He has to walk by her to get out. Well, no sense in postponing the inevitable. Trudging towards her, he looks at her, not aggressively, but warily, the way you eyeball a dangerous dog that’s planted itself in the middle of the sidewalk, right in your path. Move, please, he thinks, turn and go.
She holds her ground. He passes by her, no more than three feet separating them as he reaches the high, heavy door.
He’s going to have to say something; he can’t brush by her without an acknowledgment. It would be unspeakably rude, even cruel.
“Glenna …”
She says nothing.
“I’m sorry.” That’s all he can come up with. I’m sorry. For everything, for everything, for everything.
SIX
LUKE’S PREPARATION OF HIS summation to the jury is going to take all his weekend time. He burrows himself in his office, reading over the transcripts, making notes, thinking about the angles. Maria Gonzalez seeing Allison on the property is deadly, a real bullet to the heart, especially when combined with the other evidence, which was killer stuff to begin with, but it’s still not an absolute smoking gun. He might be able to plant some slim doubts in the jurors’ minds about her credibility. No one actually saw Allison with her body, alive or dead, and no murder weapon has ever been found.
But the worst thing you can do is lie to yourself. The prosecution’s case, looking at it with a cold, objective eye, forswearing emotion and passion, is almost bulletproof. There’s motive: she was pregnant, she was going to blow the whistle on him. Opportunity: he was there, according to the eyewitness. And the strong circumstantial evidence—the key ring, the shoes, the condoms. Everything he’s known, and everything he’s learned, points in one straight line: a guilty verdict.
But he’s got to keep plugging away. The rules don’t change when you’re losing.
Riva, antsy, is sleuthing on her own. It’s way late in the day, but she doesn’t have much else to do, and she has her own theory that she can’t let go of—that Allison slept with Emma, knocked her up, but didn’t kill her.
Nicole Rogers, of course, is on her mind. And with that suspicion, she’s started pursuing another element. It’s a hit-and-miss kind of investigation, what she’s doing. She isn’t a real detective with an established private investigator’s tools at her disposal—networking, computer programs, contacts in and out of law enforcement. Although she has the smarts of one and the curiosity as well, she lacks the resources—plus, she’s pregnant and is often, to her annoyance, tired, which makes her cranky; she’s a woman of action, she doesn’t like being tired, sapped of energy—and she has nothing tangible to go on. It’s all intuition. The truth is out there, as her favorite television show proclaims. But where?
What’s the old rule? Follow the money. Joe Allison is the money in this case. So recreate a couple of typical days in his life and follow him.
One problem: his place of employment, the television station, took a lot of his time, and she can’t tread in those waters, so she tools around the periphery: where he worked out, where he hung out, ate, drank, socialized. The organizations he belonged to, his community work.
Kris & Jerry’s is a popular upscale bar where many of the city’s hipper young professionals gather. The habitués knew Joe Allison as a steady customer. The barman, a buffed UCSB grad student, recalls that one woman who drank with Allison on a couple of occasions was a bourbon drinker. Designer bourbon—Maker’s Mark, she asked for it specifically. The bartender remembers her because rare is the California woman whose choice of alcohol is bourbon. He doesn’t recall her name; he doesn’t know if he was ever told. She was only with Allison those few times. “I had the idea they worked together. After work, people from the office having a drink together, the usual thing.”
Maker’s Mark bourbon. The same kind of bourbon, seal cracked, found in Joe Allison’s car. Interesting coincidence.
The woman is a friend of Glenna’s. She’s receiving Riva in her Montecito home, a few blocks from where the Lancasters used to live.
“Glenna was in an agitated state. She was drinking. She drank more than she should have.”
“You were with her?” Riva asks. “You have firsthand knowledge?”
“Yes. There were a few of us together, late that night.”
“Did she say why she was upset?”
