Dead Last

by James W. Hall

  “A lot of upstanding ladies fell for his act. But it was all a fraud. ’Cause inside that man, in his heart of hearts, he wasn’t looking for a woman to love and nurture, he was scouting the next calamity. Women thought he was courting them, but what he was really courting was disaster. Any of that sound familiar?”

  “I’m honored,” Thorn said. “You came all this way to deliver that rousing speech.”

  “No, sir. I came all this way because a woman got murdered. A good, honest woman who was more mother to me than my flesh-and-blood mom. She happened to be Rusty’s aunt. She and Rusty exchanged e-mail, lots of messages back and forth over the years. Rusty described her life with you, what was going on in her heart. And Michaela Stabler shared some of that with me. So that’s why I’m here. A woman was cruelly murdered in my peaceful, law-abiding town. And you, Mr. Thorn, are smack in the middle of it.”

  Thorn held her eye for several moments, then broke away from her biting gaze and padded into the living room. Only two couches were left. All the small stuff, the chairs, end tables, and bookshelves he’d tossed into the fire. The room seemed bigger, cold and strange.

  He sat on the long white couch, tucked the towel close between his legs.

  “Don’t worry about flashing me,” Buddha said. “I already had a good look at that ding-dong. It’s nothing special.”

  Thorn glanced out the French doors into the side yard where the fire was burning low. Dawn coming. A pale russet glow out on the water.

  “Rusty had an aunt?”

  “Michaela Stabler. She was murdered last Saturday night, July twenty-fourth.”

  “And you think I had something to do with it.”

  “I don’t think it, I know it to be true.”

  “Because of my blemished past.”

  “That’s one thing. But by itself that wouldn’t bring me this far.”

  “Why did you do that to your face? All those marks.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “What do you say we keep this moving in the right direction?”

  Thorn’s eyelids were heavy, weariness overtaking him. The all-night purge, the frantic cleansing, the roar in his blood had left him empty. The last fumes of his destructive outburst had burned off. He felt as if he might be slipping into a trance. A long, dreamless vacation from earthly cycles.

  Maybe if he chose not to fight it, didn’t pinch himself, just drifted off into the beckoning shadows, everything would be over. Everything would go away and he could rest for a month. That’s how it felt. Drift away and be done. When he woke and returned to his body and his house, it would all be simple again. As easy as letting his head rest against the soft cushion of the couch. Leave this woman, this room, this new crisis, just drop away and go.

  “What do you know about Zentai?”

  Thorn straightened, cleared his eyes, looked at this small strange woman.

  “Never heard of it.”

  “How about Iklwa? Ever come across that word? Know what it is?”

  She was studying his reaction with distrusting eyes.

  “Sorry to disappoint you.”

  “Iklwa,” she said. “It happens to be an onomatopoeia. Know that?”

  “A word that sounds like what it is.”

  “Good. You’re one for three.”

  “And you’re way past pissing me off.”

  Thorn watched while Buddha craned her head left and right, stretching the tightness from her neck.

  “Shaka Zulu. Ever come across that name?”

  “African warrior,” he said.

  “Good, good. Early 1800s, Shaka Zulu invented the Iklwa. A thrusting spear. Short, good for working in close. In battle, after Shaka’s enemies threw their long spears, his soldiers charged and used their Iklwas for close-in killing.”

  “I have a scholar in my house.”

  “Not really. All that is, it’s about ten minutes of Web surfing.”

  “Where’s your onomatopoeia?”

  “Iklwa. The slicing sound the spear makes entering the enemy’s flesh and the sucking sound when it’s pulled out.”

  “Cheery.”

  Thorn used his good hand to rub the exhaustion from his face.

  “Michaela Stabler was stabbed three times in the belly with a replica of an Iklwa. High carbon tempered steel with a brass wire reinforced socket and wood shaft. About four feet long. This particular spear was manufactured in Plainfield, Indiana. And it was purchased in Miami.”

  “It’s always Miami.”

