by Iris Kincaid
“Mr. Osborne. I see you are out on bail. Given the nature the charges, I understand that was a rather expensive proposition. Who paid your $200,000 bail, Mr. Osborne?”
“Objection,” Jeremy said.
“Sustained,” the judge said, raising a warning eyebrow at the prosecution.
“I’m sorry, Your Honor. I didn’t mean to veer too far away from the pressing matter at hand, the gruesome and unthinkable murder of one of Oyster Cove’s most prominent citizens. Mr. Osborne, have you ever been to the home of James and Heather Kelton.?”
“No. Sort of know what neighborhood it’s in but I’ve never been at her house. Why would I be?”
“Then could you please explain to the court how your fingerprints were found on the outside of the Kelton’s first floor side window?”
There was a loud gasp from both audience and jury. The judge banged her gavel for order. “Answer the question, Mr. Osborne,” she reprimanded.
“Those might’ve been really old fingerprints. Back to when I was fired and she was trying to mess with my unemployment. I went to her place to give her a piece of my mind about that.”
“But Mr. Osborne, you just told us you had never been at her home. Now you’re saying that you did go to their home. Which means you just lied to us, under oath. It’s really going to be difficult to know if the next thing out of your mouth is a lie. Did you kill Heather Kelton?”
“No. I didn’t.”
“Of course not,” the prosecutor said, his voice dripping sarcasm. “In order to do that, you would have had to go to her home. Nothing further, Your Honor.”
Jeremy was shaking his head, ever so imperceptibly. His client was not doing himself any favors. Turning this around was not going to be easy.
“Mr. Osborne. You stated that, angry at Heather Kelton after having your unemployment claim denied, you went to her house to confront her. That would have been a couple of months ago.”
“Yes, a couple of months ago.”
“So, when you said earlier in your testimony that you hadn’t been to her home, did you mean that you hadn’t been to her home the day that she was murdered?”
It was a desperate distinction, but Wanda had to admire the effort.
“Yeah, that’s what I meant. I wasn’t anywhere near her house on the day she was killed. And anyway, what do I know about snakes?”
The snake expert, Mr. Bloggs, had speculated that the killer really wanted Heather to suffer. Unfortunately for Jeremy, the jury could see that Harley Osborne had all the motive in the world. Being fired is brutal enough, but trying to block his unemployment? That’s pretty infuriating. All the more reason to kill her.
“Thank you, Mr. Osborne,” Jeremy said. “That will be all.”
Wanda watched him sympathetically. Yikes. Fingerprints on the outside window. This was going be a very difficult case for Jeremy to win. And perhaps he shouldn’t win it. Not if his client was guilty. He looked like he might need a little cheering up. Oh, who was she kidding? She had thought about him every day for the past seven years and couldn’t wait to see him outside the courtroom.
After the jury was dismissed for the day, Wanda went straight to the wig shop. It was a first for her, but she had seen enough Law And Order episodes to know the contact between lawyer and juror was strictly forbidden. If anyone saw them together, she didn’t want to be recognizable.
Fortunately, she had overheard Jeremy saying to an assistant that he would be spending a few hours at the law library, right near the community college. She had no idea whether it was open to the general public, but she could always wait outside if it wasn’t. As luck would have it, even non-lawyers were allowed to come in and look around. She located him very easily and quietly slid into a chair right across from him. He looked up casually and was shocked to recognize her, wearing a high-volume curly black wig.
“What are you doing here?” he whispered incredulously. “And what are you wearing?”
“I know you can’t talk to jurors. I didn’t want to get you in trouble.”
“I absolutely can’t talk to jurors. But, I hope you know . . . I hope you know how much I’m going to want to talk to you after this trial is over. But not now. Now is a really bad idea. I don’t want to have to resign from this case, which I would have to. In fact, I probably have to give that some serious consideration, even now.”
