“No.”
“Nobody knocked you down on the steps leading up to the sidewalk from the downstairs apartment?”
“No.”
“You didn’t drive off with my car.”
“No. I did track down a private detective for you after you recovered the car. You wanted somebody to lift the prints of whoever had taken it.”
“Of Melissa Butler.”
“If that was her name.”
“Thank you, Ms. Marshall. That will be all.”
A silence had fallen on the courtroom. Both the judge and Aubrey Biggs were staring hard at Brooke. “If I can begin my case in chief,” I said, “I think I can clear all this up.”
Cochran nodded slowly.
“Call Matt Nolan.”
He came forward and was sworn.
“You’re Matt Nolan?” I said. “The son of the defendant, Lynn Nolan, and the decedent Derek Nolan?”
He nodded.
“You have to respond out loud so the court reporter can record your responses,” I said.
“Yes. I am.”
“Do you think your mother killed your father?”
“No. Of course not. He was abusive. He hit her. But she was going to run away.”
“Did you spend any time with your mother the day of the murder?”
He nodded, then caught himself. “Yes. I went with her to your office in the morning to talk about divorce. Then I was with her again in the evening from about 6:30 on.”
“Until when?”
“Until a man named Charles Rogers knocked on the door and said there was a woman lying unconscious on the downstairs steps.”
“Is this Charles Rogers here in this courtroom?”
He was, because I had subpoenaed him. “Yes,” Matt said. “He’s there on the second row. On the right. Second from the end.”
I turned and looked. “Could you wave at us, Mr. Rogers?” I said.
Rogers waved.
“Who was the woman on the steps?”
“My fiancée, Melissa Butler.”
“The woman who just testified?”
“No, that was Brooke Marshall. She’s helping me—my mother and me—to wind up my father’s collection business. She and Melissa do look alike.” He fished in his hip pocket. “I have a picture of Melissa and me. We got it taken in one of those booths in the mall.” He handed it to me. I glanced at it, then went and showed it to Biggs. Biggs was beginning to look as if he’d been clubbed in the head with a baseball bat, which I have to say improved his personality. I retrieved the picture from Biggs and took it to the bench to give to Cochran.
“That’s all I have for this witness,” I said.
“Aren’t you going to submit the picture into evidence?” Biggs said.
“All right. Can we have it marked please? Defendants’ Exhibit One. Thank you. I take it there’s no objection?”
Biggs shook his head.
Cochran said, “There being no objection, the picture is admitted into evidence.”
“No questions,” Biggs said.
I called Rodney Burns.
“Mr. Burns,” I said when he had been sworn and had taken a seat. “Could you tell us your profession?”
“I’m a private investigator licensed by the Commonwealth of Virginia.”
“Were you so employed on October twenty-fourth?”
“Yes. That was the day you drove up in a red Volkswagen Beetle and asked me to dust it for prints.”
“It was also the day after the murder, and the day after Melissa Butler helped herself to my car. Did you find any prints?”
“A lot.”
“Some of them mine?”
He nodded. “I took your prints for comparison purposes, but I still had several after I had eliminated them.”
“Were you ever able to identify the prints?”
“Yes. They belonged to a woman who was wanted by the Arlington police. Her name was Melanie Burke.”
“What was she wanted for?”
“Murder. She mutilated her boyfriend, and he died from his injuries.”
“What do you have in the envelope you’re carrying?”
“Faxed pages from the Arlington police reports.”
“May we have them?”
He withdrew the pages from the envelope and handed them to me. I was glad to see there was a picture—not a good one, but clearly recognizable as the same girl as in Matt’s picture. I carried the papers over to Biggs, who leafed through them and handed them back. I carried them to the judge and handed the pages to him.
He took them, frowning. “Ms. Starling, is it your contention that Melissa Burke or Melanie Butler or whoever she is killed Derek Nolan?”
“No, your honor. I won’t rule it out, but that isn’t my contention.”
