[Marc Kadella 03.0] Media Justice

by Dennis Carstens

  “We still can. You don’t have to do this, Robbie,” Gabriella pleaded.

  “It’s too late, it’s too late,” he cried. “You couldn’t leave it alone. You had to keep digging…”

  “No, Robbie, please. It’s not too late. You need help, we can…”

  “I don’t need any goddamn help! It’s too late!” he screamed above the howling wind as the rain began to come down.

  Still holding her by the hair, he stood up and started to pull her up with him. Another flash of lightning lit up the sky after which a strong, firm, serious voice said, “Put the knife down and let her go.”

  They both looked toward the sound of the voice and a wave of relief washed over Gabriella as Robbie let go of her hair and allowed her to slump down on her butt. Standing twelve feet from them in a shooter's stance holding her Ladysmith .357 revolver was a very grim looking Madeline Rivers.

  Another bolt of lightning flashed which caused Maddy to flinch, blink her eyes several times and shake her head in confusion. The image she was looking at suddenly changed and she yelled, “Drop the goddamn knife, Carl. I swear I’ll shoot again.”

  “Go to hell, bitch! You’re both gonna die!” Robbie yelled back.

  “I mean it, Carl. I mean it. Drop the knife now, Carl, or I swear I’ll shoot.”

  Enraged, he again grabbed Gabriella by her hair, Robbie looked down at Gabriella, raised the knife above his head and before he could strike heard Maddy yell, “Don’t, Carl, I…” Then she began pulling the trigger and didn’t stop until the gun was empty.

  The first bullet struck him in the right shoulder and spun him around to face her. The next five all hit him in the chest and literally blew him backwards over the ledge, off the roof and down into the parking lot.

  Madeline calmly walked over to the ledge and looked down at Robbie’s lifeless body, the blood beginning to pool on the asphalt. She stared down at him for ten seconds or so and the image fluctuated back and forth in her mind from seeing Robbie to seeing another man lying lifeless in the rain on the roof of a car. She blinked several times at the image and it finally stayed as Robbie lying in the parking lot in a pool of blood, his lifeless body twisted and broken, the knife still in his hand.

  At that moment the skies opened and the rain started. The two women looked at each other; the tears flowed through the smiles as they held each other in the rain. Gabriella stepped back and asked, “Who the hell is Carl?”

  “What? What are you talking about?” Maddy asked.

  “Who’s Carl? You kept calling Robbie, Carl, telling him to put the knife down. Who’s Carl?”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  Maddy shook her head and said, “I can’t talk about it now. I’ll tell you later.”

  “Let’s get inside,” Gabriella suggested.

  The two of them, huddled together holding each other, started toward the door, then suddenly Maddy said, “Oh shit,” and started to run. When they got down the stairs to the third floor as they ran past Gabriella’s cubicle, Gabriella asked, “Why are we running?”

  Maddy stopped, turned and said, “Look, call 911. Call the cops. Then call Marc. I gotta get downstairs. I left the security guard handcuffed and gagged. I’m gonna have some serious explaining to do.”

  SEVENTY-ONE

  Marc drove his SUV into the station’s parking lot and was immediately stopped by a uniformed police officer.

  He handed the officer his attorney license card and explained why he was there. The officer politely told him to wait where he was while the officer went to find a superior.

  While he waited he noticed that the rain had stopped. He looked to his left and saw Robbie lying on the asphalt illuminated by the lights of a dozen police cars and other emergency vehicles. The area around the body was already cordoned off with yellow crime scene tape. Two CSU people, a man and a woman, were taking photos and an assistant M.E. Marc recognized, was examining the body.

  A tall, good-looking black man looked into his window and handed Marc’s attorney I.D. back to him and said, “I’m Detective Owen Jefferson, Mr. Kadella, I’ve been expecting you. Park your car over there,” he continued as he pointed to a spot away from the crime scene, “Then I’ll take you in to talk to your clients.”

