“I don’t know. But the government’s making a good case that Corey Lyle’s a monster. And if we don’t find Toby, I’m going to have to argue for Lyle’s release.”
“We’re going to find Toby. So stop worrying.”
The cellular phone, balanced on the edge of the sink, gave a soft ring. Catch Talbot climbed out of the tub, wrapped himself in a towel, and lifted the receiver. “Hello?”
“Catch?” He recognized the voice of Peggy Cedilla, his secretary at Gurney and Gurney in Seattle. She still had that head cold and she sounded agitated.
“Peggy—what’s the matter?”
“You had a call from your broker. The Canadian mine shares you bought on margin—they’re still going down. He had to sell.”
Catch had a sense that just when the bottom of his life had dropped out, just when he’d hit rock bottom, rock bottom was dropping out too. “So much for hot insider tips on gold stocks. Where does that leave me?”
“A quarter million in the hole. Or a half, if you count Jake de Clairville. He’s been phoning. He says he never authorized you to put any part of the estate into mine shares.”
“Never authorized? That’s nuts. Only five weeks ago we had a long phone talk about it. He was crazy about the idea.”
“I can’t find any paper on it. Jake wants you to make good the loss. Or he’s going to sue.”
A kind of slow astonishment pulled at Catch. Pacing with the phone from strange bathroom to strange bedroom, still drowsy from his half-hour soak, he felt he’d floated into a nightmare. “If I had any sense, I’d probably put a bullet through my brain.”
“You’re not serious.”
“No. I don’t have a gun.” He sat on the edge of the strange bed. Beyond gray-curtained windows, skyscrapers glowed against the night. “Did I remember to stop my MasterCard?”
“I stopped it Monday, remember?”
“I’m losing my short-term memory.”
“You’re under a lot of stress.”
“I wonder if I’m going crazy.”
“You’re the sanest man I know. Tell me what’s happening in New York.”
“The police suggested I check hospitals to see if Toby turned up. So I’ve been checking.”
“And?”
“I think the police followed me.”
“What makes you think that?”
“I kept seeing the same man. I think he was in the precinct.”
“You could be imagining. You’re under a lot of stress.”
“Possibly.” He always said possibly when he didn’t feel up to a discussion with Peggy.
“What did you find in the hospitals?”
“Nothing.”
“Catch, far be it from me to speak out of turn, but …”
“But what?”
“Maybe I shouldn’t say this.”
“Say it.”
“Have you considered the possibility that maybe your ex is behind this?”
“Kyra’s been on a sequestered jury since last Wednesday. Toby vanished Saturday. And it was a man who picked him up.”
“Then she’s got a male accomplice. I don’t trust that woman. Just speaking to her on the phone, she’s devious.”
“I don’t know,” Catch sighed. “I’ll give it some thought.”
“I wish I were there right now to rub your back.”
“Mmm. Me too.”
“Get some sleep. Things will look better tomorrow. I love you.”
“Me too. G’night.”
Cardozo set his coffee down on the desk and tapped Tess diAngeli’s number into the phone.
“DiAngeli.” She sounded rushed and irritable.
“Tess—Vince. I stopped by Mickey’s apartment on West Twelfth. Thought you’d be interested—he hasn’t lived there for over a month. He’s rigged up an answering machine that forwards his calls somewhere else.”
He could hear shock in her silence.
And then, in her most unflappable courtroom voice, “Dumb of him to play games with the feds. But I can’t think of any New York law he’d be breaking.”
“I can think of a few possibilities. Like kidnapping and murder. By the way, when does he testify?”
There was an instant’s hesitation. “What are you planning to do?”
“Relax. I just want to catch his act.”
“He testifies tomorrow morning. But, Vince—don’t try anything tricky.”
“Tricky?”
“Like arresting him. Because you’ll be going up against the federal government. You’ll lose your job, your pension, and maybe a few other things too.”
Today Mickey’s guard answered. “Security.”
“Rick? It’s Tess. You were out of the mobile-phone service area yesterday.”
