The Murder of Sara Barton (Atlanta Murder Squad Book 1)

by Lance McMillian

  ***

  The empty condo torments me, just like Lara’s non-answer to the text I sent a little while ago. Midnight approaches, and temptation hangs on me. The need to possess her lodged itself into my brain earlier in the evening and refuses to disembark. I cannot shake the desire and am unsure if I even want to. I feel sick.

  Will she even show?

  When I was twelve, I accompanied my father on a visit to a great plantation in south Georgia where horses were bred. To the discomfort of us both, Daddy and I were treated to a front row seat of the physical joining of stud and mare. The corralled madness of the two beasts—both primed for it by the machinations of the breeders just prior to the moment of union—demonstrated the raw power of the sexual urge. I felt the same pent up stirrings with Amber as we walked the hotel halls to our wedding suite. I feel the same need to animalize Lara now.

  The turning of the key in the lock halts my movement in mid-step. Like an alert hunting dog, my ears point themselves in the suspected direction of the desired prey. Before the door even closes, I cover the distance between us and swallow her with my mouth. Token resistance—more a product of surprise than disinterest—melts into mutuality. We never make it past the kitchen.

  Lara slumps to the hardwoods in the aftermath. I bend over the sink, turn on the faucet, and splash cold water on my face. Naked and exposed, my mind is blank. Lara sits before me, her legs splayed randomly on the floor, the refrigerator supporting her back. Neither of us says anything for a while. What is she thinking? I have no idea. She is the foreign language I cannot decipher—an Asiatic-type dialect made up of characters, not letters, foreclosing all hope of comprehension.

  Without looking at me, she says, “I almost killed myself today.”

  I hold my tongue, not understanding. The scene is surreal—the prolonged silence, the smell of sex still fresh in the air, the casual mention of aborted suicide. I feel like everything is happening apart from myself. I’m an observer, and the man near the sink is a hapless stranger out of step with the world around him. She finally looks at me, demanding a response to her words—the intensity in her face matching the intensity of her body just a few minutes before.

  I answer, “I don’t need any more dead bodies before trial.”

  “Bastard. I don’t know if you’re serious or kidding.”

  “I don’t know, either.”

  Without Lara, the picture of Sara Barton’s bruised back would likely never make it into evidence. No one living could authenticate it. I reach that calculation immediately on the spot—thinking like a lawyer my old professors would call it. Standing naked in that kitchen, my response to a confession of near suicide is to analyze the rules of evidence.

  “You know why I didn’t kill myself? I couldn’t solve the problem of how. I don’t own a gun and I’ve never fired one in my entire life. That’s out. I left all my pills in Los Angeles. Can’t use those. Slitting my wrists is too bloody. Watching yourself bleed out has to be excruciating. That left hanging, which seems to be the method of choice for celebrities these days. But that involved too much engineering. I’m no good at engineering. So I’m here, sitting naked on your kitchen floor, like the good little whore you think I am.”

  The discomfort on my face must’ve been evident because she bursts out laughing at me. The frankness rattles my conscience.

  “Look at you,” she says. “Do my words bother you? Should nice Southern girls not speak in such ways? I’m simply stating a fact. You’re a lawyer. You like facts. You summoned me over here tonight like I was an obedient whore. You pounced on me like a whore. And you used me like a whore to satisfy your cravings.”

  “Stop.”

  “You want everything to be nice and clean in your little bubble. You pretend that you’re some kind of respectable man. Stop and open your eyes! I’m ugly. You’re ugly. We’re ugly. You think your hands are clean? I almost killed myself today, and I come here tonight for you to treat me like a whore. How do you think that makes me feel? Is that what you want? A whore? Was your wife a whore?”

  “Don’t talk about her.”

  “Did you treat her like a whore, too? Is that how you like your women? Amber the whore. I bet she was good, but not as good as me, was she?”

  “Stop talking about her.”

