by Robert Ellis
“What happened?” he whispered.
“I found you in the snow.”
He took in the news as he tried to collect himself. His arms and legs felt weighted down. He didn’t know how he got here or why, and couldn’t think through the pain eating at him from just above his brow.
“I’ve got a headache,” he said, propping himself up.
She left the warm washcloth against his forehead and rose. The kitchen was to his back, and he couldn’t see what she was doing. As he listened to several cabinets open and close, his eyes returned to the fire. The oak logs were dry, the heat reaching him with its soothing touch from across the room.
Sally sat down on the couch, passing him two Tylenol caplets and a glass of cold tap water.
“What time is it?” he asked.
“Three in the morning. When you didn’t come back to the hospital, I got worried and called a cab. You were lying beneath a tree by the front door.”
Her words were barely audible, her eyes swollen with worry. Teddy swallowed the pills and noted that she was trembling. Barnett had been in an accident, he recalled. He’d come to their house to pick up some things for Sally. He remembered seeing blood all over the snow in the driveway. What happened after that wasn’t clear. It had been dark, and he wondered if he hadn’t run into a tree.
Sally took the glass and set it down on the table. Then she picked up a tube of Neosporin and a large Band-Aid and set to mending the wound on Teddy’s head.
“It just missed your temple,” she said. “Do you think you need to see a doctor?”
“I’m okay,” he said, even though he wasn’t sure. His headache seemed way too big for a couple of pills. “How’s Jim?”
“They won’t know for a few days,” she said, turning her face away. “But they think he’ll make it.” She covered her eyes with her hands. “The car crushed his legs. They won’t tell me if he’ll ever walk again. His recovery will take time, they said. A long time. I’m not very good at living on my own.”
Teddy listened to her voice trail off and didn’t know how to respond. The reality of what had happened to Barnett seemed so overwhelming. So horrible. She turned back to him, dabbing his wound with Neosporin and applying the large bandage. As she smoothed her hands over his forehead, he noticed the smell of fresh coffee brewing in the kitchen.
Sally got up and left the room. A few minutes later, she returned with two piping hot mugs.
“Jim’s a fighter,” Teddy said, trying to sound hopeful.
She didn’t say anything. She couldn’t.
“If the doctor’s are saying he’s gonna make it, then he will,” he said.
She listened to him and nodded, taking a seat at the other end of the couch and sipping her coffee. Barnett was strong willed and in good shape. Teddy had spent enough time with him to know that if the man had a chance, he’d take it and run with it. While it was true that he seemed to be dipping into an unknown variety of medications recently, Teddy had never seen him do it before they took the Holmes case.
“He’s been upset lately, hasn’t he?” Teddy said.
She turned to the fire without responding, her expression blank as she stared at the flames.
“I’ve never seen him like this before,” he said. “It’s got something to do with Oscar Holmes.”
“He wants it to end quickly,” she whispered.
“That’s the part I don’t understand.”
“He’s lived a troubled life, Teddy.”
“Holmes, you mean.”
She nodded, still gazing at the fire. “His family’s been worried about him for most of his life.”
“How so?”
She paused, thinking it over. “He never seemed to fit in,” she said after a moment. “He always had to do things his own way. There have been times as an adult when he couldn’t take care of himself very well. He’s had a problem with depression, but I think Jim already told you that. His family knew it would come to something like this one day and it has.”
“Jim told me he’s known the family for a long time,” he said. “Who are they?”
She turned to him, the fire reflecting in her eyes. “Oscar Holmes is my brother, Teddy. My maiden name is Holmes.”
It settled in with the subtlety of a death ray.
Oscar Holmes was Sally’s brother. Holmes was Barnett’s brother-in-law. It settled into the room like a deeply kept secret that had just been ripped open and exposed. As far as Sally knew, her own brother had brutally murdered two young girls. And now the DA was saying there might be ten more.
Another family tragedy was unfolding, Teddy realized. He thought about Barnett’s desk drawer again—how it had become the pharmacy drawer in recent days. And Barnett’s attitude from the beginning—how he couldn’t be reached on the phone, and when he could, all he wanted was to end the case quickly and make sure Holmes got the care his family thought he needed. Barnett was the family, not a mysterious friend from childhood or a client with the firm. The murders weren’t something to be read about from the safe distance of words printed in a newspaper. Jim and Sally Barnett were part of the story, the crime, intimately connected to it by family. No wonder Barnett wasn’t seeing things clearly.
Teddy set down his coffee mug. It occurred to him that the night Holmes checked into prison he’d tried to make a collect call to his sister but she wouldn’t accept the charges. That sister was Sally Barnett. He looked at her at the other end of the couch, her head against a pillow and her eyes closed. Her breathing had quieted and it appeared as if she was sleeping. He wondered why she hadn’t taken the call that night. It seemed odd, curious. She hadn’t paid her brother a visit either.
