Dark Justice

by Sinclair, Rachel

  The cops, they tried to make me think that I did this. They told me that I hate my mother, because she’s a drunk and she doesn’t take care of me. They tell me that because I hate my mother that I hate all women, and that I specifically hate Addison Wentworth because she reminds me of my mother.”

  “Can I see picture of your mother?”

  “Yeah. By now, the picture of me when I was a young boy posing with my mother has been making the rounds. You can do a Google search for it, you’ll find it. I have to admit that my mom does look a lot like Ms. Wentworth. She does. So that’s what the cops say, that somehow I got Ms. Wentworth mixed up with with my mom, and I went over and killed her. I hope you don’t mind my language, but that’s bullshit. Nobody has ever been able to explain to me how it would be that I would be able to even get on her grounds.”

  I got my phone out of my bag, and did a quick Google search for Carter Dixon. Just like he said, there was a picture of him when he was about 10 years old, with his mother on Christmas day. I was astounded by how much his mother resembled a younger Addison Wentworth. Same dark hair, same blue eyes, same full lips and high cheekbones. Same straight nose. Same body, even. Tiny waist and hips and legs, full breasts, slim shoulders. No doubt about it, Carter’s mom was a ringer for Addison. She could be her stunt double.

  “Well, I guess it’s not good that your mom and Addison resemble one another so much. In a weird way, their close resemblance does give you motive for killing Addison. If you really do hate your mother, Addison would be a good substitute for actually killing your mother without exactly killing her. It’s gonna be a tough one for them to argue something like that, however, because it is so out there. However, unfortunately, people in the jury probably watch a lot of television programs such as Criminal Minds, and they find out that a lot of times killers are substituting their victims for their mother. That would be a theory that the jury would buy. That and the fact that your hair was found at the scene, combined with these online postings, and I hate to say that things just don’t look good right now.”

  Yet I also knew that all wasn’t necessarily that lost. I knew that, a lot of times, I would dig into a case, think it didn’t look good, then do the investigation and realize that things were not as they seemed. I still remembered the first time that I received a Motion to Dismiss from a party, and it seemed like they had an airtight case with their arguments. However, as soon as I started getting into the nitty-gritty of case laws and statutes on the issues, I would realize that their case was actually very weak. They were basically throwing spaghetti against the wall, and I was able to counteract their arguments, point by point.

  I hoped that this was the case with this guy. I hoped that when I really started my investigation, I would find out that it was all an elaborate framing system. I hoped and prayed that Carter was actually innocent, and that everything that was going against him were all things that could be explained away somehow.

  Carter looked at me anxiously. “You really think that there’s a chance for me?” He looked down at the table. “I don’t want to burden you, Ms. Justice, but I really feel very alone. I really don’t have anybody except my mom, and she hasn’t come to see me at all. Not even once. In fact, she wasn’t around when I was arrested at our apartment. I don’t know where she was, but she wasn’t home.”

  I put my hand on Carter’s hands, and looked him in the eye. “I can’t make any promises. Right now, with the facts as they are, things don’t look so good. But I’ll tell you one thing – I’ll do everything in my power, everything humanly possible, to get to the bottom of all of this. You have to understand, the investigation hasn’t even started yet. The law firm I work for –”

  I took a deep breath and brought my phone out of my purse. I wanted to see if there were any text messages or phone calls from Grey. I had shut off my phone when I came to meet this kid, so I, as of yet, didn’t know if I was going to be canned that very evening.

  My heart sunk when I saw that there were three text messages from Grey and five phone calls from him. All within a period of about 10 minutes. I took a deep breath, and put the phone back into my purse. At that moment, I really didn’t want to find out what was going to happen to me. I really wanted to take this kid’s case. Even if it meant my former law firm suing me for poaching a client, I really wanted to take his case.

  “What’s wrong?” Carter’s eyes looked concerned as he could tell that there was something going on with me.

  I just shook my head. “It’s just a text. There’s nothing wrong. What I was going to say is that the investigation hasn’t yet begun. There are a lot of resources at my fingertips, resources that I can tap into to make sure that a thorough workup on your case will be done for you. That means talking to every witness and doing a forensic analysis of your computer. That’s going to be the most important, I think. You say that you didn’t write those messages?”

  He nodded his head. “That’s right. I would never write things like that. That’s just not me.”

  I nodded my head. “Then, here’s the thing – we need to find out who would do something like that to you and why. I understand that there is a way of spoofing your account.” I remembered that I, myself, had my email address spoofed several times – basically, people were receiving messages from my email address, with my name on it, but these messages were not from me. They were from some hacker who would duplicate my email address and would then spam all of my e-mail contacts. I was on the other end of spoofing when I started receiving emails from one of my clients. The messages that were coming to me from this client were begging me for money, asking me to meet them with $500 in cash, saying that there were stranded in a foreign country. At first, I thought it was annoying that the client would be spamming me and asking for money. But I later saw that client in court, asked her why she was sending me those messages, and she had no clue what I was talking about. She told me that she didn’t send any emails. That was when I found out what spoofing was.

