Diary of a Serial Killer

by Ed Gaffney

  “Now that I have committed myself to true sobriety, every day seems to begin with a fresh and growing wave of gratitude for the people in my life, especially my daughter, Stephanie. I expect that I will spend the rest of my life happily attempting to express to her my thanks for her love despite my indiscretions, my anger, and my generally infantile behavior. Thanks in large part to her, I find that my life now is rather insanely joyful.

  “As I believe Shakespeare once said, ‘Go figure.’”

  And the crowd went wild again.

  It was another half hour before the meeting broke up, and their group met at one of the side doors of the church.

  Malcolm, Thomas, Stephanie, Zack, Justin, Terry, and Vera.

  He wasn’t sure if it was because he had just come from an AA meeting, or whether it was the company, but it had been a long time since Terry had felt so peaceful.

  Just seven good friends, heading out for dinner at Emilio’s, one of the nicest restaurants in town, to continue the celebration of everything this past year had given to them all. All seven people on the same page, on the same team, on the same side of the fence.

  Not a conflict of interest in sight.

  Except for Justin.

  He wanted to go to Largeburger.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Ed Gaffney took ten years of work as a criminal lawyer, added an overactive imagination, and came up with a new career as a novelist.

  Ed lives west of Boston with his wife, New York Times bestselling author Suzanne Brockmann. He is shamelessly proud of their two children, Melanie, who is also a writer, and Jason, who is a stage actor. Ed is the author of Premeditated Murder and Suffering Fools, both featuring Zack Walker and Terry Tallach, and is currently at work on his fourth legal thriller, Enemy Combatant, which Dell will publish in fall 2007.

  If you enjoyed Ed Gaffney’s

  DIARY OF A SERIAL KILLER

  you’ll want to read all of his acclaimed mysteries. Look for them at your favorite bookseller.

  And read on for an electrifying early look at his next crime novel,

  ENEMY COMBATANT

  by

  Ed Gaffney

  coming soon from Dell.

  Enemy Combatant

  Coming soon

  PROLOGUE

  My property law professor, J. Keenan Bowles, used to get angry with me whenever I used the phrase “with all due respect,” because he thought it was code for “you don’t know what you’re talking about.” Bowles also loved to say that peace was nothing more than a state of mutual cowardice.

  And my best friend, Cliff Redhorse, recently told me that according to traditional Navajo teachings, my arrest for murder in the middle of the Gomez terrorism trial was merely the universe trying to put itself back into balance.

  With all due respect, Professor Bowles and the Navajos don’t know what they’re talking about.

  The only thing that was out of balance on the first day of the Gomez trial was me. I was exhausted because a cold front had rolled through central Arizona the night before, and Dad can’t sleep through thunderstorms.

  Right up until his stroke, my father, Henley Carpenter, had been the top assistant district attorney in Maricopa County. He prosecuted all the big criminal cases in Phoenix. He was a quick-thinking, fast-talking, high-energy lawyer in a town where everything seemed to run about two speeds slower than he did.

  But by the time that Juan Abdullah Gomez was charged with plotting the infamous Denver Tunnel Bombing, my father had been retired for years, and I was taking care of him in my parents’ house up on Payson’s Ridge. The injury to Dad’s brain had left him unable to speak, unable to move around without a wheelchair, forgetful, and terrified of electrical storms. So I spent most of that night with him in the living room, listening to the greatest hits of Barry White—Dad’s favorite CD.

  To this day, we still don’t know where Dad got his taste in music.

  Anyway, from about midnight to a little after dawn, over the background of an alarmingly deep voice musically seducing dozens of devastatingly sexy women, I reassured my father that despite the intermittent flashes of blinding light and air-cracking explosions that rattled our home’s windows, we were completely safe, and everything was going to be all right.

  Less than a week would pass before I realized just how pathetically wrong I was on both counts.

  My naïvete embarrasses me, depresses me, and really pisses me off.