“Mickey went to Jersey. Withersoever Mickey goeth—”
“I want to see the surveillance log.”
“Sorry.”
“What do you mean, ‘sorry’?”
“The contents are federal property. The feds say I can’t even discuss them with you.”
“For God’s sake.” She broke the connection and tapped in another number. “Foster—it’s Tess.”
“Yes, my dear?”
“Since when am I not allowed to see the surveillance log on my own witness?”
“It’s inconvenient, I know, but that’s the way we do things at Justice. Stop worrying. I gave you my word of honor.”
She sensed something badly askew. “Words of honor are no use to me. Not even yours. Unless you’re willing to take the stand.”
His voice was suddenly as flat as a knife blade. “What do you need?”
“I need to know what’s in that log.”
“You’ll have it tomorrow.”
THIRTY-SIX
Thursday, September 26
Eighth day of trial
First day of deliberation
9:35 A.M.
CARDOZO FLASHED HIS SHIELD and the armed guard waved him through the metal detector into the courtroom. Most of the benches were already crammed with chattering spectators. He saw an empty place and made a beeline to grab it.
Just as he sat, there was a flurry of movement at the front of the court. The jury filed into the jury box.
Cardozo knew Kyra Talbot was number 10 and he knew number 10 would be sitting in the second row toward the right. Still, when his eye found her, he felt a jolt.
I know her.
He remembered a conversation in the elevator and a woman who had been friendly and funny and a little bit crazy. And who got attacked by a Coreyite picketer the next day. And who didn’t remember him when he came to her aid.
Today, with her eyes cast downward, there was nothing friendly or funny about her. Fidgeting and biting her lips, she seemed antsy and preoccupied.
The bailiff strode forward. “All rise. The Supreme Court of the Southern District of New York, Judge Gina Bernheim presiding, is in session.”
“I’ve completed my review of Yolanda Lopez’s interviews by the police and by the assistant district attorney.” Judge Bernheim’s granite-solemn gaze swept the courtroom. “I’ve also reviewed Ms. diAngeli’s notes and audiotapes. I find no mention in any of that material that a man identifying himself as John Briar answered the phone when Sergeant Bailey called the apartment.”
At the defense table, Dotson Elihu seized a pen and made a stabbing notation on a legal pad.
“I’m satisfied that the first time Ms. Lopez communicated this information to the prosecution was last Tuesday, in this court. I’m therefore ruling that the prosecutor complied fully with the law. The People may call their next witness.”
“The People,” Tess diAngeli said, “call Mickey Williams.”
Dotson Elihu shot to his feet. “Your Honor, we notified the People of our intention to call this witness. But Mickey Williams is in the federal witness relocation program, and he has been unavailable to us.”
Judge Bernheim’s eyes flicked to Tess diAngeli.
“Your Honor,
that’s false. We offered to let Mr. Elihu deal with Mickey Williams on exactly the same basis as the People dealt with him—by secure fax forwarding through an automatic shunt.”
“Your Honor,” Elihu protested, “we attempted to do just that, and all we could get was an officious bureaucrat who claimed Mr. Williams is residing in some kind of nerve clinic and is in much too precarious a condition to be disturbed.”
“Objection to the prejudicial nature of that remark!” DiAngeli shouted.
“At no time,” Elihu shouted, “did the People indicate their intention of preemptively calling this witness. If Mickey Williams is allowed to take the stand this morning, I will move that Your Honor declare an immediate mistrial!”
“And your motion will be denied. The People are entitled to present their case. People’s witness may testify.”
The door flew open. Something large and male stood there in shadow. A heavyset man came hesitantly into the courtroom. With his hair shaved to the scalp, his loose seersucker trousers and rumpled black jacket, he bore little resemblance to the gridiron star that Cardozo remembered. The Mickey Williams of the all-American and Pro Bowl days had been honed and lithe, every ounce of him geared to speed. This man looked as though he exercised by opening beer cans.
