Legal Thriller: Michael Gresham: Secrets Girls Keep: A Courtroom Drama (Michael Gresham Legal Thriller Series Book 2)

by John Ellsworth

  * * *

  FRANNY ARLINGTON SPOTTED Jana as he climbed the bleachers toward the clutch of seniors at the far end. They included seven senior girls and six senior boys. Jana would make boy number seven. Franny had had her eye on him, hardly acknowledging it to herself, since he had transferred to Wendover. He was a cool California kid in his baggies and surf shop shirts. His long brown hair, cut in a massive shag, made her want to run her fingers across his face and into the haircut. He was cute, dammit, and she planned to make him her own. As she watched him climb the steps, their eyes met and she couldn't help herself: she smiled. And then immediately looked away. For Jana, he felt his heart leap when Franny looked his way and smiled; she was the only one of all the senior class who was willing to give him a break on the murder case. Evidently she didn't think that he had done it and was willing to cut him some slack.

  She wondered if Hank had seen the smile. Even if he had, she doubted that Hank would have known who Jana was. He only knew that a senior boy had been arrested for the freshman girl's murder; he didn't have a clear mental picture of who that was. He certainly didn’t realize it was Jana who was accused and who, in fact, he did see smile at his daughter. Kids, thought the father. Always with the flirting eyes and eager smiles. Still, it was good to see his daughter was attractive to her peers. Any father would be proud, and Hank was no exception.

  * * *

  RUDY GOMEZ NEEDED a vantage point from which to pick a victim. Seeing the knot of senior classmates, he went to the far end of the bleachers and climbed above where they would be sitting at the other end. Once he was sure he was above them, he edged his way across to their side by climbing to the top row of the stands and heading over. He was a good twenty rows above them when he took his seat. Within five seats of him in one direction sat Jana's angel, Marcel. Within six seats of him the other way, sat Hank, Franny's father. Of course he didn't know these men or he wouldn't have selected the seat he did. But it was done and, truth be told, the two men were paying him no attention anyway.

  Rudy focused on the backs of his classmates below where he sat. He watched Sue Ellen Baumgartner in her cutesy little cheerleaders' outfit come bouncing up the steps to check on her man, Fuzzy Oberlich, who ordinarily dressed out with the football team but was nursing a fractured foot and getting lots of attention for the plastic cast he was wearing. Rudy hated Fuzzy and wished he had the strength to take down another male; but he didn't. A female would just have to do. Besides...there was the sex thing and tonight was the night. His gaze shifted to the twins, Wanda and Wendy Ketcham, who still dressed alike even though they were seventeen years old and should have known better. He crossed them off his list because those two were inseparable and would never go to the bathroom or anyplace else without the other along. That wasn't going to happen. Then there was Olivine Washington, the daughter of their chemistry teacher, who has black and ran the hundred-meter dash during track season. Rudy didn't like admitting it, but Olivine actually frightened him. She had twice his musculature and wasn't hesitant about speaking out and stepping up where she saw injustice in their world. Not only that, Olivine was smarter than the entire class put together and that in itself was off-putting. If he were successful in trapping her alone somewhere she might very likely outthink him and dump his dumb ass before he did the deed. So she was out.

  Which really only left Franny Arlington as the girl he would like to do tonight. She was playing shove and pull with Jana—the kid they arrested for Amy's murder. So what the hell was she doing with him anyhow? Didn't she know he was accused of murder by the Chicago Police Department? He hated her for ignoring the heinous nature of Jana's attack on Amy. He wished she wasn't flirting with the new kid from California. He had loved her from afar for a very long time. There, he finally admitted it. Now he had to make her notice him, and there was but one way to do that. He would watch very carefully for his opening and he would be bold.