  “Or what? ‘I’m not a murderer,’ you told me. Are you going to hit me? Look at you trying to control your anger. Be a man! Get angry! Hit me! Treat me some more like the whore you want!”

  I don’t move or speak.

  “No? You’re pathetic. I knew that this morning. You lack the nerve—you and that ten-ton conscience you carry around. You castigate yourself for the enjoyment of any pleasure. You’re nothing. You’re the most boring man I’ve ever known. Here’s a newsflash for you: I’ve been treated like a whore by men far worse than you. You wouldn’t believe the things men have asked me to do—vile, depraved things, things that would sicken your precious conscience. You and your boring life with your sweet little Amber. Nah, she wasn’t a whore, but I bet you wanted her to be.”

  The constant mentions of Amber nearly push me over the edge. But I hold on and begin the work of de-escalating my anger. Lara is a rape survivor. She is not really screaming at me, even if I deserve it. She is yelling at the father who molested her a long time ago. The shock of Sam’s death masked the significance of last night’s confession about her treatment at the hands of Bill and Julia. Lara doesn’t have scars. Her wounds have yet to even skin over—a minefield of memories ready to detonate at the slightest touch. No telling what happened to her out there in Hollywood, either.

  I offer, “I’m sorry.”

  “For treating me like a whore?”

  “For that and everything that has happened to you.”

  “Don’t go Freud on me. Stick to the law and something you know. Why don’t you apologize instead for not seeming to give a solitary damn that I almost killed myself today?”

  “I’m sorry for that, too.”

  Except I’m not really sure I believe her. I don’t disbelieve her. I’m just not sure I believe her, either. Everything she says feels like a rehearsed line out of a movie playing only in her head. These doubts I keep to myself.

  I offer, “I would be devastated if you killed yourself. Please don’t.”

  “I should kill you instead.”

  “I don’t like that plot twist, either. Too much talk of killing today—Barton this morning, then yourself, now me. It solves nothing. Let’s just go home and get some sleep.”

  “Not even a courtesy cuddle after I took care of your needs? You really do think I’m a whore, don’t you?”

  “You didn’t seem to be in a cuddling kind of mood.”

  “I am now.”

  We lay down together on the bed. I hold her, willing the demons to go away—both hers and mine. I won’t sleep. The chance that I might awake with an ice pick in my heart looms too large as a possibility. I don’t really believe that, but I don’t disbelieve it, either. Driving down to see Mom, the gaps in my knowledge of Lara scared me. Now I know too much. I have no idea of what I have ahold of.

  I ask, “Why suicide?”

  “I’m tired.”

  The response holds dual meanings, and she is fast asleep before I can probe further. I hold her for hours while my mind runs a marathon of disparate thoughts that I soon forget. The trial is almost here. I need to get back to work. I leave her sleeping and execute a quiet getaway.

  ***

  I arrive at the office before anyone else. The halls belong to me alone, and I try to draw inspiration from the solitude. The trial is now a chore, but the best way to manage unpleasant tasks is to break them down into bite-sized morsels and chew a little at a time. I create a comprehensive punch list that will serve as my blueprint for everything that needs to be done before the real thing goes live. Number Eight on my list is the most enigmatic: “Sam?” Well, at least I have a couple of weeks.

  Hours pass, and the purposeful flow of work su
pplies me with a comfortable energy. The burner phone in my right pocket vibrates, and only Lara contacts me on that number. I study it for three seconds before deciding to answer. A flood of obscenities crash into my ear as Lara berates me for abandoning her. The getaway was short-lived. My plaintive response about the need for trial preparation sounds pathetically weak. More verbal abuse follows. I take it like a punching bag until she hangs up.

  The energy of the morning disappears into a vortex. I’m the tired one now. I push the punch list to the side, lay my head on the desk, and wish it all to go away.

  27

  “What now?”

  Ella’s question to me later that day floats futilely in search of an answer. The topic is Sam, and talking about the problem brings me no closer to a solution.

  “I’m going to the funeral tomorrow. Maybe something will shake out.”

  “We have to have a strategy.”

