Sleeping Beauty

by Phillip Margolin

  “No,” Ashley answered in a voice bereft of strength. “I want to get this over with.”

  “You’re certain, Miss Spencer?” the judge asked. “We can recess.”

  “No,” she answered more forcefully. “I can answer the question.”

  Ashley turned to face Maxfield. She pointed at him.

  “He was standing over Dean Van Meter. He was holding a knife. There was blood on the knife. I must have made some sound because he turned toward the window and stared right at me. Then he moved and I saw…I saw my…my mother.”

  “Now, let me clarify this point. Did you know the identity of the two women then?”

  “No. I couldn’t see their faces. It was dark in the boathouse.”

  “But you could see the defendant?”

  Ashley felt stronger now. She glared at Maxfield. “Definitely. It was him. He was very close to the window, holding the knife. There was blood all over it.”

  “What happened next?”

  “I ran and he chased me. I got to the dorm and told the security guard. He called the police.”

  Delilah checked her notes. She had covered everything she wanted to bring out from Ashley for purposes of the preliminary hearing. The medical examiner’s report and the stipulations established that Terri Spencer had been murdered and that Casey Van Meter was in a coma because of an assault. Ashley had placed Joshua Maxfield at the scene of the murder and the assault moments after Ashley had heard two screams. She had also established that a woman had shouted something inside the boathouse seconds before Ashley had seen the defendant holding the bloody knife that had been used to murder Terri Spencer.

  “No further questions,” Delilah said, regretting that Ashley would now be at the mercy of Maxfield’s attorney. She had seen how hard even the friendly questions had been for her witness. Barry Weller was a decent sort. Delilah hoped that he would not be too rough on Ashley.

  “Any cross, Mr. Weller?” Judge Stillman asked.

  Weller started to say something, but Joshua Maxfield touched him on the arm and whispered in his ear.

  “May I have a moment to consult with my client, Your Honor?”

  “Of course,” Stillman said.

  Weller leaned toward Maxfield.

  “We need to talk,” Maxfield said.

  “I’ll ask for a recess after I cross.”

  “No, now. We have to talk right now,” Maxfield insisted.

  “Look, Joshua, Spencer is rattled. I don’t want to give her time to get her legs back under her.”

  “Cross won’t be necessary, Barry. I want to change my plea to guilty.”

  “What!” Weller said in a tone loud enough to attract attention. He looked around briefly. Everyone in the courtroom was staring at him. Barry lowered his voice.

  “Are you serious?”

  “Very.”

  “If you plead, it doesn’t mean you’ll avoid a death sentence. You understand that the DA can demand a sentencing hearing if she still wants to go for death?”

  Maxfield looked over his shoulder at the spectators. Miles Van Meter caught his eye for a moment and Maxfield looked away.

  “People are listening to us,” he said nervously. “Can we go someplace where we’ll have some privacy?” He pointed at the door to the jury room. “Is that a place we can talk?”

  “Let me ask the judge.”

  Weller stood. “May I approach the bench, Your Honor?”

  The judge summoned the attorneys to the dais. As soon as Delilah joined him, Weller leaned toward the judge.

  “Your Honor, my client and I need to discuss an important matter in private. Could we take a brief recess? Perhaps we could use the jury room.”

  “This young woman is barely holding on, Barry,” the judge said. “I want to get her out of here as soon as possible.”

  “Without revealing any confidences, Judge, I can tell you that the outcome of our conversation might benefit Miss Spencer.”

  Judge Stillman looked puzzled.

  “I have no objection, Your Honor,” Delilah said. She thought Ashley could use a break.

  “Very well. You can use the jury room.”

  The judge called over the court guards and told them that she was going to let Weller confer with his client during the break. Two guards escorted Weller and Maxfield to the jury room while another corrections officer left the courtroom to watch the door that opened into the hallway.

  Judge Stillman ordered a recess and left the bench. The spectators filed into the hall or stood chatting at their seats. Delilah walked over to the witness box.

  “How you feeling?” she asked Ashley.

  “I wish it was over.”

