Twenty

by James Grippando

  “Last week you embarrassed me in my own house in front of Swyteck, accusing me of having a Muslim chip on my shoulder as big as the Middle East. Now you’re telling me that our son was set up by an anti-Muslim conspiracy. I can’t take your mood swings.”

  “It’s not a mood swing! I’ve had more time to think about it.”

  “Maybe you should stop spending so much time cooking up conspiracy theories and start worrying about yourself.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I got a phone call from Detective Claudia Vega at Miami-Dade homicide today.”

  “What did she want?”

  “They subpoenaed my cell-phone records.”

  “Your cell phone?”

  “The family plan. Everybody’s calls are on it, including Xavier’s. The detective is focused on the incoming and outgoing calls on the morning of the shooting.”

  “And?”

  “There was a flurry of calls from you right after the shooting.”

  “Of course there was. Like every other mother in that school, I was frantically trying to find my children.”

  “That’s what I told her. But here’s where I think the detective was going. The police still can’t find the clothes and the vest the shooter was wearing. They think he ditched the clothes, but they can’t find anything.”

  “What do cell-phone records have to do with that?”

  “Obviously, the police think he coordinated with someone.”

  “‘Someone’ meaning you?”

  “No. I was out of town,” said Amir. “They suspect you.”

  “That’s insane. They think I helped my son shoot schoolchildren?”

  “No. They think you’re an accomplice after the fact.”

  “That’s preposterous.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes! Amir, I swear. I did not help Xavier in any way. Until the police pointed their guns at us and Xavier said ‘I did it,’ I didn’t even consider the possibility that it was him.”

  Amir finished his beer and tossed the bottle into the recycling bin. “I’m going to send the phone records to Swyteck. He should have what the police have. Maybe we can stop the bleeding.”

  “Bleeding?”

  “Financial bleeding. If you’re a suspect, maybe we can work this out so we only have to pay one lawyer.”

  “Wonderful, Amir. Our son may be headed to death row, your wife could be charged as an accessory to murder, and all you care about is the two-for-one plan. Do you ever think of anyone but yourself?”

  “I’m not making it about me, damn it! I’m trying to salvage what this family has left! I’m just—”

  “Just go to hell,” said Molly. She turned to leave, but Amir’s booming voice—“Molly!”—brought her to a dead stop. It was that burst of anger she’d experienced only a handful of times in their marriage, the one that sent a chill down her spine. Molly turned slowly to face him.

  “Xavier is your son,” he said, no longer shouting, but deadly serious. “To me, he no longer exists.”

  Molly hurried from her kitchen, avoiding even a glimpse of the family portrait as she passed the living room on her way to the master suite.

  Chapter 15

  Jack flipped to the next page of his print magazine, a two-year-old edition of Sports Illustrated that he’d picked up in the detention center’s waiting room.

  Jack did most of his reading online these days, but cell phones were considered “contraband” in the jail visitation lexicon, even for attorneys. Xavier was seated across from him, on the other side of the table. His lower lip was swollen. The left side of his face was bruised. Clearly, he’d been in some kind of tussle, which was why the corrections officer had left him shackled for this meeting—unusual for a prisoner’s meeting with his attorney. The guard had given Jack no explanation for Xavier’s bruises, and, as per usual, Xavier refused to speak a word about anything. So Jack sat there, reading. Finally, he laid the magazine aside.

  “I blocked out an hour for this meeting,” said Jack. “You can sit there in silence and watch me read, or you can talk and let me help you.”

  No response.

  “Letting your whiskers grow, I see,” said Jack.

  It wasn’t idle chitchat. Appearances mattered. Jack had cleaned up many a client before letting him set foot in a courtroom, including a former Gitmo detainee.

  “Brilliant move on your part,” said Jack. “You’re accused of carrying out a terrorist plot. Might as well look the part. You going for the al-Qaeda suicide-bomber look, or the Isis foot-solider look?”