A wave of murmuring shock washed through the courtroom. The man next to Cardozo whispered, “What happened?” and Cardozo whispered, “Hot fudge sundaes and booze.”
The painful thing was, Mickey seemed to know he was an object of shock: Cardozo could see it in his blinking brown eyes.
Mickey took the oath and sat in the witness chair. Tess diAngeli led him gently through the preliminary questions. She had the manner of a deeply concerned social worker guiding a frightened child. “Have you ever been convicted of or charged with a felony?”
“Lord, what felony haven’t I been convicted of! Well, the very first one was assault with a deadly weapon. Bread knife.”
DiAngeli’s lips thinned. Cardozo could see that something about the witness’s answer bothered her. “Who did you assault?”
“My father.” Mickey’s voice broke like a teenager’s. Embarrassment pulsed red in his face.
“Would you tell the ladies and gentlemen of the jury why you assaulted your father?”
“He shot my mother pretty bad, and he was about to do the same for me and Rilda-Mae—my little sister.”
As Mickey sat back and turned his head, something glistened in his left ear. Cardozo leaned forward in his seat and squinted. Mickey was wearing a small gold earring.
“How old were you at the time?”
“Ten.”
A clammy certainty slithered through Cardozo’s mind. It’s him.
“Were you sentenced to serve time?”
“They put me in a trade school in Texarkana. It was really a kind of reformatory. I learned welding.”
The hair, the eyes, the earring. They fit Mademoiselle’s description of the man who took Toby.
“How long were you in this institution?”
“Three years—till a minister and his wife adopted me. They were Pentacostalists. We didn’t see eye-to-eye. I ran away—joined a rodeo. I was always big for my age.”
Cardozo’s eye went to the jury box. Kyra Talbot was staring at the witness with an expression of shock.
Does she know him? he wondered. Why’s she looking at him like that?
“And did your troubles with the law continue?”
Mickey grinned uneasily. “Regular as clockwork. I was drunk from the time I turned thirteen till I was fifteen. Sobered up in prison. Got released. Stayed drunk till I was seventeen. Sobered up in prison again.”
Dotson Elihu rose from the defense table. “Your Honor, I object to the presence of Ms. Lisa Lopez in this room.” He nodded toward the third row in the spectator section, where the little Hispanic girl, starched and immaculate in a fresh white dress, sat in the aisle seat beside her mother.
“Do you intend to call Lisa Lopez as a witness?” the judge asked.
“I do not, Your Honor. But her presence is clearly part of an orchestrated attempt by the People to—”
“Overruled.”
Tess diAngeli gazed at her witness for a long, evaluating moment. “And after your second stay in state prison?”
Mickey pulled at his earring. “I got out and assaulted a security guard at a Wendy’s restaurant. They caught that one on the security video; it made national TV.”
DiAngeli stood with her arms folded. Annoyance flicked across her face. She hammered the witness with a tight-jawed stare. As if she were trying to signal him.
“A recruiter for Texas A and M saw me and paid my bail, got me off, offered me a football scholarship. Should have been the happy ending, but I was too deep into drinking and drugging and self-will run riot.”
Cardozo flashed what the trouble was: the testimony was not following diAngeli’s script. She had lost control of her witness. Stage fright had got him, and he was babbling.
“After I graduated, I married a lovely young woman. Hope to hell we won’t have to drag her into any of this. Screwed up my marriage.”
“He married that movie actress,” the man next to Cardozo whispered. “She ditched him.”
DiAngeli uncrossed her arms. “How did you happen to meet Corey Lyle?”
“That’s quite a story.” Mickey gazed at the defendant with eyes that seemed to say, My whole life I dreamed of loving someone and then of all people on God’s earth I picked you. “I was up for the third time on a charge of exposing myself at a playground. It could have meant prison. But the judge offered me a deal: prison or join the Corey Lyle cult. I didn’t want to do hard time, so Corey seemed the way to go.”
“And how did you and Corey Lyle get along?”
