If she was looking for an old case, this one fit the bill. Dog-eared and crumpled pages jutted out from under the top of the box, trying to escape. For a moment, she had a vision of the mouse that had been living in the other box in the basement.
“I seem to remember a thing or two about that case,” Minter said, scratching his beard and studying the ceiling. “Morales shot a man in cold blood. Couple of witnesses saw him do it. Slam dunk case for the prosecution. Seems odd for a case like that to have three big old boxes like this, doesn’t it? Not real sure what it’s doing here either. Seems to me the murder took place in Florida … or maybe New York.”
Amber tilted her head to the side as dust motes swirled in the orange afternoon sun shining across the boxes. “Who knows,” she muttered.
She heard the bubbling pour of another drink in his tumbler behind her. “Then it would seem we have some light reading to do.”
She turned to see he was offering her another glass of the Darjeeling tea. She was not surprised to smell the bourbon in it.
5
1000 Miles
Seven minutes before Minter Tweed’s grandfather clock struck midnight, Amber opened the third box. A rooster crowed in the distance and she wondered why in the world it was up at this hour. Then again, why in the world was she up at this hour. Most of what she’d been poring over was repetitive, dull, and utterly normal for a murder case: chronological record, crime scene log, crime report, death report, property and evidence reports, crime lab reports, vehicle reports, arrest reports, related crime reports, follow-up reports, victim information, suspect information, photo line-ups, witness list with statements, officer at scene reports, crime scene notes and diagrams, crime scene photographs, ambulance and medical records, medical examiner’s reports, communications (teletypes, press releases, police bulletins, wanted flyers, newspaper clippings, and agency-generated social media posts regarding the investigation,) search warrants, miscellaneous notes and computer runs, video or CCTV if any exists, and an eliminated suspects list.
The volume of information was staggering, yet unremarkable in any way. As she leafed her way through the reams of endless paper, it seemed to Amber that Chief Decker might be right. This case seemed to be open and shut.
Marcario—referred to as Marc in most of the reports—gunned down Eric Torres in cold blood. Marc shot him once in the side, then crime scene techs said it was likely that Eric had fallen or kneeled down. The ME confirmed with gunshot residue and stippling that the fatal shot was point blank to his forehead. Two eye-witnesses independently picked Morales out of a standard group of mugshots. Even with zero trace of residue on his hands, the jury deliberated for just under two hours before sentencing him to life in prison.
“Why in the world would Governor Cruz want this case to come up again?” She said stuffing papers back into the box. “This thing is rock solid. I’m just going to type up the report, scan the file into the database, and shred it. There’s nothing to look at here.”
“Don’t be so sure, Miss Cross,” Tweed said, wagging a single, yellow carbon copy sheet between two fingers.
“What’s that?” She asked. “And you can call me Amber.”
He laid the sheet flat on the conference table and slid it toward her with one finger. “It seems that our fine, young Mr. Morales provided alibis.”
“Alibis?”
“Fifteen of them.”
She thumbed through the back of the third box. “That can’t be right,” she said. “I didn’t see any alibi reports.”
“Curious,” Tweed said around the chewed black stalk of a pipe he had yet to light.
Amber squinted at the sheet of names. “Why wouldn’t they call these people?”
Standing with a cacophony of snaps and cracks, he ambled to the French doors looking out over the dark square below them. A couple of late night party-goers were stumbling past, laughing and shouting, their feet clicking along the cobblestone walk. He couldn’t make out their faces, but he could discern with remarkable accuracy their age, sex, height, weight, and build—a talent he’d developed long ago when discussing clients with the police department.
“They had eye-witnesses,” he said, striking a match and lighting his pipe.
“Yes, but there are fifteen people that say— “
He turned to look at her, interrupting her with a tone not unlike a Harvard professor. “Miss Cross, have you ever heard of Occam’s Razor?”
She shrugged. “Hasn’t everyone?”
He studied her, a strange look in his eye, as if he was … setting a trap. “Then you’ll know that when you are presented with two explanations for an event, it is very likely the simpler one will be found to be correct, yes?”
“Sure. I guess.”
He knelt down and tapped the piece of paper with the alibis listed on it. The smell of vanilla and cherry wafted around her in the intoxicating pipe smoke. “On the one hand, you have a complex puzzle of explanations that could have been somehow concocted by Mr. Morales to assure a jury that he was not at the scene of the crime, but in fact over one-thousand miles away. A jigsaw of facts that would require interviews, depositions, affidavits, statements, testimonies, timelines, and on and on to support that particular explanation of events.”
Amber felt her eyelids getting heavy. She was exhausted, but she knew something important was happening. Tweed smacked his hand down on the top of the nearest box, jolting her awake.
“And here, on this hand, you have two people, independently picking Mr. Morales out of a notebook of suspects, saying they are sure beyond a reasonable doubt that he committed the crime.”
He pulled his pipe out of his mouth and blew a perfect smoke ring. She watched in a daze as he blew a second ring, inside the first. “It would seem that our fine Savannah Police Department took it upon themselves to believe the simpler of the two explanations. Even in the absence of such pesky things as alibis and lack of any evidence that Morales ever fired that gun.”
