by Diane Capri
“The coin had unidentified fingerprints on it. Not only didn’t they match Nelson. They weren’t a match to anyone in the databases or who’d been known to visit the house in the past month.” Jenny stopped again to let Jordan catch up.
“Investigators apparently decided Grantham was a good enough lawyer to create reasonable doubt in the minds of the jury with those facts.”
“Which meant they couldn’t convict my dad. Because of reasonable doubt. That’s why they stopped hounding him.” Jordan’s brain was slower than usual, but it still worked logically. “Dad said that police never came up with a motive of any kind. So the fingerprints on that coin were another hole they couldn’t fill with real evidence against my dad.”
“There was other circumstantial evidence and some of it eventually got settled in Nelson’s favor, too.” Jenny reminded her.
“You mean the alibi witness?” Jordan had pleaded with her dad to say where he’d been in those crucial three hours between the time he left school and the time he came home that night. He’d refused. “Dad couldn’t tell anybody that he’d gone to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting to support one of his best teachers. He’d never violate a confidence like that. The man was already on probation at work and would have lost his job.”
Once the teacher came forward, Jordan had understood her dad’s reasons. Too bad the teacher wasn’t half as loyal to her dad. If that teacher had simply spoken up earlier? Well, who knows?
“There’s still a few problems for your dad. His missing fishing boots have never been found. The boots were the same size and type as the boot prints left by the killers. For a while, it seemed he’d escaped the scene in the neighbor’s stolen johnboat.” Jenny listed the bits that led too many people to conclude Nelson Fox had killed his wife. Or at least, hired someone to kill her.
“They found the missing boat and no forensic evidence in the boat tied to the murder,” Jordan reminded her, pushing the tiniest doubt aside. She’d never believe her dad was a killer. Never. He’d loved Brenda like crazy. She was more sure about that than anything else in her life.
Jenny said nothing. The evidence was either there or not there. Nothing Jenny said or Jordan believed could change that.
“So he’s definitely cleared forever.” It was a question, but Jordan said it like adding conviction to her voice would make it true.
“I’ve been in this business long enough to never say never or forever.” Jenny Lane clenched her jaw, unclenched and shrugged. “But he’s pretty damn clear. It’s not likely they’d come back after him now, unless some new evidence against him turned up.”
Jordan nodded silently letting the news sink in. Her dad was in the clear. He really was. Or at least, he could be. “I want an apology from them.”
“From who? The police?”
Jordan said, “Yes.”
“My sister was a crime suspect once, so I know how you feel.” Jenny smiled sympathetically. “I wish the system worked like that, Jordan. I really do. People who are wrongfully accused deserve better. After more than five years of practicing law, I’ve never seen that happen. Not once.”
Jordan barely heard. She wouldn’t argue or let Jenny convince her that a public apology was impossible. Her dad deserved exoneration in the community. People needed to know that he didn’t kill his wife.
All those people who had let their tongues run wild. They should be ashamed of themselves. And Detective Grey owed her.
Never say never…
“But, listen to me. This is important.” Jenny sat up straighter in the chair and flashed a quick glance at the clock. She put her hand on Jordan’s arm again to get her full attention. “Brad Shane was Anthony Grantham’s law partner. He was there when Nelson was under the microscope. He was there when the coin was found. And he was there when the fingerprint reports came in. He had access to your dad’s file, all of it. Maybe he had access to even more evidence that wasn’t shared with Grantham. Rumor is that Shane is well connected at the highest levels. And now he’s El Pulpo’s lawyer.”
“Right…” Jordan felt her eyes widen. Her heartbeat pounded hard against her chest. What exactly did she mean?
An alarm sounded from the clock on the desk. Jenny glanced at it, took another deep breath and exhaled slowly. “I’ve got another meeting. But here’s the point, Jordan. As you go through that file, look for anything that’s odd or doesn’t ring true to you. Something isn’t right here. My lawyer’s gut tells me Brad Shane is at the bottom of this situation.”