“Don’t resign. You haven’t done anything wrong. And don’t tell anyone that you spoke to me. We may be breaking a little rule, but for the greater good. I know you represent Mr. Osborne. The most important thing is finding the truth, isn’t it? I’m the foreman, and when it comes time to deliberate, I need to be very sure of what I’m telling everyone. So, I was hoping to get a little clearer on some things.”
Jeremy had seriously been considering confessing to this encounter and dropping out of the case. But all of a sudden, he could see her point. Why should he drop out? He knew himself well enough to know that he wasn’t going to try to tamper with her decision-making.
“Tell me the truth. Who paid Harley Osborne’s $200,000 bail?”
“I have no idea. I wish I knew. Guess he’s got some well-connected friends. Maybe family.”
“So, he’s angry and desperate because he can’t get his unemployment check. Worried about rent, utilities, food? But he has friends or family who can help them out to the tune of two hundred thousand dollars. So why weren’t they there to assist him with his rent? It would certainly have been more economical than bailing him out on a murder charge.”
“Yeah. If we were to assume that he was guilty. And if we were to assume that he killed Heather Kelton because she deprived him of any means of support, then wealthy relatives just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”
“One more question, and I realize it’s kind of an unfair one. Tell the truth—did he do it?”
Jeremy grimaced. “I don’t know. But what I do know is that this is not the charge they should’ve gone with—premeditated first-degree murder. If he was sick with worry about his nephew and those mounting bills, and he was staring homelessness in the face—I’m not saying those are good excuses, but those are mitigating circumstances. I might’ve talked them into a plea of something lesser. But this will put him away for life. There’s nothing to do but fight.”
“Those fingerprints! I think they really made an impression on the jury. I hope you have some kind of plan in mind.”
“I wish I could go with insanity, because you’d have to be insane, for heaven’s sake. I mean, a snake! Off the top of my head, I can think of half a dozen easier ways to kill someone. That’s lunacy. You’ve got to contact this guy, order the snake, and pick it up somehow, keep it alive in the box, and deliver it. Obviously, it’s doable, but if I need to kill someone, I think I would just go old-school. Not that I would ever kill anyone. But, why not just shoot them? Easy for the killer, and not that they should be thinking about us, but it’s also easier for the investigators and the lawyers. Nice and straightforward.”
“It is a pretty odd way to go. But it involves such lengthy preparation that yeah, I would imagine an insanity plea wouldn’t stand a chance,” Wanda commiserated. “So, tell me your plan.”
“This case is gonna require a bucketload of reasonable doubt. The jury has to see other suspects. I need to see if my hacker has gotten anywhere.”
“Your hacker?”
“Yeah, she’s really good, although a bit of a hermit.”
“So, you do bend rules on occasion?”
“I really have to get to the bottom of this posting. Here. I guess you’ll see it soon enough in court.”
It was a picture of Heather with an ominous bull’s-eye on her head. The page was called Heather Must Die.
“I need to find out who this poster is. My hacker says she’ll be done by tonight.”
“Is the jury ever going to be able to have a look at the crime scene?” Wanda wondered.
Jeremy shook his head. “Sometimes it’s really necessary,
to get an understanding of how events played out. But this was so straightforward. Open box, snake jumps out. There’s not a whole lot of information to be gained by looking at the crime scene. Not at all germane to the case.”
Wanda disagreed.
CHAPTER SIX
As they drove to Mayor Kelton’s house, with a brief stop at Wanda’s place, Jeremy was in a slight fog of confusion. How, exactly, had he allowed Wanda Macomber to talk him into breaking into the crime scene? And how was that pretty, very well-behaved cat of hers going to help?
“I’m sure the police did a really thorough investigation. But I think it can only help me, in understanding what happened, to actually see everything,” Wanda explained. “And it could only help your case if you find evidence pointing to other people suspects. Right?”
“I suppose it can’t hurt. But, you do realize that the doors will be locked?”
“But the mayor’s staying at a hotel. We stopped by my place to pick up Butler. And she’s gonna help us get into the house.”
“She’s a beauty. Pick locks, does she?”
