Joel Goldman - Chasing The Dead

“No.”

“Okay, so here’s how your case is going to play out. Your initial appearance is Friday morning at nine. I’ll meet you in the courtroom. That’s when the judge will set bail. It will probably be too high for you to get out, so I’m afraid you’ll be here for a while.”

“That’s okay. Been on the street a long time. Like they say, three hots and a cot.”

Alex grinned. “Not many of my clients see it that way. You’ve been charged with forcible rape and first-degree murder. In a month or so, the prosecutor will ask the grand jury to formally indict you on those charges. If you’re convicted, you could get life in prison without parole, or the death penalty.”

She paused, gauging his reaction. Jared’s face slackened, and what little color he had melted away, his eyes fluttering. She expected that, but not the small smile that leaked from the corners of his mouth, as if he was telling himself, I told you so . He was revealing pieces of himself, but she didn’t know what they meant.

“And a few months after that, we’ll have a preliminary hearing. That’s when the prosecutor will put on enough evidence to convince the judge that you should stand trial. And six months to a year from then you’ll go to trial unless we make a deal.”

Jared perked up. “What kind of deal?”

“Too early to say, but it would probably mean pleading guilty to a lesser offense to avoid the death penalty or life without parole. Something that would give you a shot at eventually getting out.”

He shook his head. “They ain’t ever lettin’ me out.”

Alex cocked her head. “Why do you say that?”

“’Cause that’s the way it is.”

“Innocent people confess to crimes they didn’t commit more often than you could guess. It happens for all kinds of reasons. And someone who’s been to war and who ends up living on the street may be even more likely to do that just because of all the stress you’ve gone through. I’ll come back after court and we’ll go over everything that happened. And I’ll dig into everything the police did to get you to confess. If there’s a way to keep your confession from the jury, I’ll find it.”

“I hear you,” he said, his chin down. “But. .”

Alex leaned toward him, holding her breath, waiting to see if he would recant his confession. Jared looked away, saying nothing. Alex pressed him. “But what?”

He leaned back in his chair, took a deep breath, and let it out. “It don’t really matter anymore.”

“What doesn’t matter?”

His eyes were red and wet. “All of it. Everything. I been headed here a long time, and now that I am here, it don’t matter anymore.”

Her clients rarely told her the truth, especially the first time she met them, even when they were confronted with persuasive physical evidence, like DNA and fingerprints. The street-smart ones who’d spent their lives perfecting the arts of deception and denial would tell her without flinching that they knew it looked bad but it wasn’t them, that the eyewitnesses were liars and the lab tests were wrong, that they’d been at their mother’s house watching television when the crime occurred. When she’d tell them to get real, they’d ask what kind of deal they could get, not admitting their guilt but offering to testify against somebody. Who? she’d ask. Anybody, they would say. Whatever it took.

Jared Bell told her something she didn’t hear very often from her clients. He was where he belonged. Maybe because he was guilty and nothing he could do would change that or maybe because he was innocent and nothing he could do would prove that.

“Well, it matters to me,” she told him.

On her way out, Alex stopped to talk to Calvin Lockett, one of the corrections officers. Alex had cultivated a friendship with him, making it a point to ask about his family, sharing news of hers. It had paid off more than once when Calvin let her know about an inmate too eager to testify against one of her clients.

He had worked the jail for twenty years, using the time to become an unofficial jailhouse psychologist, adept at diagnosing what he called an inmate’s roots, the tangle of bad breaks, bad judgment, and plain meanness that put them in his charge. He grew up poor and black like many of them, puzzling about how he ended up on the other side of the steel bars. Rail thin and graying, he watched over the inmates, shaking his head and clucking his tongue.

“Hey, Calvin,” Alex said. “How’s it going?”

“Same old, same old.”

“I’ve got a new client, Jared Bell. What’s your take on him?”

“Boy’s a midnight screamer. Wakes everybody up with all his racket.”

“Nightmares, huh? Any idea what they’re about?”

Calvin shrugged. “Some people say dreams don’t mean a thing. I don’t buy that. Man dreams of making love to a beautiful woman, that’s what he needs. Man dreams he can fly, he’s trying to escape his troubles. Man that’s a midnight screamer, well, that’s his demons trying to get out.”

“You talk to him about his nightmares?”

“Don’t need to talk to him. I heard enough.”

“What did you hear besides his screaming?”

Calvin paused, looking around to make certain they wouldn’t be overheard. “Whoever that girl, Ali, is-or was-you ask me, he killed her. That’s what’s waking him up. He’s calling her name, saying he’s sorry.”

Alex’s heart picked up a beat. According to Rossi’s report, Jared said he didn’t know the victim’s name and Rossi hadn’t identified her. Knowing her name would jump-start Alex’s investigation.

“What, exactly, did Jared say?”

“He kept calling her name, saying ‘I’m sorry, Ali, I’m sorry.’”

“I don’t suppose he mentioned her last name.”

Calvin smirked. “You ever hear of a demon with a last name?”

Alex thought about her recurring nightmares, the ones in which Dwayne Reed appeared out of the darkness, reaching for her with one hand, the other clamped around Bonnie’s throat.

“I can think of at least one,” she said.

Rossi got back to his desk in the homicide unit, playing out in his head his next visit with Alex Stone, wanting that encounter to appear as accidental as the one at the Zoo actually had been. He was trying to figure out how to make that happen when his boss, Mitch Fowler, hollered at him from the door to his office.

“Rossi! My office! Now!”

Fowler was the commander of the homicide unit. He yelled at Rossi because he could and because it was his idea of strong leadership. Fowler lived in and by the book, while Rossi used the book as a doorstop. Fowler spent his days crunching numbers on overtime and closed cases, his hair thinning as his waistline swelled, frustrated that Rossi’s name was always at the top of both lists. Rossi’s overtime cost their unit too much money, but his closure rate made it impossible for Fowler to dial him back.

Rossi grabbed his cell phone, holding it to his ear, pretending to be talking to someone on the other end, one finger in the air signaling to Fowler that he’d be there in a minute. No one was on the other end, but he couldn’t resist pimping Fowler. He watched Fowler from the corner of his eye, waiting until Fowler’s face blossomed red before he pocketed his phone, slow walking to Fowler’s office. By the time he got there, Fowler was behind his desk, thumping a pencil against his belly. There were two chairs on the visitor’s side of the desk, one of them occupied.

“Hey, Rossi,” Charlie Wheeler said. “How’s it hangin’?”

Wheeler was Rossi’s first partner when he joined the homicide unit. His parents were wealthy physicians who sent him to Pembroke Hill, Kansas City’s private prep school, and to Princeton, where he got an engineering degree. He’d disappointed them when he enrolled in the academy the day after he graduated, telling Rossi he never grew out of playing cops and robbers. Rossi nicknamed him Mr. Mayor since he shared the name of a popular former holder of the office.