“Yeah, it seems pretty cut-and-dried, but according to the coroner’s report—”
“The coroner’s report? Since when do you have access to my files?”
“I don’t. I just talked to the guy. I mean, I was there that night, so I’m interested. That’s all.”
“Yeah, well you know, I still don’t know what the hell you thought you were doing by going out there. Your job is to prosecute delinquent traffic violations. If Bob found out—”
“How would Bob find out? Are you gonna tell him? What? You think I enjoy hanging out in traffic court? I mean, goddamn it, Paula, gimme a break. You used to work for me. How do you think that makes me feel?”
“Well, now you work for me. I would think that you’d be used to it by now. What do you expect from me? Should I resign because your feelings are hurt?” He was making her feel uncomfortable. Didn’t the fucker know who got him his lousy job in traffic court? She was sure it was humiliating, but, goddamn it, it also paid the bills. And wasn’t that what he wanted when he came to her begging for a job? And she had wanted to help out. She felt sorry for him and had gone to Bob to see what he would let her throw his way. And really, she and Bob had shared the same concern about the situation. It wasn’t that they held a grudge, it was that something like this might happen. That Leo might start bringing up the past. He might try to remind her of the way things used to be. He might make her feel uncomfortable.
Paula took a bite from her burger and asked, “What is it you want from me?”
“Just a chance. To do something besides speeding tickets.”
“Ever since what happened, you’ve been looking for that big break. A way to prove yourself again. I know that. I respect that. But, Leo, you might as well face it, no one’s ever gonna forget what happened.” She felt bad. That was a low blow, but Christ, he was asking for it. What did he expect from her?
Leo nodded his head. “Yeah, I know. No one’s ever gonna forget. Least of all you.” He turned to leave. And the shrug of defeat that passed through his shoulders was too much for her. She wasn’t fucking heartless, was she? She had, after all, once worked for this man. This pathetic excuse for a man who made her decidedly uncomfortable. She wasn’t a shrew, after all. For God’s sake, the man only wanted to feel like a man again. Who would it hurt if he asked a few questions?
“Hold on.”
“What?”
“So what did he say?”
“Who?”
“The coroner. Vedder. What did he say?”
“He, uh, he said the wound, the wound was caused by a blow to the head with a blunt instrument inflicted by a left-handed individual.”
“So?”
“So the kid’s right-handed. I called the hospital.”
“So?”
“So he’s retarded, not ambidextrous.”
“Ambi-what?”
“Ask me about the husband.”
“What about the husband?”
“He’s a lefty.”
“So are about fifty million other people—including me. Do you think I killed her?”
“I don’t know, did you?”
“Leo, you are a kind and faithful servant. Some day you’re gonna make it big. Maybe even sit here again. In the big chair. I feel it. I really do. What’s your point?”
“If nothing else, what was the son doing home alone with the mother? Feels a little bit like a setup. I wanna talk to the husband some more.”
Paula picked up a French fry. Swabbed it in a pool of ketchup. “So, who’s stopping you?”
TWENTY-THREE
It had been three years since his fall from grace, but it had been two years before that when Leo had first heard the name Frank Guaraldi.