He held up the papers I had handed him. “Then what is the relevance of these? And, for that matter, the relevance of Mr. Burns’s testimony?”
“No relevance. I’m not the one who has made Melanie Burke a central part of the case.” I glanced in Biggs’s direction. “I would argue, though, that she’s no less relevant than she was twenty minutes ago when my roommate and I were being threatened with jail.”
“How do you account for her disappearance?”
“Her police record. After Melanie Burke jumped bail, she moved to Richmond, managed somehow to produce whatever documents allowed her to get a job—I haven’t had time to explore that angle—and picked up a boyfriend. When another murder occurred, though, and police started arriving on the scene, she decided it was again time to relocate. Bad luck for my clients, since she had seen the murderer and presumably could have identified him and cleared Steve Bruno.”
“What made you think she had a police record?”
“She disappeared and never even returned to work to pick up her last paycheck. Something had to account for it. I had one major advantage over the police. I knew I hadn’t spirited her away, and I wasn’t hiding her. The police and the prosecution were so focused on me they couldn’t think about anything else.”
Cochran’s gaze slid toward Biggs.
“I did hope for one good thing to come of the prosecution’s mistake. Melissa Butler, as far as everyone knows, got a good look at the murderer, but it’s possible that the murderer didn’t get a good look at her. Brooke Marshall and she do look superficially alike. When Brooke Marshall was hauled into the courtroom and placed on the witness stand, the murderer would want to get out.”
Cochran looked at Steve Bruno.
“Obviously, if Mr. Bruno was the man on the stairs, he was going to have to face the witness. My contention, though, is that it was someone else. I’ve had everyone who wasn’t on the prosecution’s witness list subpoenaed so they’d be here today.”
I turned to look over the gallery and with some dismay saw James Jordan standing in the back of the courtroom, just inside the doors. He shook his head at me.
The inside pocket of my jacket vibrated against my left breast, and I jumped about a foot. I fished out my cell phone and flicked it open. “Excuse me,” I said to the judge. “Hello?”
It was Paul Soldano. “When that redhead came in, Elizabeth Lockard got up and left the courtroom,” he said. “I figured she was just going to the ladies’ room, but I followed her anyway. Right now, she’s on I-64 heading west. I’m right behind her.”
“You’re a life-saver. Don’t lose her.” I looked up. “Liz Lockard has fled the courtroom.”
“She seems to be having trouble deciding where to go,” Paul Soldano said in my ear. “Are you there?”
“I’m here.”
“First, she got onto I-64 headed east, and I thought she was going to the airport. Then she exited and got back on the interstate going the other way. Now she’s taking the Glenside Drive exit.”
“Probably going home,” I said. James Jordan looked as if he was on the point of flight.
“Your honor, could we recess until tomorrow morning? I’d like to go with Officer Jordan when
he goes to pick her up.”
“Melissa Butler said she was struck by a man,” Biggs said.
“Probably she didn’t get any better look at her assailant than her assailant got at her. On the other hand, you’ve seen Liz Lockard.”
Somebody in the courtroom snorted explosively. The sound was followed by a nervous titter, and a corner of Cochran’s mouth lifted in the start of a smile.
“Can we recess?” I said, already pushing through the rail. “I really want to be in on this.”
After the briefest hesitation, Cochran nodded. “Officer Jordan, take her with you.”
Chapter 31
Jordan looked at my feet, saw I was wearing flat-soled shoes, and nodded. “Let’s go,” he said.
We bypassed the elevator and took the stairs.
“How the hell did she get by you?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I think she left the stairs at the second floor and either switched stairwells or took the elevator down. How did your colleague manage to stay with her?”
“I don’t know.”
Jordan’s car was just around the corner of the courthouse, parked against the curb. As I got in and pulled on my seatbelt, he took a bubble light off the seat between us and clamped it magnetically to the roof of his car. He slammed the car door and turned the key.
