Dead Reckoning

by Linda Castillo

  The next thing he knew he was lying on the ground. He saw black smoke billowing into a perfect blue sky. Around him, people were running, their faces covered with blood and soot, their eyes filled with horror. Raising his head, he looked around for Gittel, but all he saw was the twisted remains of a table and umbrella. He called out her name, but he couldn’t hear his own voice, and he realized the blast had deafened him.

  Gittel! Gittel!

  He didn’t know if he was screaming her name or if he was only thinking it. Panic and horror swept through him as realization settled into his brain, as the amount of damage registered in his brain. And he knew people had died.

  Oh, dear God, no . . .

  Pain zinged up his left leg all the way to his hip as he struggled to his hands and knees. When he looked down he saw that his jeans were soaked with blood. His stomach pitched when he saw the shrapnel jutting from his thigh. His leg was broken; he could see the bone fragments in the blood. But he was alive. He could move. He had to find Gittel.

  He looked around wildly. A patch of blue snagged his eye. He recognized the fabric. Gittel, he thought, and his heart began to hammer when he realized she wasn’t moving. Groaning in pain, choking on smoke, he began to crawl toward her, dragging his injured leg.

  Please, God, let her be all right. . . .

  It was as if he were crawling through a tunnel that was devoid of sound and light. He saw mangled bodies and parts of bodies and twisted heaps of metal and blood. He’d never seen so much blood. The cobblestone was slick with it. A red river that ran like death into the street. He could smell it, sickly sweet and mingling with the stench of the dead and dying.

  The wail of an ambulance sounded in the distance. Hope bubbled up from somewhere deep inside him. The paramedics would arrive quickly. Gittel would be taken to the hospital, and everything would be all right.

  But he knew the instant he saw her that nothing would ever be all right again. She was lying on her back in a pool of blood that glimmered like red ice. Her eyes were open as if she were looking up at the sky. Even torn and bleeding, she was beautiful. So innocent and decent and good.

  “Gittel.” He reached her, ran his hands over her torso. “Aw, God. Honey, it’s me. Wake up.”

  Her dress was blood soaked, burned in places, and had been nearly torn from her body. Shoving a fallen chair out of the way, he tried to assess her injuries. The world crumbled beneath him when he saw her legs. Both had been severed from the knee down. . . .

  Denial and rage rose in a violent tide inside him. “Aw, God, no.” He pushed himself onto his elbows and put his arm around her, shook her gently. “Gittel. Oh, God. Oh, baby, no.”

  No!

  No!

  Frank Matrone sat up abruptly, his heart pounding, his mind raging at the horrors trapped inside it. He could hear himself breathing hard. Feel the cold slick of sweat covering his body. The scream in his throat receding back into its deep, black hole where a thousand more lay in waiting.

  He jolted when a knock sounded at the door. Rubbing his hand over a day’s growth of beard, he threw his legs over the side of his bed and stood. Pain streaked up his left leg and exploded brilliant and red inside his head.

  “Goddamn it.” Face contorted, he sat down hard on the bed and waited for the muscle cramp to pass.

  The bell rang four times in quick succession, an annoying buzz that drilled a hole straight to his brain, and he wanted to kill the bastard standing in the hall, gleefully pressing the button.

  “Can it, damn it. I’m coming.”

  Hefting himself off the bed, he limped to the doorway, trying hard to shake off the dark press of the nightmare, knowing that was the one thing that would never really leave him no matter how many shrinks he saw or how many pills he took. God knew he’d had his share of both in the last year.

  He glanced at the clock as he crossed through the living room. “Shit,” he muttered, wondering who the hell would be dragging him out of bed at nine o’clock on a Sunday morning.

  Twisting the knob, he swung open the door. “This had better be good,” he growled.

  “I guess that’s going to depend on your perspective.” Sergeant Rick Slater didn’t bother with niceties as he brushed past Frank and entered the dimly lit living room. “You look like shit.”