  The remark was intended to draw a reaction of some sort, but Xavier gave him nothing.

  “Some of your fellow students have been telling the media that they saw you on the campus after the shooting. Not that it helps you in any way. Nikolas Cruz did the same thing at the Parkland shooting. Ditched his gun and his ‘work’ clothes and then tried to blend in with the students as the police led them to safety.”

  Jack tightened his gaze, trying to force Xavier to make eye contact. He wouldn’t.

  “So what’d you do with your ‘work’ clothes, Xavier?”

  Jack didn’t expect a response. He rose, walked to the other side of the room, and then glanced back to see if Xavier’s gaze had followed him. Jack caught him looking, but Xavier quickly averted his eyes.

  “The cops think your mother helped you lose the clothes you wore during the shooting,” said Jack.

  Xavier offered no verbal response, but the body language told Jack that he finally had his client’s attention. Jack returned to his chair and laid the Khoury cell-phone records on the table for Xavier to see. It was several pages in length with each call identified by the ten-digit number of the caller or recipient.

  “The police have focused on these calls,” said Jack, pointing to Molly’s phone number. “The ones from your mother to you right after the shooting. I guess their theory is that you were coordinating a rendezvous. Pretty far-fetched, if you ask me. What mother wouldn’t be calling her son’s cell phone after a school shooting? But this wouldn’t be the first time the cops put the pressure on the mother to get the son to confess.”

  Xavier was staring down at the page.

  Jack continued. “I don’t know how hard the prosecutor intends to push the idea that your mother helped you. He may just be rattling your cage, hoping you’ll sign a nice and clear confession to keep the police from charging your mother with a crime. Or maybe he really does intend to charge your mother as an accessory after the fact to murder. Either way, your parents want me to be her lawyer.”

  Xavier continued his stare at the printed page. Jack laid his hand flat on the paper, palm down, to break Xavier’s concentration.

  “Under the professional rules of ethics, I need your consent to represent both you and your mother. It’s called joint representation. Honestly, I don’t think it’s a good idea. It’s not in your mother’s interest to be linked to you in any way, and joint representation only reinforces the link. My advice to your mother was to get separate counsel. But your father is determined to pay only one lawyer. So I’m asking you, as my existing client: Do you object to joint representation?”

  Jack waited. Silence.

  “I’m not going to take silence as acceptance,” said Jack.

  More silence.

  “Okay, I have my answer. I’ll let your parents know that you do not consent to joint representation. All for the better, as far as I’m concerned.”

  Jack shuffled through the next few pages of cell-phone records until he found what he was looking for. He laid a new page on the table.

  “Here’s what interests me,” said Jack, pointing. “This number, right here. It’s not your mom’s number or your dad’s number. In fact, when I asked your parents, they had no idea whose number this is. Which is interesting because you called it every day. Multiple times a day. Until five days before the shooting. Then the calls stopped.”

  Jack gave him a moment to review the record, to
see it in black and white.

  “Whose number is that?” asked Jack.

  Xavier was staring down at the page.

  “You obviously know,” said Jack. “You talked every day. Why did the calls stop? Why did you stop talking just five days before the shooting?”

  The silent stare continued.

  “Fine,” said Jack. He folded the papers and tucked them away in his coat pocket. “I’ll pick up my cell phone on my way out of the building and dial the number. Let’s see who answers.”

  Xavier’s eyes widened, and for a second Jack thought he might say something, but he didn’t. Jack rose, went to the door, and called for the guard.

  “I’m not bluffing,” Jack said to his client. “I’m giving you this one chance to tell me. If you don’t, I’m going to dial that number the minute I leave this building.”

  He gave Xavier a moment to reconsider. Not a word.

  The door opened. “I’m finished,” Jack told the guard.

