Cold Justice (Kali O'Brien series Book 5)

by Jonnie Jacobs

  Jackson sipped his wine. “I couldn’t reach her. And the cops won’t give me the time of day. They issued a very brief press release yesterday morning, and there’s been nothing since.”

  “I’m sure there will be more after Lancaster is charged.”

  Jackson eyed him. “So your office is going ahead and prosecuting?”

  “Of course. Why?”

  “Just curious. Not all arrests lead to prosecutions.”

  “My office has been working closely with homicide on this from the beginning.” Owen had about had it with this subject.

  “I don’t suppose you know whether he washed windows for any of the Bayside Strangler victims?”

  Owen was momentarily stunned. “What’s the matter, Jack? You didn’t express any doubts about Davis in the book.” Not entirely true, Owen conceded silently since Jackson had included enough controversy to propel the book onto the bestseller lists.

  “I’m not expressing doubt now, either,” Jackson said. “Just asking what strikes me as a rather interesting, and obvious, question.”

  “Two different killers, Jack. Remember that. Davis was the Bayside Strangler, and he wasn’t around to commit the new murders.”

  Just then another man approached and Owen was off again, shaking hands and trying his best to impress. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught Jackson watching. He wasn’t thinking of parlaying these latest murders into another book, was he? Owen tried to work his way back to ask Jackson that question directly, but the wave of people greeting him pushed him to the far side of the room. At least there, the conversation focused on education.

  By the time they left for the evening, Owen was hoarse. And badly in need of a glass of scotch.

  Selby fixed one for each of them as soon as they got home, and they took the drinks to their bedroom. Selby slipped out of her dress and hung it in the closet, then came up behind Owen and gave him a hug. “I love you,” she said, her chin pressed against his back.

  “That’s good, because I love you.” Her very presence made him feel whole and grounded. He was lucky to have met her. Luckier still that she’d shown any interest in an aging bureaucrat when she’d been surrounded by Hollywood charm.

  “I think you won over a lot of people tonight,” she said.

  “It was an audience predisposed to be won.”

  “Yes, but there’s a difference between perfunctory approval and genuine admiration.” She was leaning against the dresser now, gazing at him with her soft blue eyes. “You have a winning way with people, Owen.”

  “We’ll see how much of that translates into public endorsements and monetary support.”

  Selby sighed. “It’s sad that’s what politics comes down to.” She turned to look at her own reflection in the mirror, pulling her hair back from her face with her hands. “You know, I hadn’t realized until tonight that I knew that real estate agent who was killed. Jane Parkhurst.”

  “Knew her? How?”

  “Maybe knew isn’t really the right word. I’d met her. Remember when we were thinking of selling the house?”

  Owen nodded. Last year, following their engagement. Moving had been Selby’s idea. She wasn’t keen on the idea of living in “another woman’s house,” as she’d put it. But once she’d started looking at what else was available, she’d more or less given up on the idea. Instead, she’d redecorated.

  Owen undid his tie. “You were working with someone by the name of Carol, I thought.”

  “Right, Carol Johnson. But she had a couple of her fellow agents look at this house to give us an estimate of how much we might get for it, remember?”

  Vaguely. Owen had left the matter pretty much in Selby’s hands.

  “I’m sure Jane Parkhurst was one of the women Carol asked.”

  “And?”

  Selby let her hair fall loose again. “And nothing. It just dawned on me tonight that I’d met her, that’s all.”

  It was an instance of what Owen thought of as woman’s logic. Random thoughts that came out of nowhere and somehow took on significance. He kissed her forehead. “I’ve had enough murder talk for one night. Can we put it behind us now and go to bed?”

  “And?” she said playfully, echoing his own question a moment earlier.

  He gathered her into his arms. “Definitely not nothing.”

  CHAPTER 28

  Kali woke during the night with a start, her heart pounding and her bedclothes in a tangle.

  She’d heard a noise. A faint, unfamiliar scratching.