  I rubbed my hand on Carter’s forearm. He looked up at me, and something told me that my gesture to him, the touch that I gave him on his arm, was probably the most affection he’d gotten from anybody in his entire life. I didn’t know why I thought that – it was something in his eyes. I knew that he had bonded with me in that short period of time.

  The intake interview lasted about another hour, and by the end of it, I felt that he had bonded with me and I with him. He brought out my latent maternal instincts.

  I also knew that I was going to do everything in my power to try to save his kid.

  I just hoped that my law firm would let me do it.

  Chapter 6

  Carter Dixon was led back to the cell by the guard, looking back one more time at the woman that he felt was going to be his savior. It wasn’t just that he thought that she was going to be able to win his case. It was something more than that. It was that, for the first time in his life, he felt like he had really been seen by somebody. He finally felt that somebody actually cared about him and what was going to happen to him. He had never yet, in his entire young life, experienced that kind of caring. Not from his mother and not from anybody in his life.

  In a way, he felt that the situation was almost a blessing to him. All of his life, he had looked for someone to care about him. He only ever had his mother around. His father had died before he was born, and his mother had sisters and brothers, somewhere in this country, but he didn’t ever talk to them. Carter thought he knew why – his mother was always someone who was addicted to drugs and alcohol. Her siblings probably had nothing to do with her after a little while, and Carter really couldn’t blame them. He would do the same to a sibling who just refused to get clean. After a little while, you just have to just walk away from people like that. Leave them to their own devices, because nothing that you ever say to them is going to get through.

  The problem was that, because his mother never cared about him, he didn’t have any relatives to care about him, either. He
had teachers along the way, teachers whom he thought probably would be concerned about him if he had confided in them, but he could never bring himself to do that. He was always a bit of a loner. He played basketball, but even the guys who he played with weren’t close with him, and he didn’t really know how to reach out to them. He didn’t really know how to ask them if they wanted to do something after the game. He always felt, in his heart, that they probably didn’t want to hang out with him anyways. He was too awkward, too stupid, too ugly.

  He knew that the reason why he felt that way about himself was because his mother always made him feel that way. She was always telling him how he was a mistake for her and that he never should’ve been born. Her entire life had been ruined because of him. That was a message that he had gotten from his mother his entire life, and it was drilled into him from a very young age. When that was the only message you ever got from somebody when you’re young, that’s the only message that you could hear. And so, he never tried to make friends with people, because he just didn’t feel that he was worthy of them. That was why he joined the online community of involuntary celibate men in the first place. They were just like him – rejected, neglected, lonely, abused. They all had self-esteems that were also in the toilet, so he felt like they were kindred spirits.

  Yet, the online community brought him here. Here in a cell, awaiting trial for something he didn’t do. He would never hurt a woman. Never smack a woman. His mother usually deserved to be smacked around. If any woman deserved it, that is. But Carter would never even think of that. It just wasn’t in him to be violent like that.

  After meeting with Emerson, he was led back to the cell, but as soon as he was led back there, it was dinner time. Carter had not yet met the other guys in prison. He felt nervous, like the other guys in the jail were going to pick on him. He wasn’t puny – in fact, he was quite tall, at 6’3”. Yet he was gangly. Or at least, he felt that he was gangly. And he certainly didn’t have fighting skills.

  He had no clue what he was in for.

  When he got into the cafeteria, he found that his reputation had preceded him. At least, that was what an albino African-American by name of T-Pain said to him.

  “Yo,” T-Pain said to him. “I hear you in for doing that Addison Wentworth bitch.” He put his hand out so that Carter could slap it, but Carter didn’t do that.

  Carter didn’t say anything to him. He didn’t really know what to say. Yes, he was in for murdering Addison Wentworth. That was true. But he didn’t do it, so there was no way he was going to be slapping hands with another inmate about it.

  “You famous,” T-Pain said to him. “You know what that means. You better watch your ass.”

  That caught Carter’s attention. “What do you mean by that? What do you mean by watch my ass?”

  “I mean, you better watch your ass. Listen, all these guys in here, they know you. They see you on TV. They know that the newspeople are all over your ass. And, I hear some guys, they be talking about popping you. Listen, you don’t want to get on the wrong side of these niggas. Anyone of them would slice you as soon as look at you.”

  Carter felt his anxiety well up. He felt the tightness in his chest. He knew the symptoms of a panic attack, and that was what was happening to him.

  “I don’t feel so good,” he said as he noticed a table full of African-American men looking at him and pointing. One of the guys had braids close to his head, and he stood up and approached Carter. Carter saw that he was the same height as him, about 6’3”, but he was built like a brick shit house. He was probably 250 pounds of solid muscle.

  He walked over to Carter menacingly.

