, grunt work. But it’s a lot of grunt work because none of the freaking bosses know what they want. Some of them are trying to disrupt the medical field, and some of them just want to copy other products and make money.”

  Yardley watched her daughter, the way her eyes sparkled and her skin flushed. She wondered if that enthusiasm was something only the young felt. Was there a time she’d felt it, too, when she was a budding photographer, or maybe even when she first started prosecuting? She wondered if moving, starting over, would help her feel that way again.

  In the end, she said nothing about Eddie Cal. They ate together, talking about things other than work, and Yardley lay on the couch after dinner and read while Tara took a shower. Baldwin had texted asking if he could come over to talk, and he showed up a little later still wearing a suit. He had two bottles of foreign beer in his hands and gave her one.

  “For interrupting dinner.”

  They went out to the balcony.

  “You all right?” she said. “You look exhausted.”

  They sat down on the deck chairs. Baldwin opened his beer and took a sip. “Haven’t been sleeping much. That testimony didn’t go well, did it?”

  “It went fine.”

  “The Nolan case . . . it was just a perfect storm of shit. The lab screwed it, I screwed it, the odontologist and prosecutors screwed it, and he happened to fit the profile just right.” He shook his head. “It’s worked as a good tool so many times, but you pull out just one bad case and it makes it all look like witchcraft.”

  “Don’t worry about it too much. On redirect, I’ll get in a dozen times when it’s helped apprehend the offender, and you can talk to the jury about it as long as you like. Just be prepared.”

  He let out a sigh. “My ASAC thinks it’s bullshit, too. He’s got me running down some cases that’re nothing but going through boxes of documents. Takes my whole day. In comparison, getting the shit kicked out of you in court for an hour isn’t so bad.”

  “You might change your mind if this gets a hung jury and you have to do it a second time.”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  “What did you want to talk about, Cason? Anything trivial could’ve been handled over the phone.”

  “It’s not trivial. There’s some things about Harmony’s disappearance you should know.”

  “What?”

  “Kristen Reece got a call from a man who says he’s seen Harmony Pharr. That he recognized her from the picture in the media. So she set up a meeting and gave me a call. We met, and the guy said he saw her at a bar in the passenger seat of someone’s car. He said she got out and talked on her phone and was laughing. Didn’t look in trouble at all.”

  “Is he credible?”

  Baldwin took a long swig and shook his head. “He’s a tweaker. You could almost smell the meth on him. Probably cooks it himself, too, poor bastard. Reece got a surveillance team on him. He lives in a halfway house near Florence Boulevard. He got out of prison eight months ago on a drug beef. But here’s the part you need to know: he says he saw her the day after Harmony officially disappeared, around lunchtime. Michael Zachary was at the hospital and Tucker Pharr was at work. There’s people that can verify that for both of them. So if this guy’s right, neither one of them took her. So they’re either working with someone else, or the disappearance is completely unrelated to Kathy and Angela’s cases.”

  “Why did he come forward?”

  “He wanted two hundred bucks. You shoulda seen Reece’s face when he told her that. I thought she was going to Taser him in the balls right in front of me.”

  “He didn’t mention he wanted money on the phone?”

  Baldwin shook his head and took a sip of beer. “Blood on the necklace came back a match for Harmony, by the way. Totally possible she ran away and just nicked herself or something, but we got blood on a necklace she never takes off and a phone left in a tree house. How many teenagers you know can live without their phone? And Tucker didn’t think any clothes or shoes were missing, so she didn’t grab anything before taking off either. I don’t believe it. I don’t think this guy’s being straight with us. She didn’t run away.”

  Yardley looked out over the dark desert and watched as the moon began to appear as a slit in the sky. “What are the odds that she happened to be kidnapped in the middle of all this by some random stranger?”

  “Unlikely.”

  “I’d say virtually impossible. If she really didn’t run away and was taken, it has to be the same person. We have to assume whoever killed her mother and tried to kill Angie took her.”

  “So what do you wanna do?”

  She rubbed her temple, attempting to alleviate the headache she could feel working its way up from the base of her skull. “I thought you weren’t working this anymore?”

  He waved her off. “I had the entire day off for court. It’s my free time—screw Young.”

  “Well, I appreciate it. Lucas Garrett won’t return my calls, so I don’t think he’ll be much help anymore.”

  “Why won’t he call you back?”

  “Long story,” she said, opening her bottle of beer and taking a sip. “I want to talk with the man who saw Harmony.”

  “He’s under surveillance. Let’s see what plays out first.”

  She ran her thumb along the smooth label of the bottle. “If I’m wrong, Cason, and Zachary is not the man I think he is, then I won’t be able to live with myself if he gets convicted. And if he didn’t do this, then every day he spends in jail is because of me. I can’t wait and see how things play out. I need to meet with him.”

  He thought a moment as he watched her and then shrugged. “Was supposed to have a late dinner with Scarlett. Lemme text her and tell her I’ll take a rain check.”

  59

  Later that night, Tara dressed in jeans and a baggy hoodie along with a baseball cap. She took the tattoo kit from her closet and went to the bathroom, where she slowly applied the dyes to her skin. Her eidetic memory recalled with com
plete accuracy the shapes and locations of the previous tattoos.

  Garos Vasili was a big-time art dealer her father had told her about. She’d done some digging, and in addition to art, he had a reputation for selling narcotics. There had been an arrest by the DEA for trafficking, but the case was dismissed because they couldn’t figure out how he smuggled his drugs into the country. Tara knew almost instantly: his art. Likely tucked behind the paintings.

  When she’d asked Eddie Cal how they knew each other, he’d just grinned and said it wasn’t important.

  Tara looked at herself in the mirror. It would be difficult for even someone who knew her to recognize her like this. It felt odd, like a stranger was looking back at her. Her heart was racing, and she couldn’t tell if it was from excitement or fear.

  The meeting was going to be held in a secluded apartment near what was called the Old Strip, a seedier section of Las Vegas now made up of run-down bars, strip clubs, and tattoo parlors that catered to the drunken tourists that rushed into getting something permanent to remember the night.

  The complex was three buildings and poorly lit. Tara parked two blocks away and walked there. The night air was warm. A car filled with younger men honked and yelled something obscene, though she doubted they could even tell what gender she was, much less what she looked like. Harassment just to harass.

  She stood in front of the complex for a few minutes. There was a black SUV parked at the third building, but no one was around. She stuffed her hands into her pockets and kept her head down, strolling as casually as she could force herself to. In a doorway were two men smoking, and they stopped speaking when they saw her. She glanced at them and then away as she continued to the third building.

  She took the set of stairs to the third floor. The first apartment was unoccupied, but the one behind it had a light on.

  The guard from earlier answered her knock. He towered over her and was as wide as the doorway. He smirked as he stepped to the side. Tara went into the apartment.

  The entire living room and kitchen held only two things: a desk and chair. Vasili sat in the chair, smoking some kind of black cigarette. He placed it down on the desktop without looking at her and put on his glasses. Scanning her up and down, he leaned back in the chair and said, “Did you bring them?”