A Killing in the Valley

by JF Freedman

  At a quarter to five in the afternoon, court was adjourned for the day.

  It was well past midnight, but Kate couldn’t sleep. Worrying about the trial wasn’t keeping her awake; it was Sophia. It had finally hit her this morning, when she saw how Sophia reacted when Steven McCoy came into the courthouse. Her baby was hung up on him, badly. She might as well have stamped the news on her forehead, it was so obvious. She had fallen right down into the well; Kate had realized that as soon as she’d seen that look on her face.

  No wonder Sophia was spending all her free time at the ranch. Horseback riding couldn’t be that compelling. She was sleeping with Steven. She had to be, you can’t hold back hormones that are raging that fiercely.

  By now, having discovered Peter Baumgartner, she was convinced that Steven hadn’t killed Maria Estrada, so the issue wasn’t that Sophia was involved with a murderer. Steven was the grandson of one of the finest people she had ever known, which had to rub off, even if his parents were cut from lesser cloth: genes often skipped a generation. He was bright, with a good future; he was going to be a doctor, like Wanda. And in many ways, he was a good person. Look how he had gone out and rescued that couple during the fire. He could have been caught in a backdraft and killed. They had been lucky, but it was Steven’s grit that had gotten them through. A heroic act, and selfless. There were many checkmarks on the positive side of Steven McCoy’s ledger.

  The problem was, some of those strong qualities were the very things a mother feared for her daughter. Steven was a man, and Sophia, despite her maturity, was still a girl. She hadn’t even graduated from high school. And regardless of how much Steven liked her, whatever was happening between them couldn’t last. In a couple of weeks the trial would be over, and he’d be going back to Arizona, to the real life he’d had to suspend for over half a year.

  She knew that Sophia had to be on edge about her affair, but she also had to be happy, out of her mind with rapture. She remembered the feeling from when she was that age. It was like no emotion could ever be that powerful again. And maybe it never was. A woman never forgot her first love, even if it turned out to be less than the real thing—how many of those were there?

  Well, there was nothing she could do about it. It was time for this to happen. She hoped that when Sophia crashed, she wouldn’t break. What she did know was that she’d be there to pick up the pieces. But maybe that wouldn’t happen. Sophia was strong. She had to be; it had been forced on her.

  Sophia would be all right. She was the one who was going to suffer. September, when Sophia would leave home for college, was coming in the blink of an eye. She would be alone again. She had forgotten, over these months, what it was like to be alone. Before, it had been bearable, often comfortable. It wouldn’t be like that this time.

  She thought, again, as she halfheartedly fingered herself, about Warren Baumgartner. They had talked on the phone a couple of times, but she hadn’t seen him. Ethically she couldn’t, until the trial was over. But that wasn’t the real reason. They were on opposite sides of what could turn out to be a wall too high to climb. She wondered if he would show up in the courtroom, now that his son was going to be a principal in the case. She wanted him to, and at the same time, she didn’t. She didn’t want to be distracted, and his presence would do that. But she wanted to see him, anyway.

  If he showed up, she’d deal with it. Right now, all her energy was centered on her daughter.

  34

  JEREMY MUSGROVE, STIFF AS a marionette, was sworn in and took his seat in the witness chair. He blinked nervously as he looked up at Luke. The courtroom was humid from the recent rains. He could feel sweat starting to form in his armpits.

  As Luke greeted Jeremy, the rear door to the courtroom opened and a man quietly slipped in. Kate, sitting in her customary seat in the first row behind the defendant’s table, glanced behind her. Warren Baumgartner, at the back of the room, saw her staring at him, and stared back without expression.

  She closed her eyes, then opened them. He was still there. She started to smile—partly in greeting, partly in recognition, partly in welcome, and most urgently, partly with desire—but her mind overrode her emotions, and her lips didn’t turn up, for which she was very glad. She had to bury her feelings toward him. To open herself to emotion, even a crack, could be awful, both personally and professionally.

  If Warren picked up on the distress his showing up caused her, he didn’t show any sign of it. He turned away, scanned the room for a moment, then took a seat in the last row.

