Chasing The Dead (An Alex Stone Thriller)

by Joel Goldman

  Judge West knew the prosecution’s theory that Alex had staged the crime scene to make it look like self-defense, and he had access to the crime scene photos, which were part of the court file. If he was worried that Alex would back out of their deal, he could have manufactured the photo to keep her in line.

  Or maybe, Alex thought, he hoped the photograph would force her to confess her guilt to him, her admission giving him a more powerful weapon to use against her. But if that was his plan, it hadn’t worked. She hadn’t confessed and never would. Not to him. Not to Bonnie. Not to anyone. Not ever.

  If she was right that Judge West was behind the photograph and that he had been waiting for the right moment to use it, she had to prove that it was a fake. That was the only way she’d be able to make a clean break from him.

  The judge wasn’t the kind of person who would spend time hunched over a laptop manipulating images in Photoshop. Which meant he had to have had help, and the help was always the weakest link in any conspiracy. So all she had to do was figure out a way to prove the picture was phony, find whoever had created it, and then tell Judge West what he could do with it. Not easy, but it was enough to stop the bleeding.

  Her new client, Jared Bell, was next up on her critical list. If the case against him was as strong as Judge West had said, Bell would be convicted or plead guilty regardless of which public defender represented him. So why would Judge West use his influence to get the case assigned to her and why would he go to such lengths to make certain she persuaded Jared to plead guilty? The inescapable answer rocked her. Jared Bell was innocent and Judge West wanted him to spend the rest of his life in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.

  A criminal defense lawyer’s two worst nightmares were helping the guilty go free and failing to save the innocent. Alex had lived the first with Dwayne Reed, and now she was faced with the second.

  Chapter Eight

  ALEX WASN’T READY TO GO HOME. She needed more time to wind down and think and enough beer to help with the former without making the latter impossible. And that meant taking a trip to the Zoo.

  The Zoo was a downtown dive bar at Twelfth and McGee, a narrow, shotgun joint with room for a couple of dozen people. There were stools along the bar, a few chairs against the back wall, and standing room only for everyone else. The bartenders did business in front of a floor-to-ceiling display of whiskey, and the surest way to get thrown out was to ask them for a drink made in a blender. The walls, ceiling, and anything that was nailed down were covered with graffiti, some patrons just signing their names, others bragging or begging, and a few making promises they couldn’t keep.

  Alex was a regular. She liked it when it was jumping with shoulder-to-shoulder people and she could get lost in the noise. But she was glad it was Tuesday night, because that wasn’t a big night for the bar business and she needed a quiet place to drink in peace while she tried to find a way out of the wilderness.

  Half a dozen people were scattered around the room when she took a seat at the bar, the stools on either side of her empty, and asked for a bottle of Bully! porter. It was ten o’clock. She turned her phone off, not wanting to be bothered. Taking an easy pull, she rubbed the back of her neck, feeling her knotted muscles give a little bit. Cranking her head from side to side, she saw Hank Rossi approaching her from the back of the bar.

  “I’ll have what she’s having,” Rossi said, taking the stool next to hers.

  Alex shook her head. “Of all the gin joints . . .”

  “In all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine. Casablanca. Great flick, even if the cop was on the take.”

  She wasn’t in the mood for company, especially his and especially if he liked Casablanca as much as she did. Rossi had arrested her for Dwayne Reed’s murder. He’d also saved her life when he killed Gloria Temple. None of which made them pals, Rossi making it clear that he was just doing his job, neither of them trusting the other. It didn’t matter that she’d been acquitted of murdering Dwayne and he’d been cleared in Gloria’s shooting.

  Rossi was long and muscled, with dark-eyed, craggy good looks that drew women close until the blood on his hands drove them away, blood that belonged to the bad guys who’d put up a fight, taken a shot at him, or just pissed him off too many times.

  Alex was surprised that he would join her, certain he’d rather drink by himself in a toilet stall than have a beer with her.

  “Here’s lookin’ at you, kid,” Rossi said. He tilted his beer toward hers and they clinked bottles. “Didn’t figure you for a Bogart fan.”

