He got up, went to the bathroom, splashed cold water on his face; then put on jeans and a sweatshirt and went out to the kitchen. While his coffee brewed, he stood at the French doors and gazed out at the gray light of dawn over the eastern ridge. He opened one of the doors. The still air was damp and raw, but it attached him to the actual world around him.
There was just enough light to see the frost on the patio stones, frost on the grass beyond it, frost on the bird feeders. Soon the chickadees and nuthatches would be visiting, flitting back and forth from the apple tree. He began to shiver. He closed the door, got his coffee from the sink island, picked up the plain white envelope that Emma had left on the sideboard, and went into the den. In the light of his desk lamp, he opened the envelope and removed its single sheet of paper. On it were just two short items.
The first was the contact information for Ziko Slade’s defense attorney, Marcus Thorne. Thorne, Gurney recalled, had achieved his initial notoriety by demolishing the seemingly airtight prosecution case against Simeon Lorzco (a.k.a. the Kindergarten Killer), who moments after his controversial acquittal was fatally shot by the mother of one of the murdered children. Below Thorne’s phone number Emma had appended a handwritten comment: “He is still retained by Ziko and will answer any questions you have about the case.”
The second item was a link to New York State v. Slade on the video archive of Murder on Trial, the division of RAM-TV that streamed sensational homicide trials.
Rather than go directly to the video, Gurney decided to look at the media coverage of Ziko Slade, past and present. If he had spent years as the sort of tabloid celebrity Emma described, jurors would have held preconceptions of Slade that might have slanted the verdict.
Typing “Slade Tennis Star” on his laptop brought up articles from Sports Illustrated, Tennis Today, and the sports sections of major newspapers. These articles—with headlines like “Hottest Teen in Tennis” and “Ziko-Mania”—covered Slade’s career from ages fourteen to seventeen. The photos were action shots of him on the court—a graceful teenager with wavy hair, sinewy limbs, and an invincible grin.
The words “Slade Celebrity” led to articles covering his late teens and early twenties, a distinctly different phase of his life, in which the media’s attention shifted to his romantic relationships with female pop stars, his frequenting of glitzy art openings, and extravagant promotional events for his “Z” brand of sportswear. In the photos taken in this period his eyes were more knowing, his grin more suggestive. An article titled “Sexiest Man in Tennis” caught Gurney’s eye, mainly because of the writer’s name—Connie Clarke.
Back when Gurney was given an award for a record number of NYPD homicide arrests, Connie Clarke had written a piece about his career for New York Magazine. Its “Supercop” title and adulatory tone raised his department profile in ways he’d found endlessly embarrassing.
The search term “Slade Scandals” brought up stories revealing the dissolution of the twenty-three-year-old darling of society into a recklessly corrupt twenty-six-year-old. There were drug-related arrests, rumors of underage sex trafficking, accusations of statutory rape, links to disgraced politicians, and a succession of fashionable drug rehabs followed by spectacular public relapses.
An enlarged mugshot from this period showed his movie-star features marred by hard eyes and a smirking mouth. The final headline at the end of this chaotic time announced that he’d entered yet another recovery program—a private facility run by a controversial psychologist named Emma Martin. After that, the media lost interest in him, relegating him to the black hole reserved for troubled personalities no longer creating newsworthy trouble.
This period of invisibility ended explosively two years later with the news of his arrest for murder in what the tabloids were calling “The Case of the Headless Hunter.”
A brief announcement had run in The New York Times the previous November.
CELEBRITY ATHLETE CHARGED WITH MURDER
Former tennis prodigy and society bad-boy Ziko Slade has been arrested in the upstate town of Rexton, New York, for the murder of Leonard Lerman, a sometime employee of the Beer Monster, a local beverage retailer. Rexton Police Chief Desmond Rickles provided the following statement:
“After a thorough investigation, we have arrested Ziko Slade and charged him with the premeditated commission of this heinous crime. Further details will be provided by the Office of the District Attorney at the appropriate time.”
The reference to District Attorney Cam Stryker gave Gurney a jolt. Although Rexton was a good sixty miles from Harrow Hill, it was part of the same sprawling rural county that fell within Stryker’s jurisdiction. His recollection of the young, transparently ambitious DA was mixed at best.
Now that he was up to speed on Slade’s history, Gurney turned to the trial itself. The link Emma provided brought up a flashy page with a pulsating headline: MURDER ON TRIAL. A subhead read, YOUR FRONT-ROW SEAT AT THE ULTIMATE CONTEST IN OUR JUSTICE SYSTEM. In a blue banner were the words, NEW YORK STATE V. ZIKO SLADE—FROM THE TRUE CRIME ARCHIVES OF RAM-TV. Gurney adjusted the angle of his laptop screen, clicked Play, and sat back in his chair.
The front of a courtroom appeared on the screen, centered on the judge’s raised bench. The Rexton courthouse managed to escape the mid-twentieth-century modernization craze of blond furnishings and fluorescent lights that made so many other courtrooms appear shoddy and ephemeral. Dark mahogany covered every surface, from the judge’s bench to the witness box adjoining it and even the wall paneling.
A small plaque identified the dour-faced judge as Harold Wartz. He had unruly gray hair, brushed straight back, and thick features. His heavy-lidded eyes were magnified by his glasses. His first words were delivered in a voice as cheerless as his demeanor.
“Ms. Stryker, you may proceed with your opening statement.”
A lean young woman in gray slacks and a dark blue blazer strode from the prosecution table to a nearby lectern. Placing her hands on it, she leaned slightly forward, making eye contact with each member of the jury.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the crime I’m about to describe is sad and horrifying. It involves a fatal confrontation between a pathetic small-time criminal and a slick, ruthless murderer. It’s the story of an ill-advised blackmail attempt that ended with the would-be blackmailer decapitated and buried behind the country lodge of the powerful man he’d targeted. That would-be blackmailer was Lenny Lerman—a high-school dropout who spent the next twenty-six years of his life in a succession of menial jobs interrupted by arrests for petty theft, possession of stolen property, and passing bad checks. A dreamer with no common sense, always on the lookout for the one big score that would change everything. And then he found it. Or he thought he did.”
Stryker stepped from behind the lectern and approached the jury box.
“It all began when, in Lenny’s own words, a former jail-mate passed along a piece of information involving something awful that had happened in Ziko Slade’s wild, drug-using days. You’ll hear from witnesses how obsessed Lenny became with using this information to get rich. He planned to offer Slade the ‘exclusive rights’ to the information for a million dollars. If Slade balked at this, Lenny figured he could threaten to sell what he knew to the highest bidder.”
As Stryker went on, her angular features seemed to grow sharper and her voice flintier. “Perhaps because he had some inkling of the danger in this plan, Lenny purchased a million-dollar accidental death policy, with his son and daughter as beneficiaries. But, blinded by his dream of wealth, he failed to grasp how great the danger really was.” Stryker sighed in sad amazement at this blindness.