Deadly Judgment (Detective Sarah Spillman Mystery Series Book 5)

by Renee Pawlish

  “I did something I shouldn’t have,” he said bluntly. “It had to do with the Bradley case. I’ve often wondered if anybody would figure it out, and no one ever did.” He put a hand to his mouth thoughtfully. “It’s funny, the more time that passes, the more you reach a point where you think maybe no one will ever know, except for those involved. I went through the rest of my career, and no one seemed the wiser. I retired, and I’ve been living here quietly.” He seemed lost in thought for a moment. “And then you showed up at my door, asking about McCleary and Nakamura. I knew right then what it was about.”

  Now I did stop him. “Judge, I need to read you your rights.”

  “Of course, but it won’t matter.”

  I read him his rights, asked him if he understood, then narrowed my eyes. “What is it about? You didn’t tell us anything when we were here.”

  He shook his head. “No, I didn’t.”

  “Why?”

  He studied his hands. “It doesn’t matter. McCleary and Nakamura are dead, and there’s nothing you can do to help me now.”

  “Did McCleary or Nakamura contact you?” I asked.

  “Warren came by the house,” Halloran said. “I won’t tell you what we talked about.”

  “Why did McCleary and Nakamura meet last week?” I eyed him. “Were they talking about the past? Were things catching up to them, and you?”

  He shrugged, but didn’t reply. I looked at Ernie, not sure where to go with the conversation.

  “We can protect you,” Ernie said.

  Halloran shook his head. “No, you can’t. And besides that, I don’t deserve it. I’ve resigned myself to my fate, whatever that will be.”

  Ernie leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. “Judge, please, tell us what’s going on.”

  Halloran locked eyes with him. “I would’ve never done it, you know, but I needed the money. Do you know about my daughter?”

  We both shook our heads. Halloran went on. “She was sick, a rare form of cancer. Even with a judge’s salary, the bills piled up.” He waved a hand in the air. “You’d think I could afford a better house than this, like most other judges, their country club memberships, that kind of thing. “But my daughter’s medical expenses ate all that up.” He rubbed his chin. “Don’t get me wrong, I’ve lived a comfortable life, and I don’t regret spending the money on her expenses. I did what I had to do to try to save her.” His eyes misted. “As it turns out, it didn’t help. After a couple of years of treatments, she passed away anyway.”

  I thought about the pictures of a little girl in the living room. I’d wondered if she was a granddaughter. I was wrong.

  “You did something for money?” I pushed him to answer. “Were you paid off?” It was the first thought that crossed my mind.

  “We were paid a lot of money,” Halloran said.

  “By who?” Ernie asked.

  He shook his head slowly. “I’m not going to tell you who.”

  I stared at him. “Judge, what happened at the Bradley trial? You know more than you’re telling us.”

  Halloran stared back at me and shook his head.

  Ernie gritted his teeth, frustrated. “Judge, if there’s a killer out there, we can protect you, and we can protect whoever this person is, the one who paid you off.”

  “He doesn’t deserve protection,” Halloran snapped. “He never got what he deserved back then, and that was partly my fault. I won’t stand in the way of anything now.”

  “Judge,” I started to say. I had completely misread him.

  He held up a hand. “I’m sorry, my mind’s made up. I knew a long time ago that I would never protect him if it came to that.”

  “What about you?” I asked. “We can get security here to protect you.”

  “I told you before, and I’ll tell you again, I don’t want any security.” His face was hard. “Please, that is my wish.”

  “What about your wife?” Ernie asked.

  Halloran smiled. “That’s not who he wants. She’ll be fine.”

  I shook my head. “You can’t know that.”

  He shrugged. “I know more than you do.”

  “Did you receive a threatening note?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “That’s not important.”

  “What does AK mean?” His eyes revealed nothing. I stared at him, angered by his evasiveness. “Judge, please tell us what’s going on.” I sounded as if I was begging, and I didn’t care. “There has to be a way out of this, one where no one has to pay with their life.”

  That brought a small, bitter laugh. “Someone already did, and he shouldn’t have had to. If I have to pay with mine, then so be it.”

