Gone Again

by James Grippando

  The crack of the gavel hit Jack like ice water.

  “All rise!”

  “Harmless error?” Hannah whispered. “Is he serious?”

  It was a bitter pill for a condemned man and his lawyers to swallow, the judicial equivalent of “You’re absolutely right, but it doesn’t make a dime’s worth of difference.”

  As the judge stepped down from the bench, Jack glanced at the prosecutor, who seemed more than pleased, and then at Carlos Mendoza’s attorney, who was downright smug.

  “It isn’t over,” he said in a voice barely loud enough for Hannah to hear. “Not yet.”

  CHAPTER 51

  The entire team convened around the kitchen table. Jack had Dylan Reeves on the speakerphone. Hannah, Eve, and Brian listened as Jack delivered the news. The mood was somber, but their client was taking it better than expected.

  “What now?” asked Reeves.

  “Judge Frederick slammed us by lifting the stay of execution,” said Jack. “He should have at least left it in effect until we took our appeal. So first thing tomorrow morning we file an emergency motion with the court of appeals in Atlanta. If we get it, then the court can schedule oral argument before a panel of three judges, who will give full consideration to all of the arguments that Judge Frederick rejected.”

  “But what if we don’t get a stay?”

  “We take a shot at the U.S. Supreme Court.”

  “What if that doesn’t work?”

  A volley of uneasy glances worked their way around the table. “Then you’ll want to make your preparations,” said Jack. “Phone calls. Letters. Time with clergy. Any personal items you may want someone special to have.”

  “It’s time to say my goodbyes. That’s what you mean?”

  Jack hesitated. It wasn’t the first time he’d had this conversation with a client, but having to tell people how much time they had left on this planet was one reason he’d decided against med school. “Yes.”

  Reeves sighed so deeply that it crackled over the speaker. “When will we know?”

  “Tomorrow’s Friday, so . . . no later than Monday, I would expect. But it could be anytime before your execution date. I can’t say exactly.”

  “So this is probably my last weekend, huh?”

  Probably. “We’ll know more by Monday,” said Jack.

  “Is there anything you need from me?”

  “No. Now it’s up to your lawyers to convince the court of appeals.”

  “Okay, then. It’s in your hands.”

  “It is.”

  “You’ll let me know as soon as you hear?”

  “Of course.”

  All eyes were on the speakerphone, which was silent. Jack would let his client decide when it was time to end this call.

  “All right,” said Reeves. “I’m gonna hang up now. But . . . thank you. Okay? That’s all.”

  There was a clunk before the click on the line, the sound of an unsteady hand returning the phone to its cradle. The dial tone hummed, and Jack silenced it with a press of a button.

  “You’re welcome,” said Jack.

  Hannah pushed away from the table. “I’ll start on the emergency motion.”

  “Brian and I will get going on the brief,” said Eve.

  “What are you gonna do, Jack?” asked Hannah.

  Jack rose slowly, sliding his hands into his pants pockets. “I want to pay one last visit to Debra Burgette.”

  CHAPTER 52

  Jack reached Debra on her cell phone as she was driving back from Aquinnah’s place. Alexander had stayed with his sister for the hearing, and Debra didn’t want to talk on the cell while he was in her backseat. She was passing downtown on her way to Cocoplum, and she offered to stop by the Freedom Institute.

  “I have a little something for you,” she said.

  Her car pulled into the driveway just after eight. Jack greeted her at the door. Alexander was with her. “Introduce yourself to Mr. Swyteck,” she told him.

  He did, and they shook hands. “I’ve heard a lot of good things about you, Alexander.”

  “I’ve heard good things about you, too,” he said.

  Jack glanced appreciatively at his mother, but the moment still felt awkward, if not bizarre, on the heels of Jack’s conversation with the man convicted of murdering her daughter.

  “May I use your restroom?” she asked.

  Jack showed her the way, which left him alone in the reception area with the younger brother that Sashi had led from a war zone in Chechnya to an orphanage in Moscow, only to leave him behind in Coral Gables. Beyond bizarre.

