Murder One

by Robert Dugoni

  As Sloane listened to the testimony, something bothered him, though he could not determine what. Still, having learned to trust his gut, he opened his file and pulled out Adderley’s report, studying it yet again, wondering what he might be missing. What didn’t quite make sense?

  Barclay picked up her pen and scribbled a note on the yellow pad. Everything all right?

  Sloane nodded but remained unsure what had caused his visceral reaction to the testimony. He’d had similar experiences, when the cause for his concern would suddenly come to him later, at an odd moment—driving, exercising, or in the middle of the night.

  Cerrabone asked Adderley whether he and the second officer attempted to enter through the sliding-glass door, but again Adderley said that they had concluded the victim was dead, so they did not even touch the door.

  “What did you do next?” Cerrabone asked.

  Adderley described how he stationed himself at the back of the house while the second officer waited at the front for SWAT.

  “When SWAT arrived, we cleared the house . . . looked to make sure no one else was inside,” Adderley explained.

  “And did you find anyone else inside?”

  “No. Just the victim.”

  “You didn’t disturb anything inside?”

  “Tried not to. Once we cleared the residence, we taped it off, secured the perimeter, and waited for the detectives.”

  “Did you do anything else? Talk with anyone? Go anywhere else on the property?”

  Adderley shook his head. “When Detective Rowe arrived, I turned over the site to him.”

  When Cerrabone sat, Underwood looked at the clock. There were just fifteen minutes remaining in the day, and Sloane would have preferred to have the evening to let the unknown thought that Adderley’s testimony had summoned percolate further, but that wasn’t an option. Underwood was not about to waste a minute. “Mr. Sloane, cross?”

  Sloane remained seated. “Officer Adderley, you testified that when you arrived at the back of the house, you considered the sliding-glass door and it was closed, correct?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Closed all the way, as it is displayed here in court, with no opening at all between the edge of the door and the vinyl doorjamb?”

  Adderley looked at his report. “I didn’t note that, but that is what I recall.”

  “You didn’t attempt to slide the door open?”

  “No.”

  “So you don’t know if it was locked.”

  “I don’t.”

  Sloane stood and approached. “Now, you testified that you received a call from dispatch of a suspected prowler, correct?”

  “That’s right.”

  “It wasn’t ‘shots fired’?”

  “No.”

  “In your line of work, you get reports of shots fired fairly frequently, do you not?”

  Cerrabone objected to the use of the words “fairly frequently” as vague, and Underwood sustained it.

  “You receive those calls, do you not?” Sloane asked. He knew the answer from conversations with two retired King County police officers.

  “Yes,” Adderley said, then, apparently feeling in the mood to educate, offered, “They are more common than the average person might suspect.”

  Sloane silently thanked the officer. “Why is that, Officer Adderley?”

  “Most of the time the calls turn out to be false alarms—maybe a car backfiring or a firecracker or something. I had one when a tree branch cracked and two neighbors called it in as a gunshot.”

  “Would it be fair to say, given that most of these calls turn out to be false alarms, that you and your fellow officers have become a bit desensitized to them?”

  Adderley became cautious. “We treat all calls seriously.”

  “I’m sure you do. But would it be fair to say that a report of a suspected prowler would generate, let’s say, greater interest?”

  “It’s fair to say that a report of a prowler is less common.”

  “And generates a quicker response?”

  Adderley had figured out where Sloane was headed. “We respond as quickly as we can to every call.”

  “Officer, isn’t it true that because you get calls of shots fired more frequently, and because many of those turn out to be false, that a call of a suspected prowler causes you and your fellow officers to react more earnestly?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “And police officers recognize this, correct?”

  “I suppose we do, yes.”

  “Who else would know that a call of a suspected prowler would generate a quicker police response?”

  “I don’t know what you’re asking me.”

  “What about experienced criminals?”

  Cerrabone was up. “Objection. He’s asking the witness to speculate.”

  “I’m asking, based upon his education, training, and experience as a King County police officer for more than ten years, whether experienced criminals become savvy in police procedure—that sometimes they can know the law better than even us lawyers?”

  Several jurors smiled at that comment.

  “The witness can answer,” Underwood said.

  “Some are pretty savvy, yeah,” Adderley said.

  “Was there a prowler?”

  “We didn’t find one, no.”

  “Police officers interviewed the neighbors, did they not?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are familiar with the reports?”

  “Yes.”

  “None of Mr. Vasiliev’s neighbors called in shots fired?”

  “No.”

  Sloane looked at the clock on the wall as the big hand ticked to the twelve. Four o’clock straight up. He made sure Underwood noticed. The judge sat up, about to call the proceedings to a close for the day. Perfect timing.

  “One last question. Which one of them called in the prowler, Officer Adderley?”

  TWENTY - THREE

  LAW OFFICES OF DAVID SLOANE

  ONE UNION SQUARE

  SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

  Sloane walked into the conference room to find Pendergrass, jacket off and tie pulled loose, recounting for those who had not been present in court—Carolyn, Alex, and Charlie—how Officer Adderley had sat on the witness chair dumbfounded. Sloane hadn’t rescued him with any further comment but had allowed the silence to punctuate his question and Adderley’s inability to answer it.

