Justice Denied - A Harper Ross Legal Thriller

by Rachel Sinclair

  “I’m so sorry to hear that,” I said to Axel. “Really. I couldn’t imagine losing somebody in that way. My parents live here in town. I have three sisters and two brothers – two of my sisters are here in town. I try to see them as often as I can. I just couldn’t imagine losing somebody in my life to suicide. You must be devastated.”

  He shrugged. “I am. It was tough for me, just because I always saw how much she tried. She tried so hard to make something of herself. To make a name for herself. She had my brother and me, but our father split when we were very young. So, there wasn’t ever a lot of money, because mum couldn’t seem to ever make it. That was tough for her. We grew up in Australia, so there wasn’t really the dole for us. We had to make do with what there was, and there wasn’t ever much. I always wished that I could do more for mum, but I left home when I was 17 to come here. I came here on a student visa, and then I met Neila, my ex-wife, so I was able to stay. My mum killed herself 12 years after I moved to America.”

  I could hear guilt in his voice. I knew what he was thinking, without him actually saying a word. He abandoned his mother, in his view. He abandoned her and left her lonely and destitute and with nothing to live for. “Axel, it wasn’t your fault. It sounded like your mother had a lot of problems.”

  “I know, mate. I know. But I think that what I was going to talk to you about is that I’m worried about you. Last night, I saw you act in a way that I had never seen before. You looked different – your eyes were wide and your face was flushed. And you acted very strange. Very out of it. I know that you’re not drinking. You told me that, and I believe you. But I wonder if there was something else happening.”

  “What did you think was happening?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t really know. But mum used to act like that. Sometimes she would lock herself in her room and paint for literally days. Not eat, barely drink water. She would just be in there, and, when Daniel and I – my brother’s name is Daniel – would go into her room, we would see that she completed about twenty paintings. In a span of about a week. We would ask her what she was doing in the room for those days, and she would tell us that she was working around the clock. Other times, she would go to the pokies and lose any money that she managed to earn from selling her paintings.”

  I furrowed my brow. “Pokies?”

  “Yeah, pokies. You put your money in and pull the lever and, hopefully, money spits back out. Pokies.”

  I smiled. “Oh, slot machines. I got it. So, she was a gambler?”

  “Yeah. A gambler. She played the pokies and she played cards. She didn’t make much money, but what little she did went to the pokies and the cards. When she was like that, anyhow.”

  I shook my head. “I didn’t do any of those things. I mean, I went shopping, and I spent a lot of money. More money than I usually spend. In fact, today, I’m going to take half of those things back. I don’t need them, and I don’t like to spend frivolously. And, I admit, I stayed up the entire night looking over the cases that Judge Sanders was going to rule on, and looking at some of his past rulings. I need to find the thread. It’s a puzzle, and one that I’m determined to solve. But I feel okay right now. I feel fine.”

  He smiled. “You look fine.” He kissed me, slightly biting my upper lip while his lower lip enveloped mine slowly. “You look very fine.”

  I nodded and I put my arms on his shoulders. Axel and I were heading towards making love, and I didn’t actually know how I felt about that. The truth was, I hadn’t been intimate with anybody since that night in the fraternity house all those years ago. That night was 17 years ago, and I hadn’t let any man get close to me since then. I didn’t know how to talk to Axel about that, though. I knew that I wanted to make love with him. I was dying for that. He was sexy and sweet and handsome and smart. He treated me like a princess. I was falling in love with him.

  Yet I was afraid of being intimate with him. I associated the act of sex with something violent. I still associated sex with rape. My therapist had worked with me for years, but I still didn’t feel that I was whole.

  In a way, I felt that, by taking Michael’s case, I would finally be able to process what had happened to me all those years ago. I wanted him to lose, yet, at the same time, I wanted to win. I was so conflicted about it…at any given moment, I had a different idea as to why I was on his case. I swung wildly between wanting to sink him at all costs to knowing that I couldn’t, to not wanting that at all. I knew that my therapist was going to have to help me sort all of this out.

