Jailhouse Glock

by Lizbeth Lipperman

  But there was nothing unusual, and from the images of the lady’s back and a few blurry shots of the front, no jury would be able to say for certain that it wasn’t Maddy with the gun in her hand.

  Frustrated, he slammed his fist on the desk hard enough to draw the attention of Tom Rogers, who had just walked into the station. He waved to the officer to indicate that everything was alright.

  But everything was not alright.

  One man had been killed and another badly wounded in his jail cell, and their only suspect couldn’t possibly have done it. He knew that in his gut, yet he also knew that whoever was framing Maddy for the murder had spent a lot of time preparing for that night. The plan had been too intricate and too perfectly executed for it to have been spur of the moment.

  But if he believed that, then how could he explain the fact that Maddy wasn’t supposed to be on duty that night? How could someone have known that Jeff Flanagan would get a call from his ex and have the opportunity to keep his kids an extra two days over the holidays? Or that Maddy would be the one who had graciously volunteered to change shifts with him?

  He’d have to think more on that later, but for now, he was anxious to hear what Rogers had found out at Cowboys Galore. After waving for the officer to come to his office, Colt ran the tape back one more time. Still, nothing seemed out of the ordinary until the shooter walked away from Bernardi and stood outside Alan Foxworthy’s cell. Colt hit the Stop button and ran it back again, this time in slow motion. Something about it wasn’t right, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it … and it was driving him crazy.

  He looked up when Tom Rogers knocked on his door and walked into the office.

  “Hey, Colt, whatcha looking at?”

  Colt swiveled the computer screen around for his deputy to see. “I’ve watched this four times already. I keep hoping something will jump out at me.” He turned the screen back to face him again. “Any luck at the bar?”

  “Might have gotten a lead on the woman from the other night.”

  “The one Bernardi and Foxworthy were fighting over?”

  “Yep.” Rogers looked pleased with himself. “The funny thing was the bartender told us the woman had been hooking up with men there on several different occasions, and it never bothered Bernardi before that night.”

  Colt eyebrow hitched. “Us?”

  Rogers diverted his eyes away from Colt’s narrowed ones and shifted his weight to the other leg, a maneuver Colt recognized as something his deputy always did when he was nervous.

  “I was asking questions, and there was this other woman at the bar who recognized Bernardi’s girlfriend from the bartender’s description. She’s the ‘us’ I was talking about.” He paused and finally looked Colt in the eye. “Said she thinks the woman lives down the street from her. I ran by the house she mentioned on my way back here, but nobody was home.” He shifted his weight back to the other leg. “Thought I’d stop by after work and ask her a few questions if she’s home.”

  Colt stared at him for a moment. “And what did Maddy have to say about all this?”

  Rogers’s eyes widened, and he shook his head quickly. Way too quickly. “Maddy? How would she know about my trip to the bar? You said we weren’t supposed to tell her anything at all about the case.”

  “I did, indeed. I just wanted to impress upon you why giving Maddy information would be such a bad idea. I know you want to keep her in the loop, Tom, but it’s for her own good that she stays as far away from this investigation as possible, at least until we can clear her name.”

  “She has to be going crazy not knowing what’s happening down here.”

  “Knowing Maddy, I’m sure she is, but even if she’s not thinking about her own safety, we have to. There’s a shooter out there who has balls big enough to walk right into our house and kill a prisoner under our noses. And if that isn’t enough, to then make sure that one of ours takes the blame for it.” He shook his head. “And another thing, I’d hate to have someone’s testimony thrown out because she intimidated a witness.”

  “She’d never do that.”

  Colt pursed his lips, thinking that Maddy and her meddling sisters wouldn’t think twice about doing just that. As sure as he was sitting here right now, he knew that somehow Maddy was poking around in the case. Maybe she hadn’t actually gone to Cowboys Galore, but he’d bet good money that she’d been the first person Rogers had called after he’d left the bar and gotten back into his patrol car.

  Hell, he’d probably called her on the way out the door. And now with Tessa’s ghost showing up again, it was a certainty the Garcia sisters would find a way to get involved in the murder investigation. The fact that the women had been instrumental in finding Tessa’s killer had them believing they were all mini Jessica Fletchers.

  But he’d have to wait to go down that road with Maddy and Lainey, positive he was spot on to include his own wife in the middle of it all. She was loyal to her sisters and would do anything if one was in trouble. And Maddy was definitely in trouble right now.

  “Just wanted to be clear about what’s at stake here, Tom.”

  Colt glanced out his window where Jeannie, the woman who’d taken over as his secretary when Maddy left for the police academy the year before, was on the phone. She waved her hand in the air when she saw him looking her way.

  “Why don’t you bring our bar girl in and question her here at the station?” Colt stood up and walked to the door. “People are sometimes intimidated by this place and tend to be a little more honest.”

  Before Rogers could close the door behind him, Jeannie hung up the phone and came running past both of them into Colt’s office.

  “That was Flanagan,” she said, excited. “He said you need to get over to Vineyard Regional right away.”

  For a moment Colt felt a little rush of hope snake up his back. Was it possible that Foxworthy had changed his story about seeing Maddy shoot him? “Did he say why?”

