I felt spacey yet numb. “Yes. That will be fine. Thank you, Axel.”
We walked to his car, his arm around me. “You know, Harper, I like having you close to me like this. It’s getting a tad nipply already. It’s going to be really cold pretty soon. Let’s get to your house and build a fire and talk to your kids. You can tell me all about your new murder case, too. Maybe I can help you with that.”
“Maybe,” I mumbled. Axel opened up my door, and I got in and lay back on the seat. I closed my eyes, trying to concentrate on something. Anything. Yet I couldn’t. My thoughts were coming in again, faster and faster, and I couldn’t sort any of them out.
Axel was saying something, but I couldn’t process it. I couldn’t process what he was saying anymore than I could process any other thing that was in my environment right then.
“We’re home,” he said in a few minutes. My house was really close to the Country Club Plaza, so it took us only a matter of minutes to arrive at my doorstep. “I mean, we’re at your home.”
“Good. Thank you, Axel, for driving me home. Come on in.”
We made our way to the door and I opened it. Rina was there, waiting for me, and she had been crying. She immediately came up to me and threw her arms around me. “Aunt Harper, say it’s not true. Say that you aren’t going to give us up. We’re happy here. I’m sorry, Aunt Harper, I get bratty sometimes, but we’ll be good from now on. We promise. Please, Aunt Harper, please don’t give us up.”
I had no idea what she was talking about, but, at the same time, I didn’t feel like I had the ability to properly respond to her. I opened my mouth and shut it again, and I looked over at Axel. He was looking at Rina with an expression of concern on his face. “Harper, what is she talking about?”
“I don’t know.” I pushed Rina off of me. “I really need to go and lay down. I-“
I sat down right on the floor. I was vaguely aware that Rina was still bawling and that Axel was comforting her. Abby, for her part, also was crying, but she stayed seated on the couch. Her head was hanging and I could hear sobs.
“Axel, I’m so sorry,” I said. “I know that you were looking forward to hanging out with me and the girls and building a fire and everything, but I really need to be alone. You’re welcome to stay, though, and play a game with the girls. I know that they would really like that. But I don’t think that I’ll be very good company at all.”
I went upstairs to my room and shut the door. I didn’t even look at Axel before I went up to my room. I didn’t want to see his look of concern or, even worse, his look of being pissed off.
I went over to my desk and opened up my laptop. I was going to look at Michael’s enemies list again. For some odd reason, my mind suddenly cleared up. I was full of energy, perhaps more full of energy than I had ever been before, but my thoughts were no longer jumbled. Instead, it seemed like I had clarity. More clarity than I had had in a long, long time. I felt like I could do anything. I was going to win this case for Michael and I was going to do things right. Yes, I hated him. I hated him more than I had ever hated anybody in my life. Yet, I was an attorney and, as such, I had an ethical duty to do all I could to make sure I won his case.
And I was going to win it. I had no doubt about that. Hell, I was Harper Goddamned Ross. If I had a case before the Supreme Court of the United States, I could win that, too. I could win anything, anything at all.
THAT NIGHT, I stayed up all night long. I took a careful look at all the cases which were pending in front of Judge Sanders at the time he was killed, and I felt that this was a promising avenue to go down. Several companies were in court for various reasons – there was a pharmaceutical company who was being sued for price-gauging; another company was in court because they were arguing that certain regulations were unconstitutional; there were several cases regarding environmental pollution.
I didn’t see a smoking gun, however. There was nothing in the list of cases that jumped out at me. On the contrary – I found too many cases that were high-stakes. Cases where a certain company would lose millions of dollars in revenue if the judge ruled adversely. I also looked at the judge’s record and saw that he ruled on behalf of the “little guy” more than he ruled in favor of the big corporations. Whether it was the Sierra Club suing because of environmental concerns, a worker suing because a company violated safety laws, or an individual suing because he was denied worker’s compensation, Judge Sanders seemed to have a bleeding heart.
That made me sad. I was always in favor of the little guy sticking it to The Man, especially if The Man was a corporation that was screwing people over for a buck. I was a justice warrior at heart. Judge Sanders seemed to be a true populist, a judge for the people, and we needed more men like him.
Now he was dead. He was dead, and a Republican president was going to appoint his successor. I knew that there was a thread there. But what was it?
After looking over Michael’s enemies list, I realized that this list wasn’t going to bear much fruit. I could speak with each and every person on the list, and I planned to, yet I just couldn’t see how or why anybody on this list would kill a federal judge just to frame Michael. That was a drastic step, killing a federal judge, and killing the judge would certainly carry the death penalty with it. In fact, that was what Michael himself was facing – the death penalty. I received the statement of information from the prosecutor, whose name is April Todd, and it informed me that the death penalty was being sought.
No, I was going to have to think of something else. I was going to have to get creative with this one. The police weren’t doing investigations – they had their man in custody. And that was the first place that I was really going to have to look – I had to figure out why the police were sure enough that Michael killed Judge Sanders that they would immediately arrest him. There must be a history there, something that Michael wasn’t telling me. That wasn’t hard to believe, really – the slimy worm lied to me repeatedly when I first met with him. I was going to have to get his story, but it was going to have to come from other people. Once I put the puzzle together about who he was and how his relationship was with his father-in-law, I would have the complete picture. Once I had the complete picture, I could anticipate what the prosecutor’s case was going to be.
