Dark Justice

by Sinclair, Rachel

  However, Addison’s case against him would mean something much different if she prevailed in court. It would mean that he could possibly spend the rest of his life in prison. That meant that Addison’s charge was much more serious than any of the other charges were to him. Would the prospect of him going to prison for raping Addison be enough for him to have her killed? People have killed for less reason than that.

  “Mr. Anderson, I understand that what really happened between you and Addison is she was not a little inebriated, but that she was passed out cold. I also understand that the reason why she was passed out was because you gave her something that knocked her out like that. So, it’s not a gray area. What happened between you and Addison was a rape.”

  I studied his face while I was speaking. He hung his head even more than it was before, and he took another long swig of his whiskey. “So what if it was? So what if I raped her? Does that make me also a murderer?”

  “I don’t know, does it? Listen, would you be willing to submit to a DNA test?” I figured that if he gave me his DNA, I might’ve been able to establish that he was in her bedroom around the time that she was killed. After all, there were two hairs that had not yet been identified. Maybe one of the hairs belonged to him.

  He shook his head. “I know what you’re thinking, and that baby’s not mine,” he blurted out. “It’s not mine.”

  Baby? What did he mean by baby? “What are you talking about?”

  He looked stunned, and then got a look on his face that told me that he spilled something that he wasn’t supposed to.

  “What are you talking about?” he asked me.

  “You just said that baby’s not yours. Was Addison pregnant?” Was she? And if she was, how come I didn’t know this? How come nobody seemed to have known this but this guy?

  “Why are you asking me to give DNA? I didn’t mean that she was pregnant, but if you’re asking for DNA, you must know something I don’t. Right?”

  Was he gas lighting me, or was he just trying to cover his tracks? Or did he really misunderstand my question?

  “Was Addison pregnant?” I suddenly realized that there might have been some other reason why she was killed. I wondered if the fact that she was pregnant gave somebody else a reason to kill her. Yet, I didn’t imagine that a guy like Jackson would necessarily care if Addison was carrying his child. After all, Jackson wasn’t married, so who would really care if he got an actress pregnant? Something like that wouldn’t even rate as a big enough story for the National Enquirer.

  He put his finger to his mouth. “Shhhh,” he said. “I’m not supposed to know that. Nobody’s supposed to know that.”

  “Well, if you’re not supposed to know that, then how do you know that?”

  He waved his right hand in a horizontal motion, which was a gesture for “so so,” usually, but, this time, it seemed to mean something different.

  “I might have gone to see her right before she was-” He sliced his hand across his neck. “You know. Right before she was murdered.”

  I nodded my head. This was suddenly getting interesting. “You did.”

  “Yeah, I did. Listen, I had to talk to her. I had to talk to her about not telling anybody about what I did. I had to at least try. I was surprised that she was willing to talk to me, quite frankly. But that’s all we did. We talked.”

  “You talked.” I nodded my head. “And? What did you talk about? And where did you talk to her?”

  I thought about how that detective said that there were two hairs that were unidentified in her bedroom. I wondered if one of those hairs belonged to this guy. I also wondered if I was going to have enough evidence to pin the murder on him. I could certainly go to the cops with my suspicions, and let them take it from there. If the cops didn’t do anything about it, at the very least, I would be able to call this guy to the stand in Carter’s case and try to nail him in front of a jury. I was surprised that he was being so talkative, but, then again, he was pretty wasted.

  In vino veritas, they always say.

  “We talked about what happened that night. I told her that I had some huge movies coming out and she was right for a starring role in each of them. But-” He shook his head. “She knew that I was bullshitting. Addison knew all those other bitches who are accusing me of bullshit, so she knew that I was going to be forced out at Centurion at just any moment. So, she knew that I was going to be about as useful to her as tits on a goddamn boar.” He shook his head again. “Let’s just say that it didn’t go well, our little talk.”

  “And she told you that she was pregnant?”

  “No. She didn’t say that she was pregnant. She never brought that up. But she’s pretty careless, I guess, or maybe she wanted me to see that she was going to have a baby. Because I used her bathroom and there they were - a bunch of pregnancy tests, all positive. I mean, I know that she had that sober living companion, that Katie girl, so maybe those tests were Katie’s tests. But these tests were in her bathroom, in the master bedroom bathroom, you know, so I just assumed that they were Addison’s. I didn’t say anything to her, though, about it.” He shrugged his shoulders. “I figured it wasn’t my business. She’s having a baby, she’s having a baby. Ain’t no skin off my nose. I know that it wasn’t mine, and that’s all that really matters, isn’t it?”

  I nodded my head. “I suppose. Was she seeing anybody that you know about?”

  “No. Not that I know about. Listen, I don’t know her all that well, to be honest. I’ve never made a movie with her. I’ve seen her at parties, usually she’s pretty wasted, and I’ve always found her very attractive. But I don’t know her well enough to actually have a legitimate conversation with her about life and things like that, you know? I’m not calling her up and laying my bullshit on her in the middle of the night. I’ve got women that I do that with, you know, women I can call up at any time of the day or night, and they’ll come over. She wasn’t one of those girls.”