  Or had she?

  She’d been dreaming, she realized now as she came more fully awake, though she couldn’t recall anything about the dream but a rush of fear. Had she imagined the noise?

  Kali pushed back the covers and listened. Nothing. Loretta was sleeping, undisturbed, on the floor at the foot of her bed. Granted, she was no watchdog, but she was usually quick to react to anything out of the ordinary.

  Just as Kali began to relax, she heard it again. A fleeting sound from somewhere outside.

  Again, Kali listened intently. Her muscles were taut and her body stilled. She held her breath, wanting nothing to get in the way of her ability to hear.

  There it was once more, an uneven scraping near the kitchen. She eased herself out of bed, grabbed the cordless phone from the table, and moved quietly into the hallway.

  Despite the cold, she went barefoot rather than risk the shuffle of slippers on wood. The noise was coming from outside, she reminded herself; she didn’t have to worry about an intruder hearing her. Still, she preferred the cover of stealth.

  She crept down the hallway, through the living room to the kitchen. The house appeared undisturbed, the doors and windows locked. She checked the lower level, as well, and found nothing amiss. Finally, she returned to the kitchen and flipped on the outside light. A movement caught her eye and her heart stopped until she determined that what she’d seen was only a paper bag flapping in the wind. It was caught on the leg of one of her deck chairs that had itself been blown close the house. As she listened now, she heard the sound for what it was, merely the rustling of paper against wood.

  Kali felt her body relax and she breathed deeply for the first time since waking. She had really let her imagination get the best of her this time, and that didn’t happen often. It must have been the dream, she decided. Kali tried, and again failed, to recall what it had been about. But the aura of fear that had been so central to the dream still clung to her. It took her over an hour to get back to sleep.

  <><><>

  Rain arrived with the first light of day. A forceful, pounding rain that made Kali happy to be warm and dry and comfortable in her own bed. Twenty minutes after the alarm had gone off, she was still huddled under the comforter. Finally, she forced herself to get up, but even then she moved more slowly than usual. Rainy days did not bring out the best in her.

  Kali fixed coffee, and to fortify herself against the wet weather, allowed herself an English muffin with jam. She lingered over the paper, where Lancaster’s arrest was front-page news, and then coaxed Loretta outside for her morning constitutional. Instead of hunting for a spot to squat, the dog made a beeline for the paper bag that had wakened Kali the night before.

  “No, you don’t,” Kali said, dashing barefoot into the rain to grab the bag before Loretta tore it to shreds. “Do your business and come back inside.”

  It was a Safeway grocery bag with two Dove candy wrappers and the remnants of a tuna sandwich inside. No wonder Loretta had been attracted to it. Kali wadded the thing up and tossed it into the garbage.

  She was rinsing her hands when curiosity got the better of her. Retrieving the bag, she checked the cash register tape. The purchases had been made the day before at eight-thirty in the evening at a store nowhere near her neighborhood. The candy and the sandwich were part of a larger order that included gum, film, beer, hair gel and cigarettes. So how had the bag ended up outside her back door? She remembered the wind from the night before. No doubt the bag h
ad blown from a neighbor’s yard.

  Kali again tossed it into the garbage. She let Loretta back into the house but only after wiping her muddy paws with an old towel. Finally convinced that the rain wasn’t going to let up anytime soon, Kali headed for her car.

  “I don’t suppose we’ve lucked into a confession?” Owen asked when she was seated across from him in his imposing office later that morning. As he folded his hands, his gold stud cufflinks clanked against the polished surface of his desk.

  “Far from it. He says he didn’t do it.”

  “No surprise there, I guess.” Owen leaned back. “We’ll have to build a case the hard way, piece by piece.”

  Kali shifted in her chair. Owen was apparently leaning toward forging ahead. “The evidence against him isn’t as solid as we’d like,” she said.

  “Enough for the prelim, though?” His tone made it a question, but it was clear he thought the answer was obvious.