  “Alan Foxworthy is dead.”

  Colt grabbed his keys from his desk drawer and started toward the front door.

  “You want me to go with you, boss?”

  “No, you stay here and work on getting that woman into the interrogation room,” Colt said over his shoulder. Once he was in his car, he turned on the sirens and headed for Vineyard Regional.

  The minute he walked through the emergency room doors at the hospital, the feeling of doom and gloom set in. The last report he’d received from the doctor about Foxworthy had been promising. They’d expected him to be discharged in a few more days, and Colt had plans for a much lengthier interrogation when that happened. He was surprised to hear the man was dead. According to Foxworthy’s surgeon, although the prisoner needed another surgery down the road and was damn lucky to have survived, his prognosis had been good.

  Guess his luck had run out.

  Colt rounded the corner and waved to one of the nurses he’d known since grade school.

  “Sheriff, what do you want us to do with the body?” another nurse asked, suddenly appearing beside him.

  “I’ll be able to answer that after I have a chance to talk to my officer.”

  He proceeded down the hallway to Room 402 and was surprised to see the chair outside the room empty. Pushing open the door, his first thought was that someone had tossed the room. There was a cart next to the bed with syringes and vials strewn all over the top and EKG graph paper rippling from the monitor on top down to the floor, weirdly resembling a slinky.

  He didn’t need a medical degree to know what it all meant. Apparently, they’d tried unsuccessfully to revive Foxworthy. He remembered all too clearly from several years back when he’d been called home from college after his dad had been hit by a hit and run driver. They’d worked for over an hour trying unsuccessfully to keep him alive, and the room had looked very similar afterward.

  He chased that memory from his head and concentrated on the cart. The Crash Cart, they called it. How appropriate, he thought, scanning the m
ess in the room again.

  The door to the bathroom opened suddenly, and instinctively, he reached for his gun before realizing it was only Flanagan.

  “Hey, boss, how long have you been here?” Flanagan dried his hands and threw the paper towel into the trash can. “All the coffee the nurses have been pumping into me finally kicked in, and I didn’t want to leave the room unguarded.”

  Colt relaxed and nodded. He took a few steps and stood next to the bed, getting his first look at Alan Foxworthy. Something about a dead man always made him uneasy, which was a real drawback, considering what he did for a living.

  A breathing tube was still taped to Foxworthy’s nose, although it was disconnected from the machine on the wall. Someone had at least thought to close the dead man’s eyes, and if you didn’t know what had gone on in this room, you might think Foxworthy had simply drifted off to sleep.

  Colt touched the hand with the IV needle still in place. It was already cold. “So what do they think happened?”

  Flanagan shrugged. “The doctor said it was probably a heart attack.”

  “Heart attack? The guy’s only in his thirties.”

  “I know. Doc said the stress of the surgery and everything that’s happened to him over the past few days must have been too much. Said this sometimes happens even without a prior history of heart problems.”

  Colt took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “When did he die?”

  Flanagan glanced down at his wristwatch. “The orderly cleaned him up around ten-ish, and Foxworthy was alive and well then. I came in to check on him when I heard him scream, but he was only hollering for his pain medicine.”

  “Did he get it?”

  “What?”

  “The pain med. Did someone give him morphine or some other narcotic?”

  Flanagan thought for a minute. “I don’t remember the nurse coming in after the orderly left. About ten or fifteen minutes later, the nurse’s aide came by to take his vital signs. She’s the one who found him.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “They called a code and worked on him for about a half hour before they realized they wouldn’t be able to save him. Something about his pupils being fixed and dilated. So they stopped giving CPR.”

  Colt glanced up at the IV bag, noticing it was no longer dripping and the machine that regulated it was turned off. “Have you had a chance to talk to the orderly yet?”

  Flanagan shook his head.

  “Why not?”

  “Thought I’d better wait on you. I’ll go get him now and bring him back here.”

  “Good idea. He was the last one to see this guy alive. Maybe Foxworthy said something to him before he died that might help us with the case.” Colt walked around the bed, scrunching his nose at the strong urine odor coming from the catheter bag hanging on the side.

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” Flanagan said, before pushing open the door and walking down the hall.

  Colt sat down in the chair next to the bed while he waited for Flanagan to return with the orderly. He was anxious to talk to the guy so he could get back to the station. With Foxworthy gone, the last bit of hope that maybe he would change his mind about his positive ID of Maddy was also gone.

  And with the security footage that showed Bernardi’s killer looking a lot like his sister-in-law, his job of proving she hadn’t killed anyone just got harder.

  He moved his neck in circles, trying to relieve the tension building there and his eyes caught sight of the clock next to the TV on the opposite wall. It had been over twenty minutes since Flanagan went for the orderly.

  What in the hell was taking so long? He needed to get back to the station to see whether Rogers had been successful in getting the woman from the bar to come to the station and to study that security footage again. Whatever had seemed out of place to him the last time he’d looked might stand out this time. Then he remembered the department had gone high-tech the year before and everything on the computer in his office automatically downloaded to his cell phone.