The woman frowns. “No. Something had come up, something that had thrown her for a loop.” Riva’s interviewee, talking with the strict proviso that this conversation is off the record, lights up a Virginia Slim, sucks in a nervous drag. “I should quit.” Another vigorous puff. “I shouldn’t be talking about this.”
“Was it about a man?” Riva asks.
“I don’t think so—not this time. Not this time, but there sure were others.” The woman snorts derisively. “What we do to ourselves in the name of love. I’ve been in that position, I know.”
“This agitated state. It happened the night Emma Lancaster was abducted?”
“The very same.”
Damn, Riva’s thinking, where was I with this a month, two months ago? She doesn’t know if Luke’s going to be happy that she uncovered this stuff or upset that she did it so late. Too late to help, really. He’s rested his case. The reason this information hasn’t been found out is that they didn’t have the time or the manpower to do everything they wanted to do: they live in a finite world. And Luke has a client who never came clean, only shedding light on the truth when it was forced out of him.
If they lose the case, and this information might have made the difference, Joe Allison will have no one to blame but himself. He could’ve remembered if he drank bourbon with his lady friend, and how upset she truly was over his leaving town.
“Hello, Janet.” They’re friends now, she calls the woman by her first name.
“Hello, Riva.”
“Are you nervous, Janet? Your knee’s doing the two-step mambo.”
Doctor Lopez’s knee is bouncing up and down to a spasmodic rhythm. “I shouldn’t have talked to you. I should never have talked to anyone. I should have preserved the patient-doctor confidentiality.”
It’s Sunday afternoon. The clinic is closed. Lopez has come in at Riva’s urgent request.
“You had no choice. Her parents waived the confidentiality.”
“I should have resisted them.”
Riva commiserates with the woman. They’re sisters in their ethnicity, in this time and place a strong bond. And she likes her, she likes someone who’s trying to do the right thing. “In the end it would’ve been forced out of you, so don’t beat yourself up about it, hermana.”
The doctor shrugs. Like, who will ever know? “So what do you want to know now?” she asks wearily. “I’ve already testified, they’re done with me.”
“I want to know for me,” Riva tells her. “Outside of courtrooms, juries, laws. For the truth of it, whatever that is. If there can be said to be some, here.”
“So what is your question?”
“Who besides you would have known about Emma’s being pregnant? Who could have known?”
Lopez ponders the question. “That’s a hard one.”
“Other people working here?”
“Maybe.”
“Did you tell anyone?”
The doctor nods. “I told my colleague. Our other doctor, Sam Hablitt.”
“Who else?”
“No one else. She came in one day, and the next day she’d been kidnapped.”
“Okay. So you only told one other person.”
Lopez stares at her. “Yes.”
“Did you write anything down? Was there anything on paper?”
Lopez nods gravely. “I wrote it all down.”
“So someone could have found it, and told someone else, or taken some action.”
“No.” Lopez shakes her head vehemently.
“Why not?”
“It’s all in code. We never identify a patient by name. That way, the government or anyone else who’s trying to p
ry into our private affairs is stymied. It’s a huge privacy issue, particularly regarding AIDS patients and their employers and insurance companies, and we fight to maintain our autonomy and independence, tooth and nail.” Angrily, she adds, “These so-called conservatives in Washington. They’re always talking about less government, but when it comes to social programs that help poor or disadvantaged people, their pawprints are on everything. Anything to try and shut us down, the bastards!”
“I hear you,” Riva says. “So here’s my question: Who knows these codes? Or could get access to them?”
Luke, buried in work, his tension level mounting, regards Riva snappishly. “Just what I need—an overflowing new bowl of fresh distractions.”
Sunday evening, Mountain Drive. The true beginning of the end starts tomorrow. He’s fidgeting over a draft of his summation, staring intently at the screen of his laptop. As if the answer he’s looking for will leap off it, of its own volition.