  Cerrabone had sat with his foot angled around the leg of the counsel table as if contemplating standing to object, but he pulled back the foot.

  “None of them,” Adderley had finally said, the words sounding more like a question than an answer. Better than Sloane could have hoped for.

  Adderley had not been privy to the conversation in Judge Underwood’s chambers and likely had not been told about Willins and Cruz, there being no reason for him to know about them or Centac. The obvious question Sloane left the jury to ponder overnight was, if the caller wasn’t one of the neighbors, then who was it? Barclay wasn’t a sensible option. If she had been intent on killing Vasiliev and getting away with it, why would she have called in the crime after the fact? The implication was that the caller must have been the experienced criminal to which Sloane had made reference.

  Sloane interrupted Pendergrass. “Let’s not get too full of ourselves.” He knew they could expect an equal number of bad days ahead. He directed Carolyn to order in dinner and retreated to his office to prepare for the next day. He did not notice that Barclay had followed until she shut the door and kicked off her shoes. She slipped silently between his arms and placed her cheek against his chest. As experienced in the courtroom as Sloane, she was fully aware she was a long way from feeling secure.

  Jenkins and Alex retreated to her office and shut the door. It smelled of popcorn. Jenkins picked up the microwave bag and shoveled a handful into his mouth as Alex pulled back her curls, manipulating them into a bun on the top of her head, which she somehow held in place with a pencil. Wit
h a pair of cheaters on the bridge of her nose, she looked like one of those women in a music video, the high school teacher about to whip off the glasses, let down her hair, and transform into a luscious vixen. Jenkins shook away the thought. He was on his way out again and likely until late in the evening or early in the morning. He hoped to talk to the owner of the underground nightclub where Joshua Blume and his friends had partied the night of the murder. The man had been avoiding Jenkins, apparently not eager to have a discussion that included his allowing underage patrons into a club that sold alcohol. But that was not what Jenkins wanted to discuss with Alex.

  “Anything on the transvestite?” he asked.

  Andrew Lorin appeared to have dropped off the face of the earth shortly after he signed a statement that he and Felix Oberman had a personal relationship.

  “Nothing.” She sipped from a can of Diet Coke. “No job history, no bank accounts, no medical records. He hasn’t filed a personal tax return since 2001, hasn’t registered a car, and I found nothing in the King County assessors’ records. It’s like the guy just disappeared.”

  “Maybe like the private investigator disappeared?”

  She took the popcorn bag and ate several pieces. “Maybe, except then there would at least be a death certificate, or maybe an obituary. There’s nothing.”

  Jenkins twirled the car keys around a finger, and bent to kiss her. “Wish me luck. I’m off to crash an underground bar.”

  She considered his attire. Black jeans, black T-shirt, black jacket. “At least you’re dressed for the occasion.”

  Late in the evening, Sloane stood to stretch his legs, hoping that increased circulation and additional food might get the synapses of his brain firing again. Adderley’s testimony continued to bother him, though he still didn’t know why. He had asked Pendergrass to get him a copy of the transcript from the court reporter so he could review the testimony in greater detail and without the stress of having to listen and consider objections. With computers, a witness’s testimony could be transcribed nearly instantaneously. He hoped reviewing it might spur his subconscious.

  Barclay sat alone at the conference room table, surrounded by several piles of paper from the boxes of documents the prosecutor’s office had delivered. Light blue Post-its with handwritten notes stuck out of the piles from all four sides. Going through the materials—records of her financial transactions, phone calls, and computer searches—had to be like a flashback of the prior three years of her life. The prosecution was hoping, of course, for some tidbit of evidence, like how Barclay used MapQuest to determine the best path from her home to Vasiliev’s backyard, or perhaps a Google search on how to keep a .38 revolver from getting wet while swimming.

  “Are we making progress?” He picked up one of the white cartons and considered its contents, put it down, and searched another. He had insisted they all take a half-hour break to eat dinner together rather than fill their plates and dash back to their respective offices. He felt it important they remain connected, part of a team with one goal. He also found the input from others on areas of potential cross-examination and trial strategy insightful.

  Barclay did not answer. She held a document in her hand but stared past it, out the windows, her gaze so intense Sloane shifted focus to see if something or someone stood in one of the rectangular lighted cubes of the nearby office building.

  “Barclay?”

  She looked up at him. “Do you have Rowe’s report of what they took from my house when they came with the search warrant?”

  “The inventory? Yeah, it’s in my office.” Carolyn had put a copy in Rowe’s witness binder. “Why, what is it?” he asked.

  He followed her to his office where she surveyed the dozen or so black binders on the carpet. He stepped past her, checked the spines, and handed her Rowe’s binder. She placed it on his desk and flipped the tabs, stopping when she came to the inventory from the Washington State Patrol evidence facility. She ran her finger down the list, flipped the page, and continued on the second page. Her finger came to a stop halfway down. Her focus shifted from the list to the documents in her hand, a series of credit-card transactions. She flipped through those pages, lips moving silently. She reconsidered the inventory, then looked at Sloane. Her expression appeared indecisive, like she wanted to smile but refrained, not yet certain.

