A Killer's Wife (Desert Plains)
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ALSO BY VICTOR METHOS
An Invisible Client
A Gambler’s Jury
The Shotgun Lawyer
The Hallows
Neon Lawyer Series
The Neon Lawyer
Mercy
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2020 by Victor Methos
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781542003919 (hardcover)
ISBN-10: 1542003911 (hardcover)
ISBN-13: 9781542003896 (paperback)
ISBN-10: 154200389X (paperback)
Cover design by Christopher Lin
First edition
CONTENTS
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
What is revealed to us as the conscious mind is no more than a flicker in the flames of the subconscious. Beneath our awareness lies a forest of terrors, of all the darkness of nature. In rare individuals, these ghostly drives break free, and monsters climb out of the abyss.
—The Psychopathology of the Subconscious Drives, by Dr. Nicolas H. Lagrand, as translated from the French by Harold Martin
1
Jordan Russo swung the passenger door open and leapt from the moving car.
The first thing she felt was the hot sting of asphalt against her bare legs. It scraped the skin off her knees and thighs, pain flooding her body as though she had been set on fire.
She would’ve screamed, but the road had knocked the breath out of her. She tasted blood pooling in her mouth and tongued the jagged edges where teeth had broken with the impact.
When she tried to sit up, a blinding agony, like being stabbed with knives all over her body, made her wonder if she’d fractured ribs. But she forced herself to sit up anyway, wincing from the pain.
She looked around. This far into the Nevada desert, there was nothing but clear blue sky, red rocks, sand dunes, and cacti for miles.
A screeching noise from in front of her. The car had slammed on its brakes.
“No,” she muttered, nearly sobbing.
She pushed herself to her feet, and instantly her right leg gave way. She braced herself against the pain, stood again, and hobbled toward the large rock formation across the nearest sand dune.
Jordan looked behind her as the driver got out of the car.
“No, no . . .”
She forced herself to run, stumbling twice. She was crying now, thinking of her mother. If she died here, her mother would be completely alone in that big house and would never find out what had happened to her.
Her leg gave out again just as she reached a boulder near the formation, and she collapsed against it, using it for balance as she scrambled behind it. There was a small nook between the rocks—the opening wasn’t large, but maybe it was enough . . .
She got down on all fours and forced her body through the small opening, the boulders scraping her skin and squeezing her injured ribs. The pain was so overwhelming she had to cover her mouth to stifle a scream.
The nook was the size of a closet. She wedged herself against the rocks and looked up. A narrow space between the boulders let in a stream of sunlight. Her hands trembled as she reached into her pocket and took out her cell phone. The screen was shattered, but it was on.
“Please,” she whispered, “please please please . . .”
No bars were showing. She dialed 911, and it wouldn’t go through. Every bit of strength left her with the silence on the other end of the phone.
Footsteps crunched on the sand outside.
She gasped and covered her mouth, her eyes wet with tears as urine soaked through her shorts and dripped down her torn and bleeding legs.
A hand lunged through the opening and grabbed her ankle.
“No! Help me! Please, somebody help me!”
She felt a violent tug that nearly ripped her leg from the hip socket. Her fingers clawed at the ground, grasping nothing but loose sand. With one powerful yank, she was pulled out into the hot sun, screaming as the shadow fell over her.
2
A scream pierced the silence of the courtroom.
Jessica Yardley leaned back against the witness box as the defendant, Donald Burrow, surged across the defense table. Yardley could see the rage in him, the pure hatred. For a moment, everyone, even the defense attorney, froze. No one was stopping him.
All at once, the normal speed of the courtroom resumed. A bailiff tackled Burrow at the waist. Another jumped on him and slammed a knee into the man’s back, yanking his arms up behind him at a sharp angle as the pen he’d grabbed as a weapon fell from his hand.
Yardley exhaled, though she hadn’t realized she’d been holding her breath.
The judge rapped his gavel, calling for calm. Yardley turned to the young woman on the stand, a high school student Burrow had locked in his cellar for two days before she’d managed to escape and call the police. She was trembling, used tissues wadded up in her palms. Yardley took her hand and said, “He can’t hurt you anymore.”
The judge bellowed, “Counselors, approach.”
Yardley and Martin Salinger approached the judge. The judge turned the microphone off and said, “I’m sure you have a motion, Mr. Salinger.”
“Obviously we need a mistrial, Judge. There is no way this jury is going to be impartial after seeing that.”
