by A R Kennedy
Judge Lowe held up his hand. “And where was she when officers arrived?”
“The officers on scene reported she was in the house when they arrived. I arrived within ten minutes and she was in her foyer.”
“Is this accurate, Ms. Chandler?”
“Yes, sir. My skin was irritated from the monitor.” She swung her leg up and placed her foot on the judge’s desk. Sewell closed his eyes at the offense. “I was trying to clean it. It’s a little better now.”
Judge Lowe inspected the area. “Okay, thank you, Ms. Chandler.” He motioned for her to remove her foot from his desk. “Anything else you’d like to add?”
She looked at Owens. Both knew there was plenty that she could add. And cost two police officers their jobs. “No, sir. It appeared to be a misunderstanding.”
Judge Lowe dismissed them all. Wyatt took Cecilia by her arm and guided her to a bench outside the office. “Nice outfit,” he whispered.
“You gave me five minutes to get ready. You’re lucky I’m wearing pants,” she whispered back.
“Could you have told me it was a malfunction before I made an imbecile out of myself?” Briscoe said to Owens on their way out of the office.
“I tried,” Owens answered through a clenched jaw.
Owens passed Wyatt and Cecilia seated on the bench. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Wyatt asked her. “You have to tell me everything.” She nodded understanding and avoided looking at the passing Holden.
Owens outpaced Briscoe and passed Michael down the hall, on his cell phone. “Calling in an order please…Sloppy Joe. Thanks.”
Holden calmed down by the time he returned to the station, thankful Cecilia’s bail had not been revoked. Sloppy Joe in hand, he headed to his office to have lunch. He passed Officer Pugliese.
“You owe Mrs. Chandler your job,” he told him.
Pugliese huffed. “Please.”
CHAPTER 36
Promptly at nine, Cecilia opened the front door expecting to see her defense team. She only saw Wyatt. “Abigail needed another Starbucks run?” Cecilia asked when she let the lone Wyatt to come in.
“A caffeinated Abigail is a happy Abigail.”
Cecilia followed him to the defense team’s office and she stood at the table while he unpacked his briefcase and flattened out his daily copy of the Folley Press. She usually went her own way after letting them in. He identified her hovering as a need to ask something.
“Why haven’t you told them about Ferris? Why haven’t you told the media I was protecting him?” she asked without prompting.
“Strategy.”
“I…I’m not second-guessing you. I know you are a very experienced and skilled defense lawyer. I’m just thinking this would garner us support. There was that gorilla at the zoo a couple years ago. People went nuts when it was killed. I think animal lovers would support Ferris. That they’d support me for protecting him.”
Cecilia thought public pressure might force Briscoe to drop the charges.
Ferris plopped his head on the dining room table. Usually Cecilia would have scolded him for this. But she leaned down next to him and looked at him closely. “Come on, he’s cute.”
“I won’t argue about that. Come here, Ferris.” Wyatt nuzzled his ears. “We all know you’re cute.”
“But?” she asked.
“There’s only one way to win this case and it’s in the courtroom. We can’t fight this case in the media.”
“But—”
“Yes, I’ve used the media a few times. Held a few press conferences, for all my cases. Mainly to placate the media. I like to keep them appeased. In case I need them.”
“But—”
“And I needed to use them to get Gabbert’s juvenile record. I couldn’t use it in court anyway. It looks a lot better when the media rips him to shreds than if I did it. It won’t affect the trial but I think we’re all glad it’s out there.”
“But…” She paused, expecting him to anticipate her question again and answer. He didn’t and she continued. “…maybe Briscoe would give in to the pressure and drop the charges.”
Wyatt nodded understanding. “I see what you’re saying, but that’s not Briscoe. He’s not the hick country lawyer we all expect. He’s quite shrewd. He graduated top of his class. I can see why he’s hoping this case catapults his career. We’ve looked into him. We’ve talked to area lawyers, co-workers, and classmates. If we cage him in, he’ll strike back. Better to lull him sleep. Let him think we’re not going to use the dog issue.”
