by J. D. Barker
Dobbs nodded reluctantly and stood. When he reached the door, he knocked twice, then turned back to me. “I know you’re guilty, Michael. Know how I know?”
I only looked at him.
“You never once asked me how she died.”
The man in the gray suit raised his hand. “No need for jabs, Detective. You’ve traumatized my client enough. Out. Both of you.”
An officer opened the door and stepped aside. Young guy, short dark hair.
Wilkins smirked and seemed about to say something, then apparently thought better of it. He pushed past Dobbs and went out the door. Dobbs lingered a moment longer, his eyes still locked on me, then he left too. The door closed behind him.
The man in the gray suit dropped into Dobbs’s seat; the frame groaned under his weight. “An overdose of propofol.”
“What?”
“That’s what killed the girl in your bathtub. An overdose of propofol. She was injected here.” He touched the left side of his neck. “It’s a drug typically used by anesthesiologists, a sedative.”
“I know what propofol is.”
He frowned. “I wouldn’t tell anyone else that. Ignorance is bliss, and you, my friend, need some bliss.”
“Who are you?”
“Philip Wardwell. Our firm has done a significant amount of work for your father over the years. After you spoke to your sister, she talked to your mother, who in turn called our New York office,” he said. “I’m based in Los Angeles, so I was dispatched.”
I lowered my head and ran my hand through my hair. “I didn’t want my mother to find out about this. Megan shouldn’t have said anything.”
Wardwell shrugged. “Well, she did, and I’m here. I plan to help you avoid a jail cell for the foreseeable future—try not to get too dizzy with gratitude.” He flipped through several pages of notes on his pad. “I just spent the better part of an hour reviewing the evidence with those two detectives. It is substantial but primarily circumstantial.”
“Primarily?”
“They have one witness. One of Tepper’s neighbors, a Velma Keefe. She told them she saw you with Alyssa Tepper twice—two days ago and last week. Says she passed you both on the stairs. She ID’d you from a photo lineup.”
“That’s ridiculous. I’ve never met Alyssa Tepper. Somebody is trying to set me up,” I insisted.
He gave me a sideways glance, then returned to his notepad. “They told me about your field trip to Tepper’s apartment. If we need to discredit this Keefe woman, we can say she saw you when the police brought you through. I’m not worried about her.” He flipped the page. “I saw the photographs, video, clothing. They’re rushing DNA on a number of the items they pulled out of there. Did they tell you what they found in your building? Beyond the items that were near your bed? Did they tell you about the garbage chute?”
I shook my head.
“They pulled out a trash bag, same brand as under your sink. The bag was stuffed full of women’s clothing, Tepper’s size. One of the blouses, purple with white trim, matches her outfit in one of the photographs with you they found at her place.”
I had no idea what to say to that so I said nothing.
When it was clear I wasn’t going to respond, Wardwell went on. “They found a phone too. A disposable cell. The log showed calls and texts dating back nearly three months.”
“Not with me.”
Wardwell said dismissively, “Circumstantial, anyway.” He placed his pad and pen back inside his briefcase and snapped the lid shut. “The phone was wiped clean, no prints. Nothing on the bag itself or any of the items found inside. They’re pulling a warrant to check your truck at Nadler. I imagine they’ll have that by the time the sun comes up.”
“This is crazy,” I muttered. “What do we do next?”
Wardwell stood and knocked twice on the door. “We get you out of here.”
The door opened and the dark-haired officer looked in. “Yes?”
Wardwell grabbed the man by the collar, pulled him inside, and slammed his head against the cinder-block wall three times. The officer crumpled to the ground, blood trickling from his ear.
Chapter Ten
Michael
What the fuck!” I jumped up from my seat and backed into the corner.
“Get his gun,” Wardwell said, sliding the toe of his shoe into the doorway before it could close and lock us in.
I shook my head. “No way.”
Wardwell rolled his eyes. “You’re some kind of Boy Scout now? We don’t have time for a crisis of conscience.”
He jammed his briefcase into the opening, freeing his shoe, then knelt down beside the unconscious officer.
“Is he dead?”
Wardwell stood with a grunt, fumbled with the leather strap on the officer’s gun, and pulled it from the holster. He tucked the gun under his belt at the small of his back and smoothed his suit jacket down over it. “Walk directly next to me, don’t make eye contact with anyone but me. Look like you belong, and nobody thinks twice.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you!”
“Do exactly as I say, or I’ll start shooting people. It’s a Glock twenty-two—fifteen rounds in the magazine, another in the chamber. I’m a good shot. I’ll take out at least five to ten people before someone gets a bead on me. You want that on your head?” Wardwell picked up his briefcase and held the door open. He quickly glanced into the hallway, then back at me. “Come on, move.”
I went.
I knew I shouldn’t but I went anyway.
I stepped out into the hallway, fully expecting a dozen cops to jump me. A female detective walked by, her head buried in a folder, gun slapping at her hip.
Wardwell pressed his free hand against my back and steered me to the left. At the end of the hall, he turned us to the right. “Good,” he said in a low voice. “Keep moving. Make a left up ahead.”
