Panther's Prey

by Lachlan Smith

  “I see.”

  Before the police had arrived at Jordan’s apartment I’d examined the Bersa to check whether it had been fired. There were no scorch marks. Though I hadn’t touched it, it would have been easy enough to lie and tell Chen I’d held it in my hand, and claim I’d never seen it before handling it at Jordan’s place. Apart from my scrupulous nature, the reason I hadn’t tampered with the Bersa, or lied and said I’d done so, was because it seemed to me the police needed to know how it got there. I told Chen as much.

  “You’re telling me that gun in her apartment is yours?”

  “It’s not registered to me. Probably it’s been reported stolen. All I’m saying is my fingerprints are likely on it. You knew that before you walked in here, I’m guessing.”

  Chen was silent, seeming to process the implications of my admission that I’d handled the gun before, rather than after, Jordan’s murder. If it’d been the murder weapon, he probably would have considered reading me my rights.

  “Why would Jordan want to ditch a gun for you?”

  “She thought it was a risk for me to have it. She was right. It was stupid of me, but it came into my hands at a time when I thought I needed protection.” Without delving into particulars, I explained about the arson fire and my belief someone wanted me dead.

  Chen wanted to know where I’d gotten the gun.

  “The point isn’t why I needed the gun, or where I got it,” I said. “The point is that Jordan wanted me to leave it with her. The question is why she thought she needed it.”

  “You think she was afraid of somebody.”

  “I didn’t pick up on this at the time, but it seems likely. She wanted me to bring the gun to her apartment—supposedly so we could get rid of it together. Then she received a text on her phone and showed me the door, reminding me to leave the Bersa.”

  “Janelle Fitzpatrick thinks Randall Rodriguez is pretty scary. You think Jordan might have been worried about him?”

  “Randall’d never have done something like this, showed up at her apartment. He isn’t capable of it, any more than he was capable of the Fitzpatrick rape.” Even as I said these words I felt a tremor of doubt. He’d probably spent the day sifting trash bins for clean copies of newspapers from which to create new versions of his precious scrapbooks, and for the chess puzzles. These scrapbooks would have included articles about his own case—maybe even yesterday’s scathing column blaming the police and the DA for botching the investigation. The whole city knew a confessed rapist had walked free.

  According to our expert witness, freedom was the last thing Rodriguez had wanted.

  “You must have noticed the shared elements with Fitzpatrick,” Chen said. “First, the apparent sexual assault, with the bedding stripped and taken away, and the victim locked in the bathroom to keep her from reporting the crime immediately. Of course, our intruder did a better job with the tape this time. Too good, as it turns out.”

  I closed my eyes, suddenly confronted again with the imagined scene I’d tried to shut out all afternoon: Jordan trapped in that bathroom, bound, her legs cramping and finally going numb, her breath forced for hours through the tiny passages of her nostrils, knowing at every moment that if she panicked, she would suffocate and die, hoping only that someone would discover her in time. No one had, and thus appeared to be, for the rapist, a stroke of luck.

  “I’m sorry if these questions disturb you. But, as you pointed out in the trial, if he didn’t do this, the real rapist is still out there. If that’s true, Ms. Fitzpatrick’s case can no longer be considered closed. Now, shortly after your client’s release from custody, there occurs a second crime that follows the same pattern as the first. Put yourself in my shoes.”

  Inadvertently complying, I thought of what I’d seen in the courtroom the day of the verdict—Rodriguez standing behind the counsel table after Jordan had taken his hand. And, a few days earlier, his wink, like we’d shared a secret he knew I’d never tell.

  “We found this on her desk.” The detective took out a file folder and from it removed two clear evidence bags. One contained a ripped-open blue envelope, the other the card that must have come with it. On the envelope, stamped by the post office the day after the verdict, Jordan’s home address was printed in block letters. The card was a generic thank-you card like an old lady might send, with a pastel rainbow on the front. Blue fingerprint dust stained both items. “It’s blank inside,” Chen said. “Unsigned. You ever see it?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t receive one?”

