Defensive Wounds

by Lisa Black

  Agnes took the pan off the burner and, in one of those masterpieces of timing that Theresa had never been able to pull off, removed a tray of lightly browned, puffed-up pastries from the oven. “Do you have any suspects?”

  “I’ve got a favorite.” Theresa snatched up one of the puffs.

  “Hot,” her mother warned again. Theresa passed it from hand to hand as she described Sonia’s—and now her own—suspicion of Dennis Britton. “That’s all it is, though, suspicion. Nothing approaching proof. But then he’s defended enough murderers to be good about proof. Maybe good enough to get away with killing his wife.”

  “His wife’s dead?”

  Theresa had been unable to resist a look after stumbling onto Elizabeth (Ellie) Britton’s file. It hadn’t taken long.

  The healthy brunette had been thirty-two years old, five-five, and 130 pounds. She had been driving a three-year-old Honda Accord that went over the embankment behind a business on Canal Road, near I-480 in Garfield Heights. Why she would have arrived well after closing time (passing a security camera over the side door) or why she somehow missed the end of the parking lot behind their building remained unknown. She apparently drove off the asphalt, through some trees, and down a short but steep hill to the Cuyahoga River. A rotting tree stump stopped the car from submerging, leaving it stranded on the bank.

  Ellie had died only a month and a half after Jenna Simone. Again, this explained why Theresa had no recollection of the case—she’d still been in a funk over her fiancé’s death. Plus, it had been reported as a car accident, and Theresa hadn’t been as familiar with attorney Dennis Britton then as she now had the misfortune to be. She didn’t mention any of this to her mother, only summarized the autopsy report: The victim had received a blow straight across the forehead, consistent with having hit the steering wheel upon impact. Decomposition had advanced slightly faster than usual as the corpse lay in an open car in mid-July, next to the river’s humid environment. Even without the stump, it would have been unlikely for the car to wash away in the shallow river, but the hood of the car had entered the water and a pool had formed at the victim’s feet. Police found the victim in the driver’s seat, wearing a seat belt. After the impact her head came to lodge between the headrest and the open window. Either the blow to the head or the loss of blood had caused a lack of brain functioning until the involuntary muscles failed and her heart stopped. Keys were in the ignition, her purse and wallet found intact. The toxicology results showed no traces of alcohol, sedatives, or any illegal drug use.

  As in Jenna Simone’s file, a few of the scene photographs had been printed. Dr. Phil Banachek had done the autopsy; perhaps the aging pathologist preferred to work from the photos rather than make his way down a sloping forest hillside with his aching knees.

  They showed what Theresa had already imagined: a damaged Honda, its nose stuck in the flowing Cuyahoga; a bloated, maggot-infested corpse, with wisps of brown hair escaping through the open window and hanging down the side of the driver’s door alongside narrow streaks of blood; a smear of blood on the steering wheel and one on the passenger door; the view from the passenger side—the body slumped, another streak of blood visible against the light gray interior of the driver’s door … not much blood for someone who bled out, even partially, but there could be more behind the body itself or poured down into the window well; an oversize Gucci purse on the edge of the passenger seat with a briefcase on the floor, its papers scattered; more blood on the passenger door, its window rolled down as well; and the view from the parking lot, deep ruts in moist ground at the edge of the lot, the Honda visible in the distance. The car had traveled in a straight line. There were no concrete barriers to stop it or even alert the driver that the asphalt ended, which seemed like a lawsuit waiting to happen. But the victim’s aggressive lawyer husband had not filed one.

  Scary to think that a life could be lost so easily, by simply driving four feet too far in a dark parking lot.

  Between bites of the pastry, Theresa told her mother that a vehicle-inspection sheet reported the Honda to be in working condition, with all relevant parts functioning as expected. This meant that the seat belt and the brake and gas pedals were working properly. The headlights, however, had not been turned on at the time of impact.