  “The killer did a half-assed job covering his tracks. The torn-up pieces of the sales receipt for the spear were in a Dumpster outside a local bar. That spear was bought with cash in a Miami sporting goods store two days before Michaela Stabler was stabbed to death.”

  Thorn was quiet, waiting for the punch line.

  “Zentai is a head-to-toe bodysuit usually made out of stretchy material. Sometimes they have zippers that join the head to the body. On the tips of the zipper pulls are eyelets where small steel locks secure one zippered section to another. When the locks are on, the wearer can’t escape. Those are the ones sex fetishists wear. S and M. It gets them off, I understand. Covers the whole body, eyes, mouth, everything. They have orgies, like a bunch of mummies rubbing against each other.”

  “What fun.”

  “On the night Michaela was murdered, a local woman in Starkville, Susan Hooks, had been drinking in the Blue Heaven, our local tavern. When she exited the bar with a gentleman friend, she observed a person sitting in a vehicle in the parking lot. This person was wearing a body suit, black in color. Ms. Hooks was inebriated, but she was dead certain of what she saw, and she came to the station the next day and told me all about it, thinking it might have something to do with Michaela’s murder, which by then was all over town. So I went to the parking lot, performed a search, and found the sales receipt for the spear torn up in little pieces inside the bar’s Dumpster.”

  “And somehow this implicates me?”

  “I’m getting to that,” she said. “First, there’s all the overlapping connections. The spear coming from South Florida, and Rusty’s death directly linked to Michaela’s.”

  “Directly?”

  With her lips clamped tight, she looked up at the ceiling.

  Thorn asked her what the problem was. She looked at him and heaved out an aggravated sigh.

  “This is unprofessional, sharing the details of a police matter, but I don’t see any way around it.”

  “I wouldn’t want you to be unprofessional. Stop right where you are, get up, march back to your car, and fly away home to lovely Starkville. We’ll forget any of this happened.”

  Buddha rose and began to walk the room. She circled it twice, then started to pace behind the couch. She’d tucked the revolver back into the holster under the tail of her bulky white shirt. Like her gray, baggy trousers, her shirt was a size too large, as if she meant to conceal the shape of her body.

  She halted directly in front of him, standing in the darkened rectangle on the ancient blue rug where for decades the coffee table had blocked sunlight from a nearby window. That cherry table had been holding that same position until about an hour ago. Now it was smoke riding out to sea.

  Buddha rubbed a fingertip along one of the lines of tiny black characters that marked her forehead. In the brighter light of the living room Thorn decided the tattoos resembled letters, some language he didn’t recognize, Sanskrit or Icelandic.

  “It’s nuts, confiding in you,” she said. “You with your fucked-up history. One disaster after another all your adult life.”

  “You being the latest.”

  A hint of a smile came to her lips but faded quickly.

  “All right, go on. Make your pitch. You’re going to anyway.”

  She muttered to herself, some pet curse, then gave him a quick probing look as if taking one last assessment of Thorn’s character before she dove in.

  Her eyes toured his face. There was
worry in them, worry and an ancient hurt, but he also saw the bright flicker of intelligence, the kind that was neither crafty nor clever, but was more sturdy and solidly rooted. For all her strangeness and backwoods demeanor, this was a very smart lady.

  She looked down at the floor between them and sighed, deeply dismayed she had to rely on the likes of Thorn.

  “Okay, it’s like this,” she said. “The morning after Michaela’s murder, the FBI sent a forensics team from Dallas, and they spent the day at her house doing their usual thing. Examined the scene, dusted for prints, took DNA samples, bagged a piece of physical evidence the killer left behind. They removed the Iklwa spear and sent it for tests. They appeared to be acting professionally, in good faith.”

  Thorn stayed quiet.

  “But I’m not buying their act.”

  “You don’t trust the FBI?”

  “Not on this one. Not even a little bit.”

