I raised my eyebrow. “Don’t underestimate people. Never underestimate them. And never underestimate the power an authoritarian figure can have on weak-minded people. Our history has been full of such figures getting people to do worse things than killing their kids.”
Axel leaned back and nodded his head. “Look at who you are talking to,” he said. “I’ve been on the police force for twenty years. I’ve seen everything. But I haven’t run across the situation that you’re talking about.”
My mind started to turn and I found that I wasn’t even focusing on what Axel was saying to me. I only knew that I was going to have to subpoena Louisa and the Reverend Scott, and that I suddenly knew that my case was looking better than it ever had before.
I bit my lower lip. There still was the issue of the butcher knife, the missing butcher knife, to think about. And exactly why it was that Connie Morrison and Louisa Garrison stopped talking to one another over the e-mail. I knew that Louisa was going to be an indispensable witness, and I was excited that I was going to make her crack. I knew that I was going to. The Reverend Scott was a different story. He seemed like he would be a hard nut.
I wondered if I could subpoena some of the other parents who were in the church, too.
I suddenly knew that the case was opening up, and I couldn’t have been more excited about it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“Hey girly,” Heather said when I went to see her the next day at her halfway house. “What’s up? What’s going on with your plan to let me stay with you?”
“I filed a motion with the judge,” I told her. “I expect to get an answer on it this week. The one thing that might be standing in the way would be Alexis Winters. She’s fine with me having Rina and Abby, but she might balk if you come in. We’ll have to see.”
Heather’s face fell, and I felt awful. She shrugged. “It’s okay, I guess. I don’t mind staying here. My roommates harass me, but I told them all that I was about to cut a bitch, and they’ve backed off, surprisingly enough. I guess they’re not interested in catching another case. And they will catch another case if they fuck with me too much. I’ll squeal like a stuck pig if they get too much up in my grill. I can hold my own.” She sat up in her chair, squaring her shoulders, and she leveled her heavily made-up eyes toward me. “Anyhow, what you got for me?”
“Well, I’ve been investigating that church that your mother went to. What can you tell me about her relationship with Louisa Garrison?”
Heather shrugged. “I don’t know who that is.”
I cocked my head. “Did your mother stay out at night? Like overnight ever?”
“Yeah,” she said. “She stayed out a lot, actually. Why do you ask?”
“I’m starting to think that your mother was having a lesbian affair with Louisa Garrison, who is in a position of authority over at the Church of the Living Breath. That’s significant, because Louisa might be the point woman for the Reverend. I think that she’s the woman who carries out his dirty work. But I have to ask you about the butcher knife. Why wasn’t it recovered at the scene?”
“It wasn’t?” Heather genuinely looked perplexed. “I don’t know about that. All I know is that I ran out of the house after I killed her, so I have no idea what could have happened to it.”
I bit my lower lip. Things were looking good, as far as my working on a theory on what happened at Heather’s house. But could that theory be trusted here? What if Axel Springer was right – what if it was a serial killer who was targeting gay kids at the Church? That theory really made much more sense to me. Like Axel, I really couldn’t imagine that parents could ever be brainwashed into killing their own flesh and blood. If it was a serial killer, then I was at square one, because it would never explain why Connie was on the verge of killing Heather.
I stood up and started to pace around the room. “I’m going to have to figure this out,” I said. “If I can’t answer the DA’s questions about what happened to that butcher knife, then this case goes out the window. We need to figure that out.”
Heather shrugged. “How am I supposed to know? I told you what I know, and that’s that the old bag had a butcher knife in her hand when I killed her. I can’t tell you what happened to it. You’re going to have to figure that out. You’re the lawyer.”
“There’s another thing that’s bothering me,” I said to Heather. “When did you read my article? My Law Review article?” That detail was nagging at me suddenly. I simply couldn’t imagine that Heather, who was on the run after killing her mother, would have the presence of mind to sit down and do legal research. For one, finding Law Review articles isn’t that easy. You can use Google to find what you want, but, to actually read the article, you typically needed some kind of legal software, like Lexis/Nexis or Westlaw. Would her drug-dealer boyfriend have the kind of computer that would have this kind of software? Maybe, since he’s a drug-dealer, and he might actually use case-law to try to figure out what are the limits of what he can get away with.
Maybe, but I doubted that.
“Why does that matter?” Heather looked at me suspiciously. “Why do I have the feeling that you’re not believing me all of a sudden?”
“I’m just trying to get things out of the way. I think that I have a working theory, but I need to clear the bugs out of it if I’m going to sell it to the jury. That’s all.”
“I’m not buying that,” Heather said, crossing her arms in front of her. “The DA isn’t going to ask me about my reading that article. He doesn’t even know I read that article. He probably doesn’t even know that the article exists. You’re asking me because you think that somehow I’m lying. That I looked at the article because I wanted to know if I could have a defense before I killed my mom. Aren’t you?”
I had to admit, Heather was sharp. She had my number.
“Well, is that the truth? When did you read the article?”