  “Okay.” I took a deep breath. I could place this guy in Addison’s bedroom, but only if he was willing to give a DNA sample so that one of the stray hairs could be matched up with him. It was well-known, apparently, that he raped Addison, so he had motive to kill her in order to silence her.

  The facts surrounding this guy looked good. Yet, there was a voice inside of me that was holding me back from actually telling the cops about him and what he did. They were bound to get involved, anyhow, because the talk around this town was that he raped Addison, and the cops were probably going to question him, at the very least. Since he no longer had the powerful posse that he had before, protecting him, he was going to be very vulnerable to criminal charges.

  I decided to go ahead and let the cops do their work on him. I didn’t necessarily have to get into the middle of it. If they decided to charge him with the rape, they probably would go ahead and investigate him for her murder, too. I didn’t have to get into the middle of it.

  The reason why I hesitated getting into the middle of it was simple.

  My gut was screaming that this guy didn’t lay a hand on Addison.

  Chapter 26

  Michael - August 20. One day before Addison is discovered missing

  “What did you do?” Michael screamed at Violet, the second he got home. After he went to Addison’s home and saw all that blood, and saw that Addison was missing, he immediately ran out of her house and headed home to confront his wife.

  He was surprised that he made it back to his home in one piece. His mind was going 1000 miles per hour, and he felt inebriated, even though he hadn’t taken one single drink. He threw up in his car the second he pulled out of Addison’s driveway, and he kept having to pull over to throw up some more.

  He wanted to think that Violet had nothing to do with that scene in the bedroom. Intellectually, he figured that she had nothing to do with it. After all, that bedroom was a mess. An absolute mess. It was like somebody had gone in there and stabbed Addison hundreds of times and just let her bleed out all over the bedr
oom. Like an animal. That was what it reminded him of - when he used to go hunting with his father, and they had to bleed out their prey. That disgusted him then, and it disgusted him just as much now.

  But that was what her bedroom looked like - like somebody had taken a deer and took it up to her room and just let it bleed everywhere.

  So, he knew one thing - Sonny Mancino had nothing to do with this murder. Sonny was a professional, or, at least, the guys that he used were professionals. They were hit men, like you see in the movies. They wouldn’t make a huge mess like what he saw in Addison’s bedroom and just leave it like that. They would do a clean kill. What happened to Addison was apparently anything but a clean kill.

  It was apparently a butchery.

  So, in the back of his mind, he thought that Violet probably had nothing to do with all that blood. Yet, emotionally, he couldn’t help but think that she was behind that butchery. After all, she was, just yesterday, plotting and planning and trying to convince him to have Addison killed. That was the reason why he was going to her house, after all - she needed to be warned.

  Violet was sitting on the couch when he got home, painting her nails. She blew on them, and then looked at him. “What do you mean?”

  She was calm. Way too calm. He always knew her to be shrewd and somebody who could be calculating when he couldn’t be. He tended to approach crises with something that approached panic - in fact, he had been hospitalized several times for panic attacks related to some kind of crisis in his life. But Violet was always able to see the forest for the trees. She never got emotional. She just approached everything logically. She was like a chess player, moving people around the board, seeing the end-game and just how to get to it.

  But that was before. That was how she dealt with the bimbo eruptions and the threats that his women made about talking to the press. That was how she dealt with days like the day that he thought that he was about to lose everything. His ex-boyfriend, Steven, the guy who he dated from the age of 18 to the age of 21, was threatening to write a tell-all. This was after Michael had formed an exploratory presidential committee, and after he had been named a United States senator. Steven unfortunately had pictures of the two of them, pictures that were taken on various vacations. The pictures were innocent enough - the pictures were pretty much just of the two of them, smiling for the cameras, with their arms around one another. Michael was young and naive, then. He never thought about the consequences of having a same-sex partner. All that he knew was that he was in love with this guy, and tomorrow would never come.

  Michael knew that it would be his word against Steven’s. But it really wasn’t like that. Michael and Steven had a group of friends, and those friends were going to back up Steven.

  That was when Sonny Mancino came in. He bought Steven’s story and just never published it, and he backed up his bribery - he paid Steven $250,000 for his story - with threats. You ever breathe a word of this, you’re a dead man. Literally. Steven backed off and Michael never heard from him again. Getting Sonny involved was Violet’s idea, and he had been using Sonny ever since to get him out of scrapes.

  “You know what I mean. Addison.”

  “What about her?”

  “What the fuck do you mean, what about her? What about her? I went over there, and-”

  “You what?” Violet’s eyes got big, and then she stood up, still blowing on her nails. “You dipshit asshole. I swear to God, if I would have known that I was marrying a retard, I never would have walked down that fucking aisle. What do you mean, you went over there?”

  He shook his head rapidly. “I couldn’t let you do it, Violet. I couldn’t. I mean, I know that we’ve done a lot of shady things over the years, but murder? Seriously?”

