by Alex Segura
“Oye, pero que tu te crees—” Diego said. What are you thinking?
Soon, the man was next to Diego. He moved haltingly, but handled the knife with confidence. The man grabbed Diego’s collar and pulled him close to his face.
“Felicidades, Fernandez,” the man said. Diego felt the blade jam into his midsection, the sharp metal explode into him—pushing him down as the man pulled the weapon back and out of Diego, whose back slammed onto the stairs. Diego let out a frightened, gurgled scream—pain, fear, and surprise melding together to form an animal-like cry—and let his hands slide over his stomach, his body already slick with blood. He heard the man leave through the front door, the lock clicking shut behind him.
THE ATTORNEY’S office waiting room was bathed in blinding fluorescent light and smelled like a handful of air fresheners had just exploded. Pete tried not to sneeze as he took his seat next to Harras and Kathy, the three of them facing a distracted receptionist. Kathy flipped through a two-year-old copy of Glamour while Harras sipped a large black coffee and Pete rubbed his temples.
“I need caffeine,” Pete said. “Especially before this.”
“Well, that is something you should have resolved before we told them we were here,” Kathy said, eyes focused on the magazine. It looked like a story about some starlet’s struggles to get her basketball player husband into rehab.
Harras cleared his throat. “Maybe we can use this time to go over what we know,” he said.
“Yes, excellent idea,” Kathy said. Pete didn’t like the look in her eyes as she glanced at Pete. “Anything you’d like to offer up to the group, Pete?”
“I tracked down Stephanie Solares,” Pete said. “We chatted for a bit.”
Harras clenched his teeth and let out a long sigh.
“And here I was hoping you’d decided to loop us in more,” he said.
“Mea culpa on that one,” Pete said, letting out a long sigh of resignation. “I’d reached out to her before we chatted and it came together after, but I should have let you both know. I’m trying to keep the going rogue to a minimum, I swear.”
“How about keeping it to zero?” Kathy said. “Maybe try that. What did she say? Anything?”
“It was all pretty bland,” Pete said. “The one thing that stood out to me was something she overheard while at the Varela house—she’d overheard Carmen screaming at someone on the phone a few weeks before she was killed.”
“Guessing Solares had no idea who Carmen was talking to,” Harras said, his interest piqued.
“Right,” Pete said.
“I scream into the phone at least twice a day, so this means nothing,” Kathy said. “At least without any more info.”
“Do we know what we want to ask this lawyer?” Harras said, his tone sharp. “I get that you two like going on instinct, but I’m here to earn a paycheck too, and that involves some level of pre-gaming.”
“Ms. Cruz will see you now,” the receptionist said, interrupting Pete’s answer, her tone subdued. She didn’t bother to look up from her computer.
Kathy dropped the magazine, switching off whatever interest she had in the lives of the rich and vapid. The assistant led them past the reception desk and through another door. They turned into a long hallway.
“How’d you get on her calendar?” Pete asked.
“Barely. She says we have ten minutes. I also didn’t mention you.”
“Can’t wait.”
“Why wouldn’t you mention him?” Harras said.
“You’ll see,” Kathy said, giving Pete a muted grin.
“Jesus Christ,” Harras said under his breath.
They reached Jackie Cruz’s door. Kathy rapped on it and they heard a voice from the other side. Pete couldn’t make out what she said. Before he could think about much else, the door swung open. Jackie Cruz was on the other side, looking indignant and impatient. She was toned and athletic, her olive skin smooth and unblemished. She was in her early forties but probably got carded from time to time. She also didn’t seem happy to see any of them.
“Kathy Bentley?”
“That’s me.”
“You didn’t tell me who your partner was,” she said, eyes locked on Pete. “Hi, Pete.”
“Hi, Jackie,” Pete said.
“Been a while,” she said, moving behind her desk. “What was it? Two years ago? That messy case you tried to help me with but made even messier?”
Pete knew this was coming. He just had to ride it out.
“Did you tell your new girlfriend about us?” Jackie asked, taking her seat, a crooked smile on her face. “I wonder how that went over. I’m assuming the geezer is Harras?”