  Marc and the detective were almost to the entrance of the building when Marc asked, “Are they under arrest?”

  Jefferson stopped, thought for a moment then said, “Nothing’s been decided. We’re still investigating and I haven’t heard their story. When I got here, they told me they had called you so, I sat them down in the lobby and stationed an officer with them just to keep everything orderly.

  “I should tell you this, too. A couple of weeks ago, the two of them came to me with their suspicions about this guy,” he said nodding toward the body. “In fact, I talked to Ms. Shriqui day before yesterday and the two of them were supposed to meet with me tomorrow in my office.”

  “What suspicions? What are you talking about?” Marc asked looking puzzled.

  “You don’t know?”

  “No. Know what?”

  Jefferson held up a hand and said, “Look, I’ll let them tell you, then we’ll talk. Okay?”

  A minute later Marc led the two women into a glass-enclosed conference room on the main floor a short distance from the lobby. They all took chairs. Marc looked at the two of them and said, “Okay, what’s going on?”

  “You start,” Maddy said to Gabriella.

  “About three weeks ago, I was reading the paper when I saw a little article about the body of a young girl being found in a park in St. Louis. She was found in a pond in that park. She had been missing for over a year. They even gave the date she disappeared.

  “Then I remembered hearing about another little girl being abducted just after Christmas in Rockford, Illinois. So, I checked my calendar and realized Robbie Nelson, Melinda Pace’s producer, had been in St. Louis at the same time the girl there went missing and in Rockford last Christmas.”

  “A little thin,” Marc said.

  “Very thin, but a little too much of a coincidence, too. I’ve known Robbie for a while, in fact, he had a big crush on me and pretty much told me his life’s story.

  “After checking my calendar, I spent an hour or so on the computer checking for abductions of girls in places where Robbie has lived during the times he was there. I found at least seven more possibilities.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Marc whispered.

  “The next day I got together with Maddy and told her what I found.”

  “I called Tony and he put us in touch with Detective Jefferson and a department sketch artist,” Maddy said.

  “I had the sketch artist draw a picture of Robbie, and then we had him add features of the sketch of Bob Olson that Brittany had done,” Gabriella said.

  “It matched,” Marc quietly said.

  “Dead on,” Maddy agreed.

  “We had him do some other drawings of Robbie adding different disguises…”

  “Because we had talked to Detective Jefferson who told us what we had wasn’t enough for either a search warrant or an arrest warrant,” Maddy interjected, “we agreed to do some more digging. I went to Illinois and Gabriella went to St. Louis.”

  “I found a store owner who identified one of the disguised drawings of Robbie as someone he remembered. He also swears after the abduction in St. Louis, it was all over the news, that he never saw the guy again,” Gabriella said.

  “And,” Maddy said picking up the story, “when I went to Illinois I found out a lot about him, especially in Rockford. People who knew him and knew the family all figured there was something wrong. His father took off when he was very young, seven or eight. He had a younger sister, Lucie. I talked to an aunt, his mother’s sister, who said the mother blatantly favored the daughter. She said she believed his mother took it out on Robbie for the father leaving.

  “I also got a copy of a file on him from a school psychologist and he believes the
mother even sexually abused him.”

  “We figured we at least had enough to have him brought in for questioning and get a search warrant,” Gabriella said.

  Gabriella paused, looked at Maddy and continued, “Then, tonight, he overheard me talking to Maddy and he had discovered I went to St. Louis. He found a brochure I brought back from the same place where the girl’s remains were found.”

  The two of them then told Marc the story of what happened that evening on the roof. Maddy even told him about the flashbacks she had to the night she was attacked in her apartment by a former client of Marc’s.

  When they finished, Marc told them to keep all of this to themselves for now. He would set up an interview with Jefferson but until then, avoid the media who were already lined up outside to find out what happened.

  They left the conference room and Marc found Jefferson. The first thing he said was, “Did you find the knife?”

