The Girl in the Glass Box: A Jack Swyteck Novel

by James Grippando

  “I’m not sure how I can help you,” Jack said into his phone.

  “You could start by bringing your client down to the medical examiner’s office. I’m here now. We need someone to ID the body.”

  “What makes you think Julia knows him?”

  “We checked the victim’s smartphone. Her photograph is in it.”

  Jack felt his plans for the weekend crumble. “We can be there in half an hour.”

  They left Beatriz with Jack’s assistant, and a minute later Jack and Julia were making the short drive across the river to meet with Detective Barnes.

  “It’s either Hugo or Jorge,” Julia said, as they crossed the drawbridge.

  Jack chose not to weigh in with a guess as to which of the two would survive a confrontation.

  The county medical examiner’s office was in the Joseph H. Davis Center for Forensic Pathology, a three-building complex on the perimeter of the University of Miami Medical Center/Jackson Memorial Hospital campus. Even on a Saturday the campus was bustling with activity—people headed to the spine institute, the eye institute, and other world-class specialists. A guard buzzed them through at the main entrance, and the receptionist took them straight back to see Detective Barnes.

  “Victim had no wallet, no identification,” said Barnes.

  “What about the cell phone with Julia’s picture?” asked Jack. “Was there a service agreement attached to it?”

  “Yeah, but it’s in the name of a seventy-three-year-old woman in North Carolina who obviously never reads her monthly bill. Happens all the time.”

  An assistant medical examiner met them at the end of the hall and took them around the corner. A wall of stainless steel drawers was before them. One to the right, three drawers from the bottom, was open. The examiner led Julia to it and pulled the drawer farther from the wall, drawing the sheet-covered body into the room.

  “I should warn you that there is a wound in the back of the head. The skull has multiple internal fractures from the movement of the bullet. There is no exit wound, but the face is bloated and distorted.”

  Jack held his breath. With a nod from Julia, the examiner lifted the white sheet. Julia closed her eyes slowly, as if she, too, had known that it wouldn’t be Jorge.

  “His name is Hugo,” said Julia.

  The examiner draped the white sheet back over the face.

  “Ms. Rodriguez, can you tell me more about him?” asked Barnes.

  “Would it be okay if I have a minute alone with him first?”

  Barnes allowed it. Jack walked around the corner with him to talk on his client’s behalf.

  “Do you know who did this?” Jack asked.

  “Not yet. But I think your client knows.”

  “Can I see the cell-phone photo you mentioned?”

  Barnes brought it up on his tablet. It was a woman standing on the steps outside a church. “That’s St. Jude on Brickell,” said Barnes, as he zoomed in.

  Jack couldn’t deny that it was Julia. “She already told you she knows the victim. Not surprising that he’d have a picture of her on his phone.”

  “Shooting was right outside apartment two-oh-one. Tenant hasn’t been seen since the neighbors heard the gunshot. Landlord has no idea who he is. Said he paid the rent in cash and lived alone.”

  “He definitely sounds like someone you’d want to talk to,” Jack said, offering nothing.

  “Fingerprints from inside the apartment match the fingerprints we found in Duncan McBride’s car. I’m betting that the DNA we gathered from the toothbrush inside the apartment will also give us a match to the saliva secretions from the cigarette in McBride’s car.”

  “Good work,” said Jack, still offering nothing. “Let me know if there’s anything more we can do to help.”

  “We also have footprints inside and outside the apartment. They’re from a woman’s shoe.”

  Jack showed no reaction. “Is that so?”

  “Yup,” said Barnes, as he put away his tablet. “So tell me something, Swyteck: How good is your client’s alibi for Friday night?”

  “I’ll ask her.”

  “You do that,” said Barnes. “If I were you, I’d ask her two or three times and make sure her story is rock solid from top to bottom. ’Cause I think the tenant who’s gone missing is her husband. And I think the footprints are hers.”

  Jack was in no position to counterpunch. “Like I said, I’ll ask her.”

