Jonathon King - A Killing Night

"Was she successful?" Diane asked.

"I don't know. O'Shea called me and said they'd confiscated his boots. Richards was figuring on bloodstain to connect him with the assault, but he didn't say what else they might have taken."

"It would be easy enough to get a copy of the warrant, see what they took out of the place," Diane said, the lawyer in her, working it even as an unconscious reaction.

"If he g-gets arrested, you just sh-show up at magistrate's court as an eyewitness and squelch the p-prosecutor's p-probable cause by entering an affidavit that you two were the ones who were attacked."

"Through who, Billy?" I said. "The public defender who's just going through the morning cattle call? You know how that works in front of a judge who's probably on rotation for three weeks because everyone hates that duty."

Billy and Diane again looked at each other. They knew I was right.

"The guy needs a lawyer," I repeated.

I knew what I was asking of my friend, who had not spoken in open court since his days in college when his law degree required him to display his stutter in front of fellow students. I knew he loathed the idea of revealing his flaw and giving others a reason to think they had some advantage over him.

"Can I get anyone coffee?" Diane said, standing to clear the table and then going to the kitchen without an answer which she knew she already had.

"I'd just hate to see the guy standing up there with no one to throw another possibility across the judge's bench," I said.

"The magistrate judge isn't likely to listen any more to Billy than she would the public defender, Max," Diane said from the kitchen. "Unless they try something outrageous like asking for no bond."

This time I knew she was right. But I also knew that if they were holding O'Shea on assault charges it would just bolster any argument the prosecutor made to a grand jury on filing an abduction and homicide rap on the guy later. I could hear it clearly in my head: "I know the evidence is circumstantial, ladies and gentlemen, but our suspect was also recently arrested for a violent act which shows his penchant for aggression."

Billy was quiet. Even as a behind-the-scenes litigator, he knew the workings and the working flaws in the system. He also knew that a lawyer can get a leg caught in the machinery and get pulled in, just as a suspect can. I was asking him to risk that chance that he might be pulled into an arena that he had avoided his entire career.

"O'Shea says he has nothing to do with these disappearances, Billy. And he asked me to help him."

"D-Do you trust him?"

I hesitated, something a good attorney would never do, whether they were convinced or not. People familiar with the working of courtrooms know that truth and justice are only in the eye of the beholder. The best lawyers know that their job is only to convince that beholder of their version.

I knew I could never accept that role and I knew Billy well enough to know how he disdained it.

"My gut tells me he's not involved," I said. "But I could be giving him more benefit than he deserves. The guy did save me from a hole in the back ten years ago."

Diane brought over the coffee, put mine in front of me and then sat next to Billy.

"Do you want to t-tell me that part?"

Even if he did phrase it as such, I knew it wasn't really a question. While I told the story, I went through the entire pot of strong Colombian blend. Diane got up twice to refill her wineglass. I reconstructed the drug bust on South Street and how O'Shea must have been listening in on the tack channel that night and horning in on the action. But there was also no doubt that he'd kept the drug runner from using the handgun I neglected to frisk him for. I could have been dead in the street, another cop funeral in the family.

I told them of my interviews with O'Shea's ex-wife and my trip to the IAD office. When I mentioned Meagan's name, Billy looked up into my eyes. He would let me gloss over it, but I was using truth to base my assumption of O'Shea's innocence on. When Diane heard that I had been married to an aggressive, type-A personality who was always bent on being the alpha-male of her block, she kept her eyes on the rim of her glass. But I could see the twitch at the corners of her mouth.

I stopped talking and she finally looked up.

"What?"

"It only lasted two years," I said defensively.

"I'm surprised."

"At what?"

"That it went that long."

She waited a beat.

"Any children?"

"No. Thank God," I said. "She would have eaten her young."

Diane coughed into her glass. Billy patted her back.

"Sorry," she finally said.

I smiled and shook my head. Billy brought us back on line.

"OK. If I was his lawyer. If," he said. "I would obviously argue f-for no crime to begin with. No body. No evidence. But say it m- moves to indictment anyway. Then as an attorney I try to sh-show that someone else could be responsible. Who? What kind of man abducts grown, s-smart single women whose only similarity is their chosen work?"

"Someone who's a psycho, but a different one," said Diane, rejoining us. She had switched her drink to ice water in a crystal tumbler.

"If I put myself behind that bar, I see the same group of guys every night waving their dicks around trying to show who can snag the attention of the good-looking bartender. So to be successful, this one's got to have a different schtick."

"Your honor!" Billy said in mock horror. "Waving their…"

"And at the risk of sounding shallow," I interrupted, "he's good- looking himself. She's probably got a target-rich environment, if you know what I mean. She knows she's onstage and can pick from the audience."

"Someone in their age r-range, I would suspect. M-Maybe a little older."

"But not Daddy," Diane said. "You said your friend Richards profiled these girls as being far from home, not necessarily close to family, independent-minded. I see that as a girl running away from Daddy, not to one."

"Someone who appears stable. Has a job. Isn't in there scraping change together or begging off a tab. These girls have seen enough of that."

"Someone s-safe. Or p-perceived to be safe," said Billy. "They see a lot of quick hit hustle going on b-between pickup and bar stool relationships every night."

"All right," said Diane. "We've got a good-looking guy with an aura of something out of the ordinary who appears stable, self- sufficient, not boring, smart and makes you feel safe."

The table went quiet for too long. I was staring into my coffee cup and when I raised my eyes they were both looking at me.

"Where were you on the night of January third?" Diane said with that mischievous look in her eyes.

"It fits you, M-Max. And your friend, O'Shea," Billy said.

"Who doesn't trust a cop, off-duty, in a bar?" Diane said. "Especially a blue-collar girl from a blue-collar neighborhood."

"I'm not a cop anymore, and neither is O'Shea," I said, going on the defensive.

"The problem with all this dime-store psychoanalysis is that none of us knows what the women were looking for to let themselves fall into this trap. And that's if they fell at all and aren't tending bar in Cancun or Freeport or Houston for Christ's sake," I said. "And what's the killer's motive in all this if they were abducted?"

This time I got up myself and poured the final cup from the coffeemaker.

"They're lonely, Max," Diane said, answering the first question. "You don't use logic to explain what one person sees in another to save them from loneliness."

She slipped her hand under Billy's.

"Just like m-most abusers, rapists, it's not about sex," Billy said. "The guy is trying to control something and can't, not even himself."

"Colin O'Shea doesn't want control that bad," I said. "Hell. He never wanted it when he did have it."