by Joel Goldman
The most conclusive evidence they’d found was in the Kyrie Chapman case, not the Henderson case. Ballistic tests had confirmed that the gun Dwayne Reed was holding when Rossi burst into the living room was the same gun used to kill Chapman. Had Alex Stone not killed Dwayne, that would have been enough evidence for a conviction.
Rossi had made no further progress on either case in the months since the murders. Other crimes had been committed that would have pushed the Henderson murders deep into the stack of unsolved cases had it not been for Patrick Ortiz, who had been calling Rossi a couple of times a week for updates.
He’d worked with Ortiz on a lot of cases when Ortiz was the prosecutor, each of them doing their job, neither sending the other a Christmas card. Ortiz didn’t like Rossi’s freewheeling style and Rossi didn’t like that Ortiz had let him twist in the wind before clearing him on a couple of excessive force complaints. But the job was the job.
“What’s the Henderson case got to do with Alex Stone killing Dwayne Reed?” Rossi asked the first time Ortiz called him. “That’s pretty straight up. She shot him and you’ve got an eyewitness who makes it premeditated.”
“I’ve got an eyewitness who’s a crackhead and a prostitute who also happens to be the victim’s mother. I need more.”
“I get that,” Rossi said, “but how is closing out the Henderson case going to do that for you?”
“I don’t know-not yet anyway. Alex Stone defended Dwayne Reed and that got Reed killed. So I’m interested in anything having to do with the two of them, including everything that happened in the Donaire trial. Keep me posted if you find anything new. Day or night,” Ortiz said, giving Rossi his office, home, and cell numbers.
Rossi hadn’t needed Ortiz’s numbers until two weeks ago. He was lying in bed with Lena Kirk, who had finally accepted his offer to have dinner and the other offers it came with. They were talking about the Henderson case, and Rossi kept coming back to finding the aluminum bat in Gloria Temple’s closet.
“Did you search the rest of the house?” Lena asked him.
“You know we did. We gathered up every article of Gloria’s clothing and had them tested, but there was nothing to tie her to either the Chapman or Henderson murder scenes.”
“Hmmm.”
“Hmmm, what?”
Lena propped herself up on one elbow. “You remember that day Dwayne caught his leg on the fence and you had me pull those fabric fragments from the fireplace?”
“For all the good it did.”
“Well, maybe the day wasn’t a total bust.”
“Meaning what?”
“I went over the house, inside and out, in case there was anything else that might help with the murder investigations.”
“And found a whole lot of nothing,” Rossi said, sitting up.
“Only because we didn’t know what we were looking for.”
“A connection between Gloria and Dwayne.”
“Exactly. There were a bunch of footprints in the mud around the back door of the house. Some of them were clean enough for a molding. One of them was a woman’s shoe, but it didn’t match the shoes Odyessy was wearing. Did you find any of Gloria’s shoes when you searched Virginia’s house?”
“Yeah, three or four.”
They looked at each other, grinning, and jumped out of bed. An hour later they were in the lab. Lena compared the moldings to a pair of Gloria’s shoes.
“It’s a match,” she said, “right down to the dried mud on Gloria’s shoe.”
Rossi called Patrick Ortiz, waking him.
“It’s the middle of the night, Rossi,” Ortiz said. “This better be good.”
“We can place Gloria Temple at Odyessy Shelburne’s house,” Rossi said, explaining about the shoes and the molding. “The Hendersons were killed during the night. She had to have been at Odyessy’s house sometime between when they were murdered and when I went there to question Dwayne and he tried to run away.”
Ortiz thought for a moment. “Thank you, Detective. That’s a start. Call me back when you find Gloria Temple.”
Rossi had kept looking for Gloria Temple, but not because of Ortiz. She was the only one who could fill in the blanks on the Henderson case-if she was still alive. An entire family was in the ground way ahead of God’s schedule, and Rossi couldn’t leave that alone. He was convinced that Dwayne Reed had murdered them, but that wasn’t enough to close the case. He needed proof.
