Hostile Witness: A Kate Ford Mystery

by Leigh Adams

  Richard and Chan Hamilton didn’t seem to be putting on an act, but what they were doing made Kate very nervous. Their body language was just . . . wrong. Richard Hamilton had brought his daughter in to court. He was sitting right behind her, lending her public support. Kate was sure there would be comments on all the news programs about how he was standing by her. And yet . . .

  It’s like they hate each other, Kate thought. Enemies stood like that when they were forced to be together. Every time they accidentally bumped against each other, Chan jumped. It was a tiny jump, less than a hiccup, but it happened every time.

  She turned her attention to Ozgo, and instantly she knew who she would be sympathizing with in this case. She’d seen pictures of him in the papers and on television, but those were still just pictures. Photographs had two emotional tones: very happy or dead-eyed zombie. In the very happy ones, the person was smiling. In the staring-zombie ones—well, anybody would look like a serial killer in one of those.

  Ozgo in person was far more human, and he wasn’t emotionless at all. His face was round, and his expression was completely guileless, as if he were a child. A very unsophisticated child, Kate thought. Jack hadn’t looked that clueless since he was five.

  How could anybody believe that this person had done—well, all the things they said he had done? Kidnapping. Arson.

  Ozgo looked both confused and frightened, and Kate recognized at least some of his fear. Every time Evans raised his voice or slammed his fist on the prosecution table, Ozgo jumped, and every time he jumped, he became less and less able to control himself.

  Kate recognized the signs. This was classic PTSD. She’d read a hundred articles about returning veterans with just these symptoms. There was sweat on Ozgo’s forehead in tiny little dots. His shoulders were pulled back and stiff in an uncomfortable-looking twist Kate was sure had to be painful.

  Kate was suddenly aware that she had risen slightly out of her chair and that she was as rigid as a board. She made herself sit back down again and go through her ritual to calm herself down. This was when she needed her soothing stone.

  I really can’t do this right here and now, Kate told herself frantically. I really can’t.

  She tried to concentrate on Ozgo. His whole body was twitching. His head was moving from side to side. When it moved far enough in her direction, she could see his eyes. They were rolling. Everything on Ozgo’s body was rolling.

  And this room was hot.

  It was very, very hot.

  The lights were glaring. Everything was too bright. Everything was too loud.

  Loud, loud, loud.

  The room had turned a very light shade of lavender.

  It was a question of taking control now while she still could. The room felt claustrophobic. She’d be better if she could get some air. She stood up and moved carefully toward the aisle.

  She went to the ladies’ room. She was sure there would be fewer people there so that if something bad happened, it wouldn’t happen in public. She was right. The foyer was full of people milling. The front steps probably still had media people. The ladies’ room was empty.

  It was also beautiful, one of the old ones with a little room off the side so women could lie down if they had cramps. She sat down on the little cot, closed her eyes, and then lay back.

  ***

  “Fainted,” a voice she didn’t recognize said. It was an older man’s voice, thin and querulous. “Happens every time. They get too hot. They faint.”

  “I don’t think she’s fainted,” another voice said. That one Kate knew. It was Tom’s voice.

  “I told you not to call the ambulance,” the older man said. “No point in calling the ambulance. Causes a fuss nobody wants, breaks up the work of the court, gets everybody mad as hell even if they won’t say so.”

  “I wasn’t the one who wanted to call the ambulance.”

  Kate still had a headache. It was a dull one, not the piercing, jagged knife that hit her in the middle of an episode, but it still hurt. She raised her hand to her forehead and rubbed it. She kept her eyes closed.

  “She’s fine,” Tom said.

  Kate opened her eyes.

  “Do you want to sit up?” Tom asked her.

  “I can sit up myself,” Kate said.

  She did just that. She even managed not to wince when the upward movement made her head pound.

  “Give her some of that water you brought,” the older man said. “Got to be dry as a bone.”