“You’ll see.”
The Kelton home was contemporary, sizable, and on a large plot of land with high shrubbery, providing seclusion from the neighbors. Even so, it was a good thing that those neighbors were all away on their workday. Wanda and Jeremy were able to enter the front yard space alone and make it to the front door unseen.
“Go through that little doggie door and unlatch the front door,” Wanda ordered.
“Umm, it’s a little small for me. Oh, you mean the cat,” Jeremy said, trying to pretend that he hadn’t misunderstood.
But that still felt almost as problematic. Sure, the cat could get in, and it was probably a simple deadbolt latch. But it was three feet off the ground, and opposable thumbs seemed essential. Jeremy watched Wanda’s calm expectancy. Did she realize that the cat was probably going to run amok in the mayor’s house?
Instead, they both heard that small, imperceptible click, and Wanda opened the front door triumphantly.
“How many years have you been training that cat?” Jeremy asked incredulously.
“She’s just a very smart cat.”
“Uh, huh.”
“Now, we’ve got to look around for any kind of evidence. Papers, documents, purchases. Anything that might point to a threat against Heather, or legal clashes, disputes, anything. I’ll go upstairs, and you look around down here,” Wanda commanded.
It was a big house. Filled with drawers, file cabinets, closets, and stacks of paper. Half an hour of searching unveiled no other information than how hard it is to keep taxes straight when you have three different streams of income coming into the house, and how the Keltons were really big consumers. There must have constantly been packages on the doorstep, several times a week.
Most of them would have been delivered during the day while the married couple were both at work. The mail carrier often leaves packages at the back door in those circumstances, but the Keltons had a remote-controlled security door on their attached garage. So, packages were probably just left on the front step. Just like that last fatal package had been.
There were also indications of a multitude of social engagement, past and future. They did their share of soirées, grand openings, ribbon-cutting ceremonies, and VIP dinners. Two big vacations had been scheduled for the following year, a Caribbean cruise and a trip to Paris. It was yet another reminder why, as unpleasant as Heather Kelton appeared to be, she had a life, she had plans and dreams, maybe silly superficial dreams, but she was entitled to them. She was entitled to life, and getting justice for her remained as important as ever.
Not wanting to press their luck, they prepared to sneak back out the front door and straight to Jeremy’s car just as they heard the mayor’s large SUV roll up the driveway. What was he doing here? He was supposed to stay away from the crime scene. Probably had some clothes to pick up. This could look really bad. They heard the automatic garage door opening as they hovered near the front door.
“We will wait until he opens that back door and then shut this door right at the same time,” Wanda whispered. “That way, he won’t hear anything.”
“I think he might hear something,” Jeremy speculated.
He was right. The mayor wasn’t deaf. But perhaps he could be distracted. There was a wasp buzzing around the front entrance. Perhaps they had let it in. In any case, not a lot of people like wasps.
“Go to the back door and distract the man who is coming in. You do not have to sting him, though,” Wanda directed.
Jeremy and Wanda could hear the mayor’s panicky cries of hysteria as he waved away the wasp attack. They were able to make an easy escape, Butler trotting sprightly behind. As soon as they were a safe distance away, Jeremy’s mind was still turning over what he had just seen and the needed to head off his curiosity.
“Do not ask any questions about the wasp.”
“Okay, where to next?”
“How about a cup of coffee?”
*****
Café Au Lait was a rather public place to have a tête-à-tête. But Wanda felt herself well disguised, and Jeremy concurred. Plus, the coffee was just out of this world. The barista prepared their cups with big striped hearts in the foam, as if it were Valentine’s Day. It almost made it feel like a date.
It was time to step away from their focus on the case and take a few moments to focus on one another. Wanda wanted to know about his job.
“I used to be in the prosecutor’s office, in Boston. Major commute, but I got a lot of work done on the train, both ways. It was fun, exciting stuff. Putting the bad guys away. Until one day, I put away a guy and it seemed like a slam dunk. All the evidence in the world I needed was right there.