  “Wow!” said Alexander. “That is so cool!”

  He was staring at the motorcycle. “It belonged to my old boss,” said Jack.

  “Why do you park it here in front of the stairs? Do you ride it up to the second floor?”

  “No, no,” said Jack, smiling. “No one goes up there anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  It had been closed off ever since the termite inspector came crashing through the ceiling and landed in the dining room. Jack gave a simpler explanation. “It’s just really old up there. Do you want to sit on the bike?”

  “Seriously?”

  Jack smiled. “Come on.”

  They walked over, and Alexander climbed into the leather saddle. He could barely reach over the gas tank and grab the throttle, but that didn’t seem to dampen the thrill.

  “How fast does this thing go?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know. No one has ridden it in a while. This is what you’d call a classic. It’s a BSA, made in England around 1950.”

  “I like it. How much you want for it?”

  Neil had thought about selling it many times, whenever money was tight, but he’d always managed to hang on to it. “Sorry, not for sale.”

  Debra returned, and Jack suggested that Alexander wait in the back room and watch TV while he and Debra talked.

  “Mom doesn’t let me watch TV or play video games on school nights. She says I do enough of that at my dad’s house.”

  “Moms are usually right,” said Jack.

  “Yeah. That’s pretty much all I do when I’m there. He’s got a girlfriend.”

  That struck Jack as odd, given all of Gavin’s legal and other maneuvering to get primary custody.

  “We’ll make an exception tonight,” said Debra.

  Jack took him to the TV room, found something he liked, and then led Debra back to Neil’s old office. Jack went to the sitting area rather than his desk, and they sat across from each other at the chessboard on the coffee table.

  Debra handed him an envelope, and for a moment Jack thought it might contain a check, until he opened it. Inside was a wallet-sized photograph of a seventeen-year-old Sashi.

  “I didn’t want your last impression of her to be those photographs you saw in the notebook,” said Debra. “This is how I remember her.”

  Jack studied it. She had a pleasant expression, even if she wasn’t smiling. I wonder if she ever smiled?

  “Thank you,” said Jack. “I hate to dwell on the notebook, but I did want to talk about one of the men in there. The name that came out in court tonight.”

  “Mikhail Volkov?”

  “Yes. He hasn’t admitted it, and unless we find the disposable phone that was used to make those phone calls to you on Sashi’s birthday we can’t ever prove it. But I believe he’s our guy. I’m sorry to have to tell you that, because you came to me hoping that it was Sashi, and that she was still alive. But I feel like I have to tell you this. It wasn’t Sashi. I do believe it was Volkov.”

  If Dylan Reeves had taken his news well, Jack sensed that Debra was on the other end of the spectrum. But she was keeping it inside.

  “Why are you so sure?” she asked.

  “For one, it makes geographic sense: the cell tower analysis indicated that the last call you received was placed from Little Moscow.”

  “The FBI told the state attorney it came from my house.”

  “
They said it was possible it came from your neighborhood. I obviously think that’s a bogus theory—that you made the call to yourself.”

  “Which is my point. Does anybody really know where the call came from? It all seems like technical mumbo jumbo and guesswork to me.”

  “It’s not just the cell towers,” said Jack. Volkov also had motive to strike back at you. Sashi toyed with him. She led him on. It would have been one thing if he’d simply been burned by a teenager. But look at how this turned out for him. He’s been mutilated. In his mind, that never would have happened if it weren’t for Sashi.”

  “So he takes it out on me? Calls me on my daughter’s birthday?”

  “Who else is he going to take it out on? He thought he was on his way to a rendezvous with a teenage girl. It all blew up when he dialed the cell number Sashi gave him and you answered.”

  “That might explain why he called me on her birthday. But why did he call me during the hearing? And why has he been following me and Alexander?”