After Lena did her magic with Gloria’s shoe, he’d gone back over all the interviews, all the leads, and all the tips from CIs that hadn’t been worth the money the department had paid for them. He went back to the CIs, pushing for anything new. The effort had paid off Sunday night when one of the CIs said he’d seen Gloria the night before outside a crack house. He found Ortiz’s numbers.
“We’ve got a line on Gloria Temple,” he said, telling Ortiz the rest.
“How reliable is the CI?”
“What can I tell you? He’s a CI, but he peddles a lot less bullshit than most of them. And, he treats this shit like a business, not like a strung-out junkie looking to get high. He knows if he gives me bad information it’s bad for his business.”
“So what now?”
“This feels right. Gardiner Harris will watch the crack house and I’ll sit on Virginia Sprague’s apartment. Gloria shows up, we’ll bring her in.”
“Why not just knock on Sprague’s door?”
It was a lawyer’s question. A cop wouldn’t ask it. “Because if she’s not there, Virginia will tell her we’re looking for her and Gloria will vanish again. And if she is there, chances are Virginia will lie to us and we’ll end up in the same place. Better to watch and wait.”
Three days had passed and they had yet to catch up to Gloria. Rossi took another sip of his coffee when his phone rang.
“We just finished opening statements and the judge adjourned for the day,” Ortiz said. “Have you found her?”
“Nope.”
“That’s not very helpful.”
“Wasn’t meant to be.”
“What are you doing?”
“What I told you I was going to do. Watch the apartment at Choteau Courts.”
“That’s the best idea you’ve got?”
“When I get a better one, I’ll let you know.”
“I’m counting on that. We’ll be to the jury by Friday, Monday at the latest. After that, it’ll be too late to do me any good. I already punted on a plea bargain because I thought you’d find her by now. Don’t make me sorry I did.”
Rossi didn’t like Ortiz busting his balls while he was busting his hump on his day off. “You’re so worried, make the deal and I’ll go home.”
“Screw you, Rossi. Find the girl.”
Rossi closed his phone and pressed his back against the seat, letting out a sigh. He drained the last of his coffee, sitting up when he saw two people coming out of Choteau Courts. One of them was a middle-aged black woman who looked vaguely familiar, though from a distance, he couldn’t place her. The other was Wilson Bluestone, Jr., an ex-cop everyone but Rossi called Blues. Rossi called him a pain in the ass.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
When Blues was a cop, people lumped him and Rossi together. They were big men, each pushing six-five and 250, unafraid and quick with their fists and their guns. People stopped making the comparison when Blues resigned rather than face an Internal Affairs probe on a shooting that was far from righteous.
Since then, Blues had tended bar, played piano, and done unlicensed, freelance PI work, proving more than one cop to have been sloppy, stupid, or bent. Rossi didn’t like outsiders, especially Blues, showing up his brothers even if they deserved it. Blues returned the love, never passing up a chance to stick his finger in Rossi’s eye.
Rossi knew that Blues was Lou Mason’s running mate and that Mason’s aunt was Alex Stone’s lawyer. He doubted that Blues lived at Choteau Courts, and the odds were against him being there to visit a friend. But Blues could have gone there
to find Gloria Temple.
Rossi hadn’t seen Blues go into the apartment complex, but there was more than one entrance and he couldn’t watch them all. Blues and the woman walked down the street away from Rossi, stopping to shake hands before the woman got into her car and drove away before he had a chance to take down her license tag. Blues continued down the street and around the corner, out of Rossi’s view.
Rossi put his car in gear and eased down the block until he could see Blues’s car around the corner. He had to decide whether to stay where he was or stick with Blues. Staking out Virginia’s apartment had gotten him nowhere, but Blues gave him another option. He waited until Blues pulled out, giving him a decent lead before following him.
Blues drove to his bar, Blues on Broadway, parking in a back alley and disappearing through the rear entrance. Rossi circled back to Broadway, parked, and went in through the front door. Blues wasn’t there.