“But you are?”
“Of course! If Ferris doesn’t garner sympathy for you, I don’t know what will!” He patted Ferris again, before Ferris ran off to find a toy. “I just have to wait for the right time.” She nodded but wasn’t convinced. “Trust me, Cecilia.” She took a deep breath and tried to believe Wyatt was right.
She headed to the door so Wyatt could start his workday and she could start hers.
“If it makes you feel any better, I’m sure Briscoe’s wondering why I haven’t told the media yet either.”
After getting her order, a double espresso, Abigail headed to the door and another long day at work. A familiar face caught her eye. “Hi, Dan,” she said as she walked up to his table.
He took off his glasses and looked up from his tablet. “Hello, Ms. Hodson,” Briscoe greeted her. He put his glasses back on and returned to reading the news on his tablet.
She sat down next to him and sipped her coffee. “There’s still time, you know,” she said.
“For what?” he asked, without looking at her.
“To drop the charges.”
He put the tablet down. “Are you scared that your team can’t win?”
She smiled. “No, we’ll win. Wyatt will win. He always wins.”
“Well, someone is bound to beat him and it’s going to be me. I want to beat him.”
“Don’t we all,” she said.
“Really?”
“You think I want to be his number two forever? One day I’ll be on my own.”
He nodded and took a closer look at her. He was surprised by her aspirations. He thought she was, and would always be, Sewell’s lackey.
“You know we look into everything when we’re preparing for trial.” He nodded, not surprised. “Even things we know will never come up during the trial.” He waited, knowing she wasn’t done. “We look into everything.”
“That doesn’t scare me.”
“It should,” she said, in between sips.
“I looked into you too,” he told her.
She laughed. “But we have better, and more, resources. What do you have, Marcy? Who is forty-one and still lives with her mother? And their three cats?” She expected a reaction from him. Outrage. Surprise. Anger. But he had no reaction. “I know why you don’t like dogs,” she revealed.
“I never said that,” he said, returning to his reading.
“You don’t need to. I know.”
He noted her confidence but also her language. “Interesting, you said ‘I know’ not ‘we know.’”
She smiled. Her research on him was accurate. It had surprised the defense team. Dan Briscoe was a formidable opponent.
Abigail asked one question before she got up to leave. “Is this what she would want you to do?”
Wyatt was scanning the police’s crime photos. It wasn’t the volume of photos he was used to receiving in violent cases. But a small town like Folley wasn’t used to a case, or a trial, of this magnitude. His eyes were starting to glaze over and his stomach growled. He knew he’d have to break for lunch soon. A mark caught his attention. He grabbed a magnifying glass and focused on the spot.
“Abigail, what does that look like to you?” he asked.
She got up and looked over his shoulder. She smiled. Wyatt didn’t want her answer, only her reaction. “I’ll send it off to the lab for examination.”
The defense team broke for lunch and each was in a different part of her house. Ferris made a con
tinual loop to each of them in hopes of getting a piece of their lunch. Or to clean up any crumb they dropped. Each was on their cell phones or tablets and would pat Ferris as he passed by.
In between projects herself, Cecilia also stopped for lunch. She walked into her dining room. It had become defense team central. The table was littered with files. Folley Press copies were stacked on a side table. The floor was covered in filing boxes. They had commandeered a table from another room to hold a printer and scanner and a WiFi router. She barely recognized the room. Cecilia only came in when she was summoned.
“What’s this?” she asked pointing to a folder marked ‘R G’.
“Crime photos,” Michael answered. “I don’t think you should look at those.”
Ignoring Michael, she flipped through the photos.
“So, this is him? Robert Gabbert.” He looked so young and so dead. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing to the mark in his forehead.
Michael looked over her shoulder. “That’s the bullet mark.”
“I only shot the gun one time. Just to scare him. How did I hit him in the head?”
