Compulsion (Max Revere Novels Book 2)

by Brennan, Allison

  Charlene said, “Let the record show the exchange of text messages between Ms. Raines and her friend Ginger.”

  “So noted,” the judge said.

  “What did you do when you left Fringe?” Charlene asked Ava.

  “I wanted to get out of the city before traffic. I walked back to the hotel, but stopped at this little gift shop first—I can’t remember the name. But they had these apple earrings in the window. They were so touristy, but I loved them, and I think I bought them.” She frowned.

  Charlene said, “Let the record reflect that Exhibit Fifteen is a receipt for a pair of apple stud earrings from Big Apple Gift Shoppe, time-stamped two forty-eight P.M.”

  She prompted, “Then you went back to the hotel?”

  “I think so.”

  “Objection,” Warren said.

  Charlene said, “We have testimony from Ms. Raines medical team as to why she has a memory loss at the time she was drugged. I would ask for leniency here, as we’re trying to determine exactly what Ms. Raines remembers and what we’ll be able to prove with other witnesses.”

  “Overruled,” the judge told Warren.

  Good, Max thought. Tarkoff was tough but fair. So far Max didn’t have any problems with the way he’d run the trial. She didn’t even have a problem with the no electronics rule—iPads and computers and cell phones could be distracting. Even the sounds from the pens on paper from the reporters around her were annoying.

  “You say you think you went back to the hotel,” Golden prompted.

  “I remember looking at the earrings and wanting them. And I see myself walking down the street and turning the corner. I thought someone was following me, but there’s always so many people in Times Square. I didn’t want to be paranoid. I’ve lived on Long Island my entire life. I come to the city all the time. I turned around and saw a blur and a hand and my neck hurt. The next thing I remember I woke up with my feet and hands and mouth tied up and I was in a car. A trunk.”

  “Just to clarify, you don’t remember who was behind you on the street outside the Big Apple Gift Shoppe?”

  “No, I don’t. It’s fuzzy.”

  “You woke up in the trunk. Then what did you do?”

  “The car was moving, slowly. I heard lots of noise from cars, and knew I was in traffic. It was dark in the trunk, but I saw a little light coming in from a seam or crack or something. At first I didn’t realize it was my car, but then I felt my shopping bags, the ones I’d been carrying around, I just kind of knew. And there’s this screw on the trunk lid. I rubbed my wrists against it trying to break the duct tape. I kicked the trunk lid a couple times, hoping someone could hear me. Once I got my wrists free, I pulled off the tape on my mouth. When the car stopped, I screamed. I just screamed as loud as I could and then the trunk opened and for a minute I thought it was whoever took me and he was going to tape me up again, but it was the police and I had never felt so happy to see anyone.”

  There were tears in her eyes, but she kept herself together. Brave girl, Max thought. Smart and resourceful. She made a note to follow up on the post-trial interview. Ava would do well on camera. She would give other young women the inspiration to fight back when they found themselves in dangerous situations.

  “You told the officer that you thought the man driving your car was familiar, but you didn’t know his name. Do you know why he was familiar?”

  “Yes,” Ava said. “From Fringe.”

  “Objection,” Warren said.

  “Overruled, Mr. Warren. I told you in chambers that this line of questioning was admissible; please don’t make me warn you again.”

  “Sorry, Your Honor.”

  Max leaned forward. She glanced at Bachman. He seemed to have shrunk even more into his seat, his too-large suit now looking enormous on him.

  Charlene said, “Did you see Mr. Bachman when you were at lunch?”

  “No, I don’t remember seeing him that Tuesday. But I was at Fringe on Sunday night, after the musical. I came in for a late dinner and a couple glasses of wine. The tables were full, so I sat at the bar. He was the bartender. I didn’t know his name, but he came over to talk to me a couple of times. I was there for nearly two hours, then walked back to the hotel.”

  “Do you remember what you talked about?”

