A Killer's Wife (Desert Plains)

by Victor Methos

  When they got to her house, she opened the car door and said, “Thanks,” before stepping out. Baldwin had to roll down the window and call after her.

  “I’ll come back and check up on you. I’m going to get the ERT over to his condo. When you’re ready, we’ll take your statement. I’ll let Lieu know you’re going to be out the rest of the week.”

  “Thank you,” she said as she turned away.

  “Jessica?”

  She looked at him.

  “I can’t even imagine what you’re going to go through or what you’re going to think about yourself, but I do know that what happened with Eddie would’ve broken almost anyone. But it didn’t break you; it made you stronger. It made you stronger because you’re a survivor. And it may not seem like it, but this will make you stronger, too. Because that’s just the person you are.”

  Without a word, she turned away from him and went inside her house.

  Baldwin took a deep breath and let it out slowly as he looked over the neighborhood. He wondered how the neighbors would treat her once they found out.

  A headache had started at the back of his skull and drifted up to his forehead. The headaches were more frequent now. He figured it was a lack of sleep. A recurring dream woke him most nights.

  He was a child in the dream and saw his mother in a grave looking up at him with vacant eyes. The eyes of the dead. The cemetery was wet from rain, gray clouds enveloping the headstones and the sky.

  His mother’s throat had been slit, her flesh pale from the loss of blood. Baldwin would reach for her, and she’d fade away to nothing.

  Wesley Paul . . .

  How could it possibly be true? Yardley felt like a fool, but so did he. He’d known Wesley for three years, even asked his advice once on a case involving a young child. He had recognized Henry Lucado as the Beltway Butcher from a photograph, but he hadn’t suspected anything about a murderer of families he’d met half a dozen times.

  He took a bottle of pills from the glove box. Something he’d picked up from a local doctor this morning after complaining about knee pain. He took two of them out and nearly popped them in his mouth but stopped.

  How did I not see him?

  His thinking had felt muddy lately, slow and arduous. Like he was constantly stuck in that moment after waking up from a long night’s sleep and struggling to concentrate.

  He tossed the pills on the floor of his car and pulled away. Wesley Paul was waiting in an interview room at the LVPD station.

  46

  The room seemed cool compared to outdoors. Wesley Paul sat stiff in his chair, handcuffed to a steel link that was bolted into the massive table in front of him. He tugged playfully at the cuffs, listening to the rattle of the metal on metal. He wondered if they would bring him a coffee if he asked.

  The two detectives had tried to question him, and he had sat quietly without a word. Finally the fat one said, “To hell with him,” and they’d left. They weren’t who he wanted to speak with. This case would be handled in federal court, and the FBI was who he needed here.

  Without having to wait too long, he was pleased to see Baldwin enter, along with Agent Ortiz in a disheveled suit, and pull up two chairs.

  “Hello,” Wesley said with a smile. “I don’t think we’ve met. Oh, wait, you’re the one that knocked me into the floor. Agent Ortiz, right?”

  Ortiz rolled his eyes. “We got you, Wes, my man. We seen you in that bathroom attacking Jessica.”

  “You mean when she had a gun pressed against me? I had to kick down the door because she was threatening to kill herself, and then she turned the gun on me. So I seriously hope you have something better than that to come at me with.”

  Baldwin said, “What’d you do with the videos? Jessica said she saw some DVDs you had. We’ll find them anyway. They’re tearing your condo apart as we speak.”

  He grinned at him playfully. “I don’t think I like you, Agent Baldwin. We have a history together. I would like to speak to Agent Ortiz, and only Agent Ortiz.”

  “No.”

  Wesley shrugged and leaned back in the seat. He made the motion of a key turning in a lock by his mouth.

  Baldwin bit his lower lip, looked to Ortiz, and then left.

  Wesley said, “Cameras make me nervous. Turn the camera off. You can record the audio if you like. I have no problem with that.”

  Ortiz watched him a moment.

  “It’s the only way I’ll talk to you, Agent Ortiz.”