Heather sneered and suddenly stood up. “If you don’t believe my story, maybe I should find another attorney who will. You can give me back my retainer, what’s left of it, anyhow.” She looked genuinely hurt.
“Where did that come from? I’m simply asking a question. That’s all. I need to know, because I don’t want to be blind-sided.” The way that Heather was acting, right at that moment, was getting my suspicions raised about her, and I didn’t want to feel that way. Not about my client – I needed to believe in her if I was going to give this case my all. God forbid it turned out to be another John Robinson case.
“I’m not blind-siding you. I told you what happened, and that’s that.”
I crossed my arms in front of me, and I suddenly started to question everything that I was coming to know about this case. “I know that you told me, but you’re acting weird about this article, and I need to know why. Why, Heather? I have the feeling that you read it long before you killed your mother, and, if you did, why did you?”
“I need for you to leave,” she said. “You’re going back on your word about taking me in, and now you’re acting like you don’t believe my story. I don’t need your shit, Harper. I’ve taken my share of crap from all kinds of flying monkeys through the years, and I don’t need it from the one person who’s supposed to be in my corner.”
I knew that she was going to try to fire me, but I wasn’t going to let that happen. She had to know that I had her back, even if I didn’t entirely believe her. There wasn’t any way that I was going to let this case go. I was connected to the girl, really connected, and I knew that I had to see the case through.
But first, I needed to give her some tough love.
“Heather,” I said. “You can fire me if you wish. But you have to know one thing – if you lie to your next attorney, then there’s no way that attorney can ever do your case justice. You have to come clean with me. Come clean with me, Heather, and we can do this together. I’ll figure out a theory on what happened to the butcher knife, and hopefully I can get evidence about it. That’s a major deal, but it can be expla
ined away. But I need to know what you’re hiding from me. And you are hiding something from me, Heather. I know that you are. You might as well tell me, right here, and right now. I surely don’t want something coming up to bite me in the ass later on.”
Heather’s lips pursed and her long eyelashes fluttered. She tapped her high-heeled foot on the wooden floor as she crossed and uncrossed her arms.
I let out a tendril of breath as she said “okay. I’ll tell you.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“I need a smoke,” Heather said, looking down at the floor. “Let’s go out on the porch.”
We went out on the porch, sat on the swing, and Heather got out her cigarettes. “Hey, Ace,” she said, calling to a homeless guy who was walking along the sidewalk pushing a shopping cart. “What’s up?”
Ace waved to her and motioned to the shopping cart. “I’m picking up cans and bottles. You got any for me?”
“You know I do.” Heather nudged me. “There’s a box in the kitchen that has all the recyclable bottles and shit. Bring that out here. Ace has room in his shopping cart for it.”
“You’re stalling.” I was disapproving of her dancing around the question of the article, and it was just making me all the more suspicious.
“I’m not. Now, go. I’ll be sitting right here. Where am I going to go? I got this goddamn ankle bracelet on. I was hoping I was going to be able to stay in a nice house with a nice bed and have some good meals, but that looks like it’s not going to happen.” She glared at me. “Thanks for getting my hopes up and letting them crash down.”
I sighed and went into the kitchen. It was an old kitchen, with appliances that looked like they were from the 1940s – a white stove that had two different compartments inside, a refrigerator that had a metal handle, and no microwave. Heather told me that very little cooking went on in the house, because she and the other people living in the house were fed mainly frozen foods that were heated up in the oven. There was even a litter box in there, because there was apparently a cat that lived in the house, although I had never seen it.
I found the box and went out to the porch, where Heather was sitting there, smoking her cigarette. She was wearing ripped jeans and her usual high-heeled boots, topped with a black tank top that showed off her surprisingly muscular arms. Around her neck was a floral pink and black scarf. She was nervously sucking on the cigarette, and was rapidly rocking back and forth on the swing.
“I have the cans and bottles,” I said to Heather.
“Ace is waiting,” she said, pointing to the homeless guy who was just on the other side of the front yard fence.
I went down to the guy and dumped the cans and bottles into Ace’s shopping cart.
“Thanks, ma’am,” he said politely. He then started to push the shopping cart on up the street, looking carefully throughout the sidewalk for more cans and bottles.
“Okay,” I said, walking back up the worn concrete steps that lead to the wooden porch. “Now, the time for beating around the bush is officially over,” I said, sitting next to her on the swing. “What’s going on?”
She sighed. “I read the article before my mom came after me,” she said. “I didn’t tell you before, because I knew that you would have thought that it looked bad. Like I planned this whole thing out from the start.” She shook her head and sucked on her cigarette some more. “All right? You happy? I read your article before my mom attacked me. Now I suppose you think that I’m guilty, and you’re going to wanna get off my case. So go ahead, withdraw. Why don’t you just fucking leave me, just like everyone else has?”
I looked at her, and saw that she was on the verge of crying. She turned her head away and sucked harder on her cigarette, and she blew it out with an enormous breath. Her right hand, which was holding onto her cigarette, was shaking hard. She bit her lower lip and continued to turn her face away from me.
