He understood the tactic. McGuiness suspected he was trying to connect the dots with the murder cases and he also realized that Jamison needed to prove his client was guilty of the Garrett kidnap in order to prove that he used the same conduct to commit the murders. Get an acquittal on the Garrett case and he would drive a massive hole in the murder cases because he would realize if Jamison had the evidence to charge the murders he would have done it already. Both sides needed to win—Jamison to prove St. Claire was guilty of the murders and McGuiness to deprive the prosecution of the one thing they needed to prove St. Claire was guilty.
Jamison also knew that McGuiness had something damaging and the defense attorney didn’t want to give him time to discover what it was, but Jamison couldn’t say that. He had said he had a case and he had charged it. With more confidence than he actually felt, Jamison said, “Your Honor, the People are prepared to go forward tomorrow if that suits Mr. McGuiness.”
Sullivan pulled his lips into a deeper frown. “Fine, the case will be calendared for three weeks from today. I hope you gentlemen are ready and remember the adage to be careful what you ask for because you just got it.”
Whatever McGuiness had, he was saving it for the trial. This was going to be an ambush and Jamison knew it. The only question was whether he could anticipate when it would take place at the trial and what McGuiness would have as his weapons besides surprise.
PART TWO
Chapter 19
The trial was now a week away. As Alex St. Claire drove into the gravel driveway of the house in the foothills, he felt some of the strain of the past two weeks begin to drain away. This house had been his private refuge, the place that always restored him. When his parents died he had inherited it as part of the trust that allowed him to live as he wished. The bills, the taxes, everything was paid for by the trust. Unlike the farmhouse where he had gone with Elizabeth, there was no paper trail that would allow anyone to link him to this house or lead anyone to find this place. Nothing was in his name.
He closed the car door quietly even though there wasn’t anyone close enough to hear. St. Claire had a cultivated dignity that he wore at all times like a cloak. He stood in the quickening chill of evening, his car making the settling sounds of heat dissipating into the cold night air. The house always looked the same to him. The windows were shuttered and seldom opened to the daylight. It had been his grandparents’ vacation home, and he had left everything in place, just as they had left it.
These days he didn’t spend much time in the house itself and indeed right now what he wanted was to visit the barn, which held other objects that restored him—but in a different way. He thought perhaps later he would walk the dark rooms of the house.
Most of the last two weeks St. Claire had spent with his lawyer, going over details that seemed to absorb McGuiness but held only detached interest for him. He had driven here to be alone. He preferred the carapace of his own carefully created persona. Rarely did he allow others the compliment of emotional intimacy.
He knew the sideways looks of hospital staff and his physician colleagues’ awkward efforts to offer words of support barely concealed their doubt and suspicions. It wasn’t that he didn’t understand why they looked at him, it was because they didn’t understand. They would never understand him and that ground on him like a pharmacist’s pestle as he tolerated their clumsy solicitude.
He had to get away from them, from their averted eyes and whispering. They bored him, and whether he frightened them bored him as well. He had taken a leave from the hospital. Under the present circumstances he knew he made people uncomfortable and the time off hadn’t been difficult to obtain.
St. Claire really didn’t care what his lawyer thought either. He knew himself intimately, what stirred him, touched him, and made him feel alive—and different than other men. What he was he had long ago accepted. As for why, it didn’t matter to him. As a child, when he realized he was different he considered the difference a gift. He had no desire to be like those who moved through life reacting to it instead of, like him, creating the reaction.
It was what lay ahead that would make the difference, the trial and the slow dance with Elizabeth. It was still a game. His whole life had been a game played out against what always proved to be lesser men, always testing himself, only his intellect helping him keep his balance on the cutting edge of the blade upon which he walked.
That was the game. Walking the blade. That was where he felt alive. Without it the hours and days were simply hours and days. But Elizabeth, the thought of her had drawn him back—back to the cutting edge of the blade. And now with the trial ahead, a new game. All the pieces to be moved, every move anticipated like a chess match with the eye on the queen. The thought made him shudder slightly with anticipation.
His mind jumped back to that moment with Investigator O’Hara’s knee in his back. He hadn’t forgotten that, nor would he. He dismissed O’Hara. O’Hara was as refined as a battle-ax.
The prosecutor, however, was different in St. Claire’s mind. He did not have the street cunning of his investigator, but St. Claire could sense a relentless and dangerous mind when he saw it, not an insurmountable challenger, but a challenger nonetheless. He also saw the prosecutor’s weakness. As he watched Matthew Jamison in the courtroom, he could sense it. Elizabeth was the prosecutor’s weakness.
St. Claire had seen the way Jamison looked at Elizabeth, the way he moved around her, like a moth. But like a moth, St. Claire contemplated that Jamison had no idea that he was circling a flame.