  The only thing that I knew was that I was going to have to find a way to get past what he did to me. To find a way to forgive and let go. If I didn’t, then I was going to screw up this relationship with Axel. Thus far, it was the healthiest relationship I had ever been in. I couldn’t mess things up.

  “Well,” I said, looking into his beautiful eyes. “I need to get to work. I have hearings this afternoon, and I need to start my investigation of my new capital murder case.”

  He smiled. “Let’s go and find your car.”

  I furrowed my brow. What was he talking about, find my car? My car was right out front, wasn’t it?

  Then it hit me – no, my car wasn’t out front. It was somewhere on the Plaza. I couldn’t find it yesterday.

  I was really crazy yesterday. I hoped that I didn’t feel like that again. I had too much on my plate – I wouldn’t be able to feel like that and do my job.

  Nine

  The next day, I had my hearing on the exhumation of Judge Sanders. Judge Graham was the trial judge for the murder case, and she wasn’t one to have a ton of patience for much. She was about sixty years old, about 240 pounds, with black hair that had a white streak running through the middle like a skunk. There were times when she was nicer than pie, and other days when she yelled and screamed at any attorney who was so much as five minutes late to her courtroom.

  When I walked in, I wasn’t sure which Judge Graham I was going to encounter. I saw her and saw that she was smiling pleasantly, so I relaxed just a little.

  The other attorney, the attorney for Christina Sanders, was named Christopher King. He wasn’t somebody that I usually encountered, because he, like my partner Tammy, usually chose to do estates, wills and trusts. I assumed that he was the family attorney. He did look like he and Christina were friendly. She, too, was in the courtroom, even though she really didn’t need to be. I figured that she was there because she wanted to make sure that the judge saw her and her tears.

  Christina Sanders was somebody who I called, in my head, a mean girl grown up. That was what she looked like to me. Her hair was platinum blonde, but her eyebrows were dark brown. She was impeccably dressed in a grey suit with high-heeled Chanel pumps. Her nails were long, perfectly formed and bright red. She looked like a woman who didn’t work a day in her life, even though I knew that she had to, as she had five kids at home. That was work enough, but I wondered if she had a nanny who watched them while she drank gin and tonics with the girls. She struck me as the type.

  She gave me a dirty look and started to whisper to her attorney. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but I imagined that it wasn’t good. It never was whenever I had to deal with a grieving loved one. I had to do that far too often. This wasn’t the first time that I had to make a motion to a court to have a body exhumed. In fact, this was the third time that I had to petition the court for something like this. And, every time I did this, there was always a grieving person in the court room who would shoot me a dirty look. This time wasn’t any different.

  “Okay, Mr. King and Ms. Ross,” Judge Graham said. “Come on up.”

  Christopher and I went up to the bench. “Ms. Ross, I see that you have filed a petition to have Judge Sanders exhumed. You state that there wasn’t an autopsy and that, before the judge died, he showed signs of arsenic poisoning. Now, I will agree with you that there probably should have been an autopsy done, and I don’t really know why there wasn’t one conducted, but exhuming a body is not
something that I order lightly.”

  “I understand that,” I said. “But, your honor, in this case, I think that it’s necessary. I need to see if he was poisoned. Obviously, if he was poisoned, then I would approach the case in a different way.”

  “Mr. King,” Judge Graham said. “What do you say to Ms. Ross? What are your objections to Ms. Ross’ motion to have Judge Robert Sanders exhumed?”

  “Your honor,” Christopher began. “We do not feel that Ms. Ross has made a good faith petition for this. She only has suspicions that Mr. Sanders was poisoned. She has no proof.”

  “Your honor, Mr. King has put me into a Catch-22. I don’t have actual evidence that Mr. Sanders was poisoned, although I have a strong suspicion that he was, because there wasn’t an autopsy done and the body hasn’t been exhumed. I obviously can’t prove it unless exhumation is ordered.”