  There were no police reports in the file—not any reason for there to be, unless the pathologist requested them and tossed them into the file when done. But a second newspaper clipping told her more. The parking lot and the building belonged to Rule and Sons, a manufacturing plant and home of the main witness against Ellie’s client in a case of high-dollar employee theft. The owner and two managers had been dodging her calls, and she may have gone there to see them before resorting to subpoena, a common technique for her. The parking lot had no fence and not much lighting. They had never felt the need, the owner said, as they functioned solely during business hours. The security camera had only been installed because of the aforementioned theft case.

  Her husband, Dennis Britton, had last seen Ellie that morning before they left for work. They lived only a mile away, off Brecksville Road on the other side of the river. She did not come home after work so far as he could tell. He had arrived at about 7:00 P.M., unsurprised to find the house empty—they both worked long days, even on Fridays. But when she hadn’t returned by bedtime and calls to her cell phone went unanswered, he became concerned. He did not call the police at first, knowing that they wouldn’t be too interested in an able-bodied adult who’d stayed out late, but called his wife’s friends and co-workers. The co-workers reported that she had left the law office—a small group specializing in drunk-driving cases, not where her husband worked—at around 6:00 P.M. on Friday. No one had heard from Ellie since. As soon as he could, he filed a missing-persons report with the Garfield Heights police department. Dennis Britton made a point of saying that the police officers had been polite and helpful—Theresa found this sudden admiration of the boys in blue suspicious, to say the least, but the rest of his behavior had been pitch-perfect.

  The article even snuck in the small fact that the police had dusted the trunk of the car for palm prints, to see if someone had pushed it into the ravine. Nothing.

  A couple of kids playing on the other side of the river had seen the car on Saturday morning but didn’t mention it to their parents until after the news broke. An employee arriving for work at Rule and Sons bright and early on Monday morning, who made a habit of parking in the shade at the back of the lot, noticed the tire tracks leading into the brush. This, along with the security camera, which showed the Honda Accord passing the entrance at 8:40 P.M., fixed the time of death at Friday night.

  Ellie Britton, while alive, had been a pretty woman with straight dark hair and a prominent nose. The article did not include a photo of the grieving husband.

  “Sounds like she took a wrong turn in the dark,” Theresa’s mother said as she filled the puffs with custard. “She’d hardly be the first person in history to do that. Why does your friend think her husband killed her?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out. There are a few things I don’t like, such as why wouldn’t she have hit the brakes when she felt the terrain dip? And if she had hit the brakes, wouldn’t the seat belt lock up to prevent her from slamming into the steering wheel? I guess she could have slipped out of the shoulder strap. But why douse her lights in a dark parking lot? How could the final impact be harsh enough to crack her skull but not hard enough to throw her purse forward onto the floor? How did a smear of blood get on the other side of the vehicle, onto the passenger-side door?”

  “Good Lord,” her mother said. “The details you notice.”

  “Not really. There are always the unexplainables. Items fly around, peculiar coincidences occur, homeowners actually forgot to lock a door they insist they always lock. Maybe the blow didn’t kill Ellie Britton outright but was enough to cause a slowing of the motor functions, maybe a touch of positional asphyxia. The blood on the passenger door c
ould have squirted there; usually the initial blow doesn’t bleed a lot, but head wounds bleed especially well. I’ve seen way more bizarre examples of blood flight characteristics. Maybe she had a habit of turning off her lights before parking to minimize the chances of forgetting about them entirely and returning to a car with a dead battery. I’ve done that.”

  “Or maybe the guy killed her.”

  “Or maybe,” Theresa agreed, snitching another one of the now-sufficiently-cooled puffs and popping it into her mouth, only to realize that it had not sufficiently cooled.

  Perhaps Dennis Britton had killed his wife, put her in the passenger seat of her own car, then driven to the parking lot of a business involved in one of her cases, a business he lived only a mile from and whose terrain he might be familiar with. He moved her to the driver’s seat, turned out the lights to lessen the chance of discovery, pushed it over the edge, and hoped it would float away down the river, decomposing the body until no clues remained. Then he simply walked home. Not a perfect murder, perhaps, but near enough as made no difference.