  “I was always more into Ingrid Bergman.”

  “Even if she was into Bogart?”

  “Girl has to dream.”

  “I’ll give you that, but I don’t thing she would have gone for you tonight.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “’Cause you smell like horseshit. And I don’t mean that metaphorically.”

  “Metaphorically? Don’t tell me you’re reading Thirty Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary.”

  “I am. Last night I got all the way up to motherfucker.”

  “Ah, but can you use it in a sentence?”

  “Stone, you motherfucker, you smell like horseshit.”

  Alex cocked her head, fighting against a laugh and losing, not wanting to tell him where she’d been. “You’re definitely getting your money’s worth from that book.”

  “No doubt about that, even if I didn’t think of you as the horseshit type.”

  “And I never think of you at all.”

  Rossi grinned. “We both know that’s bullshit. Deep down I think you like me.”

  “There you go again, Rossi, doing all that thinking. Didn’t your father warn you about working without tools? Besides, why do you care? It’s not like I’m at the top of your Christmas list.”

  “I don’t have a Christmas list. Hell, I don’t even have a fucking stocking.”

  “Poor pitiful Rossi. Need a suggestion on where to put your lump of coal?”

  “No, thanks. I’d rather keep it in the sunlight where I can admire its natural beauty. And, not that you’re asking, but I’d say you could use a little sunlight.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means you don’t just smell like shit. The way you’re hunched over and your face is all pinched, you look like you’re trying to decide between going postal or fetal.”

  “You really know how to make a girl feel good about herself.”

  Rossi swiveled on his barstool, facing her. “Doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”

  Alex straightened, flattening her palms on the bar and forcing a smile. “Is that better?”

  “Now you just look like you’ve got gas.”

  “Fuck you, Rossi.”

  “No, thanks, but I get it.”

  “Get what?”

  “All most people know about killing is what they see on television. Good guy kills the bad guy and goes home for dinner with the wife and kids like it was just another day at the office. But it’s not, is it?”

  Alex rubbed her hands around her bottle, setting it on the bar.

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “No, it isn’t, is right. It changes you forever. I still get the nightmares, wake up sweating like it’s all going down again, my heart trying to bust out of my chest.”

  Alex nodded and sighed. There’d been moments when Rossi had reached out to her like he cared. She hadn’t known what to make of him in those moments, whether that was the real Rossi and the rest was just for show. But in this moment, she hoped it was the real Rossi, because he was the only person who truly knew what she’d been through. Bonnie’s therapist had tried to understand but could never bridge the gulf between his compassion and her experience.

  “I know the feeling, and I get so worked up, so angry, I can’t get back to sleep. I just stay mad. Is it like that with you?”

  He shrugged. “Nope. I thank God they’re dead and I’m not and I go back to sleep, and you know why I can do th
at? It’s because I don’t feel guilty. I was doing my job each and every time, by the book on permissible use of deadly force. And when I had to go on the record, I told the truth. I’ve got a clear conscience, and that makes a world of difference.”

  Rossi’s message was clear. Alex dropped her chin to her chest, biting her lip, anger swelling and rising from her belly. She sat up, squaring around at him.

  “Is that what this is about, Rossi? You sit down next to me like this is a PTSD support group and pretend you give a shit about me? Why, because you think I’ve got a guilty conscience and if you give me some love, I’ll come clean?”

  “I guarantee you’ll feel better. And why not come clean? You’ve got the double-jeopardy passport to freedom. Or you can spend the rest of your life hanging out in dive bars, drinking alone in the middle of the week, wondering if Bonnie’s figured it out yet and what she’ll do when she does and if you’ll ever get another good night’s sleep or if you’ll ever stop being so pissed off at yourself for making such a fucking mess of your life.”

  Alex stood, trembling. Rossi had gutted her, and it was all she could do not to scream and take a swing at him or just puddle onto the floor and cry like a baby. She gripped the back of the barstool, steadying herself and gritting her teeth.