  Jack took the elevator down to the lobby and retrieved his smartphone from the custodian. He walked straight out of the building, crossed the street to his car, and got inside. He turned on the air-conditioning but left the car in park. Then he made good on his threat. He dialed the number, and the call linked to his Bluetooth on speaker.

  “Hello?”

  It was the voice of a young woman, which took Jack by surprise. “This is Xavier Khoury’s lawyer, Jack Swyteck.”

  He wanted her name, but fishing for it would only increase the chances of a hang-up. Better to act like he already knew who she was. “Your number is in Xavier’s cell-phone records. Are you a friend of his?”

  No response.

  “Are you still there?” Jack asked.

  “What do you want?”

  “I’d like to talk to you.”

  “What about?”

  “Xavier.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t want to talk.”

  “If you’re worried about talking on a cell phone, I understand. I’d be happy to meet somewhere in private.”

  “I just don’t want to talk.”

  “We could meet wherever is convenient.”

  “I don’t want to meet.”

  “I’m not asking you to tell me anything that makes you uncomfortable.”

  “That leaves us nothing to talk about,” she said, and the line went silent.

  “Hello?”

  Jack waited, but she was gone.

  “Damn it!” he said, pounding the steering wheel, angry only at himself.

  Andie was at her desk, working on a witness statement, when the assistant special agent in charge of the Miami field office stepped into the doorway and invited her to lunch.

  “We need to catch up,” he said, but Andie sensed there was something more to it. Schwartz was a well-known brown-bagger who ate almost every day at his desk, working. Just before noon, they left the building together and went to Andie’s car. She drove in the direction of a local sandwich shop that had the best tuna salad on pita around.

  “Tell me something, Henning,” said Schwartz.

  Andie kept her eyes on the road but braced herself. Her instincts had been right: clearly more to it.

  “Do you think the al-Qaeda claim of responsibility is real?” he asked.

  She knew exactly what he meant, but she asked anyway. “You mean about the school shooting?”

  “Yes. The school shooting.”

  “Terrorism is not my turf, as you know. So I really can’t say any more than anyone else who watches the nightly news.”

  “What does Jack think?” he asked.

  “I don’t know what Jack thinks.”

  “Two possibilities, right? A terrorist cell radicalized the shooter and made him an instrument of al-Qaeda. Or someone wants law enforcement to think it was an act of Islamic terrorism.”

  “I agree,” said Andie. “Which way Jack is leaning I can’t say. We never talk about his cases. At least not until the trial is over.”

  “I find that hard to believe in this situation. A shooting at your daughter’s school. You and Righley could have been killed. And you don’t talk about it?”

  Andie steered into a parking space outside the sandwich shop and stopped the car. “Maybe it is hard to believe. But it’s true.”

  They climbed out of the car, shut the doors, and started toward the restaurant. Andie heard the click of heels on the sidewalk behind them. She walked a little faster, and the footfalls quickened. She turned and stopped. The man kept coming and then stopped.

  “Andrea Henning?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “This is for you,” he said, handing her a large manila envelope.

  Andie took it, and the moment she did, the man hurried away.

  “What the hell was that?” the ASAC asked.

  Andie opened the envelope and looked inside. “That was a process server,” she said, leafing through the pages. “And this is a civil summons and a complaint.”

  “Huh?”

  Andie looked up in time to see the process server drive away.

  “I’m being sued,” she said in disbelief.

  Chapter 16

  Jack met MDPD Homicide detective Vega outside the front gate to Riverside.

  The defendant’s motion to allow his counsel to tour the campus grounds had drawn no opposition from the state attorney. Jack had visited the campus before, of course, but only casually, as a parent. Before the students returned to classes—the target date was the following Monday—he needed to view the grounds as counsel for an accused killer. It was an entirely different way of looking at a familiar place filled with mostly fond memories.

  “Here’s how we’re going to proceed,” said Vega.