Wardwell was leading us deeper into the building, in the opposite direction from Dobbs, Wilkins, the officer who took my prints.
“End of this hall, make another right.”
We passed a janitor emptying trash cans, lost to some song in his earbuds.
Two more lefts.
A right.
A service elevator.
Wardwell pressed the button. “Almost there.”
I started to turn, see what was behind us.
He squeezed my shoulder. “Don’t.”
The doors opened.
We stepped inside.
He pressed the button marked P2.
When the elevator doors opened again, we were in the parking garage. “The blue Ford, over there to your right.”
The level was only about a quarter full. I spotted a Ford Escort parked beside a concrete support pole. A wreck of a car, at least fifteen or twenty years old. The hubcap was missing from the right front wheel. Faded navy-blue paint, pocked with dings and dents and patches of rust.
I glanced over at Wardwell. His suit was probably worth more than the car. “Are you even an attorney?”
He fished the keys out of his pocket and tossed them to me. “You’re driving.”
The car wasn’t locked.
I climbed into the driver’s seat. The tattered beige material was patched with duct tape.
Wardwell took out the gun, got in the passenger side, put his briefcase on his lap. The door squealed and closed with a thunk. Sweat trickled down his brow, the fast walk taking a toll on his large frame. “Go, damn it. Start the car!”
“Why are you doing this?”
He appeared puzzled. “This is what you paid me to do.”
A wetness slapped against my face before I registered the sound of the gunshot, heard the shattering of the passenger window. Wardwell jerked toward me, then fell forward, his eyes blank.
Chapter Eleven
Michael
I don’t know how long I sat there, my limbs paralyzed, my heart thudding wildly. The shot echoed off the concrete and faded away, replaced with the sound of rapidly retr
eating footsteps. Then the garage was quiet except for my breathing. My gasping, quick breaths.
Wardwell’s empty gaze seemed to focus on the gun in his own hand, still resting atop his briefcase, his finger less than an inch from the trigger.
I touched the side of my face. My fingers came away slick. Not with my blood, though. Wardwell’s.
The bullet had entered the front right side of his head and exited the back left. Owing to either a carefully placed shot or an extremely lucky accident, I was alive and unhurt.
I wiped my hand on the side of the filthy seat.
Instincts took over in that moment and I let them. If I thought about what I was doing, I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t do what needed to be done.
I twisted the key.
The engine sputtered, caught, and came to life with an aggravated groan.
I put the Ford into drive and followed the exit signs from the second level up to the first, toward daylight. Not one of the officers in the several police cars that passed me gave me a second glance.
Wardwell had left his parking ticket on the dash. I fished Wardwell’s wallet out of his jacket pocket and paid the twelve-dollar fee with his Visa card.
The name on the card was not Philip Wardwell.
An alarm went off as the arm went up, a wailing through the structure. I didn’t know if someone had heard the shot or found the officer down in the interview room, but I didn’t care. I made a left on North Main Street and didn’t look back.
Chapter Twelve
Michael
Roland Eads,” I said into the pay phone.
I had circled the block around the police station, then made a left onto Fourth toward Sanford. From there, I drove to the fish market. Nobody followed me.
I knew I couldn’t go back home. I couldn’t go to my truck—that was the first place they’d look.
The Los Angeles fish market officially opened at six in the morning, but the restaurant buyers, tourists, and locals lined up long before that.
What I needed was a crowd.
Someplace I could disappear.
Someplace I could dump the Ford.
I drove behind the old Edward Hotel and nestled the wreck between a Dumpster and a large pile of trash partially covered by a blue plastic tarp.
The engine sputtered a few times, then dropped off.
The dead man beside me was large. Too large for such a small car. He had shifted during the drive, but his slumped body remained wedged between the dashboard and the passenger seat. His ruined head lolled toward me.
I pulled the briefcase from his lap, careful not to touch the gun. Inside, along with the notepad and pen, I found a cassette tape. I must have stared at the handwritten label for at least a minute, my heart pounding at the sight of it, before finally shoving it into my pocket.
I kept his wallet.
I searched his pockets for a cell phone but found nothing.
With napkins from a discarded McDonald’s bag on the floor, I wiped my face, the steering wheel, the dashboard, my door, his briefcase, anything I remembered touching.
And I left him there.
I didn’t want to, but I had no idea what else to do. What else could I do?
The gas station on Fifth had a bathroom around back. I bolted across the parking lot, locked myself inside, fell to the ground beside the grimy toilet, and threw up into the bowl.
My hands were shaking.
My heart was pounding.
I couldn’t get enough air.
I threw up a second time, nothing but yellow bile. My stomach churned, wanting to get rid of more, but there was nothing left.
I rolled to the side and closed my eyes.
I had to calm down.
I forced my breathing to slow.
Deep breaths—in through my nose, out through my mouth, as Megan had taught me. The burn of adrenaline began to ebb. My heart slowed. When I finally managed to stand, my legs almost folded under the sudden weight. I stumbled over to the sink and got a good look at myself in the mirror. The eyes staring back at me were not my own but those of a much older, very tired man.