I was, at last, getting beneath the layers. Seeing the scared kid behind the mask. The kid who had known nothing but rejection from the adults in her life. Her mother tried to kill her, it sounded like her father rejected her too, and now she was positive that I was going to do the same.
I put my arm around her, and I felt her shoulders stiffen beneath my touch. “Heather,” I said. “I’ll go ahead and petition the court to have you stay with me. I’ll run it by the guardian ad litem for the girls, though. If she’s okay with it, then I’ll do it. I don’t know that she will be, though, and I’m at a really precarious place with them.”
She nodded her head, and I saw a single tear slide down her cheek. She blinked hard, trying to stem the tide that was no doubt threatening to come, but she didn’t say a word.
“But Heather, I’m not going to withdraw. Not unless I think that you’re lying to me. Now, I have to admit, there’s two things that give me pause, and we need to get to the bottom of it. Because if we don’t, the prosecutor will. The butcher knife is a mystery, and now you need to tell me why it was that you read my Law Review article before you killed your mother.” I crossed my arms in front of me. I suddenly felt like my case wasn’t nearly as strong as I thought it was.
“You won’t believe me anyway. You have your mind made up that I’m lying to you. I can see it in your eyes.”
“Heather, don’t prejudge what I’m thinking. I’ll admit, I need to answer these nagging questions before we go forward. You need to help me with this. You need to come clean.”
She narrowed her eyes and kept on swinging. “I’ve changed my mind. I’m not going to tell you. I don’t think that you’re going to believe me.”
I sighed. “Heather, don’t do this to me. Don’t shut down. I need you to tell me everything. Everything. The prosecutor will find out about you reading my article, and then he’s going to use that information to hang you. Don’t think that he won’t somehow get access to your computer, and if that article is on your history, well, then, you’re history. It looks bad, Heather, really bad, that you’re reading about self-defense before your mother attacked you.”
I looked at Heather, and I saw that she wasn’t going to talk to me about this issue. Her body language was completely closed, and her face had the hard mask on it again. “You can withdraw.” She looked away. “I don’t want you to, though. But if you want to, I understand.”
I sighed. “I’m not going to withdraw.” I looked at my watch. “I need to go. I told the girls that I would be home by 7. I try to have dinner with them every evening, and they’re showing a great deal of patience with me in waiting until 7 to eat.”
I looked at Heather, who looked once again that she was about to cry, and my heart went out to her. “Heather, I’m not going to withdraw. But I won’t be blindsided. I won’t be. I’m on your side, but you have to cooperate with me. Now, I’m going to tell you this not because I don’t believe you, but because I have to cover all my bases. But if you killed your mother for some reason other than self-defense, I need to know this. Maybe we can get mitigating circumstances in front of the-“
I was about to say the word “jury,” but that word never made it out of my mouth, because Heather hauled off and punched me before I could finish my sentence.
Sigh. Here we go again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
I got home and Rina and Abby were waiting for me with Sophia. “Aunt Harper,” Rina said, coming up to give me a hug. “Why didn’t you tell us you had a boyfriend?”
Boyfriend? What was she talking about? “Because I don’t,” I said. “Why do you think that I do?”
Rina shrugged, and Abby came over to tattle. “She was reading your e-mails, Aunt Harper.” After she said that Rina, slugged her hard on the arm. “Ow!” Abby hit her back, and I had to get in the middle of the two.
“Come on,” I said. “I know the two of you are starving, so you’re irritable. I made a casserole last night and I think that Sophia has baked it up, because I smell it.” Even though I was technically not supposed to use my kitchen, I defied that order and I used my oven,
which, surprisingly enough, was still workable. I had created “funeral potatoes,” which was one of my favorite recipes. It was basically hash browns, sour cream and cream of mushroom soup, mixed with onions and garlic. I even threw in some turkey sausage.
“We’re starving,” Rina said. “But tell us about Axel.”
I shook my head. “Sit down. No, wait, get the plates out, and then sit down.”
The two girls obediently got out three plates, three forks and three glasses and set the table. I got out a pitcher of water and poured everyone a glass, and then went to the oven and brought out the casserole and set it on the Lazy Susan in the middle of the table.
“Okay,” I said, as I spooned some of the casserole on each of their plates. “Now, what are you talking about again? You read my emails? How did that happen?”
Rina shrugged her shoulders. “I’m snoopy, you had your computer on and your email page was up and I read that email from Axel Springer.” She smiled. “I guess you guys had a date the other night?”
I cleared my throat, not sure about how to feel about Rina grilling me about this. I didn’t know how I was feeling about Axel, and I didn’t know how to explain it to them. I was certainly attracted to him, wildly so, but I had so much on my plate, I wasn’t at all sure where he was going to fit in. If he was going to fit into my life at all.
The girls dug into the casserole and Abby smiled, big. “I love this,” she said. “Mom made casseroles for us. She used to make this awesome casserole with chicken and green chilies and sour cream and mushroom soup. She crunched up some taco chips on the top.” She rubbed her tummy. “That was probably my favorite, but she made this exact thing too. She called it pot luck potatoes.”
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