Snap Judgment (Samantha Brinkman Book 3)

by Marcia Clark

  Alex headed south on the 101 Freeway, which was packed. “It definitely shows he was a vindictive asshole. But I’m not sure it shows that he was as shaky as we’d like.”

  That was true. “No one thing will do that. It’s going to be cumulative. He did revenge porn, and he wasn’t sleeping well, and he was into Kurt Cobain—”

  Alex shot me a look. “Hey, I like Nirvana.”

  “You know what I mean.” I told him my worries about Roan’s police statements.

  He looked grim. “That’s a bitch, all right. I don’t suppose you’d be able to get the cops to admit they weren’t looking for signs of mental problems?”

  I stared out the window. “Oh, I’m sure they’ll admit that. The problem is, it’s not enough. It’ll just seem like Roan was only as messed up as you’d expect any guy to be in his situation. They’ll never admit that Roan looked seriously unhinged.”

  Alex turned to look at me. “Assuming he did.”

  I stared back at him. “Don’t get all objective on me. We need him to be unhinged. Think positive.” Making sure Roan’s death stayed a suicide was our first—and best—line of defense.

  I’d called Nomie before we left, but I got her voice mail, so I left a message asking her to let me know if she had time for a quick visit. Gayle answered at the house and said she’d be in class all day but that Davey and Phil should be there. Sure enough, Davey answered the door when we got there. I saw an open laptop on the dinette table. “I hate to break into your study time.” Not enough to not do it, obviously.

  Davey waved me off. “Gayle told me you were coming.” He called out to Phil. “Hey, they’re here.”

  A few seconds later, Phil came shuffling out in bare feet, his hair mussed up and scratching his stomach. Elegance and beauty personified. He headed into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. “Get you guys anything? We’ve got beer.”

  I watched, amused, as he hung over the open refrigerator door. “No, we’re good. Thanks.”

  Phil settled into the beanbag chair with his cup of blueberry yogurt, and Davey plopped down in the beanbag chair next to him. I asked whether either of them had seen Roan after Alicia died. As I’d expected, neither of them had. “What about before that—when was the last time you saw him?”

  Phil stared into his yogurt cup. “I think maybe a week before Alicia said she wanted to take a break.”

  Davey said, “Probably around that same time.”

  I knew what they were going to say, but I had to ask. “Was he acting weird in any way? Depressed?”

  Phil shrugged. “Not really.” He looked at Davey. “You?”

  Davey shook his head. “I didn’t notice anything.”

  As I’d expected. I tried another tack. “Did Roan ever tell you about revenge porning any other girls before Alicia?”

  Phil said no, but Davey did remember him mentioning it. “He didn’t tell me her name, but yeah. I remember him saying some girl really had it coming, so he fucked her up.”

  YES. Progress. I leaned in. “Did he elaborate?”

  Davey frowned, then shook his head. “Just said he’d posted her selfies on a website.”

  Alex had taken out his notebook and pen. He asked, “Did Roan mention which one?”

  “No. At least, not that I remember.” Davey paused. “But none of us was tight with Roan, so he really didn’t talk to us much.” He added, his tone sarcastic, “I’m sure you couldn’t tell. I was actually pretty surprised when he told me about that other girl.”

  I wondered if Roan had done it deliberately, hoping Davey would carry the message back to Alicia—an implied threat about what would happen to her if she stepped out of line. “Did you tell Alicia about that?”

  Davey reddened. “No. I wanted to, but . . .” He hung his head. “The thing is, we all knew he was bad news right from the start, so we tried to get her to drop him, but it just pissed her off. I figured if I told her, she’d just defend him—like she always did.”

  I nodded. “You’re probably right.”

  Phil finished his yogurt and set the cup on the floor. “You should talk to his buddy Miguel.”

  Alex’s lips twitched as he suppressed a smile. “You know a friend of Roan’s?” I could hear the note of incredulity in his voice. We’d been asking for information on Roan since we sat down. It’d taken Phil this long to wake up and join the party.

  Phil pulled a joint out of his pants pocket. “Yeah. Miguel. We were roomies our freshman year. I didn’t know he was tight with Roan until Roan told me his bro Miguel had scored tickets to a Lakers game.”