At Broad Street, he turned toward I-64. The siren let us slide smoothly through two red lights, and then we were at the on-ramp. “I missed what went on in court,” he shouted over the siren. “Why is everyone convinced Liz Lockard’s guilty?”
“Hocus pocus,” I shouted back.
“What?”
“The affect is temporary. I haven’t proved anything except that Liz Lockard left the courtroom and that I didn’t obstruct justice. By now Biggs and Judge Cochran have probably realized it.”
He spared me a glance, though the needle of the speedometer was at eighty-five and his hands were rigid on the steering wheel. “Then what are we doing?”
“Seeing what develops. I’m pretty sure Liz embezzled money from Derek Nolan. She framed her boyfriend for it, Mark Walker, who was combination errand boy and handyman for Nolan. I think Nolan figured it out, threatened her with prosecution, and she shot him.”
He shook his head.
“I know. It’s guesswork. If I were a better lawyer, I could bring all this out in the courtroom.”
“If you were a better lawyer, you’d run a conventional trial, and your clients would be convicted.”
I wondered if there was a compliment in that somewhere. “Acquittal is still a long shot,” I shouted. “I just don’t have anything else.”
Jordan exited the interstate, went through a light, then killed his siren as we got close to Lockard’s house. When we turned onto her block, I saw Paul Soldano’s car against the curb across the street from the house. Liz’s faded Toyota was in her driveway.
Paul opened his car door as Jordan stopped on the street and got out of the car. Jordan had a big automatic in his right hand, though I hadn’t seen him draw it. “You stay here,” he said.
He started up the walk, and I was right behind him. He stopped me with a gesture as he mounted the stairs. He made a circling motion with his free hand, which I took as an instruction to go watch the back of the house. I started around, hearing the faint sound of chimes inside the house. Jordan had rung the bell.
The gunshot sounded as I reached the corner of the house, a reverberating crack that was immediately followed by two more. I reversed course and ran back toward the front door. Paul Soldano was on the sidewalk, standing frozen. James Jordan was on the front stoop, bent almost backward over the rail, his head in a large bush and his body sliding away from the front of the house. His pistol fell from his fingers and clattered onto the top step and down to the sidewalk. The front door was open about a foot and swinging slowly inward as Jordan fell from the stoop, his shoulder hitting the scraggly lawn with its hard-packed dirt, the rest of his body landing on the sidewalk.
I went by him, taking the stoop in a single jump. I slammed into the front door, bouncing it off the wall beside it so hard that the door nearly hit me as I went through. Liz Lockard lay on her back, so close to the door that I stepped in the middle of her abdomen, lost my balance and stumbled to my knees by a revolver that lay on the rug just beyond her body.
I lunged to my feet, looking down at her. Her open eyes were vacant, staring blindly upward. Blood spouted from the side of her neck and puddled beneath her head and neck. She wasn’t dead—the blood spouting from the carotid artery told me that—but she was dying too rapidly for me to do anything about it. I stepped over her and went out the door.
Jordan was down, Paul standing over him with a cell phone. He was giving the address. “There’s a police officer down,” he said. “He’s been shot.” At his feet Jordan lay on his side, each breath whistling faintly like a flute sucking air, the front of his shirt sodden with blood.
Dropping to my knees beside him, I ripped open his shirt. There was a hole in the blood-soaked T-shirt beneath it, low in his chest. I forced up the T-shirt so I could see the wound. As the chest hitched upward, air whistled through the hole in the chest wall. The chest didn’t fall. Jordan struggled to exhale, but the air wasn’t going anywhere. It was going in through the bullet wound, but wasn’t coming out again.
“Paul,” I shouted. “Get down here and keep your hand pressed to this wound.”
I lurched to my feet, stumbling back up the stairs into the house, leaping over Lockard’s body, running to the kitchen, jerking open the door of the cabinet beneath the sink. The half-full box of Hefty garbage bags was an answer to prayer. I grabbed it and ran. Jordan’s efforts to breathe were drawing air into the chest cavity outside the lung, collapsing it. I had to do something, or he wouldn’t survive until the paramedics got there.
