The Wages of Sin

by Nancy Allen

  In front of Madeleine’s closed office door, they met the other assistant prosecutors on the staff: Doug, the traffic attorney, and Dennis, who handled child support.

  “Knock on the door,” Bree said.

  “We did,” Doug said.

  “Is she in there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “With Chuck?” Bree asked.

  “Don’t know,” Doug said.

  Elsie pushed past them and put her ear to the door. “I can’t hear anything.”

  The oak door flew open and she nearly lost her balance, tumbling into her boss, Madeleine Thompson.

  “What are you doing?” Madeleine said, deflecting Elsie with a shove.

  Elsie stepped back, covering her discomfiture with a laugh. “We’re just reporting for duty. To meet with you about the homicide.”

  “I don’t want you.” Turning an indignant eye on Doug and Dennis, she said, “Why are you standing around my office? Why aren’t you in court?”

  Breeon intervened. “We got an e-­mail, Madeleine. Stacie said you wanted to see us. All of us.”

  Shaking her head with a muttered slur against Stacie, the office receptionist, Madeleine grabbed a set of keys from her handbag and locked the door behind her. “I wanted to see you, Bree. And Chuck. The rest of you: back to work. This is a murder investigation, not a traffic ticket.”

  Chuck Harris was the chief assistant in the Prosecutor’s Office, a Kansas City native who had been hired for the job, at least in part, due to his father’s political connections with Madeleine. Breeon was the assistant with the most seniority; she had served as a prosecutor for five years, besting Elsie’s term of ser­vice by nine months. A single mother from St. Louis, Breeon was a fierce advocate in court. Her grit served her well, as the only black attorney in a community that still ran on the good-­old-­boy system.

  Elsie loved Bree, but she had a stellar trial record as well, and Madeleine’s dismissal stung.

  Doug and Dennis retreated, heading back to their duties in the courtrooms on the third floor of the courthouse. Elsie watched them as they hurried down the hall. But she remained, turning to Madeleine with a dogged look.

  “I’d like to be in the loop,” she said tersely.

  Madeleine started down the hallway. “Oh please.”

  “Madeleine, I handled the last murder case in McCown County. Solo, you may recall.”

  “Yes—­I recall what a mess that turned out to be.”

  Reflexively, Elsie’s hand circled her neck, which bore the scar of the courthouse attack that landed her in the hospital during the trial of State v. Tanner Monroe.

  Breeon jumped to her defense. “I think Elsie should be there with us. We’re your felony trial lawyers. Me and Elsie and Chuck.”

  Madeleine stopped at Chuck’s office and rapped on the door with her knuckles. She threw back her head, closing her eyes with an expression of weary resignation.

  “Fine. Elsie can come along. If she doesn’t say anything. I don’t want to hear a single word.”

  Elsie knew she should keep her mouth shut, but she was unable to contain herself. “What if I have something important to contribute?”

  Without responding, Madeleine fixed Elsie with a glare, her lipsticked mouth turning down in a deep frown. Though Elsie had served as assistant prosecutor under Madeleine for four years, they had never enjoyed a friendly relationship. Despite Elsie’s outstanding trial performance—­or possibly because of it—­she and Madeleine butted heads on a regular basis. Elsie’s friend Breeon summed the conflict up every time Elsie complained to her, with, “Elsie, you’re not Madeleine’s kind of cat. She’d much prefer a subordinate who’d follow her around with a dust broom.”

  Chuck Harris, the chief assistant prosecutor, emerged from his office, straightening his tie. “Ready?” he asked.

  Madeleine nodded. “Let’s go see Detective Ashlock.”

  Chapter Four

  The Barton City Police Department was housed in a flat-­topped two-­story building on the town square, across the street from the courthouse. The McCown County Courthouse, an imposing stone structure, had graced the center of the town square for over a century. But the police department, erected in the 1960s, was a modest, utilitarian facility of yellow brick. Once the four attorneys were inside, they climbed the stairs to the second floor. Detective Ashlock led the way into a small conference room, the only space within the Barton City Police Department that could accommodate a group of five ­people.