  Alex wrote down the name. “Do you know Miguel’s last name?”

  Phil lit the joint and took a drag. “Miguel . . . ah . . . Lorenzo?” He blew out a long stream of smoke. “Yeah. Lorenzo. He lives about a block away from Roan, on Hoover.”

  It might be too much to hope for, but I asked anyway. “Do you happen to have a phone number for Miguel?”

  Phil held the joint out to all of us—ever the polite host. Alex and I declined; Davey accepted. “Maybe. It’s old, though.” He took his phone out of his other pants pocket and scrolled. “Here you go.” He read it off to Alex.

  Alex wrote it down. But I knew that a friend of Roan’s was unlikely to be a friend of ours. “Could you maybe check to see if he’s around—without telling him about us?”

  Phil studied me, then nodded. “Sure.” He pressed a key on his phone, and after a few seconds, I heard a man’s voice answer. Phil, wisely using Roan’s death as cover for the call, offered his condolences. It was a brief conversation and when it ended, Phil told us Miguel was on his way home. “Told me to call him back in ten.” He gave us the address. “If you head over there now, you’ll catch him.”

  I wanted to get the lay of the land before we jumped off the cliff. “Did he seem pretty broken up?”

  Phil stubbed out the joint in the ashtray on the coffee table. “Hard to tell. He was in the car. Said a cop was close by, so he couldn’t stay on the phone. Guess you’ll find out.”

  Davey gave us a sympathetic look. “Good luck.”

  I knew what he meant. A shitbird like Roan was unlikely to have a prince of a guy for a friend. Who says practicing law isn’t fun?

  TEN

  The nice thing about our witnesses being USC students was that they all lived within a few miles of one another. It took Alex less than five minutes to find Miguel’s place: an upstairs apartment accessed via an open staircase in a small four-unit building. It was a little farther from campus, which meant it had less of the student-poor vibe and more of the working-poor vibe—dying postage-stamp-size lawns sporting empty beer cans, bottles, and broken toys; old couches parked on curbs; and grimier, more run-down-looking houses.

  As we moved toward the building, the smell of bacon grease wafted out through the window of the downstairs apartment, and a baby’s wail, thin and insistent, mixed with the sound of a vacuum cleaner. But as we mounted the stairs, those sounds began to be drowned out by a heavy bass. By the time we got to the door of Miguel’s apartment, the thumping bass was so loud it made the metal handrail vibrate. The music sounded like Hispanic hip-hop. I didn’t recognize the artist.

  I looked at Alex. “Ready?” He reached into his pocket, flipped on the mini-recorder, and nodded. I knocked on the door. No answer. I knocked harder. Still no answer. I knocked as hard as I could and called out, “Miguel?” The volume on the music was abruptly turned down. The door swung open, and the odors of pot and French fries floated out, making me simultaneously nauseous and hungry. A slender young man with shoulder-length black hair, dressed in baggy jeans and a plaid shirt over a white T-shirt, stood scowling at us. “Who are you?”

  On the way over, Alex and I had worked out a lie about being affiliated with a watchdog group monitoring the LA coroner’s office. But we obviously hadn’t had time to dummy up business cards or pick up official-looking forms to put on clipboards. And this guy seemed too smart to game without the suitable accoutrements
, so I made the snap decision to go with the truth. “I’m a lawyer, Samantha Brinkman, and this is my investigator, Alex Medrano. I assume you’re Miguel Lorenzo?”

  He passed a suspicious gaze between Alex and me. “What do you want?”

  I knew we were about ten seconds away from a slamming door, so I went straight at it. “To ask you about Roan Sutton. I represent Alicia’s father, Graham Hutchins—”

  His expression darkened. “Roan didn’t kill her. That’s all I’ve got to say.” He started to close the door.

  Alex stepped in closer. “Was that Big Pun you were playing?” Miguel gave him a piercing look, then nodded. “Sounded like ‘It’s So Hard.’” Alex had a nostalgic look. “A classic. Too bad he checked out so young.”

  Miguel’s expression softened a little. “Yeah. Heart attack. But the dude weighed, like, seven hundred pounds, so . . .” He threw me a flinty look, then gave Alex a chin bob. “I guess you can come in. But I got class at four thirty, so you’d better make it quick.”