  Or perhaps Theresa simply wanted to believe that.

  “So what did you do with this file?” her mother asked.

  “I put it back in the cabinet. Powell’s right—if there was any way to prove that Dennis Britton killed his wife, the cops would have. Everybody hates lawyers, as Sonia keeps reminding me.”

  “Especially you.”

  “Do not.” Theresa frowned. What had she just told Neil Kelly about mothers and daughters?

  Mothers and daughters …

  “Where is Rachael anyway?”

  “She went on a date.” Agnes took a spatula to finish up the pan.

  Theresa felt a prickling along her scalp, like the first tiny tremors that herald an earthquake to come. “What?”

  “She came over, said she didn’t need dinner because that boy from work was picking her up.”

  “William.”

  “Yes, William. He must have pulled into your drive, because I didn’t see him. She looked cute, though, wearing that purple top you gave her at Christmas. I asked where they were going, but I don’t think she heard me, she rushed off so fast—What’s the matter?”

  Don’t panic, Theresa told herself. Don’t scream. And don’t worry your mother. “Nothing, I just remembered something I have to do for work.”

  Her mother nodded but had too many working instincts to be entirely convinced. Mothers and daughters … “I think she really likes this one.”

  “So do I.”

  PART III

  *

  RACHAEL

  CHAPTER 25

  *

  Frank had visited the Office of the Public Defender perhaps three times in his fifteen-year career as a police officer. Depositions—where attorneys could question witnesses on the record but without the damper of a judge or jury—were taken in the neutral territory of the court reporters’ offices, and there would be no other reason for Frank to hang out around defense lawyers. It wasn’t like they were friends. Though with one or two exceptions, he felt the same way about prosecutors. Lawyers lived in a specific, contained universe, where nothing mattered except their own strategies. Frank preferred to leave them to it.

  In fact, the last time he’d set foot inside PD, they’d still been in the threadbare building on Prospect. He had to use Google to find the new place, a scant four hundred feet from the police department. It looked about the same, a weary collection of hallways without any particular decor. Newer paint, that was all.

  Frank and Angela had already spoken with the Ritz-Carlton’s disgruntled former employee, a general manager who, though he wouldn’t admit it, had been let go for following the maids around too closely and too consistently for it to be considered a quality-control effort. He now worked at a convenience store and did not feel any more gruntled toward the Ritz-Carlton but had, they learned, been in Chicago for a grandmother’s birthday on the night Marie Corrigan was killed.

  So now the two cops perched in surprisingly comfortable chairs across from Maryann Mercer, who’d been Bruce Raffel’s supervisor during that attorney’s time at the PD. Maryann had been working the system longer than Frank had been with the police department, yet she still managed to have a sense of humor. She had her graying hair pulled back in a thick ponytail and wore sandals with socks under her tailored slacks. As with most law grads, she had applied to both the prosecutor’s office and the PD and gone with whichever one offered a job first. But most newly minted lawyers used the PD as a way station, a stepping-stone to a private firm; the ones who didn’t were either very ambitious, very unambitious, or true believers (or, as in Frank’s parlance, crazy). Maryann fell into the third category.

  “Did you keep in touch?” Angela now asked her. “With Bruce? Or Marie?”

  “Saw them around, said hi while passing through the corridors of power. I wouldn’t call it keeping in touch. They shook the dust of this place off their feet as soon as they had an offer and never looked back.”

  “They got along when they worked here?”

  “Like a house afire. Symbiotic. They thought alike,” she added, then pondered her own words for a moment. “No, not alike, kind of complementary. You probably weren’t fond of Bruce”—she looked at them for confirmation, received uniform nods—“but he was smart. A lot smarter than he seemed. Innovative. And Marie—she was plenty smart, don’t get me wrong, but she had the charm, the personal connection. She had that mischievous quality, that ability—I mean aside from being gorgeous—to make you like her even when she was slicing your heart out. Put them together and they were unstoppable. They would pretty much only work with each other after a while. Formed a sort of unofficial partnership, pooled their cases.”