He walked across the lawn toward the barn, the grass softly crunching under his feet as he broke the frost-stiffened blades with each step. Pulling the switch inside the door, the cold fluorescent light reflected off the stainless steel table in the room, his grandfather’s favorite place. As a child he had watched with fascination as his grandfather worked at that table, dissecting tissue pulled from glass jars. The time away from his own father, so distant and critical, was a welcome respite, and the hours spent with someone who really cared for him aroused a passion.
Unlike his father, his grandfather’s indulgence of his fascination with death and pain made him feel like his inquisitiveness about the morbid was natural. It was why he had become a physician—to learn the secrets that his pathologist grandfather discovered in bits of flesh and microscopic slides.
His father had been a surgeon who looked upon his only son as an obligation and his curiosity as a reflection of some flaw in the genetic inheritance. The realization of his father’s feelings—which St. Claire recognized from an early age—justified the satisfaction he took when his father’s life ended. As for his mother, she accepted him, and her death mustered a flicker of regret that he did not feel more at her passing.
He had not acquired a taste for the unrefined work dissecting a human body, but he had developed an appreciation for the body’s secrets and the power a physician held over a human being.
His breath hung in shapeless puffs; the room had long gone unheated. As he turned on the electric radiator, his eyes ran over shelves with rows of jars that still held lumps of tissue in varying shades of pink to gray. There was intellectual challenge in them, just as there was challenge for him as an anesthesiologist in submersing a human being into the depths of unconsciousness, holding them there at his will. Sinking them to near death levels and slowly retrieving them took him almost to the edge of where lesser men dared not go, an edge that constantly tempted him to cross.
He ran his hand along the side of the stainless steel table, feeling its ever-present chill, reminding him that now that table was where he worked. He took pleasure in the thought of the seamless transition of generations and of the work he now did at this steel platform.
But tonight there was no work to be done. He walked across to the wall of shelves and bent down to the lowest shelf, moving several specimen jars. The edge of the wooden wallboard was smooth from the countless times in his life that he had pulled it open, revealing t
he space in the wall. As a child it was where he had kept his secret things, mementoes of his small triumphs over the living: a cat’s collar, a twisted bird’s wing, the remnants of his furtive childhood experiments with pain and consciousness. As a man it still held his secrets. He pulled out a small box and stood up. The gleam of a computer thumb drive caught his eye. He pulled out the compact digital memory stick and walked over to a laptop computer, inserting it. He carefully typed in a password to open the encrypted memory on the stick. As the digitally concealed photographs on the thumb drive revealed themselves on the computer, the collage of images spoke to him, as they always did.
St. Claire relished the moment as he revisited each photograph, each memory, the anticipation building until he came to the photographs of Elizabeth. He traced his finger along the curve of her face and her body, held still in the digital image. His mind transported to his fingertips the memory of the warmth of her breasts, her torso, if only imagined, the photograph portraying the essence of the queen of this game.
Chapter 20
Jamison pored over the reports in the file for the St. Claire case. Their contents were now memorized through the repetition of reading and rereading the same pages. The trial was less than a week away. He had a case that looked like it should be open and shut—victim disappears and is later found tied to a bed. Yet he was troubled by his nagging, vague concerns that the case still held secrets that only heightened his anxiety. What had he missed? What didn’t he know?
With his investigators he spent hours questioning Beth Garrett, but only a few new details emerged. Jamison listened to her and tried to take a detached view, but it didn’t come as easily as it had in other cases. He had a growing unease arising from his gut intuition that she was holding something back, something that was going to come straight at him at trial like an oncoming truck. And he was also very certain that McGuiness knew precisely what Beth was holding back and was keenly aware that he didn’t.
He dropped the file and looked up at the sound of the door creaking open; O’Hara never knocked. He came into Jamison’s office, sat down, and put his feet up on Jamison’s desk. He knew how much Jamison disliked anyone doing that, so Jamison knew O’Hara was obviously trying to irritate him.
“Boss, I’ve been on the phone with T. J.”
“So? Did he call to ask me again when I was going to get my head out of my ass and file murder charges or just to wish me good luck on the trial?”
O’Hara grinned. “He called to tell me that St. Claire made a mistake.”
“What mistake?” Jamison sat up in his chair.
“They got a lab report back on some evidence. I don’t have all the details yet. After I talked to T. J., I spoke to Washington. They got some physical evidence out of St. Claire’s car and Washington says that it’s enough to put the needle into St. Claire’s arm.”
“What physical evidence? The forensic boys went through his Lexus and didn’t turn up a damned thing other than a strand of Garrett’s hair.”
Signaling Jamison to be patient, O’Hara said, “Apparently T. J. went back to the car because he couldn’t believe there was nothing. Washington was with him and so was one of our forensic people.”
“So? Come on, Bill.”
“Near the passenger side, under a floor mat, they found a few strands of fiber that didn’t match the carpet in the car. I don’t know how our guys missed it, but Washington said that T. J. found it. The fiber is identical with individual carpet fibers from the carpet in Johnson’s house and individual carpet fibers from the carpet in Symes’s apartment.”