  “Thanks.” Frank closed the door, cringing when the sound slammed into his brain. For the first time he realized how shaky he felt. That his head was fuzzy. To top things off his leg was hurting like a son of a bitch.

  Rick crossed to the patio door and pulled the cord to open the drapes. Frank lifted his hand to shield his eyes from the sudden light. Christ, he felt like a vampire. Like the light was going to send him up in flames.

  Shaking his head, Rick looked around the cluttered living room. “This place looks like a freaking pigsty.”

  “You should see it on a bad day.” Scrubbing his hand over his face, Frank started toward the kitchen, trying hard not to favor his leg. “What the hell are you doing here this early on a Sunday morning, anyway?”

  Rick looked to the heavens as if to ask for patience. He looked military neat in his blue uniform and spit-shined shoes. It was a uniform Frank himself had worn a lifetime ago. But he’d sell his soul before ever admitting he missed being a cop.

  “It’s Monday, you asshole,” Rick said.

  That surprised him, and for an uneasy moment Frank tried to remember what had happened to Sunday. Or maybe it was Saturday he’d lost. . . .

  “You were supposed to be at Mike Shelley’s office at seven-thirty this morning.”

  The words stopped him cold. Frank was well aware that he’d been on a downward spiral for the last year. He’d been pretty sure he’d hit rock bottom a couple of months ago. Now he wasn’t so sure because he’d hit a new low this morning. Missing a job interview, for chrissake.

  “Aw, Christ,” he said. “Sorry . . .”

  “Don’t apologize to me, partner. I don’t want to hear any more of your excuses. I’ve done what I can and the rest is up to you. If you want to fuck up what’s left of your lousy life, go for it. Just don’t expect me to stand around and watch. I can’t stomach it.”

  “I’ll call him.”

  “If I were Shelley, I’d tell you to get screwed.”

  “Maybe he will.”

  “I doubt he’ll make it that easy for you, partner. You’re going to have to do some creative fucking up to get out of this one.” Rick stood in the middle of the living room looking exasperated and more than a little angry. “Shelley’s a sap. Somehow he got the idea that you’re some kind of a goddamn war hero.”

  “I don’t know where he got that idea,” Frank said dryly. But for the first time in a long time, he was ashamed. Ashamed for what he had done. For what he had become.

  “The ball’s in your court, buddy. If you want the job, you’re going to have to do some damage control and see if you can salvage the offer.”

  Frank didn’t know what to say.

  Rick made a sound of disgust. “I watched you throw away twelve years with the police department. Don’t expect me to watch you throw away another opportunity—”

  “I didn’t throw away those years,” Frank snapped with sudden anger. “The department tossed me and you know it.”

  “They offered you a desk job when you came back, but your ego wouldn’t let you take it.” He looked around the littered living room. “You’d rather wallow in this shit hole like some kind of a drunken pig. I’ve had it with you and your bingeing and self-pity.”

  Self-pity. Jesus.

  Furious because it was true, Frank spun away and limped to the patio door and looked out at the gray morning beyond. But he could feel his friend’s words crawling inside him, like a bundle of worms in his gut, taunting him with a truth he didn’t want to face.

  “So you got a rough deal. We both know it could have been a hell of a lot worse. Some of our guys came back in body bags, partner.”

  The image of Gittel’s torn and b
leeding body flashed grotesquely in his mind, and Frank could feel the old rage building into a storm he wasn’t certain he could contain if it broke free. “Shut the fuck up about that,” he said darkly.

  Rick didn’t look away. “You could have been one of them. Think about that next time you pop a pill.”

  Frank’s hands curled into fists, but he didn’t move. Rick was his best friend. They’d been rookies together some twelve years ago. It didn’t matter. Frank didn’t trust himself not to knock the other man flat, even though he knew everything the other man had said was true. And he would never reveal that there had been times in the last year when he’d thought coming home in a body bag would have been better than coming home alone and torn to pieces inside and out.

