Intent to Kill

by James Grippando

  “How was your day, sweetie?”

  “Good.”

  “Did you have fun?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Daddy, I’m hungry.”

  He shook her hand. “Hi, hungry, nice to meet you. I’m Ryan James.”

  Ainsley rolled her eyes. Two months ago she would have thought a joke like that was hilarious. She was growing up fast.

  He buckled her into the booster seat in the car and drove out of the parking lot. Normally, they turned left to go home. This time, they went right.

  “Wrong way, Daddy.”

  “We’re not going straight home today.”

  “Where we going?”

  “Pawtucket,” he said.

  “Why?”

  Somehow, the word cemetery wouldn’t come. “We have to deliver some flowers.”

  The journey down I-95 took less than an hour. Ryan dropped off Ainsley at her grandparents’ house in Pawtucket. Anniversaries were tough, and Ainsley was still too young for him to risk a breakdown at the grave site in front of her.

  The afternoon seemed to get more beautiful as the day wore on, clear and crisp, very much like the last one Chelsea had seen. Ryan drove as far as the winding road through the memorial grounds would take him. He parked alongside the footpath that led to Section L-5 and walked the rest of the way, careful not to step on any of the graves.

  Chelsea was buried beneath the sprawling limbs of an old oak tree, within earshot of the soothing sounds of the river. Ryan had a bouquet of off-white roses in hand, the color Chelsea had chosen for their wedding. The flat granite marker had a metal vase affixed to it, but it was already filled with an arrangement of fresh flowers. A smaller bouquet lay across headstone, a mixed arrangement that looked as if it had been picked from someone’s own garden rather than store bought. Ryan knelt on the grass, oblivious to the moisture that was soaking through his pant legs. He moved the flowers aside, his chest tightening at the sight of CHELSEA JAMES chiseled in stone. He pulled himself together and laid the roses on the headstone. Only then did he notice the card attached to the small bundle of flowers. It certainly wasn’t the norm to send a written message to the departed, but Ryan understood that everyone had a different way of grieving.

  From your mother, I’ll bet.

  Had it been inside an envelope, Ryan would have respected the sender’s privacy and left the card alone. But now that he’d moved the bouquet, the card was in plain view, the typed message exposed for the world to see. Ryan’s heart skipped a beat, as he recognized immediately that it couldn’t have been from Chelsea’s mother, father, or anyone else who’d loved her.

  It was no accident, the message read.

  Ryan continued to kneel at the graveside, momentarily frozen. Literally thousands of strangers had sent him cards and e-mails since Chelsea’s death, and fewer than a handful had upset him. This one seemed especially cruel, and Ryan immediately linked it to the words of Tony from Wattahtown: Accidents happen.

  He grabbed the bouquet, climbed to his feet, and threw it as far as he could. It landed in the stream beyond the oak tree, floated toward the river, and disappeared.

  Finally, Ryan could breathe again.

  5

  THE ADRENALINE WAS STILL PUMPING AS EMMA CARLISLE LEFT THE Licht Judical Complex in Providence. Her closing argument had been flawless, and the case was now in the hands of twelve jurors. She could smell another conviction coming.

  Emma was a trial attorney in the Criminal Division of the Rhode Island Office of the Attorney General, which was the prosecuting authority for all felonies throughout the nation’s smallest state. She had joined the office right out of law school, and in five years—the last two in the Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Unit—she had yet to lose a case. Her record was a source of pride, though admittedly it was somewhat artificial: prosecutors didn’t take losing cases to trial. Sometimes they knew who did it but couldn’t prove it. Other times the investigation failed to turn up a single suspect. It was difficult to say which scenario was more frustrating. Either way, there was still a victim, still a suffering family. Occasionally, on days like today, Emma was able to deliver a sense of justice, but the thrill of victory was short-lived. In the end, her courtroom successes seemed only to remind her that many cases were never solved. Some, she knew, would haunt her for years.