Pete cringed. He didn’t need to turn to know Harras’s reaction.
“You don’t want to know what my assumptions are about you right now, lady,” Harras said.
Jackie Cruz. When Pete first met her, she wasn’t a hotshot defense attorney—and she was still reeling from the Varela case. They’d had a thing—Pete wouldn’t define it as a relationship, because most of their time was spent at Jackie’s place, in her bedroom or eating takeout in her kitchen. It lasted longer than it should have, mostly due to Pete’s inability to be an adult, a byproduct of his drinking himself to near death. It felt like a decade ago. After their sort-of romance fizzled, Jackie asked Pete to help her on a case involving a grisly murder. It did not end well. Seeing Jackie now, in the flesh, reminded him it really hadn’t been that long ago.
Pete, Kathy, and Harras grabbed the seats set up in front of Jackie’s opulent desk.
Jackie folded her hands and rested her pointer fingers on her lips. “Well?” she said. “I only took this meeting as a favor to an old client. If I’d known I’d be forced to sit in a room with Pete fucking Fernandez and his two sidekicks, I would have passed, so let’s get on with it.”
“Thanks again for seeing us,” Kathy said, trying to keep the meeting as cordial as possible.
Jackie shuffled some papers on her desk, put a few in a stack, and moved said stack onto a small file cabinet to the left of the desk. Her every action screamed annoyance.
“Fill me in,” Jackie said. “Gaspar wants you to prove he’s innocent? How’s that going to work?”
“Well, that’s what we’re here for,” Pete said. “To talk to you about the case.”
Jackie glared at Pete, not interested in anything he had to say. Her brow furrowed. Her eyes reminded Pete of a predator’s—the kind of wild animal who didn’t waste time or energy unless they were going in for a kill. He tried not to break their eye contact.
“No shit,” she said. “But what can I offer you? Gaspar said I should talk to you, which is fine, but I don’t even work for him anymore. He can’t afford me. I went through the trial and we thought we had it in the bag. But we lost. End of story. Even if he is innocent, he still needs to gather enough evidence to convince a judge to grant him a new trial. No easy feat. I mean, the guys burned through dozens of appellate attorneys. Big names too, like Sotolongo, Riesco, Otero and Kemp. Plus, people are over this.”
“Over this?” Harras said.
“Yes, over it,” she said. “It’s shut. No one has an interest in putting in the work, money, or time to retry a case that’s already closed, nice and tidy.”
Jackie leaned back in her chair, as if to say, There, what now?
“So why’d you lose?” Pete asked. He heard Harras try to mask a chuckle with his hand.
She closed her eyes and pursed her lips. Pete didn’t know Jackie all that well anymore, but he had spent enough time with her to know she was not the kind of person that appreciated being reminded of her losses. But Pete wasn’t in the mood for posturing. Kathy fidgeted in her seat.
“Excuse me?”
“What happened?” Pete said. “If you’re as good as the press says—and I know you are—why’d you lose this one? The one case that was ready to propel you to the next level? Garagos, Cochran—that strata. You’d be fighting off potential clients. What made this the one you lost
?”
“Pete—” Kathy started, but she was interrupted by Jackie. She was laughing. Hard.
“You’ve got some major cojones, Pete, coming in here like this, talking like that,” she said between giggles. “That was something. You almost got my goat, but I am too fucking old to get riled up that easy. Nice try though.”
“Well, I had to do something,” Pete said. “We’re down to three minutes here.”
Jackie waved her hand at the phone.
“Ah, don’t sweat that,” she said. “I make my hours. I just didn’t know if I wanted to help Varela, much less that I’d be sitting across from you, of all people. It is kind of nice to see you again, I have to admit. You don’t look as fucked up as you did the last time we talked.”
She got up, cracked her knuckles, walked around to the front of her desk, and sat on the left corner, closer to Kathy.