  Buddha came over, settled on the couch beside him. Her scent was flowery with a smoky edge, as though she’d been burning sticks of patchouli incense in her car. While Thorn massaged his aching hand, she drew a piece of paper from her hip pocket and unfolded it, pressing out the creases against her thigh.

  She lay the newsprint on the table before him.

  “If you don’t mind, I’d like to use your facilities. Freshen up a little. I thought Julys were hot in Starkville, but you folks got yourselves some prizewinning humidity down here.”

  “Down the hall on the left.”

  Thorn sat for several moments looking at the news clipping. He could see from the headline that it was an obituary for Rusty’s aunt.

  He understood full well that once he picked it up and read the story, he was a goner. That’s why she’d left it. A temptation she must have known he would be unable to resist.

  THE OKLAHOMAN

  Tuesday, July 27

  Michaela Miranda Stabler, Notorious Defense Attorney

  By Randolph Whitlock

  Michaela Miranda Stabler, who spent over thirty years vigorously defending some of the most infamous scoundrels, rapists and killers in Oklahoma, Texas and Arkansas, died last week of wounds suffered in a violent attack that took place in her own home.

  Sheriff B. Hilton of Starkville reported that Michaela (known as Mickey to her friends) had never been concerned about her own security. “Even though she’d gotten death threats for years, like everybody in Starkville, she kept her doors unlocked and was welcoming to friend or foe alike.”

  Because of her extraordinary record in successfully defending high-profile clients, she’d made a great many enemies, although there were those, like Circuit Court Judge Edwin J. White, who had great respect for her legal talent. “Lots of people despised Mickey because she was so damn good at her job, which was finding the weak points in prosecution cases. She had a way with juries too. Down-home delivery, very wry lady, look you in the eye, speak intelligently. She never talked down to jurors, didn’t fake anything. And the woman was brave. She didn’t shy away from taking on the most disagreeable cases. She liked to say she wasn’t trying to get elected to office, so she could damn well be as unpopular as she wanted. I’ve seen a lot of lawyers in my time, but Michaela’s A-game was as good as the best I ever witnessed.”

  Michaela Stabler was educated at the University of Oklahoma and completed her law degree at UCLA in 1971. As a young attorney, she worked for a while in the public defender’s office in Oklahoma City, then moved back home to Starkville and opened her own practice.

  “She was idealistic and positive,” Sheriff Hilton said. “But she was a realist too. She knew all about evil and depravity, but she believed great defense lawyers made America stronger. That’s what she wanted, to set a high standard and do her part to improve the entire justice system.”

  It wasn’t long after she opened her own practice that she started winning cases. She defended abortion doctors and drunk drivers and alleged child abusers and bank robbers, all with equal dedication. Before long criminal defendants were coming from all over the tri-state area to enlist Michaela’s help.

  Bobby Boggs was one of those. In 1988 Boggs, 66, was arrested by the FBI in Dallas and charged in the rape and murder of nine high school girls ranging in age from 13 to 18. He was reviled in the press, tried, convicted and hung out to dry in editorials all around the state. The government’s case included DNA evidence, eyewitness testimony and a signed confession by Bobby Boggs as well as a video surveillance tape of what appeared to be an abduction of Cindy Mellon, one of the nine girls whose body was found buried in a field close to Boggs’ home. It seemed that the state attorney had an overwhelming case against Bobby Boggs.

  But Boggs’ trial, which lasted six months, ended in a hung jury. The retrial was also unsuccessful. “Mickey picked apart the FBI’s case, nit by nit,” said Judge White. “The video was murky. It might’ve been Boggs or it might’ve been a hundred other men. There were serious problems in the FBI’s lab where the DNA was evaluated. Samples contaminated, bad labeling practices. Not just technicalities but full-scale incompetence. And the two eyewitnesses turned out to be about as reliable as drunks on a monthlong bender. Bobby walked. And Mickey had some choice words for the nincompoop prosecutors. Didn’t make a lot of friends on that one.”