I pulled my stained sweatshirt off and scrubbed my face and hair to get rid of the red. The white and gray too—I tried not to think about that. The water swirling around the drain ran red, pink, and finally clear. I did my best to clean the sweatshirt. I tore off the tag and turned it inside out, then pulled it back over my head.
By the time I’d finished, twenty minutes had passed. I found a pay phone on Stanford and dialed Megan collect.
“I can barely hear you. Where are you?” Megan said. “Who did you say?”
“Roland Eads,” I repeated into the pay phone. I covered my other ear and tried to twist away from the people pushing past me on the sidewalk. “I’m at the fish market.”
“I didn’t call anyone,” Megan said. “I’ve been worried sick, calling you all night, but I didn’t talk to anyone else. Not about this.”
“So you didn’t tell Dr. Rose?”
“I’d never do that. At least, not unless you told me to. Christ, Michael. You’ve never met this girl? Are you sure?”
“I don’t know who’s doing this or how, but someone is setting me up.”
“But it was you? In the video?”
Two patrolmen walked by me. I turned away. “If you didn’t send this guy, somebody else did.”
“Why would someone frame you for murder?”
“I have no idea.”
I pulled out Roland Eads’s wallet and picked through the contents.
Ninety-three dollars in cash, the Visa card, and a driver’s license. Nothing else. The address on the license told me this man lived in Needles, California—a small town on the Nevada border nearly four hours away. I knew it from my route. I kept the driver’s license out and shoved the rest in my pocket. “Megan, I need you to do me a huge favor.”
“Of course, anything.”
“I need you to get into Dr. Bart’s office and see if his Joe DiMaggio baseball card is still there.”
Megan grew quiet.
“Meg.”
“I’m here.”
“Can you do that for me?”
After a moment, she said, “His office is locked, Michael. Dr. Rose has the key. Nobody has been in there since he died. She won’t even let Ms. Neace in there to clean.”
Ms. Neace had been our parents’ housekeeper for the better part of thirty years, but nonetheless, Dr. Bart had rarely allowed her into his office—she could go in only on Friday mornings, when he was at the university. Even then, Dr. Rose watched over her as she worked.
“Please, Meg. This is important. The police found a card just like it in Alyssa Tepper’s purse,” I told her.
“It can’t be the same one.”
“A 1936. Half the paper on the back was missing, and the left corner was torn.”
“For real?”
“There’s something else,” I told her. “She had a sparrow feather. I saw it in her apartment. It was on a leather strap, like a necklace.”
Megan said nothing.
“Meg, please,” I pleaded.
“Are you sure it was a sparrow feather? There’s, like, thirty-seven million kinds of birds, Michael, and they’ve all got feathers.”
“I’d recognize one of those feathers from a hundred feet.”
“You need to come home, Michael. Right now. Just come home.”
I looked down at Eads’s driver’s license in my hand. “I can’t. If I run, they’ll find me. I need to figure out what’s going on.”
“Maybe we should tell Dr. Rose.”
“No way.”
“She can protect you.”
“Promise me you won’t.”
Megan didn’t reply.
“Meg? Promise me.”
Finally, she said, “Promise me you’ll come home, then I’ll think about it.”
“I will,” I told her. “As soon as I can.” I hung up before she could object, because Megan would object.
At a small drugstore, with money from Roland Eads’s wallet, I bought a baseball cap, sunglasses, and a T-shirt. Not much of a disguise, but all I could put together. I also bought a disposable phone. I changed in the alley behind the store, stuffed my sweatshirt deep into a Dumpster, then dialed Megan from the disposable phone. The call went to voice mail.
I fished the cassette tape out of my pocket and glared at the handwritten label.
Dark room—M. Kepler—August 12, 1996.
Dr. Bart’s handwriting.
I was four in 1996. The year I went to live with the Fitzgeralds.
I needed a cassette player, and I knew where to find one.
Chapter Thirteen
Written Statement,
Megan Fitzgerald
To Special Agent Jessica Gimble, the lovely Detective Dobbs, and their friends in law enforcement—
Okay, fine, I’ll write it all down. Every last word of it. Not because you asked me to, but because I think it may be the only way all of Michael’s story gets out there. The truth of it. The nuts and bolts. I’m certainly not going to leave it up to any of you to piece together. I’ve spent the past two days watching all of you try to gather evidence and figure out what really happened, and while that was pretty entertaining, I can’t let you twist in the wind forever. You’re clowns in a circus car. Our tax dollars at work—what a joke. I owe this to Michael. I’ve got no intention of throwing him under the bus—he managed to crawl under there all by his lonesome. But when the dust settles on these last forty-eight hours, I do want to be sure the facts are straight. And you clearly need a little help in that department.
So here it goes, all that you’ve missed, spelled out nice and neat on a legal pad. I’ll try and keep it between the lines and in tight cursive just as Dr. Bart would have wanted. The language of a lady, as Dr. Rose would insist. Pay attention, kids—it’s time to go to school.
My shit of a brother hung up on me!
He called me from a pay phone somewhere in LA not only to repeat that he’d found a dead girl in his bathtub but also to tell me how his attorney had decided to bypass the court system and bust him out of jail. He finished with the attorney catching a bullet in the head soon after exiting said police station.