  And one case, in particular.

  “Another brilliant performance, Counselor. Any predictions?”

  A microphone was suddenly in her face. The handsome courthouse reporter from the local news had ambushed her once again at the base of the granite staircase. Doug Wells had no cameraman with him, however, and Emma knew that the mike was just a prop.

  “Predictions,” she said, stopping to ponder the question. “Maybe just one: you and I will never have a second date.”

  “Aw, come on,” he said, with the smile that had won him two local Emmy Awards. “You know I don’t take no for an answer.”

  “That was the problem with the first date.”

  “Fair enough. I came on too strong, I admit. But we’ve seen each other around the courthouse for so long that it just didn’t feel like a first date to me. I said I was sorry.”

  Emma felt a mild sense of irony. She’d just spent the last three days prosecuting a case of date rape in which her final words to the jury had been “No means no.”

  “And I accept your apology,” she said. “But let’s leave it at that, all right?”

  Doug’s smile faded, his feelings obviously hurt. “Okay. Sure. I can keep it professional. But you do realize what this means, don’t you?”

  “What?”

  He smiled again. “My cameraman will now only film you from your bad side.”

  “I can live with that,” she said.

  “I’ll catch you later, Emma.”

  “Later,” she said, happy to part amicably.

  Rush-hour traffic was already crawling toward the interstate entrance ramps, and Emma was in a hurry to return to the office across the street before her division chief left for the day. She was still at that stage of her career where an integral part of the trial experience was recapping the drama for her boss, which was much more fun to do in person than over the phone.

  She stopped at the corner before crossing the street. Several copies of the Providence Journal were still in the self-service newsstand. In today’s world of real-time reporting it contained nothing but old news by 5:00 P.M., but she bought a copy anyway and saw that the man who’d hired her out of law school was on the front page. Brandon Lomax had served as Rhode Island’s attorney general before launching his campaign for the U.S. Senate a year ago, and he was the front-runner heading into the fall election. Emma smiled at his photo. But it was the date on the ProJo’s masthead that had caught her attention: September 6.

  The three-year anniversary of Chelsea James’s death had not been lost on her—Emma was the prosecutor on the vehicular homicide investigation.

  Public outcry over the accident had been considerable, especially when it leaked that—for reasons not made public—the police believed the hit-and-run driver had been drunk. The community wanted justice, and for a time it was a high-profile investigation at the attorney general’s office. Emma worked her contacts at local papers and used the Providence television media to appeal for leads. It turned out to be one of those frustrating cases that never turn up a suspect, never come close to the filing of criminal charges. Emma even felt mocked by one of the state’s most well known bumper stickers: IN RI DRUNK DRIVERS GET COURT. It was a play on words rooted in a dialect where the letter r appeared out of nowhere—where a soda was a “soder” and an idea was an “idear.” Did it literally mean “court,” or did drunk drivers get “caught”?

  In the Chelsea James case, it meant neither.

  After two years without a single lead, Emma still fought to keep the case active. When she was transferred to the sexual assault unit last year, all but one of her DUI pr
osecutions had been reassigned to other prosecutors. The James case she held on to. Or, perhaps more accurately, it held on to her.

  Emma stood at the busy street corner flipping through the newspaper pages. She didn’t even realize that the traffic light had cycled from red to green and then back to red. Today’s local section contained not a single word about Chelsea James. Not that she’d expected to find one. It was as if the world had forgotten.

  But Emma hadn’t.

  She tucked the newspaper away and crossed the side street, continuing down Main. She was just a few steps from her building when she spotted her car in the public lot across the street, a citation on the windshield catching her attention. She’d parked the same car in the same spot at the same time every day for a year and never gotten a ticket. She was sure that she’d fed the meter plenty of change.

  Meter maids on steroids strike again.