“Sorrrry,” she comes back at him, miffed. “I thought you might be interested in this. Some of this, any of it.” She skitters away. “I worked my buns off all weekend, tracking this down. Try to help someone, and see the thanks you get.”
“I’m preparing my closing remarks, Riva. Only the most important summation I’ve ever made in my life.” He’s buying into his own hyperbole. “What am I supposed to do with all this?”
“Reopen the trial?” she asks hopefully.
He groans. “Reopening a trial’s serious business. You can’t waltz in there and say, ‘Listen up, Judge, I found out some new stuff that you might want to look at. Let’s stop everything and turn left ninety degrees.’ No judge in the world would ever consider that.”
“But this is important,” she argues vehemently. “It could be vital.”
“I agree. And if we’d known about it earlier, which I guess I should have, we might have found a way to use it—although it’s highly circumstantial. To go back in now and try to reopen would be an admission of incompetency.”
“You didn’t have the time to check out everything under the sun, Luke,” she reminds him. “Don’t get down on yourself again. It’s a luxury you don’t have time for. You know you were never supposed to win, Luke. You were supposed to tank this. Make it look good and exit gracefully into the night.”
His gut feels like he’s been shot, all over again. “I know.” He looks out into the night, the darkness of the canyon below them, the lights further down towards town, the oil-platform running lights out in the channel defining the horizon.
“Do you plan to do anything with my information?” she asks.
“I don’t know. It supports my theory that at the least someone additional is involved.” He sprawls out on the living room couch. “Under different circumstances I’d leak this to the press. But Doug Lancaster is the local press.”
“What about you?” she asks, flopping down opposite him, head to toe, presenting him with her bare feet to rub.
“What about me what?” He takes one foot in his hands, begins kneading the instep and ball.
She luxuriates in the delectable, rough caress. “There’s still someone out there who tried to kill you,” she says, moving in slow, libidinous rhythm with her foot massage.
“I know,” he replies somberly. Cocking his head towards the street: “My keepers are a constant reminder.”
“Shouldn’t you at least turn this over to the sheriff?” she asks breathily.
“Good idea.” Abruptly he lets go her foot, gets up, goes over to the dining table, which he’s using for a desk. “When I see him tomorrow.” He sits down, begins assembling his papers, turning to the speech he’s composing.
“I’m going to take a bath.” She heaves up from the couch, pads into the bathroom.
He’s locked into his final argument, but he isn’t focused, not the way he needs to be. He’s thinking about Riva, how she’s so with him it’s almost heartbreaking. He wishes he’d pursued this angle more, but you can’t do everything. His job was to defend his client, not search out and identify every possible suspect. That’s the police’s job, and they weren’t thorough enough.
Tomorrow he’ll pass this on to Sheriff Williams. Maybe something will come of it. That’s not his concern now. His sole task is to get Joe Allison an acquittal. Then, if by some miracle he pulls that off, he’ll deal with everything else.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury …”
Ray Logan is the man of the hour. And he knows it. This is his chance to shine like he’s never shone before. To stamp his seal on his office, make it his own, once and for all. Luke Garrison will be his accomplice in this task—not a willing one, but a player all the same. The king is dead, long live the king. He’s even bought a new suit for the occasion, a dark blue Hugo Boss pinstripe, which hangs on him like a million bucks.
Everyone who needs to be here, is. Doug Lancaster’s back in his customary seat in the first row behind the prosecution table. Doug is looking calm, much calmer than he’s appeared since the trial began, calmer than he’s been for months. Luke, glancing over at him as they all wait for Judge Ewing to make his entrance, marvels at the man’s newly acquired self-control. Maybe he’s accepted whatever’s going to come, Luke thinks. Or he’s convinced himself that the verdict, once these last speeches are made, will go his way.
Glenna, too, is in her usual seat. Last row, closest to the door.
He had planned on handing over Riva’s newfound information to Sheriff Williams and taking a few minutes before the day officially started to explain and discuss it, particularly as it might apply to his own shooting, but Williams, who is customarily early, came in only a minute before the bailiff called the proceedings to order.
