“They bothering you, Sondra?”
Sondra’s demeanor changes instantly; her fear of this man is palpable. “They ain’t bothering me, Rick. We just talking.”
Rick smiles briefly. “Oh, you just talking? I thought you supposed to be just working.”
What happens next goes by so fast that it seems surreal. Rick slaps Sondra across the face, and she falls back. Then Laurie grabs Rick and spins him around and down face-first onto the hood of his car. He screams in pain, and I see blood spurting onto the hood from the place where his intact nose used to be.
He tries to get up, but Laurie has his arm behind him in what looks like a wrestling hold. She slams his head down again, and he moans in agony. Then she actually opens her handbag and takes out a pair of handcuffs, cuffing him behind his back.
Finally, I spring into action, albeit verbal action. “Holy shit,” I say. My comment seems to have little effect on events as they are unfolding.
Sondra is crying softly, but Laurie and Rick are paying just as little attention to her as they are to me. Laurie takes out her cell phone and calls a friend on the force, asking that officers be sent down to make an arrest. Then she takes Rick’s car keys and drops them down a sewer.
Rick attempts some kind of talking noise, but his exact words are lost as they fail to navigate through the blood and smashed teeth. Laurie makes the reasonable assumption that what he was going to say was not conciliatory in nature, and smacks him hard in the back of his head.
She leans over until her mouth is maybe an inch from Rick’s ear. “I’m going to have some people check on Sondra every week, and if anything bad happens to her, anything at all-if she gets hit by lightning or catches a cold-I’m going to think it’s your fault. And compared to what will happen then, tonight will seem like a day at the beach. You understand?”
Rick mumbles something that sounds like “Miskshbelflk.” I assume that’s pimp-talk for “Yes, crazy lady, I understand real well. Please don’t smash my face again.”
The police show up and take Rick off to face assault and various other charges that they and Laurie will dream up. They don’t seem terribly concerned by his injuries, and as an officer of the court, I assure them that Rick sustained those injuries while resisting a citizen’s arrest.
After they’ve gone, Laurie turns to Sondra. “Do you want out of this?” she asks. “You can do better.”
Sondra laughs a short laugh, as if the idea is ridiculous. “Where am I gonna go?”
“That’s the easy part,” says Laurie. “The hard part is wanting to.”
“I’ll be okay,” she says.
I take out my card and hand it to her. “If you’re not, call me,” I say. “Next time I won’t be so easy on him.”
Sondra goes off, and Laurie and I head back to the car. “I didn’t know you still carry handcuffs,” I say, grinning like an idiot.
“I figured if I told you, you’d grin like an idiot.”
“You got any more of them?” I ask, since the first pair went off with Rick.
“I do, but I only use them in the pursuit of truth and justice.”
“Oh,” I say. “Damn.”
• • • • •
DR. JANET CARLSON must be the best-looking coroner in the United States. It’s ironic, because she had to have been voted “Least Likely to Hang Out with Dead People” in high school. She’s about five foot four, a hundred and ten pounds in rubber surgical gloves, and at thirty-five years old still looks like every guy’s dream date for the senior prom.
But put a scalpel in her hand, and you don’t want to mess with her.
I once helped Janet’s sister out of a sticky legal situation with her ex-husband, so she owed me a favor. I’ve called in that favor about fifty times since, but she doesn’t seem to mind, so I’m doing it again today.
Janet’s full medical reports on the murders aren’t in yet, or at least they haven’t been turned over to the defense, so I go down to her office to find out what I can. As soon as I arrive she buzzes me in; she almost seems anxious for the company. Maybe because the other ten people hanging out with her are in refrigerated drawers.
“I shouldn’t be talking to you,” she says. “Tucker would tie me to a tree and flog me.”
I close my eyes. “What a great visual . . .”
She laughs. “So what do you want?”
“Information that will clear my client.”
She touches her apron pockets. “Sorry, I left that in my other apron.”
We finish bantering, and she takes me through what her reports will say. “It’s pretty straightforward, Andy. All four women died from manual strangulation, probably with a cloth. Cause of death in each case is asphyxiation.”
“Were they sexually molested?” I ask.
“No.”
I’m surprised to hear this. “Isn’t that unusual, considering they were naked?”
“In my experience, very. And there was no semen found on or near the body, so it’s likely he didn’t masturbate, although two of the bodies were moved. But it’s refreshing, don’t you think, Andy? A prudish sex fiend.”
“If they died from the strangulation, when did he cut off their hands?”
“Postmortem. Very neatly done . . . he took his time. Same thing with the clothes.”
“They found the clothes?”
“Only Linda Padilla’s,” she says. “But I doubt that they were ripped off in any of the cases . . . there would have been some abrasions. I believe he cut them off after the victims were dead, most likely with the same knife he used to cut off the hands.”
“Without passion?” I ask, since she’s making the murders sound almost clinical.
“I would say so. If there was, it’s certainly well hidden.”
I thank Janet and head back to my office. What she had to say is surprising and vaguely disconcerting. I had been having trouble seeing Daniel as a psychopath and was counting on the jury feeling the same way. Janet’s portrayal of the crimes is such that it may not be the work of a psychopath, at all, but rather someone making it look that way. That would make the killer smart, cold, and diabolical, a role Daniel is far more suited to.
On the more positive other hand, if the killer is more calculating than psycho, he would be quite capable of pulling off the frame we are claiming has been perpetrated on Daniel.
Vince is at the office when I arrive, and he starts in on his daily ritual of questioning me about progress in the case. I’ve basically been telling him what I know, for two reasons. First, I cleared it with Daniel, and second, I don’t know anything.
“What do you know about Daniel’s sex life?” I ask.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“It’s a pretty straightforward question, Vince. Is there anything unusual that you know of?”
He’s upset by the question. “Of course not. Come on, Andy, he’s my son.”
“Having your genes is not exactly proof of normalcy.”
“The killer had weird sex stuff going on?” he asks.
“He murdered women, stripped them naked, and cut off their hands,” I say. “There’s a hint of the loony in that, don’t you think?”
Vince believes his role in this is to convince me of Daniel’s innocence. While he’s babbling away about that, I glance at the call list Edna left on my desk. First on the list is Randy Clemens. He called only once, which is not a surprise, since inmates in state prison are allowed to make only one phone call a day. Next to Randy’s name is Edna’s note: “He needs to see you right away.”
I defended Randy Clemens on a charge of armed robbery four and a half years ago. The state had a strong case, but not an airtight one. I came to like him and believe in his innocence. The fact that he’s calling from prison should give you some idea of how successful I was in his defense. After he was sentenced to a minimum of fifteen years, his wife divorced him and took their daughter to California.