  She jaywalked across Main Street to read the bad news. But she soon realized it wasn’t a ticket. Someone had neatly folded a page from the newspaper into a rectangle and left it under the driver’s-side wiper. She slid it out and saw that it was the front page of the Pawtucket Times. The date was September 7, but she didn’t have to check the year to know that it wasn’t an early edition of tomorrow’s paper. The headline read: TRAGEDY FOR PAWSOX STAR. The beautiful young woman in the color photograph staring back at her was Chelsea James.

  Emma had seen the article several times, but it still chilled her—chilled her more than ever before. She wasn’t sure if it was because today was the third anniversary of Chelsea’s death, or because someone had gone to the trouble of leaving an old newspaper on her windshield.

  Emma checked for a signature or a note that would reveal the sender’s identity. She found only a few curious markings. Certain words on the front page were underlined, and each underlining was numbered one through five. Three of the words were from the article about Chelsea, but two of them were from another front-page story. The numbers were not sequential—if she read the words left to right, top to bottom, the number sequence was three-one-two-four-five. But when she read each word in the order of the assigned number, they created a sentence.

  “‘I know who did it,’” she said, reading aloud.

  She checked again for a signature, but there was none. Someone was being cute and clever, but Emma still had to take it seriously for what it might be: a note from an anonymous tipster who claimed to have seen the drunk driver who ran Chelsea off the road.

  She put the newspaper into her trial satchel, careful not to smudge any possible fingerprints, and headed back across the street to the Office of the Attorney General.

  6

  IT WAS UP TO EMMA AND THE CHIEF OF THE CRIMINAL DIVISION, Assistant Attorney General Glenda Garrisen, to decide what to do about the anonymous tip.

  “Use the media,” said the chief.

  “We don’t have to reveal the tipster’s unusual MO—the way the message was crafted from underlined and numbered words in a newspaper,” Emma said. “That would just trigger copycats.”

  “Agreed.”

  “The media is the only way for us to communicate with this source. If he’s for real, we want to encourage him to keep talking to us. If this is a hoax, we want to remind him that giving false tips to law enforcement is a crime that we will prosecute.”

  “Emma, I said go for it. So go.”

  It was the green light Emma had been hoping for.

  The Chelsea James investigation might have been cold for some, but for Emma the details remained fresh: the make and model of the car, the street name, the official time of death. She didn’t even have to retrieve the file to draft the press release. By six forty-five it was finished. It was time for dinner.

  She chose to eat crow—and call her Action News “friend” Doug Wells.

  “I need a favor,” she said.

  “Well, isn’t this an interesting turn of events?”

  Somehow, she just knew he was grinning on the other end of the line. “This is important,” she said. “There’s a possible break in one of my cold cases. The Chelsea James accident.”

  “Oh, yeah. The ballplayer’s wife. Very sad. I did a story on that.”

  “Can you run an update at eleven?”

  “If it’s newsworthy.”

  Good answer. She’d almost expected him to say, If you’ll have dinner with me. Emma said, “I’ll e-mail you the press release.”

  “Press release? You mean you’re not giving me the exclusive?”

  The guy never stopped pushing buttons. “You’re the first one I called,” said Emma. “Does that count for anything?”

  “Not really. But I’m a pushover. Send it to me. I’ll see what I can do.” She thanked him and hung up before he could take the conversation in the usual direction.

  What other talking heads owe me a favor?

  She gazed out her office window, thinking. The sun was setting, the long shadows of downtown Providence ushering in darkness. It was a beautiful sunset, but an eerie feeling came over her as she realized that three years ago to the minute, Chelsea James was driving to the PawSox game with her two-year-old daughter in the backseat. They were probably excited about going to see Ryan play. Maybe Chelsea was even a little anxious about running late. Without question, she was completely unaware of how defenseless she and Ainsley were against another driver who’d had too much to drink. Emma thought about Ryan, too, inside the stadium wondering why his wife and daughter were late for such an important game.

  Ryan. He needs to know.