Back outside, I dropped to my knees again beside Jordan’s body, opposite Paul. I yanked a garbage bag from the box and pressed it down on top of Paul’s hand. “Okay,” I said. “You can slide it out. Try not to hurt him.”
Paul withdrew a hand dripping with blood and wiped it on the grass as I smoothed the black plastic over Jordan’s chest, trying to seal off the wound. The movement of air as Jordan inhaled helped to suck it tight. I sat cross-legged on the grass beside Jordan, one hand pressed to the plastic-covered wound, the other grasping his wrist in search of a pulse.
I couldn’t find one. Panic was rising in my own chest when I noticed the pulse beating visibly in Jordan’s neck. I’d never been good at finding a pulse in people’s wrists. On the other hand, if Jordan was in shock, his blood pressure would be falling, and his radial pulse would be the first to disappear.
“Is he dying?” Paul asked, hunkering down next to me.
“I don’t know. Something’s happening to him.” Whatever it was, it wasn’t something good. The veins in Jordan’s neck bulged as the external jugular veins became progressively distended. His trachea deviated left as the mass of air building in his chest cavity pushed it over.
Jordan whispered something between gasps, and I leaned over him. “What?” I asked.
He gasped and said it again.
“He says he’s thirsty,” Paul said.
It was the least of his problems. He was gasping uselessly, the veins in his neck swelling, his trachea moving further left with each intake of breath. No air at all was coming out between breaths. I closed my eyes, trying to visualize what was happening. I saw the diaphragm dropping, drawing air into the lungs—and through them, out through the hole in the punctured lung and into the chest cavity where it was becoming trapped.
“I need another tube of some kind,” I said, my voice unnaturally loud. I saw for a moment the face of my father in the courtroom, but where was he now when I needed him? I opened my eyes and looked at Paul. “A tube like a glass straw or the body of a pen.”
Paul patted the breast of his jacket.
“Maybe a turkey baster or something like it from the kitchen,�
�� I said. “Oh, crap. I don’t think there’s time.” The pulse was no longer visible in the swollen blood vessels of Jordan’s neck.
Paul stood and fished in the pockets of his pants. He came out with a pen.
“Hallelujah,” I said. “Take it apart.”
He was already unscrewing it. I yanked the Hefty bag away from Jordan’s chest. No air leaked from the wound. The veins in his neck were thick, blue cords.
“It has to be now,” I said.
Paul handed me the bottom half of his pen. I put the narrow end against the bullet wound in Jordan’s chest. It wasn’t sanitary, but antibiotics would have to take care of that later. I pushed cylinder of the pen into Jordan’s chest, following the path of the bullet wound as best I could, getting onto my knees in order to exert more pressure. I was panting.
“Aren’t you afraid of puncturing an organ?” Paul asked. It was the first unhelpful thing he had said.
“Terrified,” I said.
Abruptly, air whistled through the body of the pen like air from a deflating balloon.
“It’s working,” Paul said.
The positive effects of the release of air were already evident. The bulging veins in Jordan’s neck were retreating, becoming less prominent by the second as air continued to flow through the tube, silently now, but still coming. The trachea moved slowly back in the direction of its customary midline position.
I took Jordan’s wrist again, feeling for the return of his radial pulse as he came out of shock. I found it just as the faint sounds of a siren reached us and began to grow louder.
Chapter 32
“You did it again,” Paul said. “With a pen. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“He’s still bleeding, and there’s a bullet in there somewhere.”
“But he’s stabilized.”
“Your,” Jordan gasped hoarsely.
I leaned over him. “Easy, Jordan. You’re going to make it.”
“You’re always…trouble,” he said.
I kissed his cold, sweaty forehead. “I know. I’m sorry.” The sounds of the siren were louder now. The ambulance turned onto the street, and the sound became earsplitting, then died.
Juggling Evidence (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery) Page 21