  “Where the hell do you get off, Rossi? I was fucking acquitted, you miserable asshole! So take your bullshit psychology and stick it up your ass with your fucking lump of coal.”

  Rossi’s face was a pool of calm. “You want my advice, Counselor, I’d get a grip on that anger. Makes you hard to live with.”

  Alex didn’t answer. She dropped a dollar on the bar and left without looking back.

  Chapter Nine

  THE PUBLIC DEFENDER’S OFFICES were on the twentieth and twenty-first floors of Oak Tower at Eleventh and Oak, one of Kansas City’s first skyscrapers. The original fourteen stories were doubled in 1929, and in 1974 the terra-cotta exterior was blanketed in stucco, a sad example of style buried by progress. Its days as class A office space long behind it, Oak Tower was perfect for public defenders, who didn’t have to worry about impressing clients. Lawyers who dealt in life and death had bigger issues than the pale rose paint chipping off the walls and the threadbare carpet lining the halls.

  On her drive downtown the next morning, Alex bounced back and forth between how Judge West had blackmailed her with the photograph and how Hank Rossi had dissected her psyche. Both had unnerved her in spite of the show she’d put on, leaving her feeling raw inside and out.

  When Alex got off the elevator, no one was at the receptionist’s desk, the secretaries’ stations were abandoned, and the halls were empty. She’d started toward her office when Grace Canfield came out of the bathroom, wiping her swollen red eyes with a tissue.

  Grace was one of the investigators in the PD’s office. Middle-aged and stout, her black hair cut short and spiky and flecked with gray, she was a lifelong resident of Kansas City’s east side, home to many of the African American clients Alex defended. She went to church with their families, worked their cases, and went to their funerals, giving her more street cred than any lawyer in the office; even the gangbangers called her Miz Grace.

  “Grace, why are you crying? Where is everybody?”

  “Oh, Alex,” she said, fighting back tears, her voice catching. “It’s Robin. She was killed last night in a car accident. They’re all in the conference room.”

  Robin Norris had spent thirty years in the public defender’s office, the last twenty running the operation. She hired Alex straight out of law school, raising her from a pup, as Robin put it after Alex won a case no one thought could have been won, and she took Alex back after the Dwayne Reed case when everyone bet she wouldn’t. Her death left Alex numb, the reality not yet registering. Though she’d heard the words, part of her brain refused to accept the news, believing instead that someone must have made a mistake. She slumped against the wall, wide-eyed and gut punched.

  “What happened?”

  “She was out somewhere up north and lost control of her car and ran off the road. She was dead at the scene.”

  “Oh, my God!”

  Grace sniffed and straightened, wiping her hands against her sides. “I know. I know, but if I don’t get to work and get my mind on something else, I’m going to spend the whole day crying, and that’s only gonna make me feel worse.”

  Alex went to the conference room, pushing the wooden doors open and stepping into a sea of sorrow. People were hugging as they sobbed or staring out the windows, dazed and mute. Others were milling around the room, lost. Alex moved from one to another, squeezing a hand, rubbing a back, and giving a hug, tears rolling off her cheeks, everyone muttering that it couldn’t be real, that it didn’t make sense, and that it wasn’t fair, all of it true.

  Looking out on the city, she saw the muddy Missouri River rolling past the north side of downtown on its way to St. Louis. A century and a half ago, bluffs a hundred feet high hid the view of the river until ancestral Kansas Citians carved through them, laying the streets that now ran two hundred feet beneath where she stood. Microscopic people glided by Oak Tower, as distant from her and her loss as those who had dug their way from the river. Robin’s death had stopped time for her and everyone else in the room, the rest of the world swirling around them, sweeping past without a second glance.

  “Can I have your attention, everyone.”

  Alex turned around to see the woman who had joined them. She was slender, her sandy hair cut in a bob. Half a head shorter than Alex, and in her forties, she was dressed in a dark-green pantsuit from the Hillary Clinton collection. On Alex’s beauty scale, Bonnie was at the top and everyone else was ordinary, though this woman was ordinary-plus in spite of the pantsuit, the strength in her face and the glint in her hazel eyes setting her apart.

