James Grippando - The Pardon

He’d been in the house only a few minutes when the phone rang. He was seized with cold fury as he recalled how he’d nearly been run over outside the Freedom Institute, and then gotten a call a few seconds later. He snatched up the phone.

“Listen, you son of a bitch-”

“Jack, it’s Jeff,” said the vet.

Jack swallowed back his anger. “Sorry. I thought-”

“No problem. I just wanted you to know. After you left, I took a closer look at that stuff Thursday expelled from his stomach. There’s not just glass in the meat. There’s seeds too. Some kind of flower seeds, it looks like. I don’t know if they’re poisonous or not, but it was still the glass that killed your dog. I just thought I should mention it.”

Jack nodded with comprehension. But he didn’t share his thoughts with the vet. “Thanks, Jeff. Maybe it’ll help me get a lead on the guy. I’ll let you know if I turn up anything.”

He hung up the phone. The seeds gave him a lead all right. In fact, they pointed right at Eddy Goss. Jack’s most notorious client had explained the meaning of the seeds in Jack’s very first in-depth consultation with him. The two of them had been locked alone in a dimly lit, high-security conference room at the county jail, about twelve hours after Goss had confessed on videotape to Detective Lonzo Stafford. Jack had sat passively on one side of the table listening, as his client doted on the details of his crime. Now some of those details-the ones that had earned Goss the nickname “Chrysanthemum Killer”-were coming back.

“Did they find the seed?” Goss asked his lawyer.

Jack lifted his eyes from his yellow notepad, pen in hand, and looked across the table at his client. “The medical examiner found it. It was shoved somewhere beyond her vagina.”

Goss sat back in his chair and folded his arms smugly, obviously pleased. “It’s a chrysanthemum seed, you know.” He arched his eyebrows, as if his lawyer was supposed to see the hidden significance.

Jack just shrugged.

Goss seemed annoyed, almost angry that Jack didn’t appreciate his point. “Don’t you get it?” Goss asked impatiently.

“No,” Jack said with a sigh. “I don’t get it.” Sigmund Freud wouldn’t get you, buddy.

Goss leaned forward, eager to explain. “Chrysanthemums are the coolest flower in the world, man.”

“They remind me of funerals,” Jack said.

“Right,” Goss answered, pleased that Jack was following along. “Nature designed them for funerals. Because funerals are dark, like death. And chrysanthemums love that.”

Jack flashed a curious but cautious expression. “What are you talking about?”

Goss warmed to the topic. “The chrysanthemum seed is just really unique. Most flowers bloom when it’s warm outside. They love summer and sunshine. But chrysanthemums are different. You plant the seed in the summer, when the ground is nice and warm, but it doesn’t do anything. It just sits there. The seed doesn’t even start to grow until summer’s almost over, when the days get shorter and the nights get cooler. And the cooler and darker it gets, the more the seeds like it. Then, in November-when everything around it’s dying, when the ground is getting cold, when the nights are long and the days are cloudy-that’s when the big flower pops out.”

“So,” Jack said warily, “you planted your seed.”

“In a warm, dark place,” Goss explained. “And that place is going to grow darker and colder every day from now on-until it’s the perfect place for my seed to grow.”

Jack stared at Goss in stone-faced silence, then scribbled the words “possible insanity defense” on his pad “How did you learn so much about flowers, Eddy?”

Goss averted his eyes. “When I was a kid in Jersey, the was this man in the neighborhood who had a greenhouse. He grew everything in there,” he said with a sly smile. “Me and him used to smoke some of it, too.”

“How did you learn about planting the seed? How did you get this idea about planting seeds in a warm, dark place?”

Goss’s mouth drew tight. “I don’t remember.”

“How old were you?”

“Ten or eleven,” he said with a shrug.

“And how old was the man?”

“Old. . not real old.”

Jack leaned forward and spoke firmly, but with understanding. “What did you used to do in there, Eddy? With that man?”

Goss’s eyes flared, and his hands started to shake. “I said I don’t remember. Something wrong with your ear, man?”

“No, I just want you to try to remember-”

“Just get the fuck outta here!” Goss shouted. “Meeting’s over. I got nothing more to say.”

“Just take it easy-”

“I said, get your ass outta here!”

Jack nodded, then packed up his bag and rose from his chair. “We’ll talk again.” He turned and stepped toward the locked metal security door.

“Hey,” Goss called out.

Jack stopped and looked back at him.

“You’re gonna get me out of here, aren’t you?”

“I’m going to represent you,” Jack said.

Goss narrowed his eyes. “You have to get me outta here.” He leaned forward in his chair to press his point. “You have to. I have a lot more seeds to sow.”

As Jack stood in his living room recalling that conversation, the memory still gave him a chill. He sighed, shook his head. If the situation wasn’t so serious, he’d laugh at the irony. He’d secured a psychopath’s acquittal, only to find himself the man’s next target.

But was he really Goss’s target? Of his rancor, maybe. But Jack found it hard to believe that Goss would actually do him physical harm. He seemed more comfortable confronting overmatched women and small animals.

He had more than enough to get a restraining order against Goss, if he wanted one. But he wasn’t sure that was the answer. The legal system had failed once before to stop Eddy Goss-thanks to him.

So it was up to Jack to find something that would work, once and for all.

It was just after 11:00 p.m.-bedtime at the governor’s mansion. Harry Swyteck was in his pajamas, sitting up in bed against the brass headboard, reading a recent Florida Trend magazine article about acquitted killer Eddy Goss. Toward the end of the story, his irritation ripened into anger as the writer delivered a fusillade of criticism against Goss’s “argue-anything” lawyer, Jack Swyteck. “They call this balanced journalism?” the governor muttered as he threw down the magazine.

A few seconds later, Agnes emerged from the bathroom in her robe and slippers. She stopped at the table by the window and tended to a bouquet of flowers, her back to her husband.

“Thank you for the flowers, Harry,” she said, her body blocking his view of the bouquet.

“Huh,” said the governor, looking over. He hadn’t sent any flowers. Today wasn’t a birthday, anniversary, or any other occasion he could think of that called for flowers. But it wasn’t inconceivable that in all the campaign commotion he’d forgotten a special day and one of his staff had covered for him. So he just played along. “Oh,” he replied, “you’re welcome, dear. I hope you like them.”

“It’s nice to get things for no reason,” she said with a sparkle in her eye. “It was so spontaneous of you.” Her mouth curled suggestively. Then she stepped away from the table, revealing the bouquet, and the governor went white.

“Keep the bed warm,” she said as she disappeared into her walk-in closet, but the governor wasn’t listening. His eyes were fixed on the bouquet of big white, pink, and yellow chrysanthemums perched on the table. He rose from the bed and stepped toward the bouquet. The card was still in the holder. Harry’s hand trembled as he opened the envelope. It suddenly seemed so obvious: the disguised voice, the threats, the photographs of a gruesome murder, and now the flowers. His mind raced, making a logical link between the “Chrysanthemum Killer,” whose weird pathology had been mentioned in the article he’d just been reading, and the blackmailer.