  “Oh, yeah, he still had it in his hand,” Jefferson replied.

  “We got a self-defense here and it looks like our DOA is a serial killer of little girls. From what they told me, they had enough for at least a probable cause arrest and search warrant,” Marc told him.

  “So, they found more?”

  “Yeah, I’ll bring them in for a statement tomorrow at 10:00 A.M. Will that work for you?”

  “Yeah, see you then.”

  The next day the police obtained a search warrant for Robbie’s apartment. What they found would make Madeline Rivers and Gabriella Shriqui national heroes.

  In a spare bedroom, they discovered Robbie’s trophy collection. He had saved an item or two from every one of his victims, a toy, a piece of clothing, a stuffed animal, something to commemorate his gruesome sickness.

  They also discovered a number of wigs, hats, glasses, a make-up kit and false noses for several disguises. Apparently, he had been perfecting his craft for many years.

  Maddy and Gabriella gave complete statements to the police, at least most of it. The investigation was headed by Owen Jefferson who agreed there were some things that need not be included.

  Maddy, off the record, told him about the personal psych file she had obtained on Robbie. In order to protect her source and keep him out of any potential trouble, Jefferson agreed with her that since no prosecution was going to happen, it wasn’t really necessary.

  At the end of the interview, Jefferson said to her, “Here take this.” He handed her a small stuffed Teddy Bear. Around its neck was a tiny gold chain with the name Becky engraved on a small gold plaque. “I thought you might want to give this back to the family.”

  Melinda Pace’s show, like most of the media the day after the shooting, was devoted to her deceased producer. The gist of it was: You just never know what is in somebody’s heart. Of course, her ratings were through the roof and she uttered not a peep showing any remorse, contrition, guilt or apology about what she had done to Brittany Riley and her family. There wasn’t any forthcoming from anyone else as well. Like Melinda was prone to say, “It’s just showbiz and we’re only giving them what they want.”

  Coming Summer of 2015

  Certain Justice

  A Marc Kadella Legal Mystery

  Thirteen Years Ago

  The two men sat silently staring through the windshield of the dark blue Chevy sedan. The passenger, whom the driver called Big, had his window open an inch while he smoked. Big was flicking the ashes out of the wet window and staining the outside of it with gray, wet, cigarette ash. It was a cold, wet, windy, miserable night, especially for mid-September. While Big stared silently into the night the driver, whom Big referred to as Little, fidgeted anxiously in his seat and occasionally coughed lightly due to his partner’s smoking.

  Big crushed out his cigarette in the car’s ashtray, careful not to toss it out the window and possibly leave DNA evidence for the cops. When he did this, Little broke the silence by saying, “Roll your damn window down and let some air in.”

  Without turning his head, Big replied, “Roll yours down. It’s raining out there.”

  A gust of wind came across Lake of the Isles shaking the oak tree they were under on Parker Street. The sudden burst of wind shook the big tree causing a small torrent of rainwater to splatter down on the car. A second, less powerful wind burst broke off a tiny, leafy branch from the tree that landed on the windshield directly in front of Little. The sudden appearance of the oak leaves and the noise it made caused Little to jump in his seat, bring his hand to his heart and say, “Jesus Christ!” Big, who rarely smiled and almost never laughed, cracked a brief grin at his partner’s discomfort.

  “Time?” Big asked.

  Little checked the digital read on his watch and said, “At least five more minutes.”

  Big’s real name was Howie Traynor. At twenty-seven he was already a career criminal and no stranger to jail cells. He was a first-rate burglar because his nerves were almost non-existent so that nothing seemed to faze him.

  At a very early age, his parents began to notice that Howie was a little off. He seemed to be a little too quiet and unhappy. When he started school his teachers didn’t tell his parents he didn’t play well with the other kids. He didn’t play with them at all. He showed no interest in making friends, rarely participated in kids’ activities and basically kept to himself. By the time he entered high school he had become a bit of a bully who scared just about everyone, including his teachers and was someone to avoid.

