Defensive Wounds

by Lisa Black

  She shouldn’t say anything to Neil, she thought. She should just let him enjoy the view of the city lights and the coursing water beyond them. It might be his last glimpse for a very long time. And she shouldn’t say anything, period.

  But of course she couldn’t stop herself. “Whose idea was it? Yours or hers?”

  He stared at her. “You think I knew?”

  “Stop playing me, Neil.”

  “I’m not—shit, if I had known, I would have stopped her!”

  Theresa gazed at him, searching his face for any sign of untruth, but she didn’t know him that well and had never been able to read people like a book. That was why she stuck with inanimate things, like microscopes and dead cells.

  “I didn’t even know about this convention. Coral comes here for lunch with her group every so often. She must have seen an advertisement or heard about it from the staff.”

  Theresa nodded. And when Coral realized or found out that her company provided the keycards for the hotel, it must have seemed like destiny. A plan began to form.

  “I didn’t know defense attorneys even had conventions until we got the call for Marie Corrigan’s death. I knew she’d been his lawyer, of course—I’d come here to support Coral, attended the trial—but I figured at least two percentage points of this city’s population hated that bitch, so I didn’t think … I went over Coral’s to tell her. She acted surprised. We had a drink to celebrate.” His expression grew pensive, now that he had a moment to think back and connect dots. “She wanted to hear all about it. The hotel room, what Marie’s body looked like. Yeah, I shouldn’t have been discussing an open case, but she’s my sister. I swear, Theresa, she never gave me the slightest idea that she already knew all the answers.”

  Theresa rested her head against the cold brick, watching the lights at Browns Stadium. Wrong season for football—probably a high-school graduation. She kept six inches of space between their bodies, but it wasn’t enough. She could still feel the electric pull of his flesh, the smell of his aftershave. “What about Bruce Raffel?”

  “I didn’t recognize him at the scene, but when I saw his photo in a suit and tie, he looked familiar. I’d attended a few days of the trial, and I must have seen him. At that point I began to wonder, yes, but—you couldn’t even call it suspicion, only this little gnawing worry in the pit of my stomach. And there seemed to be other connections between Raffel and Corrigan—sex, past cases, Dennis Britton. I didn’t ask Coral about it. I didn’t want to know.”

  “If you had, Sonia Battle might still be alive.”

  “Do you think I don’t know that?” The words couldn’t come out fast enough; he seemed to choke on each one. “Coral attended every second of William’s trial. She’d arrive an hour early, wouldn’t leave until the attorneys did. Sat there through every recess, every sidebar. I was with her the day Sonia came in during a break and thanked Marie for taking the case. Once the jury’s gone, attorneys don’t really pay much attention to who’s around them. Sonia laughed and said William would wind up on death row if she had tried it. She laughed. Coral went to the ladies’ room and threw up.”

  Theresa found herself wanting to take his hand, to say something comforting. She didn’t.

  He swallowed hard and went on. “That’s why I was so … harsh about her death, because that’s when I knew. And I couldn’t see a way out. I couldn’t figure out how to save Coral. Or myself.”

  Family was family, she got that. You protect them as best you can. Except when it allowed someone else to die.

  She watched Rachael, standing by as the paramedics helped the injured teenager to his feet. They had immobilized his shoulders with a wide Velcroed strap, like a cummerbund worn ten inches too high.

  “On top of that, I had to run the investigation. I couldn’t break away to confront her. I had to keep pretending that everything was normal—at least normal for a cop investigating a triple homicide. I never thought Coral would come back here. I never told her Rachael worked here.” The portable halogen lights were harsh and unforgiving, the beams picking up and emphasizing every line in his face. “I swear, Theresa, I never told her a thing about you.”

  “No. I did. Then she read about Rachael in the paper.”

  Neil, too, watched the two teens. “That kid’s got nine lives. Coral lunched here all the time. It’s a habit she got into when her husband was still around, and it’s some principle or other of the support groups to reconnect each member with the things they enjoyed in life.”