  Elsie watched him covertly, noting his red eyes and five-­o’clock shadow, trying to read his expression. If she didn’t know better, she’d have suspected he’d been crying, but she dismissed the idea. Elsie knew Ashlock well; they had been keeping company for the better part of a year. A former Marine and eighteen-­year veteran of the Barton, Missouri, Police Department, Ashlock was not given to weeping.

  He pulled a sheaf of papers from a folder, sorting through them with a drawn face.

  “Did you just return from the crime scene?” Madeleine asked.

  “The morgue. We were at the crime scene most of the night, but I headed to the morgue after I left the deceased’s trailer.” He started to say more, but fell silent, shaking his head.

  “Pretty bad?” asked Chuck.

  Ashlock blew out a long breath. “Oh yeah. Really bad.”

  Elsie leaned forward in her chair. “You okay, Ash?” Elsie asked in a quiet voice. He met her eye and sent her the ghost of a wink. Reassured, she sat back.

  Madeleine pulled a pair of jeweled reading glasses from her handbag and balanced them on her nose. “Let’s see what you’ve got, Bob.”

  He pulled a photo from the stack of papers, and placed it in front of Madeleine. Elsie had to scoot her chair closer to Madeleine to see what it depicted: a huddled body, facedown, purple hair matted in a pool of blood.

  Elsie turned to Chuck. “Am I blocking you? Can you see?”

  Chuck cast a bare glance at the photograph. Shuddering, he uncapped a pen. “Don’t worry about me. I’m good.” He picked up a copy of Ashlock’s report and shuffled through the pages, making a notation in the margin.

  Madeleine sucked in a breath as she studied the image on the table. “Weapon?”

  Ashlock set another photo down on the table. “Baseball bat. Witness says he used his fists, at first. Then went at her with the bat.”

  “Cause of death?” Madeleine murmured.

  “Coroner said skull fracture. There are probably abdominal injuries, too, from the looks of her.” Ashlock coughed and rubbed his red eyes. “Just an initial finding, till the autopsy is completed.”

  “And the baby?”

  “The coroner said the mother’s death likely caused the baby to die in the womb. He speculates that the baby could’ve been saved if there’d been a 911 call in time. But by the time we found the mother, she and the baby were both dead.”

  With a careful hand, Ashlock set another photo on the table in front of Madeleine. From her position at the table, Elsie couldn’t make out what it depicted; but after a brief glance, Madeleine pushed her seat back from the table and closed her eyes.

  “Dear God,” she whispered.

  “Yep. Yeah.” Ashlock cleared his throat. “It was a boy.”

  “Oh, Bob. I think this one’s going to do me in. I’m getting too old for this.”

  Elsie looked at Madeleine with surprise. Her boss never revealed vulnerability; in Elsie’s experience, Madeleine rarely gave any indication that she was a member of the human race. She had long suspected that ice water ran through Madeleine’s veins. Of course, with Madeleine, it would be Evian ice water.

  Chuck was jotting notes on a legal pad with a Mont Blanc fountain pen. To Ashlock, he said, “We have a suspect?”

  “He’s in custody. The deceased’s boyfriend, a guy named Larry Paul. A local scumbag.
Probably an addict, a meth head. I interrogated him. His statement was incriminating.” He cleared his throat. “Larry Paul clearly indicated liability.”

  The name struck a chord with Elsie; she dimly recalled a court appearance against Larry Paul on a drug charge. She tried to remember the particulars, but couldn’t. McCown County was a rural community in the heart of the Bible Belt, but like so many others, it was infected by the plague of methamphetamine production.

  Chuck looked up from his legal pad with a solemn face. Compared to Ashlock’s rumpled appearance, the chief assistant looked like a glossy ad ripped from GQ Magazine. He wore a charcoal gray suit with a crisp lavender shirt, and gold cuff links glinted on his French shirt cuffs. He said to Ashlock, “Madeleine told me you have an eyewitness.”

  “There were two witnesses. One is a guy named Bruce Stout—­friend and associate of Larry Paul. We tried to locate him this morning, but he’s either run off or hiding out.”