But, first thing first. I called Pearl. “Hey, Pearl, it’s me. How are we coming along with the exhumation thing?”
“Not good. The daughter has filed a motion in opposition to it. The hearing on the matter is tomorrow at 1:30.”
I sighed. While I anticipated this happening, it didn’t make it any easier to deal with. “On what basis is she trying to deny it?”
“Her motion in opposition just says that it would be unnecessarily painful for the family, and that there must be extenuating circumstances before the court can order something so drastic. I mean, that’s the argument in a nutshell.”
She was right. Exhuming a body was something that was definitely the last resort. And it was something that was extremely painful for the loved ones left behind. Especially in a case like this – he was murdered. Shot through the chest and the head, and then the killers just left his body there in the living room. If somebody did that to my father, I would want to find that person and kill him or her slowly. And I certainly wouldn’t be down with anybody wanting to exhume my father after he was laid to rest in that scenario.
So no, I didn’t blame Christina Sanders for not wanting her father’s remains to be disturbed. At the same time, though, I knew that it needed to be done. I knew that, if Judge Sanders was poisoned, that would be significant. It would mean that the killer was somebody who had access to the judge. Somebody who would have been able to put poison in his drink, at a low level, for a long period of time. Michael told me that Judge Sanders had been sick for a month. That would take a lot of planning. It would mean that the person who did it was somebody who was around the judge on a regular basis.
That would certainly narrow it down. I could imagine that there mig
ht be some greedy CEO out there who had a big case in front of the judge and wanted to kill him so that they could get somebody different to hear their case – some other judge who didn’t have a track record of ruling against large corporations in favor of the little guy. But if the judge was poisoned…that would be a different ballgame altogether. What greedy CEO would have that kind of intimate access to Judge Sanders on a daily basis?
I walked downstairs and saw, to my surprise, Axel was sleeping on my couch. I approached him and put my hand on his cheek. He opened his eyes and smiled at me sleepily. “Hey,” he said. “How are you?”
“I could ask the same.” I sat down next to him on the couch. “I’m sorry about last night. I…” I shook my head. I couldn’t explain why I was feeling so funky.
“No, no,” he said. “Don’t apologize. I was worried about you, so I spent the night. The girls are really upset, too. They have this idea that you’re going to give them back. Put them back into the system. I don’t know why they have that idea, but they were crying about it all last night.”
I furrowed my brows. “I don’t know why they think that, either. I-“ Suddenly, the lightbulb came on. “Oh my God. I know why they think that. Where are they right now?”
“Sophia took them to school. I called her, because you were literally locked in your bedroom, and I didn’t want to disturb you.”
“You could have. I didn’t sleep last night. Not even for a minute.”
Axel screwed up his mouth. “Have a seat, Harper,” he said, patting the sofa next to him. “We need to talk.”
I sighed. “Okay, but I have afternoon hearings, so I can’t talk for a long time. By the way, how come you’re not at work right now?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “I’m doing investigations, so I set my own hours. My department doesn't keep me on the clock. They’re only concerned with whether or not I get my work done. But don’t change the subject. I’m worried about you.”
I nodded my head and sat down next to him. I put my head on his shoulder. “I’m worried about myself, too. Sometimes I feel that I have the slightest, most tenuous grasp on reality. I feel like, sometimes, that I’m right on that edge of the precipice. I’m looking down, and, if I fall off that cliff, I’m going to end up in the loony bin. I’ve always felt that way. You don’t know how much I white-knuckle my sobriety. I don’t think that I’ve told you this, but I’ve suffered, on and off, from depression almost my entire life.”
“I can see that about you,” Axel said. “People who are perfectionists often do suffer from depression. They feel that they have to do everything just right, just so, and they just set themselves up for failure. They can’t handle failure, either. I’ve known people like that. My mother was like that.” He sighed and looked into the distance. “She was like that. She had a hard time handling things. Handling the world. She was an amazing artist, very gifted. She didn’t sell much, though, because it’s a hard business if you want to make a living. But you should see some of her paintings. Her sculptings. She worked herself to the bone, but she never could find an audience.”
I put my arm around him. “Are you close with her?”
He nodded. “I was. She killed herself 11 years ago.”
I closed my eyes, feeling his pain. I felt that Axel and I had something in common at that moment. He lost his mother. I lost everything the night that Michael and Jim raped me. I could never get over that, and I doubted that Axel could ever get over losing his mother in such a way.
“I’m so sorry to hear that,” I said to Axel. “Really. I couldn’t imagine losing somebody in that way. My parents live here in town. I have three sisters and two brothers – two of my sisters are here in town. I try to see them as often as I can. I just couldn’t imagine losing somebody in my life to suicide. You must be devastated.”
