* * *
Thaddeus didn’t leave home the next day.
The cops came and went, snapping photographs of the broken glass and damage to the outer wall. They took statements and assured the kids that they were on the job. Thaddeus remained unconvinced. He waited, and by one in the afternoon the first agents from XFBI were onsite. They spoke with Thaddeus. They developed a plan of protection for the Murfee family. There were kids to accompany to school; perimeters to be established; shifts to be manned and weapons to be issued.
“Whatever the cost,” Thaddeus told Richard Bolt, his account manager in L.A. “It’s worth everything to me.”
The initial crew was selected and put in place. Only then could Thaddeus relax and even think about his clients again. Katrina called from the office with messages. These needed to be returned today, she implored him. Top of the list: Dr. Emerick Sewell, Coconino County Jail.
He didn’t bother showering or shaving; he needed to speak with Dr. Sewell ASAP.
Their usual lassitude notwithstanding, the gatekeepers at the jail finally had to allow him inside to see his client. Thaddeus swore under his breath at the public servants manning the jail who all too often obstructed anyone who wanted to visit what the jailers considered their own private inventory. Prisoner and family needs and feelings be damned.
He declined help in finding Interview Room A.
His client looked to have aged ten years since being incarcerated. But jail did that to a person, Thaddeus knew, and he wasn’t surprised by the man’s forlorn look and gray complexion. What should have been an easy remediation for the Turkenov family—turning off the life support—had become, because he had done it without permission, a serious crime. The doctor’s kind eyes said he knew this but that he would do it again.
“Thanks for coming, Thaddeus. Sorry if my phone calls jangled any nerves.”
“We’ve been busy at home.”
“Is it Katy?”
“Not exactly. Now, let’s talk about you. The last time we talked, you told me you went into Ms. Turkenov’s room and withdrew her life support because she asked you.”
“That’s what happened.”
“Of course, she was unconscious when she asked.”
“Consciousness isn’t that easy. Her brain was damaged by the narcotics she ingested and her brain was essentially dead. However, her consciousness was fully operational and communicating if you knew how to listen.”
“Which you knew.”
“I did.”
“And I believe you said she asked you to set her free.”
“She did.”
“You know, Doc, I have a hard time finding any defense in all this. For openers, we tell the jury that you did it. You caused the woman’s death. Then we tell them that she asked you to do it. You may not know this, but even if Joe Blow asks me to shoot him and if I do and he dies, I’ve committed murder. That’s your situation. Even though she asked to be released, you didn’t have the legal right to do that.”
“No, that’s correct. I was following a much higher law. A much higher authority gave me permission.”
“Well, I don’t need to go into that right now. That’s between you and whatever religious beliefs you have. But even that doesn’t solve your problems inside a courtroom. We see lots of clients telling us God told them to do this or that.”
“And lawyers and judges and police officers routinely write those people off as crazies.”
“Right. Which brings me to your mental state.”
“Shoot.”
“Well, for openers, were you under a doctor’s care when this happened? Were you taking medication at the direction of your doctor?”
“Cholesterol pills.”
“Anything psychotropic?”
“Nope. Can’t help you there.”
“All right, then have you ever been under the care of a physician on account of mental health concerns or problems?”
“I was depressed in college after Kathy Gray broke up with me. That was resolved with a pitcher of beer and a camping trip with a certain senior cheerleader.”
“Did you see any doctor due to that depression?”
“Only at the university student health clinic. The cheerleader blessed me with genital herpes.”
“Have you ever been hospitalized because of mental health issues? This is a ‘no’ I’m guessing.”
“You guessed right. No.”
“On the day you withdrew Ms. Turkenov’s life support. Were you hearing voices that day?”
“Not with my ears. My mind, however, heard her voice. Rather, my mind received her thought.”
“Explain that.”
“In the realm of nonlocal consciousness, two spirits can communicate.”
Thaddeus abruptly clicked his ballpoint. “You know what, Doc? I don’t think I’m gonna be able to help you with this case.”
The doctor smiled and stood up from the table.
“I scared you off with that one, eh?”
“Pretty much. Besides, my wife’s terribly sick and needs me around. More than that, I want to spend my days with her. You’ve probably got yourself the wrong guy here.”
“What if I could provide scientific proof of what I’m saying?”
Thaddeus sat back and adjusted his glasses. His eyes narrowed.
“What if you could provide scientific proof? What, some scientist has a picture of a ghost?”
“Not at all. Have you ever heard of quantum physics, Thaddeus?”
“I read something on Huffington Post about that some time back. Don’t recall anything about it.”
“Well, it’s a study of particle physics, long story short. It’s about tiny little events, little laws that operate in the physical world totally different from the laws of physics you and I know about.”
“Give me an example,” said Thaddeus. He was fighting off sneaking a look at his watch.
“Well, in quantum physics a particle can be at point A and over here at point B both at the same time.”
“You just lost me.”
“It just is. It’s a scientific fact in quantum physics.”
“Give me something about spirits talking.”
“To do that, you’re going to have to learn about entanglement.”
“I know a lot about entanglement already.”