“All rise.”
Judge Ewing, looking formidably magisterial, sweeps in with the hem of his robe trailing on the floor. He’s had a fresh haircut over the weekend, and under the top of his judicial garment he’s wearing a new tie, Luke notices, silver and navy blue silk. He looks like a judge; there’s more than a passing resemblance to the late chief justice Warren Burger. Dignified, calm, in control.
“You may proceed,” he directs Ray Logan straightaway.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury …”
Ray Logan is organized. He is on top of this. He is smooth, confident, friendly, tough. He doesn’t talk down to the jurors, he doesn’t patronize them, he doesn’t bully or in any way intimidate them.
“The facts are incontrovertible. All you have to do is look at them. There was a young, impressionable girl who was befriended by an attractive older man. The man worked for her father, so she knew him as a friend for a long time, was comfortable with him, trusted him. And as she progressed from a twelve-year-old grade schooler with braces on her teeth to a fourteen-year-old almost-woman in bloom, and her beauty and sexuality became a tangible, alive thing, she could feel her own inner stirrings, and she aroused them in this man, who has no conscience. Did she enter into sexual congress with him willingly? Yes, in all probability she did. She had a crush on this local media star. Many girls her age had a similar crush. So when the opportunity arose, all too tragically and predictably, they became lovers.
“Which you do not do, ladies and gentlemen. Not if you are an adult person with any sense of morality, of right and wrong.
“She became pregnant. She was carrying their love child. Except this was no love child, this was a fetus from hell, an albatross growing in the womb. It would be a social disgrace for her and her family if it became known, though they could weather it, as a family. Maybe she’d have an abortion—she had looked into that. Or maybe not, maybe they’d send her away on some pretext, they have plenty of money, a few months going to school in France or Italy is a wonderful experience for a young girl. And the baby would be put up for adoption. No one would ever know. Emma would survive it and her life would go on. Remember that, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. Her life would go on.
“For Joe Allison, however, the scenario was very differ
ent. This was ruination for him. He had to stop this right now, “by whatever means necessary.” That’s a military phrase meaning you do what you have to do to get the job done and protect yourself.
“So that’s what he did. He murdered her.
“Let’s follow the facts together. Emma Lancaster had missed her last two periods. She went to a clinic where her parents wouldn’t find out about her possible condition. The clinic confirmed that she was three months pregnant. That was Saturday afternoon. Immediately she tried to call Joe Allison, the father of her unborn child. They kept missing each other. Finally, after two in the morning, they connected.
“He came to the house immediately. He took her right out of her bedroom. A witness saw him do it. They went somewhere to talk about it, probably the gazebo on her parents’ property where they had made love before. We know that because the contraceptives he had used there matched the ones found a year later in his house. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here.
“Something happened between them. Maybe she wasn’t going to have an abortion after all. She was going to have the baby. And who was the father? People would want to know. Sooner or later, that would come out. Or maybe she was going to tell her father what was going on. Do you have any doubt what would have happened if she had done that? Joe Allison, up there in the gazebo with his fourteen-year-old pregnant mistress at three in the morning, had no doubts.
“There was only one way out for Joe Allison.
“We know he was there that night, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. Because a courageous woman, who initially entered this country illegally and has always been afraid of what might happen to her if she ‘got involved,’ overcame her fears and came forward. But that too would happen later.
“A year went by. For Douglas and Glenna Lancaster, a year of continuous, nonstop grieving. A year in which their lives fell apart. And during that year, their friend Joe Allison was by their side, giving comfort and support.
“And then a miracle. We admit it, folks. It wasn’t dogged police work that solved this case, this horrible, unthinkable crime. We probably would have solved it sooner or later, but there are no assurances. We were blessed. Which proves there is a God after all, I firmly believe that.
The Disappearance Page 43
