Naked Justice

Chapter 30

BEN SPED BACK TO his apartment as fast as his well-worn Honda could get him there. The front left headlight was beginning to dangle out of its socket, and his muffler scraped the pavement every time he hit a bump, but he ignored both. He had called first, but there was no answer, which could mean one of two things—and one of them made his heart stop just to think about it.

He parked his car on the street and bolted at top speed toward Mrs. Marmelstein’s boardinghouse. Just as he hit the front lawn, he saw Joni coming from the opposite direction. To his relief, he saw she was cradling Joey in her arms.

“Thank God,” Ben gasped as he ran up to them. “Where have you been?”

One glance at his face told Joni that he was not inquiring out of idle curiosity. “We went to the mall. Baby Gap. Clothes shopping, remember?”

Ben tried to calm himself down. “How long have you been gone?”

“Pretty much all morning. Why? Should we have stayed home?”

“No. It’s just as well you didn’t.”

“What? Ben, what’s going on?”

“I’m not sure. But I think we may have had company.” He glanced over at the front window to his apartment. “Doesn’t Giselle normally sleep on the windowsill this time of day?”

Joni glanced at the house. “You know, come to think of it, she does. That’s funny, she was there when we—”

There was no point in finishing her sentence, because Ben was already gone. He tore up the front wooden steps, barely missing Mrs. Marmelstein’s garden. He ran up the stairs, forced the key in the lock, and ran inside.

“Giselle!” he cried out, but who was he kidding? She didn’t come when he called even under normal circumstances. More drastic measures were required. He bolted into the kitchen and opened a can of Feline’s Fancy, Giselle’s favorite food. He held the can up in the air, letting the sweet aroma (well, he assumed cats liked it) waft its way through the apartment. Normally, ten seconds would be sufficient to draw her out of the farthest corner of the apartment.

Nothing happened. No cat.

“Giselle!” He set the can down on the floor and began a search. He felt a profound aching in his chest. He had to search, but he was bitterly afraid of what he might find.

“Giselle!” He pushed open his bedroom door and looked all around. Could she be caught in the closet, in a dresser drawer, under the bed? Each possible place turned up empty.

He tried the bathroom. No luck. Then the front living area—under the sofa, inside the end table. Even inside the piano, for God’s sake. But she wasn’t there.

The sick feeling expanded and rose up Ben’s throat. This just wasn’t like Giselle. If she were here, she’d have come to him by now.

If she could.

Joni and Joey came through the front door. “Found her yet?” Joni asked.

“No,” Ben said. “Why don’t you take a look?” But even as he said it, he knew she was no more likely to find Giselle than he had been.

Think, he told himself. Assume that this person did want to hurt him. The point of the videotape was to prolong the pain, to drag out the twisted suspense. And to tell him … what?

Ben tried to recall what he had seen and heard on the tape. That was definitely a cat he had heard shrieking. But what were the other sounds? There was a bell, followed by a clicking, followed by a whirring noise. Some kind of engine running. What was this sicko trying to tell him?

Ben ran it over and over in his mind as his eyes scanned the apartment. Click. Bell. Hum. Click. Bell. Hum.

It hit him the instant his eyes moved to the kitchen.

It was a microwave.

You click the door closed, the bell rings, and the microwave hums into action.

A cat in a microwave? The demented mind behind this was probably just the type who would enjoy seeing a sick urban legend brought to life.

His eyes barely open, barely willing to be open, Ben reentered the kitchen. This time he checked the microwave. It was dark inside, but—something was in there.

Ben closed his eyes and slowly, not wanting to but knowing he had to, opened the microwave door.

There was a large shoebox inside. Closed. Taped shut. Just barely fit.

Not breathing, Ben edged the shoebox out of the tight space. He closed his eyes, said a quick and quiet prayer, and opened the box.

Giselle leaped out of the box, claws extended, and clutched onto Ben’s shoulder. Ben cried out in surprise, not to mention pain. A piece of cloth had been jammed in her tiny mouth and held in place by adhesive tape. Ben carefully cleared the cat’s mouth and a forlorn howl followed.

“Giselle!” Ben reached for her, but she eluded him and bounced down onto the floor.

“Giselle! Are you all right?” Ben held out his arms, but she had already scampered across the floor to the open can of Feline’s Fancy. She lowered her nose and attacked the food as if she hadn’t eaten for days.