  “I think I might have something you can use,” she said.

  THE PARAGON

  PIONEER SQUARE, SEATTLE

  Located in an alley surrounded by the three-story brick buildings that made up Seattle’s Pioneer Square, the Paragon wasn’t actually underground, though it was close. Jenkins had to descend a flight of stairs from ground level to get to the door. Alex had been correct—black was the preferred color of clothing—but it didn’t help Jenkins to blend. People his size didn’t blend, and even if he tried, there wasn’t much room for him to do so in the forty-foot-square club. A raised platform, with a set of drums, speakers, microphones, a keyboard, and sound equipment took up one corner. A navy blue curtain draped from the ceiling hung behind the stage. Though the walls were painted black, flyers and scraps of colored paper covered much of the space. The club smelled like clove cigarettes.

  As Jenkins walked toward the bar at the end farthest from the stage the few patrons seated at the dozen or so round tables watched him with curiosity, no doubt certain they had spotted an undercover cop. The woman behind the bar, however, gave Jenkins only a tacit acknowledgment. She continued to laugh and chatter with a smitten young man at the other end of the slab of wood. She was obviously the young man’s type. Hell, she was everyone’s type, and in this place, that meant men and women.

  And she knew it. She had cropped her jet-black hair short and folded it behind her ears. Silver balls pierced her right brow and lower lip. Brightly colored tattoos adorned both shoulders, covered only by the lace straps of a black camisole that stopped short of her navel, also pierced. Despite the accoutrements, or perhaps because of them, Jenkins found her strangely attractive. It could also have been that, unlike the others in the club, some of whom had subtly made their way to the door, she didn’t seem the least bit intimidated by his presence. To the contrary, when she turned to greet him, she smiled with teeth so white and straight she had to be an orthodontist’s daughter, and had eyes so blue he finally understood the saying about Irish eyes smiling. He couldn’t help but smile back.

  The kid at the other end of the bar left.

  “Sorry if I’m causing you to lose business,” Jenkins said. “I’ll refrain from flashing my badge, if that helps.”

  She propped her forearms on the counter and leaned forward, displaying a hint of cleavage, eyes fixed as if in a staring contest. The smile morphed into a flirtatious grin. If she was twenty-one, it wasn’t by much; “cute” was still a word that could be used to describe her. “You want to show me your gun instead?”

  “I don’t carry a gun,” he said.

  “So you’re not a cop.”

  She was good. “Nope. I work for an attorney.”

  She stood up, animated. “I used to work for an attorney.”

  “Paralegal?”

  “Receptionist.” The eyebrow without the piercing arched, daring him to ask the obvious question.

  “Okay, I’ll bite. How did you get the job working at a law firm?”

  “When I interviewed, I removed all the jewelry and wore a shirt that covered the tattoos.”

  “The old bait and switch, huh? Let me guess. Then you put the jewelry back in and slipped on the camisole, and you didn’t fit the corporate image they were trying to impress upon their clientele, and you got sacked because you refused to compromise your principles.”

  She slapped the counter. “Wrong.” Her voice rose with pride. “I put in the jewelry, and the attorney found it a turn-on. When I wouldn’t sleep with him, he fired me.”

  Jenkins chuckled because he knew the story was completely honest.

  She lowered back to her forearms. “So, what do
you do?” she asked.

  “Private investigator.”

  “Oooh. Are you any good?”

  “Sometimes I am.”

  “You want a drink?”

  “Can’t. I’m working.”

  “That was a test.”

  “Did I pass?”

  “So far.”

  He smiled. “Have you worked here long?”

  “Do you come here often?” she said. Then, “About six months.”

  “Weeknights or weekends?”

  “I’m here, aren’t I?”

  “And it being a weeknight, I will take that as a yes to the first part of my question.”

  She touched her finger to the tip of her nose and winked. “Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Give that man a cee-gar.”

  “How could I get a copy of the bartenders’ schedule?”

  “Are you hitting on me, Mr. Private Investigator . . . with the wedding band?”

  “I’m too old for you. I meant a copy of the past work schedule.”

  “What night are you interested in?”

  “Tuesday, September sixth.”

  “Wow, that’s specific. What happened that night?”

  “Were you here?”

  “It was a Tuesday night in September?” she asked.

  “The sixth.”

  She pulled out a black calendar from beneath the bar and flipped the pages backward. “Yep, I was here that night.” She pointed to the date in the calendar. There was an X in the box that corresponded with the name Anastasia. Other names filled other dates.

  “You’re Anastasia?”

  “Wow, you are good.” From anyone else, it would have sounded sarcastic, but she made it sound cute.

  Jenkins realized his attraction to the girl. With longer hair and a lot less jewelry, she’d look vaguely like Alex. Though she had a little more attitude, she had Alex’s confidence and spunk. From his pocket, he pulled the pictures of Joshua Blume that Alex had somehow downloaded from Facebook, pictures of Blume holding an electric guitar, playing in a band. She had also provided pictures of Blume’s friends.