Hard Evidence

by Pamela Clare

  Tessa laughed. "Well, it's good to know I'm not weird."

  "I didn't realize you spoke fluent Spanish." Reece poured more scotch into her glass. "Did you study it in college?"

  Tessa shook her head, spoke without thinking. "I learned growing up."

  "In Georgia?" Kara looked surprised.

  But Tessa hadn't grown up in Georgia. She'd never told her friends where she'd been bom or just how she'd come into the world. That life was behind her.

  She changed the subject. "I saw a man after the shooting. He was watching me while I was talking with the cops. He had on a black leather jacket just like the killer. When I spotted him, he vanished. I told the officer, but he didn't seem interested. Someone needs to find him."

  "I'm sure the police know what they're doing." Reece sat down on the ottoman in front of her and rested a reassuring hand on her knee. "You'd best leave that up to them."

  Both Tessa and Kara glared at him.

  He stood, pushed a hand through his blond hair. "Oh, wait. That's right. You're a reporter, and that means trying to catch killers, doesn't it?"

  "Reece!" Kara frowned.

  But Tessa needed to explain. "She was young. She was so young and afraid, and they killed her, just shot her down. I saw it happen. I watched her die. She pleaded with me to help her, and instead of helping, I watched her die. I have to do something."

  Reece crossed his arms over his chest, looking stern and senatorial. "Not tonight you don't. Finish that drink, then it's off to bed."

  "Thanks. You two are the greatest."

  A wail came from upstairs.

  "Caitlyn! I'm trying to wean her." Kara shook her head, then looked up at Reece. "Will you check her, hon? If she sees me, she'll just—"

  "—want breast. I have the same problem." Reece winked at his wife, a smile on his face, then headed up the stairs.

  Tessa found herself smiling, too. "You are so lucky, Kara."

  Kara gave her a reassuring squeeze. "You'll find a man of your own one day, Tess. Now let's get you settled."

  Tessa soon found herself lying between soft sheets that smelled of fabric softener, the roughest edge of her nerves smoothed by soap, scotch, and friendship. There was something comforting about a home with a mother, a father, and small children. She didn't know exactly what it was, but she liked it, perhaps because she'd never had it herself.

  You'll find a man of your own one day, Tess.

  How Tessa hoped that was true. She longed to have what Kara had—a career, babies, a happy marriage, a man who cherished her. Still, she wouldn't hold her breath. The women in her family had never had much luck with men. As she drifted off to sleep, it wasn't thoughts of her ideal man that filled her mind, but the image of the man in the black leather jacket.

  Chapter 2

  They found exactly what Julian had known they'd find at the abandoned apartment. The cops, new to this sort of thing, didn't know what to make of it, and Julian, wanting to prevent leaks, wasn't going to fill them in.

  The front room was a mess of junk-food wrappers, half-empty liquor bottles, and other trash. A stained beige couch faced a television that sat on an overturned crate. Beside the crate sat dozens of videos, almost certainly porn, most of it homemade.

  The kitchen reeked of garbage gone bad, the trash piled high with used paper plates, beer cans, and food cartons. The dimly lit bathroom smelled strongly of urine and mildew, orange piss stains on the floor, grime and hair in the sink.

  "The maid's year off," Julian said to Petersen, who was still young and green enough to look shocked.

  Across from the bathroom, the smaller bedroom had held two unmade double beds crammed into opposite corners. An electric cord was tied around one of the bedposts—a crude and painful way to restrain someone. Apart from a handful of scattered videotapes, the closet was empty.

  But it was the master bedroom that told the story. Four mattresses on the floor, their sheets stained with semen and old blood. A small plastic trash can filled with dozens of used condoms. Black and gold condom wrappers scattered across the filthy tan carpet. A set of leather restraints—the kind used to tie a woman spread-eagle to a bed—in a heap in the corner. Used syringes, half-empty packets of birth-control pills, antibiotics, maxi pads, and boxes of unused condoms.

  "Holy fucking shit." Petersen gazed around him, clearly stunned. "She must've been a hooker."

  "Don't make assumptions, Petersen." Julian kept his tone neutral, glanced at his watch. It would be oh-four-hundred before they finished here.