Prosecuting bad guys was all he’d ever wanted to do. When he was a boy, countless television programs had instilled in him the ideal of fighting for justice as a worthy pursuit, but it wasn’t until after his mother had been taken in by a scam artist that he knew for sure he wanted to be a prosecutor. A man had come by the house one day shortly after Leo’s father had been taken out by a massive heart attack while cutting the lawn. The man who came to the door that day had been smartly dressed and neatly groomed. He introduced himself as Samuel Abdul, investment counselor. Mr. Abdul had ended up talking Mrs. Hewitt into investing her dead husband’s insurance money in an overseas petroleum company. Mr. Abdul had shown her conclusively, using charts and projected fuel prices, that she could easily triple her money, or more. Dorothy Hewitt had vivid memories of the 1970s oil crisis. She could remember a time when the idea of gasoline selling for as much as a dollar a gallon was laughable. But it had happened. And then some. But what had ultimately swayed Leo’s usually levelheaded mother was Samuel Abdul’s insistence that this was her golden opportunity to secure for her son’s future, for his education. She had signed over the entire insurance premium and was given a piece of paper entitling her to a thousand shares of an oil company that had never existed. Abdul, who apparently couldn’t leave well enough alone, kept pulling the same scam all over town, always targeting recent widows. Once he was caught, Leo’s mother had promptly filed charges along with eighteen other people the man had cheated. Using the money he had scammed from his mostly poor victims (who besides the poor would believe in such easy money?), Abdul had hired the best lawyer dirty money could buy. It was at this time that Leo, only twelve and wanting revenge for his mother, had decided that he wanted to be a prosecutor. To defend the defenseless. The prosecutor who handled the case had been a dedicated, intelligent, resourceful man who systematically dismantled every defense strategy the scam artist’s well-paid lawyer tried to mount. Leo sat with his mother in the courtroom every day of the trial, completely entranced with the legal battle that was waged there on his mother’s behalf. Even after the trial, Leo would sometimes skip school and spend his days in the county courthouse watching small legal dramas played out. Abdul’s trial lasted less than a week, and although others might have given up or simply gone through the motions, this public prosecutor had persevered and ultimately won back his mother’s money and sent Samuel Abdul to jail for eight years. The prosecutor had even helped Mrs. Hewitt figure out a more conservative way to invest her inheritance, and seven months before she died, Leo’s mother saw him graduate cum laude from law school.
As a deputy prosecutor Leo had been assigned to the team handling the Guaraldi case, although, at that time, no one had yet heard the name Frank Guaraldi. The case was simply known as the torso murders. It was already one of the longest and costliest unsolved cases in the county’s history. Certainly it was the highest-profile case any of them had ever been involved with, and a legitimate suspect had not even been named yet. Leo’s work on the case eventually earned him the position of prosecutor, then lead prosecutor, and, once Guaraldi had been fingered as the most likely suspect, Bob Fox had appointed Leo to the post of assistant district attorney. It was rumored that if he could bring the Guaraldi matter to a successful conclusion, he was an odds-on favorite to go on to become the youngest district attorney to ever hold the seat.
The whole thing started with an arm. A severed arm found in a drainage ditch on a rural road outside Atlanta. The arm had been eaten at by animals and was badly decayed but obviously that of a child. Decomposition had robbed the forensics team of any hope of a print ID. Only one clue offered any chance for identification. A toy ring had been found on the middle finger of the severed arm. It was a cheap plastic thing that only a child would wear. The type of toy that could only be bought out of a bubble gum machine, with cheap gold lamination that was chipping away from the pale plastic base. Investigators tracked down the Chinese manufacturer of the ring, and then the importer, and from there the distributor. The distributor’s records listed several vendors in the Atlanta area. The ring went in a seventy-five-cent machine of which there was one vendor who maintained only one such machine. That machine was located in an arcade in the Little Five Points area of downtown Atlanta. This was a definite starti
ng point, the first real lead they had had to follow up on. All missing-persons reports from the city police department were culled for the previous two years, and from those reports investigators pulled the names of children between ages four and twelve, and from this list was pulled only those missing children who had lived within a twenty-mile radius of the Little Five Points neighborhood. A group of officers was dispatched to interview family members of the missing children.
The temperature had peaked at a record-breaking one hundred one degrees that July day, and Officer Lyle Davis was thinking only of a cold beer when he knocked on the door of the last address on his list. Donny Easton, missing for three months. He showed the photo of the plastic gold ring to Mrs. Easton, a huge and solidly built woman. Her eyes widened and hope bloomed on her face. Donny had worn one just like it. Never took it off. Officer Davis explained the circumstances of the ring’s discovery and watched Mrs. Easton crumple to the floor. He’d forgotten all about the dreamed upon beer. More body parts were found. Arms, legs, sometimes just a finger, twice an ear, and one time a severed head. Always children. Never an entire body. Some of the body parts led to identification, but many did not. Each time a piece was found, the national media descended on the city like vultures following the scent of carrion. The police department, and in particular the mayor, were singled out for criticism for allowing the slaughter of children to continue. Gestures such as a hotline number for tips and a dusk-till-dawn curfew were made to appease the frightened population, but no real progress was made.