  The peevishness of her tone irks me. I know very well we need a strategy without her lecturing me about it. The ice between Ella and me remains unthawed, and the forecast points to a long winter. We’re stuck together for Barton, but this ride will be our last one as trial partners. Every beginning has an end.

  I respond, “Much depends on how Millwood plays his hand. I’m inclined to let him make the first move and react accordingly.”

  “You always taught me to be the action, not the reaction—to be offense, not defense.”

  Just like Millwood taught me. I wonder who taught him. Maybe I should write a book—Lessons From The Great Trial Lawyers. I could run off to some remote place by myself, far from the world, and leave Lara here to work out her own issues. The life of the scholarly monk appeals to me. But first the problem of Sam demands attention.

  “Exactly. That’s precisely why I want Millwood to make the first move. If you’re explaining, you’re losing. I can’t explain Sam’s death. But I don’t need to. Sam’s death is irrelevant to the guilt or innocence of Bernard Barton. If Millwood thinks otherwise, let him explain why. He ain’t going to be able to explain it, either. What does he know about Sam’s death? Nothing. Whatever he comes up with, I can swat it away, say it smacks of desperation on the part of the defense. Unless something more definitive breaks with the cause of Sam’s death, we’re going to have to take our lead from Millwood.”

  Ella is unconvinced and shows it. The cracks between us threaten to widen as doubt in me personally bleeds over to doubt in me professionally. Or maybe Sam’s death has made everyone prickly as a cactus.

  I ask, “How’s it going with Lara in witness prep?”

  “Lara? I don’t call her that. Always ‘Miss Landrum.’ But I guess you would call her ‘Lara.’ I bet you called her a bunch of different things.”

  The challenge in her eyes begs me for a harsh response, but I sit and take it. Fighting solves nothing. She breaks eye contact with annoyance upon realizing I won’t take the bait.

  “Lara has done all that I’ve asked of her. She takes direction well. I think she will be a strong witness. We don’t like each other, but we can fake our way through.”

  Ella starts to stand up but sits back down. She asks, “Do you miss her?”

  Her question assumes a fact not in evidence—that Lara and I are actually apart. That fact needs to remain out of evidence. I deflect.

  “I miss what you and I had.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have thrown it away by sleeping with a witness.”

  “Guilty as charged.”

  Better that Ella focus on the relationship between the two of us than ask more questions about Lara and me. The nuclear fallout if she discovers the truth is something I don’t want to contemplate. But Ella has always been a dogged questioner once she latches onto something.

  “You still didn’t answer my question. Do you miss her?”

  Trying hard not to lie, I truthfully respond, “I think about her all the time.”

  Disgust spreads in a wave across Ella’s beautiful face. Her previous resort to the racial issue still riles me, but I now wonder if my subconscious did reject her based on the color of her skin. The past months show that all manner of untoward things lurk beneath the veneer of my respectability. Lara’s words of the previous night ring loud—“I’m ugly. You’re ugly. We’re ugly.”

  Ella demands, “Why her? I don’t understand. I could’ve made you happy.”

  “Honestly, she threw herself at me, and I caught her. Showed up at my house and started taking her clothes off. Literally. I tried to resist even then. Eventually, I stopped resisting. If you would’ve thrown yourself at me like that, I would’ve caught you, too.”

  “So it’s my fault for not showing up at your house naked?”

  “Not fault. Just an explanation. You patiently waited. She didn’t. Nothing ever would’ve happened with her if she hadn’t chased me down. I wasn’t looking for it.”

  “Poor pitiful you.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, sure. You going back to her after all this is over?”

  “I’m less certain of the future than at any other point in my adult life.”

  Ella shakes her head at me, frustrated at the divergence of who I am and who she wants me to be. She gathers her things in an agitated and distracted sort of way. Perhaps she’s past anger and on to bargaining in the five stages of grief—trying to make some deal with herself to make the most of what’s left in this whole business. She stands and gives me a last look filled with the sad recognition that I am a lost cause.

