Peter had been on the Today show? On Thursday?
I really had seen him in Grand Central Terminal!
Chapter 79
“HARRIS IS THE MISTAKE,” Cogle shot back. “And his murderous ass is going to get corrected come Friday. This is bullshit. You already had all the appeals you’re going to get. Everything is in order.”
“You wouldn’t just be saying that because it’ll be your job if we find something, would you?” Charlie said, taking out his cell. “You’re not actually going to make me call the DA again, are you?”
“Fine,” Cogle said, leaving.
“This is a wild goose chase, isn’t it?” Detective Cantele said, drumming her fingers against the cheap office table as we sat there, waiting. “It’s gotta suck knowing your boy is going down, and you couldn’t stop it, huh, Baylor?”
Why don’t you shut up, bitch, I wanted to say to the cop as Cogle came in with a bulky white evidence box.
Charlie threw open the lid and quickly flipped through the file folders. He lifted out a bag with a faded pair of panties in them and shoved them back into the box.
“Where are the hair samples?” he yelled at Cogle.
“Hair samples?” Cogle said, scratching his tilted head. “What do you mean?”
Charlie pointed at the evidence manifest.
“Right here. Evidence Sample D2. Hair sample found beneath the ligature.”
Cogle hummed as he slowly flipped through the file folders. Finally he stopped and shrugged elaborately.
“What do you know? Must have gotten lost,” he finally said. “Maybe a rat ate them or they evaporated. We are talking seventeen years, right? Was that all, or do you two need to use the restroom before you leave?”
Back out in the baking parking lot, Charlie seemed to have trouble opening our rental car. He suddenly threw the keys as hard as he could across the lot, then sat down on the concrete car stop beside it.
I sat down next to him, stewing in my own depressing thoughts.
Peter knew I was alive.
That was bad. About the worst thing possible. Was he still in New York? I thought about calling Emma and telling her to get out of the apartment, but then I remembered she was at her friend’s in Brooklyn.
I wondered if I should go straight home and grab my daughter. I’d run once before. I could do it again. Throw a dart at a map and just go. Even if Peter was onto me, at least he didn’t know about Emma.
I shouldn’t have been surprised that Peter was chief of police now. He’d always been ambitious. But representing the Jump Killer victims’ advocate group? What a goddamn bullshit artist. He must have been thrilled all those years, thinking I was dead without having to kill me himself.
“The police destroyed that evidence, Nina,” Charlie finally said. “They’re laughing at us. They don’t care that an innocent man is about to die. No one does. That’s it, Nina. That’s all she wrote. We’re done. Justin’s done. It’s over. We have to accept the inevitable.”
I sat there thinking about that. Maybe Charlie was right. Maybe I should just let Charlie and Justin figure it out. Every man, woman, and child for themselves.
But right there, among the cop cars, with tar sticking to my four-inch heels, my anger tipped the scales against my fear. I was tired of running. Tired of Peter. Tired of what I had become.
I wasn’t going to run. I wasn’t going to hide. I was going to do the right thing.
“Nothing’s inevitable,” I said as I finally stood. I held out my hand and helped Charlie back to his feet as well. “They won this battle. Now let’s go and win the war.”
Chapter 80
AFTER WE FOUND the rental’s keys (Charlie had flung them under one of the Boca PD cruisers), we drove to the parking lot of a nearby Burger King, where I proceeded to go through Charlie’s messy files like I was possessed.
Alone and penniless, I had managed to raise a daughter in New York City with nothing but sheer will. I was pissed off now. I was going to straighten out Justin’s case if it killed me.
“What are you looking for now?” Charlie cried.
I pulled out a sheet of copy paper on which Charlie had typed, “HARRIS’S ALIBI INFO!” in big, bold letters across the top.
“This,” I said.
I read that Harris’s ex-fiancée’s name was Fabiana Desmarais. She was a Haitian immigrant who lived in Princeton, Florida, a few miles north of the Homestead Correctional Institution.