The death count stood at nine. Possibly nine, because not a single complete body had thus far been recovered. The city lived in fear; parents existed in a constant state of maniacal paranoia. Neighbors reported neighbors for eccentric behavior. An anonymous caller to the tip line gave the name of a man, James Nice, a bachelor with no children, who was seen purchasing dolls and hacksaw blades in a local K-Mart. Nice was investigated and found to be blameless (the blades were to cut a section of burst water pipe in his garage, the dolls for his niece’s birthday), but his name was leaked to the media. They called him a person of interest. News crews set up mobile studios outside his house. His face was seen on television and in newspaper photos with captions that capitalized on his ironic name. Within a week of the tip line call, the chief of police declared him no longer a suspect, and the media pulled away. By then, Nice, a recovering alcoholic, had turned to bouts of heavy drinking and antisocial behavior. He yelled at strangers in the street and took to shoplifting. He lost his job. Lost his house. Three months after being cleared as a suspect, he was found dead in a homeless shelter lying facedown in a pool of his own vomit. Nice’s family sued the city and were eventually awarded four point seven million dollars.
Frank Guaraldi. He and his wife, Janice, ran the Little Wonders day care and after-school center in College Park. When the ninth victim of the Torso Killer was identified as Gwendolyn Peters, Leo Hewitt, as the district attorney’s liaison to the police department, was the one who made the connection. Donny Easton, the first identified victim, and Gwendolyn Peters, the last, had both attended the same day care. Little Wonders.
Suddenly, the case now had something it had never had before, a legitimate suspect—Frank Guaraldi. And, at the exact same time that Leo was making the connection with the preschool, almost as if by divine intervention, Carolyn Conners, a housewife from College Park, called the tip line and reported a smell like rotting meat coming from the Guaraldis’ house. Two detectives interviewed the Conners woman, and she stated to them that she had observed Frank Guaraldi unloading bags of quicklime from the trunk of his car at three o’clock in the morning. She also claimed to have seen Guaraldi remove from his trunk an object wrapped in a plastic tarp. Yes, she had said, although she could not say so definitively, the object wrapped in the tarp could very well have been the body of a child. A search warrant was issued, and Guaraldi and his wife were brought in for questioning. The search of Guaraldi’s home yielded a cache of pornographic photographs hidden in a trunk in the attic. The photos depicted, among other things, women in bondage costumes being urinated on by men. Guaraldi’s vehicle was impounded. Every print, fiber, and microscopic speck was analyzed in record time. A strand of hair was recovered that matched the DNA of Gwendolyn Peters. Mitigating this was the concurrent discovery of DNA evidence that matched up with nine other (unharmed) attendees of Little Wonders. The Guaraldis denied any knowledge of the missing children. Janice Guaraldi was released from custody and asked to remain available for future questioning. Frank Guaraldi remained behind bars and was held pending formal charges.
In the heat of the media maelstrom that enveloped the city, attorney Monty Lee visited Guaraldi in his cell and offered to take his case pro bono. Guaraldi accepted gratefully and Monty Lee stepped into the limelight for the first time. He called the allegations against his client preposterous and nothing more than just that, allegations. He told the press that his client would sue the county for being held without just cause and being denied due process. The media ignited, and Montgomery Lee became a star.
Letters were drafted by the DA’s office and sent out to the parents of children who attended the Little Wonders preschool. The letters asked about any unusual occurrences, inappropriate touching, evidence of violence, and unusual bruising. The children said nothing happened.