“You’re obviously some marksman.” He took a bite of his sandwich. “All those hours at the gun range worked for you.”
“Me? I went to a gun range once. With Joey.” She thought for a moment. “That was over a year ago. I hadn’t touched a gun between then and shooting him. I’ve only touched a gun twice in my life.”
“Wyatt!” Michael yelled, his latest bite still in his mouth. “Say it again, Cecilia,” he told her as Wyatt entered.
“I…I don’t know how I shot that”—she started to say ‘kid’ but Holden told her she could not think of him that way—“intruder in the head.”
“About the gun range,” Michael corrected her.
“I only went once,” she told Wyatt.
Wyatt looked to Michael, who was smiling and had mayo on his lip. He turned his attention back to Cecilia. “But you’ve been paying a monthly membership.”
“No I don’t.”
“The business account still has a monthly membership to the local gun range. Don’t you use it?” Wyatt asked.
“No, of course not! I didn’t even know I had one. I don’t pay the business bills. Clayton handles all that.”
“Get Clayton on the phone,” Wyatt directed Michael. “And find the gun range owner. And anyone who works at that gun range.”
“Well, it was the luckiest—” Michael started.
“Or unluckiest shot,” Wyatt corrected him, “anyone has ever hit.”
CHAPTER 37
Cecilia stood at the open sliding glass door and watched the sunset. She missed the nights sitting on the deck with Joey, while Ferris ran around the yard. On cold nights, like this, Joey would pull her in close and wrap them up in a blanket. Despite those terrible metal patio chairs, he made it comfortable. At least in the dark, she couldn’t see the hideous green.
Lost in her thoughts, ten minutes ticked away. A gust of wind brought her back to reality.
“Ferris,” she called out. He’d been out for a while now, she realized. He hadn’t run around the yard wild for months. Since Joey had died, his escapades in the yard—running after squirrels, jumping at butterflies, chasing after blowing leaves—had diminished. He had taken to running out, doing his business, and running back in. She couldn’t think of one time since the attack that she had to call out for him to return to the house.
The last bit of light was gone from the horizon. She pulled her gray hoodie—Joey’s gray hoodie—across her chest as she stepped out into the yard. She glanced down at the ankle monitor. They’d assured her that its boundaries were the boundaries of her yard. She hoped they were right, as she stepped onto the patio. She did not want a repeat performance of police officers with guns storming into her home.
Cecilia hadn’t been out in the backyard since the attack. She’d let Ferris out the kitchen door, wait a few minutes for his return, and then close the door. The motion light flicked on as she stepped out onto the patio. She scanned the yard but didn’t see Ferris. “Ferris,” she called out again. She prepared to be tackled by the golden retriever, his usual response when called while outside. She waited motionless but heard and saw nothing.
Cecilia gasped as the backyard’s light shut off and the yard was engulfed in darkness. “Ferris!” she screamed. Oh no, she thought, where could he have gone? “Ferris!”
She waved her arms in a panic and the backyard light flipped back on. She ran the perimeter of the yard, along the fencing, continually calling his name. She cursed Joey for not replacing the fencing like he had talked about. This was too low, too easy for Ferris to jump. But he had never escaped the yard before.
Cecilia made a second lap of the yard. Each call for him was becoming more urgent, more panicked. Breathless, she ran into the house to the front door and out into the front yard. She prayed she’d find him sitting by the front gate, wondering how he’d gotten there. She ran the perimeter of the fence and saw no sign of Ferris.
Cecilia glanced at her watch. How long had he’d been missing? Five minutes? Twenty? She didn’t know. All she knew was that it was too long.
Cecilia grabbed her cell phone as she ran through the kitchen, wanting to scan the backyard again. It was still empty. She stared at the phone and tried to think who she could call. She scanned her contact list and stopped at the listing for the service that had microchipped Ferris.
She called and shouted, “I lost my dog!” when the operator answered.
“What, ma’am?”