  At the end of the first quarter of the game the score was Wendover 11 and Niles 3. Everyone stood to stretch, including Rudy. As he was stretching, he stepped up on the bench below him and got a good look at Franny and Jana. But Jana wasn't around. Franny was alone. He carefully kept his eyes on her for what she might do next. Someone passed her a program and she flipped through it. Someone else passed her a lighted cigarette but she shook her head; Hank was watching all of this and she knew better than to smoke in front of Hank. Then Jana returned with two Pepsi cups and handed one to Franny. She accepted and smiled and leaned into him with her shoulder. He feigned pulling away but then moved right back up against her. Rudy was put off by this and he hated Jana for sitting where he, Rudy, should have been sitting. Right beside Franny Arlington, the coolest and prettiest girl in the senior class.

  She abruptly stood up and came up the steps in double-time straight at Rudy. He was about to say something to her when she stopped off to the side and began talking to a slight man wearing khakis and a denim work shirt. "Hank," he heard her say, "all of us are going to the restrooms, boys and girls. We'll be okay, so please just wait."

  "No," said the man, Hank, "I'm going to tag along."

  "Please! You're embarrassing me!"

  "I am? Why?"

  "You just are. Now stay put, please, or I'll never speak to you again."

  She turned and two-stepped down to her friends. Something was said and they rose as a group and began filing down the stairs to the very bottom of the bleachers, where they turned left in the direction of the restrooms. Then Rudy saw that Jana had remained behind. Jana turned and gave Rudy a scowl--Rudy thought it was meant for him, not realizing Marcel was close by--but Rudy ignored the look. By the time Jana had turned back around to face the field, Rudy was up and gone.

  Before the other seniors had reached the bottom bench, Rudy was down and running in the shadows for the restroom. He cut inside the girls' restroom and decided he would wait inside the farthest stall. Why? He reasoned that Franny was a leader. Which meant she would come through the door first and that she would seek the farthest stall. It just seemed to make sense. Besides, if it was anyone else he would just have to settle for her. Either way it happened, it was all good.

  He was back against the wall of the stall when the door creaked open. In one move he was on her, pressing the knife blade against her throat, demanding her absolute silence. He told her to sit on the toilet and urinate. He stood behind her with the knife drawn tightly against her throat while she complied. One by one they heard the other stalls flush and the occupants wash and leave. Soon the restroom was quiet. He dragged his prey to the light switch and darkened the restroom. Then he shut off the exterior light as well. In the darkness, he walked his hostage out of the restroom and back along the fence, out of view of anyone in the stands.

  He pushed her under the stands. She struggled, trying to run past him, and he seized her arm and flung her back, further under the stands. She fell backwards and as she was falling she violently struck her head against a lower portion of the bleachers. Then she didn’t move. Her eyes were half-shut.

  “What the fuck happened to you?” he said in disbelief. He had brought her here to rape her first. He was suddenly frightened and a terror swept through his body.

  But before he ran, he jammed his hand into his front pocket; he removed the prize and inserted it inside her mouth. Then came the glue.

  He was gone in four minutes altogether. Three minutes and fifty-eight seconds, actually, according to the digits on his watch.

  His bicycle slipped backward from the rack and he pushed forward and was riding along the dark street moments later.

  A hue and cry went up from Hank, who returned from purchasing a large black coffee and realized Franny wasn't among her friends. He didn't see that Jana had already gone to the security officer at the far end of the stands and was speaking animatedly with him. Had he been watching, he would have spotted the security officer suddenly throw Jana to the ground and cuff his hands behind him with plastic handcuffs.

 
But Hank was already headed for the opening under the bleachers.

  So he saw nothing of the arrest of Jana and nothing of the police officers who arrived moments later and replaced the plastic cuffs with stainless steel ones.

  Then Hank was screaming and men were rushing toward his cry.