“Only in hindsight did I see that every piece of it was circumstantial. He spent two years in prison before he was fully exonerated and the real killer was caught. Two years of his life. I know some guys have had it worse. There are some guys who have spent two decades behind bars before DNA evidence helps to prove their innocence.
“But it was me who put this guy behind bars for two years. Me doing my job. Wanting to win the case, because winning is always the goal, right? So, this guy is back out into the world, with his freedom. But he can’t get a job. He’s an ex-con. And he can explain to potential employers till he’s blue in the face that he was unjustly imprisoned. They just say, “Sure you were, but you’re not going to be working here.” His life is ruined and I was a part of that.”
He was still feeling bad about it. Wanda put her hand over his sympathetically, which did seem to cheer him up immensely.
“So, I switched over to public defender. Don’t get me wrong. I knew that the moral high ground was in the office that I’d just left. Ninety percent of my clients are guilty. And I don’t win nearly as many of my cases because . . . ninety percent of my clients are guilty. But I give them the defense that they’re entitled to by law. And occasionally, I do a really good deed for the ten percent who are innocent. At least I know that no innocent person is ever going to rot in jail again because I put them there.”
Tortured and highly principled. He was even more appealing than the flirtatious young man Wanda remembered from Holloways. Much more of a grown-up. She was glad that he wasn’t simply going through the motions of doing his job. And even though representing Harley Osborne was his first priority, she got the feeling that the up-close look they had just gotten at Heather Kelton’s private life had given him an even greater commitment to figuring out what actually happened.
Of course, she couldn’t ask about the thing that was uppermost on her mind—why had he stopped coming to see her at Holloways all those many years ago? Perhaps it didn’t matter. He was here now. Their clandestine rendezvous was infused with an electrifying energy. And up close, he left Matt Damon in the dust.
*****
Heather’s underling, Amelia Jarvis, had been called back to the stand. The prosecution looked especially irritated
as Jeremy began to question her.
“Ms. Jarvis, have you heard of the Facebook page called Heather Must Die?”
Amelia sucked in a sharp breath. She hadn’t expected to end up on trial herself, but she could see where this was going.
“Yeah, I’ve seen it.”
“Did you see it while you are in the process of creating it? This is your account, isn’t it?”
Amelia wasn’t going to risk perjury on top of all the other trouble she might be in. “Yes, it’s my account.”
“I’m going to pass Exhibit A to the jury, a photo image of Heather Kelton with a gun’s bull’s-eye superimposed over her forehead.”
The jury’s reaction was one of predictable shock. Wanda had to remember to cluck disapprovingly as she saw the photo, since this was really supposed to be her first time seeing it.
“Ms. Jarvis. This page is full of a lot of disturbing fantasies. A lot of revenge scenarios where Heather Kelton is treated to the most gruesome punishments for her perceived transgressions.”
“Perceived transgressions! They were very real transgressions. She was just an indescribably horrible human being. She would come out and start humiliating one of us, so abusively and so loudly, and there was nothing the rest of us could do about it. We would just stare at the page in front of us, completely silent, not able to do anything to help. It was the worst thing in the world. I just never understood why the company allowed her to do that to us.”
“Her behavior does sound pretty inexcusable. So, I can surmise from this Facebook page that you thought that she deserved to be punished.”
Heather Must Die. The title alone was pretty incriminating evidence. “It was just cathartic, you know. Harmless. I was just blowing off a little steam.”
“Did anything happen out of the ordinary in the days leading up to Heather’s death?”
“Maybe not the days, specifically. But for a lot of weeks beforehand, she just got so much worse. She would call people hurtful names, make fun of them for being too heavy, or call them stupid, or remind them that they would never accomplish anything important in life, that sitting in this cubicle was the best thing they’d ever do, not that she thought they were doing it particularly well. It was just like a storm of rude, spiteful behavior. I don’t know what set it off. But something triggered her, and things just went downhill.”