  Chuck said, “But you still have another witness to the crime.”

  Ashlock nodded once, with a humorless grin. In a rueful voice, he said, “We do.” He shuffled through the papers a final time and pulled out a third photograph, a close-­up depicting a child.

  Elsie rose from her seat to look. Stepping over to stand behind Chuck’s chair, she saw that it was a child of five or six, a girl with short blond hair that looked like it had been shorn with rusty scissors. Her face was hidden by a pair of broken eyeglasses held together with a safety pin on one side and a dirty Band-­Aid on the other.

  After seeing the photo, Chuck lurched back in his chair with such a violent retreat that he nearly knocked Elsie down. “What the hell,” she snapped; but stopped when she saw that he was gasping for air.

  “Chuck,” Elsie said, slapping him on the back, “are you choking on something?”

  In reply, he pointed at the photo of the child. All eyes were on him as he stumbled out of his chair and backed away from the table.

  “I’ve seen her. The glasses,” he said.

  His face was pasty white, bordering on green.

  “He’s gonna throw up,” Breeon said, and Elsie agreed. But Chuck surprised them all.

  Elsie looked away as the dark circle spread on the fly on Chuck’s charcoal gray Brooks Brothers suit pants.

  In the hallway of the police department, outside the conference room, Breeon grasped Elsie’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “Elsie, you stop that. Stop mocking that boy.”

  Elsie raised a brow. “What are you deviling me about? I’m not making a sound.”

  “I can read your face. You’re laughing on the inside.”

  Elsie rubbed her eyes with her hand. “Sorry, Bree. You’re not a psychic, after all. Always thought you could read my mind.”

  “So you’re not thinking about Chuck Harris peeing in his fancy pants.”

  Elsie shook her head. “Not right this minute. Nope.” She was thinking of the photographs that Ashlock had shown them in the conference room; of the dead woman on the bloody floor of the trailer. And the little girl. The child’s face was haunting. It recalled a photo series she’d studied in a history class at the University of Missouri, images of child laborers at the turn of the twentieth century. The girl with the broken glasses had the same expression, of a child who had seen too much, whose exposure to the ugliness of human nature had aged her beyond her years.

  Restless, Elsie walked up to the door of the interrogation room and peeped though the narrow glass panel. “Wish I could hear what they’re saying.”

  “Elsie, back away from that door. You’ll embarrass him. He couldn’t help himself.”

  “God—­I know. It must’ve been a hell of a shock. Flips me out, and I wasn’t the one who ran into the deceased and the suspect out in the woods, two days before he killed her.”

  “I know. This will haunt Chuck, it’s bound to.”

  Elsie looked through the panel in the door again. “What’s taking so much time in there?”

  Breeon walked to a folding chair on the opposite side of the hallway and settled onto it. “Ashlock’s taking Chuck’s statement. It shouldn’t go on too much longer.”

  Elsie leaned against the wall outside the conference room. “I thought Madeleine’s head would explode when Chuck identified that little girl. It looked like her face-­lift was going to come unglued.” She started to laugh at her own joke, then caught herself. In a whisper, she said, “You don’t think they can hear what we’re saying, do you?”

  Bree shook her head, but Elsie sidled up to the door again, to see for herself. Peering through the glass, she saw that Chuck’s complexion had returned to a normal color, though his hands shook. Madeleine was sitting across from him with her arms folded, glaring over the top of her glasses.

  Elsie said, “She looks like she bit on a sour pickle.”

  “Yeah, that’s about right.” Breeon checked her watch. “I’ve got to get back to court. You think we’re supposed to hang around here much longer?”

  “I’ll ask.”

  Bree gave her a warning look. “Elsie,” she said, holding out a restraining hand; but it was too late. Elsie tapped on the door and stuck her head inside.

  “Madeleine, sorry to interrupt, but do you want us to wait out here? Or go on back to the courthouse?”

  Madeleine’s head jerked up at the interruption. She opened her mouth to speak, but clamped it shut, as if reconsidering her words. Looking away from Elsie, she said in a frosty tone, “I want Breeon to wait. Shut the door.”

