Chasing The Dead

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Pieces were lining up, even if they weren’t quite falling into place for Alex as she drove away. Joanie Sutherland had a benefactor concerned enough about her to pay for a rehab stint at an exclusive treatment center. She was excited enough about meeting someone special the night she was killed to put on her one good dress. And Bethany had five thousand dollars in crisp hundreds sitting on her kitchen counter. Chances were those dots connected in a straight line to Joanie’s killer.

Her benefactor may have started out smitten, pretending he was Richard Gere in Pretty Woman or, if he was old and proper enough, Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady. Joanie latched onto him, street-smart enough to know a good thing when she saw one, leveraging sex for rehab, then tacking on a premium to keep their relationship a secret, adding blackmail to prostitution. Her benefactor ran a cost-benefit analysis and decided he could no longer afford her. End of a sad but familiar story. The good news was that, if Alex was right, Jared Bell was innocent.

Had Rossi not made up his mind that Jared was the killer, he might have actually done an investigation that would have painted the same picture. But he didn’t, which brought Alex back to the night in Judge West’s barn when he told her that Jared was her new client. She suspected then that the judge was fronting for someone who wanted this case closed in a hurry, and now she wondered whether Rossi’s decision not to look past Jared for a suspect was part of that effort. She couldn’t picture Rossi conniving with the judge, but a year ago she would have said the same thing about herself.

Proving all of that wouldn’t be easy. Judge West wasn’t going to find religion and confess his sins, and he wasn’t going to give up whomever he was protecting. The same was true for Rossi if his hands were dirty. Bethany knew more than she was willing to say, maybe even knowing who killed her sister. But five thousand dollars was a lot of money, and if there was more where that came from, it might be enough to soothe her grief and guilt over her sister’s death.

Alex called Grace Canfield, leaving a message with a to-do list when Grace didn’t pick up. Subpoena Joanie’s records from Fresh Start and find out who paid for her treatment. Check Joanie’s rap sheet to find out who posted her bail. Track down her street sisters and ask them if they knew Joanie’s sugar daddy’s name.

If none of that panned out, there was still Charlotte. Like a lot of autistic kids, the girl was a wanderer. A couple of years before, Alex had defended a father who was charged with felony child endangerment for not preventing his autistic son from sneaking out of the house at night. The boy was found at the bottom of a neighbor’s swimming pool. The boy’s doctor testified that nearly half of parents with an autistic child aged four or older said their child had tried to leave a safe place at least once and one in four said their child had disappeared long enough to cause concern.

Bethany must have been searching for Charlotte the day Alex found her playing in Rock Creek. That she was playing in the exact spot where Joanie’s body had been found could have been a coincidence, but Alex didn’t have faith in random chance on that order of magnitude. Since Bethany left Charlotte alone when she went to work, Charlotte might have gone out the night Joanie was killed and might have been playing in Liberty Park, maybe even in the creek, when the killer dumped Joanie’s body. If so, Charlotte might be able to identify the killer, assuming Alex could get her to talk.

It was midafternoon and Alex was famished. She headed to Hamburger Mary’s near the southwest edge of the downtown. The chain was known for its gay founders, openness to diversity, and knockout burgers, though Alex favored the GLBT, which added guacamole to the traditional BLT in a tasty salute to her world.

Her cell phone rang as she pulled into the parking lot on Southwest Boulevard, but it wasn’t the phone resting in the cup holder next to the steering wheel. It was the burner phone she’d set in the console between the driver and passenger seats, the caller ID displaying Unknown instead of a name.

She picked up the phone, unable to tell whether her hand was shaking because the phone was vibrating or because her insides were quaking. Judge West and his wife, Millie, were the only people who had the number for the burner phone. Millie had no reason to call. When the judge called her from his office, the familiar phone number showed up on caller ID, and when he called her from his home, his name was displayed.

Either the caller had misdialed or someone else had her number, and she didn’t want to answer without knowing who that might be. She hadn’t set up voice messaging for the phone, and since the caller was unknown, the phone wouldn’t capture the caller’s number. She stared at the phone, transfixed, waiting for it to stop ringing. Most people’s phones had voice mail. If it was a wrong number and there wasn’t an option to leave a message, odds were the caller would realize her error and not try again. If it wasn’t a wrong number, the caller would keep trying.

