Steve Martini - Prime Witness

Then a noise. I’m drawn from this reverie of horror by the slightest of sounds, a metallic click at the back of the room. I look. No one. Claude is still not there. Then it settles on me. The noise. Someone has pushed the button that locks the doors from the inside.

Department Four is the criminal court in this building. It has the highest level of security of any courtroom, bulletproof doors that can be electronically locked from two points: the bailiff’s station below the bench, and backstage, another switch near the clerk’s desk. Once locked, these doors can only be opened with the bailiff’s key inserted in the lock on the door.

I am now sealed in this room, with death. My mind turns to Lenore, somewhere in the back. I am pining for Claude’s little pistol, outside in the hall. Where the hell is he?

In the darkness off the bench, with blood dripping down the steps, I have the presence of mind, or perhaps just the foolishness of habit, to find my shoes.

I make my way to the evidence cart a few feet away. I look. Of the metal stakes, pointed pieces of angle-iron fourteen inches long used in the student murders, four had been ground to a razor-sharp tip before being driven through the bodies of the victims. Only two now remain on the cart. Another is accounted for in Ingel. I grab one that remains.

Hugging the wall I move down the corridor toward the private offices in the back. Here the light is bright, the full intensity, a ceiling of fluorescence. At the door to the clerk’s station, I edge one eye around the frame and peek in. The room is empty. On the desk I see a ring of keys, large like something a jailer might use. There are four keys on this. My guess is that one of these will open the security locks on the front door. So carefully laid are these, in the center of the desk, I look, and wonder, if this is not bait.

To the left is the door to the judge’s chambers, it is half open, the lights inside are on. But from this angle I cannot see in. I would have to move inside, beyond the clerk’s desk, for a clear line of sight.

To my right, and a little behind me, is another door, closed this time. This leads to the private corridor that links the back of each courtroom on this floor. Out of bounds to the general public, this corridor is for use by the judges and their staffs, to communicate and pass papers. It is sealed by steel doors at each end of the building where the corridor would otherwise join the public hallways outside. The judges only, I am told, know the little button combination that allows them to enter this sanctum, the private corridor, beyond the steel doors.

I study the clerk’s station, places where Adrian could conceal himself if he is waiting for me. There are few. My guess is he is in the judge’s chambers.

I make my way around the door, the metal stake in my right hand, pointed up and out should I need it.

Now I can see through the doorway into Ingel’s office, the desk and the chair behind it.

Then I see her, in the distance, Lenore lying on the couch, against the far wall of the office, her back to me. She appears to be bound hand and foot, white cord. Adrian has made good use of our evidence cart. Everything he needed.

As I pass the clerk’s desk my peripheral vision goes wide, taking in both sides of the room, low behind the desk, in the corner beyond the filing cabinet, anywhere Adrian could hide. I grab the keys off the desk. Despite my efforts these jingle a bit as I pick them up.

I edge my way toward Ingel’s office. I check the opening, the crack by the hinges. There’s no one behind the door. As I do this, I hold the stake poised in one hand in case he should rush. By now Adrian surely knows I am here. I would think he might have made his way out the back door, a clean escape, except for the click of the lock out front. Someone had to do that.

He is here, and I know it. To say this is anything but personal is, at this point, to ignore reality. I was right about one thing. His words this afternoon in my office, his final futile attempt at settlement, was indeed a conversation more appropriate to Adrian’s analyst.

Through the door I can see Lenore more clearly now. I cannot tell from this distance whether there is the rise of respiration from her body. I look for blood. Then I see it. A mass, congealed hues of brown, on the white of her blouse, near her neck. I stand still, staring at this. With the volume of blood I can see, she cannot be alive. I stand there stunned, angry, feeling the rise of hormones that drove me to rip Coltrane from his chair in the little room at the jail. I can feel it in my fists, out to the tips of my ears, like molten lead driving rage to the top of my head. I stare at the motionless body of Lenore Goya coiled on the couch, her knees drawn up, her arms twisted and tied behind her.

If Adrian Chambers is in this room, only one of us will come out alive.

I push the door slowly, allowing it to swing open. As it makes its slow arc toward the wall, I step across the threshold.

Nothing.

The room is empty. I look. The leg-well to the desk. It is the only place anyone could hide. The door hits the stop on the wall with a gentle thud, and suddenly there’s movement. On the couch, Lenore has struggled to turn her head. Quickly I move toward the couch, reach her body and feel the warmth of her arm, the confirmation that she is still alive. Then I see it. The cloth with dried blood. Chambers has used the bloody towel from the evidence cart, the one found in the Russian’s van, as a gag on Lenore. I untie this from the back of her head.

“Where is he?” I say.

Breathless. “I don’t know,” she gasps. “He went off behind me somewhere and I lost him, the sound of his footsteps out the door.”

I fight with the cord on her wrists. It takes several seconds to undo. She rolls over and sits up. Together we work on the piece around her ankles. This is heavily knotted. Finally I use the scissors from the desk to cut it. So much for evidence.

“Let’s get the hell out of here.” I pull her to her feet and we head out the door, past the clerk’s station and into the corridor leading to the courtroom. My eyes have trouble with the darkness, adjusting from the bright light.

I hear noise. Someone is pulling on the doors out front, jiggling the lock. Then I see him, through the tall slits in the front door, Denny Henderson, and another cop dressed in black garb, an automatic rifle in his hand. They are both pulling on the door, rattling, as much as you can, a three-hundred-pound door in its frame.

Denny is waving at me, pounding on the door, motioning, trying to yell, to say something through the door. I cup a hand to my ear and shrug, a sign that I cannot make this out.

I take one step, and in my left shoulder, a searing pain, heat like sheet lightning spreads through my upper body. I am dazed, look down and there, protruding from my suit coat is three inches of cold steel, angle-iron honed to a fine point. My knees buckle, as nausea racks my body. With my gaze still on it I watch this point disappear, backed out through my body like a boat leaving its berth.

I turn and lash blindly behind me. I miss. But I see Chambers, his dark silhouette backlit in the corridor behind us.

“Run,” I tell Lenore. I am between her and Adrian. But he pushes me aside, and Lenore isn’t fast enough. He grabs her by one arm, raises the stake.

Before he can bring it down, I lash at his face with my own steel, tearing the flesh in a jagged arc on his cheek. I hear him cry out. Instead of stabbing Lenore he punches her square in the jaw with his fist, sending her reeling backward against the bench.

He turns on me, strikes out and punches a hole in the wall near my head. He pulls it out and brings the metal down on my head like a club, sending me to the floor. I lie there in a heap, crawling, clawing at the wall to get up, the feel of warm liquid oozing from my body, my feet sliding in my own blood.