“Why did I lose…let me count the ways,” she said, her tone wistful but with a hint of resentment. “Like I said, it’s always, always the spouse. Also, the judge hated my guts. Didn’t seem like the kind of guy who was fond of strong, independent women, or women in general. The evidence the prosecution had wasn’t much—it was all circumstantial. They didn’t even have a murder weapon. But the jury bought it. Whitelaw was a viper too. He jumped all over us every chance he got. Gaspar’s version of the story, that he and his wife were attacked by two random psychos for no apparent reason—was Charlie Manson thirty years too late, too crazy. And there wasn’t enough evidence that pointed that way but didn’t point the other. Get what I mean?”
“The evidence he was hoping would exonerate him was also hurting him?” Kathy asked.
“Sort of,” she said. “All the evidence didn’t make it to the trial either. There was no murder weapon, which I thought would help, but it didn’t seem to with the jury. They figured Varela, as an ex-cop, would know how to hide a murder weapon. At least that’s how Whitelaw played it. Varela’s fingerprints were, yes, all over the scene—but he fucking lived there. Still, that seemed to help the prosecution more than us. The judge didn’t let us focus on the fact that Varela didn’t have blood on him consistent with the kind of splatter one would see in that kind of knife attack. Then there was Janette Ledesma.”
“What about Ledesma?” Pete said.
“I’m guessing you’ve heard about ‘the woman in the orange dress’?” Jackie asked.
“Yes, and Varela still stands by that,” Kathy said. “That after he woke up from the attack, he saw a woman wearing a bright orange dress enter the house, and that woman also saw the two killers when they ran outside.”
“Yes, and the supposed woman, Ledesma, testified at his trial,” Harras said. “If you could call it that.”
“Right, that testimony killed us. Straight up,” Jackie said. “Her testimony took a shit over everything. We thought we’d won the lottery when she agreed to testify. But she ruined us when she took the stand. I’d call it sabotage if I had any evidence of it. Ledesma was supposed to confirm what she’d told the cops—that she came to the scene and saw the real murderers running off. She did the opposite, claiming she wasn’t sure what she saw or if she was even there. That went over well, as you can imagine, especially with a shark like Whitelaw sitting at the other table. After that, the jury refused to trust anyone we presented, and the judge thought I was trying to make a mockery of the court.”
“Why do you think Ledesma backtracked?” Harras asked.
Jackie looked at him. She seemed to be sizing him up.
“Why do I think she bombed?” Jackie said. “I wish I had evidence to prove it was something intentional, but I don’t. All I do know is she was a junkie. Maybe she made the whole thing up and Varela did kill his wife. Anything’s possible. If it created doubt in my mind, it certainly didn’t help convince the jury that Varela was being framed.”
“What I’m trying to say,” Harras said, straightening up in his seat, “is, do you think someone got to her? After you talked to her and before she testified?”
Jackie raised an eyebrow.
“Yes, that’s exactly what I think happened,” she said. “But by the time the thought gained traction in my brain, I was off the case and I had paying clients to worry about.”
The mention of Ledesma took Pete back to the day before. Coffee with Maya had been pleasant enough—work with an undercurrent of flirting, the atmosphere around them charged with electricity. Pete hadn’t been sure how to respond, so he didn’t. But somehow, the conversation that began at Versailles over two café Cubanos continued at Maya’s Kendall townhouse, her shelves stacked with books, notepads, and accordion files loaded with trial documents, court filings, newspaper clippings, notes, and years of case law. With Jackie Cruz gone from the case, Maya had become her father’s de facto lawyer. Pictures were tacked on the wall, along with maps and floor plans of Maya’s childhood home. Red pins. Blue pins. String. Markers and circles of every color. This was what obsession looked like, Pete had thought. She would do anything to see her father freed. Maya was Gaspar Varela’s last chance.
He felt conflicted about the quick, awkward kiss he’d shared with Maya before he left her house the previous night.
Pete caught a nasty look from Kathy—she could tell he was distracted.
“Pete, are you with us? Am I boring you?” Jackie said, bringing Pete back to the now—the office, Kathy, and Harras next to him. Last night’s kiss fading away.