  Kate’s throat did feel scratchy. So did her eyelids. So did her tongue. Tom reached up to somewhere behind the couch and came back with a large bottle of Dasani water. “Thanks, Talbot,” he said.

  “Know what my definition of stupidity is?” Talbot asked as Tom twisted off the cap and handed her the bottle. “Paying for water you can get for free out of any tap.”

  “I never thought of it that way,” Kate said weakly. She tilted her head back and drank the water in a full, long stream. Her throat felt better. Her head felt better. Even her eyes felt better.

  “I think,” Tom said, “you’d better skip the rest of the day in court.”

  ***

  In all reality, the episode hadn’t been a really bad one, but laying on that couch in the courthouse’s “ladies’ retiring room,” Kate had been convinced that she was out for the rest of the afternoon. Her head would ache. Her limbs wouldn’t work right. Her hands would twitch. Her arms and legs would be too weak to handle ordinary things.

  “That weakness you keep describing really bothers me,” one of her more conscientious doctors had said around the time Kate was in college. “It doesn’t fit the rest of it.”

  Kate had liked that doctor, Dr. Parker. He was one of the few doctors she saw over the years who took her completely seriously. The rest of them were like Jack. They thought whatever was going on was psychosomatic. She was either playacting or her subconscious was producing the episodes as a way to work out some inner psychological conflict.

  The episodes always started with the lights around her getting brighter, but that didn’t explain anything either. Kate had always been sensitive to bright lights. They hurt her eyes and made her fidgety and anxious even when there was no episode in sight. What was more, she didn’t automatically go into an episode when bright lights were flashed at her or when she was subjected to strobes or other things that brought on seizures in epileptics. Lights didn’t trigger her episodes; they were just a product of them. There was no rhyme or reason to any of it. There was no pattern she could hold onto.

  Of course, if there had been anything like that, Kate would have had a medical diagnosis by now instead of increasing numbers of people who believed she was seriously addled.

  At some point, she must have taken her jacket off. She spotted it on the windowsill, and when Tom saw her looking, he grabbed it and brought it over.

  “I think maybe I should drive you home,” he said. “You still look a little rocky.”

  “I’m all right,” Kate said.

  “You ought to take it easy and get a little sugar into you. You don’t have diabetes?”

  “No,” Kate said. She flexed first her arms and then her legs. They felt fine. “I’m all right,” she said. “I think I really am. I’m hungry, but it has to be about lunch time.”

  “I’ll buy you lunch.”

  Apparently, Tom was looking after her. Kate thought she should be flattered by that, but all she wanted to do was get away.

  “You want to watch the trial,” she said. “It will be going on all day. You need to get back.”

  “Nothing is going to be said in that courtroom today that I couldn’t miss,” Tom insisted. “At least let me take you to lunch and make sure you feel better. I don’t like the idea of you driving in the state you’re in.”

  “Am I in a state?”

  “You were in a state,” he said.

  Kate made up her mind. “No,” she said. “Thank you, but not now. I left my car in this little municipal lot on this s
ide street somewhere. I just want to find it and get myself home.”

  “You’re sure you’re going to be all right?”

  Kate nodded. The nodding was just a little too much. The throb in her head got larger. It felt like a balloon with too much air in it.

  “I really just want to find my car,” she said. “Then I want to go home and lie down for a while.”

  It was easier to find Kate’s car than she’d thought it would be, but Tom insisted on coming with her, and halfway through their walk, he darted into a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant and grabbed her an ice cream cone. And she had to admit it made her feel a lot better.

  The little parking lot looked even more deserted than it had when Kate had first parked in the morning. She spotted her car near the front and strode over to it. Kate rummaged inside her purse to find her car keys and then she just stood there awkwardly. She could have been thirteen and back in junior high. She had no idea what to do next.

  “Well,” she said.

  She tried to remind herself that she was talking to a man she barely knew. He was a very attractive man. He was a very nice man. But he was a man she barely knew.