“How far away is Princeton from here?” I said. “We need to speak to Fabiana.”
“Wait one second,” Charlie said. “I tried that before the first habeas corpus appeal three years ago. Not only wouldn’t Fabiana’s mother let me speak to her, but she actually sicced her dog on me, a half-starved boxer with a bad attitude.”
“Hey, maybe you rub dogs the same way you rub people, Charlie,” I said. “I’d like a shot at her.”
“Oh, right,” he said. “We’ll use your secret weapon: charm. I forgot about the universal love all people have for pushy New York broads.”
We took the Florida Turnpike and about an hour and a half later, we zigzagged through some side streets until we pulled up in front of a sign that said HOMESTEAD MOBILE HOMES.
“No!” I said as we pulled up at Fabiana’s address. Beyond a rusty mailbox was an obviously deserted double-wide trailer with broken windows.
“I’m the manager. Can I help you?” called a very dark black man beneath the retractable awning of another trailer across the street.
As we stepped up, I saw that he was sitting on a faded wooden grapefruit crate and that he was working a paper or something in his dark, nimble fingers.
“We’re looking for Fabiana Desmarais,” I said.
“You cops?” the man said without looking up.
“No, we’re lawyers,” I said.
“I’d tell you even if you were cops,” the old man said with a yellow grin. “Fabiana and her snooty mother took off in the middle of the night about two years ago. No forwarding address.”
“You wouldn’t happen to have her social security number on file?” Charlie said, glancing at the rusted trailer.
“Since she owed me six months’ rent, I actually tried all that skip trace stuff. Number they both gave me was fake. Maybe they went back to Haiti like the old battle-ax of a mother kept threatening. Said America was an uncultured cesspool. America! I used to say to her, ‘How many illegal American immigrants they got paddling shark-infested waters into Haiti on tire rafts last time you checked?’ ”
“Oh, well. Thanks for your time,” Charlie said.
“You know what Fabiana’s mother reminds me of? This,” the old man said, holding up the piece of paper he’d been working. It was an origami cobra. He made a hissing sound as he twirled its tail between his fingers.
“Nice,” Charlie said. “Thanks again.”
“Well, at least we didn’t get bit,” Charlie said as we got back into the hot car. “Are you finished now, or do you need some more face time with the origami man?”
I scrubbed at my forehead with my fingers. “We need to speak to Justin again.”
“Up in Raiford?” Charlie said. “You were just up there.”
“If he doesn’t give us anything, then it’ll be on him,” I said.
Chapter 81
IT WAS COMING ON THREE by the time our chartered Cessna twin-prop arrived in Raiford on Tuesday. All this flying was costing a fortune, but an innocent man’s life was at stake—and I was billing everything to my Global 100 firm. Charlie called and made arrangements with the warden as we were driving past the growing crowd of protesters outside the prison grounds.
Harris looked stunned as Charlie and I met him in the lawyer visiting room.
“Back again so soon?” he said to me.
“Hate to interrupt your reading,” I said, tossing him a bag of mini pretzels.
“Hey, thanks. They’re my favorite,” he said, actually sounding pleased. He ripped open the bag with his shackle
d hands, dumped the pretzels onto the interview table, and ate one.
“OK,” I said. “I got you something, Justin. Now you have to give us something. We need to speak to Fabiana, but she’s no longer living in Princeton. She left and didn’t leave any forwarding info. Do you have any clue where she might have gone?”
“You kidding me?” he said with his mouth full. “I haven’t spoken to Fabiana since she threw the engagement ring I bought her in my face a decade and a half ago. That bitch wants me dead, and she’s going to get her way. You’re digging a dry hole.”
“You know what I’m sick of, Justin?” I said, suddenly smashing one of the pretzels on the table with my fist. “You and your attitude. You don’t want me to try to save your life? That’s not macho, that’s just stupid. Or just come out and say it. Have the guts to say, ‘I did it! I killed Tara Foster!’ ”
He gaped at me with his open mouth for a moment before he closed it. “But I didn’t,” he said, spitting crumbs.