  After pulling it out of his pocket he followed the prompts until the image of the killer popped onto the screen. Once again he watched the woman in the uniform kill Bernardi before going after Foxworthy.

  Then it hit him! Seeing it now made him wonder how he could have missed it the other four times he’d viewed the footage. It was that obvious when you were looking for it.

  He pushed the Replay button, then brought the phone closer to his face for a better look. He had no idea what it meant, if it even meant anything, but right before the shooter took aim at Foxworthy, the camera had caught the look on his face. A man staring up at the barrel of a gun should have been panicking and trying to get out of the killer’s range. Foxworthy was doing neither. He had simply looked up, and in the split second before the gun went off, he may have even smiled.

  Before Colt could process what that might mean, Flanagan burst into the room, obviously excited. “You’re not gonna believe this, boss.”

  “Where’s the orderly?” Colt asked, putting away his phone and standing up.

  “That’s what you’re not gonna believe. They’ve looked everywhere. He’s gone.”

  “What do you mean gone?”

  “No one’s seen him since about an hour ago, and his locker is cleaned out.”

  All of a sudden, everything was beginning to make sense to Colt. “Call Mark Lowell and tell him to get down here with his CSI team right away. Then cordon off this area. It looks like this room may be a crime scene.”

  twelve

  Anthony Pirelli stared at the report in front of him, wondering how anyone could think that Madelyn Castillo had it in her to kill a person in cold blood, even someone as sleazy as Gino Bernardi. If his new client did by chance possess hidden psychopathic tendencies, he was doing a favor for a man way more powerful than he was to find out if the prisoner had confided in her before his death. If there was even the slightest possibility that Bernardi had chatted her up the night he was killed, Tony was their best bet to find out what was said.

  If she hadn’t killed Bernardi, setting her up for the murder had been a stroke of genius and had required intense planning on the killer’s part. He’d lay odds that the Vineyard Sheriff’s Department would need a lot of help to prove her innocence, even though she was one of their own. In his opinion, the local cops were way out of their league with this case, and he hoped his client wouldn’t pay the price because of it.

  Proving she was innocent was a challenge since the evidence against her would be difficult to explain away. Even having spent only a little time with her, he’d already decided she was someone he’d get along with under different circumstances. But he’d have to maintain a professional relationship, at least until the trial was over.

  He got up and walked to the minibar in the boardroom lined with multiple pictures of his dad and his powerful friends. After Mario Pirelli had died in his jail cell many years back, young Tony had dedicated his life to making his dad proud. And this room had been turned into a shrine in his memory.

  He poured two fingers of whiskey, threw back his head, and drained it. Two in the afternoon was a little early to be drinking alone, but something about this case had him on edge.

  Maybe it was the fact he’d basically been ordered to take Maddy on as a client that had him unnerved. Vineyard was a forty-minute drive from his office in downtown Dallas, and his plate was already filled with some high-profile murder cases. Ever since he’d beaten the district attorney’s best prosecutor not once, but three times on cases he shouldn’t have won, he’d enjoyed a reputation as a lawyer with the best chance of getting someone off—even if that someone had been found holding the smoking gun.

  He’d almost had his secretary call and say that his schedule was too tight right now to take on another case. That was before a messenger had arrived at his townhouse on Friday night with the preliminary paperwork.

  And on a holiday weekend, no less. When he’d argued that his caseload alr
eady had him working eighty hours a week, they hadn’t been sympathetic. Even guilted him by pointing out that his dad would have been the first one to help them if he were still alive.

  Mario Pirelli had always believed his son should come up the business ladder the hard way. If adding an extra twenty hours to an already busy work schedule was necessary, he wouldn’t have thought twice about making his son put in the time. The fact that Tony’s social life was almost nonexistent anyway wouldn’t have mattered to the old man.

  What little contact Tony had with the female gender added up to a whole lot of first dates over the past six months. An expensive dinner and a lot of sweet talking usually got him breakfast in bed, but he didn’t have the time or the inclination right now to work on developing a long-term relationship with any of his one-night stands.

  In essence, he was married to the job. Maybe that was why he’d felt a strange tightness in his groin when he’d gotten his first look at the accused cop herself. But he was pretty sure an expensive meal and a come-on smile wouldn’t get him an invite into her bedroom.

  Maintaining a business relationship with all his clients was essential to his success, and he’d have to be very careful around her. The story she’d related about the night Gino Bernardi was killed was hard to swallow with no evidence to support it. But in the end, he was left with no choice about taking her case. Not if he wanted to take over where his father had left off.

  When the call came in from back east on Friday, Tony had a feeling his weekend plans would be shot to hell. You don’t say no to “an offer you can’t refuse” and walk away with intact kneecaps.

  Growing up in a small town in New Jersey, he’d understood about the well-dressed men who’d come to their house late at night. These weren’t your average citizens seeking legal advice. And they sure as hell didn’t make their money running restaurants or dry cleaning establishments. When they’d show up at the Pirelli house with their bodyguards after hours, his father would drop everything to take care of them. Even before the senior Pirelli had become the target of an FBI investigation for tax evasion, Tony had concluded that his father’s clients were not your usual run-of-the-mill rich guys in silk suits.