  During his junior year, his parents took him to a psychologist who somewhat reluctantly told them that Howie appeared to be a pure sociopath. A person without empathy or any real feelings for or a connection with other people. A Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory was administered and Howie’s results revealed a 49 profile. He was quite intelligent but had a marked disregard for social norms, mores and standards. He was essentially someone with little or no conscience or regard for anyone else.

  The oddity was that people exhibiting these traits normally come from economically depressed, fractured environments. Howie was the anomaly. John Traynor, his father, was a dentist with a very successful practice. His mother, Monica was a surgical nurse. Between them, they made an excellent living and provided well for Howie, his brother Martin who was three years older and a sister Alison, two years younger. The family had an upper-middle-class home life in an upscale neighborhood of a Minneapolis suburb. The family was caring, loving, nurturing and almost exactly what any child should have. His brother and sister showed none of the antisocial traits of Howie and both had become normal, self-supporting, law-abiding adults. Howie was simply not wired right.

  His criminal life began while still in high school. There was nothing too serious at first. Joyriding in stolen cars with a couple of other boys with behavioral issues; shoplifting items he didn’t really need and one arrest for burglarizing a house.

  Howie’s behavior in school steadily worsened as the years went by. None of it was very serious just antisocial to the point that everyone in the building breathed a sigh of relief when he dropped out two months before graduation. He gave no explanation why. One day he simply walked into the principal’s office and announced he was leaving. No one, not even his parents, bothered to try to talk him out of it.

  From that day until tonight, his family having given up on him years ago, left Howie unburdened with human ties or any responsibilities and he bounced around from one loser job to another. His adult life was spent in and out of trouble, jail and the workhouse without a care in the world. Howie was a criminal. He knew he was a criminal and simply accepted it as a fact.

  Howie made most of his money from home invasion burglaries. With his total lack of conscience, he justified it by simply believing it was what he was meant to do and that was that. The only legitimate job he had that he liked was as a nightclub bouncer.

  Howie was big only in comparison to the man in the front seat next to him. Howie was a touch over six feet and one hundred eighty rock solid pounds. While not at work
, Howie could be found at a boxing school in North Minneapolis training and working out.

  When he first started working as a bouncer, his actual size rarely intimidated the average drunken idiot, until the drunken idiot crossed the line with Howie. One night, a well-known and very large Viking football player tried to show off to his entourage. Howie politely asked the man and his friends to settle down but the football player thought he would have some fun with the smaller Howie. One punch from Howie and the fool’s eyes rolled back in his head, his knees buckled and the table they were seated at shattered when he fell on it. No one messed with Howie after that story got around.

  Howie’s partner was a man named Jimmy Oliver. Eight years older than Howie. He was Little to Howie being Big because he was barely five foot six and rail thin. Howie hooked up with him because Jimmy was a first-rate safe cracker and knew all of the best places in the Cities to fence stolen property. Jimmy kept it well hidden but he was scared to death of Howie who reeked of menace. Jimmy had witnessed Howie scaring cops with little more than a nasty look.

  It was Jimmy who had scoped out the job they were on tonight. Jimmy had taken a job using a false identification and forged documents with a home cleaning service. This would be the second job he had come up with while cleaning homes with this company and he figured the cops would find the connection after one more. The third one would be it then he would have to move on.

  The house they were going to hit was a sixteen-room beauty overlooking Lake of the Isles surrounded by a six-foot high, spike-topped, wrought iron fence. Jimmy had been inside with a weekly cleaning crew three times. The third time the home’s owner, a seventy-eight-year-old widow, was arguing with her daughter about selling the place. The daughter was adamant that it wasn’t safe for her mother to live there alone and the place was simply too much for her. The daughter also let it slip that they would be out of town and the place would be empty for several days, including the night Big and Little now found themselves sitting patiently across the street.