  In recent years, Michaela Stabler earned great enmity from law enforcement personnel throughout the region when she successfully defended a series of “cop killers.” Police unions and federal prosecutors were uniformly outraged at Ms. Stabler’s aggressive defense of several defendants charged with violent crimes, including premeditated murder and rape against officers of the law. “She specialized in scum,” said Jerry Jeff Peters, special agent in charge of the Dallas field office. “Now she’s got to face her Lord and Maker, and I think she’s going to have a hard time talking her way out of that one.”

  But there was another side to Michaela Stabler that few ever saw.

  “Mickey had an enormous heart,” Sheriff Hilton said. “She took care of people, the elderly, the sick and the helpless. She donated most of her weekends to hospice work for people around southeastern Oklahoma. She never made a big deal out of it, but in her private time, she was a generous, loving lady. Sitting by sickbeds, running errands for the families of sick folks and drawing up wills pro bono for the dying. Mickey gave great consolation to the people of the Starkville area.”

  Sheriff Hilton had firsthand experience of Mickey’s altruism. A dozen years ago Michaela Miranda Stabler took 7-year-old Buddha Hilton into her home and became her legal guardian after Hilton’s own father was jailed for vicious acts of child abuse. She defended the abuser, then adopted the abused. “Mickey lost that case,” White stated, “but in the end she won a beautiful girl child.”

  Friends gathered in Stabler’s home for a farewell party last Thursday. “A couple of hundred people showed up, including about fifty protestors,” said Judge Edwin White. “But even with all those ugly signs marching on the sidewalk outside, the ceremony that went on within those walls was beautiful. I wish all those folks who so despised Mickey could have heard the testimony about her good works, and seen her home overflowing with love.”

  SEVEN

  THE DOOR WAS OPEN TO the guest bathroom, and Buddha Hilton was standing at the sink staring at her reflection. Her eyes were muddy and there was a faint shiver in her chin. Thorn stayed in the doorway.

  “You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Fine and dandy.”

  “You don’t look so dandy.”

  She nodded at her reflection.

  “Talk to me, Buddha. Go ahead.”

  “It just this minute hit me. I’ve never been this distance from home. Never had occasion to. Never flew on a jet plane, never rented a car, never did much of anything people my age do. And this damn face. Back home people don’t give a second glance, so I kind of stop thinking about it, how messed up it is. But today folks were sneaking looks. Some outright gawkers too; a couple followed me down the conc
ourse, taking pictures with their phones. I kept my head down, kept moving. But just now, when I walked in here, turned on the light, it busted me in the gut. How damn strange it all is.”

  “Your father did that to your face?”

  Staring at her image, it took a moment for her to muster the words.

  “From the age of three till I was six. He put it on little by little. All I remember is wailing, looking up at his face and wailing. Not much else.”

  “Where was your mother when this was happening?”

  “Ran off with some crackhead even crazier than my old man.”

  “Then someone discovered what he was doing and he was arrested.”

  “Social worker saw me playing out in the front yard one afternoon.”

  “Rusty’s aunt defended him.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why?”

  “That was Mickey. That’s what she did, took on the cases no one else wanted. From what I heard Mickey did a damn fine job. But the jury wasn’t buying it.”

  “Guy still in jail?”

  “Paroled, living in California last I knew. I haven’t wasted my time tracking the sad old man.”

  She ran a finger across a red line that had been hidden by her bangs. The skin was puckered and inflamed like a bad rash.

  “Had some of it lasered off last month,” she said. “All I could afford. It costs a hell of a lot more to get rid of the shit than it cost to put it there.”

  “Seems to work that way with a lot of things.”

  On the morning Thorn and Rusty headed out for their last fishing trip, she’d stood before that same mirror and had taken a long look at her shrunken face and groaned at the image. Thorn had tried to reassure Rusty that she was still a beautiful woman. A very beautiful woman. It was true, but his saying it gave her no consolation.

  Since she’d died, Thorn had been avoiding that guest bathroom. But no matter how hard he tried, he kept butting into fresh memories of her tucked in every corner of the house. Echoes of her voice, wisps of her scent.