It was late afternoon and business was slow, one man in a booth nursing a beer and nibbling at a hamburger, a bartender watching a television hung from the ceiling. From the street, Rossi had seen lights on in a room above the bar, but he didn’t see a stairway to the second floor.
He left and walked around to the rear alley and tried the back door Blues had used. It was unlocked. He stepped inside and found himself in a narrow hallway, the entrance to the kitchen on his right, a steep staircase to his left. The kitchen was empty, so he started up the stairs.
A hallway divided the second floor, two rooms on each side and another at the end. The door was open to the first room on his right. It was an office, papers scattered across a desk, a computer screen on a credenza behind it. An electric keyboard lying on the floor told him this was probably Blues’s office, but he wasn’t there.
The other doors were closed and unmarked except for the door at the end of the hall, which was open a couple of inches. The nameplate mounted on the wall next to the doorframe read Lou Mason. Lights were on inside the office, and he heard voices coming from the other side of the door. Rossi soft-stepped his way to the door, listening.
“Detective Rossi, are you going to stand out there eavesdropping or come in?” Lou Mason said.
Red faced and hating it, Rossi pushed the door open. Mason was sitting behind his desk, Blues on a sofa crowded with files stuffed in banker’s boxes and rumpled sweatpants and sweatshirts and a rugby ball. A rowing machine was pushed up against the wall opposite the sofa. A closed wooden cabinet was mounted above it. He didn’t see the overnight bag Blues had been carrying.
“Took you long enough,” Blues said.
Rossi shrugged. “Just being careful. When did you make me?”
“The night you were conceived.”
Rossi let it pass. He was there for information, not to pick a fight. “What were you doing at Choteau Courts?”
“My business, not yours,” Blues said.
They stared at each other, faces hardening, until Mason intervened.
“What can we do for you, Detective?”
“I’m looking for Gloria Temple.”
Mason spread his arms wide. “Well, as you can see, she isn’t here.”
“Do you know where she is?”
“Why are you looking for her?”
“She’s a material witness.”
“In what case?” Mason asked.
“The murders of Jameer Henderson and his family.”
“Sorry, I can’t help you,” Mason said. “That’s not my case.”
“You don’t have any cases, not since you were disbarred.”
Mason smiled. “True enough. Not a case that I’m interested in. How’s that?”
“She’s also a witness in Alex Stone’s case,” Rossi said.
“And that’s a case I am interested in. But she’s on the prosecution’s witness list, not ours. Why don’t you ask Patrick Ortiz where she is?”
“Like I said, she’s a material witness in two murder cases. If you know where she is and don’t tell me, that’s obstruction of justice.”
Mason leaned back in his chair, hands behind his head. “In Missouri, we call it hindering prosecution, and it only applies if I prevent the apprehension, prosecution, conviction, or punishment of another for conduct constituting a crime. So are you telling us that Gloria Temple committed a crime or that she’s a material witness?”
“The man may not be able to practice law, but that doesn’t mean he don’t know the law,” Blues added.
“Like I said, she’s a witness in Alex Stone’s case. You hide her or do anything else to prevent her from testifying against your client, that’s witness tampering. You can look it up.”
Mason smiled, but there wasn’t any humor in the gesture. “See you in court, Detective.”
“Looking forward to it,” Rossi said.
He left the way he came, annoyed that he’d played that so poorly. He had hoped that the overnight bag was for Gloria Temple and that Blues was taking it to her. When she wasn’t in Mason’s office, he realized that Blues had played him, leading him to Mason’s office instead. Worse, he’d left Virginia Sprague’s apartment unwatched, giving Gloria a chance to get away if she’d been there in the first place.
Mason watched from his office window overlooking Broadway as Rossi got in his car and drove away.
“Nice work,” he said to Blues.
“Rossi made it easy.”
“What did you find out about Gloria?”