  “And how did you plan on handling it?” Violet demanded, her hands on her hips. “Tell me your brilliant fucking plan. You do know that her being pregnant means that ‘he said, she said’ won’t work, right? All she needs to do is get a judge to order DNA on that brat, and your political career is up in smoke. Everything that we’ve worked so hard for, gone. Poof.” She made two fists and popped her hands out above her hand. “You might have been willing to chance all that, but I sure as hell wasn’t.”

  “You weren’t, so you did it, didn’t you? You had Addison killed, didn’t you?”

  “No, you moron. I didn’t. I didn’t get a chance to get in touch with Sonny. I was working on that, so the fact that you went over there, behind my back, really pisses me off. What did you hope to accomplish with that visit, douchebag?”

  “I was going to warn her about what you were planning.”

  At that, she slapped him across the face. Hard. “You were? You were going to warn her? Goddamn you, goddamn you. Listen, you were the one who couldn’t keep his dick in his pants, despite the fact that you know, you know, that the press was going to be all over that shit like white on rice. You were the one who caused all these problems, not me. I was simply trying to solve the problem as best that we could. And you go and try to warn her. You dumbass.”

  “Violet, we’re not murderers. That’s not who were are. That’s not what we do. I’d rather risk my political career than to be involved with something like that.”

  At that, she slapped him again. “You would. You would. Well, what about me? You didn’t even think about that, did you? Did you? You never even thought about what you losing your political career would do to my own political career. You know that your fortune and mine are tied together, like a knot. A knot that neither of us will ever be able to untie. So, you sink, I sink. That’s how it goes. So, I get a say on how your scandals are handled, and that was how I chose to handle this particular bimbo eruption.”

  “But you did it. You did it. You killed her, or you had her killed.”

  “No, I didn’t. I told you, I didn’t. But now you’ve gone and made a goddamned mess of things, so you have to fix it. You have to clean it up. And you have to do it goddamned soon. Like, yesterday. You have to fix things so that nobody ever suspects you of being behind that bitch’s murder. You have to get back over there before somebody figures out that she’s gone. That she’s missing. Nobody knows that, do they?”

  Michael shrugged. His heart rate was coming down, along with his blood pressure, and he was finally feeling a sense of calm. “Guy Forlani might think that there’s something amiss, because Addison didn’t show up for work today. But, other than that, I don’t know. Her cleaning crew doesn’t come in until Thursday, two days from today, and Katie probably knows something, but I didn’t see her around, so…”

  “So, Katie probably killed her,” Violet said. “Probably. But, listen…” Violet put her hand to her chin. “You didn’t see a body lying around, did you?”

  “No. I didn’t see a body.”

  “Good. No way to establish time of death without a body. Very good.” She nodded her head.

  Michael started to feel bile come up from his stomach and enter his esophagus. “What are you getting at? Listen, you-”

  Violet took a deep breath. “Here’s what we’re going to do.”

  For the next hour, Michael and Violet plotted and planned. Their plan was only going to work for a short period of time. A very short period of time. Once somebody either reported Addison missing, or her cleaning crew showed up for work, the jig would be up. There would be no going back at that moment.

  By the end of their talk, Michael felt completely calm. He wasn’t going to get into trouble. There was no way that he was going to be looked at for this murder. He knew that there was a good chance that the world might end up knowing about his affair with Addison, once the news hit that she was murdered. That was because Sonny knew too much about Addison, and he probably was going to be hit with a subpoena by the prosecutors in this case. He was going to have to maybe give up what he knew about Addison, Michael and all of the things surrounding Addison. He might be able to claim some sort of First Amendment privilege, but that would only go so far. If Sonny had to give up Mich
ael and his affair with Addison, so be it.

  But there was no way that he was going to be on the hook for her murder.

  Not after he carried out his and Violet’s plan.

  Chapter 27

  Emerson - September 2

  I returned to my office, carefully avoiding Declan’s office as I walked into my own. I closed the door, but I heard a knock just a few minutes later.

  “Come in,” I called.

  An African-American woman peeked her head in the door. “I heard that there was a new attorney in our suite, so I had to come and greet you. Name’s Alisha Drake.” She smiled. “I’m the resident domestic attorney, so if you have any questions about custody or divorces or what-not, I’m your girl.”

  I smiled and waved at the chair in front of my desk. “Glad to meet you. I really am. Actually, I do have a question, if you don’t mind.”

  “Shoot,” she said. “That’s what I’m here for.”

  “Well, see, I have these two young girls at my home. I’m their guardian. Their mother designated me to be their guardian after she died, and, well, she died. So, I had the home study done while she was sick, and the judge signed off on it.”

  She nodded her head. “Go on…”

  “Well, in the meantime, my mother dropped in on me and moved in. She’s not the best influence in the entire world, plus my place has suddenly become too small for all of us. What do I need to do about that?”

  “Well, if you want to make your guardianship permanent, then you’re going to have to have another home study, of course. But, if their mother designated you as their guardian, that will carry a lot of weight with the judge. I wouldn’t worry too much about your mother. But I would definitely make sure that the girls have their own room.”