  Luke was oblivious to the emotional psychodrama that was playing behind his back. He greeted Jeremy, and after a mumbled “hello” in return, asked his first question: “Where and when did you first meet Maria Estrada?”

  “Last September 14, at Chico’s Restaurant in Santa Barbara,” Jeremy answered. His voice was flat and low.

  Luke led Jeremy through the series of events that had occurred after the boys met Maria, up until the time when they brought her and Tina Ayala back to town. His account corresponded closely with Tina’s, the only difference being the spin he put on the interaction between the two of them. His version was that they hadn’t done anything because he didn’t want to, not because she stopped him. He hadn’t been the least bit interested in her, he claimed; he went along to help his friend Peter out. Salve for his ego.

  “Okay,” Luke said. “You got back to town around when?”

  “Around one-thirty,” Jeremy answered.

  “What did the girls do then?” Luke probed.

  “The one I was with headed back toward where we met her,” Jeremy said. “Maria went to the mall.”

  “Before Maria went into Paseo Nuevo, did she and Peter spend any time together that you weren’t part of?”

  Jeremy nodded. “They talked off to the side, away from me.”

  “For about how long?”

  Jeremy shrugged. “A minute? Not long.”

  “Did they exchange any information? Phone numbers?”

  “I couldn’t tell,” Jeremy answered.

  Luke stared at his notes for a moment. “After the girls left, what did you and Peter do?”

  “We drove back to our apartment.”

  “In Peter’s car. His BMW convertible.”

  Jeremy nodded. “Right.”

  “Then what? After you got back?”

  “We started setting things up. We’d just moved in, so stuff was all over the place.”

  “And that’s what you did for the rest of the day, you and Peter? Worked on your apartment?”

  The tip of Jeremy’s tongue played with his upper front teeth. “That’s what I did.”

  “What you did?” Luke repeated. “What did Peter do?”

  “He went out to buy stuff we needed.”

  For a moment, there was a sense of suspension in the courtroom. Luke filled the void. “Peter went out?” he repeated. “To get things for your apartment? What did he get?”

  Jeremy twisted uncomfortably in the hard chair. “Sheets, towels, dishrags. We had plates and utensils from his mother, but we needed garbage bags, dishwash detergent. A spaghetti pot.”

  “Small household items,” Luke certified. “How long was Peter gone on these errands?” he asked.

  “A couple of hours.”

  “A couple?” Luke said doubtfully. “Could it have been three? Four?”

  Jeremy face’s contorted as he recalled. “I don’t know if it was that long,”

  “A few hours, does that sound right?”

  “That’s about right,” Jeremy confirmed.

  Luke stopped for a moment to steal a look toward the jury box. This startling disclosure had captured their attention, as he had hoped it would. He turned to Jeremy again. “Besides these basic household things, did Peter buy anything else for your apartment?”

  Jeremy waited a moment before answering. “Yes.”

  “And what was that?”

  Jeremy paused again. “A kitchen table,” he told Luke. “One of t
hose square butcher-block jobs.”

  Luke’s face showed confusion. He was sure everyone else in the courtroom was manifesting the same expression, especially Alex and Elise. “A kitchen table?” he repeated back.

  Jeremy nodded. “From the Pottery Barn. It’s next to Robinsons, at La Cumbre Plaza. They were having a sale, so Peter bought it,” he explained. “And a couple of chairs that went with it. We already had our beds, a couch, TV. That was the last thing we needed.”

  “So besides the small items you’ve told us about, Peter also bought a table and chairs,” Luke catalogued. “When did the Pottery Barn deliver it?”

  “Nobody delivered it,” Jeremy answered. “Peter brought it back with him that afternoon, with the rest of the stuff.”

  Luke left the podium and walked a few steps closer to Jeremy. “Peter came back to your apartment with the pots and pans and sheets and the other stuff he had bought. And the table and chairs?”

  Jeremy was getting more and more nervous. He could feel his underarm sweat dripping down his sides. “Yes.”

  Luke nodded slowly, as if something wasn’t computing, and he was trying to figure out what it was. He glanced at his notes again. “How did Peter get a table and chairs into a BMW convertible?” he asked Jeremy.