The phone quieted. Alex silently counted to ten, easing the phone back onto the console like it was fragile, jolting so hard when it rang again that she banged her head against her seat’s headrest and dropped the phone on the floor of the car. Unlatching her seat belt, she leaned forward, groping with one hand around her feet, accidentally kicking the phone beneath the seat. Cursing, she opened the car door, slid onto the asphalt parking lot on her knees, and stuck her head inside the car, peering under the seat. She grabbed the phone and answered.

“Who is this?”

“Why is Rossi asking me about our relationship?” Judge West asked.

Alex began to shake, her voice uneven. “I have no idea.”

“Don’t forget that if I go down, you go down with me.”

Alex heard footsteps approaching from behind her. “Like that’s news. I gotta go. Someone’s coming.”

The footsteps stopped. She could feel someone standing over her.

“Are you praying, throwing up, or just hiding from me?” Bonnie asked.

Alex shoved the phone under the seat and grabbed the inside of the car door, pulling herself up, her gut in full-tilt trampoline mode, a hot flash racing through her.

“I dropped my phone.”

Bonnie pointed to the phone in the cup holder. “There’s your phone. Is that the best you can do?”

Alex’s face was so warm she thought her eyeballs would catch on fire.

“And yes,” Bonnie added. “You’re blushing like your mother just caught you playing with yourself.”

“I can explain.”

“Me first. Sit down. In the car, not on the pavement.”

Bonnie walked around to the passenger side and got in. Alex stared at her. She wasn’t wearing makeup. Her eyes were red and puffy. Her hair was pulled back, held in place by a black headband. She was wearing faded jeans and a heavily pilled crewneck sweater. The only other time Alex had seen her leave the house looking like that was when they had to evacuate in the middle of the night because of a gas leak.

“You wouldn’t answer my calls, so I had to track you down. I looked at your credit card charges online to find out you were staying at the Residence Inn at Twenty-Ninth and Main.”

“You did what?”

“Don’t be so surprised. Did you think I was just going to sit back and do nothing? And in case you forgot, I know where you keep your list of passwords. I wanted to know where you were staying so I wouldn’t worry as much. I hear that Residence Inn is nice. It’s across the street from Penn Valley Park. I know you love to run there, but please don’t go at night. It’s not safe.”

Alex blinked, her mouth half-open, dumbfounded. “It’s okay.”

“I drove by a couple of times but I was afraid to knock. I didn’t want you to think I was stalking you.”

“You mean you didn’t want me to know that you were stalking me.”

Bonnie took a breath, smiling. “Yeah. That. And I thought you needed time and space, but that was Saturday and this is Monday and I talked to Grace and she said she didn’t know where you were, but I know how much you like to eat here so I took a chance and I’ve been sitting at a table in the front window since eleven this morning and-”

Alex stopped her. “I’m not coming back.”

Bonnie sniffed. “I know. Not now anyway. Maybe never. But you can’t just walk out like that without. . without me telling you something.”

“I know you love me. I love you too, but that’s not what this is about.”

“I do know that, but you’ve got some crazy idea what loving someone means, so just be quiet and listen for a minute.”

Alex nodded. “Okay.”

“I’m glad you told me everything. I know you think you did some terrible things and I’m not saying you’re wrong about that, even if I’d like to think I’d have shot Dwayne Reed if it had been me instead of you. And the whole thing with the judge and your clients, well, I won’t lie. That’s. .” She shook her head. “That’s a real mess. And shutting me out, that’s a huge problem in the trust department even if I get why you did it.” She made a quarter turn, facing Alex. “You carried all this crap by yourself for the last year and you can see how well that worked out, but you can’t fix it now by running away from me, from us. I don’t know anything about the law or what you have to do to set things right or even if you can. I don’t know if you’ll lose your job, your law license, or go to jail, and I don’t care. All I know is that I love you and I’ll be by your side every step of the way if you’ll let me. And if you don’t come home, I’ll find you no matter where you go.”

She leaned over, kissed Alex on the cheek, got out of the car, and walked away, not looking back.