  Chapter 50

  Jorge woke at Rosa’s apartment.

  No one ran faster than Jorge after a gang-style hit. He’d caught up with Rosa just as she was getting into her car at the West Wind Apartments. She’d begged him to let her go, but that wasn’t going to happen. At gunpoint—Hugo’s gun—she’d driven Jorge to her apartment.

  It was much nicer than expected, a spacious and practically brand-new one-bedroom unit in Downtown Dadeland, a mixed-use development for young professionals. Rosa talked, talked, talked when she wasn’t sucking cock, so Jorge had heard the whole story. Her parents up in Indiana thought she was still a college student, which meant that the rent was prepaid by Mommy and Daddy through July. The landlord would be pretty upset come August to find out that Rosa had sold the refrigerator, the stove, the dishwasher, and virtually every stick of furniture except the bed. It was amazing how low a young woman could go and how fast she could get there when addicted to opioids.

  “What are you going to do with me?” asked Rosa. She was sitting on the carpet, chained to the bed, where Jorge had left her for the night. The handcuffs she carried in her bag of sex toys had proved useful.

  “I don’t know yet,” he said.

  Jorge peeked through the mini-blinds from the third-story window. Downtown Dadeland was one of Florida’s many Disneyesque incarnations of the quaint urban village. Narrow streets of cobblestone encouraged pedestrian traffic. Each building was painted a different color and was a little taller or a little shorter than its neighbor, all designed to create the false impression that the community had grown over a period of years, not weeks. Residences on the upper floors had balconies that overlooked the town square, while the street level was loaded with shops and canopied cafés. Jorge was trying to decide which of the many restaurants looked good for lunch. Everything from pizza and burgers to sushi and dim sum made it hard to decide. The liquid option at World of Beer was also tempting.

  “You hungry?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you do when you get hungry? Call your OxyContin supplier and ask him what looks good in the fridge you sold on eBay in order to pay him?”

  “Not funny.”

  “Your life is pretty fucked up, isn’t it?”

  “Like yours isn’t?”

  He smiled a little, not at all friendly, smile. “That guy I shot last night. He came to my apartment to kill me.”

  “He didn’t tell me that. He said you owed him money and he needed me to literally help him get his foot in the door. I would never have done it if I thought there was going to be a gunfight.”

  “For a lot of reasons, he got what he deserved.”

  “I don’t care what he deserved, and I don’t want to know your reasons. I just want you to leave.”

  Jorge stepped away from the window. “It’s not that simple. If I turn you loose, the first thing you’ll do is call the police and tell them what I look like, tell them everything you know about me.”

  “Your neighbors will tell the police what you look like.”

  “My neighbors didn’t see me put a bullet in Hugo’s head.”

  She thought for a moment. “Neither did I,” she said, seemingly pleased with the clever response she’d come up with.

  “Nice try, Red.”

  “Seriously, I’m not going to turn you in. I promise.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “I’m not a liar.”

  Jorge’s gaze swept the shiny new but empty apartment. “You’re living a lie, sweetie.”

  Rosa didn’
t answer.

  Jorge scratched his head, as if bringing an idea to fruition. “There is one way you could convince me that you won’t go to the police.”

  She looked up eagerly from her seat on the floor. “What?”

  “You have to be as dirty as I am.”

  “I’m a drug addict and a prostitute. How much dirtier do you want me?”

  “That’s petty bullshit. You have to get in big-time.”

  “Meaning what?”

  Jorge sat on the edge of the bed and took the pistol from the nightstand. “There’s one more bullet I need to deliver before I go back to El Salvador. But I got a big problem now. You made a good point: my neighbors will tell the cops what I look like. This whole city will be crawling with cops out on the street looking for me, which makes it pretty hard for me to deliver this bullet all by myself.”

  “Are you saying—” Rosa was silent for a moment, as if she didn’t want to get his drift. “Are you asking me to help you kill someone?”