Inhaling deeply, O’Hara paused before saying anything more, and the slow smile appearing on his face told Jamison that there was more. O’Hara was seldom subtle. “And they found another strand of hair. It’s identical to Ventana’s hair in color and texture, although the hair doesn’t have a root ball on it so there’s no way to test for blood. But we got enough off of the hair that we can say it’s definitely hers.”
He removed his feet from Jamison’s desk and leaned forward. “Two separate carpet fibers that are identical to the carpet fiber in different places that belonged to two of the victims and a strand of hair that is identical to the hair of the first victim. McGuiness can argue all he wants, but you know and I know that can’t just be a coincidence. You wanted a connection between St. Claire and all three victims. There it is.”
Feeling a spurt of euphoria, Jamison stood up, pacing in the area between his desk and the window. Each piece of evidence by itself wasn’t enough to convict St. Claire but together it couldn’t be explained away. Those women had all been in St. Claire’s car or in some way somebody who had been in St. Claire’s car had been in the residences of those women. With the hair from Garrett that was in his car and the circumstances of her abduction they finally had something that would place the murder victims with St. Claire.
With a wolfish smile, O’Hara asked, “So do I get the pleasure of snapping the cuffs on Dr. St. Claire one more time when we arrest him for murder?”
For weeks, all Jamison had been able to think about was what he would do once he had more evidence, and now he had it.
He reached for the phone, turning to O’Hara as he started to punch in numbers. “Tell T. J. and Washington to keep their mouths shut about this. At least for now nobody talks. You get to the forensic people to make sure there are no leaks. The only warning Alex St. Claire and Tom McGuiness get will be when you make the arrest.” O’Hara’s grin disappeared as soon as Jamison finished his thoughts. “But no arrest just yet.”
A dark cloud suddenly over his face, O’Hara leaned forward. Jamison held up his hand before the torrent spilled out of his investigator. “We still haven’t found the link between St. Claire and those three other women. Why did he pick them? There has to be something. Get their personal medical records from their doctors. There has to be some way that St. Claire picked them and I’m guessing it has to do with medical records. We know these weren’t random. This guy watched these women. He knew how to find them and he had a reason for picking them.”
The conversation wasn’t going to end with that. Jamison could tell. “You have something you want to say, Bill? So get it out.”
“Yeah, I do. What the hell? We have the evidence T. J. found. You already said as much that we got enough to make an arrest, so why not do it? And another thing, there hasn’t been another murder since we arrested St. Claire, has there?” O’Hara lowered his voice as he stared at the younger man. “Matt, this isn’t going to go down well with Mover and the rest of the boys. You have to know that.”
“I know that, but everything turns on the Garrett case. Win that and we have St. Claire. Lose that and if all we have is those bits of fiber and hair, then we got shit. I need more. You have to get it and those cops need to keep their mouths shut until we’re ready. That’s your job. Now find me the link.”
He walked around his desk and put his hand on O’Hara’s shoulder. Jamison had never done that before any more than he would put his hand on a pit bull. Still, he let his hand rest there for a moment. “Bill, I’ve thought about this. You and Ernie keep working on the murder cases and as soon as we have a case we can try, that’s when we make an arrest. Okay?”
Still glowering, O’Hara’s face softened a bit. “Just tell me what you’re thinking.”
“Okay, what I’m thinking is that I can’t question St. Claire at all about the murders because he’s lawyered up and there is no way McGuiness is going to let him talk to us. I do know that McGuiness has to put St. Claire on the stand in order to defend him in the Garrett case. He has no choice.
“I’m going to wait, and during the Garrett trial when St. Claire is on the stand I’m going to figure out a way to ask him questions that will help me prove the three murders. I’m not sure what they are yet, but we’re going to go after St. Claire during the Garrett trial.”
“And if the judge won’t allow you to do that?”
“That’s my job, to figure o
ut how to ask questions that give us bits and pieces without McGuiness being able to stop me. You use a hammer. I use a scalpel. Okay?”
“Yeah, okay, but you want me to take the heat from T. J. and the rest without explaining any of this? That’s not going to be easy.”
Jamison didn’t respond. He was thinking about the evidence the two detectives had found. It was perfect. He couldn’t help thinking to himself, Maybe too perfect.
O’Hara spent the rest of the day visiting the family physicians of two of the murdered women and the gynecologist of the third. He avoided any indication that the information might be related to St. Claire. The doctors were cooperative, although O’Hara had to listen to several comments about what his office was doing to poor Dr. St. Claire.
Apart from the doctors’ sensitivity about one of their own being caught in the vise of police and prosecutors, not a single doctor would turn over the medical records of the women who had been murdered without a court order for fear of violating some legal privilege. They could use a search warrant but that would require probable cause, and in the face of such a request any judge would say they were just fishing. And O’Hara knew that was exactly what he was doing, fishing with not much to use for a hook and no bait.
Late in the afternoon O’Hara returned to Jamison’s office. “I can’t get the records for our victims without a court order, so what do you want me to do?”
Fractured Justice Page 15