  “I hear that there’s a bounty on yo’ head,” the man said. “I hear that if somebody pops you in here, they going to be famous, because you famous.”

  At that, T-Pain put his hand on this massive man’s chest. “Now, you don’t want no trifling shit with this white boy. He ain’t done nothing to you.”

  The Hulk continue to look at Carter with a menacing look on his face. “I know he ain’t done nothing to me. That ain’t the point now, is it? Point is, this boy have a bounty on his head, and I intend to collect on it.”

  Carter swallowed hard. He still had the tray of food in his hand, and he dropped it all over the floor. He looked anxiously over at the guards, who weren’t looking in his direction.

  “They ain’t going to save you, white boy. Don’t even look at those guards. They in on it too. They want their cut.”

  Carter could feel himself shaking all over, as two more guys came up to him. One was a white guy, who was almost as big of a hulk as the black guy. He had a bright red Afro. He was as pale as the albino T-Pain, but he had more coloring to him. He had blue eyes with a fierce light behind them and his face was covered in freckles and scars. His neck was covered in tattoos. The other guy was a shorter Mexican guy. Black hair, only about 5’5”, but was made of solid muscle.

  The three of them approached Carter, but T-Pain stood in front of him. He seemed to have a kind of power over them. “You ain’t got no issue with this boy,” he said to them. “Now you all could just run along, mind your own goddamn business, and eat your dinner.”

  To Carter’s surprise, the three guys had looked like they were going to kill him, but they turned around and walked away.

  “What did you say to them? Why did they leave me alone?”

  T-Pain just smiled at him, showing his gums. “They be leaving you alone for now, but I can’t be your bodyguard forever. I know some shit on those guys, all of them. They have my number, and I have theirs. Let’s just leave it at that. But I’m telling you, they want a piece of you. They want a piece of you, and they’re going to get it.”

  “Just because –”

  “Yeah, just because. You’re a target just because you on the news all the time. That’s all. Every guy wants to make a name for themselves. You gotta toughen up. You looking scared, you can’t be doing that. They be like a dog – they can tell if you scared.”

  The two of them sat down to eat.

  “Listen, you gotta start acting like you own this place. You gotta start acting like you got something to cut them, and you ain’t gonna take their shit. But they gonna keep messing with you unless you act like you can take them, and get protection around here. That’s the biggest thing – you need protection.”

  “Protection, I don’t know what you mean. Does that mean that I have to join a gang or something?”

  T-Pain chuckled. “Yeah, something like that. I can have some of my boys protect you, but they ain’t taking recruits at the moment. I’ll ask around and see what I can do for you, though. You got a roommate yet?”

  Carter shook his head. “No, not yet.”

  “You probably will soon. You bunk up with a guy who’s been in the system for a while, and they’ll set you up. You gonna need it.”

  Carter suddenly was afraid that he might not make it to trial.

  He might not live that long.

  Chapter 7

  Addison - August 17. Four days before Addison goes missing.

  “What do you mean, you’re pregnant?” Michael’s eyes were flashing angrily at Addison. She had just passed her first trimester and had been given the all-clear. Since she made the determination that she was going to have the baby, she finally made the decision that she was going to go ahead and tell him about her pregnancy. She thought, perhaps naïvely, that he would be happy about it. She imagined that he would find out that she was pregnant, and he would then announce to the world that he was going to give the baby a name, and that he was going to leave his wife for her.

  She should’ve known that her fantasy was just - a fantasy. Things were never going to be that easy. After all, he was a prominent senator who was currently running for president. His wife had metastatic breast cancer, and the media had portrayed her a saint. His career would be ruined if the media ever found out about their affair. Yet, Addison thought that he would actually be happy about the baby. />
  She was clearly wrong.

  “I am. I’m just now in my second trimester. I just saw my gynecologist, and she did an ultrasound, and everything is looking good.”

  His hand struck her face so suddenly that she fell over on her back, hitting the coffee table with her tailbone. “Fucking bitch. You’re not going to do this to me. You’re not going to ruin me like this.” He walked over to her, where she was laying on the floor, and he pulled her up by her hair. “Do you understand me? You’re not going to do this to me. I have plans. My plans have nothing to do with you, and they certainly have nothing to do with this brat.”

  Addison was too stunned to say a word. She had never seen this side of him, not even a little bit. What happened to the man who was so kind to her, so caring and loving? In that man’s place was a man whom she had never seen before in her life. A man with wild eyes, sweat coming off of his forehead, and a body that was coiled like a rattlesnake. His fists were clenched, and she could see that he was going to hit her again.

  She got to her feet, and started to run, but she couldn’t outrun him. She ran towards her acres of land in her bare feet. As she crossed the cement surrounding the pool, her feet were burning. It was unseasonably warm, and the cement was very hot.

  She just had to make it out to the field, and she could maybe hide from him. Yet she knew that this wasn’t going to happen. He was just too fast and too big.