Teddy lifted the blanket away and draped it over her. He slipped into his shoes and stood. His legs wobbled at first, and as he steadied himself and felt the ache deepen inside his head, he wondered if he shouldn’t call a doctor. He saw his coat on the chair by the fire and pulled it on. As he walked to the front door and looked outside, he noticed it was snowing again. He could see the impression his body had made in the snow right outside the door. Stepping out into the cold air, he buttoned up and looked at the marks he’d made crawling up from the driveway. The falling snow had almost filled them in. Curiously, there were a faint set of footprints running alongside the same path. He stared at them for a while, wondering what he was looking at. It didn’t really seem like he’d crawled to the door. Instead, it looked more like his body had been dragged.
The fog lifted and burned away in a single moment. He remembered the Sterling silver shot glass with tall ships and whales etched into its side. He hadn’t run into a tree. Nothing that occurred here tonight had been an accident. He glanced back at the snow falling to the ground, softening the impressions and wiping them out.
He bolted across the lawn to his car, ignoring the pain. Ripping open the glove box, he fished out his flashlight and switched it on. Then he hurried into the yard, picking up the footprints and following them across the drive into the trees. It was difficult to see them, the impressions had become vague—some of them already obliterated by the falling snow.
There was a man, he remembered. The shape of someone standing in the darkness right behind him. A dog had been barking from somewhere in the neighborhood, but Teddy hadn’t understood it as a warning.
He moved to the spot where he remembered standing with the silver shot glass. The place he’d been knocked out and fallen to the ground. He didn’t expect to still find it here, but knelt down anyway, sifting through the snow with his hands. After fifteen minutes, he’d covered the entire area and knew it was pointless. The man had obviously returned for the shot glass, seen Teddy holding it in his scarf, and struck him as he turned.
Teddy looked back at the house, watching the lights in the windows switch off one by one. The dark house looked like every other house in the neighborhood. When the breeze picked up again and he heard the branches rattling over head, he pretended he wasn’t afraid even though he really was
. He turned his flashlight the other way and took a step into the vacant lot bordering Barnett’s house. Raking the beam of light across the snow, the tracks leading from tree to tree toward the street were gone now. Everything the man had left behind was either gone or erased, except for those impressions, however fleeting, Teddy kept locked in his head.
TWENTY-NINE
Jackie, Barnett’s assistant, clicked open a window with her mouse and pointed at the monitor with a shaky finger. Teddy leaned in for a closer look. It was a press release announcing that Nash had joined the legal team defending Holmes.
“I told him not to send it to the DA,” she said in a nervous voice. “I told him not to, but he did. And look what happened. Sally called and told me he may never walk again.”
She printed a copy and handed it to Teddy. She was upset, even frightened. What she was implying—that Alan Andrews might have had something to do with Barnett being run over—caught Teddy by surprise.
He sat down in the chair beside her desk and studied the copy. It was a press release, but it read more like a negative hit piece in a political campaign. Nash’s name was mentioned, along with his biography. But the results of his legal workshop were detailed as well. An innocent man had been executed as a result of Andrews’s mishandling of the case. Even worse, Andrews had suppressed evidence to win the conviction. Before his election as district attorney, he’d been branded an overzealous prosecutor by more than one judge. Nash believed that there were other cases where the DA had been less than forthright and planned to continue his investigation of the man in his workshop after the holidays. Making sure Andrews got it right in the Holmes case would only be the beginning.
It was clear to Teddy that both Barnett and Nash wanted to drag Andrews’s nose through the mud. It was a message. A first salvo. Do the deal or Andrews’s name could become the issue, not Holmes. Take the death penalty off the table, or else.
Teddy actually admired it. Particularly now that he knew Holmes was Barnett’s brother-in-law. It was ugly, even brutal, a small sample of what Barnett would do to Andrews’s name and reputation in order to save Holmes’s life.
“Do you think it had anything to do with what happened?” Jackie asked.
Teddy looked up and saw the fear still haunting her.
“No,” he said, even though he wasn’t sure. “What happened to Jim was an accident.”
He didn’t want to scare her. Didn’t want to tell her what was really on his mind.
He’d been thinking it over since four in the morning. When he finally got home, he couldn’t sleep. Instead, he stretched out on top of the bed watching the snow swirl in the breeze outside his window and letting his mind drift. He couldn’t be sure, of course, but he didn’t think the man who ran over Barnett last night was the same person who murdered Darlene Lewis and Valerie Kram. Whoever it was had left his silver shot glass behind and returned for it. When he saw Teddy had found it, he hit him over the head and knocked him out. But the man had done one more thing before leaving that would seem to rule him out as the killer. He’d dragged Teddy’s unconscious body out of the darkness of the vacant lot and left him in front of the entrance to Barnett’s house. The distance from the empty lot to the front door of the house was in excess of thirty yards and would have required considerable effort. Even risk with the house lights on.
Why?
The only answer that seemed to make sense was that the man wanted Teddy to be found. He’d smashed Teddy in the head hard enough to knock him out, but he didn’t want to kill him.
Now, in the face of what Jackie had shown him, it seemed to make some degree of sense. If not sense, it was a perversion worth considering. Barnett’s accident meant Teddy was essentially alone in his defense of Oscar Holmes. While it was true he still had Nash, the pressure on the DA had been coming from Barnett. Andrews must have been livid when he read that fax—seen his future in politics in jeopardy again and gone ballistic.