  Ortiz rose and unplugged the camera from the wall. The room was all walls, no two-way mirror. Ortiz left for a moment and came back with a digital recorder. He went to press play, and Wesley gently touched his finger, preventing him from doing it.

  “Before we begin, I wanted to ask you something.”

  “What?” Ortiz said, withdrawing his finger from the recorder and leaning back in the seat.

  “How’s your daughter?”

  The pain he tasted from Ortiz at that moment was tangible.

  “What the hell you know ’bout my daughter, you piece’a shit?”

  “I know she’s not at home right now, Agent Ortiz.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Call your wife and ask her to check the baby’s room. I believe you’ll find your wife rousing from a long nap she didn’t mean to take. Almost as if someone had given her a sedative.”

  Ortiz hesitated and then took out his phone. He rose and turned his back to Wesley as the phone rang. Wesley turned on the digital recorder.

  He listened while Ortiz spoke in Spanish. There was a pause, and while he waited, Ortiz glanced back over his shoulder. Seconds later, Wesley heard the high-pitched, panicked voice of a mother on the other end of the line. A smile broke over his lips.

  Ortiz dropped the phone. “Where is she?” he shouted, rushing toward him.

  “No,” Wesley said, begging, “no, please. Stop, I’ll tell you. Stop hitting me.”

  Ortiz swung with a right that knocked him out of the chair. Wesley’s arm was still cuffed to the table, twisted now at an awkward angle that sent biting pain through wrist and shoulder.

  “I killed the Olsens and the Deans. I said it—please stop!”

  Ortiz kicked him in the ribs. “Where is she!”

  “I have a storage unit in Las Vegas. It’s right off the Boulevard, Castle Storage. I keep things there from the murders. Please,” he cried, sobbing now, “please stop.”

  Ortiz kicked him again and again. Wesley shifted his body so that the blows would land on his face and head. One nearly sent him into unconsciousness, and he tasted the blood that popped out of his mouth like a burst balloon.

  “I don’t want to die!” Wesley screamed through his sobs.

  The door swung open as Baldwin came in, the two detectives behind him.

  “Oscar! Stop!”

  Ortiz kept kicking him. Wesley felt one of his teeth chip before the other three men could pull him off.

  He had a nearly uncontrollable urge to laugh, but he swallowed it down, along with a torrent of blood, and instead wept. Loud enough to ensure that the digital recorder would pick it up.

  47

  Yardley found Tara sitting on the balcony, reading a text on something called nanoparticle confinement.

  Her heart broke all over again at the sight of her daughter. So much trauma in such a short life. How would her daughter trust anyone—even her—ever again?

  And yet Tara, as she often did, surprised her. When Yardley told her, in halting tones, about Wesley, Tara said nothing, just quietly listened. They sat that way for a while until Tara finally said, “I talked to Mr. Jackson while you were gone. He called the dean of the math department at UNLV. They have tests I can take to skip as many courses as I need to.”

  And that was where they spent much of the day. Strolling across the UNLV campus. Though it was in the middle of the city, the campus had enough palm trees and green shrubbery to make it a pleasant enough area. Someplace that felt separate from Las Vegas.

&nb
sp; It was where she’d first met Wesley. Or where she thought she’d met him for the first time.

  She stopped on a patch of grass and sat down on a bench. Tara followed, and they watched a small fountain surrounded by palm trees.

  “I feel like I’ve failed you,” Yardley said. “I’ve exposed you to something I swore I would keep you away from.”

  “You shouldn’t feel that way. You probably think something inside you attracts men like him, but it sounds like he’s trying to follow in Eddie Cal’s footsteps. He purposely found you. It wasn’t anything inside you that attracted him; it was Eddie. Besides, someone really smart told me once that certain men look for the best traits in people to take advantage of.”

  Yardley stared at her a moment and lightly put her hand on Tara’s knee, letting her know how grateful she was for what her daughter had just said to her.