  "Look at all those syringes! Shouldn't we get DEA in here?"

  'This is a vice operation until I say it isn't. Got it?"

  "Yes, sir."

  Julian thought of the girl whose blood he'd seen spilled on cold tiles tonight. She'd run for freedom, had gotten death instead. Someone had silenced her, but this evidence, if handled correctly, would speak for her. Julian would make damned sure of it.

  Tessa got little sleep, her dreams turning to nightmares after the scotch wore off. Each time, it was the same—the girl ran through the door, begged for help, and was riddled with bullets while Tessa watched, frozen in place, unable to breathe or scream or move. And each time, Tessa woke up, gasping for breath and covered in cold sweat.

  She finally gave up trying to sleep at about four and watched CNN on mute until Kara and Reece got up. Then, while Kara got Connor ready for school, Reece gave Tessa a ride to the gas station to fetch her car.

  "You're welcome to stay with us for as long as you like," he said. "We're heading up to the cabin this weekend. We'd love it if you'd come with us. I hear it's supposed to snow in the high country."

  "Thanks. I might take you up on that." She gave him a hug and a kiss on the cheek, then, stepped out of his Jeep and turned to face the scene that had haunted her all night.

  It looked different in the morning light—small, dingy, desolate. The shattered doors and windows of the little store were boarded up. The building was cordoned off with yellow police tape. The interior was dark apart from one flickering fluorescent light.

  How many times had she driven past this place? How many times had she stopped in to gas up or get coffee? Now she wondered if she'd ever be able to walk through its doors again.

  It struck her as strange that if she'd made it to her favorite coffee shop on time, she wouldn't have witnessed the killing. It would have been just another press release, just another news brief—girl killed in drive-by, investigation ongoing.

  But she had witnessed it. She'd seen a young woman live out the last moments of her life in terror before being cruelly murdered. She knew she would never forget it.

  A red SUV pulled into the parking lot and stopped at a pump, and a man in a suit stepped out, yammering on his cell phone. It took him three swipes of his credit card to realize the place was closed. He drove off in a huff.

  Tessa fished her car keys out of her purse, unlocked her car, and slipped behind the wheel, determined to pull herself together. She drove home, tried to revive herself with a hot shower, and did her best to hide the dark circles under her eyes with makeup.

  "You look like hell, girl," she told her reflection.

  Her reflection stared back through eyes that were red and puffy and full of shadows.

  A part of her wanted to call in sick and crawl into bed, but she was done crying. She knew she wouldn't be able to help anyone—most especially the girl who'd been murdered last night—by hiding. Besides, she probably wouldn't be able to sleep anyway. It was best to stick with her routine and face the day head on.

  Seeking the comfort of the familiar, she dressed in her favorite black silk suit—the color seemed fitting—and headed first to the local coffeehouse for a cup of salvation and then to the paper. By the time she'd had a few sips and made it to her desk, she felt almost human.

  She checked her phone messages and e-mails and then rummaged through the stack of press releases she'd grabbed from her in-box. Ketamine stolen from another vet clinic. A
n alleged sexual assault. A fatal crash on 1-70.

  Surprised not to find any mention of the shooting, she picked up her phone and dialed.

  "We're not releasing the police report." Larry from Sheriff's Records was grumpier than usual. "The incident is still under investigation. You know the drill."

  Across the newsroom, Sophie Alton pointed at her watch and held up three fingers. They had an I-Team meeting in three minutes.

  Tessa nodded, gathered her notes for the meeting, and reached for a sharpened pencil. "Is Chief Irving going to issue some kind of statement?"

  "You'll have to call the press office for that."

  She forced sugar into her voice. The least she could do was try to make him feel guilty. "Thank you, Larry. You've been so helpful. I know your time is very valuable. You have a good morning, and I'll be in touch."

  She hung up. "Bless his heart."

  "Larry being a dick again?" Matt Harker, the city reporter, stood and smoothed his hopelessly rumpled tie—the tie he put on every morning and threw on his desk every afternoon. "Someone ought to investigate why city employees are so obnoxious. Does the city train them to act that way? Did someone steal their Prozac? Do they drink too much coffee?"