  “Well,” she said again.

  “You’re absolutely sure you don’t want me to drive you home?” Tom tried again.

  “Absolutely sure,” Kate said.

  “How about this,” Tom said. “Tomorrow, I’ll pick you up and drive you out here. I can park in police spaces. It’ll be more convenient.”

  “I’m going to need the car later,” Kate said. “I mean, there’s the day, things to do—”

  “Okay. How about you drive back here and park the car, and I’ll be waiting for you. And you can use my partner’s reserved ticket again.”

  “Isn’t your partner going to want to use it himself?” Kate asked. “You’re with the police. You must have some serious reason to be attending the trial.”

  “That’s a little complicated. And my partner doesn’t really want to attend the trial at all. He thinks I’m wasting my time. So you come. And when the court recesses for lunch, I’ll buy you more ice cream and tell you what I’m doing here. And then you can tell me what you’re doing here.”

  “I told you before,” Kate said, “I’m just curious. I was at loose ends and thought I’d check it out. I never thought I’d actually get inside.”

  “Maybe,” Tom said.

  Kate shook her head. “There’s no maybe about it. That was it. And I feel like an idiot.”

  “And you don’t want to go back?”

  “I do want to go back,” Kate said. “And that makes me feel like an idiot, too.”

  “I’ll see you here tomorrow morning, then. I’ll be here before you, I promise.”

  “Okay,” Kate said.

  Tom leaned closer to her and put his thumb and forefinger on the front of her jacket. Kate looked down at what he was holding and saw with surprise that it was her Almador security pin, the one employees used to get into the Almador parking lot through the building.

  “I’m really interested in this,” Tom said before walking away.

  ***

  If Kate had headed for Jack’s school as soon as she’d left the parking lot, she could have made Jack’s track meet. And that was exactly what she would have done if she had remembered that Jack had a track meet, but she didn’t. She was far more shaken than she had admitted to Tom, even if she was far less shaken than she would normally have been after an episode.

  She started driving with no idea of where she was going to go, and once she started, she couldn’t make herself stop.

  It was nearly seven o’clock by the time she pulled into her own driveway, close to fully dark. The lights were on in her townhouse, and she could see somebody moving back and forth in front of the window: Frank, carrying things. Kate instantly felt guilty. This was later than it usually was when she came home. She was supposed to make dinner. Jack and Frank must have made dinner for themselves again.

  She shut off the car and grabbed her bag. Now that she was here, it felt urgently necessary for her to get into the house right away. She climbed the two steps to the garage entry and went inside. When she got there, she found that she had guessed correctly. A dinner of hot dogs and potato salad had been made and consumed. The remains of it were strewn across the kitchen table.

  “Sorry,” Kate said. “I forgot the time.”

  Jack looked up from where he was sitting. “We looked for you on the news,” he said.

  “Oh,” Kate said.

  “It wasn’t a big deal,” Frank said. “Jack thinks you had another episode, but I’ve been arguing against it.”

  “I don’t know what it was,” Kate said, not realizing she’d just admitted to something they would have had no other way of knowing about. “It didn’t feel like the usual thing.”

  Jack was not looking at her.

  Kate was just about to ask him what was wrong when he abruptly rose from his seat and began to collect plates and utensils.

  He turned to look at her, up and down, and then he shook his head.

  “I placed in two events.”

  Seven

  The next day, Tom was waiting for her near the entrance to the little municipal lot she’d parked in the day before, leaning against the ticket booth and conversing with the attendant. He saw her pull in to the ticket booth and straightened up. Kate waved at him.

  “You’re even early,” he said after she’d pulled her car into an empty space and gotten out.

  “I don’t feel early,” Kate said. “I overslept.”

  “Court never starts before nine,” Tom told her. “Sometimes it doesn’t start until ten.”

  “I like the suit,” Kate said.