“I know she’s alive and that she’s in town. I’ll know where in a day or two.”
“Do I want to know how?”
“Relax. Only thing that got hurt was my feelings when I couldn’t get to her on my own.”
Mason’s eyes popped. “Don’t tell me you had to ask for help. That’s like a husband asking his wife for directions.”
“I’ve evolved. The job is bigger than my ego. I even went to church.”
“You got religion too?”
“Not yet. When I struck out on the street I tried Virginia Sprague. She took one look at me and wouldn’t even open the door. So I asked a pastor friend of mine if he knew someone Virginia would talk to while I listened. He put me on to Grace Canfield.”
“The same Grace Canfield who’s an investigator in the public defender’s office?”
“Same one. And she’s got a soft spot in her heart for Alex Stone. We went to see her today. I saw Rossi staking out her apartment when we left.”
“What did Virginia tell you?”
“Kyrie Chapman was her grandson. She took Gloria in when she was fifteen. Kyrie had a thing for Gloria but Gloria wasn’t interested. She said that Gloria disappeared about six months ago. She also said that two detectives came to her house looking for Gloria a few days after Kyrie was killed and she let them search her house.”
“Did they find anything interesting?”
“Yeah, an aluminum baseball bat on the floor in Gloria’s closet.”
Mason thought for a moment. “Alex said when she found the bodies of the Hendersons, the kids skulls had been crushed.”
“Aluminum bat would do that.”
“Be a hard thing for Gloria to explain,” Mason said.
“No good way to explain that, so she took off. Virginia didn’t hear from her until the other day. Gloria called her asking for money.”
“What did Virginia say?”
“She said no until Grace convinced her to call Gloria back and say yes. She told Gloria to come pick up the money but Gloria said no, she wanted Virginia to bring it to her. Said she’d call her in a day or two and tell her where and when.”
“And Virginia said she’d tell Grace?”
“She did, and Grace said she’d take Virginia to wherever it was they had to go.”
“Where’s that leave you?”
“I’m the driver.”
“Does Alex know Grace is helping you?”
Blues shook his head. “No, and Grace isn’t going to tell her. Not until she hears what Gloria has to say.”
&n
bsp; “So her soft spot may not be so soft after all. Is that it?”
“Almost. Grace and I made a deal with Virginia in return for helping us.”
“To do what?”
“Save Gloria if she needs saving.”
“Some promises are harder to keep than others.”
“This one may be impossible,” Blues said.
Chapter Forty
Alex Stone sat between Claire and Lou Mason, waiting for Judge West to enter the courtroom and gavel everyone to order, the sharp crack reminding her of a starter’s gun, signaling the beginning of a race between incompatible versions of the truth. She’d lost that race more often than she’d won, but that was the nature of her work. Most of her clients were guilty. That didn’t kill the thrill of the race for her, because charging uphill for a good cause against long odds had been a challenge she couldn’t resist.
As long as it wasn’t her turn in the dock, her fate being decided by twelve people who neither knew nor cared about her, their verdict as likely to be based on the evidence and the law as on hidden agendas and secret bias. There was no thrill in that, only soul-crushing fear. She was wearing her standard courtroom black suit with a white blouse, but she felt like she was naked in the middle of Main Street.
The worst part for Alex was how completely helpless she felt. Though she’d done as much as Claire and Lou would allow her to do to help prepare for trial, they made it clear that she lacked their objectivity, reminding her of how well her insistence on not disqualifying Judge West had worked out. From this moment until the jury returned their verdict, she would sit in her chair, mute, listening to witnesses testify against her, afraid that she would slowly suffocate, her throat already beginning to constrict.
Kate Scranton sat behind her, ready to slice and dice every juror’s twitch and every witness’s tic. She had explained to Alex the facial-action coding system and how involuntary facial expressions could separate fact from fiction and belief from disbelief. It was black art as far as Alex was concerned, though she found herself avoiding Kate’s studied gaze, worried about the verdict Kate might render about her.