  “I didn’t. Have you identified the fingerprints?”

  “Rodriguez’s are on both the card and the envelope. Jordan’s address was unlisted, but evidently he was able to find out where she lived and send her this card. The way you spun things at the trial, you’d think he didn’t have the mental wherewithal to find her even if she was in the phone book. Now I’m wondering if the picture you painted was accurate.”

  I didn’t tell him about Randall’s chess skills, the wink he’d given me, or his reaction before the verdict to Jordan’s touch. “He’s no imbecile,” I confessed.

  That seemed to be all Chen needed. “Just for the file, where were you Sunday?”

  “Most of the day I was alone. I left a message for Jordan in the morning. I took BART to Oakland around nine and went for a bike ride in the hills, stopped at my brother’s in Berkeley for lunch, and rode BART home in the afternoon.” I fished out my wallet and pulled out my Bay Area Rapid Transit ticket, which I’d saved because it still had a dollar-and-a-half credit. “Here.”

  He slipped it into the chest pocket of his shirt and rose. “Thank you. We’d like to talk to Mr. Rodriguez. You wouldn’t happen to know how to reach him?”

  “Try the shelters. Under freeway overpasses. I doubt he’ll be hard to find.”

  I felt my grief and anger boil over and knew I was getting out of this little room just in time, but I couldn’t resist delivering unwanted advice. “Do me a favor. Videotape the interrogation this time,” I said as Chen walked me to the front desk. “Document Rodriguez telling you something you didn’t already know. Because if you guys had done the job right the first time …”

  Chen made no response, just opened the door for me and held it. As it clicked shut between us, I had a sudden fleeting feeling I was standing on the wrong side.

  Chapter 7

  As soon as I walked out of Southern Station I called Gabriela Alame, the elected public defender and my boss, to tell her I’d be in tomorrow. She tried to convince me to take at least the rest of the week off, but I knew too well that work was the only antidote. The prospect of the empty hours I’d have to fill would otherwise be intolerable.

  I let my brother know what had happened and that I was okay. He offered me his couch, a consideration that would never have occurred to the old Teddy, his concern yet another sign of the changes the bullet had wrought. I thanked him but declined. No matter how awful my little room and the recent memories it contained, I needed to spend this evening alone.

  I slept only fitfully and was ready for the dawn when it came. By 7:30 AM I was at my desk. Several colleagues stopped by and spoke a few words, but my affair with Jordan hadn’t been common knowledge, and it was an open question what special consideration the weeklong sexual partner of a murder victim should receive. Rebecca, with a longer claim to friendship, hadn’t come to work. Only when I’d been there a few hours did it dawn on me that people might see me as callous for showing up the day after finding her dead.

  This realization came as a shock and was my first sign that my internal calibrations were disturbed, my self-assessments not to be trusted. But my dread of going home and being alone outweighed my worries about what my coworkers might think.

  I sat at my desk staring at a document open on my screen, completely unable to work or to think of anything but Jordan. If I let them, the images of our relationship bowled me over. There was much to remember and I was afraid of losing the immediac
y of the nights we’d spent together. I e-mailed the court reporter and ordered the transcript from Rodriguez’s trial. Never mind the expense; I could find a justification later for needing it.

  As for the rest, we might as well have been writing on water. And now the universe had sucked Jordan away.

  I sat at my desk all morning, forgetting lunch, until a piercing headache reminded me I’d had no coffee. When I came out of my office, I realized it was late afternoon. Instead of pouring myself a cup I went outside and walked, following Embarcadero around the city until I was lightheaded with hunger, my heels sore. I meant to find food but instead I walked home through downtown, climbed the stairs to my room, and fell into bed.

  Jordan’s funeral took place Friday afternoon. The burial would come later, when the medical examiner released the body. But the family had decided to hold the ceremony now.