Jordan gasped. Her hand flew to her mouth. “You think he killed my mother?”
“No. No.” Jenny’s head shook quickly. “I’m not saying that. But I am saying he’s a smart guy and he’s connected to El Pulpo. And El Pulpo is at the center of everything you’ve been working on. Maybe I’m adding up the wrong numbers and reaching the wrong conclusions. But be careful. Forewarned is forearmed.”
Jordan smiled weakly. “My mom used to say that.”
Jenny gave her arm one last squeeze.
As Jordan walked out to her car with the heavy redwell, she wondered if she had fully comprehended everything Jenny Lane meant. She sat in the driver’s seat, file in her lap, struggling to regain her equilibrium.
Her hands trembled too badly to pull the elastic band aside and open the redwell. She needed coffee. Quiet time. She needed to think.
She moved the bulky file to Hermes’ passenger seat and rolled out of the parking lot. Her police detail followed close behind. All of a sudden, she felt more than grateful to have them with her, even as she planned to escape their constant watchful eye.
CHAPTER 8
Jordan steered Hermes slowly along the city streets toward the mansion, bewildered thoughts still swirling in her head. She grabbed her phone and noticed three text messages. Clayton, Theresa, and Tom Clark.
Hopefully Clayton would be gone by the time she got to the house. She didn’t want him to know what she’d learned. Not yet.
She’d see Theresa at work. Whatever she wanted could wait.
She called Tom. She’d told him most of her story already. He would help without questioning her every move or demanding explanations. She felt more comfortable with Tom than anyone else except her best friend, Claire, and her dad. Which was a fact that scared her when she dwelled on it too long.
“Good morning.” Jordan started speaking as soon as he picked up. She heard the quiver in her own voice and cleared her throat. “I’ve got four hours before work. Can you come to the mansion now and help me sort through some stuff?”
“You bet.” Tom’s reliably normal voice sounded sleepy but excited. “Did you get the file?”
“I got the file.” Why didn’t that news make her feel like fist-pumping the car’s ceiling?
Tom was waiting for her in the driveway when she reached the mansion. She parked behind him and her police detail parked on the street. Clayton’s car was nowhere in sight. Good.
“Couple things we have to do,” she said as she closed her car door and carried the redwell into the house, with Tom at her side. “Look through this file, and search my mom’s hard drive.”
She unlocked the back door and opened it. No strong breeze greeted her this time. She shivered anyway.
He followed her inside. “What are we looking for?”
“I’m not sure, exactly. That’s why I need your help. Fresh eyes.” Which wasn’t exactly true, but not a lie, either.
Tom nodded. “Just curious. Why the urgency?”
Reasonable question. She didn’t have a solid answer and she wasn’t ready to share her half-formed plans. “I feel like I’ve become caught up in something and I don’t know what it is. I’m fed up with it.”
She smiled a little. He’d been nothing but helpful to her. And she liked him. A lot. He deserved an honest answer. At some point, she’d tell him everything.
He gazed into her eyes for a few moments as if he was disappointed in her. She shrugged and turned away.
She planned
to approach Agent Ryser and Clayton about the evidence she’d collected and what she’d learned from Jenny Lane. But first she had more things to figure out and not enough time to get the job done. “Which do you want? The file or the hard drive?”
Tom opened doors and checked around in the kitchen until he found the coffee pot and coffee. He busied himself with brewing. “I’ll take whichever is harder for you.”
Jordan closed the door. “Would you look through the hard drive? It’s my mother’s personal stuff. I keep getting emotionally hung up on it.”
“You got it.” The rich coffee aroma already wafted through the kitchen. Tom found mugs and sweetener and crossed to the refrigerator. “Any cream?”
“I think so. Top shelf.” She pointed him toward her laptop on the dining table, where the external hard drive was plugged into it. “Password is ILoveNelsonAndJordan. Maybe look for anything related to Aaron Robinson, which is Evan Groves’ real name. And check on a boy named Mark Gifford, too.”