  “Mostly theater. I told him about Rock of Ages and how much I loved it. I told him about Mandy and Ginger and probably said something stupid like guys are jerks. He asked if I had a boyfriend, I said not now, I had a breakup last year and then just focused on studying.”

  Max kept her eyes on Bachman. He’d deflated from between their interview until now. It was as if every sentence Ava Raines spoke made him smaller. Had he truly not believed the State had enough evidence against him? Had his attorney not properly prepared him for the testimony? He looked defeated, and the trial wasn’t even one day done.

  Charlene asked, “Did he ask for your phone number? Where you were staying?”

  “No. But since I had three glasses of wine, he offered to call me a cab. I said no need, my hotel was less than two blocks away. I might have mentioned which hotel, but I don’t honestly remember.”

  “What time did you leave?”

  “Midnight.”

  Charlene said, “Let the record show Exhibits Nineteen and Twenty, the ticket stub from the seven thirty P.M. show of Rock of Ages and the Fringe receipt time-stamped twelve oh five that night. Let the record also show that the server on the time stamp was listed as Server 414. Exhibit Twenty-one are the employee records from Fringe. They list all employees by employee number, and Server 414 is known to Fringe as Adam Bachman.”

  “So noted,” the judge said.

  “Ms. Raines, did you see the bartender from Fringe at any other time on Monday or Tuesday?”

  “No, not until the police officer asked me if I knew who was driving my car. He looked familiar, but my head hurt and I didn’t know why he looked familiar. And I was scared and relieved and shaking and my hands were bleeding. I was confused then. I’m sorry.”

  “There’s no need to apologize, Ms. Raines. Your witness, Mr. Warren.”

  Warren stood. “No questions at this time, but I reserve the right to recall Ms. Raines.”

  “So noted,” the judge said. “You may step down, Ms. Raines.”

  Ava got down. She looked over at Adam and as Max watched, Adam looked down. Guilt? Remorse? Far more emotion than he’d shown in their interview.

  As Max watched, she realized that Bachman looked angry. Perplexed. His attorney leaned over and whispered something, but Adam turned his head away as if he didn’t want to hear it.

  But it was clear to Max that Ava had hammered in the first nail on Adam Bachman’s conviction.

  Chapter Six

  Max stood in the middle of her home office sipping a glass of wine and reviewing the facts.

  When she first bought her apartment, Max had done extensive remodeling. The previous owner had been an eccentric artist. While the light and windows of her penthouse were amazing, he’d destroyed the floors with paint and chemicals, never updated the kitchen or bathrooms, and in a fit of rage he’d demolished his bedroom wall.

  She’d completely gutted and refinished the apartment. It was largely open with a two-story great room as the focal point. Her bedroom was at the top of an open, freestanding staircase that curved nearly 360 degrees. Off her bedroom and up a half flight of stairs was her office—an opening looked down into her bedroom and the two-story wall of windows that showcased the river and part of the city.

  She’d taken the largest wall in her office and covered it with magnetic whiteboards where she could both pin things up and write on. Her current project always took up most of the board, including a time line across the top, newspaper clippings, photos, questions, and facts. The first time David had walked in he’d dubbed it “the Wall” and the generic nickname had stuck.

  Her office also had a functional desk, a reading chair, and a small couch. A bookshelf had been built i
nto one wall and held most of her research books, plus extra copies of her own four true crime books. She had a file cabinet with articles and other research papers and an oversized closet designed for storage. But her wall always had her attention.

  She’d never have been interested in the Bachman investigation under normal circumstances. There were hundreds—thousands—of murder trials in New York. Her focus was missing persons, and while there was a human interest angle in how Ava Raines had survived, justice was being served, as far as Max was concerned. The killer had been arrested, the victims had been recovered, their families had closure, and that was that.

  The Palazzolos, however, were a different matter.

  When the Palazzolo children contacted her, several months after their parents’ disappearance, Max was interested immediately. She’d visited the family in Ohio, wrote an article about them, and pushed law enforcement in New York and the neighboring states as much as she could with the limited information she had.