  “William works in the kitchen, not out by the tables.” If he had, maybe William would be dead and three lawyers would still be alive. “You would have let her shoot him, wouldn’t you? That’s why you didn’t step in—”

  “No,” he insisted, not very convincingly. “Yes. I don’t know. We hated him so much … I just didn’t want to walk away again. I wanted it to be over.”

  She looked at him, seeing real regret in his face. He would have killed William, taken his revenge for the death of his niece or removed a dangerous animal from society, however he chose to look at it. He would not, she thought, have killed Marie Corrigan or the other attorneys but got sucked into the process anyway. He might not go to jail, almost certainly would not go to jail, but he would never again be a cop.

  “I should have faced the facts sooner, I should have owned up to my connection to Marie Corrigan, I should have immediately gotten up on that platform and taken that gun away from her,” he said. “Now I’ve lost my sister and everything else as well.”

  “Like your job?”

  “No. You.” He looked her in the eyes. “I really liked you.”

  She pushed herself off the brick wall. “I really liked you, too. Until you pulled out a loaded gun ten feet from my daughter.”

  “Mom?” Rachael asked, trailing the paramedics off the deck. “Are you coming?”

  She walked toward her daughter without another word.

  “Theresa.”

  She didn’t want to look back. She wanted a clean cut, to slice Neil Kelly out of her life as if he’d never been there.

  Not possible, of course. There would be statements and hearings and maybe a trial. She turned.

  “You’d have done the same thing, if it had been Rachael.”

  She didn’t answer.

  They followed the ambulance to the hospital, leaving the crime scene in Don’s capable hands. Theresa wondered if, like cops, forensic scientists were forbidden to investigate crimes in which they’d been involved; if so, that was fine by her. She had no desire to see that observation deck again. She had no desire to photograph Coral Simone’s ruined body, which had landed on the roof of the Ontario Street entrance. She had no desire to go over, for the fourth time, where she’d been standing when Coral confessed to the murders of three attorneys or when Neil Kelly pointed a gun at her. She had no desire to think, period.

  “Mom?”

  “What, honey?”

  “Is that true? If someone murdered me, would you kill them?”

  There are times when you should lie to your children. This might have been one of those times, but Theresa couldn’t tell and didn’t have the strength left to think it through. This was something she was willing to admit. “Without hesitation.”

  Rachael absorbed, accepted, nodded. “Good.”

  CHAPTER 42

  *

  Theresa waited with Frank outside courtroom B on the twenty-third floor, gazing down on the city and the lake. Her dislike for the setup that restricted this view from the common folk had not changed, but she needed some calming. Testifying in Neil Kelly’s preliminary hearing wouldn’t be pleasant.

  “Coral told me when we first met that she programmed something called low coercivity,” Theresa told her cousin. “I had no idea what she was talking about. Turns out that magnetic strip on plastic key cards is low coercivity for items that store little, usually temporary information, like bus passes and hotel keys. High coercivity would be used for credit cards, bank cards, things
that retain a lot more information.”

  “Fascinating,” her cousin said without inflection. “What was up with all the cat hair?”

  “Americans love their pets. And their fur gets everywhere—I’m living proof.” Theresa picked one of Nefertiti’s strands off her skirt. “People spread around trace from their own homes with their clothes, their luggage, their shoes. Bruce ran into Marie, probably gave her a hug for old times’ sake, transferred some of his pet dander to her. Sonia’s hairs belonged to her own brood. The unidentified ones belong, I’m sure, to previous hotel guests.”

  Frank grunted, still unhappy at having been stuck in this building while the lives of his cousin and her child had been threatened high atop the Terminal Tower. He said he hated missing out on the action—it left him without much to say in the locker room—but she suspected he worried about her getting into scrapes when he wasn’t around to get her out of them. “How’s Rachael doing?”