  Behind him he heard Rick walk to the door and yank it open. “Pull yourself together, Frank. I’m sick of watching you self-destruct.” He waited a beat, as if expecting a rebuff. But Frank didn’t have a rebuttal. There were no words left inside him. Nothing left to say. Nothing left to feel.

  Just a big black hole that had blown through him that day in Jerusalem.

  TWO

  MONDAY, JANUARY 23, 8:35 A. M.

  A hundred questions descended on Kate in the span of a nanosecond, and for an instant she was overwhelmed. She was aware that the room had gone silent. That all eyes were upon her. That her heart was pounding. And that she was excited. Too excited. She needed to calm down. Logical decisions weren’t made when there were emotions or ego involved. In this case there was a good bit of both.

  When she could find her voice she pursed her lips and met her boss’s gaze. “What about the rest of my caseload? It’s extensive.”

  “I want your full focus on the Bruton Ellis case, so I’ll reassign most of your other cases to another ADA.”

  She was so flustered she couldn’t even remember her other cases at the moment, but it didn’t matter. She would give up all of them for the case she was being handed. She thought about her court date that afternoon. “I’m scheduled to give my opening argument on the Ricky Joe Paulsen case at two.”

  “You’ll need to see that one through to the end. Judge Reinhardt doesn’t like surprises, so we had better not switch prosecutors this late in the game.” He scribbled a note into the appointment book that lay open on his desk. “How long do you expect the trial to last?”

  “A week at most.”

  “Then it shouldn’t be a problem.”

  She looked around the room, her mind already jumping ahead and prioritizing all the things that needed to be done. “I want to handpick my team.”

  “I anticipated that.”

  “I want two paralegals. Two administrative assistants. And three investigators.”

  One side of his mouth twitched. “One paralegal. One admin. Two investigators.”

  This is too easy, she thought, and something began to niggle at the back of her mind. Mike Shelley had a reputation for being tough on crime. It was an election year; he would be running as incumbent. And it suddenly dawned on her how important this case was not only to her career but to his.

  Not sure how she felt about being used for political gain, she looked down at the legal pad and scribbled. Three investigators. If he wanted her to win, he was damn well going to give her the tools to do it.

  “What kind of evidence do we have?” she asked.

  Shelley motioned at the detective. “Detective Bates?”

  The detective slid a small cardboard box toward Kate. “We’ve got him cold. He had the two hundred dollars on him when he was pulled over for speeding ten minutes after he hit the store. We’ve got at least one witness who put him at the scene. We’ve got physical evidence. The murder weapon. We’ve got ballistics. Latent prints. DNA—”

  “DNA?” she asked. “You mean blood?”

  “Semen.”

  “That will help.”

  “We’ve also got the videotape from the security camera.” The detective motioned toward the box. “I can have a copy made for you. The documents in the box are copies, so they’re yours to keep. The Dallas PD has maintained the chain of evidence and will continue to do so. Everything we’ve got is in the evidence room. It can be signed out, but, as you well know, I highly recommend that if you want to see any of it, you go to Evidence and have a look. Once that chain of custody is broken”—he shrugged—“I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that some yahoo defense attorney will start screaming that the evidence has been contaminated.”

  “When can I get my hands on the tape?”

  “I can have it couriered over tomorrow.”

  “This afternoon would be better.” Kate looked from the detective to Mike. “What kind of time frame are we looking at?”

  “I want this case tied up yesterday, Kate. Arraignment is the day after tomorrow. Preliminary hearing is probably going to be sometime in March. Motions to suppress evidence sometime in April. We expect the trial to be on the docket in early fall.”

  Just in time for the election . . . “That’s a fast timeline for a capital case.”

  “You can handle it.”

  She and her team would have to work quickly. She would have to clear her schedule and start working weekends again. Mentally she reviewed her long-term calendar and realized she would have to cancel the cruise she’d had planned with her parents. She didn’t want to disappoint them, but she knew they would understand. When it came to her job, Peter and Isobel Megason understood all too well.

  “Does Ellis have a defense attorney yet?” Kate asked.