I held my hand to my ear. “Holy moly! Did I just hear someone actually defend himself?”
“Who’s running the show here, Charlie?” Harris said.
“Isn’t that obvious?” Charlie said, eyeballing me.
“Fine. Try her cousin Maddie,” Harris said. “She was the one who actually introduced us.”
“Maddie what,” I said, thumbing my iPhone.
“Maddie Pelletier,” Harris said. “She’s a teacher at the high school in Key West now. She was always pretty cool to me. She even writes sometimes.”
I thumbed the phone book app. “I got a Madeline Pelletier on Fogarty Avenue.”
“That’s her,” Justin said.
I stood. “We have to go, Justin,” I said. “But we’ll be back.”
“Yeah, for the execution,” Harris mumbled.
“No, dumbass,” I said, pointing at the barred gate. “To open that door and let your mother hug you again.”
Chapter 82
“HEY, WHO WANTS A BEER BRAT?” Peter yelled, smiling, as he snapped barbecue tongs in front of his smoking grill.
With the festive smell of charring jerk chicken and chorizo sausage, the cries of running children and Neil Diamond playing softly from his backyard speakers, the barbecue seemed more like a birthday party or a christening than an event for the surviving family of serial killer victims.
It was an eclectic group: black, white, brown, rich, poor, even a gay Protestant minister. Death didn’t discriminate. Peter knew that firsthand.
The barbecue was actually one of several events planned for the group this week. Tomorrow, a chartered bus and plane from Miami would take all of them to the governor’s mansion in Tallahassee for a sit-down and some more press coverage, Peter hoped. Then it was over to Raiford on Friday for an all-day camp-out vigil before Harris’s midnight execution. An exhausting schedule for these poor folks but one that he hoped would provide some closure.
Knowing that Jeanine was actually still alive disqualified Peter’s membership in the group, but, hey, who was he to burst everyone’s bubble with a technicality?
Besides, she’d be deader than grunge music once he went back up to New York and hunted her down after the execution.
He was flipping some peppers and onions when the minister formed a prayer circle around the pool.
“In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” Peter said along with everyone as he took his place between his beaming wife, Vicki, and the minister.
Across from them, his new best friend, Arty Tivolli, the multimillionaire, smiled approvingly.
The closing on the golf course was scheduled for a week after the execution. Peter would be splitting the six percent commission with the broker. In two weeks’ time, if all went well, he’d be handed a check for three and a half million dollars.
And it all would go well. He of all people would see to that.
An hour later as everyone was lining up along the seawall in lawn chairs to watch the sun set, Peter’s cell rang.
“Hey, Peter. How’s it going? It’s Brian Cogle from the Boca PD.”
“Of course, Bri. What’s up?” Peter said to the crusty old cop. He knew everybody who was anybody in South Florida law enforcement. It was all about the networking.
“Just wanted to let you know that we got a visit from Harris’s mouthpiece, that son of a bitch Charlie Baylor. He was asking about the hairs.”
“Those, huh?” Peter said, frowning. Baylor was such an asshole.
“There was a woman with him, too. A lawyer. He got some help.”
Shit, Peter thought. That was all he needed to upset the apple cart. Some eleventh-hour crusade. If Justin Harris was given a stay, who knew how pissy Tivolli would get. Now was not the time for the unexpected. Harris needed to be in a pine box by next week.
“Any chance your boy at the lab who squelched the hairs will squeal?” Peter said. “If there’s any friction, I’d be willing to make it worth his while.”
“Pete, c’mon. Don’t insult me,” Cogle said. “I got it under control. The lab rat is my geeky little brother-in-law. I’m his son’s godfather. Besides, he’d get canned. Not a chance.”
“Good,” Peter said. “Like I told you before, Brian, getting rid of them was the right thing. Showing that there was a second person at the crime scene would have complicated the whole case and gotten that son of a bitch off. You did the right thing, brother. I’ll never forget it.”