  “Following you? Are you talking about the man who was watching you and Alexander outside that deli in Little Moscow—the one you told me about the last time you were here?”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t say that was Volkov. You said it was just a random person who saw your picture in a Russian-language newspaper and was sneering at you for rehoming Sashi.”

  “That’s what I thought initially. Even though I got a pretty good look at him outside the deli, it wasn’t until last night that I made the connection in my mind between the man at the deli and those men Sashi was contacting on the Internet. So I double-checked the notebook. I was ninety-nine percent sure I had a match. And after this evening’s hearing, when you put up those pictures on the screen in the courtroom, I was absolutely certain.”

  “Debra, I made a point of letting you know that the Institute has limited time and even more limited resources. We can’t investigate every lead. But if you had told me that you were being watched by one of those strangers that Sashi had contacted on the Internet, I would have been all over it.”

  “But I didn’t make that connection till last night.”

  “Then you should have called me last night.”

  She lowered her eyes. “I’m sorry. You’re right. But it’s not like I withheld information that would have helped your client. As you said, if I was being harassed by someone from Little Moscow, it means Sashi probably didn’t make those phone calls to me. And if Sashi wasn’t making those phone calls . . .” She still couldn’t say it, and Jack didn’t fill in the blank for her. He was trying to understand her reluctance to follow up on Mikhail Volkov. To Jack, Volkov was a solid lead to the truth; to Debra, he was a clear path to a conclusion she couldn’t accept.

  “You need to report this to the police,” Jack said. “It would be difficult to convict Volkov on stalking charges based solely on anonymous calls from a prepaid cell that can’t be linked to him with any certainty. But if you can identify him as the man who was watching you and Alexander, the state attorney could make a case against him.”

  “Calling the police is one option,” she said.

  “There’s no better option when you’re dealing with a stalker,” said Jack.

  “But . . . I think maybe he wants to tell me something.”

  “What?”

  “You’re going to think I’m crazy, just like everyone else does. But after all this courtroom drama, we still don’t know what happened to Sashi. I think Volkov is afraid to say what he knows after the horrible things that Carlos Mendoza did to him. I think he’s trying to ‘tell me’ without telling me that Sashi is still alive.”

  Jack considered it, but only for an instant. Debra might never let go. “If you’re sure that the man watching you and your son was Mikhail Volkov, my strong advice is that you report it to the police.”

  She seemed to be waiting for him to say more—perhaps a validation of her theory that Sashi could still be alive. It didn’t come. “Well, I need to get Alexander home and to bed,” she said, rising.

  Jack walked her out of the office, and she stopped him in the hallway before reaching Alexander. “I’m going to either find Sashi, or find out what happened to her. You know that, right?”

  Families didn’t always find answers, but Jack saw no point in saying it again. “I hope you do,” he said. “But please be careful. And promise me that you will tell the police about Mikhail Volkov.”

  She didn’t answer as quickly as Jack would have liked. “I will,” she said, and Jack walked with her as she started down the hall toward her son.

  CHAPTER 53

  Andie took Uber to Abuela’s town house, and Jack met her there. They wanted his grandmother to be the first to know that Baby Swyteck was no Junior, and her name was Riley. Jack had to get back to the Freedom Institute, so they blocked out half an hour, which was barely long enough for Abuela to stop shedding tears of joy.

  “La niña preciosa!” she said as she caressed Andie’s belly.

  “Precious little girl,” said Andie, translating for Jack.

  “I know what it means,” he said.

  Abuela fired back in Spanish: “Yes, Siri told him.”

  It was a running joke that Andie’s Spanish was better than Jack’s, but it had nearly sent Abuela into cardiac arrest to catch him pulling out his iPhone at last year’s Noche Buena celebration to ask, “Siri, how do you say ‘pig roast’ in Spanish?” His Anglo father and stepmother spoke only English in the home he grew up in. It took three decades after his mother’s death for Abuela to find a way to leave Cuba for Miami, and she’d made it her sole mission in life to give her gringo grandson a crash course in the Spanish language and all things Cuban. Jack’s hope was that the gift of a granddaughter might finally bump his grade up from a C minus.