  “Me too, but you were good up there and you’ll handle Weller’s cross just fine if you remember my simple rules.”

  “Think before I answer, always tell the truth, don’t be afraid to say that I don’t know an answer, and always ask Mr. Weller to explain his question if I don’t understand it.”

  Delilah beamed. “A-plus, young lady. You’re ready for law school right now. Come on down out of that chair and stretch your legs for a while.”

  Ashley and Delilah walked over to the counsel table. Larry Birch, Tony Marx, and Jerry Philips joined them. The Van Meters asked the DA how she thought the proceedings were going. Delilah said that she had no doubt that Maxfield would be bound over for trial. She complimented Ashley again for doing so well during her direct examination.

  “What are they doing in the jury room?” Ashley asked Delilah.

  “I don’t know.”

  Wallace did have a hunch but she didn’t want to get Ashley’s hopes up. The DA suspected that Ashley’s testimony had convinced Maxfield that he would lose at trial. She hoped that he was asking his lawyer to negotiate a deal.

  “Do you think…?” Before Philips could finish his question, a man in an orange jumpsuit staggered out of the jury room. The guard stepped back, startled, before grabbing him. Delilah stared at the prisoner’s face.

  “That’s Weller, the lawyer,” she shouted at the guard as she crossed the courtroom. “Where’s Maxfield?”

  The guard looked confused.

  Delilah pointed at Weller. “This is the lawyer. Your prisoner changed clothes with him. He’s escaping.”

  The guard took one more look at the man he was holding and finally figured out what was going on.

  “Watch Ashley,” Larry Birch told his partner as he rushed toward the jury room. Delilah was already inside. A conference table that seated twelve dominated the long, narrow room. The guard who had been posted in the hallway was sprawled on the floor between the table and the corridor door. Larry Birch raced past Delilah and checked the guard for a pulse. He was breathing.

  “Get a doctor up here,” he told Delilah as he pulled his gun and entered the corridor outside Judge Stillman’s courtroom. Two women gasped and moved against the wall. A muscular construction worker had the opposite reaction-he looked ready to take on the armed detective. Birch held up his badge.

  “I’m a police detective,” Birch said. “Did you see a man in a suit leave this room?”

  The man shook his head without ever taking his eyes off Birch’s gun. The detective ran down the hall toward the wide marble stairway that led to the courthouse lobby. He held his gun at his side to avoid a panic. Most people rode the elevators. The detective guessed that Maxfield would take the stairs where there was little traffic. The few people he passed were concerned about their cases, or courthouse business, and paid no attention to him. They wouldn’t have paid attention to Maxfield, either.

  Metal detectors had been set up in the lobby at the front of the courthouse. A number of security guards were screening the lawyers, employees, and litigants who were entering the building. No one was paying any attention to the people who were leaving. Birch walked outside into a crisp, cool afternoon. A summer rain had fallen a short time before, but the sun was shining now and the air was heavy with ozone. He looked up and down the street and
across Fourth to the park. There was no sign of Joshua Maxfield.

  When Larry Birch returned to the courtroom, Barry Weller was seated at the defense table, surrounded by Judge Stillman, the Van Meters, Delilah Wallace, Tony Marx, Jerry Philips, and Ashley Spencer.

  “I walked into the jury room and put my briefcase on the table,” Weller was saying. “Maxfield was behind me. Before I could turn, he put on a chokehold. It was so tight I couldn’t shout or breathe. He wrestled me to the floor and wrapped his legs around me. It was some kind of wrestling hold. I struggled for a few seconds and passed out. When I came to, I was dressed in Maxfield’s jumpsuit and my clothes and briefcase were gone.”

  “Do you have any idea where he went?” Tony Marx asked.

  “No. He never said anything that made me think he’d try something like this. He was planning on writing a book about the case. He seemed resigned to going through a trial.”

  Marx spotted his partner. “Any luck?”

  Birch shook his head. “Did you put out an alert?”

  “Yeah. It sounds like Maxfield’s been planning this for a while. Weller thinks he was hired because he looks a lot like Maxfield.”