“Not this kind you don’t,” said the doctor. “This is the kind that keeps consciousness intact when it leaves the body at death.”
The room fell silent. Thaddeus debated looking at his watch. But didn’t. Didn’t because the doctor had just shared something with him that was very important to him and Thaddeus didn’t want to disparage it by insulting him with a look at his watch. Instead, he honored the moment, sitting quietly, thinking about what had just been said.
Finally, “When the consciousness leaves the body at death. Is this something a doctor like Katy would know about?”
Dr. Sewell shook his head. “Probably not. But she should. I had planned to open her mind to this science but then this other thing happened and now I can’t because I’m stuck in here.” He indicated the jail but Thaddeus didn’t even hear him. His mind was far down the road, considering how he might spring the doctor from jail so he could take up the notion of life after death with Katy. As for himself, Thaddeus believed in no such thing. But for Katy’s sake, he would act as if. If it gave her any hope to cling to, he would act as if. Moreover, he would go so far as to pause his own life and defend this doctor to the bitter end just so Katy would know he was invested in a belief system that had come to give her hope. If it ever came to that. But it was looking like it would not, because the good doctor, the bearer of the good news, was locked away in jail facing a Murder One charge. That was ordinarily not a bailable offense.
Or was it?
He pulled a notepad out of his messenger bag and for the first time that evening began writing.
“Let me think,” he told Dr. Sewell. The doctor closed his eyes and set his mouth. He could
wait.
Knocks came on the door. Demands that he “hurry up.” He stuck his head out and asked what the rush was, that there was no limit on the time a lawyer could spend with a client. This kept the jailers at bay for another hour.
Finally, he had the bare bones of a motion to set bail in a first-degree murder case. It was predicated on the typically common phrases, “ties to the community,” and “no prior history of criminal acts,” and “not a threat to himself or to others,” and the like. But that’s where common ended. Common ended because Thaddeus then argued—in his short, handwritten motion that someone would type up tomorrow—that Nadia Turkenov couldn’t have been murdered, that she was already dead.
You can’t murder a dead person. That was elementary stuff, Criminal Law 101.
But it’s what he had been given, the cards he had been dealt.
And he planned to make the most of them.
36
“So you’re telling me you failed, Diego,” said Mascari over the scrambled phone.
“I am telling you that I have just begun,” retorted Luchesi. He was hot and angry; he didn’t like being told he had failed. Not at anything.
“So how will you get to him?”
“Through his wife. I will use her to bait the trap for him. Trust me, it is as good as done, Don Mascari.”
“I trust you will get it done or I wouldn’t have sent you. But it needs to be now. The woman got away and already they are preparing to return with her. Especially now that you torched her companion.”
“We will bite off the head of the snake and the body will wither and die. With Murfee gone, there is nothing else to be said.”
“I can’t argue with that.”
“So I take her down. Then he will leave the security of his XFBI guards to come for you. Once he is away from them, he belongs to me.”
“He will return with that woman. She worries me as much as him.”
“She will be next. After the wife, I will go for her. We will isolate this Murfee, leave him utterly alone and enraged, and then we will strike.”
* * *
The next day found Diego Luchesi in the offices of Peak Home Health, a provider on the west side of Flagstaff. It had taken Luchesi all of two telephone calls to determine the identity of the company providing Katy Murfee’s home nursing care. Now he was waiting in the outer office of the Director of Nursing, his bogus resume and forged nursing license in his satchel. He was dressed in chinos and a blue button down with a red striped tie and blue blazer—looking every bit like the home health aide he meant to portray.
The DON showed him inside her office. She was a mid-fortyish woman, heavy around the girth and burned out with nursing, as so many are when they reach their forties and are still caring for the sick and injured. Right now she was wishing she had a nice, secure job in some large corporation doing HR recruitment—anything that didn’t require dealing with sickness and death. But, it was what it was and now she had to meet with another possible staff, a home health aide, the position most needed by home health agencies—after R.N.’s, of course.
“Take a seat,” she told Luchesi. Her manner was short and curt. He was low on the food chain though high on the needs chain. But she had no stake in the agency other than her salary and it was late in the day; common courtesy was almost too hard to provide.
She reviewed the resume, highlighting two or three lines with her yellow Hi-Liter. She nodded several times and then cleared her throat.
“So you’ve just moved here from Miami. Are you Cuban?”
“I am. Grandparents were refugees. I am second generation American.”
“You have an accent. Cuban?”
“Yes, my grandparents speak no English. They basically raised me.”
“Got it. Okay. Says here you’ve worked at maybe a dozen agencies and you’re what, twenty-eight?”
“Twenty-eight. I like to travel and so I’ve moved around a lot, trying to see the U.S.”
“I haven’t actually heard of any of these agencies you have listed. Like Topeka? You were there eight weeks? And then on to Omaha? Why Omaha?”
“It came next on the map, to tell the truth.”
She peered at him over her half-shells. “What’s the weather like in Omaha?”
“I was there in the summer. Very humid.”
“Yes, it is. So what are you looking for with Peak? Long-term or are you going to kiss us goodbye after a month or two?”