  I should probably apologize in advance for my tone. Until recently, I did not consider myself to be an angry person. In fact, before the Gomez trial, I would have told you that I had big plans for an exceedingly bright future. I saw the world as a treasure chest of promise, a complicated but beautiful origami of constantly unfolding opportunities. The perfect day was one filled with discoveries.

  My favorite word used to be threshold.

  I don’t have a favorite word anymore.

  A perfect day for me now consists of little more than some chores, a bit of writing, and spending time with the few remaining members of my family. I have been told that after a time, my old self will reemerge, and my feelings of betrayal and suspicion will pass, but I’m afraid that I have developed some rather severe trust issues. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that my old self was long gone, and hadn’t left a forwarding address.

  I guess we’ll see.

  ONE

  It was a fluke that I was in the courtroom at all.

  The Juan Gomez trial was sensational by any standard, but for the scandal-starved southwest, it was a thrill-seeker’s ambrosia, and the good folks of Arizona were dying for a taste. Phoenix Superior Courtroom Number One was awash with the curious and the vengeful as the trial opened on that fateful June fifth. The defendant was being prosecuted for plotting two attacks: one in Houston, which, thank God, had not yet come to pass, and the one in Denver on that terrible May morning that killed one hundred-ninety-six people, and injured over a thousand. Gomez was the biggest terrorist suspect to be tried in the U.S. since Timothy McVeigh and Zacharias Moussari.

  The only reason I got to see the trial in the first place was because Sarge, the chief court officer, had saved a seat for me.

  Sarge was a former Marine, and the most physically intimidating sixty-five-year-old man I knew. He started as a court officer at around the same time my dad began his career as an A.D.A. As a child, whenever I accompanied my father to the courthouse, I would always spend a considerable amount of time staring at Sarge’s terrifying but mesmerizing flat-top hair. It didn’t hurt that he’d sneak me a Tootsie Pop every time he saw me.

  My Tootsie Pop connection dried up around the time I became a lawyer myself, but Sarge’s affection for my family never did. And he knew that on the fifth day of every June—except for 1995, when my mother’s appendix demanded a hasty detour to Phoenix General—my parents, my older brother Dale, and I would attend whatever criminal trial was taking place at the superior courthouse.

  It is the one family ritual I continue to honor even after everything that happened. But more about that later.

  At the time of the Gomez trial, Sarge was well aware that my mom and Dale were no longer alive, and that it was a real long shot that my father would have the energy to endure the wall-to-wall mob sure to make life in the wheelchair even harder than it already was. But that didn’t stop the husky court officer from saving a place for us anyway, just in case.

  And so the stage was set for my spectacularly ill-advised pratfall into the unique limelight strictly reserved for mass-murderers.

  I was in the third row, shoe-horned between reporters from U.S.A. Today on my left and the New York Daily News on my right. All the mega-press outlets had swept into town like an Old Testament plague when it was announced that Gomez would be tried here. Fifty of the nearly three hundred seats in the gallery were reserved for them. They complained—hundreds of them were shut out—but they weren’t the only ones clamoring for a firsthand view of terrorist justice, Arizona-style. Thousa
nds of ordinary citizens competed for the remaining opportunities to witness what Governor Atlee Franklin, in his ever-annoying drawl, had promised would be a demonstration of “good old-fashioned American West jurisprudence”—whatever that was supposed to mean.

  One thing that was definitely not old-fashioned, however, was the trial’s television coverage. That entire aspect of the case was being managed by the new, government-run, Judicial Broadcasting System. The idea was to balance the public’s right to view criminal trials with the limitations of space by setting up a single camera in the courtroom, operated by a federal employee. That source would then provide a live video and audio feed of the proceedings to any television network or station that requested it.

  And according to what I’ve heard, the system worked very well. Tens of millions watched as Judge Rhonda Klay presided over jury selection on the trial’s historic opening day.