  Ernie thumped his foot on the floor. “I don’t believe this,” he said. “You need to tell us what’s going on.”

  Halloran looked at us wanly, then pushed himself out of his chair. “I appreciate your coming here. I know you’re working hard on this case. It will all be resolved soon.”

  I looked at Ernie, then at Halloran. “That’s it? What do I tell McCleary and Nakamura’s families? They want to know who murdered their loved ones.”

  His eyes narrowed mysteriously. “You’ll have your answers soon enough.”

  “What about your wife?” I asked. “We’ll talk to her about this.”

  He looked at me smugly. “She’s already left. She’s going out of town for a few days, and you won’t be able to get hold of her.”

  My frustration boiled over. “I could take you down to the station.”

  “For what?” Halloran tipped his head at my threat and stared down his nose at me. “I haven’t admitted to anything, so I don’t have to go with you.”

  He had me there. Halloran didn’t say another word, but left the room. Ernie and I followed him down the hallway to the front door. He opened it and waited without a word.

  “Judge,” I tried one final time.

  He shook his head and looked toward the street. Ernie shrugged and motioned for me to move, so he and I walked outside.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  “Can you believe that guy?” I stormed down the sidewalk of Halloran’s house. “Why wouldn’t he want to tell us what’s going on, and tell us who this other person is, the one who paid off the judges?”

  Ernie quickly followed me back to our cars. “I don’t know. Whatever he’s hiding, we need to figure it out before anybody else dies.” He gazed at Halloran’s house. “Including him.”

  “Let’s get back to the station and find out everything we can on Scott Bradley.” I frowned. “And I’m going to call for surveillance on Halloran’s house, whether he likes it or not.”

  Ernie jingled his keys as he pulled them from his pocket. “Let’s go.”

  I touched his arm and nodded toward the end of the block. “Watch the house until I can get someone here, okay? Then head back to the station.”

  “You got it.”

  I watched him get in his car and drive to the end of the street, then I hurried back to the station. On the way, I called Commander Rizzo to tell him what was going on, but he was in a meeting, so I left him a message. I got hold of Lattimore and had him coordinate surveillance on Halloran’s house. As much as I wanted to post a cop at the judge’s door, I had to respect his wishes. Then I called Spats and gave him an update.

  “Well, I have news for you on that front,” he said when I finished. “I tracked down Dixon’s alibi with the food bank. Three different women who work there remember Dixon and his sister helping out Monday and Tuesday.”

  “I think Bradley’s our guy, and he’s AWOL.” I swore as I drove past a semi. “We need to figure out where he is, and now.”

  “I’m almost back to the station, and I’ll help with that.”

  “I was going to look up Bradley, but I got waylaid with other things. We need to find everything we can on him, see if we can figure out what he did after he got out on parole, see where he might go.”

  “I’ll be back soon.”

  I en
ded the call, then called the Golden Police Department and asked for their commander. Once I was connected, I explained the situation with Judge Halloran. The commander said he would put extra patrol cars in the area and alert DPD of anything suspicious. When I finished, I gripped the steering wheel hard as I drove east on Highway 6.

  “This is what I have on Bradley so far,” Spats said when I rushed into the room. He was at his desk, working on the computer. Rizzo was standing nearby. Spats waved me over. “Scott Bradley is forty-four years old, but you knew that. He grew up in Pennsylvania. His dad was a gardener, and his mom was a cook. He did okay in school, nothing spectacular, but he did learn about gardening from his dad. He flitted from job to job in Pennsylvania for a few years after high school, had some run-ins with the law, some drug trouble, and then he moved to Colorado. He worked with a couple of local companies here, and then he was hired directly by Sanders Frost. He’d worked for Frost for three years when he was convicted of murder.”

  I pulled up a chair. “Yeah, I remember reading that from the trial notes. This was the case where Bradley said he didn’t murder Alex Knight, that he was high at the time, and he didn’t remember anything.” I looked at a picture of Bradley that Spats had pulled up on the monitor. Scott had longer brown hair, a thin nose, and he stared at the screen with cold hazel eyes. I perused the notes Spats had compiled.