She sucked up her courage and said aloud what she’d told no one else. She couldn’t prove it. Not yet. But she believed it with all her heart. “I think the other guy, the one who kidnapped me? Hugo Diaz? That’s an alias, too. I think his real name might be Mark Gifford.”
With his head inside the refrigerator, he said, “Be right there. Go ahead and start without me.”
Jordan grabbed a glass of tap water, settled across from Tom’s seat at the laptop, and opened the redwell.
She started with a quick run through. There were folders inside labeled Correspondence, Transcripts, Bank Records and the like. All contained papers, lots of papers. One of the folders seemed promising. The label was December 4, 2009, timeline. She pulled it out and set it aside.
Several CDs in cases, with labels such as B. Fox Employment File and Inventory of Missing Items. A few of the CDs contained audio recordings. Nelson Fox first interview, Brenda Fox Press Conference and so on. Clear plastic pockets contained plastic sleeves filled by eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch pictures.
Jordan flipped through everything and zeroed in on the folder quickly.
After a few minutes at the keyboard, Tom said, “Find something helpful?”
“Maybe.” Jordan frowned without looking up. “A timeline for the day of the murder. It’s a little confusing because it has notes about where the information came from and some of it’s conflicting.”
“Um hm.” She heard the keyboard keys clacking.
“They couldn’t pinpoint the time of death. But they estimated that it happened between six and seven o’clock. But it was definitely before six forty-five, since that’s what time I got home and the killers were already gone.”
“Makes sense.” More clacking.
“So maybe a forty-five minute window to get in, kill her, and leave.” Jordan’s entire body hummed with nerves, but she pressed on as objectively as she could manage. “She’d stopped at the grocery store and the ATM and made a phone call to Dr. Chelsey Ross at 5:46 p.m. on the way home from work. Which is why they figured the murder couldn’t have happened before six o’clock.”
Jordan closed her eyes and recalled the kitchen that night. She’d seen her mom on the floor almost immediately. After that, she’d been busy with, well, other things. But what did she remember about the kitchen?
Mom was making a new recipe for dinner. She wasn’t a great chef, so she followed recipes closely. This recipe was a little complicated, Jordan remembered. Sunshine Salmon.
She imagined Brenda lugging the groceries into the kitchen through the back door because that’s how she usually entered. Fewer steps from the car with heavy bags. She would have changed clothes. Maybe poured herself a glass of white wine because she saw chefs on TV cooking shows drink the wine they used for a good recipe.
This one called for oranges and the Turtle Road house had an orange tree out back. She’d have gone outside again for fresh ones. She’d have kicked off her shoes in the kitchen. She liked to walk around in bare feet inside the house.
The cookbooks were open and the ingredients chopped. Jordan took an imaginary whiff and smelled garlic, dill, tomatoes and oranges. In her mind’s eye, she saw the concoction in the large skillet simmering on the stove, almost boiled dry by the time Jordan entered the room that night.
“Earth to Jordan.” Tom’s teasing voice seemed to carry from a far distance. The keyboard clacking had stopped. “Are you okay?”
She shook herself from the almost trance-like state she’d fallen into. “Yeah. I’m good. What’s up?”
“I’m getting a refill. Can I bring you anything?” He stood with his coffee cup.
She shook her head and raised her still full glass of water.
“Where were you just now, anyway?”
She felt the blush staining her cheeks. “Uh, thinking about the actual timeline. I think the investigators could have been more precise.”
“How so?” Tom called from the kitchen.
She took a gulp from the water glass. “Mom was pretty far along with that dinner when she was attacked. She had to have been home about twenty minutes, at least, to make so much progress. I figure she was attacked closer to six fifteen.”
He brought his cup back to the table and sat across from her. “Which means what?”
“Well, let’s say they arrived about six-fifteen and the attack happened within five minutes and she died about six-twenty. It’s a narrower time frame. Gives us a better picture of how quick and expert these guys were. Timing is everything, right?”