  I was sorry to see that Judge Klay had been assigned to the case—not because she was one of the meanest judges in Arizona, but because she was one of the worst.

  The trouble was not that the small, lizard-like woman lacked the brains for the job. It was, instead, that Rhonda Klay used her considerable intelligence to twist the rules to make it almost impossible for any defendant to get a fair trial.

  I realize that last statement sounds like it was written by a defense attorney, and, well, it was. But for several years before the Gomez fiasco, aside from a handful of very mediocre trial performances, I had made my living almost exclusively as a court-appointed criminal appeals attorney. It was my job to review trial transcripts, and to spot judges who didn’t follow the rules. I was pretty good at it, too. And usually, when I found a problem, it was because a judge didn’t know or understand the relevant legal principle.

  What made Judge Klay unique was that she knew and understood all the relevant legal principles. She just slithered her way around and through them so that virtually all her criminal trials ended in guilty verdicts. Often in ways that were not ethical.

  Or at least they seemed not ethical. No one could prove anything, of course.

  For example, the pool of potential jurors for the Gomez trial looked almost exclusively Anglo. Considering that the defendant was Hispanic, and that about one-quarter of the population of Arizona is Hispanic, anyone in Gomez’s position might well have wondered how twelve individuals culled from an all-white group of individuals could comprise a jury of his peers.

  And anyone in Judge Klay’s position would surely be concerned, or maybe just puzzled, at the unusual racial composition of the jury pool.

  But the woman seated at the head of Courtroom One with the slicked-back hair and the skinny nose looked like everything was just dandy. She knew that potential jurors were supposed to be randomly divided into different groups for different cases behind closed doors, by officials who were sworn to act in accordance with even-handed rules. So she also knew that it was virtually impossible to prove that she’d tampered with the selection process to ensure a racial imbalance favorable to the prosecution.

  Why was I so sure that Judge Klay had stacked the deck? Because in every one of the major criminal cases she presided over where the defendant was Hispanic, the jury pool was always disproportionately Anglo. You do the math.

  From her perch behind the bench, the judge smiled in the direction of the defense table, and announced, “There being no objections to the jury pool, the defendant may exercise his first round of peremptory challenges.”

  It was a classic Rhonda Klay move—cheat, then dare anyone to call her on it. What was a lawyer supposed to do? Accuse her of manipulating the composition of the jury without a shred of evidence to prove it?

  And then, a surprise. The defendant did just that.

  Or at least he tried to. At the judge’s words, the brown-skinned man with the curly beard and the wire-rimmed glasses began whispering frantically to his lawyer, stabbing his finger at the potential juror pool, then pointing to himself, then shaking his head. Finally he motioned to his lawyer with both hands, as if urging the man to stand up and say something.

  But Gomez’s lawyer did neither. Which, sadly, was not a surprise. Because Gomez was being represented by Silent Steve Temilow, another disgrace to the criminal bar.

  Temilow didn’t belong in the courtroom for any number of reasons, high on the list of being that he couldn’t lawyer himself out of a bad parking ticket. But Judge Klay had appointed Temilow to the case because Gomez had complained twice during the six months he’d been awaiting trial that his attorneys weren’t representing him adequately.

  It wasn’t particularly unusual for indigent defendants in capital cases to doubt that the same government that was trying so diligently to have them executed was also going to provide them with an attorney who was really going to do battle for them. And Gomez was not exactly your run-of-the-mill indigent defendant in a capital case. Because he was suspected of a terrorist attack, when he was first arrested, he was treated by the government as an “enemy combatant,” which is another way of saying that he was held for the better part of eight months without the most basic of civil rights, and regularly tortured in an effort to extract information about future terrorist attacks.

  So it was hardly a shock when it was reported that after meeting his first lawyer, Gomez couldn’t bring himself to trust the man, and promptly requested another one.