  Dozens of lawyers were in attendance, including Rebecca and Gabriela, who’d given a rousing speech to the troops at the office. There are those who say we couldn’t do the work we do if we knew how it felt to be victims. But the truth is none of us is immune, and we’re not indifferent. The crucial thing is not to let anger overwhelm us. What Jordan would want, what any of us would want, is that we go out with renewed purpose and fight all the harder for the clients she’d hoped to spend the rest of her career defending. To Gabriela, Jordan was a martyr to be exploited in the service of our mission, not the warm-blooded woman who’d slept in my arms.

  At the funeral, by contrast, the emphasis was on a reconstructed, sanitized version of a life that to me bore little connection with the Jordan I’d known, the passionate lover, the hard-nosed lawyer. It was as if her adult self, including her professional persona, had been carefully set aside. The priest recalled memories of her as a teenager. Then her best friend from high school talked of trouble they’d gotten themselves into during a trip to Europe before college. The facts that she’d been murdered, most likely by one of her own clients, and that she’d suffered terribly before dying, weren’t mentioned at all. By the end, the effect was nauseating to me. I couldn’t take seriously a religion that wouldn’t call the devil out.

  A large contingent was present from Baker Benton. I recognized Tom Benton, the named partner, from his profile on their website. I’d looked him up when Jordan and I first teamed up, after she told me about the case they’d tried together just before she took her leave of absence. Benton was all vertical lines, as if carved from a slab of wood, with hair precisely chiseled and fixed in place. He wore a black suit and a red tie over a cream-colored shirt. The lawyers with him seemed to form their own tribe, set apart by their awareness of their superior gifts.

  Jordan’s father, by contrast, was weak chinned and narrow shouldered. Standing between wife and daughter, he seemed not to know where he was, or why. His wife had to prod him to stand for the hymns. Both men wept openly: Walker’s head dipped as if in shame, Benton’s high. By the end of the service, I disliked the latter without having exchanged a word with him.

  In the receiving line afterward, Benton ended up next to Gabriela. Each evinced a similar aura of charisma held carefully in check. They appeared to know one another, but that was hardly surprising. Gabriela was required to stand for election every four years, which meant she had to seek campaign donations from those with the means to give, and to ingratiate herself with the power structures that made her lesser power accessible.

  I waited my turn, then shook hands with Jordan’s father, sister, and mother, introducing myself by reference to the case we’d just tried. When I mentioned Rodriguez’s name, Hiram Walker just nodded. He was glassy-eyed, undoubtedly unused to whatever sedative had been urged on him. His silver-haired wife stared at me with the sharpness her husband lacked. The receiving line behind me couldn’t move until I walked on, and I couldn’t do that until her eyes released me.

  “Jordan was very proud of your accomplishment,” she said, tilting her head back for emphasis. “I asked, ‘What if he’s guilty and goes out and rapes someone else?’ ‘Mother,’ she said, ‘I can’t worry about that.’ It wasn’t all principle. She believed he was innocent. She and her father argued terribly about it before the trial.”

  Her gaze went instantly cold, as if suddenly she’d remembered who I was and what I’d done to cause her daughter’s death. I had an urge to tell her how I’d felt about Jordan. Yet if my throat hadn’t choked up, such a declaration was the last thing she or anyone in her position could want to hear. Meanwhile the line was moving forward, pressing me on.

  Monday morning I was seated at the back of the courtroom when the deputies led Rodriguez in. He’d been arrested over the weekend and according to news reports had immediately confessed. Several of us from the office had managed to find places in the crowded gallery. Gabriela and her deputies were there, as was Rebecca. I’d walked over with the others, but there wasn’t enough room for us all to sit together. So I’d found a spot near the back, wedging myself in between family members waiting for their loved ones’ cases to be called on the felony arraignments calendar. It felt strange to be sitting on the DA’s side of the courtroom. Jordan’s family was near the front. They still had the look of people who’d been pulled alive from rubble. Because there was no room left in the gallery, the deputies had allowed reporters to sit in the jury box.