  He brushed his hand against his suit jacket. “It’ll do,” he said. “But it’s a little tight in the shoulder with the holster.”

  By the time they got into the courtroom and to their seats behind the prosecution table, Kate had managed to get over that line about the holster. She didn’t take her sunglasses off when she sat down, but if Tom noticed, he said nothing about it. Chan Hamilton was already in her place, as was Ozgo. Richard Hamilton was at his place, too, his face set, his expression murderous. Chan’s face was much softer and just a little befuddled looking. But it was still Ozgo that Kate felt the most sympathy for. He really did look like a child. And like a child in a dangerous and bewildering situation, he looked terrified.

  Tom leaned close and whispered in her ear. “Take a careful look at Chan. They’ve gone the pharmaceutical route.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve got to balance the danger of a full-blown public breakdown with a demeanor so blank, the jury will think you just don’t care. They’ve given her tranquilizers. They’ve opted for ‘just don’t care.’”

  “You’d think they’d let her have a breakdown,” Kate said. “Wouldn’t that get the jury to sympathize with her?”

  Tom laughed loudly enough that some people turned to see who he was. “It would probably make the jury think she was faking,” he said.

  “Really? But I thought you said yesterday that juries liked to see emotion.”

  “They like to see the right kind of emotion at the right place and the right time. Juries think they know how guilty people behave and how innocent people behave. They think they can tell just by watching. And they’re usually wrong.”

  “But,” Kate said. Then her eyes went to Ozgo again and, behind him, a thick, heavy woman dressed in a blue cotton jumper with tiny roses all over it. Her hair was thin and held back in a rubber band. She turned her head to look around the courtroom, and Kate saw that her eyes were very blue and very bloodshot—and also very young.

  Kate had not been in the courtroom long enough to hear much of any importance yesterday. Now it felt as if the court was in the middle of something that had taken place out of her sight, and for a few moments, she had a hard time catching up.

  Evans was strutting back and forth in front of the judge’s bench.
There was a tiny, heart-shaped grease stain on his green rep tie, just above the lapels of his jacket. He gestured toward the jury box, which was now filled with jurors. The jurors were a motley group, mostly middle aged, mostly white, mostly women.

  “Interesting jury selection,” Tom said cryptically.

  Evans took a big breath and bellowed, “Detective William Flanagan.”

  There was a short line of uniformed police officers one row back. Detective Flanagan was tall and red faced. He walked to the stand and sat down abruptly, without being asked.

  The judged cleared his throat and said, with considerable annoyance, “Please remember that you are still under oath.”

  Kate couldn’t imagine that Flanagan could get any ruder than he’d already been, but he managed it. He behaved as if he hadn’t heard the judge at all.

  “Meet Wild Bill Flanagan,” Tom whispered in Kate’s ear. “The biggest fraud in law enforcement in Fairfax County.”

  Kate would have asked him what he meant, but Evans had approached the witness stand.

  “Mr. Flanagan,” he said. “When we left off yesterday, you were telling us about your experience as a criminal investigator. Let me go over that once more to refresh the jury’s memory. How long have you been a police officer in Fairfax County?”

  “Thirty-two years.”

  “And how long have you been a detective?”

  “Twenty-one years.”

  “And in that twenty-one years, you have investigated homicides?”

  “Yes.”

  “A great many homicides?”

  “I have been a detective on the homicide squad for ten years.”

  “The last ten years?”

  “Yes.”

  “What were you doing before those last ten years?”

  “I was a detective on the arson detail for eight years.”

  “And before that?”

  “I was the department’s liaison to the FBI for abductions.”

  “So you therefore have extensive experience in investigation of all the types of crimes involved in this case.”

  Flanagan shifted a little uneasily in the witness chair. “I wasn’t an investigator for abductions,” he said. “I did do some investigating on a couple of cases, but, technically, I was a liaison to the FBI, and they did the investigating.”