  Jorge held the pistol loosely in his hand, casually pointing the barrel in Rosa’s direction, not really aiming, but threatening her all the same. Then he leaned closer, his expression deadly serious.

  “No, honey,” he said in a deep, coarse whisper. “I want you to save yourself.”

  Chapter 51

  “I was with Theo Friday night,” said Julia.

  “My Theo?” asked Jack.

  “How many Theos do you know?”

  Thankfully, there was just the one.

  When it came to alibis, Jack had heard them all. I was with a prostitute. With two prostitutes. With my husband’s brother who, by the way, is a priest. With Elvis. “With Theo” wasn’t the alibi Jack would have scripted, but it was enough at this point. The investigation into Hugo’s homicide would run its course in due time. It was Jack’s job to keep his client focused on the asylum hearing, which was less than forty-eight hours away.

  They finished the prep session around six p.m. Before heading home, Jack drove to Cy’s Place to get the details that he’d chosen not to pursue in his meeting with Julia.

  “What does ‘with’ mean?”

  “We just talked,” said Theo.

  “You talked?”

  “Yeah. Julia came downstairs after Beatriz went to bed. She sat right on the stool you’re sitting in now. We talked till about midnight. Then I turned the bar over to Sandy. Me and Julia moved to that table over there,” he said, pointing with a nod, “and talked till about two. Then she went home.”

  Jack smiled to himself. It was at one of those tables, just big enough for two pairs of elbows, that Jack had proposed to Andie.

  “That’s so—”

  “Weird?” Theo suggested.

  Sweet was the word that echoed in Jack’s mind, but Jack didn’t dare repeat it. “Let’s go with weird.”

  Theo poured him a draft and set the tall beer glass in front of him. Jack watched the amber bubbles rise, seemingly out of nowhere, and disappear into a perfect head of foam.

  “You know, I’d be happy for you and Julia,” said Jack, “under normal circumstances.”

  “What’s normal?”

  Good question. It was like justice: easier to say what it was not. “Getting involved with a woman whose insanely abusive husband is probably behind two of Miami’s most recent homicides is not normal.”

  “Being her lawyer is normal?”

  Jack drank from his beer. “Now you sound like Andie.”

  “Julia and me are friends, Jack. I have friends in prison, friends who used to be in prison, and a few friends who probably should be in prison. My brother and my best friends growing up would be in prison right now if they weren’t dead. I’m not going to stop being Julia’s friend because you think it’s not normal.”

  It was hard to push back against that kind of reasoning. “She’s scared,” said Jack. “You know that, right?”

  “I know she is.”

  “I mean really scared. Julia has to walk into that courtroom on Monday morning and tell a judge that her husband sexually assaulted her. She has to say it in explicit fashion if we are going to get to square one on her claim for asylum. After what happened to Duncan McBride and now Hugo, I’m not sure she’ll find the courage to testify about all the things her husband did to her.”

  “You want me to talk to her?”

  “I don’t see how that would help.”

  “It can’t hurt for her to know that she doesn’t have to be afraid to tell the truth.”

  Jack gave him a sobering look. “Her husband is a murderer, a rapist, a gang member, and domestic abuser. And he’s probably in Miami. You can’t guarantee her safety.”

  “I can guarantee that I’ll do everything I can to keep her safe.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “Because she’s my friend, Jack.”

  Jack thought about it. There was a depth of clarity and purity to Theo’s commitment that Jack envied, a complete absence of the “What’s in it for me?” mentality that governed so many relationships. “That’s a good reason,” said Jack.

  “Hopefully, we’ll stay friends. There’s only one major issue I see so far.”

  “What?”

  “Toilet seat.”

  “Ah, that one.”

  “I’m right, ain’t I? Women always leave the damn thing down. They refuse to put it up the way it belongs when they’re finished.”

  Jack gave him the benefit of the doubt: a guy who lived for four years with an open toilet in his own cell at Florida State Prison was definitely challenged in the ways of women in shared bathrooms. But it was an interesting twist on the immutable premise underlying an age-old argument.