“So, they just buried his claim of fifteen alibi witnesses?”
“In the best possible place to be sure they would never see the light of day.”
“I have to speak to them. I need to talk to these people and see what they have to say,” she shook the paper as she said it. “I can’t believe they didn’t talk to a single one of them. I have to call them.”
She shoved her hand into her pocket and pulled out her phone.
Before she could dial the first number, Tweed glanced at the Grandfather clock. “And the clocks were striking thirteen,” he said, as a single gong echoed from the antique time keeper. “Perhaps, you should call them a little later in the morning, when normal people have eschewed the bonds of slumber.”
“Oh, right.” She put her phone away and a yawn burst out of her mouth. “Guess I should be going.”
“I usually arrive by ten or ten thirty,” he said, walking her to the door. “And Mattie always has coffee and danishes on by then. You’re more than welcome to use this office for your purposes. I honestly don’t know that Chief Decker will notice, or even care, if you clock in and come on over. I’m sure he gave you this onerous job to get you out of the way of more important police business.”
She hurried across the street to the lot behind the police station. She put the key into the ignition of her Datsun—the single thing her mother had left her when she died—praying the engine would turn over. The car was an unfortunate shade of brown with intermittent wipers that worked intermittently at best … if at all. The radio could be tuned with a pair of pliers grabbing stem of the long-gone plastic knob to exactly three stations—88.1 The Light, 93.1 La Frontera, and 107.7 The Bull. She wasn’t sure if that was because the antenna was faulty in some way or if there were only three stations left broadcasting in Savannah. The AC had given out a long time ago, but the faux leather seats were faded and cracked, so she’d covered them with chic velour covers that looked like black and white cowhide protecting her legs from scalding in the hot, Sout
h Georgia sun.
Three cranks did the trick and she was blowing smoke down the street as she made her way across the tracks to her tiny, one-bedroom apartment. The bright, full moon draped long blue shadows over everything and more than once, she had the sensation that someone was watching her. She passed three golf courses, two cemeteries, a dozen parks with creepy statues and fountains, a Walmart, Georgia Southern University—not yet a hub of activity at this time of night—before pulling into the poorly lit parking lot at the Orchard View Apartments. Though maybe there had been once, there was no orchard anywhere near the complex, and the view was of a concrete jungle of low-end storage units.
The population of Orchard View was an incongruous mix of students and retirees making her feel, at times, like the only one who wasn’t getting stoned on Vodka Cranberries or Vicodin. She didn’t look at anything but the door handle as she jammed her key in, turned it, ducked inside, and turned the deadbolt. She slid the brass chain across and wedged a wooden chair back under the knob.
The front room was billed as open concept in the splashy brochures in the rental office. In actuality, it was a single space that was supposed to double as living room, kitchen, and dining room. Amber could easily sit at the “vintage,” chrome diner table she’d bought at the thrift store, adjust the vertical blinds hanging down over the screechy sliding door looking out into the courtyard, adjust the rabbit ears on top of her tube TV, and scramble an egg all at the same time. To say it was cozy was to misuse the word in the worst way. The out-of-fashion taupe paint bubbled in places and the apartment always felt slightly damp. She wanted to adjust the air conditioning to just above walk-in cooler temperature, but that would mean a higher utility bill, so she just cranked up the dusty box fan in the kitchen window sending a pile of unopened envelopes cascading off the counter.
Knowing she wasn’t likely to sleep at this point, she poured a glass of milk and sat down at the kitchen table. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the single sheet of yellow paper—the one with all of Marcario Morales’s alibi witnesses on it—and began to make notes.
6
The List
After a couple of simple internet searches on her phone, she found that the first five names on the list were friends of Morales. His alibi claim produced a web-like story of his visit to Florida at the time of Eric Torres’s murder. The original notes taken by the police were in a nearly illegible scrawl that reminded Amber of a doctor’s handwriting. The detective who had taken Morales’s statement was listed as Roger Dalton. Amber was not aware of anyone by that name in the department and he wasn’t listed as the lead officer on the case. That wasn’t altogether unusual, but it made tracking down the team who had questioned the alleged shooter just a few days after the event tough, if not impossible.
She made her way through the other names and the cryptic notes about each one, some with no more than a single word or two to describe the nature of the alibi in question. But it became clear that they were all alibi witnesses that would say Marcario Morales could not have been in New York at the time of the murder. According to Morales, he was more than one thousand miles away in Florida and there were fifteen people who could testify to that fact.
Amber resolved that she would search the files again to see if any contact at all had been made with the witnesses. She didn’t recall any notes to that effect, but it had been late and she was exhausted. A yawn escaped unbidden from her mouth and she stretched her hands above her head. Just another minute and … she woke several hours later, her head lying on her crossed arms on the kitchen table as the gray dawn was seeping between the vertical blinds. Somewhere down the hall a cat screeched. Pets were frowned upon at the Orchard View Apartments, but if they were clean, quiet, and contained, they weren’t strictly forbidden.