  “Okay.”

  As Elsie was pulling the door closed, Madeleine raised her voice. “And please—­have the courtesy to let us complete this without further interruption.”

  Once the door latched shut, Elsie turned to see Breeon regarding her with weary resignation.

  “You’ve got some nerve, hon,” Bree said.

  Elsie shrugged as she walked over to join Breeon on the metal chairs. “It’s cool. My buddy’s in there with her. She tries not to beat me up too much when Ashlock’s around.”

  Elsie’s relationship with Detective Ashlock provided a valuable buttress against Madeleine’s dislike of her.

  She slumped down in the metal seat, stretching her legs in front of her on the tile floor. “Madeleine says you’re supposed to stick around. But not me.”

  Breeon sighed, with a weary exhale of breath. “What’s she want with me?”

  Their conversation was cut off when Madeleine appeared in the doorway. Though she started to slam the door behind her, she seemed to abort the impulse, catching the door at the last minute and pulling it gently shut. She turned and focused on Breeon, her face frozen with displeasure.

  “Breeon, do you have a jacket at the office? A blazer?”

  Breeon shook her head. She was wearing black slacks and a white blouse, standard office attire. Jackets were not considered a necessity for standard courtroom duty, but when the women appeared for jury trials, they wore suits.

  Irritation flashed across Madeleine’s face; she pulled off her glasses with a jerk.

  “I have an extra in my office; it’s black, it should do. You can wear it.” Looking Breeon up and down, she added, “Though it will be a tight fit. Just don’t try to button it. I don’t want you pulling out the seams.”

  “Thanks,” Breeon muttered.

  Standing behind Madeleine, Elsie pulled a comic face and tried to catch Breeon’s eye, but her friend wouldn’t take the bait.

  “We’re calling a press conference,” Madeleine said, her voice brisk.

  “You want me to appear in the press conference?” Breeon asked.

  “Yes, I want you to appear; why else would I put my clothes on your back? You need to look presentable.”

  Elsie asked, “So what’s the conference about? The murder?”

  “What else would it be?” Madeleine started dow
n the stairs, gripping the bannister so tightly, the tendons stood out in her thin hands. Breeon and Elsie followed close behind. “I’m going to let the public know I’ll be seeking the death penalty.”

  Breeon stopped in the middle of the stairway. Elsie bumped into her, nearly losing her footing.

  “Madeleine,” Breeon said, “I can’t assist you on this case. I can’t serve as second chair.”

  Madeleine wheeled on her with a face like Medusa. “Don’t mess with me. I cannot endure any more madness today. Of course you’ll assist me. Chuck is out of the picture, and he’s my chief assistant. I can’t do it alone.”

  “Madeleine. I don’t believe in the death penalty.” Breeon’s voice was resolute and unapologetic, her posture erect as she towered over Madeleine, who stood two steps below her.

  Madeleine’s eyes blazed. She clutched the manila file folder in her right hand and swung it at the cinder-­block wall. The file connected with a crack that make Elsie take a step back in retreat. “Well, shit,” Madeleine said. “Shit shit shit.”

  Elsie’s quick intake of breath caught in her throat. Madeleine said shit, she thought, with wonder.

  It was a red letter day.

  Chapter Five

  The women left the police department in strained silence. While waiting on the sidewalk for a car to pass, Madeleine said, “You are a prosecutor, Breeon.”

  “I certainly am.”

  “And it’s your job and responsibility to uphold and enforce the law in Missouri.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  The car moved slowly by, an ancient white Oldsmobile, driven by a silver-­haired man.

  Crossing to the middle of the town square, Madeleine said, “Missouri has only two possible punishments for first degree murder. The death penalty or life without parole. You knew that when you signed on for this job. The prosecution decides when it’s appropriate to ask a jury to impose death, and I believe that the facts of this case justify it.”

  Elsie watched Breeon’s face. It was shuttered and resentful, her jaw locked.

  Looking over her shoulder at Breeon, Madeleine said, “You are a member of law enforcement in this community.”