  “Yeah, but at the trial, Bradley’s lawyer,” he tipped his head at me, “Raymond McCleary, was unable to explain how Bradley’s fingerprints got on the murder weapon, a 9-millimeter. Nor was McCleary able to establish a plausible reason for why Bradley was found passed out next to Knight’s body.”

  I stared at Spats’s chicken scratches on the page. “Bradley and Knight didn’t know each other?”

  Spats nodded. “That’s what Bradley said. None of Knight’s friends had heard of Bradley, and Knight wasn’t speaking from the grave. As far as I can tell from all the case notes,” he pointed at his computer, “and from a couple of articles I found, the two men had never encountered each other before the evening Knight was shot and killed.”

  “What do we know about Knight?” I asked.

  “He was a known drug dealer,” Spats said. “He had a couple of arrests, but other than that, not much.”

  I pushed my hair out of my eyes. “How did Knight happen to be at the scene?”

  Spats tapped his cheek with the pen. “I can’t seem to find much on that. Sanders Frost had never heard of Knight, never seen him around. Nor had Frost’s wife, kids, or staff. Why Knight was there in the garden that evening, nobody seemed to know. Nobody could explain why Bradley shot him, not even Bradley.”

  I leaned back in the chair and crossed my arms. “So Bradley denies knowing Knight, or knowing why Knight was there, and yet he gets convicted of murder.”

  Spats nodded. “It was a lot of circumstantial evidence, but it was apparently enough in the minds of the jury to convict Bradley. Because of the extenuating circumstances, where nobody knows exactly what happened – except that Knight was dead and Bradley’s fingerprints were on the murder weapon – Bradley got second-degree murder and he served twenty years. When he got out about a year ago, he met with his parole officer regularly, and he started working at a grocery store. But six months ago, they lost track of him.”

  “How did that happen?”

  Spats shrugged. “He quit reporting to parole, and I guess he’s been using cash everywhere. We can’t find a credit card statement or any money trail, so he’s become kind of a ghost.”

  Rizzo had been listening to all this, and now he stared at us. “And based on your conversation with Judge Halloran,” he nodded his head at me, “we think that this guy, Scott Bradley, may go after Halloran.”

  I got up and began to pace. “That’s what my gut says. If Bradley felt like he was unjustly convicted, he goes after the people who put him in prison.”

  “That was our theory about Felix Robinson, too. Right?” Rizzo asked.

  I shrugged. “Yes. I’m not sure about him. I still think he’s capable of doing that.”

  “What about the extra notes McCleary received?” Rizzo asked.

  I pressed my lips together. “Olivia Hartnell may have sent them. I still need to follow up with her.” I told him about Iles overhearing her conversation with Marko at Starbucks. Then I pointed at Spats. “With everything we’ve found, it looks like Bradley could be our man.”

  Rizzo nodded. “It makes sense. But what about McCleary’s murder? Why kill him? Did Bradley have a grudge against him because he didn’t win the case?”

  I paced and thought. “If that’s where your mind was at, yes. You want revenge on the defense attorney who didn’t help you, the prosecutor who is trying the case, and the judge who sentenced you.”

  “Then who’s this other person that Halloran was mentioning?”

  I stopped pacing and put my hands on my hips. “We don’t know. Halloran wouldn’t say. Maybe someone from the jury? Or, Bradley said he didn’t do it, so maybe the real killer?”

  “And who would that be?” Rizzo posed.

  I looked at both of them. “I don’t know.”

  Rizzo eyed Spats. “What was Bradley’s story again?”

  Spats consulted his notes. “Bradley said that he was working at the Frost mansion, preparing the gardens for a big charity event that evening. He admitted that he would hide marijuana in a shed at the back of the property, and he would smoke it there. This was long before weed was legal in Colorado. He could have gotten in trouble for using, and even more because he’d been in trouble for possession when he was eighteen. He says he smoked some weed, and then he must’ve passed out or something, but he’s not sure. The next thing Bradley knows, it’s evening and he wakes up by a fountain in the Frost back gardens. He’s got the gun in his hand, and Knight is lying nearby. Bradley said he didn’t even have time to think before Frost and some guests stumbled upon the crime scene. It freaked everybody out, and someone called the police right away. Bradley was arrested, and because he couldn’t make bail, he stayed in jail until his trial.”