  “Let’s just win the case,” she says and shuts the door behind her.

  ***

  Sam’s three kids sit off to the side by themselves when I walk through the door of the church for their father’s funeral. I consider offering them condolences but leave them alone to their pain. The kids need far more than platitudes from me in a time like this.

  Liesa receives visitors at the front of the chapel, and I wait my turn to pay appropriate respects. She offers me her cheek to kiss. I oblige.

  “I’m so sorry, Liesa.”

  “Are you?”

  The words hurt and contain an undercurrent of accusation. I scurry away. Jeff Yarber drops next to me in the pew. I wonder if he blames me, too. It would fit the pattern.

  He asks, “Did he kill himself?”

  “I honestly don’t know. You knew him better than I did. Talk to him lately?”

  “Two weeks ago.”

  “Suicidal?”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  We sit quietly and ponder. The mirror doesn’t lie. All of us are older now, and the life we anticipated in law school has taken turns too dark for us to have ever imagined. Another one of our classmates, Marilyn Stubbs, was gunned down by a crazy ex-husband five years ago. Trey Miles died in a car wreck. Cancer got Barbara Allen.

  “Too much death,” I say.

  Jeff agrees.

  I skip the burial. Without even intending to do so, I end up back at The Varsity—sitting in the same booth where Sam and I last saw one another. I eat angry, furiously chewing my food as if it were responsible for the dark tide. I remember Sam across from me that night, his investigative research on Barton right next to him.

  That gets me to thinking. Sam only turned over what he wanted me to know about Bernard Barton and nothing else. And no Sara Barton divorce files were in Sam’s home or office when the police searched. More files have to exist.

  Where is the stuff Sam didn’t want me to see?

  “A safe place,” Sam claimed when I questioned him that night. I call Scott.

  “Did you impound Sam’s vehicle from that park where he was killed?”

  “Of course.”

  “Search it?”

  “Why else would I impound it? Of course we searched it.”

  “Find Sam’s file on the Barton divorce in there?”

  “I probably would’ve told you if I had.”

  “How thorough a search?”

  “Really? Do you take me for some haysee
d from where you grew up? I didn’t French Connection it, but it was thorough enough.”

  The classic film The French Connection contains a scene where Detective Popeye Doyle and his fellow police officers take apart an entire car in search of heroin only to put it back together again as part of a sting operation. Scott has always wanted to French Connection a suspect vehicle, but this case doesn’t justify it. If Sam hid the file in his car, Scott would’ve found the documents. Where on earth are they?

  I text Liesa to ask her about the file. The dwindling options leave me no choice. The galling insensitivity is not lost on me. Yet I ask all the same.

  Two hours or so later, the phone beeps its distinctive notification of an incoming text. I grab at the device and see Liesa’s name. The response reads:

  “Don’t know anything about your damn file. At least you waited until after the funeral. Barely. If you’re looking for another place of ours to turn inside and out, there’s our cabin in Young Harris. 125 Bear Creek Drive. The code to the house is 0527. Sam warned me about you. He had no idea.”

  I stare at the screen for a good two minutes. The shame is real. But the compulsion of the case propels me forward—an unruly bulldozer clearcutting every obstacle that darts into his path. The cabin strikes me as the longest of long shots, and part of me wonders if Liesa wants to send me on a wild goose chase just for spite. If so, I’m a willing victim.

  Young Harris is two hours away. A sober-minded person would wait until morning before hitting the road. But that file has invaded my thoughts, and I’m on the hunt.

  I make the cabin and enter the 0527 code. The significance dawns on me. Sam and Liesa got married on May 27. Amber and I attended the wedding—a radiant picture of us together at the reception remains a favorite. The memory of the beaming faces of the bride and groom punishes me. Shakespeare wrote, “What’s past is prologue.” The happy past of that Saturday in late May was the prologue to the bleak future of the present. Will the epilogue be as desolate? I remind myself that Shakespeare’s best works were tragedies.