Stumbling to the kitchen, new aches and pains grew into her forearms and elbows sending the needling pin pricks shooting up into them as the blood flowed back into place. She jerked open the cabinet and saw that she had one remaining coffee pod. She held it between two fingers and considered whether or not the fog in her head was worth using it or if she should save it for another day. Inspiration hit and she tossed the dark roast cup back into the plastic basket in the cabinet. She opened the refrigerator and was pleased—no, ecstatic was more like it—to see an Ultra Violet Zap energy drink sitting alone in the door. She had it popped open and was guzzling the sparkling soda in seconds and felt her brain slowly come into focus. She leaned back on the counter and finally, as an afterthought, glanced at the small cuckoo clock her mother had left her. As if on cue, the tiny blue bird popped its head out of the quaint, German-esque cottage and began to sing. Amber nearly did a spit-take when she saw that the clock’s hands were set neatly on the ten and the two.
“Holy crap,” she blurted out, bolting toward the bedroom stripping out of her crumpled uniform as she went.
Forgoing a shower, she grabbed a folded white t-shirt and threw it on with dark slacks. Thankfully, the chief had said while she was doing the digitization work, she didn’t have to suit up. “Casual is fine,” he’d told her. “But not too casual, Ber. You got me? You’re still an officer of the law.”
She grabbed the grape flavored Zap sending a few drops splashing onto the back of her hand. As she jerked her purse off the hook by the front door, she licked it off and burst out into the hall. A black cat hissed, leaped at her, its claws bared, and almost connected with a vicious swipe of razor-sharp claws. So much for clean, quiet, and contained, she thought. But she stepped aside quickly, watching as the cat bounded down the hall and away from her.
She slammed her palms into the glass door to exit the building and found herself in a downpour. Savannah, Georgia averages forty-one inches of rain a year, with nearly all of it coming in late summer. It seemed to Amber that they were getting most of it today … at this exact moment. She jerked open the driver’s side door to the Datsun and jumped inside. As she sat back in the car, catching her breath and wiping the rain from her arms, she realized that her freshly washed shirt was now soaked through and she was—except for yesterday’s bra—an eligible contestant for any reputable spring break wet t-shirt contest.
“Shit,” she moaned, leaning her head back.
No time. It’ll dry. She glanced behind her seat and saw that, thankfully, she had a light coat that she’d thrown back there at some point. It would do as a cover-up until she dried out.
She fired the car’s engine and pulled out of the lot, the passenger’s side wheel bumping over the edge of the curb for the umpteenth time.
7
Lost Alibi
Minter Tweed was sitting in the conference room at the far end of the table, pipe jabbed into his jaw, and tortoise shell reading glasses stuck on the end of his nose. Amber wondered if he knew they were about to fall off. It looked as if the entire contents of the Marcario Morales file had been emptied onto the table in stacks and piles without much rhyme or reason.
“Good mornin’, Miss Cross,” he said, without looking up. “I see you took my advice and slept in.”
At the sound of her shuffling off the coat, he glanced over the glasses at her. “Guess young people today don’t believe in umbrellas or some such, is that it?”
She looked down. Her bra, simple, white, minimal lace, was clearly visible through the damp t-shirt. “Oh, I have one. Just … didn’t realize it was raining until it was too late.”
Tweed chewed on his pipe for a long second.
“Your powers of observation amaze me,” he said, returning to the pages he held in his hands. “Why don’t you see if Mattie has something here you can change into?” He said. “Or there’s a boutique across the square.”
She remembered the cute little shop, but she wasn’t sure there was enough in her bank account to cover anything in the store. “Thank you, but I’m— “
“Mattie will give you the credit card,” he said, shuffling the papers around. “Consider yourself on staff for now. If you’re going to be
working out of this office, we can’t have you lookin’ like a…”
He let the pause hang and must have decided that whatever he was going to say was better left unsaid.
“Thank you.”
She walked down to the foyer to see the silver-haired receptionist on the phone. She opened her mouth to speak, but before she could, the woman smiled and stretched out a hand. In it, she was offering up an American Express Centurion credit card (the invitation only Amex black card.) She winked at Amber and shooed her out the door.
When she returned after a thirty-minute shopping spree thanks to the Tweed account, she had transformed into what might pass for a smartly dressed assistant wearing a simple yellow sundress with bold white flowers on it. She had thrown in a small umbrella and had stopped along the way for a tray of coffees. She opted for a white chocolate latte with two shots of espresso for herself and the same for Mattie. Black coffee, sugars and cream on the side for Tweed.
She placed the simple black coffee on the table. Tweed waved away the other ingredients. As she stirred her latte, her mouth watering with anticipation, she noticed that the Matlock-ian lawyer’s eyebrows were furrowed so tightly, they had almost merged into one.
“What?” She asked. “What’s wrong?”
He took the pipe from his mouth and waved his hand over the piles of papers on the mahogany table. “Are you sure this is all there was to the Morales file?”
“You had it brought over,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “I was … unconscious. Remember?”
Her Lost Alibi: A gripping suspense thriller. (An Amber Cross Thriller Book 1) Page 3