  Jeremy’s throat was dry from anxiety. “He didn’t take the Beemer.”

  Luke took another step forward. “He didn’t drive his BMW? Then what car did he take?”

  “His mom’s Lincoln Navigator.”

  Luke took a short pause to let that depth-charge sink in. Then he asked: “His mother’s Lincoln Navigator? That’s an SUV, right? Pretty big, isn’t it?”

  Jeremy nodded. “Yeah, it’s almost as big as a Suburban. His mom lent it to him for a couple of days, so we could haul our big stuff up from L.A.,” he explained. “Beds and dressers, those things.”

  Luke scanned the room. He had everyone’s undivided attention now. Judge Martindale was leaning over his perch at an angle so severe it looked like he might topple off. Alex and Elise, too, were literally on the edges of their chairs.

  “So that afternoon,” Luke went on, “after you and Peter came back to your apartment, after you dropped Maria Estrada and the other girl at Paseo Nuevo, Peter went out again in a Lincoln Navigator SUV, rather than his BMW convertible? Is that right?”

  “Yes,” Jeremy answered.

  “Alone?”

  Again, “Yes.”

  At the prosecution table, Alex and Elise looked like they had been nuked. Alex’s face was purple in rage. He leaned over and said something in Elise’s ear. She shook her head. Then he turned to Watson and Rebeck, sitting in the row behind them. They were frozen in stunned disbelief.

  Luke returned to the podium. “So for a few hours that afternoon, after you and Peter and those two girls parted company outside the Paseo Nuevo mall, your roommate Peter Baumgartner was driving around Santa Barbara in a Lincoln Navigator Sports Utility Vehicle. By himself.”

  “Yes,” Jeremy answered. “That’s correct.” He backtracked. “I don’t know if he was alone,” he clarified. “I know that I wasn’t with him.”

  Luke left the podium and walked over to the defense table. He took some eight-by-ten photographs out of a manila envelope. Looking at them, he smiled.

  Months earlier, when Jeremy had dropped this bomb in their laps, Kate hightailed it back to Los Angeles and shot a roll of film of Angela Baumgartner’s Navigator. Now Luke held a stack of them in his hand. He handed a photo to Judge Martindale, dropped a second on the prosecution table, and crossed to the jury box, where he passed several of the pictures out to the jurors. Then he walked to the stand and held one up to Jeremy.

  “Is this the vehicle Peter Baumgartner was driving that afternoon?” he asked his witness.

  Jeremy looked at the photo. “Yes, it is.”

  Luke leaned forward on the railing. “Tell me, Jeremy. What color is this Lincoln Navigator SUV that Peter was driving that afternoon?”

  Jeremy didn’t have to look at the picture again to know the answer. “Charcoal gray,” he stated in a clear, emphatic voice. “Dark gray. Almost black.”

  Court was adjourned for the day. Luke and Kate had gone back to his office. Luke was nursing a Laphroaig over ice. Kate sipped a half-glass of sauvignon blanc.

  “I wonder how Alex’s mood is right about now,” she mused gleefully.

  “The same as Elise’s and all the rest of theirs,” he answered with equal relish. “Terrible. It’s a bitch when you’re blindsided. I know, I’ve been there. Nice to be on the other side for a change,” he gloated.

  Alex hadn’t done a stellar job on Jeremy’s cross-examination. Off-balance, and lacking any damaging factual information, he had tried to bully Jeremy into making a mistake. Jeremy had held firm—Luke had thoroughly prepped him for rough tactics. By the time Jeremy was excused you could almost see a black cloud forming over the prosecution’s side of the courtroom.

  “Alex took too much for granted,” Kate said. “Once he had his bird in hand, he didn’t keep on digging. You wouldn’t have stopped there,” she told Luke.

  “Thanks for the support,” Luke said appreciatively, “but I would have prosecuted this case in a heartbeat, just as it was.” He sipped some whiskey. “We caught a one-in-a-million break with Tina connecting Sophia up with Jeremy. Without that, and Tyler’s turning around out of the blue, we’d be the ones with acid in our stomachs.” He stirred his drink with a finger. “We’ve been luckier than anyone deserves.”