  Judge Graham sat back in her enormous black chair and glared at both of us. “I’m going to go ahead and order it. From what Ms. Ross indicates on this petition, Judge Sanders was suffering from unexplained symptoms for a month before he was killed. And these symptoms are consistent with arsenic poisoning. Somebody was remiss in not doing an autopsy on this poor gentleman, but Ms. Ross is correct – if there was evidence of poisoning of Judge Sanders, then the complexion of the case changes quite a bit.”

  At that, Christina stood up. “No. I won’t let you do this. Let my poor father rest in peace. Please. Please, Judge Graham. I’ve suffered enough.” At that, she burst into tears. “Your honor, you don’t know how much pain I’m in right now. I have five children at home, and my husband is accused of murdering my father. My mother is so depressed that she can’t leave the house. My kids are having nightmares about their paw-paw. Now you’re saying that my father is going to be disturbed? I can’t take this. I just can’t take this. Please your honor. Please.”

  Judge Graham looked like she was taking pity on poor Christina. “I’m very sorry, Ms. Sanders, but Ms. Ross has made a good case. According to her motion, your father showed classic signs of arsenic poisoning. His doctors apparently were never able to find anything wrong with him, although there was something clearly amiss with his health. He ended up being murdered in his home. I agree with Ms. Ross – there’s something rotten in the state of Denmark here, and she deserves to find out what it is.”

  Christina started to wail and then she shot me the death glare. “Ms. Ross, how dare you. How dare you do this to us. I would like this to happen to you, so you can know what it feels like. I would like you to experience losing your father violently and see your loving husband arrested for his murder. I would like you to experience sleepless nights and have to tell your young children that their grandpa is never going to see them, ever again. I would like you to have to experience the pain of knowing that your beloved father is going to be removed from his final resting place and cut open like a frog on a biology table. I want you to experience everything that I’m experiencing, Ms. Ross, and maybe you’ll see what it’s like to be me.”

  The ferocity of her reaction to the petition stunned me. I was expecting her to be upset, but not that upset. And I also was wondering why it was that she would oppose something that could possibly allow her precious “loving” husband to be exonerated. I narrowed my eyes, immediately wondering if she possibly had something to do with the whole murder.

  I shook my head. I was going to have to keep her in mind, but I first was going to have to figure out what her relationship was with her father. If she was the one who had her own father killed and framed her husband, then there had to be something deviant behind the scenes. I made a mental note to check her out.

  I turned back to the judge. “Okay, I need a timetable for the exhumation to happen. Obviously, because of the nature of what I’m requesting, time is of the essence. I would like to be present when the medical examiner does his autopsy. I would imagine that the April, the prosecutor, will want to be there as well. Give me a date for the autopsy and I’ll contact April and let her know.” I was surprised that April wasn’t there for this motion, even though she technically didn’t have to be there. I knew that she was a busy lady, however, so I wasn’t all that surprised.

  “I’ll order an exhumation for next Tuesday,” Judge Graham said. “I’ll notify Ms. Todd and make sure that the two of you can be present for the autopsy.”

  “Thank you, your honor.”

  I turned around and saw that Christina was still giving me the stink-eye, even if she was calmer than she was before. I looked at her and almost saw the wheels turning in her pretty head. I walked past her and she grabbed me by the arm.

  “Ms. Ross, I meant everything I said to you back there. I want you to hurt. I want you to feel pain. You’re putting me through all of this and you don’t seem to care.”

  I took a deep breath, wanting to tell her exactly how much pain I had experienced in my life. Pain that was caused by her husband. I wanted to tell her about how he had his buddy hold his arms above my head while he raped me, and then held my arms while his buddy raped me too. I wanted to tell her that I was dysfunctional because of what Michael did to me and she could never know the depth of pain that I felt.

  I didn’t say any of these things to her, though. I simply walked away. She wasn’t worth the energy.

  Going home that night, I knew that I was going to have to deal with Rina and Abby. I felt awful that they somehow thought that I was going to abandon them. I had no idea why they would think that, but I knew that I had to reassure them.

  I picked up a pizza on the way home. It was a mushroom pizza, because I knew that was their favorite, and I picked it up at D’Bronx, which was their favorite pizza joint. I loved that little deli so much – it had become a Kansas City staple over the years. They were famous for their enormous sandwiches and their absolutely amazing authentic New York pizzas.