He thought about Michael Jackson.
Not the dancer, but the detective who’d worked with Andrews from the beginning and came off like Dr. Gloom. The man who had given Teddy the tour of Holmes’s apartment, following him around from room to room as he chained cigarettes and gagged on the smoke.
Teddy wasn’t sure why the man popped into his head, but remembered that old gun he saw clipped to the detective’s belt. The ominous feeling that hit him the moment they met. Jackson was another nightcrawler and looked like a real drinker. The kind of guy who walked into a bar, picked a seat away from the lights, and made sure he faced the door. Had he been the one, he probably would’ve brought a flask. Not for courage, but to keep warm.
Teddy checked his watch. It was seven-thirty, his breakfast meeting with Carolyn Powell just fifteen minutes away. Slipping the press release into his briefcase, he left Jackie at her desk and told her he’d be back soon.
THIRTY
She was waiting for him at a table on the other side of the open dining room at the Marathon Grill. As he moved toward her, he caught her black suit. The material was tight fitting and carefully tailored, rolling with the smooth contours of her body instead of hiding them. She wasn’t wearing a blouse beneath her jacket, just a thin gold necklace. When her blue-gray eyes popped over the menu, he saw them still reaching out at him and couldn’t believe that they’d made love last night. She was gorgeous, the most striking woman he had ever seen, let alone been with.
As he reached the table, her eyes rose to the cut just above his eyebrow. Teddy had removed the bandage deciding the wound needed air and light.
“What happened to you?” she asked.
“We can talk about it later.”
He sat down across from her and picked up the menu. He could smell her skin, the faint sent of body lotion and shampoo. He was hungry, ravenous, though he probably could have skipped the food.
“Tell me what happened right now,” she said.
“I ran into a tree.”
She lowered her menu and gave him a look. She wasn’t buying it.
“Do you often run into trees?” she asked.
“Okay,” he said, deciding to spill it out. “I went over to Barnett’s last night to bring some things back to the hospital for his wife. When I got there, I realized that it hadn’t been an accident. Someone deliberately ran over him. I even found an antique shot glass made of Sterling silver that someone had left behind in the snow. But I didn’t know the guy was still there. When I turned, he hit me over the head with something and knocked me out.”
She started laughing.
She looked good when she laughed. And either it was contagious, or hearing himself say what happened aloud was so convoluted, Teddy began laughing, too.
“Every word of it’s true,” he said.
“And I suppose when you woke up, the antique shot glass had vanished.”
He nodded slowly. She started laughing again.
He didn’t want to say anything, but when you fall for someone, it doesn’t really take a lot of work. You don’t have much choice in the matter. It sort of just hits and then you know. He looked down at the menu, his mind reeling to the point where the entrées looked as if they’d been written in a foreign language.
“I’ll bet this silver shot glass had something unique about it,” he heard her saying. “Some sort of ornate design.”
“As a matter of fact it did.”
“I thought so. What was the design?”
“Tall ships and whales,” he said.
When she finally stopped laughing, he looked at the warm smile on her face, took the hit and just knew.
“Em,” she said. “My advice would be to keep your eyes open in the future and stay away from the trees.”
Had she not been the prosecutor in the Holmes case he would have yanked her out of the chair and pulled her into his arms. Had he not been the defense attorney, he would’ve stood up and kissed her on the spot. But they were professionals, keeping a secret Teddy knew anyone watching them could guess.
He closed the menu thinking he was dyslexic. He still knew what breakfast was, and when the waiter filled their cups with coffee and took their order, Teddy ordered from memory. Bacon and eggs, over easy with whole-wheat toast.
At this hour, more than half the tables were full, but it was a big room with a thirty-foot ceiling. They could talk freely without worrying much about being overheard through the din.
“So how’s Barnett?” she asked.
“I called the hospital before I came in. They say he’s gonna pull through. It’ll take a while though.”
He stirred a packet of sugar into his coffee and tasted it. It was strong and hot, and he began to relax. On the walk over he’d had a chance to think about Barnett’s accident, and the possibility that Andrews may have played a role. He’d only touched on it before, and Powell laughed. Still, he felt the need to press the issue with her. Other than the murderer, the only one who gained anything by running over Barnett was Andrews. Teddy was fully aware that it could have been an attempt to just scare Barnett. An errand given to Michael Jackson that got out of hand when Barnett fell down on the ice and couldn’t get out of the way. Andrews had proven himself an asshole at the autopsy yesterday. And Jackson seemed more than capable of carrying out anything that he might be asked to do.
“How well do you know Andrews,” he said.
“I’ve been a prosecutor for ten years. Why?”
Teddy leaned closer. “I guess what I’m asking is how far do you think he’d go to win a case.”
She set her cup down and looked at him without saying anything. She wasn’t laughing anymore and he could see her wheels turning at high speed.
“A case like this,” Teddy said. “Andrews has political ambitions. This case is a godsend. You saw the way he acted at the autopsy. What do you think he’d do to win?”
The reach had vanished from her eyes. Just distance now.
“It sounds like you’re asking me if I think he’s capable of running over Barnett. I hope that’s not what you’re asking, Teddy.”