He shrugged. “I am. It was tough for me, just because I always saw how much she tried. She tried so hard to make something of herself. To make a name for herself. She had my brother and me, but our father split when we were very young. So, there wasn’t ever a lot of money, because mum couldn’t seem to ever make it. That was tough for her. We grew up in Australia, so there wasn’t really the dole for us. We had to make do with what there was, and there wasn’t ever much. I always wished that I could do more for mum, but I left home when I was 17 to come here. I came here on a student visa, and then I met Neila, my ex-wife, so I was able to stay. My mum killed herself 12 years after I moved to America.”
I could hear guilt in his voice. I knew what he was thinking, without him actually saying a word. He abandoned his mother, in his view. He abandoned her and left her lonely and destitute and with nothing to live for. “Axel, it wasn’t your fault. It sounded like your mother had a lot of problems.”
“I know, mate. I know. But I think that what I was going to talk to you about is that I’m worried about you. Last night, I saw you act in a way that I had never seen before. You looked different – your eyes were wide and your face was flushed. And you acted very strange. Very out of it. I know that you’re not drinking. You told me that, and I believe you. But I wonder if there was something else happening.”
“What did you think was happening?”
He shrugged. “I don’t really know. But mum used to act like that. Sometimes she would lock herself in her room and paint for literally days. Not eat, barely drink water. She would just be in there, and, when Daniel and I – my brother’s name is Daniel – would go into her room, we would see that she completed about twenty paintings. In a span of about a week. We would ask her what she was doing in the room for those days, and she would tell us that she was working around the clock. Other times, she would go to the pokies and lose any money that she managed to earn from selling her paintings.”
I furrowed my brow. “Pokies?”
“Yeah, pokies. You put your money in and pull the lever and, hopefully, money spits back out. Pokies.”
I smiled. “Oh, slot machines. I got it. So, she was a gambler?”
“Yeah. A gambler. She played the pokies and she played cards. She didn’t make much money, but what little she did went to the pokies and the cards. When she was like that, anyhow.”
I shook my head. “I didn’t do any of those things. I mean, I went shopping, and I spent a lot of money. More money than I usually spend. In fact, today, I’m going to take half of those things back. I don’t need them, and I don’t like to spend frivolously. And, I admit, I stayed up the entire night looking over the cases that Judge Sanders was going to rule on, and looking at some of his past rulings. I need to find the thread. It’s a puzzle, and one that I’m determined to solve. But I feel okay right now. I feel fine.”
He smiled. “You look fine.” He kissed me, slightly biting my upper lip while his lower lip enveloped mine slowly. “You look very fine.”
I nodded and I put my arms on his shoulders. Axel and I were heading towards making love, and I didn’t actually know how I felt about that. The truth was, I hadn’t been intimate with anybody since that night in the fraternity house all those years ago. That night was 17 years ago, and I hadn’t let any man get close to me since then. I didn’t know how to talk to Axel about that, though. I knew that I wanted to make love with him. I was dying for that. He was sexy and sweet and handsome and smart. He treated me like a princess. I was falling in love with him.
Yet I was afraid of being intimate with him. I associated the act of sex with something violent. I still associated sex with rape. My therapist had worked with me for years, but I still didn’t feel that I was whole.
In a way, I felt that, by taking Michael’s case, I would finally be able to process what had happened to me all those years ago. I wanted him to lose, yet, at the same time, I wanted to win. I was so conflicted about it…at any given moment, I had a different idea as to why I was on his case. I swung wildly between wanting to sink him at all costs to knowing that I couldn’t, to not wanting that at all. I knew that my therapist was going to have to help me so
rt all of this out.
The only thing that I knew was that I was going to have to find a way to get past what he did to me. To find a way to forgive and let go. If I didn’t, then I was going to screw up this relationship with Axel. Thus far, it was the healthiest relationship I had ever been in. I couldn’t mess things up.
“Well,” I said, looking into his beautiful eyes. “I need to get to work. I have hearings this afternoon, and I need to start my investigation of my new capital murder case.”
He smiled. “Let’s go and find your car.”
I furrowed my brow. What was he talking about, find my car? My car was right out front, wasn’t it?
Then it hit me – no, my car wasn’t out front. It was somewhere on the Plaza. I couldn’t find it yesterday.
I was really crazy yesterday. I hoped that I didn’t feel like that again. I had too much on my plate – I wouldn’t be able to feel like that and do my job.
CHAPTER NINE
The next day, I had my hearing on the exhumation of Judge Sanders. Judge Graham was the trial judge for the murder case, and she wasn’t one to have a ton of patience for much. She was about sixty years old, about 240 pounds, with black hair that had a white streak running through the middle like a skunk. There were times when she was nicer than pie, and other days when she yelled and screamed at any attorney who was so much as five minutes late to her courtroom.
When I walked in, I wasn’t sure which Judge Graham I was going to encounter. I saw her and saw that she was smiling pleasantly, so I relaxed just a little.
The other attorney, the attorney for Christina Sanders, was named Christopher King. He wasn’t somebody that I usually encountered, because he, like my partner Tammy, usually chose to do estates, wills and trusts. I assumed that he was the family attorney. He did look like he and Christina were friendly. She, too, was in the courtroom, even though she really didn’t need to be. I figured that she was there because she wanted to make sure that the judge saw her and her tears.
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