  The detective was in control, and she laid out the rules. The motion Jack had filed with the court also asked to see any hand-drawn diagrams or electronic graphics the homicide team had created to document the shooter’s movements. Jack was given an iPad to use during the tour. A room-by-room simulation would unfold on the handheld LCD screen in real time, as Vega led Jack in the shooter’s footsteps.

  “We’ll start in Building E,” she said, as she unlocked the gate and pushed it open.

  Jack followed her across the grounds. “Ghost town” was a cliché, but the term nonetheless came to Jack’s mind. It was just after the lunch hour on a school day. In the courtyard, picnic tables that should have been filled with schoolchildren and their cafeteria trays were empty. Silence replaced the usual school-day sounds—no bells, no commotion, no laughter, no snickering boys and girls who couldn’t heed their teacher’s command to stand silent. Even the flagpole was barren.

  They stopped at the entrance door to Building E. It was the logical starting point, as Jack knew that Building E was where surveillance cameras had picked up the earliest images of the shooter.

  “On my signal, hit the start button on your screen,” said Vega. “Just follow me, and walk exactly at the pace I set. Don’t stop unless I stop. This tour proceeds at the exact speed of the shooter’s movement across campus.”

  “Got it,” said Jack. He checked the screen on the tablet. It was a blueprint-style diagram of twelve classrooms, six on each side of the hallway that ran the length of the building. Inside each classroom were a dozen or more green dots and one blue dot.

  “The green dots are students,” said Vega. “Blue is a teacher. As soon as we enter the building, you’ll see a black dot. That’s the shooter. Ready?”

  “Yes.”

  She opened the door. On her signal, Jack followed her inside, and the on-screen demonstration began. A black dot appeared at the building entrance, exactly where they were standing. The detective walked calmly toward the fire alarm, as did the on-screen black dot.

  “First thing the shooter did was pull the fire alarm,” she said, but she didn’t actually pull it. On screen, green dots inside the classrooms formed lines, exactly the way students would in response to an emergency drill. The blue dots went to the fr
ont of the lines.

  “The teachers opened the doors,” said Vega.

  They were just dots on a screen, but Jack felt his heart pounding as lines of unsuspecting students filed out of the classrooms and into the hallway.

  Vega stepped into the stairwell. Jack followed.

  “The shooter waited for the classrooms to empty,” she said.

  Ten seconds passed, and then she stepped back into the hallway.

  “And then he opened fire,” she said.

  The green dots scattered across the screen in every direction, some running away from the shooter, others running toward him in obvious confusion, still others racing back in the classrooms and clustering in the corners.

  Before Jack’s eyes, green dots in the hallway changed color.

  “The purple dots are hits,” said the detective.

  Jack counted four. The detective continued down the hallway. Jack followed, putting one foot in front of the other, hardly able to imagine what it must have been like for those scattering and screaming “green dots” on that morning. The detective stopped briefly outside the door to Classroom E-101, and then kept walking.

  “We don’t know why the shooter didn’t go inside,” she said. “Maybe he was looking for a particular teacher or student. Maybe you can tell us.”

  Jack didn’t acknowledge the remark, but he didn’t hold it against her either, given the horror of the virtual reenactment.

  Vega stopped at the next classroom. “Seven-oh-three had the most victims.”

  Vega opened the door, and Jack followed her inside. A blue dot moved precipitously across the LCD screen toward the black one. Blue turned to purple.

  “That was Mr. Davis,” said Vega. “Science teacher. Thirty-two years old. Wife and three kids.”

  Over the next fifteen seconds, the dots that had clustered in the corner changed from green to purple, one innocent child at a time, leaving Jack breathless.

  “There’s more,” said Vega.

  Jack was all too aware. He followed her out. The virtual hallway on screen was empty, save for the random purple dots that marked the shooter’s first victims. Vega continued down the hallway.

  “He changed magazines while walking to the south exit. A fully spent extended magazine—almost forty rounds—was found right there,” she said, pointing to a piece of ballistics marking tape that was still on the floor.