Joel Goldman - Chasing The Dead

Which brought her to the bottom-line question. Who was Judge West protecting? The easy answer was that he was the killer, but that was too big a leap for her. He’d never given her any indication he was capable of such a crime. Still, she knew firsthand the human capacity to kill when pushed too far. And she also understood a killer’s unabashed determination to get away with murder.

Alex wanted a look at Jared Bell before his initial appearance. She had to get a feel for him, get some sense of how he got caught up in whatever Judge West was orchestrating and whether she’d be able to pry both of them out of that trap.

Jared had confessed to murder, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t being set up to take the fall for crimes he didn’t commit. He wouldn’t be the first person to confess to something he didn’t do after being questioned throughout the night by an aggressive cop like Rossi.

And his confession didn’t match all the charges. For starters, Jared hadn’t confessed to the rape. If he was willing to admit murdering the victim, why deny raping her? That there was evidence of forcible rape didn’t mean Jared was the rapist. It was possible that the victim had been raped, or engaged in rough sex, before she had sex with Jared, neither of which Alex could rule out, given what little she knew about the victim.

But that wasn’t all. According to Rossi, Jared said that he and the victim argued after they had sex and that’s when he strangled her. If Jared had raped her, that sounded more like second-degree murder, knowingly causing the death of another during the commission of a crime, than first-degree murder, knowingly causing the death of a person after deliberation on the matter. If convicted of second-degree murder, he’d have a shot at parole one day.

And if the sex was consensual, Alex might even be able to convince the jury that it was involuntary manslaughter-recklessly causing the death of another. That was a Class D felony, which carried a maximum sentence of four years.

It was a short walk from her office to the county jail. The building was officially known as the Jackson County Regional Detention Center, a name that politicians liked better. Everyone else called it what it was-the jail, all seven floors of it.

The jail population was segregated by floor. Those with serious mental health problems and openly gay and transsexual inmates were housed on the second floor, an arrangement that made Alex want to scream whenever she set foot on the floor. Instead, she continually lobbied the county to stop equating the two.

The third floor was for inmates who had no prior incarcerations, resulting in a population of mostly young inmates. Jared fit that profile. The crimes he was charged with didn’t. Rape and murder qualified him for the seventh floor, home to sex offenders and high-profile inmates.

Alex rode the elevator past the fourth and fifth floors, which were reserved for inmates who had served real time in state or federal prisons, and past the sixth floor, which housed women. She stepped off on seven, looking through a windowed wall into another room, where the corrections officers, or COs, worked. On the far wall of that room, there was another bank of windows, through which she could see the inmates. Having little else to do, they gathered at those windows to see who had come to visit.

At any one time, she might have half a dozen clients in the jail. Once they saw her, they would point at themselves, miming their question. “Are you here to see me?” She’d smile and mouth her apology, pointing at the chosen one. She’d called ahead, letting the COs know whom she wanted to see.

She scanned the faces lined up against the windows, shaking her head at the familiar ones, wondering which of the others was Jared Bell, her answer coming when a skinny white man with vacant eyes and mangy hair peeled away from the windows and shuffled toward a waiting CO.

Another CO escorted her to an interior meeting room big enough to accommodate a scarred metal table bolted to the floor and a pair of chairs. Jared entered through another door, chin down and hands jammed in the pockets of his jumpsuit, eyes darting around the room like a mouse looking for a morsel or a way out.

“Hi, Jared. I’m your lawyer, Alex Stone. Please take a seat.”

He slid down in his chair until his legs were stretched beneath the table almost to Alex’s side.

“Okay,” he said, after a moment.

“Are they treating you all right?”

He shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so. Nobody’s given me any trouble.”

He was pleasant, soft-spoken and polite, without a hint of pent-up rage or inclination to violence, the kind of person a jury might warm to and the kind of person who could be manipulated into taking a fall. His sunken eyes, sallow complexion, and yellowed teeth spoke to his time living on the street.

“Where are you from?”

“Goodland, Kansas.”

“Boy, that’s all the way west to the Colorado line, isn’t it?”

He gave her a shy smile. “Yes, ma’am.”

Alex returned the smile, holding his gaze for a moment, trying to make a connection.

“When was the last time you were home?”

He shrugged. “Three or four years, right after I got out of the army.”

“What was your rank when you got out?”

“E-4.”

“Like a corporal except you weren’t a junior noncommissioned officer.”

His eyes got wide. “You know your ranks.”

Alex smiled. “I’ve represented my share of vets. How long were you in the service?”

Jared swirled his hands on the table’s Formica surface as if he was making patterns in the sand. “Two tours, four years.”

“Did you see a lot of action?”

He ducked his chin, looking away. “Everybody did. That’s how it was in the sandbox.”

Alex shook her head. “Boy, I can’t imagine what that was like.”

“No, ma’am, you can’t. I can promise you that,” he said, tugging at the sleeves of his jumpsuit, the fabric hanging on him, the outfit at least a size too big.

She nodded. “I believe you. Thank you for your service.”

His voice rose as he hunched his shoulders to his ears. “Everyone’s always thanking us for our service, ’cept that doesn’t mean much, ’cause they don’t know what it’s like over there so they don’t really know what they’re thanking us for, you know what I mean, ma’am?”

It was Jared’s first show of anything approaching anger, making Alex wonder what might be boiling beneath his soft-spoken façade.

“I guess I do, Jared. I suppose it’s hard for anyone who hasn’t been through it to understand what it was like, so I won’t pretend that I do.”

His face softened again. “Thank you, ma’am.”

“But when I get to know you, I’ll have a better idea what it was like and I’ll thank you for your service then. In the meantime, I want you to know I’m glad to represent you.”

He furrowed his brow. “Why’s that? I’m a homeless nobody.”

“Because I know what it’s like when your life is on the line and you feel outnumbered.”

“How you know what that’s like?”

“I’ll tell you when we’ve got more time. When you were in Afghanistan, you looked out for your buddies and they looked out for you, right?”

His eyes fell, his voice dropping to a whisper. “Tried to.”

“Well, this is a different kind of war and I’m going to look after you,” she said, wincing inside, hoping to make good on the promise, knowing she might have to break it.

Jared thought about what she said and smiled. “Then I guess I should be the one thanking you for your service.”

“You’re welcome,” Alex said, pleased that she was building rapport. That was the key to building trust, and trust was the key to finding out what she needed to know. “Have you ever been charged with a crime before?”