  Jack got a call from Hannah on his cell, and he stepped out the back door to take it on the patio, leaving Andie and Abuela alone at the kitchen table.

  “Rah-lee,” she said. “Que linda.”

  “Ry-ley,” said Andie. They’d been over this five times. It hadn’t occurred to her how hard it would be for Abuela to pronounce it. “Like the old Mexican song,” she said, then sang it: “Ay, ay, ay, ay, canto y no llores.”

  “Ah! Ry-lee!”

  They smiled and shared a little laugh, but eventually Andie steered the conversation to a more serious matter. Her Spanish wasn’t perfect, and she wanted no misunderstanding in her word choice, so she reverted to English.

  “I visited St. Hugh’s Cemetery this week,” she said.

  Abuela knew exactly what she was saying. “I go every week.”

  They hadn’t told her about Andie’s preeclampsia, or how the fact that Jack’s mother had developed the same condition made them feel. Andie wasn’t exactly sure why she’d brought it up. She just wanted to know more than Jack seemed willing to tell her. Abuela didn’t need much prodding.

  “I in Bejucál when Ana writes me,” she said, using the easier present tense, as she often did when speaking English. “The letter say, ‘Abuela Querida . . .’”

  Dear Grandmother. The way her face was beaming made Andie smile.

  “I press it to my heart. I say, Gracias a Dios! Gracias a La Milagrosa!”

  Andie had to think about those last few words for a moment, but she was pretty sure that they translated to the Miraculous One. “Who is La Milagrosa?”

  “Young woman. It makes many years now—nineteen-oh-one. She dies giving birth to a baby. Baby die too.”

  “How sad.”

  “Sí. Now she lies—lays?”

  Andie couldn’t keep it straight either. “She’s buried?”

  “Sí. In Habana, el cementerio de Colón. With baby at her feet,” she said, pointing at her own. “Many years pass. They open the . . .”

  “Tomb?”

  “Tomb. Sí. The baby is . . .”

  Andie watched as she demonstrated. For a moment, the old woman was a young mother with her baby cradled in her arms, rock
ing gently back and forth.

  Andie wasn’t one to buy into miracles along the line of the Jesus Nebula or the Virgin’s apparition on a piece of burnt toast, but Abuela’s story gave her chills, if only for the way she told it.

  “Today still, women in Cuba who pray for baby go to La Milagrosa. They give flowers. I go there. I pray. I give flowers. Ana Maria have baby,” she said, smiling, but the smile turned sad.

  Andie knew how the story ended, and she didn’t want Abuela to feel that she had to finish if she didn’t want to.

  “Now I have Jack,” said Abuela.

  “We have Jack,” said Andie.

  The smile returned. Abuela rose, went to Andie, and embraced her. “And we have Riley,” she whispered.

  Jack was in the moonlight on Abuela’s patio, seated in a white wooden rocking chair, his phone pressed to his ear.

  The call had come from Gavin Burgette. His exact whereabouts on the day of Sashi’s disappearance had been an issue ever since Jack, on cross-examination, had raised the specter that Gavin was away from home on something other than a “business trip.” That was the reason for this call.

  “Nicole says that your partner has been asking for travel records to document my business trip,” said Gavin.

  “Yeah. I asked Hannah to handle it.”

  “Well, she’s handling it, all right. She’s being a fucking pest.”

  Jack smiled to himself. You go, Hannah. “When can we expect to see the records?” asked Jack.

  “Never.”

  “It’s a simple request,” said Jack. “A little documentation would put an end to the question of whether you were on a business trip, whether you were meeting Carlos Mendoza to rehome Sashi, or whether you were somewhere else.”

  “The answer is somewhere else.”

  Jack rose from the chair, surprised by the answer. “Where?”

  Gavin breathed out, almost groaning over the line. “I was with another woman, okay? You happy now?”