At the bail hearing, Leo sat at the prosecution table with Paula, who had been handpicked by the district attorney, Bob Fox, to co-chair the case with Leo. Fox was carefully orchestrating every nuance of the trial. He and everyone else in the city government knew exactly how much was riding on the outcome of this case, and he was leaving nothing to chance. It was fuck or walk, Fox was fond of saying. Fox had told Leo that the positioning of Paula as second chair was a political as well as a practical move. It never hurt to have a pretty woman in court. He firmly believed that having a man and woman sitting at the prosecution table was the only way to go. You had to cover all the bases, after all. And that was certainly true, but it was also true that there was just something about Paula Manning that he simply liked. There was just something about her, something hard underneath.
Fox had entrusted the actual prosecution to Leo because Leo was, after all, the assistant DA and had shepherded all of the evidence thus far to reach this critical point. He believed in Leo. He believed Leo could win the case. He had, after all, given Leo the assistant DA position, hadn’t he? Of course he trusted him. Of course he believed in him. Then why did he still have a nagging doubt somewhere in the back of his mind? Leo was one of the best trial lawyers Fox had ever seen, and he was damn glad to have him as his assistant DA, but Leo had yet to show clearly and demonstratively where his loyalties lay. He had not sacrificed. Fox knew that it sometimes took a baptism of fire before some men would totally and completely pledge their loyalties to another man. This would be that time. If the case was won, Fox was sure to go on to become the state attorney general, and the DA’s chair would be a fait accompli for Leo.
If the case was lost, all would be lost.
At the bail hearing, Leo addressed the judge in his best tone of placid reason. “Your Honor, in light of the cruel and sadistic nature of the crimes of which Mr. Guaraldi is accused, the People move to deny bail for the defendant,” Leo said, and sat back down. Paula, who was sitting to his left, betrayed no emotion.
Guaraldi sat to Monty’s left at the defense table. Behind them, Janice Guaraldi waited expectantly. She held a ragged ball of Kleenex in her clenched fist. Behind her, the courtroom was packed with press and the merely curious who wished to know firsthand what sort of bail would be set for the country’s most notorious and diabolical child murderer. Monty stood up and nodded imperceptibly to Leo. This was the first time these two men had ever met in or out of court. To Leo, Monty Lee was the high-priced defense attorney who had tried to get Samuel Abdul off the hook. He held Monty Lee in the same contempt as the shiftless lawyer who would have set free the man who had swindled his mother out of her d
ead husband’s inheritance.
“Your Honor, this is outrageous,” Monty said with the utmost calm. “My client has committed no crime. He is merely a suspect. And not a very good one at that. We all know that the people of this city live in fear. They demand that the child killer be caught, and rightfully so. The police department, in its clamor to find the killer, to meet the people’s demand, has accused the wrong man. In short, the prosecution has yet to offer up one piece of hard evidence. To deny my client bail would be, as I have said, outrageous.”
Judge Elizabeth Duran lifted a thick folder and waved it at Monty. Decades of smoking and marinating her vocal cords in single malt scotch had left her voice as deep as a man’s. “Mr. Lee, did you read the same police report I did? Two of the missing children were enrolled in his preschool. Did you read the affidavit of the eyewitness who saw your client removing a tarp wrapped in the shape of a body from the trunk of his car? Did you see the same pornographic photographs depicting women being tortured and degraded?”
“Women, Your Honor, not children. A taste for a little S&M isn’t a crime.”
“No, it’s not. However, there’s also the matter of the DNA evidence.”
“Found along with DNA from nine other children who attend the day care. The Guaraldis often transport the children in that vehicle.”
Duran cleared phlegm from her throat and shuffled through the papers one final time.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Lee, but I’m inclined to agree with the prosecution on this one. I feel that Mr. Guaraldi is a serious threat to the safety of this community, and I would be derelict in my duty to protect this community if I allowed bail.”
“But, Your Honor, Mr. Guaraldi has lived in this community for over thirty years, he has no police record, he’s never even—”
“I’ve made my ruling.”
A Very Simple Crime Page 6