“Don’t even mention it. Had it been my wife, I know you’d do the same for me,” Cogle said. “You going up to demonstrate at the execution?”
Behind Peter, the gathered crowd began to ooh and aah as the sun began to descend over the gulf. Peter squinted out at the water as the sky turned the color of a new penny.
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world, Brian,” Peter said.
Chapter 83
WE HAD TO DRIVE UP to Jacksonville to get a direct flight back to Key West, so it was almost nine p.m. by the time we spilled out of a puddle jumper back at the Key West airport.
We had our cabdriver take us directly to Madeline Pelletier’s house on Fogarty Avenue, not far from Key West High School. The front yard of the small stucco house she lived in was strewn with toys.
“Yes?” said the pretty, petite teenaged black girl who answered the door.
“Can we speak to Maddie Pelletier?” Charlie said.
“Mom,” the girl called back into the house. “It’s white people.”
“Hello,” said a not much older version of the girl who’d answered the door a minute later. “I’m Maddie. Can I help you?”
“Hi, Maddie. Sorry to bother you so late. We’re lawyers representing Justin Harris. Could we speak to you?”
“Oh, wow. Poor Justin,” she said, shaking her head. “I pray for him. What can I do for you?”
“Well, we actually need to speak to your cousin Fabiana,” I said. “But we can’t seem to find her.”
“Do you think Fabiana can help Justin?”
“Justin claims that he and Fabiana were on an all-day date at the Miami Seaquarium the day he was accused of killing that girl,” Charlie said.
“But Fabiana said it was a lie,” Maddie said.
“We know,” I said. “But we have some new information and just need to ask her some questions. We really need to speak to her.”
“That’s what helped the jury to convict Justin?” Maddie said with a stunned look on her face. “I had no idea. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say her mother is behind this somehow.” Maddie shook her head. “I’m not sure what to do. My aunt Isabelle, Fabiana’s mother, is a very old-school Haitian, very suspicious of everything. She stopped speaking to me for years after she found out that I introduced Fabiana to Justin at a bar. She’ll go crazy if she finds out I sent you.”
“She won’t find out from us,” Charlie said.
“Aunt Isabelle runs a pretty successful Haitian restaurant near South Beach in Miami. It’s called the Rooster’s Perch. She a
nd Fabiana live in Little Haiti. Hold the door. I’ll get the address for you.”
Charlie and I stared at each other as we waited.
“Is this what I think it is?” Charlie said. “Are we actually making some progress?”
“Shhh,” I said. “Hold your breath. We don’t have the address yet.”
Chapter 84
AFTER AGREEING that neither one of us could physically set foot on another airplane until morning, Charlie and I decided on dinner instead.
“I’ll behave, too. I’ll drink only light rum,” Charlie said as our taxi let us out on crowded Duval Street.
We sat in a booth at Jack Flats. The place had an awesome, long, beat-up wooden bar and old black-and-white photographs of cigar factory workers who had populated the island in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Outside the open stall-like doors, Duval was the same as ever. Think a drunken Greenwich Village block party in New York, with flip-flops. Only it was even crazier now that the Independence Celebration was in full swing.
I stared, amazed, at the Yanks-Rays game playing above the crowded bar beside a neon Dolphins helmet. I’d been so busy in the last few crazy days, I’d almost forgotten that there was a sport called baseball. I needed to call Emma as well. I decided I’d text her once I got back to my hotel.
“Don’t tell me. You’re a Yankees fan, too,” Charlie said as I clapped at a Posada double. “Could you try just a tiny bit more not to make me hate you even more?”
“Not a chance,” I said before finishing my beer and standing. “Watch my seat, and I counted my wings, by the way, Harvard boy.”
The first thing I noticed as I headed back to our table a few minutes later was that there was a police car at the curb in front of the open doors. The second was that there was somebody in my seat.
When I realized who that somebody was, I stopped in midstride in the middle of the bar as if I’d hit an invisible wall.
Now You See Her Page 16