  “You’ll never win that one, dude,” said Jack, and then he finished his beer. “Trust me. Never.”

  Chapter 52

  Monday morning came quickly. The final hearing on Julia’s claim for asylum began at nine a.m. Jack and his client were seated side by side in the courtroom of the Honorable Patrick Kelly. Cecilia sat behind them in the first row of public seating. It didn’t hurt to let the judge know that Julia had family in Miami. Beatriz was at school, it being the collective judgment that Julia’s daughter didn’t need to hear Julia testify about the violence in her marriage.

  “Would counsel announce their appearances for the record,” Judge Kelly said.

  Simone Jerrell was not alone this time. With her was a young lawyer from the Department of Homeland Security. His name was Jesús Padron, he was a first-generation Hispanic American, and when Jerrell allowed him to introduce himself to the judge, he spoke with an accent so affected that he made Jack’s client sound like the president of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Jack saw through the stunt immediately. Fortunately, so did Judge Kelly.

  “Well, how nice,” said the judge. “Hispanic equilibrium between petitioner and respondent.”

  Neither government lawyer knew what to say. Jack saw it as a good start, though a seasoned, if not jaded, jurist on the brink of retirement presiding over his final hearing was bound to sling arrows in both directions.

  “Normally I begin this type of proceeding with opening statements,” the judge said.

  Jerrell rose, ready to deliver hers on behalf of the department.

  “But at this point in my career, I pretty much know what you’re going to say, so, Ms. Jerrell, take a seat. I’ll deliver yours: ‘Judge, it’s the duty of this court to uphold the immigration laws of the United States and to safeguard a lawful immigration process that protects Americans, secures the homeland, and honors our nation’s values.’ Mr. Swyteck, here’s one for you: ‘Your Honor, as the United States Supreme Court recognized almost a hundred years ago in the case of Ng Fung Ho versus White, an immigrant facing deportation stands to lose “life and property” and “all that makes life worth living.”’ Thank you very much, Counsel. I apologize for my failure to include biblical references in your opening statements, but we’re short on time. Now let’s get to the evidence. Mr. Swyte
ck, call your first witness.”

  Not an arrow, but the judge had definitely flung a curveball in Jack’s direction. Jack could roll with it, but Julia surely would have liked a little time to warm up to the process before taking the witness stand. Jack touched her hand, a little nonverbal reassurance to let her know that showtime had arrived much sooner than expected.

  “Our first witness is the petitioner,” said Jack, “Julia Rodriguez.”

  Julia rose, obviously nervous as she walked to the witness stand, swore the familiar oath, and settled into the oak chair.

  “Good morning, Ms. Rodriguez,” said Jack.

  “Good—” she said, and her voice cracked, as if to confirm that she’d had much better mornings. She cleared her throat and tried again. “Good morning.”

  There was no jury in immigration court, so Julia directed her answers to the judge, who would play the role of judge and jury. He alone would decide what Julia would be allowed to say; he alone would determine if Julia was telling the truth.

  “Let’s start by telling Judge Kelly a little about yourself,” said Jack, and for as long as it would take for Julia to get comfortable, and for as long as Judge Kelly would allow, Jack guided Julia through her life story with simple questions. She pointed out her sister in the first row. She even smiled as she told the judge about her daughter. Then Jack asked about her marriage, and the mood noticeably darkened, as a story of ever-escalating violence unfolded.

  “Tell me about the first time your husband hit you,” said Jack.

  She took a breath before answering, took another breath before telling the judge about the second beating, and took even deeper breaths before describing the next one and the one after that.

  “Would you please raise your hair up over your head and show Judge Kelly the back of your neck?” asked Jack.

  She did, revealing a four-inch scar that ran along the base of her hairline. The judge leaned over the bench for a closer inspection.

  “Looks a little faded,” the judge said. “How old is that scar?”