  Birch studied the lawyer for a moment. “Damn. That never occurred to me.”

  “Or me,” Weller said sheepishly.

  A doctor came out of the jury room followed by the guard who had been attacked. The guard looked shaky but he was walking on his own. The doctor spotted Weller and walked over to him.

  “Let me take a look at you to make sure you don’t need to go to the hospital.”

  Everyone moved away to let the doctor work. Delilah noticed how pale Ashley looked.

  “It’s okay,” Delilah assured her terrified witness. “We’ll protect you.”

  Ashley sank onto a chair. Her breathing was shallow.

  “He’s going to run, Ashley,” the DA said. “The first time he was captured he was in Nebraska. Maxfield doesn’t want to be anywhere near you. He wants to get as far away from Oregon as he can.”

  Ashley looked like someone who had seen her own death. “Maybe he’ll run now,” she said in a voice devoid of energy, “but he’ll come back for me. He’s killed everyone I love and he’s tried to kill me. I don’t know why he wants me dead but he does and he won’t stop.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Larry Birch stopped at McDonald’s to get Ashley dinner before driving her to the dorm. By the time they arrived, a policeman was sitting outside her room. Birch told her that another officer was patrolling the grounds.

  Ashley did not like being the only person in the dorm. After Maxfield’s arrest, she was lonely and bored. With Maxfield on the loose, the empty building felt threatening. It was old and musty, with dark wood paneling and little natural light. Without the noise made by the students, Ashley could hear the eerie whine the wind made when it slipped through cracks in the wall. The building creaked, and Ashley was certain that she’d heard scuttling sounds in the walls.

  Before she went to bed, Ashley turned out the lights in her room and stared out the window. The dormitory was next to the science building, and the front faced the quadrangle. Ashley’s room was at the rear of the building and faced the woods. Streetlights illuminated a lot of the campus, but there were no lights in the dense forest. When the dorm was full, ambient light from the rooms cast a glow over the trees. The rooms were deserted now, and the only light came from the dim glow of a quarter moon.

  Ashley watched the trees sway in the wind. She looked up at the stars. Where were her mother and father? She hoped that there was a heaven or some kind of afterlife where they were together and happy. She wanted to believe that they weren’t simply decomposing; that there was something more than rotting flesh and naked bone to mark their time on Earth. A friend of hers was into New Age stuff. She spoke of auras and spiritual energy left behind by the dead. Ashley remembered how she used to feel her father’s spirit inside her when she was little and he could not make it to her soccer game, but the brutal murders that had taken her parents from her had also murdered her belief in magic. Ashley had searched for some trace of her parents-their spirit, a soul that lived on when the body was gone-but all she felt was an absence; a cold, hollow feeling that was the opposite of life.

  Ashley closed her shades and got into bed. She cried silently as she pulled up the covers. She used to say a prayer at bedtime, but she had not been able to since her father died. Now she just hoped that she would sleep without dreams.

  The bedside clock read 2:58 when Ashley woke up. She had finished off a large Coke at McDonald’s and had to go to the bathroom. It was hot, and she’d slept in panties and a T-shirt. She remembered the guard and pulled on sweatpants.

  The policeman who was guarding her room stood up when he heard the knob turn. He was in his mid-twenties and wore his blond hair in a crewcut. He looked strong. He had been reading Sports Illustrated, and Ashley caught him trying to hide it.

  “I’m just going to the bathroom,” she said, a little embarrassed about having to discuss her toilet habits.

  “Okay,” he said. Then he smiled. “I’ll be here all night.”

  Ashley closed the door behind her. Low-wattage bulbs created a pattern of shadows and dimly lit spaces on the floor as she shuffled groggily down the hall. The bathroom was just beyond the stairs. Still half asleep, Ashley went into one of the stalls and peed. She was wiping when she heard a noise. It was so quiet in the dorm that she could hear sounds from any place on the floor. She had no idea where this one had come from, but it unnerved her because it sounded like a gasp of pain.