  “She got a job at Kohl’s. Decent hours, and she gets a discount on clothes.”

  “And still dating this William?”

  “He dislocated his shoulder and ripped two tendons and still wouldn’t let go of her.” Theresa shrugged. “I am therefore obligated to cut the kid some slack.”

  “It really was Ray who killed Jenna?”

  “He confessed the moment they asked him. And get this—he refused the lawyer his parents hired and agreed to a plea before the assigned public defender could talk him out of it.”

  “That worked?”

  “He’s over eighteen now, legally an adult. He can do what he wants. You know the weird thing, though? What he kept apologizing for, over and over again? Not killing Jenna Simone. For letting William take the blame.”

  “What exactly did he think was going to happen when he left a dead girl next to his unconscious buddy? Speaking of which, why didn’t he just roofie Jenna if he wanted into her pants?”

  “He tried—thinking she’d start to pass out, he’d pop up like Sir Galahad and drive her home. William would want to stay at the party, would let Ray borrow his car—Ray didn’t have a car, his parents didn’t let him drive—but somehow the glasses got mixed up and William drank the dose instead. He figures okay, he’ll still have her all to himself, and now she’ll be impressed with what a good friend he is, but of course it didn’t work out that way. She refused a kiss, and he snapped. Then he couldn’t move her body by himself and he couldn’t wake William up to help him. So he just went home and began to die. His words.”

  Frank shook his head. “He probably figures you can always get another girl but a true friend comes along only once or twice in a lifetime.”

  “Who’s your true friend?” she asked, not knowing where the question came from, other than the sudden realization that she didn’t know. Frank seemed to rely on partners, but one recent partner had been killed and now his partner was a woman, so that a few large and impenetrable barriers had to be maintained.

  “The one I’d move a body for?”

  “Yeah.”

  He snorted, smiled, and, being Frank, evaded the question. “You,” he said, and kissed her cheek. Then he paced a few steps, turned, paced back. “Hard to believe our serial killer was a soccer mom.”

  “Softball. And what they say about mama bears goes for all the species. You know, I see how she got into the Presidential Suite, but how did she get Marie Corrigan to show up there?”

  Frank said, “Same way you meet with any lawyer. You make an appointment.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “From her credit-card bills, she lunched at the Ritz often enough that she could have learned of this convention about a month and a half in advance, giving her plenty of time to plan. That’s about when Marie’s paralegal said she started getting phone calls from a ‘Mrs. Jones’ with a vague story about needing to get her son out of trouble, how it had to be kept quiet because they didn’t want their family name in the papers, et cetera. Never any details, at least none that Marie shared with the paralegal. She must have given a very old-money type of sound to it, which would have gotten Marie’s attention. So she could have—and this is all theory, mind you—strung Marie along, then suggested a meeting at the Ritz. She had to call at the last minute to tell Marie which room, because of course she couldn’t be sure the Presidential Suite would be empty. Coral even used a prepaid, disposable cell phone. Probably learned that from her brother’s tales of the street.”

  “Did Bruce get any mysterious calls?” Theresa asked.

  “None that we’ve heard of. He was staying there, though, so that made him easier. All she had to do was follow him to his room and then knock on the door with some excuse. Once he opens it, she’s got a gun to guarantee her entry.”

  “Then why not shoot him?” Theresa asked, answering herself before he had a chance. “The noise.”

  “And the satisfaction of caving his head in with her own two hands. She’d waited a long time to make someone pay for her daughter’s death.”

  Theresa shuddered.

  Frank didn’t bring up Sonia, but Theresa figured it for a similar scenario. All Coral had to do was ask Sonia for a word. The attorney probably wouldn’t have recognized her and, even if she had, would be too kind to blow the woman off. She’d have accompanied Coral to the observation deck even without a gun.

  Her cousin put an arm around her, brought her back to the nuts and bolts of the case, the inanimate, objective parts. “You’ve dotted all your i’s?”