  However, when the family sent her phone and credit records of their parents’ last week in New York—several months after Bachman had been arrested—she immediately became interested in the Bachman investigation.

  The Palazzolos had disappeared on a Tuesday after having dinner in the bar at Fringe Sunday night. Fringe is always crowded before and after Broadway shows because of its location and reputation. Max had even eaten there a few times, though she usually steered clear of Times Square.

  Max felt in her gut that Bachman killed the Palazzolos and they, in fact, were his first victims. That their bodies hadn’t been recovered told her that he’d hidden them on purpose, perhaps because there was physical evidence tying him to the crimes. There were too many commonalities between their disappearance and Bachman’s known victims.

  Fringe wasn’t in the heart of Times Square, but it was close. Police cameras were everywhere in the Square, but they thinned out the farther one walked from the touristy areas. And there was always the issue of broken cameras and unclear shots and the lack of manpower to scour footage. That was why most security footage was pulled after the fact—police knew what happened, so they pull tapes from the area to see if they had evidence for an arrest. Definitely not as fast or easy as television, but the information was there—if the crime happened on camera.

  Max had already checked with her sources and there were no police cameras on the block where Ava Raines was abducted, so there was no visual proof that Bachman had abducted her. The only evidence she’d heard about was that a white male was seen on camera driving Raines’s car out of the hotel garage. There was no positive identification that it was Bachman, though the image was certainly not petite, blond Ava Raines.

  What stumped Max—and she hoped the prosecution addressed this tomorrow—was how Bachman maneuvered the unconscious Ava Raines a full block to the garage, up the staircase (the elevator had a working camera inside), and into her trunk during daylight hours with no one being suspicious. Max supposed he could have pretended Ava was his drunk or sick girlfriend, but no one had come forward as a witness. With the canvass that the police must have done, coupled with the publicity, they would have found one.

  Max’s theory that Bachman had a partner had also developed over time, not just because of the Palazzolos, but because of how smooth and seemingly easy it was for Bachman to kidnap five strangers. Six, including Ava Raines.

  What if, she considered, his partner retrieved the car while Bachman tracked Ava? He could have dropped his partner off before heading toward the bridge.

  Or maybe Bachman retrieved her car first? But … how did he know when she would return to the garage after shopping? Someone must have followed her.

  It could be that his partner drugged her, Bachman came by with the car, they dumped her in, and Bachman drove off.

  There just had to be a partner. Not only because it made sense given the evidence of these abductions, but after interviewing Bachman’s friends and family, she didn’t see how a man so completely clean to the point of being a germophobe could physically handle a dead body. Max had seen enough crime scene photos to know that people in death, even if it wasn’t a bloody death, weren’t pretty. Their bodies often purged fluids, leaving a mess. It made sense that he used their own cars to transport, but getting the dead body into the car and moving it to another location wouldn’t have been easy. Did he have one killing spot, but dumped the bodies in different locations in order not to be tracked? That made sense, because killing them in different places meant a greater chance of being seen.

  A girl the size of Ava Raines would be manageable, dead or alive. But Bachman wasn’t large. He was six feet tall and slender. He didn’t regularly work out, so didn’t have muscle mass built up. Two of the victims were men bigger and heavier than Bachman. Yet the autopsy reports—which Max had bribed a pathologist to look at—showed minimal postmortem bruising. Which meant that the bodies weren’t excessively jostled around or dragged.

  The only explanation was that Bachman had help. Maybe not with killing his victims, but definitely help in transporting the bodies from his killing spot to Queens.

  When she’d broached the subject with Richard a few months back, he’d flipped.

  * * *

  Max and Richard were having drinks at an exclusive club where no one would reveal that they ever had a conversation, let alone were members.

  “Don’t you understand what you’ll do to our entire case if you leak that unproven theory to our potential jury pool?” he’d said.

