Joel Goldman - Chasing The Dead

Alex swallowed the lump in her throat.

“But you didn’t kill her; the Taliban did.”

He lifted his head, red-eyed. “It’s the same thing, ’cause I should have saved her and I didn’t. That’s what you do for someone you love, and I didn’t even try.”

Listening to Jared’s story, seeing how his guilt and pain contorted him, Alex realized why he’d confessed to killing Joanie Sutherland. She was a stand-in for Ali. That’s why, the first time they talked, Jared had told her that his arrest was a long time coming. Joanie was a stand-in for the relationship he’d wished he had with Ali. Whatever had happened between them, as far as Jared was concerned, he hadn’t raped Joanie Sutherland. He’d made love to Ali Woodrell. That was why he hadn’t confessed to raping Joanie, though Alex had no way of knowing whether that was how Joanie saw it. At least Alex understood Jared better, even if she was still uncertain of his innocence.

“Did you kill Joanie Sutherland?”

He stopped rubbing his palms against his thighs, sitting still, looking straight at her. “No, ma’am, but after what I done, I deserve to be in prison or executed, whatever they decide. It don’t matter to me.”

“Well, it matters to me, and trust me, it will matter more to you when you stop feeling guilty for Ali’s death. I see how painful it was for you to tell me about Ali, but what happened to both of you is very important for your defense, so I’ve got to ask you a few more questions, if that’s all right with you.”

He cleared his throat. “Okay.”

“How did you get to know Joanie?”

“She was a hooker that worked Independence Avenue. I seen her there a few times.”

“Were you attracted to her?”

He blushed, turning and looking away. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“What was it about her that attracted you?”

He couldn’t face Alex. “I dunno. Everything, I guess.”

“Ali must have had long dark hair, kind of an oval face, and a good figure.”

Jared swirled around, hands on the table. “How did you know that?”

“Because Joanie did. Were you drawn to Joanie because she reminded you of Ali?”

Jared clenched his jaw. “Ali wasn’t a whore!”

“And I’m not saying she was. But Joanie was a whore who happened to look like Ali. When you talked to Joanie, I bet she didn’t make you feel like nothing.”

Jared hesitated, his eyes glazing over as if he had gone somewhere else, and Alex was uncertain whether he was still with her or back in Afghanistan with Ali. She rapped her pen on the table.

“Jared? Are you with me?”

He blinked, focusing, his voice soft. “Yeah.”

“Did Joanie make you feel like nothing?”

“No, she didn’t.”

“She was probably the one who asked if you wanted to have sex.”

He nodded.

“But you didn’t have any cash, did you?”

He shook his head.

“But you had all that jewelry you’d picked up along the way, and every woman, even a whore, maybe especially a whore, likes jewelry.”

“They do. Even the ones that got enough of it.”

“So you offered to pay Joanie with jewelry. But that meant she had to come to your tent.”

“She didn’t mind. I told where I was camped out and she laughed, said she used to play down there all the time when she was little. Knew right where it was. Said it was practically on her way home and that she’d meet me there.”

“What time was it when she got to your tent?”

“I’m not real sure since I don’t have a watch, but it had been dark for a couple of hours.”

“That’s pretty early in the evening for a working girl to get off the street. How much jewelry were you going to give her?”

He chuckled. “It wasn’t like that. I mean, yeah, I was going to give her something. I was even going to let her take her pick. She said she was meeting someone later on and wanted to go home and clean up first and she wanted a nice piece of jewelry to wear when she went back out.”

Alex leaned in hard against the table, trying not to get too excited. “Did she say who she was going to meet?”

Jared shook his head. “No, and I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to hear about her being with someone else even though I knew that’s what she did.”

“So you had sex with her in your tent.”

He blushed again, dropping his gaze to the floor. “Yeah.”

“And afterward, did she pick out a piece of jewelry?”

He nodded.

“What did she choose?”

“The gold cross I took off her when I found her in the creek.”

“Why did you take the cross?”

“’Cause I wanted it for Ali.”

“Then why did you let Joanie take it in the first place?”

He raised his hands chest high, waving them back and forth, his eyes fluttering. “I dunno.” He took a deep breath, shaking his head. “I dunno. I guess maybe ’cause, like you said before, she reminded me of Ali.”

Alex studied him, looking for something that would expose him as a liar, rapist, and murderer, but it wasn’t there. He believed what he was telling her regardless of whether it was true. Mathew Woodrell had been just as certain.

“And was that the last time you saw Joanie alive?”

He raised his head, looking squarely at Alex, not blinking. “Yes, ma’am.”

Rossi didn’t like going to the courthouse because it usually meant that he was going to have to testify in one of his cases, and that always meant that a defense attorney was going to second-guess his investigation and twist his testimony to create reasonable doubt where there was none. He got the whole innocent-until-proven-guilty thing and he wasn’t so full of himself that he thought he was infallible, but smarmy defense lawyers and their smirky clients made him long for frontier justice.

He’d been a witness in Judge West’s courtroom dozens of times, always appreciating how courteous the judge was to him and enjoying each time the judge jammed his gavel up defense counsel’s puckered ass. The days of frontier justice weren’t coming back, but every cop knew that Wild Bill’s courtroom was the next best thing.

So he had mixed emotions about starting his Monday by bracing his favorite judge. He couldn’t fathom how the judge could have gotten tangled up in either Robin Norris’s murder or Jared Bell’s case, and that was enough to make him cautious. Not because he might ruffle the judge’s feathers but because hard experience had taught him that the quickest way to miss something important was to rule out the improbable. And while he doubted that Judge West had anything to hide, he couldn’t ignore the threads that tied the judge and Alex Stone together.

Lawyers, litigants, and potential jurors were crowded outside the judge’s courtroom, typical for a Monday morning, when new trials were starting. Rossi threaded his way past them and into the office outside Judge West’s chambers. His secretary was on the phone but the door to the judge’s chambers was open. Judge West looked out into the office as he slipped into his black robe, recognizing Rossi and waving him into his chambers.

“Morning, Your Honor,” Rossi said, shaking his hand.

“What brings you over here, Detective? I’m starting a civil case this morning, not criminal.”

“And I won’t keep you from that,” Rossi said. “I just need to ask you a couple of questions.”

“About what?”

One of Rossi’s rules about questioning a witness was to establish control. His badge was usually enough to do that, but he knew it wouldn’t have any effect on Judge West. Another rule was to slow it down, because most people couldn’t wait to get the questioning over. Making them go at his pace was one more way of letting the witness know who was running the show. Judge West was in a hurry. Rossi wasn’t. He looked over his shoulder at the open door.