Tom nodded as if what she said made as much sense to him as it did to her.
She talked the rest of it through, testing for logic holes. “Then only twenty-four minutes of elapsed time after they kill her until I arrived in the driveway at 6:44. The killers had to steal her wallet, grab every trace of their stuff, leave the house, probably jump into a boat, and get far enough away.”
She drew in a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “That’s the only way they could leave without a trace like they did. That’s why I didn’t see them. I didn’t run to the river to look for a getaway boat. I was trying to save my mother. But it was too late.”
A single tear rolled down her face and fell onto the timeline document. Tom said nothing, which was the perfect thing to say.
Jordan straightened up in the chair. “And then it says police arrived at 6:56. Which seems right. It was about thirty-six minutes after my mom’s death. They started working inside. By the time they went out to the backyard, the killers were long gone.”
Remembering the details like that was hard. Looking at the photos in the redwell would be worse. She needed a breather. She stood and stretched and walked over to the French doors to stare at nothing outside.
Tom seemed tuned to her mood because he didn’t follow her or try to comfort her. The time for comfort was long past. What she needed at the moment was answers. To get answers, she had to understand the facts precisely. And time was flying by.
She returned to the redwell and located the folder marked Autopsy. Most of it was medical jargon she didn’t understand. She skipped straight to the conclusions.
“I’ve got a hit,” Tom said a few moments later, barely glancing up from the laptop.
CHAPTER 9
“Aaron’s car wreck trial,” Tom said. “You know your mom testified at that, right? There’s stuff in here about it. The court transcript. Maybe a few other things.”
“I’ve been trying to find that and it’s sealed because of his young age at the time, I guess.” She knew Aaron Robinson was convicted in a vehicular manslaughter case that sent him to lock up for four years. He was fourteen. Driving the car. And he might have been high on drugs at the time, according to what she’d learned so far. Her mom had testified on his behalf, but he’d been convicted anyway. “Can you flag it and I’ll read it later?”
“I’ll speed through her testimony and see if there’s anything useful for right now.”
Jordan finished reviewing the autopsy
and the clinical photographs of her mom’s body during the medical exam. She ran both hands through her hair and closed her eyes. She felt like she could sleep for a hundred years.
“What is it?” Tom glanced up when she sighed.
“So it looks like the actual autopsy report was provided to my dad’s lawyer. It says two knives were used by two different attackers.”
“How can they tell that?” Tom had settled back in his chair with the coffee.
She shrugged. “Multiple stab wounds, but not frenzied, whatever that means. One wound pierced the heart in a spot that killed her almost instantly. The knives were never found. I can’t really figure out all the medical stuff, but it looks like they were able to identify one of the knives by type, the shorter one. And the other one, the one that struck the fatal blow, they actually found the purchase records for online.”
She tossed one of the plastic sleeves across the table to him. It contained photos. Examples of the two knives, one police knew for sure and the other one they thought was most likely used. The good news was that neither knife could be tied in any way to her dad. Small blessing.
Tom examined the photos, then cocked his head. “Is any of that new information for you?”
“Not that part, no.” She felt tears pool in her eyes, threatening to spill over. She lowered her head and blinked several times. She cleared her throat and coughed. “The autopsy report says she struggled. Fought back. She had defensive wounds on her forearms. And they found skin and blood under her fingernails.”
“I’m so sorry, Jordan. It sounds horrible.” He’d softened his tone. “But look, at this point that’s good news, isn’t it? DNA right? They can match it to her killers, can’t they?”
“Maybe. I hope so.” Jordan stood and walked into the kitchen for a moment of privacy. He didn’t follow her. One of the reasons she liked him so much was that he seemed to understand when she wanted him around, and when she didn’t, too.
“Dude. Your boys pedaled drugs.” Tom called out loud enough for Jordan to hear. She squared her shoulders and returned to the other room.