“I’m here.”
“Now you are,” she said. “But your friends and I have been shooting the shit for what feels like hours.”
“Sorry, I need some coffee,” Pete said. “What did I miss?”
“Whatever works for you, dude,” Jackie said, “Fibers from Varela’s clothes—his PJs, basically—were found all over the living room, where he said he was sleeping, but not in the bedroom, where his wife was killed. Not game-changing, but interesting.”
“Seems pretty definite,” Pete said.
“Not if you have a good vacuum or got your clothes all bloody murdering your wife and changed, but yeah, it’s helpful,” she said before glancing at her Cartier watch. “Look, I have to go. I have to meet with some people who actually pay me money. Is there anything else I can help you with?”
“Ledesma,” Kathy said. “Our research shows she died a few years ago. Any idea of what? Any family she left behind?”
“She was out of her mind on drugs,” Jackie said. “She died alone in a crack house in Opa-Locka with a pipe in her hand and who knows what else around her.”
Jackie opened her door and motioned for Kathy, Harras, and Pete to walk out of it.
“What about family?” Pete said.
“Family?”
“Yes, did Janette Ledesma have any close relatives?” Pete asked. “A husband? Brother? Parents? Anyone we could talk to?”
“There’s a son,” Harras said. “From a previous marriage—a brief one. But that’s all I know. I never got a name.”
“See?” Jackie said. “You don’t need me. Silent but deadly over here has all the answers.”
“Who is he? What’s his name?” Pete said.
“I don’t know. But I’ll see what I can do,” Jackie said. “My assistant will send over Varela’s files to you—just let her know where you want them on your way out.”
Pete lingered in the doorway for a second.
“Jackie,” he said.
“Oh boy,” she said. “Is this going to get awkward?”
“I need a favor,” Pete said.
“Looks like it is,” she said. Pete half expected Jackie to lick her lips in anticipation.
He leaned in and whispered a few words in Jackie’s ear as Kathy and Harras looked on. Jackie gave Pete a curious look as she listened, nodding as he pulled back.
“We’ll see,” she said. “In the meantime, get lost.”
Pete heard the door slam behind them as they headed back to the reception area.
“What is wrong with you? What the he
ll was that all about?” Kathy asked, her voice a low growl. “You went off to la-la land for a while there.”
“Something she said got me thinking about something else.”
“That is not in question,” Kathy said, opening the door into the reception area and letting Pete walk out first. “I’m just asking what, pray tell, is more important than this?”
Pete kept walking.
“We got what we needed,” Harras said. “I let Cruz’s secretary know where to send the files. But we need to tighten up our game. That was sloppy. We had no plan and it showed. I’ll see you both later.”
“For once, you’re right,” Kathy said as the older detective walked on ahead of them. She wheeled around to face Pete. “Also, where were you last night?”
“What do you mean?”
“I called you around ten and you didn’t pick up,” Kathy said, her voice still quiet. “Unless you were fast asleep like the abuelo you sometimes are, you ignored my call. You know how I feel about that.”
“I was out.”
“Care to elaborate?”
“Not really.”
“I see,” Kathy said. “It’s like that.”
“I hung out with Maya for a bit,” Pete said. He braced himself for Kathy’s response.
“Well, okay,” she said. “This is becoming a weird trend.”
“What?”
“You and our client hanging out together without me, your partner on this case,” she said. “Not to mention our assigned chaperone, Harras.”
Pete could tell she was hurt. She hadn’t expected this—whatever it was.
“It just came up,” Pete said. “She dropped by the store and asked to grab a cup of coffee. We kept talking and it went on into the evening.”
“Now you’re bragging,” she said, a petulant look on her face. “And from what I remember Emily telling me eons ago, you were far from king in that category.”
“That is not what I meant,” Pete said. He could feel his face reddening. “And what the hell? You and Emily shared stories about…? Oh Jesus. Never mind. We were talking about the case. We went over some of her files. Nothing like that.”
“Then, my chaste friend, what did her files reveal to you?” Kathy asked.