  I got in the door and the girls attacked me. They both came up to me and wrapped their arms tightly around me. “Aunt Harper,” Abby said. “We’ve been dying to talk to you. We wanted to talk to you yesterday, and you didn’t want to talk to us and we’ve been paranoid all day long. Talk to us, Aunt Harper. Please.”

  “Okay. Look, I have pizza. Let’s go and sit down at the table and eat. Let’s eat and we’ll talk. I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

  I put the pizza on the center of the table and the two girls got out two plates. Sophia left, because she always had to get home to her own children, and I sat down with the girls.

  Rina put three pieces of pizza on her plate and Abby glared at her.

  “What?” she demanded from Abby.

  “Nothing. You’re always complaining about being fat, yet you’re taking three pieces of pizza.”

  “Hey,” I said to the two girls. “First of all, Rina, you’re not fat. Not in the least. You’re beautiful and I don’t want to hear about being overweight. If you do get overweight, then we’ll talk, but only because I would be concerned about your health if you gain a lot of weight. But you’re a rail.” Rina was 11 years old, 5’2”, and she probably weighed less than 100 pounds. I knew that there was always a ton of pressure of girls to look like the cheerleaders and the popular girls, which usually meant that they couldn’t have any extra pounds. I wasn’t going to have that, though. I was going to nip that stuff in the bud.

  Rina stuck her tongue out at Abby, who gave her a dirty look. “But Aunt Harper, if she keeps eating like this, she’s going to get fat. That’s what I’m saying.”

  I rolled my eyes. “You do you, Abby. Let Rina be. As I told her, if she gains weight to where she becomes overweight, we’ll figure it out from there. For now, she’s beautiful and she’s growing and she doesn’t need your nagging.”

  Rina smiled. “Thank you, Aunt Harper.”

  “Not a problem. Now, we’re all sitting here at the table. I think that I know why you two girls believe that I’m ready to let you go. I feel awful that I was misunderstood. But I told Abby yesterday that the two of
you might not have to call me Aunt Harper for long. What I meant was that I finally have a hearing for your adoption. They’re just going to use the home study that they did before, and Alexis is on board with it. There shouldn’t be any obstacles to my adopting you two. I guess what I meant to say was that I hope that you will soon be able to call me mom.”

  The two girls were quiet, just staring at me. Then I saw that Rina had tiny tears in her eyes and Abby put her arm around her. “We’re going to have you as our mom? Really?” Rina’s voice was tiny, which was not like her at all. “I just can’t believe it. I…”

  Abby came over to my side of the table and hugged me from behind. I put my hand on her arm and closed my eyes. These girls were a part of me. There wasn’t a chance I could let them go. Not now and not ever.

  I stood up and spread my arms. Rina came over and I wrapped my arms around her and Abby. Rina was now sobbing. Her arms were around my waist and she was crying and so was Abby. “We’re going to have a mom. You don’t want to give us back. I was so scared.”

  “Shhhh,” I said. “Why would you ever think that I would give you back? I would never do that. I love you two. I…”

  Rina just shook her head. “I know kids, kids who were in foster care, and they go from one home to the next. I was so afraid that was going to happen to us. We love it here, Aunt Harper. We love it here, and we want to learn everything you do. At least I want to learn. I want to be an attorney just like you. But that’s not why I want to stay here so bad. I just love you, Aunt Harper. So does Abby.”

  Abby nodded her head silently in affirmation of what Rina was saying. “We do love you. And we will be good.”

  I put my arms on both girls and slightly pushed them off of me so that I could look them both in the eye. “Hey,” I said to both of them. “I don’t want you to think that you’re on pins and needles here. You guys are going to mess up from time to time, but that doesn’t mean that I love you any less or that I’m going to take you back. I don’t want either of you to ever imagine that you have to be perfect or good or any of that, because if you mess up, I might send you back to foster care. That ain’t gonna happen. I just want the two of you to be yourselves. Okay?”