  “Was that a problem? Office-wise?” Angela asked.

  “Are you kidding? They cleared cases right and left. I should complain about that?”

  “But their relationship was personal as well?”

  Maryann Mercer laughed. “Did they screw each other? Like rabbits. On their respective desks, even, to hear the cleaning staff tell it. Might as well. You’re only young once.”

  “Any bondage involved?”

  “Wouldn’t know, wouldn’t have asked.”

  “The rest of your staff didn’t mind the drama?”

  Maryann laughed again, the amusement utterly genuine. “What is this, grade school? Two APDs getting it on is not drama. I have a hearing tomorrow over whether a mentally ill ten-year-old who stabbed his mom to death is going to prison or Northwood Regional. I’d almost rather it be prison. At least he’d have a scheduled release date. So a little sex among the children is not considered drama. No one cared. Well, except for Bruce’s wife. Poor thing.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “Waddled in here nine months pregnant, and I had to stall her with a glass of water so Bruce and Marie could get their clothes back on. Figured she’d dump him right then and there, but no, had the baby. I heard she had another one after that before she finally gave up on him. One thing you have to say about Bruce, he was crazy about those boys. No angle there. One hundred percent gaga. About the mother, not so much. Of course, men are all like that. They think loving their children makes up for everything else they do. Loving a kid is easy. Raising them, that’s a whole ’nother stretch of badly maintained road.”

  “Who left the office first?” Frank asked, ignoring the social commentary. They had already checked Bruce’s ex-wife, now happily remarried and working as a paralegal for a tax firm. The woman had motive to kill both Bruce and Marie, but between her job, her husband, two boys and now a girl, soccer practice, and a vet appointment, she seemed to be fairly well spoken for during the time periods in question.

  Maryann rubbed the back of her neck. “Bruce, I’m pretty sure.”

  “Why?”

  “Job offer. More money.”

  “Was Marie angry?”

  “She wasn’t happy, but it had to happen. They were too young and poor to
open their own office, and it’d be hard to find a firm to take both of them at once. Don’t think it bothered them much. They were just starting out, world’s their oyster. Plenty of time to move and settle and move again. Didn’t realize how rare it is to find someone you can really work with.”

  “What about Dennis Britton?” Angela asked.

  Maryann slowed down, but not by much. “Huh. Dennis. Yeah, he was in the mix here, too.”

  “He mix with Marie?”

  “Dunno. Maybe. Like I said, only young once.”

  “Any conflicts between him and Bruce?”

  “Not that I recall. Both alpha males with a capital A, so after they circle awhile, they’re either going to hunt as a pack or leave blood on the snow.”

  “Which was it?”

  “Stains on the industrial-grade carpeting. Remember when that guy robbed that guy of yours at the Shell station on Ontario?”

  Frank nodded. Barely out of his teens but armed with a Desert Eagle, a young man had made a very questionable choice of victim. Not only did his target have six inches and nearly a hundred pounds on him, he also happened to be an off-duty detective. The young robber panicked upon hearing this and pulled the trigger, winging the cop and shattering the windshield of his own getaway vehicle. From there, matters did not improve, at least not for him.

  “Guy was screwed six ways from Sunday, and I didn’t know what to do for him. Most of our clients are a bit challenged in the education department, but this guy didn’t have the brains to shuck a peanut before eating it.”

  “Exactly the sort of citizen we want running around town robbing people with a loaded .44.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Maryann said. “Bruce had already done a police who-shot-first thing, so he let me know he would be a good one to handle it. But I gave it to Dennis, figuring he needed the experience. Guy got twenty years. Bruce harped on Dennis right after the sentencing, and the two of them turned into Tasmanian devils. Me and another APD had to tear them apart, and Dennis had to redecorate his office. I didn’t do that again.”