  “I thought you might scream at me. Blame me for all of it. I know you liked Wesley.”

  “I got along with him because I know you liked him. I thought he was creepy. He walked in when I was in the shower a couple times. I thought it was an accident, but now I’m thinking he did it on purpose.” She looked at her and said, “Are you going to be okay, Mom?”

  “Eventually, sweetheart, I will be.”

  They walked to the science and mathematics building and sat in on a lecture. Yardley guessed it was a graduate-level course in some advanced mathematics topic, and she had no idea what the professor was talking about, but Tara seemed interested, and her gaze never wavered. When the class was over, Tara said, “Be right back.”

  She went up to the professor and introduced herself. She asked questions about something called the Davenport-Schmidt theorem and continued fractions. The professor seemed more than happy to discuss it, and they spoke for several minutes. When they were through, Tara came back and sat next to her mother, a slight grin on her face.

  “That was refreshing to talk to a teacher that actually knows more than me.”

  “So you like it here so far?”

  “Yeah, I think I do.”

  They were silent for a bit as the students finished filing out of the classroom, and Tara said, “Mom, I don’t want you to blame yourself for Wesley. There was nothing you could’ve done differently. Just like there was nothing I could’ve done differently with Kevin. I realized it’s not my fault. I wanted to believe he loved me, and there’s nothing wrong with that. They’re the monsters, not us.”

  Yardley watched the professor clean off the whiteboard with an eraser. “It still hurts. I thought after Eddie I would never get into a serious relationship again. Then Wesley came along, and I thought that maybe I was wrong. That Eddie was a fluke and that it was all right for me to have someone in my life.”

  Tara ran her finger over something a student had carved into the top of the desk. “What are they going to do with him?”

  “They’re not doing anything. This is my burden. I’m going to prosecute him, and I’m going to convict him. Then a jury will decide whether to impose a life sentence or the death penalty.”

  “Will they let you prosecute him since you lived with him?”

  “I’ll figure out a way. It’s tough but not impossible.”

  After picking up an application packet and speaking with an academic advisor about the mathematics program, Yardley dropped Tara off at a friend’s and then went to the gym.

  She called Baldwin from the gym parking lot after an hour of boxing, including sparring with the instructor. Her arms felt like jelly, and her breath was like fire coming out of her lungs. Every ounce of strength had been sapped from her. She had punched the heavy bag the last ten minutes so fast her hands and wrists ached.

  Yardley sat in her car for a long time and listened to Baldwin go through what had happened between Ortiz and Wesley and what they had been doing since.

  A pang of agony went through her. Having just thought she’d lost Tara, she knew what Ortiz was going through. The dark thoughts that would swirl and wouldn’t go away, the contingencies that played out over and over . . . the images of coffins and funerals you so desperately didn’t want to think about but would anyway.

  “How did he get Oscar’s daughter?” Yardley said.

  “We think he took her before coming to the condo. One of the receptionists interrupted a class he was teaching and said you had applied for a warrant. Oscar’s house is maybe twenty minutes from the condo, so we think he probably stashed Emilia somewhere on the way over. I’ve got every agent we can spare looking for her now, and the sheriff’s department and LVPD pulled officers from every patrol. We’ll find her.” He paused. “We’re searching the storage unit he mentioned, Jess. It has everything. Photos of the Deans and Olsens before and after death, his kill kit with the masks and knives, different alarm company stickers for a van he’s got somewhere so he can case their homes first, and . . . pictures of you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’d been following you and Tara for a long time. Some of these photos go back years.” He paused. “There’s some of you asleep in your bed. It looks like he’d been inside your house before.”

  She closed her eyes.

  “He wouldn’t just confess,” she said.

  “He got a pretty vicious beating.”

  “No, that’s not what this was, Cason. He’s had years to plan for his prosecution, and whatever he did was deliberate. I’m going to the office. Bring me everything you have.”

  Yardley walked into Roy Lieu’s office in her gym clothes. She didn’t want to waste any time, and this wasn’t a conversation she wanted to have over the phone.

