Marcia Clark - Guilt By Degrees

Bailey pointed out the knife and the sap that’d fallen to the ground during the fight and made sure they got bagged and tagged. It looked like the kind of combat knife that’d been used to kill Simon. I doubted there’d be anything left on it to allow for DNA testing, but it was pretty distinctive. If all the other evidence panned out, it’d be a nice addition. After the police had loaded the suspect into a car, Mario, one of the investigators, showed up, looking like a balloon that was about to burst.

“You two okay?” he asked, concerned.

Bailey nodded.

“Yep,” I replied. Though it hadn’t gone exactly as planned. We’d thought the attacker wouldn’t make his move until I had stopped at Cletus’s rig. Bailey would’ve been able to take him down before he knew what hit him. It was a flawless plan. Except, of course, it wasn’t. All he’d had to do to derail it was what he did: jump me a little sooner-just a half-block away from the blankets. Only now did it begin to hit me how crazy this whole idea had been. I decided I didn’t need to tell Mario every little detail.

“Good,” he said flatly. With our welfare out of the way, he was free to let go of one giant hunk of pissitivity. His nostrils flared, and he put his hands on his hips and fixed me with an angry glare. “You were supposed to call me before you left the office.” He turned to include Bailey. “And you two idiots obviously planned this-”

“Hey!” Bailey interjected.

But Mario was on a roll. “What the hell did you think you were doing, setting this up without telling anyone? And you ”-he turned to Bailey-“I know you know better than this. So what the hell…?”

Bailey ground her lower jaw. Her voice was harsh and raw. “I tried to talk her out of it, okay? But she wasn’t listening. She would’ve done it alone. How’m I going to let her do that?”

I opened my mouth to protest, then clamped it shut. Bailey was right. I’d always had a tendency to push the envelope, riskwise-I called it tenacious. Carla the Crone diagnosed it as survivor’s guilt. But even for me, this plan was a bridge too far. This time it wasn’t just me; I’d endangered Bailey’s life as well. How could I have done this? Why on earth had I taken it so far? Gary’s death, this case-something about Lilah-it all had me more unhinged than I’d realized.

Mario turned on me, eyes blazing, then stormed off, venting, “This is why no one wants to guard you-no one!”

When he was in a more receptive mood, I’d explain that we didn’t think we could tell him about the plan because we suspected that Lilah had a source somewhere in the police department or the DA’s office-maybe both. By then maybe he’d be able to hear me, and even agree. But maybe not.

The bags of Chinese food I’d been carrying were splayed all over the sidewalk. Crows had already found the banquet and were cawing their victory over the orange chicken.

“Bailey,” I said, “where’d you put our buddy-?”

She motioned to me to follow her. “Be right back,” she called after Mario.

One of the police officers yelled out to us, “You’ll have to give statements, so don’t go far.”

We moved quickly down the street and turned the corner. Bailey led me to her car. There, stretched out in the backseat with a feast of Chinese food, was Cletus. Bailey knocked softly to warn him we were there, and he sat up and gave us a semitoothless grin. She opened the door.

“How you doing, Cletus?” I asked.

“Just fine, missy. Cletus’s just fine,” he replied in the gravelly voice that seemed to come from the middle of the earth. “Not as good as yours, though,” he said, pointing to the boxes of food.

“I had to make do,” Bailey apologized.

“Cletus, you might want to get inside tonight,” I said. “There’re going to be cops all over your space.”

He frowned. “What’d you two get up to?” he said suspiciously.

“Don’t ask,” Bailey said.

He shook his head. “Got to bother an old man like this. Ain’t right, ain’t right.” He sighed. “I got a ride,” he said, looking around the interior of Bailey’s car. “May as well use it. Take me to Johnnie’s.”

I looked at Bailey. We weren’t exactly Johnnie Jasper’s favorite people at the moment.

“You mind if we let someone else give you a lift there?” I asked. “We’ve got to hang around for a bit.”

“Sure, sure,” Cletus said, digging into his fried rice.

We headed back to the crime scene to find someone to give Cletus a ride. And to spend another million hours giving statements.

Bailey andI got up the next morning at the crack of dawn. One of us was happy about this.

“You know,” I said when she shook me awake at six fifteen a.m., “you can probably go back to your own pad now.” I sat up, rubbing my eyes. “Besides, what’s the rush? I’m not filing on that guy without ballistics and DNA results-”

Bailey held up her cell phone and waggled it under my face. “You got ’em. The blood on Simon’s shirt came back to him, and the gun he was carrying matches the one used to shoot Gary. Good enough for you?” she asked.

That had to be the fastest I’d ever seen DNA come back. This case had a lot of people fired up. “It’ll do,” I replied.

Bailey drove us to the courthouse for what I figured would be the last time. With Simon’s killer in custody, I’d be walking to work again. Though we hadn’t lucked out and caught Lilah going to or from her parents’ house, I was confident our newly arrested killer could be persuaded to tell us where she was. Besides, now that she knew we had the evidence on Tran’s case, Lilah had nothing to gain by killing us. She seemed to be a fairly pragmatic murderer.

We were so early, we beat the morning courthouse crowds and got an elevator within seconds. Two minutes later, we’d settled in my office. I woke up my computer.

“So do we have a name for our perp?” I asked.

“Chase…” Bailey fished out her notebook. “Erling. Was a bouncer at Les Deux a few years back. But his full-time gig-that is, before he went to work for Lilah-was in computer hardware and electronics. Used to work for a gadget company named Omni-”

“Electronics and computers?” I frowned. “What the hell?”

“Must have something to do with Lilah’s business.”

“When he’s up and running, do you think he’ll be willing to cough up some information on Lilah in return for a choice of prison placement?”

Bailey shook her head. “I’d say negatory-”

“Though you really shouldn’t, ’cause it sounds silly,” I observed. “But why not?”

“Because we found this inside the lining of his jacket,” she said, holding up her cell phone.

It showed a photograph of a watch. TAG Heuer, to be exact.

I frowned at Bailey. “Okay,” I said. “He’s got the watch we saw on the video. So why does that mean he won’t talk?”

“Check out the next picture,” she instructed.

I hit the arrow. A photo showed the underside of the watch. It was inscribed. Fondly, L.

“Lilah,” I said. Then I put the rest of it together. “After he saw our photo, he knew he couldn’t be seen wearing the watch anymore. But he didn’t want to dump it because it was a keepsake from his…girlfriend?”

Bailey shrugged. “I wouldn’t necessarily go that far, but there was obviously some kind of relationship, and it meant something to him.”

I turned back to my computer. “Two counts of murder…use of a deadly weapon on Simon…use of a firearm on Gary. Even if the judge stays sentence on the deadly weapon, this guy’s getting seventy-five to life.”