“Corey treated me like no one else ever had in my life. He was gentle with me. He was wonderful with me.” Mickey smiled a smile of uncomplicated love, like a child’s. “He lifted my headaches. He lifted my sleeping trouble. He lifted my compulsion to drink. He lifted my compulsion to exhibit myself.”
“How did he do all this?”
“Just sitting with me—talking.”
“Do you recall anything specific Corey Lyle said in these talks that helped you?”
Mickey stared at the defendant. “He told me to relax. Sometimes he lit a candle and told me to look at the flame. He told me when he touched my arm it would rise. And he’d touch my arm and it would rise.” Mickey’s beefy arm floated up from the rail of the witness box, demonstrating. “He’d tell me to close my eyes—and after that it’s kind of blurry.”
“Would you say Corey Lyle hypnotized you?”
“Objection.”
“Sustained.”
DiAngeli walked back to her table and consulted a piece of paper. “Mr. Williams, did you ever hear Corey Lyle use the phrase ‘share the miracle’?”
“All the time.”
“Would you explain what you understood Corey Lyle to mean?”
“Part of the Fellowship tradition was prayer shares. Members were paired off so they could help one another with prayer and meditation.”
“Who were you paired off with?”
“I was paired off with Johnny Briar.”
“Would you describe your impressions of John Briar?”
“Johnny went to extremes. I’d see him fast, then I’d see him binge on desserts. I’d see him go celibate for months. His wife was celibate and he thought he ought to try. But then he’d fall off the wagon and we’d go whoring together.”
“Whoring? But wasn’t this against cult regulations?”
“There weren’t regulations—there were guidelines. And Corey was pretty gentle about enforcing them.”
“Do you mean Corey Lyle was lax on sin?”
“Lax? He was gentle, not lax. But he said sins had to be atoned for. There was no getting around God’s law.”
“Did you and Corey Lyle ever discuss how you might atone for your sins?”
“He said i
f I performed an act of purification, my offenses against young girls would be forgiven and I could cut down my time in purgatory.”
“Did he suggest any particular act of purification?”
“Yes, he did. He told me to go to the Briars’ apartment Friday evening, Labor Day weekend—and kill them.”
“And did you?”
Mickey’s eyes dropped. At that instant he projected frailty, vulnerability—and fear. “I always did what Corey said.”
“Who let you into the apartment?”
“Corey let me in.”
“Did you and Corey Lyle have a conversation at that time?”
“Yes. He took me into Johnny’s room and lit a candle and told me to look at the flame. I don’t remember our whole talk, but he told me that at one A.M. I had to suffocate Johnny with a pillow.”
Cardozo glanced at Corey Lyle, sitting relaxed and serious, but not at all solemn or worried, at his lawyer’s side.
“Did Corey Lyle give you any further instructions?”
“He said to make sure Amalia stayed alive till six A.M. Monday.”
“And what was to happen at six A.M. Monday?”
“He wanted me to suffocate her too.”
DiAngeli allowed the words a moment to echo and die. “Can you recall killing John and Amalia Briar?”
“Yes, I recall doing it—but it was like I was watching someone else. I knew I was doing it but it didn’t seem real. I didn’t understand—Why am I doing this? Why can’t I make myself stop? Johnny was somebody that I loved—and I wouldn’t have hurt a little old lady like Amalia for all the world—and yet I had no choice except to do what I did. It was like …” Mickey put both hands over his face. “It was like Corey was inside me, making me kill.”
There was a knock and a rattle of keys. The steel door swung open and Dotson Elihu stood stoop-shouldered in the doorway, clutching to his gut a tattered, overstuffed briefcase.
Corey Lyle looked up. He laid down his plastic fork and wiped tuna salad from his mouth. “Hi there, Dot. How are we doing?”
Elihu waited till the door clicked shut behind him. “Not so good.” He pulled Jack Briar’s police tape from his briefcase. “This videocassette is our last hope. This afternoon in cross, I want to destroy Mickey with it. I want to jump right in to his record of child molestation and Jack Briar’s statements to the police.”
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