  18

  Edward Ngo invented what he called the 12:1 Rule of detective work. His Rule said that twelve minutes inside the police station, at his desk in the homicide bureau, was the equivalent of one minute at a crime scene. Sixty minutes in the office went by in five minutes at a homicide. So when the shift changed at six p.m., the robbery-homicide dicks who'd been stuck in the office headed for Stuyvesant's Tavern on Clark Street. By midnight the murders had all been compared, theories had been exhausted in long, heated exchanges, and all the bad guys were under arrest--so it was time to go home for six hours of sack time until the day shift fell in again the next morning. The days were an endless stream on RH; there was never a day off. Another of Ngo's sayings, oft-repeated around Chicago's Loop Precinct: Homicide is a killer. Meaning RH was a meat grinder. A dick was allowed three years in RH before being rotated out for a breather in vice or burglary. Too many dead guy pictures and a detective would start showing up at the head shrinker's office, scoring depression tabs or getting dried out in rehab. And the lieutenants knew productivity fell off after thirty-six months in RH dramatically. On the day Franny Arlington was found under the bleachers at Wendover Field, the back of her head bloodied, Edward NGO had just eighty-eight days left of his three years. And more than anything, he wanted the bleachers homicides solved before he rotated out.

  He ate, slept, and talked nothing else during the twelve hours shifts he shared with Andy Valencia, his partner of five years. At lunch break, over fish tacos or beef teriyaki, they talked the bleachers. At night at Stuyvesant's he talked the bleachers with anyone still willing to listen. At home weekends with his wife--who was divorcing him but didn't have first and last month's rent saved up yet--he talked bleachers even though Charlotte had quit listening long ago. And at night he dreamed the dreams of a homicide investigator who has seen two too many high school girls with her throat slashed ear-to-ear and one too many high school girls with a closed head injury. They were awful dreams, full of wails and cries for help and dark faces without features that grinned at him out of the shadows.

  And Edward Ngo was onto a full-blown course of Zoloft for clinical depression. Of course you weren't supposed to ingest alcohol when taking the drug, his shrinker had cautioned him, but the nightly 12:1's were an exception that Ngo had carved out for himself. A dick couldn't be expected to just drop out of 12:1's. It just wasn't done. You were expected to be there; you were expected to participate; you were expected to keep sane with the help of your brothers' sharing and your own. Ngo saw it as no different than group therapy and so he declined his shrinker's invitation to engage in an official, non-alcohol group. Cops just didn't do such things. They couldn't. If they did, word might get out just how insane homicide detail had left them. So it was 12:1 and done, home by twelve-thirty and dreaming the bad dreams alone in a bed vacated by a spouse counting dollars and days until she could escape from you. Which left only your buddies at the station.

  Edward Ngo had been flown to America by Catholic Social Services at the age of thirteen. He was raised protestant but he wound up with the Catholics after all. He grew up as a member of Father Bjorn's All-Saints Church, although he attended so rarely the priest didn't recognize him under the bleachers when he and Michael Gresham had approached the tall African detective. But Ngo recognized Father Bjorn. Knew exactly who he was and knew why he was there: Jana Emerich was Bjorn's natural child and his guilt was as deep as a mountain of bullshit in a feed lot. While Ngo couldn't say so, he knew all about guilt. Recruited by BOKO HARAM into its killing corps in a kidnapping at age eight, Ngo had killed mothers and fathers and children all over northeast Nigeria under the orders of killers not much older. The motivation had been simple: either you kill who we tell you to kill or we kill you. Ngo had learned at the age of eight that he was without principles: he opted to kill rather than be killed. So he understood Father Bjorn's guilt when he came under the bleachers after Amy’s death; he understood what it meant to feel like your own flesh and blood had murdered an innocent. They were brothers under arms--one by proxy and one in fact. It didn't matter: killing was killing and Father Bjorn knew it.

  Late Friday night, after Jana had been thrown to the ground and handcuffed by the uniforms, he had been driven to Loop Precinct and delivered into the interrogation room to await Ngo and Valencia. The two detectives were nursing their second whiskey at the 12:1 when Ngo's cell phone vibrated. He fished it out of his coat pocket and read. Another dead girl Wendover Field. Jana Emerich in custody. Come now.