  “I’m not even sure about charging him.”

  “What?” Owen looked annoyed. “How can we not charge him? We need to put an end to this.”

  “But what if he’s not the right one?”

  Owen hesitated. He looked at her, then away. “What do you mean?”

  The office was cold. Kali rubbed her hands together. “He’s squirrelly, Owen, but I’m not convinced he’s our killer.”

  “You’re an expert on serial killers now?”

  Kali couldn’t tell if the words were meant to sting, but they did. “You always told us that as prosecutors, we were warriors for truth. That we shouldn’t proceed with a case unless we genuinely believed justice was on our side.” In theory, that was the tenet for prosecutors everywhere, but in too many instances, politics and personal grandeur came first. Owen, though, was a man of principle. Or he had been at one time.

  “Come on, Kali. Don’t go soft on me.”

  “Soft? All I—”

  Owen snapped at her. “Maybe you’ve spent too many years as a defense attorney.”

  “And maybe you’ve devoted so much energy to running for governor, you’ve lost sight of the fact that you’re still the district attorney.”

  The silence that followed was palpable. Kali felt the bite of her own words as much as she did Owen’s.

  She started to apologize, but Owen cut her off. “No, I’m the one who was out of line. You’re doing what you should be doing. What I asked you to do in the beginning.” He dropped his head into his hands and kneaded his forehead with his fingers. “You’re right. We can’t charge him until we’re sure we’ve got a case against him.”

  “With luck, we’ll have the evidence soon.” Maybe not soon enough, but she was relieved she didn’t have to battle Owen over it.

  “I just want this mess done with,” he said, sounding something like a petulant child. “The primary is less than two months away.”

  “I know, the timing is bad.” Worse, even, for the victims. But she knew Owen well enough to feel certain he hadn’t lost sight of that.

  He raised his head. “This morning’s Chronicle ran the results of their latest poll, conducted yesterday after word of the arrest was out. My popularity increased by seven points.” He gave her a skewed grin. “It was one of those quick and dirty surveys so the results are probably meaningless, but it was still a nice feeling.”

  “If the voters had half a brain, you’d be so far ahead this case wouldn’t matter.”

  He smiled. “Thanks. But unfortunately, it matters a lot. Even with the seven-point gain, I haven’t reclaimed the edge I had before this all started.”

  It wasn’t just the murders, Kali realized, but the play they’d received in the press. She was sure that Tony Molina had done what he could to keep the interest alive.

  Owen sat back in his chair and ran a hand through his full head of silver hair. “So, tell me what doesn’t sit right with you about Lancaster.”

  That was hard to explain because it was more a feeling than anything concrete. She looked out window. The rain had not let up. “He’s not strong, for one thing.”

  “It doesn’t take strength to strangle someone,” Owen responded. “Just know-how.”

  “But he had to accost his victims, move them at some point, pose the bodies.”

  “Know-how, again.”

  “He can’t spell worth a darn,” Kali said. “And I doubt he’s much of a poet.”

  Owen gave a short laugh. “Our killer isn’t much of a poet either.”

  “You know what I mean. If Lancaster was going to write a taunting note, I bet it wouldn’t be in the form of a poem. Besides, he doesn’t even own a computer.”

  “There are dozens of places where the public can access computers.”

  Was he simply playing devil’s advocate, or was Owen actually trying to talk her into something? Political ambition colored the thinking of even the most honest men.

  “Lancaster had connections to both victims,” Owen pointed out. “That in itself raises a red flag. The fibers from his van were similar to those found on both Anne’s and Jane’s clothing, and the rope in his trunk was consistent with that used in the murders.”

  “None of that is conclusive.”

  Owen pressed on as though she hadn’t spoken. “His van matched the description given by a possible witness to one of the murders, and he did call in sick the night Anne Bailey was killed.”

  “There’s no hard evidence, though. It’s all circumstantial.”

  “That’s often the case, as you well know.”