  “Most. The spandex fiber with the wax globules came from her batting glove. Coral still played softball every Saturday night, and she polished her furniture about every other day, because that’s what you do when you have nothing to occupy your evenings except bad memories.”

  “She’s not you.”

  “But I could be her,” Theresa said. “If it had been Rachael.”

  “It wasn’t,” Frank said. “I’m sorry about Sonia. And, of course, poor little Marie.”

  “Yeah.”

  He peered at her. “You’re still happy she’s dead, aren’t you?”

  Theresa thought a moment before answering. “I’m sorry she died the way she did. She didn’t deserve that, I guess.”

  A door to one of the judges’ chambers opened, and a man emerged, but not from courtroom B and they ignored him.

  “You guess?”

  “I can’t know. Did she manipulate the system to keep dangerous people on the street because she honestly felt that was her job? Did she do it because she wanted to be exciting and rich? Or did she enjoy manipulating, get a rush from releasing evil into the fold, thrill at doing what everyone else told her was the wrong thing? I can’t know what’s in someone else’s heart.”

  “I know what was in Marie Corrigan’s heart.” Frank removed his arm and sat on the air conditioner. “Spiders and pus.”

  “What about Marie Corrigan?” The man who had left the judge’s chambers stopped in front of them. Dennis Britton. “Thanks for finding out who killed her, by the way. I know she would appreciate it.”

  Neither Theresa nor, she suspected, her cousin could think of a thing to say that wouldn’t be insulting at best and toxic at worst, so they remained silent.

  “My profession lost some good ones last month,” he went on. “I’ll have to carry on for them, Marie and Bruce.”

  “And Sonia,” Theresa said.

  Britton snorted. “Sonia Battle. Overweight, overzealous, and overdue for a good—Anyway. She thought I killed my wife, you know.”

  Theresa straightened. Wearing heels put her exactly at the same eye level, and she let him have her full attention, waited for his.

  “So do I,” she said. “And I also intend to carry on.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Anyone familiar with the beautiful Cleveland Ritz-Carlton will notice that I seriously fudged reality for this novel. It is not truly located immediately below the Terminal Tower and their orderliness and security are too top-notch to allow the
difficulties these characters encounter, but as I am such a fan of the chain I could not bring myself to choose the tower as a setting and then make up a fictitious hotel. Speaking of the Terminal Tower, the observation deck actually reopened to the public in 2010.

  Likewise, though Corrigan is a common name in Cleveland, the characters in this book are not designed to resemble actual persons in any way, shape, or form. I have no idea what the new public defender’s offices look like and their lack of decor in this book is my own invention based on years of visits to county attorneys’ offices.

  For once I have no texts to list in a bibliography, but I would like to reference the Crazy Hotel Workers forum and of course my great good friend Google.

  I’d like to thank my siblings and our mother, Florence, who accompanied me on a fact-finding trip to check out the Ritz-Carlton’s lobby, its coffee service, and of course the ladies’ restroom (the truest measure of any facility’s quality and refinement). Also my husband, Russ, for his technical expertise; our friend Clint Williams, who got me into secret places; Cleveland attorney Kim Hammond for the legal terminology; and congratulations to Bouchercon character-naming-rights winner Maryann Mercer.

  I’d also like to thank my incredible editor, David Highfill, and everyone else at William Morrow. And, of course, Stephanie Lehmann and my agent, the late Elaine Koster, who gave me a chance when no one else would. I am, and will remain, eternally grateful.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  LISA BLACK is a latent fingerprint examiner in Florida and a former forensic scientist for the Cleveland coroner’s office. She is a member of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences and has testified in more than fifty homicide trials. This is her fourth Theresa MacLean novel.

  www.lisa-black.com

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

  ALSO BY LISA BLACK

  Trail of Blood

  Evidence of Murder

  Takeover

  CREDITS

  COVER DESIGN AND COLLAGE BY MUMTAZ MUSTAFA

  COPYRIGHT