Yardley’s brows rose. “I disagree,” she said. “In Oregon v. Kennedy, the Supreme Court made clear mistrials are there to protect defendants against prejudicial behavior by t
he prosecution or the bench, not from their own behavior. Otherwise, whenever a trial is going poorly, a defendant could just attack somebody with a pen and get a new trial.”
The judge nodded. “Ms. Yardley is correct. Let’s get back on the record and make it official.”
“Your Honor,” Salinger pleaded, “you might as well just string up my client now, because there is no way that jury is going to be impartial.”
Yardley said, “Then maybe tell him not to attack people in front of them next time.”
“I’ve made my ruling, Mr. Salinger, and you will be free to appeal it. Please step back.”
The moment court adjourned for the day, Salinger leaned across the aisle. “The plea offer still on the table?” he said. “Thirty years?”
“It is.”
“Gimme half an hour, then. Thanks for keeping it open. A lotta prosecutors wouldn’t.”
“I’m not vindictive, Martin. Believe it or not, I’m here to protect his rights, too.”
Her phone vibrated just then. She raised a hand to signal to Salinger that she’d wait to hear from him. When she glanced at the caller ID, her stomach dropped harder than it had when Burrow had come at her: it was her daughter’s school.
She answered and said, “What did Tara do now?”
“I really think it best you speak with Mr. Jackson.” Denise, the high school secretary, had a voice that managed to sound simultaneously compassionate and angry. “Tara is in his office right now. Can you come down?”
“All right, give me half an hour.”
She lifted her leather satchel and stood to leave when she saw two men in dark suits lingering at the back of the courtroom. One wore the laminated ID badge of an agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation clipped to a loop on the front of his slacks, to make getting in and out of court with his firearm easier. He had shoulder-length hair and scruff, something she knew his SAC in Las Vegas had criticized him for several times but which he wore as a badge of honor now. Cason Baldwin had on more than one occasion said to her, “Screw J. Edgar Hoover and his yuppies.”
The man standing with Baldwin was short and squat, Hispanic, with the faded blemish of an old, partially removed tattoo jutting out from his right sleeve.
“Thirty years for luring that girl into his car outside a church and doing what he did after?” Baldwin said as she approached. “That seems like a life sentence if I ever saw it.”
She grinned. He still looked the same as when they’d briefly dated, long ago as that had been. “Justice applies equally to everyone, or it doesn’t apply to anyone. That was the time the sentencing matrix determined, so that’s what I gave him.”
“It calculated that because he’s a first-time offender, but he’s still scum.”
“He has rights, too, just like everyone else. I won’t take that away from him.”
Baldwin chuckled. “You always did have that soft heart.” He glanced at the other man and said, “This is Oscar Ortiz. Oscar, Jessica.”
Ortiz got a text message just then and looked down to the phone in his hand as he said, “Hey.”
Yardley stepped to the side as the family of Donald Burrow brushed past her to get through the double doors. Most of them didn’t look at her, but his mother stared directly at her with red, wet eyes and said, “I hope you have a son and the same thing happens to him so you feel what it’s like to know your boy is gonna die in a cage.”
Yardley waited quietly as they filed out.
“Pff, whatever,” Ortiz said when they’d left. “Tell your son to quit pissing off God, and won’t nothin’ happen to him.”
Baldwin looked at him a moment and then turned to Yardley and said, “Can we talk?”
“I can’t. Tara’s school just called and I need to be down there.”
“It’ll just be a second.”
“My car’s parked underground. I suppose we can talk on the way.”
“No. I’d like to talk in private. If we can. I promise it won’t take long.”
Ortiz’s expression was intense, too. Yardley glanced from one to the other. Anything mundane could’ve been handled with a phone call. Being here in person—Baldwin had something to ask her that he knew she wouldn’t like.
“All right. I’ve only got a few minutes, though.”
The Second Street federal courthouse in Las Vegas was a square steel-and-glass building of four stories referred to by some of the staff as the Borg Cube, a reference Yardley didn’t understand.
The attorney/client rooms were large, with brown oak tables and windows that looked out to the palm tree–lined streets. Yardley sat down and placed her satchel on the floor. Ortiz shut the door.
“So you nailed the Green Street Kidnapper,” Baldwin said. “That’s a pretty big case to settle. That neighborhood is lucky Burrow hadn’t moved on to killing anyone.”
“That girl deserves the credit for finding a way to escape. Just ask me, Cason.”
“Ask what?”
“You want to ask me something you’re nervous I’ll say no to. That’s why you’re here in person, in the afternoon, when you know I’m most eager to go home and just might say yes for convenience. So let’s not waste time. Just ask.”