  Emma couldn’t let him hear about this latest tip on the eleven o’clock news. The same went for Chelsea’s parents. From a professional standpoint, a phone call from the Victim Services Unit would have sufficed. On a personal level, however, it didn’t seem like enough. Emma grabbed her briefcase and hurried downstairs to her car. She made a few more calls to her media contacts while on the road. At the freeway exit she dialed Ryan’s number. He was pleasant enough, given the anniversary, but he did seem puzzled by her call.

  “I’m in the neighborhood,” she said. “I’d like to stop by, if that’s okay. We may have a break in the case.”

  He didn’t hesitate to invite her over.

  It was after 8:00 P.M. when Emma knocked on the door. The curtain in the bowfront window moved, and through the shining pane of glass Emma caught a glimpse of a young girl who checked her out and then disappeared.

  “Daddy, somebody’s here!” her little voice called.

  The door opened a minute later, and when Ryan greeted Emma, she didn’t answer right away. Ryan had sounded very together on the telephone, but the look in his eyes and the sadness in his smile only confirmed that no homicide had only one victim.

  “Are you sure this is a good time?” she said.

  “Of course.”

  He took her coat as she entered, and Emma heard the patter of Ainsley’s little feet scampering up the stairs. They went into the living room, which was way too small for the sixty-inch big-screen television in the corner, but that kind of thing was to be expected from an ex-jock with no woman in the house. The place was otherwise furnished nicely, in a Rooms To Go kind of way. The numerous framed photographs on the walls and end tables lent a homey feeling. Emma spotted Chelsea in about a dozen of them.

  “Did you eat supper yet?” asked Ryan. “Ainsley never touched her chicken. Five-year-olds, you know. They live on the bag of Cheetos they eat ten minutes before coming to the dinner table.”

  “I’m fine, thanks. I don’t want to intrude. I just want to share some important news with you.”

  She removed the press release from her purse and showed it to him.

  He read it once to himself, then reread the key language aloud: ‘ “Assistant Attorney General Glenda Garrisen announced that late yesterday afternoon a trial attorney in the Criminal Division was contacted by an anonymous tipster who may have information pertinent to the ongoing investigation into the death of Chelsea James.’”

>   Ryan looked up from the release, his expression ashen. “Did your anonymous tip say something like ‘accidents happen’ or ‘it was no accident’?”

  “No. Why do you ask?”

  He told her about the call from Tony from Wattahtown, and about the message attached to the bouquet of flowers on Chelsea’s grave.

  “Did you keep the card?” said Emma.

  “I got so mad I pitched the whole bouquet. I’ve been hassled by ticked-off callers before, and I figured it was just this Tony character being a total ass. I hope I didn’t screw up another possible lead.”

  Emma entered a note into her BlackBerry. “I’ll have the sheriff track down the phone call and follow up. But the tip I received seems a bit too premeditated to be just another volley from some heckler.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “It’s easier if I just show you.”

  She reached into her briefcase and gave him a photocopy of the newspaper. Just the sight of the three-year-old headline and Chelsea’s photograph seemed to take Ryan’s breath away.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  Ryan studied it for a moment, reading aloud once again—“‘I know who did it’”—as he decoded the tipster’s message.

  “You’re right,” he said. “Digging up an old copy of the newspaper and creating this number-word game seems like a lot of work for just some heckler.”

  “Some planning definitely went into this,” said Emma.

  “But if it’s a legitimate tip, why would it take three years for him to come forward? And why anonymously?”

  “I can’t answer that,” said Emma.

  “Can your forensic guys do anything to figure out who sent it?”

  “Fingerprints can remain intact on porous surfaces like newspaper for decades, so I sent the original down to the state crime lab to check for prints. I’ll have results in the morning.”

  He handed the copy back to her. “I’m glad you’re going public with this. Maybe this will turn out to be nothing but harassment from Tony from Wattahtown. But even so, there’s a hit-and-run driver who probably thinks this case has gone away.”