  I glanced at my watch. That gave us only about a half hour. We’d need to loosen him up fast, and I had a feeling that wouldn’t happen if I did the questioning. As we followed Miguel inside, I motioned to Alex to take the lead on this one.

  The apartment just barely qualified as a one bedroom, with a small living room / dining room that was minimally separated from the tiny kitchen with a pass-through counter. The brown tweed sofa looked like it’d been “rescued” from the curb ten years ago. Looking at it, I had a feeling we weren’t the only living things in that room. In front of it was a banged-up low-slung coffee table stacked with comic books, textbooks on graphic design, and artist sketch pads. Three plastic white lawn chairs faced the sofa on the other side of the coffee table. I sat in the one closest to the door for a fast escape in case whatever was living in the sofa made an appearance. Alex sat next to me.

  Alex spoke in a soft, low voice. “How’d you and Roan meet up?”

  Miguel sat on the sofa and spread his arms across the back. “I’ve actually known him since junior year in high school. Used to hang out, play video games, talk about designing our own.”

  Then he’d known Roan for quite a while. This was a lot better than I’d expected. I had to force myself to keep quiet. Alex continued. “Then I guess you’d say you guys were pretty tight.”

  Miguel stared at the coffee table. “In high school, yeah. A little less so once we got here, but we’d hang every so often.”

  Alex made a move to reach into his pocket. I knew he was about to take out his notebook, but I had a feeling Miguel would clam up if this started to look too official. Fortunately—maybe because he’d realized the same thing—Alex checked himself and dropped his hand back to his knee. “Did Roan talk to you about his girlfriends?”

  Miguel gave a humph and a twist of a smile. “Of course. What else would we talk about?”

  Alex—who’d probably never found girls to be a topic of choice—wisely opted not to answer that. “You remember anyone in particular?”

  Miguel gave him a hard look. “No one he killed, if that’s where you’re heading.”

  Alex shook his head. “It wasn’t. We’re looking into the revenge-porn side of things. We think maybe one of the guys who saw her photos killed her.”

  Of course, we didn’t think that. And even if it were true, it wouldn’t do Graham any good. He’d still have a strong motive to kill Roan, since he’d believed—like everyone else—that Roan had killed Alicia. But the lie worked. Miguel relaxed. “Yeah, I remember him complaining about this girl named Laurie during our freshman year here. Said she was a drama queen, and her bullshit was driving him crazy. I know he broke up with her, but I don’t remember him ever saying he posted her selfies on a porn website.” Alex got Laurie’s last name—Schoenberg—and the name of her dorm, Cardinal Gardens. Whether she was still there, Miguel didn’t know. Alex moved on. “What do you think about the possibility that Roan committed suicide?”

  Miguel set his jaw. “I don’t believe it. That wasn’t him. At all.”

  Alex didn’t argue. His voice was mild as he asked, “He didn’t get depressed or anything, then?”

  Miguel looked out the window that faced the side of the next building. “I mean, yeah, sometimes. He had it kind of rough when he was a kid. His folks divorced when he was twelve. His dad kind of faded from the scene, and his mom just completely checked out. Some days she couldn’t even get out of bed.” He shook his head. “Lucky for him, he had a couple of older brothers who could at least put dinner on the table.”

  Alex spoke softly. “Seems to me like Roan had plenty of reasons to be depressed.”

  Miguel blew out a breath. “He never seemed depressed—at least not to me. But he could get kind of . . . intense, wound up.” Miguel made a circle in the air with his finger. “Like his thoughts were racing, and he couldn’t get out of a loop in his own mind.”

  Alex tilted his head and frowned. “Like, obsessive?”

  Miguel pointed at him. “Exactly.” He dropped his hands into his lap. “I don’t want to believe he was feeling bad enough to kill himself without at least trying to talk to me. But . . .” Miguel sighed, his expression bleak. “I guess anything’s possible. I mean, how well do we really know anyone?”

  No argument there, but we needed some solid support for Roan’s suicide, and this existential conundrum just wasn’t going to cut it. Alex probed Miguel with a few more questions about Roan’s state of mind—back then and more recently—but Miguel didn’t have anything of substance to add.

