Gregg Hurwitz - The Kill Clause

“Maybe he didn’t fire the weapon because he couldn’t hold it properly with an atrophied arm,” Tim said.

“And regardless, Robert,” Rayner said, “an aider and abetter is subject to the same sentence as those who actually perpetrate the crime.”

“Less the gun enhancements,” Robert said.

“No one needs the gun enhancements. It was a capital-punishment case.”

Robert tilted his head, a gesture of concession. “Right,” he said. “That’s right.”

“The case precedent is pretty clear on this one,” Ananberg said, “particularly for accomplices of this type. Aiders and abetters have gotten dinged on special circumstances for everything from lying-in-wait allegations to multiple-murder allegations.”

Bowrick’s booking photo sat faceup to Tim’s right, the border nudging his knuckles. Despite Bowrick’s attempt to approximate good posture, the flare of his dishwater-blond bangs barely notched the five-foot-eight line painted on the wall behind him. A jagged half-coin pendant dangled from a thin gold necklace. Sullenness pervaded his features. He didn’t have the confidence to give off surly; his was the pasty-white face of hope beaten down to unhappy submission. He was sullen like a kicked dog, like the kid picked last, like a deflowered girl after her lover’s too-hasty departure.

Ananberg backed them up, and Rayner led them through the case from the beginning. They started by scouring the evidence reports-admissible and inadmissible. Their evaluative capabilities had drastically improved as they’d grown more familiar with Ananberg’s procedure, leading to sharper focus, more incisive arguments, and a wider exploration of potentialities. The deliberations were all the more impressive given the divisiveness at the meeting’s outset.

When the final document had made its way around the table, Tim slid it into the binder and glanced up at the others. “Let’s vote.”

Guilty. Unanimous. Ananberg, who’d cast her vote last, crossed her hands on the table, her expression oddly content.

“There is one major complication,” Rayner said. “After he went state’s evidence, Bowrick went into hiding.” He spread his hands, Jesus calming the seas. “The good news is, he didn’t go into witness protection. Not formally. But he was getting death threats, his property vandalized. After someone tried to burn down his apartment, he switched his name and moved away. Only his probation officer knows where he is.”

“I’ll find him,” Tim said quietly.

“If he’s still under the thumb of his PO, he’s still laying his head somewhere in L.A.,” Robert said.

Mitchell’s fingers strummed on the table. Stopped. He looked at Rayner. “Can you pry where he’s staying from the PO?”

“Too messy,” Tim said before Rayner could respond. “Too many trails leading back to us.”

“We know he’s logging community-service hours,” Robert said. “Why don’t we run a check on what programs are up where, give a glance?”

“I said I’ll find him,” Tim said. “Without stoking any fires. I’ll take care of it quietly. You all sit tight and keep silent.”

Rayner was standing at the safe, his back to the others. Before Tim could move to rise, Rayner turned and let another black binder drop on the table. Tim’s eyes went past him to the last black binder in the safe. Kindell’s.

He wondered if Ananberg had even attempted to get him the public defender’s notes from Kindell’s binder.

Rayner followed Tim’s gaze behind him to the open safe. He smiled curtly, reached back, and closed it. Tim continued to find Rayner’s petty power plays galling, despite their transparency.

“What do you say we tackle one more case now while our brains are warmed up?”

Tim checked his watch. 11:57.

“I got nowhere to go,” Robert said.

Ananberg’s laugh, sharp and short, rang off the wood-paneled walls. “I don’t think any of us has anywhere to go. Tim, do you have to get home?”

“I don’t have a home, remember?”

Robert’s mustache shifted and rose. “That’s right. None of us do, do we, Mitch?”

“No home, no family, no records. We’re ghosts.”

The Stork emitted a wheezy little laugh. “No taxes either.”

“Ghosts.” Mitchell grinned. “We are ghosts, aren’t we? We just come out of our graves now and then to take care of business.”

Tim nodded at the binder. “What’s the case?”

Rayner folded his hands atop the binder and gave a magician’s pause. “Rhythm Jones.”

“Ah,” Mitchell said. “Rhythm.”

It would be difficult to live in L.A. County and not have at least a passing awareness of the Rhythm Jones-Dollie Andrews case. An exrapper of modest acclaim, Jones was a small-time dealer with a propensity for turning out girls. His first name derived from the fact that he was always bouncing, as if to a private beat. According to street lore, his mother had named him in the crib. As an adult he threw off a sloppily endearing vibe, all fat smile and bopping head. Usually he wore a Dodgers jersey, hanging open to reveal the RHYTHM tattoo stenciled in Gothic across his chest.

For a few chance weekends in his twenties, he’d spun vinyl with the East Side DJ set, but he’d quickly found himself back in his hometown, South Central. Three years and two hundred pounds later, he was the go-to man for shitty rock and petite white girls who’d hook for a twenty or a spoonful of liquid nirvana. He was a notoriously vicious sex addict; his charges had been known to hobble into emergency rooms, towels crammed down both sides of their pants to stanch the bleeding.

He’d been indicted on two counts of possession for sale and one count of pimping and pandering, but due to a combination of dumb luck and cowed witnesses, he’d never been convicted.

Until Dollie Andrews.

Andrews was an off-the-bus Ohioan who’d taken the archetypal Hollywood header, from waitressing actress to back-alley blow-jobber. But she’d finally gotten her dream: After her body had been found smeared into Jones’s ratty couch, punctured with seventy-seven knife wounds, her modeling eight-by-tens had been released to a ravenous press, and her short-cropped towhead curls and the just-right width of her hips had etched her persona posthumously into the zeitgeist.

Jones had been found sleeping off a PCP high one room over; he claimed complete amnesia regarding the past two days. None of Andrews’s blood had been found on his body, his clothes, or under his nails, though a crime-scene technician had discovered traces in the pipes beneath the shower drain. The weapon, bearing a clean set of ten-point prints, had been recovered from a trash can outside. Motive? The prosecutor had argued sexual rejection. One of Andrews’s colleagues had captured her on camcorder wholesomely proclaiming she’d never give it up for black meat. In certain boxcars composing the train wreck of public opinion, this was known to pass for virtue.

To Jones’s immense disadvantage was the egregious ineptitude of his lawyer, an acne-faced kid just out of school whom the overburdened public defender had thrown to the wolves on the nothing-to-gain case. Given the circumstances under which the body had been found, several witnesses who claimed Jones had been stalking Andrews for weeks, and the unanimous testimony of two medical examiners that the stabber had been a forceful, right-handed male around five feet ten, Jones had been convicted by a jury after less than twenty minutes of deliberation.

The verdict had brought out the Leonard Jeffrieses and the Jesse Jacksons, who had proclaimed that, as a non-professional-athlete black male accused of killing a white woman, Jones wasn’t being given a fair shake. The resultant political pressures had accelerated Jones’s Writ for Ineffective Assistance of Counsel, which was granted.