  “Was there anything else in Bradley’s interview, anybody that he thought was the ‘true’ killer?”

  Spats flipped through some pages in frustration. “No, I couldn’t find a thing about that. I’ve been going over the interviews the police conducted with Bradley, and he kept saying that he didn’t know who did it, but it wasn’t him. He even concocted a story that Frost had framed him, but he didn’t say why.”

  “Did Bradley’s parents or family attend the trial?” I asked.

  Spats shook his head. “Bradley wasn’t close to his dad, and his mom had died a few years before that.”

  “So nobody could vouch for him, nobody knew what happened from the time he smoked weed to the time he woke up with the dead guy there?” I asked.

  Spats put a pen behind his ear. “That about sums it up.”

  I mulled that over. “Since when does weed cause memory loss?”

  “Exactly,” Spats said. “Bradley’s story doesn’t add up.”

  Rizzo put his hands in his pockets. “And Halloran seems to know something that he won’t share, and he doesn’t want any protection,” he said.

  I nodded. “I called for surveillance anyway. Ernie was waiting until someone showed up before he left. Halloran won’t let us post anybody at the door, but we’ll at least keep an eye out on his house, and Golden Police have been asked to keep a squad car in the area when they can.”

  “That’s good.” Rizzo ran both hands over his face. “I can’t believe the judge doesn’t want to say anything.” He stared at me. “You pressed him hard, right?”

  I nodded and threw up my hands. “Ernie and I tried every which way to get him to tell us what was going on. He seems to have resigned himself that whatever he did back then, he’s going to pay for now, and whoever this other person is, that person deserves what’s coming.” I pointed at Spats’s computer. “We’ll have to comb through the case again t
o see if there’s anything we missed. Spats, do you have the names of the detectives who worked the crime scene?”

  He nodded. “I’ve called both of them. Both are retired, and I left them messages. As soon as we can talk to them, we can pick their brains about the case.”

  My cell phone rang. “It’s Ernie.” I answered it.

  “A surveillance guy’s here now,” he said. “I’m headed back to the station.”

  “Good,” I said. “We’ve got a lot to do.” I quickly filled him in, then ended the call.

  Rizzo rubbed his eyes. The dark crescents under them seemed more pronounced than usual. “I’ve been fielding calls from the mayor, and even a call with the governor. If another judge is murdered, I don’t know what they’ll do. I’m losing sleep over this one.”

  “We’ll work on this as fast as we can,” I reassured him with more confidence than I actually felt.

  He stood up. “I know you guys will. Keep me posted. I’ve got to talk to Follett.” He turned and went into his office.

  I sat back down at Spats’s desk. “All right, let’s start going through this case more thoroughly.”

  Several hours later, I finally headed home. I’d texted Harry to eat without me, and Spats, Ernie, and I had spent the better part of the afternoon and evening going over the Bradley trial. We’d also finally gotten hold of the two detectives who had worked the crime. They had been very helpful, but weren’t able to shed any more light on the case than what we already had. Both of them believed that Scott Bradley had killed Knight. The murder weapon had been found in Bradley’s hand, and his hand also had gunshot residue on it, an indicator he had fired the weapon. Bradley had a criminal past, and he hadn’t been convincing in his interviews. They concluded that on the afternoon of the murder, he had probably ingested other drugs in addition to, or instead of, marijuana, and that accounted for his lapse in memory. However, they admitted, a blood draw hadn’t revealed other drugs in his system. The detectives speculated that Bradley had lied about not knowing Knight, but they didn’t ever know why. They surmised that, on the evening of the party, Knight had sneaked onto the property and confronted Bradley, the two had gotten into an argument, and Bradley had shot Knight. But they couldn’t explain where Bradley had gotten the gun. He denied buying it, and they had no proof of purchase. The detectives again surmised that Bradley was lying. It seemed like an open-and-shut case, they had their suspect. However, all these years later, here I was, questioning their conclusion. And if Bradley was innocent, and if he’d been framed, I could see why he was out for revenge. But who had framed him?