  Ashley told herself that she was being paranoid but that wasn’t true. She had a lot of justification for her fear. She decided to wait before flushing. If someone was out there she didn’t want him to know where she was. She opened the bathroom door wide enough to let her peek into the hallway. Ashley could see the hall outside her room. The guard was still in his chair but he was slumped sideways at an odd angle as if he was sleeping, which made no sense. She had just talked to him. He knew that she was only going to be gone for a few minutes.

  Ashley was attracted by a red glow to the left of the police officer. It took a moment to figure out that she was seeing the digital clock on her nightstand. That meant that the door to her room was open. She was certain she had shut it. The digital glow disappeared then reappeared. A shape had passed in front of the clock. Ashley’s heart raced. Joshua Maxfield had killed the guard and he was in her room.

  Ashley had to fight to keep from racing down the stairs. She forced herself to move quietly. Halfway to the second-floor landing she heard the sound of her closet door slamming against the wall. She moved faster. Moments later, footsteps pounded along the third-floor landing toward the bathroom.

  Ashley stopped in the shadows in the entry hall. Maxfield was going to figure out that she wasn’t on the third floor and come looking for her. She could try to hide in the deserted dormitory but it would be easier for Maxfield to trap her in a confined space. There were many more places to hide outside. And there was the officer who was patrolling the grounds! She’d find him and he would radio for help.

  Footsteps thudded down the stairs from the third floor. Ashley ran into the night and around the side of the dormitory. Her feet came out from under her and she sprawled on the ground. When she rolled over to stand up she found herself staring into the dead eyes of the other patrolman. His head lolled to one side. The material in the front of his shirt was ripped open where the officer had been stabbed repeatedly. There was also a red gash that started at one side of his neck and ended on the other side.

  Ashley fought the urge to throw up and struggled to her feet. Maxfield would be coming fast. She had to run. Ashley raced toward the woods, which were dark and offered many places to hide. When her guards didn’t check in someone was bound to come to find out why. Maxfield would not hunt for her all night and risk being discovered. If she stayed concealed until morning she would be safe.

  A p
ath led into the woods. Ashley did not take it. She ran along the edge of the forest for several steps then disappeared between two trees. She was just in time. A figure darted across the front lawn of the dormitory and stopped on the quadrangle. He passed under two streetlights and Ashley got a good look at him. He was wearing a ski mask and gloves. Ashley couldn’t see his face but he had the height and build of Joshua Maxfield and he looked identical to the man who had killed her father.

  The man turned slowly in a circle. He stopped when he faced the woods. He seemed to be staring right at her. Ashley held her breath. She prayed that he would not come searching for her. Her prayers were answered. As Ashley watched, the intruder disappeared into the night.

  Ashley suddenly remembered Henry Van Meter and the other people in the mansion. She had to warn them about Maxfield. Ashley was barefoot, and the forest floor had done some damage to the soles of her feet. Fortunately, the Academy was a field of green with lawn everywhere. She hugged the buildings and crept along the side of the dormitory until she reached the dead policeman.

  Ashley gagged, squeezed her eyes shut, and took a deep breath. She could not afford to panic. She knelt down and searched for the officer’s radio. It was missing. If she was going to warn Henry Van Meter she would have to go to the mansion.

  Ashley was hidden by the shadows at the side of the dorm but she would be in the glow of the streetlights if she took even a few steps. She couldn’t risk crossing the quadrangle, so she ran behind the dormitory and followed the backs of the school buildings to the end of the quadrangle. She peeked around the corner of the building closest to Administration. She didn’t see Maxfield anywhere.

  Ashley took a deep breath and sprinted across the open ground to the rear of the Administration building. Now she was on the same side of the quadrangle as the gym, and there was another building to shield her. If Maxfield hadn’t seen her sprint to the Administration building, she would be safe.

  Ashley reached the rear of the gym when she heard a sound. There was a hill at the back of the building that led down to the soccer field. Ashley dove over the edge and pressed herself against the cold grass. Sneakers scraped against the cement path that circled the gym. Ashley peered over the edge of the hill. A man opened the door to the gym and slipped inside.