  She tilted her chin up and stared at him. She was angry, but she recognized that Rich was the D.A. and he had other concerns. She tried to understand them. “Rich, I won’t write anything I can’t prove.”

  “Don’t even go there—just asking the questions could get back to his defense and then they may come up with some complicated game to confuse the jury.”

  “You should know me better than that.”

  “That’s the problem. I do know you. You get these ideas and don’t think about the damage they can cause.”

  “And I don’t voice my theories publicly without backing them up.”

  “He’s guilty, Max.”

  “Have you ever thought a man you tried for murder was innocent?”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “I’ve seen enough to believe you have the right person. But I still don’t think he worked alone. I will prove it.”

  “I’m begging you—”

  “Don’t beg, Richie, it won’t get you anywhere. But I promise you this: if I find proof, something tangible, I’ll take it to you first.”

  He closed his eyes and sighed. “You’re impossible.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment, because you really shouldn’t insult a reporter who’s putting friendship ahead of a scoop.”

  “So we’re friends?”

  That had stung, just a bit. “Of course we are. What did you think?”

  “With you I don’t know.”

  “Sweetheart, if we weren’t friends you would have heard about my theory along with everyone else in New York: on television, not privately over a glass of wine.”

  * * *

  Her cell phone rang, interrupting her thoughts. It was David.

  “I have information.”

  “I can’t wait.”

  “I’ll be up in a minute.”

  Max hung up and glanced one more time at the wall. The Palazzolos were the outlier only in that they had gone missing as a couple and their bodies haven’t yet been found. Max knew all the arguments as to why Bachman wasn’t involved. But the parallel to Ava Raines was too close. The Palazzolos and Ava went to Fringe after a Sunday night show. They ate at the bar because of the crowd. Adam Bachman served them. They disappeared the following Tuesday afternoon, a day Adam had no alibi.

  But the police never asked him about his alibi for the Palazzolos because the police didn’t think he had anything to do with their disappearance. If they had only worked the case differently Max might
not be so frustrated, but because Richard Milligan didn’t want to risk a conviction on the murders of five people, he would never approve that line of inquiry. And while Max understood that intellectually, emotionally she wanted answers.

  No one should have to live without the truth. No one understood that better than Max. Her mother, her best friend, both gone—presumed dead—but with no proof either way, no truth. No justice.

  Max filled the void in her heart with work. It drove her to do what she did, it drove her to push, to prod, to find answers for others because she couldn’t find them for herself.

  David buzzed her door. Max didn’t own a car so there was no need for her to use her parking spot, so David had unhindered access and didn’t have to go through the doorman. At first he was uncomfortable with that, but he’d grown used to it.

  He held a bag of Chinese food. “In case you haven’t eaten.”

  “Yum.” She took the bag and David followed her to her kitchen.

  She loved her apartment in TriBeCa, off Greenwich with a view of the Hudson River. Her little corner of the world. Bigger than she needed, but considering she traveled more than half the year living out of hotel rooms, she wanted her own space. She’d bought it after her college roommate was murdered nine years ago. She’d still been in a battle with her family over her great-grandmother giving her one-fifth of her estate in her will, but Max knew she’d win and had no qualms about spending some of that money on this two-story apartment.

  She hadn’t furnished it right away. Even after the remodeling, she didn’t know exactly what she wanted to do with the space. She bought a small desk and put it in the corner of her living room, where she could see the river and watch sunsets and write. The rest of the living room had been bare after she came back from Miami and wrote the book about Karen’s disappearance. It had taken her years to turn the place into her home, but now it was the only place that truly felt hers. Her sanctuary.

  After she took gourmet cooking classes, she’d had her kitchen redesigned in a chic Tuscany style. High brick walls and wood-beamed ceilings, a large natural stone island with pots hanging from the rack above, double ovens, and a custom tile backsplash. It opened into the gathering room because she liked having the open space. She preferred eating at the bar or the island or in her office, but she had a dining table that could seat ten if she wanted. She just rarely wanted.