He cleared his throat and glanced at Ortiz, who looked amused that she could so easily read him. Baldwin unlocked his iPad and slid it over to her.
A photo of a couple in a bedroom, taken from the foot of the bed. A female with long brunette hair in a black tank top and green panties, the male next to her in black boxer shorts. Both of them were facedown. The white duvet was soaked with dark blood. The wall above their heads had arterial spray that looked like something a hyper child would do with a can of paint, and Yardley knew their throats had been slit.
A shot of ice went through her, and she gasped quietly, though she couldn’t be sure the men hadn’t heard. She had seen this scene before. Seen it multiple times. The memories had, over time, turned amazingly thin and indistinct, but now, in a flash, many of them filled her. The most prominent was that of her ex-husband, Eddie Cal, standing in front of her in the kitchen of their one-bedroom apartment. Sirens wailing outside as the boots of a SWAT team stormed up the cement stairs to the second floor, her stomach swollen with their child, and him gently placing his hands on her shoulders and saying, “I’m so sorry. I tried to stop.”
Those were the last words they had ever spoken to each other, and they surfaced in her mind from almost sixteen years ago as if she had just heard them.
“Sophia and Adrian Dean,” Baldwin said. “They were found about a month ago in their home in North Las Vegas.” He paused. “They have two children, three and seven. They’re the ones that discovered them in the morning. They slept through what happened to their parents, which means—”
“Why are you showing me this, Cason?” she said.
He glanced at Ortiz again and then swiped to the next photo on the iPad. If not for the clothing, it could’ve almost been the same photo. A brunette with long hair facedown in a bed, gray sheets this time instead of white, and a man wearing basketball shorts and what had once been a white T-shirt.
“Ryan and Aubrey Olsen. They were found two days ago in their home in St. George, Utah. You’ll notice the blood patterns are—”
“Much worse,” she said coolly as she slid the iPad back to him.
“Yeah.”
“I still don’t understand why you’re showing these to me.”
Baldwin and Ortiz glanced at each other, Ortiz as though he were embarrassed to be there.
“We think it’s a copycat of Eddie, Jess. And we need your help.”
3
Yardley looked down again at the photograph of the Olsens. They were caked in blood, from their throats and shoulders to their arms and backs. Aubrey’s hair was matted and dark with it. Ryan’s head was tilted slightly to the side, and she could see one glassy eye staring at nothing. Like the eyes of fish in the summer open-air markets they sometimes had in Santa Monica, where she’d grown up.
“Not my division. You got a collar, you take it to screening and—”
“No, no collar. In fact . . . we don’t have much to go on.”
“We don’t have shit,” Ortiz interjected.
Baldwin looked down at the photo.
He’s not taking back his iPad or letting it sleep, she thought. He wants me to keep looking at it. He’s desperate.
“Oscar’s not wrong,” Baldwin said. “We have nothing. And when I say nothing, I mean nothing. There was no sexual assault here, no break-in, nothing missing that we could tell. With the first one, North Las Vegas PD thought it could be anything. Business partner pissed off about money, revenge, lover one of them was having an affair with . . . but when someone with St. George PD recognized the scene and called them, they knew. And they called us. I didn’t even recognize the kill signature at first, and then last night I was pinning some photos of the Deans up on the board at the federal building, and I remembered where I had seen it. I pulled up photos of Eddie’s scenes, and they’re almost identical.”
“Almost?”
“The females aren’t nude here, obviously, because there’s no sexual assault. And he closes the bedroom doors when he leaves. Eddie never did that.” He put his hands on the table and interlaced his fingers. “Jessica, I need your help with this. Nobody knows Eddie’s case better than you.”
Yardley remembered that Eddie Cal’s last appeal would be decided soon and then his execution scheduled. She wished it had already happened.
“I’m assuming you’re joking,” she said, staring at Baldwin. “I am the last person that knows anything about Eddie Cal. And this is not my department, Cason. You’re the investigators. When you got something, bring it to screening, and if they assign me the case, I’ll take a look and we’ll work it. Until you get a collar or at least a person of interest, there’s nothing I can do. Why do you even have this case? Without rape there’s no federal crime. Let the local police departments handle it.”
“Adrian Dean was a systems information officer for the DEA. He sat at a desk and did coding and programing, training other people, things like that, but he was technically federal law enforcement, so I picked up the case myself. I figured we can add the Olsens to the same case and . . .” He paused a moment. “And anyone who comes after.”