  “Steven McCoy,” Kate corrected him. “He’s the lucky one.”

  Angela Baumgartner, reluctantly testifying under subpoena, stated that she had lent her Lincoln Navigator to her son Peter at the beginning of the fall term. She also grudgingly admitted that she and Peter had visited Rancho San Gennaro six months before Maria Estrada’s body was found there.

  Warren Baumgartner didn’t show up for his ex-wife’s testimony. Kate had been on the lookout, hanging back in the corridor outside the courtroom until the last possible moment. Either he didn’t want to be in the same space with Angela, a reasonable assumption, or he didn’t want to be in the courtroom at all, given the thunderstorm that had started to gather over his son. Or, Kate dolefully thought, he doesn’t want to be near me. He had to be harboring resentment toward her for bringing Peter into this mess.

  Her professional job had trumped the personal one. Not for the first time or surely the last, but it still wasn’t a happy thought. That it had been inevitable didn’t mean she had to like it. Of course, if she hadn’t been working the case they never would have met at all, and she wouldn’t have had that glorious night.

  When she was being honest with herself, something she was loath to do, because she hated introspection, she knew that nothing could happen between her and Warren. He was a multimillionaire who lived a glamorous life. His hangout buddies were George Clooney and Larry David. She was a working woman who struggled to make her mortgage payments. After the giddiness wore off, what would they talk about?

  There was a man out there for her; there had to be. But his name wasn’t Warren Baumgartner.

  Steven McCoy, finally given the chance to speak in his own defense, was an assured and credible witness. Under Luke’s gentle questioning, he calmly recited his version of what happened that afternoon, and as calmly rebutted Alex’s attempts, during a long and grueling cross-examination, to rattle him.

  Alex valiantly tried to stem the tide in his closing summation. But he could tell from the reception he was getting that his efforts were like trying to put out a fire with a water pistol.

  Luke didn’t have to break any new ground when it was his turn to address the jury. He reminded them of Steven’s heroics during last fall’s conflagration, and made the compelling argument that if Steven was guilty, that would have been the perfect time to flee—he could have been in Timbuktu by the time his disappearance was discovered. He had stayed right where he was supposed to be, because he wanted his innocence t
o be validated.

  Elise, all electric nerve endings, delivered the rebuttal summation for the prosecution. You could almost see the energy radiating out from her as she paced back and forth in front of the jury box.

  “In all my years of prosecuting murder cases,” she said, her heels tap-dancing a fast rhythm to the staccato tempo of her speech, “I’ve never been involved in one that had so much evidence against the accused. Forget all the mumbo jumbo, the last-minute suspects from out of left field. Here’s all you need to remember: Steven McCoy knew where this isolated location was. He could get into it, whether or not the gate was locked. And most importantly: his fingerprints are on the murder weapon. That alone convicts him!”

  She ran a hand through her hair. “Here’s just one glaring example of how shallow the defense’s case is: their invention of how Steven McCoy returned the murder weapon to the gun cabinet. The defendant’s own grandmother waxed eloquent about how ranch people are almost pathological about gun safety. She’s right, they are. So how in the world can we believe that Steven McCoy, after supposedly finding the murder weapon in a dark house, went right to the gun cabinet and opened the door? He would have known that door was locked.” She shook her head disdainfully. “Only if he had picked that weapon up with premeditation, killed Maria, and then taken the time to see if the cabinet was unlocked—in the daytime, when there was enough available light for him to be able to see—would he have been able to put the gun away.”

  She came to an abrupt, almost screeching stop. Her look to the jurors was one of primal ferocity, as if she was daring each one of them to challenge her point of view. She pointed dramatically across the room at Steven, her blood-red inch-long fingernail an accusing beacon.

  “This man killed Maria Estrada,” she spat out. “He flung her body away in the hot, merciless sun for the coyotes and vultures to pick clean. He has never shown one iota of remorse toward his victim. Even if he hadn’t done it, wouldn’t you think he would have taken a moment when he was on the stand to offer his condolences? Wouldn’t anyone with a heart and a soul do that? A tiny token of sympathy to a grieving mother?”