  But this felt different somehow. “It’s the total picture, Owen. Our killer wants us to think he’s the Bayside Strangles He’s clever and manipulative. A gamesman, in fact. Lancaster is just some dopey guy with a kinky interest in dolls.”

  Owen scratched his cheek. “I don’t see that those two portraits are so far off. He’s certainly playing games with those dolls of his.”

  “But why the Bayside Strangler? He claims never to have heard of the earlier murders or Dwayne Allen Davis.”

  “You don’t honestly believe every word he says, do you? Especially now that he’s got an attorney at his side.”

  “Of course not.” Lancaster’s attorney, a veteran public defender, had no doubt coached him well.

  “I understand the point you’re trying to make,” Owen said reasonably. He leaned forward, resting his forearms on his desk. “But I think you should ask yourself if you’re being overly cautious. Sure, prosecutors are supposed to believe in their cases but that doesn’t mean there’s never the slightest doubt. We’d never prosecute anyone if that was the standard.”

  Was she being too careful? That was part of the reason she’d decided years ago that she wasn’t cut out to be a prosecutor. There was always a niggling of doubt in her mind.

  Lancaster had the means and the opportunity to commit the crimes. As for motive, who could fathom what went on in the mind of a serial killer? All Kali knew was that his dressing of the dolls was eerily similar to what had happened to their victims.

  “I don’t want to press charges if we can’t make a case, Kali. But neither do I want to let this case hang in limbo if we don’t have to.” Owen pushed back his chair and stood. “In any event, I’d like to issue a press release. So far there’s been very little official from either this office or the police, and I think it’s time to put our own spin on events. Nothing detailed or specific, but if we don’t come forward with something, all the public will have is media speculation. Can you have a draft ready by this afternoon?”

  “Sure.”

  “Get it to me by two o’clock if you can.”

  <><><>

  Kali returned to her desk by way of the coffee machine. If it weren’t for the wet weather, she’d have gone out for a cup of the good stuff, but even the prospect of a full-bodied latte couldn’t tempt her from the relative comfort of a dry office building. She took her cup back to her desk and had just begun working on the press release when her phone rang. She picked it up on the first ring.
<
br />   “Hi, it’s Nathan. Hope I’m not interrupting anything important.”

  “On a day like this, I welcome interruptions.”

  “One of those times you’d rather be anywhere but work?”

  “Sort of. Speaking of which, I tried calling you. To thank you for the flowers. I couldn’t find anyone at Global Investment who recognized your name. What office are you in?”

  An embarrassed laugh. “No office anymore. I had a run-in with my boss and quit.”

  “Quit? Just like that?”

  “I’ve been thinking about doing something different anyway.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, I’m exploring a couple of options. Let me give you my cell phone number. It’s probably the best way to reach me.”

  She jotted down the number he rattled off.

  “Glad you liked the flowers. I considered roses, but then thought they might be too much for a thank-you.”

  Kali felt a prickle of anxiety. “Why roses?”

  “Aren’t they woman’s best friend?” He laughed. “Or maybe that’s diamonds. Anyway, I enjoyed spending the evening with you. I’d like to do it again. Soon.” He paused, maybe waiting for her to jump in. When she didn’t, he asked, “How about dinner tomorrow night?”

  Kali had wanted to thank him for the flowers because it seemed the polite thing to do. But she wasn’t at all certain she wanted to see him again. And this talk of roses cast a bit of a pall over whatever warm feelings she might have had for him. “I’m afraid I’m busy tomorrow evening.”

  “You free tonight by any chance?”

  “Sorry.” This, at least, was a legitimate excuse. She had plans with Margot.

  “Guess I shouldn’t wait until the last minute.”

  “I’m sorry, I—”

  “So pick a date. My evenings are open.”

  Now he’d put her on the spot. She hedged. “My calendar is at home. I’ll have to check and get back to you.”

  “You’re a popular woman.” His voice had become cooler.