“I want to put down roots here. I have a girlfriend.”
“Oh, you do.”
“She is pregnant. We’re getting married.”
“Well, good for you, Mr. Luchesi. This is a nice town.”
“So I’m looking for permanent.”
“Well, you have the credentials. Any shift preferences?”
“Graveyard. I’ll be taking classes at NAU during the day.”
“Good on you! Right now we have several around-the-clocks. Any preference in location?”
“Well, I live on the way out to the Grand Canyon. Anything out there?”
“Yes, we have an oncology patient out on one-eighty. Metastases in her spine and brain. I can get you maybe six weeks there. I’m told she won’t last much longer than that.”
“Graveyard?”
“Uh-huh. When can you start?”
“Tonight?”
“How about this weekend. We can have your ID badge and computer ready by then. All charting is on our company laptops then uploaded after each shift. Simple. No paper, Mr. Luchesi. What should I call you?”
“Diego is fine. Friday night will be perfect.”
“Good. I’m going to give you back to Caroline out front. She’ll take your picture and do the intake stuff for your personnel file. So, thank you for coming in. I have a feeling you’re going to thrive here.”
“Me, too. I really like this town and I’m very excited for this opportunity.”
“Come in Friday at noon and we’ll get your ID and computer turned over. We start our aides at fourteen. Does that work for you?”
“Fourteen is perfect. Any chance of pulling doubles?”
“Double shifts? All the time. You know, I like you. You’re going to do just fine here. Goodbye, then.”
“Goodbye.”
A headshot was taken by Caroline. It was then sized and laminated onto Luchesi’s new ID card.
The ID card he would use to get past her XFBI guards.
37
Judge Herbert Hoover had spent his life angry at the parents who named him after a dead president of the United States. For what good it did. He sat at his cluttered desk in the Coconino County Courthouse in downtown Flagstaff and read again the motion that Murfee’s office had delivered. The judge had agreed to a three o’clock initial appearance and bail hearing, leaving him thirty minutes to prepare. He was a tall carrot-top with thick black eyeglasses as was the style, a light fluff of reddish-blond mutton chops, and extra wide suspenders to help support the suspender holster he wore with his Glock subcompact pistol. He’d been shot at from the street before and the next time, by God, he planned to return fire. Same went for anyone who managed to smuggle a weapon into his courtroom. He was a card-carrying member of an international group calling itself Concealed Carry and he had even paid for a one-million-dollar insurance policy that would cover the aftermath of any non-justified shooting he might be involved in and even covered the fees for an attorney of his own choosing to defend him. He was always prepared for the worst-case scenario, and who wouldn’t be, after serving twenty years as District Attorney and ten years as a trial judge? The worst of man’s nature was no mystery to him, exposed as he had been vis-à-vis the two public offices.
He finished his second read-through of Murfee’s motion and cocked his head back and hooted. “Sumbitch is pushing the envelope, Chuck!” he said to an imaginary Chuck Yeager, the test pilot of the Bell X-1 who always maintained that in flying the first aircraft to break the sound barrier in 1947 he had only been “Pushin
g the envelope.” Judge Hoover had been a small boy when it happened. Yeager was his first hero. Bob Matthias of Olympic Decathlon fame was his second. His third was yet to be named. Given how long he had survived the so-called Halls of Justice, he was even thinking of bestowing the third hero’s medal on himself. A passing thought.
Back to Murfee: the judge was seventy-four and prone to mental frolics and detours just like now. He forced himself to continue reading, shutting out the rest of the background chatter his mind increasingly provided.
So Murfee was claiming the woman was already dead, ergo his client couldn’t have murdered her.
“Genius,” the judge said. He played an imaginary foxtrot in his mind and snapped his fingers to the backbeat. “Genius, Murfee. I think you might have won me over just by the creative oomph this motion took.”
Ten minutes later, he was sitting atop his own Olympic platform—the judge’s high throne in the judge’s own permanent courtroom. He pointed an index finger at both attorneys and said, “You two. Are you going to argue this with each other all afternoon or do you want to give me a listen too?”
Thaddeus Murfee and Gary Sanders, the bull of a man who presently served as District Attorney, broke off their verbal fencing match and turned their attention to the judge, who had just then flounced into his seat.
“Sorry, Your Honor,” said the litigants’ counsel in unison.
“All right, then. Mr. Murfee, I assume that is Dr. Sewell sitting beside you in the ever-stylish Coconino County orange jumpsuit?”
“Yes, Your Honor. This is Dr. Emerick Sewell. Please stand.”
Dr. Sewell stood and Thaddeus nudged him over to the lectern between counsel tables.
“For the record, state your name,” said Judge Hoover.
“Emerick Sewell.”
“And you’re a medical doctor?”
“I am.”
“What kind of medicine?”
“Neurosurgery.”
The doctor’s responses were just audible though the courtroom was essentially empty and still.
“And do you understand the charges the District Attorney had brought against you?”
The Near Death Experience (Thaddeus Murfee Legal Thriller Series Book 10) Page 17