  Twenty minutes later, Ngo and Valencia were pulling their unmarked into reserved parking out behind the precinct.

  The son had remembered the lawyer's words, spoken that night at Michael Gresham's house when he first went to live there: "If the cops want to talk, call me first."

  So when the offered him a soft drink in the interrogation room he declined. When they offered him a cigarette (even though he was hooked), he said no. When they told him that if he cooperated they would take him home, he said no. He remembered the look on Michael Gresham's face when he said the words "Call me first," and he meant to do just that.

  "Why did you kill her?" Ngo asked Jana.

  Jana leaned away from the table. He placed his elbows on the hardwood and slipped his thumbnail under his front teeth. Then he said, "I want my lawyer."

  "Your lawyer can't save you. But you can by talking to us."

  "I want my lawyer."

  "Do you have a girlfriend?"

  "Do you like girls?"

  "Do you like sex with dead bodies?"

  "What does it feel like when you kill someone?"

  "We can tell the District Attorney you cooperated."

  "We can make them go easy on you."

  "You need medical help. A year in a hospital and you walk out a free man."

  "Do you want coffee? A Coke?"

  "Do you smoke?"

  Through the barrage, Jana's answer remained the same.

  "I want my lawyer."

  Finally, Ngo and Valencia left the room and stood in the hallway to regroup.

  "He wants his lawyer," Valencia reminded his partner.

  "He really wants his freedom," Ngo said. He remembered what restraint against one's will in a strange place felt like. "Let's try that angle."

  The two men re-entered the room and took seats across from Jana.

  "Jana, we are ready to release you to go home," said Ngo.

  The boy's eyes opened wide. "Really?"

  "Really. We just need your statement first. Just tell us what happened and we'll take you home."

  "My lawyer said I shouldn't speak to you."

  "Well, your lawyer doesn't know us. We want the real killer. If you didn't do it--and we don't think you did--we'd like you to help us catch whoever did do it. Can you do that? Just a good citizen statement?"

  "Just tell what I saw? I already tried that with the security cop and he threw me on the ground."

  "Well, we're not here to throw you on the ground. In fact, we're sorry that even happened. It wouldn't have happened if we had been there."

  "If you say so."

  Ngo leaned back and folded his arms.

  "Now, were you talking with Franny at the game?"

  "Yes."

  "And someone said you were sitting next to her. Is that correct?"

  "Yes. She came up the stairs and came over by me. I didn't ask her or anything. She just did it."

  "Which made you happy, I'm sure."

  "Yes."

  "And you would have been the last person who wanted to see her harmed, correct?"

  "Of course I didn't want her harmed. I didn't want Amy Tanenbaum harmed either."

  "Did you follow Franny t
o the bathroom?"

  "No. I started to, but then I thought I better wait in the stands."

  "Was anyone else with you?"

  "My lawyer's investigator was watching me. He was behind us."

  "Really? What's his name?"

  "Marcel something. I don't know his last name."

  "Why was Marcel there?"

  "He was sent with me by my lawyer."

  "Were they afraid you were going to do something wrong?"

  "No."

  "Then why?"

  Jana smiled. He looked up at the camera and slowly said, "They weren't afraid of what I might do. They were afraid of what you might do. Like try to say I hurt someone else."

  "They told you that?"

  "They said you would stop at nothing to convict me. They didn't want me to go to the game. But I raised hell with them and got to go. But Marcel had to tag along."

  "Was Marcel with you all night?"

  "Except for when I went into the restroom. He waited outside."

  "Then you came back out?"

  "No, there was a back door. He didn't know it. I just walked out and circled around him in the shadows."

  "Where did you go?"

  "Franny and I were going to meet in the parking lot. We were going to walk and talk."

  "You weren't going back to the game?"

  "No. She wanted to hear about California. My old state."