“My dog, Ferris, he ran away. Well, he probably doesn’t realize he’s run away. I don’t know. Just gone. He’s not in the yard.” She kept scanning the yard but there were no signs of Ferris. “Can you track him?”
“Track him?” the operator asked.
“Use the microchip to track him. To tell me where he is.” She didn’t know what she would do when they told her where he was. She couldn’t leave the confines of her property. She’d figure that out once they told her where Ferris was. One problem at a time, she told herself.
“Ma’am, we don’t do that.”
“What?” Cecilia asked. She hoped she had misheard the woman.
“When’s he’s found, someone with a microchip reader scans him to get his microchip number. Then they input the number in the website and your name and details will come up.”
Joey had handled the microchipping. She had never thought about it until Ferris was gone. Had he only put in his cell number? The office number? Had he put in the business number? They didn’t have a home phone. She had no idea. Like their business and personal accounts, she should have updated Ferris’s microchip account when Joey died.
“Ma’am? Once someone finds him and scans him, they’ll see you as the owner and call you.”
Cecilia was now thankful that no one knew that Ferris was the reason she shot at the intruder. Ferris could be the victim of vigilante justice if he got into the wrong hands.
In typical customer service fashion, the operator asked, “Have I answered all your questions today, ma’am?”
She hung up before mumbling, “No, you didn’t answer all my questions. I still don’t know where my Ferris is!”
Cecilia scrolled her contact list again. There was no one she could call. The vet was closed for the day and if someone brought Ferris in, they’d recognize him. She ran around the yard again, calling Ferris’s name to no avail. She ran to the front yard in the hopes of seeing anything.
She quickly regretted that hope.
Officer Vinnie Pugliese was making his regular patrol pass by the Chandler home. He was disappointed each shift, until today.
Pugliese saw Mrs. Chandler running around her front yard. At first he thought she was going to run out the gate; instead, she ran along its perimeter. He pulled up to the curb and got out. When Cecilia saw him, her eyes bulged. He could see the panic on her face and smiled. He knew he had caught her doing something she didn’t want to
be caught doing.
As a police officer, he learned to recognize that look.
Because he saw it so often.
Cecilia dropped to her knees in the yard and held her hands above her head. “Officer, I didn’t leave my property. I swear. I haven’t been cleaning the monitor either. I don’t know why the alarm went off.”
Vinnie walked through the gate. She remained on her knees and she was thankful his gun remained in its holster. She continued scanning the front yard but could see no signs of Ferris. Finally, with a moment of quiet, the loss of Ferris hit her. Tears welled in her eyes. With her hands above her head, she couldn’t wipe the tears that ran down her face.
This wasn’t what Vinnie had expected. Through her arrest, her booking, and arraignment, she had been stoic. No signs of emotion. Even when he had first arrived at the scene, there had been no tears. He had attributed that to shock.
“What’s wrong, Mrs. Chandler?”
“Ferris is gone. He got loose,” Cecilia explained. She could see he didn’t understand. “The dog, my dog, Ferris. He got out of the yard. I can’t go after him because of the monitor and…and I don’t know what to do.”
Pugliese waved for her to put her hands down and she wiped the tears away. He walked over to her and held out his hand to help her up. “Okay, one more time, tell me what happened.”
Cecilia wiped her face again and cleared her throat. “I let Ferris out into the backyard, to…you know…do his business. He’s usually back in within a few minutes. But he didn’t come back.” She looked at her watch. “It’s…been over thirty minutes, I think.”
Pugliese looked around the front yard and surrounding area. There was no sign of Ferris or anyone else. “Do you think someone snatched him?”
“What?” she asked. He instantly regretted asking. “No…I thought he started chasing a squirrel or something.” She looked around the front yard again. “Do you….do you think someone came in the yard and took him?”
She couldn’t imagine standing at the door, watching the yard and not hearing someone in the area. But Holden had proved, many times, that someone could sneak into her yard without her having an inkling of it. Just a little stealth was all they needed.