  Alan Rosenberg grinned. “Aaron Napier.”

  “He’s good,” Kate said.

  “You’re better,” Mike put in.

  She shot him her best cocky smile. But she didn’t feel very cocky inside. She felt as if she’d just stepped off a cliff and that someone below had moved the safety net. “Anything else I need to know before I jump into this?”

  “I’m sure you’re well aware that this will more than likely become a high-profile case,” Mike said. “It’s a capital case. Brutal and sensational. Once the media catch wind of it, they’re going to be all over it. And they’re going to be all over you.”

  “I can handle the media.”

  “Another reason I chose you.” Mike Shelley rubbed his hands together, and Kate knew he was ready to adjourn the meeting. That was one of the things she liked about her boss; he didn’t call meetings for the sake of hearing his own voice. He was quick and to the point. Just the way she liked it.

  “All right then.” Rising, Mike rounded his desk and extended his hand as he approached Kate. “Thanks for taking the case. I know you’ll do a good job.”

  She took his meaty hand in hers and met his gaze as she gave it a firm shake. “I’ll do my best.”

  MONDAY, JANUARY 23, 12:25 P.M.

  Three hours later Kate sat at a bistro table with her paralegal, Liz Gordon. Kate had hired her a year earlier, and after a bumpy start and a little bit of head butting, the two women had become friends.

  “I don’t know what was better,” Liz commented, “the coconut shrimp or that nine percent raise.”

  “You earned it.”

  “The shrimp?”

  Kate smiled, but her mind was no longer on the food. “You can thank Mike Shelley for both.”

  “I’m sure you had absolutely nothing to do with it.”

  Kate rolled her shoulder. “He knows you’re worth it.” She smiled. “So do I.”

  “Maybe I should have held out for fifteen percent. . . .”

  “Don’t push your luck.”

  The waiter delivered two cappuccinos, their frothy tops sprinkled with cocoa powder and cinnamon, then hustled away. Kate picked up her cup and sipped. “Mike offered me the Bruton Ellis case this morning.”

  Liz’s cup froze midway to her mouth. Her gray eyes latched on to Kate’s. “What?”

  “I said—”

  “I heard you the first time. I’m just . . .” She set down the cup. “You didn’t take it, did you?”<
br />
  “Why wouldn’t I? This is the case of a lifetime.”

  “This is a case that’s going to have you working eighty hours a week for the next ten months.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  Liz rolled her eyes in exasperation. “God! You’re such a workaholic.”

  Raising her cup, Kate sipped, eyeing her friend over the rim. “I thought you’d be happy for me.”

  “Of course I’m happy for you, Kate. I’m just . . . exasperated because I thought we were making some headway with regard to your social life.”

  Kate snorted. “Who needs a social life when they have a terrific job like mine?”

  “That job isn’t going to keep you warm at night.”

  “So I’ll buy an electric blanket.”

  Liz shook her head. “How am I supposed to set you up with the most beautiful man in the world when you spend every frigging moment of every frigging day working?”

  Kate laughed, truly amused. Liz had been trying to fix her up on a blind date with her brother’s best friend for the last six months. Up until now, Kate had been scrambling for excuses. “Look, I’m going to have to put Thad on a back burner for now.”

  “Oh, that is so rich. You’re virtually glowing because you now have a legitimate excuse not to go out with him. God, Kate, you are sick!”

  Kate chuckled.

  “It’s not funny.”

  She pursed her lips. “Sorry.”

  “I’m starting to think you don’t like men.”

  “I like men just fine. It just so happens that I’m focused on my career right now.”

  Liz pouted for a moment, then shook her head. “Thad Armitage is a dream, Kate. He’s Harvard educated. Old-money family. Investment banker. Sexy as sin. Straight. And available. What more can a girl ask for?”

  Having heard all too much about the illustrious Thad Armitage III, Kate started to change the subject, but Liz was just getting warmed up. “You need to meet someone while you’re still pretty, Kate.”