  “My name is Meg Adler. I’m terribly sorry for your loss. I work in the St. Louis PD’s office—at least I did until I got the call about Robin. I caught the seven a.m. flight on Southwest and got here as quickly as I could. I’ve been assigned to take Robin’s place—not that anyone can really do that—until a permanent replacement is chosen. I know what a difficult time this is for everybody, but—and I don’t mean to sound callous—we’ve got clients, cases, and trials. We’ll let you know about funeral arrangements as soon as we can. I’ll be stopping by each of your offices so we can get better acquainted. In the meantime, I know this may sound corny, but from what I’ve been told about Robin I think it’s true—let’s get back to work because that’s what she’d want us to do.”

  Alex took the long way to her office so that she could walk by Robin’s, lingering in the open doorway, imagining Robin sitting behind her desk, glasses halfway down her nose, engrossed in her latest bureaucratic tangle. She’d given up the courtroom to be an administrator, keeping the office afloat with the budgetary equivalent of bubblegum and Band-Aids.

  The credenza behind her desk was crowded with framed photographs of her five children, a timeline of their lives. She wore last year’s styles, buying them on sale to save money for her kids, did her own hair and nails, and told everyone else how great they looked. Fifty-five years old, she’d earned every wrinkle and every extra pound that she wished she could lose. She was a single mother, divorced when her oldest child was not yet ten, her ex-husband long removed from their lives. Alex had always marveled at Robin’s grit, raising two families, the kids at home and the people at work. Thinking of both families made her heart hurt.

  There were a few nonfamily photographs tucked in among the rest. One showed Robin shaking hands with the governor, one showed her in the bleachers at a Royals game after she caught a home run ball, arms stretched to the sky in celebration, and another, taken six months ago, showed her receiving an award at the annual Missouri State Bar Association meeting at a hotel in St. Louis. Judge Anthony Steele, who’d recently been elevated from circuit court trial judge to judge for the Missouri Court of Appeals, presented an award to Robin for outstand
ing service. In the photograph, the two of them were shaking hands and smiling for the camera. Alex had been there. True to form, Robin gave all the credit for the award to the lawyers and staff in her office.

  Alex smiled at the memory, not for the award but for what she saw later that night in the hotel bar. Robin and Judge Steele were huddled together in a dark corner, rubbing shoulders, their faces inches apart, oblivious to anyone else. She had kidded Robin about it the next morning, Robin telling Alex she was being ridiculous not only because Judge Steele was married but because both the judge and his wife, Sonia, were her close friends. But she was blushing nonetheless.

  Though Robin never confided in Alex about her personal relationships, Alex knew that she didn’t live a cloistered life. She and Bonnie had seen her around town with different men over the years, none of them Judge Steele and none of them wearing wedding rings.

  Looking at the photograph now, Alex could understand if they had hooked up. Judge Steele was silver haired, with sparkling blue eyes and the kind of rugged good looks that improved with age, and Robin, in addition to being attractive, had the serenity, self-confidence, and zest for life that any man would have appreciated. And they were out of town, away from prying eyes, sharing the perfect cocktail for a one-night fling, the hell with marriage and friendship.

  Knowing that Robin was dead made Alex wish that Robin did have that fling, even if she couldn’t imagine Robin as a home-wrecking adulterer. She wanted to remember her alive and passionate, not lying dead in the wreckage of her car.

  For Alex, Robin was the public defender, one not existing without the other. Robin didn’t hesitate to criticize or praise, doing the former in private and the latter in public, telling complainers to suck it up. The only time Alex asked her when she planned to retire, Robin scoffed, saying she’d die on the job. And now she had. Hand at her throat, Alex shuddered and squelched a sob, hearing Robin’s voice telling her to suck it up.

  Meg Adler was waiting for Alex when she got to her office, sitting in a chair on the visitor’s side of the desk, a file in her lap, and thumbing through messages on her iPhone.