Robert Ellis - Murder Season

Hight didn’t respond, and silence overtook the room. Lena circled the table. As she passed the pantry she noticed pencil marks on the inside of the door. Beside each line was a date. The months and days remained the same-only the year changed-and she realized that the marks on the door were Lily Hight’s measurements, recorded on her birthday each year.

Lena felt the gloom creeping in. A sudden hard pull. Hight’s daughter had been five feet nine inches tall on her sixteenth birthday. Her last birthday.

She turned back to Hight. He had been watching her. Studying her. As Lena measured him in the chair, he appeared broken, but not frightening-like a man who stared into the abyss, lost his footing, and fell in.

“Why are you afraid to take a polygraph?” she said in a softer voice. “Why go through all this? Why not clear your name and move on?”

Hight had turned away, his eyes fixated on the bright sunlight spilling into the room from the window over the sink. The polished brass faucet and white porcelain tub sparkled and glowed, giving his ultra-pale skin the illusion of life.

“Move on?” he whispered, more to himself than anyone in the room.

“That’s right,” Lena said. “Clear your name and move on. Or take responsibility for what you’ve done. Own up to it.”

A moment passed, the man staring at the rays of sunlight dancing on the counter. “You don’t know what it’s like,” he said. “If you did, you wouldn’t be here. You wouldn’t be doing this to me. You are the people I trusted. The people I counted on. The people who were supposed to bring me just-” The words stopped coming with Hight thinking things over as if in a trance. “I won’t do it,” he said finally. “I won’t take a polygraph because nothing in this world is guaranteed. I won’t do it because I’m glad that Jacob Gant was murdered last night. I wished for it. I dreamed about it over and over again. Lily’s gone. She’s gone and I wanted him dead. I’m glad he’s dead. I only wish there was something past dead. Something worse than dead.”

His voice shook, then faded into silence. Lena traded looks with Barrera and Mifune, but she was thinking about the way Jacob Gant had been murdered. The two bullets in his eyes. The anger that the killer had been harboring. The bitterness and hatred that had rushed out the barrel of a gun.

Payback.

Hight gazed up at her, his dilated eyes wild with emotion. As he lowered his hands to his lap and tried to pull himself together, Lena noticed a bandage on his left palm. The blood leaking out. Hight had been cut-wounded-and he was trying to hide it.

Someone tapped on the door from the foyer, breaking the moment. When she turned, John Street motioned her into the living room. She could see his partner behind him. Exiting the kitchen, she joined them by the far window beside the baby grand. Carson was holding something: a plastic evidence bag containing a single sheet of yellow paper. Both detectives were big men. Both were experienced and not in the habit of showing much emotion. But everything about today was different.

Carson glanced at Hight through the doorway, then passed the bag over. “It’s a receipt for a gun,” he said quietly. “A nine millimeter Smith, Lena. Check out the gun dealer’s address.”

Carson opened the window shutter. Lena lowered the receipt into the light and started reading. The 9-mm pistol had been purchased in Arizona. The address was nothing more than a Web site, and nothing less. She didn’t see a phone number, but the date of purchase caught her eye.

“He bought the gun six weeks ago,” she said.

Carson nodded, his wide face flushed with color. “The day after the verdict,” he said. “No wait time and no background check. Hight types in his credit card number, and some asshole ships him the piece, no questions asked.”

“Where was the receipt?”

Street answered for his partner. “He’s got an office upstairs. We found it in his desk with a stack of other receipts. Looks like he was trying to write it off as a business expense.”

Lena felt someone move in behind her. It was Barrera. He reached for the evidence bag and examined the receipt.

“Business is business,” he said. “Find the gun. Tear the place apart.”

She had asked Mifune to remove his instruments from the table and wait outside. Barrera was seated on the couch in the living room, out of sight but within earshot. Hight remained in the kitchen, alone for the last thirty minutes with whatever was going on inside his head. She didn’t think that time would soften him. The man had been running on fumes for more than a year. When she finally entered the room, he was staring at that empty pack of cigarettes.

“What’s happened?” he said. “Why is this taking so long?”

Lena opened a file she’d pulled from her briefcase. “Do you keep a flashlight in your car, Mr. Hight?”

“I don’t think so. Why?”

She found the surveillance photo and set it down on the table. Hight looked at himself behind the wheel and seemed amazed that his ride home had been documented. Lena pushed the photo closer, pointing at the dark object on the passenger seat.

“What do you think this is?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“On the seat beside you. What do you think it is? What’s your best guess?”

Hight didn’t answer and seemed confused. Leaning over the table, he tried to study the image.

“We’re not talking about six days ago,” she said. “It’s more like six hours. You’ve just left Club 3 AM. You said that you don’t keep a flashlight in your car. So what is it, Mr. Hight? What’s on the passenger seat of your car?”

His eyes returned to the photograph. “I don’t know. It could be a shadow. It’s nothing.”

Lena tossed the receipt for the gun on the table.

“A shadow?” she said.

Hight’s body stiffened as he realized what was in the evidence bag. Beads of sweat began to percolate on his forehead. His mouth quivered. Lena pulled a chair away from the table and sat down. Nothing about her voice or manner was confrontational.

“Where’s the gun, Mr. Hight?”

He took a deep breath and shuddered as he exhaled. He tried to look at her, but couldn’t. He seemed embarrassed. The room went quiet again.

“Make it easy on yourself,” she said. “You’re so close. Just tell me where it is.”

Another long moment passed. “I can’t remember,” he whispered finally. “I don’t know what I did with it.”

“You mean you got rid of it. After you left the club, you tossed it.”

He shook his head. “No. I mean I can’t remember where I put it. It came in the mail and I put it somewhere. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was confused.”

Lena sat back in the chair, unable to hide her disappointment. “That’s your story? You bought a gun, but you can’t remember what you did with it. You were at Club 3 AM last night, two men were shot, but all you took with you was your shadow.”

The cynicism in her voice registered on his face, though only for a brief moment.

“I think I should call my lawyers now.”

Lawyers. He didn’t have one attorney. He had more than one.

“I do, too,” she said. “And here’s what you’ll need to tell them. It won’t work, Mr. Hight. What you’re doing. What you’re trying to get away with. It won’t work.”

“I’m not trying to get away with anything.”

“Sure you are. You’re trying to get away with murder. But all that depends on it looking like a crime of passion. And you’ll need public opinion on your side to pull it off.”

“If I had killed Jacob Gant, it would have been a crime of passion.”

“But what happened last night wasn’t a crime of passion,” she said. “And that’s your problem. It doesn’t look like it. It doesn’t feel like it. So how do you expect your lawyers to sell it?”