  "Don't knock coffee, Harker." Tessa picked up her latte and followed her coworkers toward the conference room. "It's not right to insult other people's religions."

  Sophie, her straight, strawberry-blond hair done in a sleek French braid, held back for her, notepad and water bottle in hand. "Are you all right? You look tired and upset."

  "Thanks." Tessa willed herself to smile as if she'd just been given a big compliment. 'Tired and upset was exactly the look I was going for this morning."

  Sophie frowned. "Okay, don't tell me what's going on."

  Tessa saw the concern in her friend's eyes and wanted to tell her, Sophie was perhaps her closest friend. They'd shared the travails of working for Tom Trent, being perpetually single, and working in the male-dominated field of investigative journalism. But Tessa didn't think she could tell Sophie about last night—not without crying again.

  She would rather face a firing squad than cry in the newsroom.

  Tom was waiting for them by the time they reached the conference room, tapping his pencil impatiently on his notepad. He was a big man—over six feet and probably close to three hundred pounds. With a mop of gray curls on his head, he'd always looked to Tessa like a cross between a sheepdog and a linebacker, but his personality was pure pit bull.

  On his left sat Syd Wilson, the managing editor. It was her job to make the news fit, and doing so under Tom's direction had turned much of her spiky black hair white. Joaquin Ramirez, the sexy photographer who reminded the women at the paper of a young Antonio Banderas, was talking over photo possibilities with Syd, while Katherine James, the newest member of the team, read through her notes. Handpicked by Tom to take Kara's place, Kat had come to Denver from her hometown newspaper in Window Rock, Arizona, on the Navajo reservation, where she'd broken a big story about toxic uranium mining. Petite with waist-length dark hair and hazel-green eyes that revealed her mixed heritage, she kept mostly to herself.

  Tessa took her seat, jotted down some notes, and tried to tell herself this was just another Wednesday morning, just another I-Team meeting.

  Tom never bothered with small talk. "Alton, what's the latest?"

  Sophie had barely taken her seat. "I got a tip yesterday about a woman who filed a federal lawsuit against the Department of Corrections. The suit claims she went into premature labor in lockdown, asked for help, and was ridiculed by the guards, who didn't believe she was having problems. She labored overnight in her cell alone, and her baby was stillborn the next morning."

  Tessa met Sophie's gaze, shared the disgust and anger she saw there. But this was what investigative journalism was all about—shining light into the dark corners so that wrongdoers could have no place to hide.

  Tom didn't react at all, but after a lifetime in journalism, he'd probably seen and heard everything. "What can you pull together by deadline?"

  "I can write up an overview of the lawsuit—probably fifteen inches. I'd like to follow up on the medical angle later in the week—how many doctors per inmate, how well equipped the facility is to deal with women's medical emergencies and such. I've put in an open-records request and am getting the usual runaround."

  Syd nodded, scribbled, did the math. "Photos?"

  "The plaintiff's mug shot."

  Tessa's thoughts drifted back to last night. She didn't hear Matt talk about his story on city council members holding illegal secret meetings via a previously unknown e-mail loop. She didn't hear Katherine discuss the latest on Rocky Flats, the site of a former nuclear weapons plant now open to the public as a recreation area where people could picnic in the plutonium.

  jPor favor, sehor, ayudeme! Ayüdeme! jMe van a matar!

  'Tessa!" Sophie leaned forward and touched her hand to Tessa's forearm.

  "Not enough coffee yet?" Joaquin grinned.

  Embarrassed, Tessa sat upright, looked down at her notes. "There's been another ketamine theft from a vet clinic. It's the third this month. I could contact the drug task force and see if we're looking at a new K craze. But there's something else…"

  She paused for a moment, steeled herself. "I witnessed a murder last night—a drive-by."

  A murmur of shock passed through the conference room.

  Tom said nothing.

  Tessa took a deep breath, forced aside her emotion. "I stopped off at the gas station on Colfax and York and saw a teenage girl get gunned down. I was standing maybe three feet away from her when they opened fire. The cops haven't released the report yet or issued a statement, but I'd like to run with it anyway."