  Seven arraignments were scheduled for Department 22 this morning, but the crowd was only here for one of them, and the judge called Rodriguez’s case first. When my former client was led in between three deputies I felt a wave of déjà vu. He wore the same county orange he’d worn when he was arraigned for the rape of Janelle Fitzpatrick. He looked just the same as he’d looked then, as he shuffled in shackles between the deputies from the holding cell to the well of the courtroom. He was over six feet tall, with tree limbs for legs and arms, his addict’s wrists knotted with scar tissue and showing the faded blue of amateur tattoos. His beard was matted and tangled. Despite his size he seemed to cower as the deputies led him forward, presenting the same pitiful aspect that had struck me so powerfully the first time I saw him.

  Rodriguez had experienced only a week of freedom since his initial arraignment over a year ago. At that time, of course, Jordan had still been with Baker Benton, preparing for that big trial with her mentor. I’d been the sole lawyer defending the case. He wasn’t represented by the PD’s office today, of course. His appointed lawyer, a private attorney paid hourly to handle cases where our office had a conflict of interest, stepped to the well of the courtroom to take his place beside him. He said a few words and touched Randall’s arm. Instead of Harold Cole, Mark Chen was the lead investigator at the DA’s table beside Saenz.

  Judge Ransom addressed the defendant and read a summary of his rights, including the right to remain silent and to have an attorney. Then he read the charges, which included sexual assault and first-degree murder, and asked Rodriguez if he understood.

  Possibly Rodriguez was still high. His tone was assertive and sharp, like someone voicing a grievance. “That’s right, judge. I did it. I’m guilty just like you said.”

  A stir passed through the gallery. Rodriguez tried to turn, blinking as if he’d just noticed the crowd. Walker bowed his head and his wife stared at the man who’d just spoken. The lawyer bent and whispered furiously in Rodriguez’s ear, seeming to get his attention for the first time. He nodded. The lawyer stepped forward. “Alex Ripley for the defendant. The public defender’s office has declared a conflict of interest.”

  “You’re appointed.”

  “I’d like to raise a doubt as to the competency of my client to stand trial or enter a plea, and I’d like to request a mental examination.”

  Rodriguez’s lawyer may not have realized this—I hoped he did, because any competent lawyer ought to have known it—but he was repeating word for word the request I’d made at Rodriguez’s initial arraignment.

  Rodriguez raised his hand, like a kid in school asking permission to speak, but again the lawyer s
ilenced him with a tight grip on his arm, whispering into his ear. The judge studied him with a frown, then said, “Let’s take this up in my chambers.”

  A recess ensued. The bailiffs returned Rodriguez to the holding cell. Ripley and Saenz followed the judge out the back of the courtroom to his chambers. At the DA’s table, Chen turned and went to the rail to speak to Jordan’s family, crouching low to put himself at their level. I hadn’t noticed before, but now I saw that Janelle Fitzpatrick’s father was in the courtroom. He sat beside Mrs. Walker.

  After twenty minutes, the judge and the lawyers returned, and Judge Ransom declared he had no doubt Rodriguez was competent to stand trial under California law. Perhaps fearing another spontaneous outburst, Ripley immediately asked for a continuance before entering a plea. The judge granted this. Ripley didn’t bother to ask for bail.

  Next, the judge called a recess so the spectators could clear the courtroom and allow the remaining arraignments to proceed in peace. I ought to have been prepared for what happened when I stepped into the hallway. I’d been screening my calls and deleting phone messages from reporters all week, and I’d just barely managed to avoid being cornered after Jordan’s funeral. This time, however, the crowd coming out of the courtroom propelled me straight into the mouth of the beast.

  Turning away from one camera crew, I found myself with another lens in my face. A blond woman holding a logoed microphone appeared. “I’m here with Leo Maxwell, who along with cocounsel Jordan Walker pulled off the acquittal in the rape trial of Randall Rodriguez last week. In a shocking twist, Mr. Rodriguez today confessed in open court that he murdered Ms. Walker. Mr. Maxwell, you were at the funeral Friday. What words did you have for Jordan’s family?”