  Gomez’s complaint about Attorney Number Two—a decent lawyer named Bruno Smithson—was that after months on the case, the attorney refused to do anything except advise Gomez to plead guilty, in the slender hope of avoiding execution. Bruno actually called me a couple of times while he was on the case. The first time, it was because he couldn’t figure out a way to convince Gomez they needed a lot of time to prepare for the case. Gomez thought they should go to trial four days after Bruno was appointed.

  The second call, several weeks later, was even more serious. Gomez insisted he was innocent, and refused to plead guilty. The problem with that was Bruno had never seen such an air-tight case, one featuring Gomez’s connections to the man who actually detonated the Denver bomb, as well as file cabinets crammed with other thoroughly damning evidence that the government had found when searching Gomez’s home. Bruno couldn’t accept that it was in Gomez’s best interest to force a trial, and their inability to get over that disagreement led to his dismissal.

  Enter Silent Steve Temilow, the human doormat.

  Now Gomez’s gesticulations were getting more exaggerated, so Steve appeared to take yet another tack—pretend that the heated whispers and the flailing arms to his left were nothing more than the products of a curious phantasm, which were best ignored. Rather stiffly, the lawyer shuffled through some papers on the table before him, clearly stalling.

  Judge Klay preferred a more direct approach to the situation. “Mr. Gomez, kindly control yourself—this is a court of law. And Mr. Temilow? Is there a problem? May we have the defendant’s first set of peremptory challenges, please?”

  There would, however, be no denying Juan Gomez. As Temilow rose to address the judge, the defendant rose, too, unwilling to let his attorney off the hook, his increasingly insistent body language demanding eye contact. But Silent Steve soldiered on, bravely disregarding his client’s sleeve-tugging and table-banging by adopting a somewhat robotic posture—his neck, shoulders and upper back so rigidly braced that he seemed almost physically incapable of turning and acknowledging the desperate pantomime taking place at his elbow. Staring straight ahead at Judge Klay, he finally spoke.

  “Um, Your Honor, I’d first like to personally apologize—and to apologize on behalf of the defendant as well—both to you and to the ladies and gentlemen of the jury pool for, well, for any impropriety that may have taken place over the last few minutes at the defense table.”

  Gomez looked dumbfounded. Could this get any worse? The answer, incredibly, was yes.

  “And with further apologies for any delay—and for any inconvenience caused by such delay—
I would like now to address the court’s inquiry regarding the composition of the jury.”

  As he realized that his attorney was finally, finally going to confront the extremely non-Hispanic-looking elephant in the room, Gomez seemed to relax a bit, and the expression on his face became somewhat expectant. That expression would soon disappear.

  Temilow droned on. “First, Your Honor, the defense specifically waives any objection to the composition of the jury pool, it being well-understood that the process by which these candidates were selected as potential jurors for this case was a random one.”

  When Gomez processed this capitulation, he began shaking his head back and forth, glaring at the judge, and pointing at Temilow, in silent, negative commentary.

  The lawyer awkwardly twisted his entire upper body so that although he was still facing the judge, his back was now fully to this client. Temilow seemed to hope that by maneuvering Gomez out of his field of view he might make the distracting little man disappear from the courtroom entirely. “And further, Your Honor, the defendant will also waive any peremptory challenges, as he is confident that any member of the community will render a fair and just verdict in this case.”

  It was at that point that Gomez could no longer restrain himself. “Oh no!” he said, continuing to shake his head, but now raising both hands above it as if Temilow had just scored a touchdown for the wrong team. “No, no, no. I am not waiving anything. And I am not apologizing for anything, either. I am firing this man. Right now. I want a new lawyer, judge. This one is not working for me. He is waiving everything, and apologizing, and he is not listening to me at all. I do not want to waive anything. I just want a new lawyer.”

  With the exception of the frenetic scratching of reporters’ pens and pencils against paper, the courtroom became deathly silent. Gomez lowered his hands, and just stood there, as if not quite certain what to do next. Then, suddenly, he sat down, and simply said, “That’s it. I’m done, Your Honor. I need a new lawyer.”