  "God, Tessa!" Sophie stared at her through wide blue eyes. "You could've been shot!"

  True to form, Tom wasted no time on sympathy. "What did you have in mind?"

  As soon as he asked, Tessa knew. "I'd like to write a first-person, eyewitness account. I'd like to follow the case as it moves through the justice system. I can use my knowledge of cops and courts to fill in the personal experience of witnessing the crime."

  Tom's bushy eyebrows came together in a frown, and he opened his mouth to speak.

  Sure he was going to reject her idea, Tessa interrupted. "I know it's unusual, but I can't be objective on this story anyway, so I shouldn't pretend. I think a first-person account will bring the idea of murder home to people in a way an ordinary news story can't."

  "I think it's a great idea," Syd offered. "It's sure to draw readership—a murder mystery being played out on the front page of the paper."

  Sophie, Matt, and Joaquin offered their support, as well.

  "There's something you ought to consider." Kat tucked a strand of long, dark hair behind her ear. "You'll be letting the killer in on everything you know. Are you ready for that?"

  Tessa remembered the terror in the girl's eyes.

  ¡Por favor, senor, ayüdeme!

  Screams. Bullets. Blood.

  The man in the black leather jacket.

  Instead of fear, she felt anger. "Yes, I think I am."

  There was silence for a moment.

  Then Tom tossed his pencil down onto his notepad. "All right, Novak. You're on. Just don't write anything sappy. We aren't goddamned Hallmark."

  Gym bag slung over his shoulder, Julian walked down the hallway of the shabby hotel over threadbare blue-and-orange carpet that looked like it hadn't been cleaned since the seventies. He'd been in hundreds of places like this—roach-infested, pay-by-the-hour dumps that squatted in every city's darkest corners. One thing kept them in business—the buying, selling, and trading of sex. Cheap, clandestine, and staffed by people too poor and too street-smart to ask questions, they made the perfect place for working girls to take their Johns, for married men who wanted a bit of tail on the side—and for scum like Lonnie Zoryo.

  Julian had been cultivating Zoryo, one of Burien's lackeys, for
a few months now, playing the part of a repeat customer with a taste for the forbidden. He had enough on Zoryo to put him behind bars for several lifetimes, though he knew Zoryo wouldn't live to serve his entire sentence. Inmates had a strange intolerance for men who raped kids.

  Julian hadn't filled Dyson in on this little deep-cover job but was working under the radar, sharing bits and pieces with Chief Irving on a need-to-know basis. What he'd been doing wasn't strictly legal in that it wasn't a sanctioned police or FBI action. But he didn't care. He wasn't officially on the FBI payroll, and he wasn't officially a cop. Subsequently he wasn't following anyone's official rule book. He had his reasons.

  He walked to the end of the corridor and turned left, barely noticing the moans coming out of one of the rooms on the right. When it came to sex, nothing shocked him anymore. Then again, he'd grown up on the lam with his father, thinking it was normal to get out of bed in the morning and find half-naked whores passed out next to his father on the couch. If Dyson hadn't pulled him out of that Mexican prison all those years ago, kicked his teenage ass, and given him a new start, Julian would probably be spending a lot of time in places like this one.

  No, he'd still be in prison—or dead.

  Ed Dyson had come to visit him behind bars and had offered him a deal: put your fluent Spanish and Mexican street smarts to use for us, or rot in your cell. Sentenced to thirty years for manslaughter at the age of seventeen for accidentally killing a man in a fistfight, Julian hadn't needed to think hard about his answer. The man he'd killed had had lots of friends on the inside, and every one of them had wanted a piece of Julian. He'd never have survived the year.

  He owed Dyson his life.

  He knocked on the door to room 69—Zoryo's idea of a joke—and waited. He felt the impact of Zoryo's heavy footfalls, saw a shadow pass over the peephole in the door. Locks tumbled, and the door opened to reveal Zoryo standing shirtless in a pair of khaki slacks. The tiger tattoo on his chest proclaimed his pedigree as a former Red Mafia enforcer, while his big, hairy belly spoke of his love for steak and booze. He stank of cigarettes, alcohol, and old sweat. In his hand was a 9mm Taurus.