  We thanked him, and I gave him my card in case he thought of anything else we hadn’t covered. I had not one shred of hope that I’d ever hear from Miguel, but he did put my card in his pocket. At least he didn’t throw it in the garbage while I was standing there. I take my wins where I can find them.

  When we got back to Alex’s car, I asked if he knew of a way to find out whether Laurie Schoenberg was still at Cardinal Gardens. He gave me an icy look. “I’m going to pretend you didn’t ask me whether I could do something that ridiculously easy.” Alex pulled his iPad out from under the driver’s seat and began tapping keys. “First bit of good news, Cardinal Gardens houses upperclassmen as well as freshmen. So she could totally still be there.”

  While Alex continued to type, I saw Miguel trot down the stairs and head toward campus, his backpack bouncing behind him. A few minutes later, Alex gave me a triumphant look. “I want you to repeat after me: I will never doubt you again, Alex.”

  I held up a middle finger. “Repeat this. What’ve you got?”

  He gave me a flat look. “Witty.” He read from his iPad. “Laurie’s got a biology class until five o’clock. She’s still in Cardinal Gardens. Her room number is—”

  I held up a hand. “I don’t care. I’m starving, and we have just enough time to hit McDonald’s before we try to ambush her.”

  Alex made a face. “McDonald’s? Seriously?”

  The smell of fries at Miguel’s apartment had been driving me crazy. I had to have some. I gave Alex a warning look. “Just give me some damn fries and no one gets hurt.”

  Alex smiled. “Yeah, the smell got to me, too.”

  Alex found a McDonald’s, we got our fries, and by ten after five, we were standing in front of Laurie’s building at the Cardinal Gardens dorm complex, hoping to snag Laurie on her way in.

  Alex had pulled up a photo of Laurie Schoenberg, who was a serious-looking girl with lots of wavy black hair, wide-set brown eyes, and high cheekbones. She couldn’t have looked more different from Alicia if she’d tried. My guess was that Roan’s “type” had more to do with an emotional landscape than a physical one.

  But as we watched the students stream past us, I started to lose hope. It’d be just dumb luck to find her this way—like trying to find a Democrat at the Country Music Awards. Plus, I was freezing. It was too cold to stand around like this. “What if she decided to go out to dinner? Or do some errands? Or go bang her boyfriend?”
>
  Alex rolled his eyes. “Poetically put. Let’s give it until five thirty. If we don’t find her, I’m sure I’ll be able to track her down tomorrow. I’ve got her class list.”

  By five thirty, I declared Laurie a no-show. “Come on, this one can wait until tomorrow.” I turned and headed for the car. After a few seconds, Alex followed.

  Back in the car, I checked my e-mail on Alex’s iPad and found a Google Alert for Graham Hutchins. I’d learned to tag my high-profile clients so I could monitor what was being written about them. Also because they don’t necessarily realize the importance of letting me know when the press hits them up. In Graham’s case, it was much less of a worry. He was an experienced talking head on the cable circuit, and he knew how to handle himself. But I opened the link anyway, just out of curiosity. And . . . Shit. I leaned back and closed my eyes. This could not be happening.

  Alex had just merged onto the northbound 101 Freeway. “What?”

  I hadn’t realized I’d said that out loud. “Graham just started a war.”

  ELEVEN

  Alex threw me an alarmed look. “What do you mean?”

  “Graham’s still handling that basketball player’s libel suit against the Daily Sun for their reporting on that rape charge. TMZ caught him on his way to court and asked him what he thought of Audrey Sutton’s press statement saying the coroner got it wrong.”

  Alex was perplexed. “And he answered them?”

  “I guess you could say that.” I refreshed Graham’s quote on my phone. “He said: ‘Someone who could raise a murderer—and a lowlife who posted revenge porn—cannot be trusted to tell the truth. I’m sure she was just trying to pressure the coroner into calling it a homicide so she can squeeze money out of me with a wrongful-death suit.’ End quote.”

  He echoed my sentiment. “Oh shit.”

  “Exactly.” I punched in Graham’s cell phone number and got his voice mail. I was just about to leave a message when a call came in on my phone. It was Graham. He’d undoubtedly checked to see the phone number of his caller before answering. I took the call and said, “Yeah, I’ll bet you’re screening.”