  Yardley sat down across from him. The office’s main decorations were photos of Lieu shaking hands with politicians from both major parties.

  Lieu gave her a sad little grin. “I’m so sorry. We’re all sorry, Jessica. We’ve put together a little GoFundMe for you. Just to help out.”

  “I appreciate that, thank you, but money’s not an issue. Our finances were always separate.”

  He nodded. “Well, if you need anything . . .”

  “What I need is to work.”

  “I understand. When my father died, work got me through it for a while. At least the hardest part. We have several cases I was going to give to Kendra since she’s back from—”

  “No. I just want Wesley’s case.”

  Lieu’s lips went rigid. She could tell he was thinking about how to reject her, because he thought he could hurt her feelings. It angered her; she didn’t need protection any more than the men here, and in fact, she needed it less. But she swallowed her anger. Getting what she wanted was more important right now.

  “I’m sorry, Jessica. I can’t do that.”

  “It’s not a conflict.”

  “It’s clearly a conflict. You saw the videos, you were his girlfriend, and you better believe the defense will call you to testify. They’ll grill you about the minutest detail of your lives.”

  “That just means I’d be a witness. There’s no ethical rule that says I can’t prosecute the case anyway, and there’s plenty of precedent about prosecutors having to testify in trials they prosecute since we take part in investigations. It doesn’t happen often, but it happens.”

  “Okay, even if you’re right, how about the public perception? What if you lost? Do you know how that would look for our office? Everyone would think you lost the case on purpose because of your feelings for him. And Jessica, honestly, I don’t know why you’d want to put yourself through this anyhow. I know you’re emotional right now—”

  “I am not emotional. This is my case. It has been from the beginning. I would’ve prosecuted it no matter who the defendant turned out to be. It shouldn’t change now.”

  Lieu pushed his tongue against his cheek while he watched her. “I’m sorry, but the answer is no. I’m giving the case to Tim. You can be present in the courtroom. I don’t have any problem with that. But I don’t want you working this case.”

  “Who’s represent
ing him?”

  Lieu gave a slight grin. “He’s chosen to represent himself.”

  You’re acting like a fool, Yardley thought. He was actually happy Wesley would be his own attorney.

  “You’re underestimating him.”

  “I’m not.”

  “He’s a genius, Roy. Tim has never dealt with someone like this.”

  He put his elbows on the desk, a pen between his fingertips. “I think we can handle one defendant with a storage unit full of incriminating evidence, genius or not. We’ll be fine.” Turning toward the computer screen, indicating the conversation was over, he said, “Like I mentioned, feel free to sit in on any of the proceedings, though I personally wouldn’t recommend that either. When you’re ready to take other cases, let me know.”

  Yardley took a deep breath and said, “Roy, we both know you gave this case to Tim because his grandfather is the governor and you’re currying favor with the biggest case this office has ever had. You’ve been doing it with him from the moment I saw you two working together. I’m not blaming you—I understand one day you want to enter politics; all men of ambition in government work do—but you can’t do this. He will screw this case up, and . . . Wesley might come after me and Tara. I don’t know what he has planned, but it’s nothing good. And if he’s released, he might think it’d be fun to kill us, or want to eliminate me as a threat, or maybe just tie up loose ends. I won’t take that chance. I will not give him the opportunity to hurt my daughter.”

  “Who the hell do you think you are? You accuse me of giving Tim work to curry favor because of who his grandfather is? You don’t know anything about it. Tim has double your experience and can remain objective about this, while you, clearly, can’t. If you ever say something like that again, you can start looking for another job.”

  Yardley rose to leave and stopped at the door. “He’s going to file a motion soon.”

  Lieu looked at her.

  “A motion to suppress evidence,” she said. “He’s going to get everything he said during his beating suppressed, and then he’s going to apply fruit of the poisonous tree to suppress anything else we ever would’ve found. He knew we’d eventually find the storage unit, and now he’ll get everything in it and anything you dig up excluded.”