“Well, you don’t seem to be in any immediate pain.” What a relief. For a moment there, he had been certain …

But he was wrong, thank God. He lowered his head to the table. He could feel his blood circulating again, his heart lurching back into action. Who the hell was behind this, anyway? What sort of game was he playing? As if the Barrett case wasn’t complicated enough already, now he had some psychopath tormenting him. Someone who had managed to find his office, his apartment, and his cat, with no problem.

And if he could get to Ben’s cat, how hard could it be to get to his friends? Or his nephew? Or Ben himself?

And what did the rest of the tape mean? The explosion. And the final words.

You’re next.

Joni rushed into the kitchen, Joey in tow. “You found her!”

“Yeah.”

“Thank goodness.” She sat in the chair opposite him. “You really had me worried there for a moment. What’s with the new jewelry?”

“Jewelry?”

“Yeah. Around her neck. Did you buy her that?”

“I didn’t buy her anything.” Ben rose out of his chair and walked to Giselle. He was surprised he hadn’t noticed it before—but everything had been happening so fast. Giselle had a bright red ribbon tied around her neck in a bow. And dangling from the ribbon beneath her chin was a coin-size gold heart engraved with two words.

SICK HEART.

It took Ben twice as long as normal to get Joey to sleep that night. It was as if the boy could sense how worried Ben was, how ill at ease. Ben tried to conceal it, at least until he could do something about it, but he apparently wasn’t doing a very good job. His mind was racing. Would this stalker continue with the sick pranks, or would he eventually try something serious? Maybe even deadly. Was it safe for them to stay here, and if not, where would they go?

Joey finally closed his eyelids, but only after Ben had run through “Annabel Lee” twice and sung the “A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes” more times than he cared to count. It was just after ten; he decided to turn on CNN.

“Our top story this evening is our continuing coverage of”—a graphic image formed over the newscaster’s left shoulder—“Horror in the Heartland.” HEARTLAND appeared in large red letters, with what appeared to be blood dripping from them. The picture cut to video of the Utica neighborhood where Wallace Barrett lived. There was a sudden explosive noise—a gunshot—followed by two more in rapid succession. “Can you trust your neighbors? Are you safe? That’s what the citizens of the usually sleepy town of Tulsa, Oklahoma, have been asking themselves in this upper-class neighborhood, since their sense of security was shattered by the hideous murder of a mother and her two tiny, defenseless children. The people of this neighborhood thought they were safe; they thought violence couldn’t find them here. Little did they know that this illusion would be shattered by a hideous melodrama featuring their own mayor in the starring role.”

Ben shut the television off. This he did not need. Obviously, Barrett’s decision to speak to the media had not profoundly influenced the general tenor of the news coverage. He thought about playing the piano, always relaxing, but he was afraid to risk waking the baby. He retrieved his box of childhood treasures from under his bed, but somehow, given his current mood, a Magic 8-Ball and a bag of marbles just wasn’t going to help. He considered reading; it seemed as if there was some book he was halfway through, but he hadn’t read a page since he became embroiled in this case and now he couldn’t remember what it was.

Nights like this, he had to admit, it would be nice to have someone else in your life. Someone to talk to, to relax with, watch a movie or listen to a CD with. Whatever. Truth was, he hadn’t had anyone like that since Ellen, and that had been an increasingly long time ago. And that had ended in tragedy.

Ben picked up the phone and was halfway through dialing Christina before he stopped and pushed the interrupt button. It wouldn’t be right. He monopolized too much of her time as it was during the day; he didn’t have any business invading her nights. She probably had a social life, unlike him. She belonged to clubs and support groups and a church and went to parties and all that stuff.

What do I belong to? Ben asked himself. He didn’t have an answer.

Without even thinking about it, he began dialing her number. Long distance to Oklahoma City. He was afraid she might not still be awake, but in fact, she answered in less than three rings.

“Hello?”

“Hi. Mother?”

“Benjamin?” There was a brief pause. “Is today a holiday?”

“No, Mother. I just thought I’d see how you were doing.”

Her voice could not disguise a certain incomprehension. “You just called … to talk?”

“Is it too late? I hope you weren’t already asleep.”

“You know, Benjamin, when you get to be my age, you don’t sleep as much as you used to. How’s my grandson?”

“He’s fine, really. All in all.”

“You don’t sound convinced.”

“Well, he doesn’t talk much.”

“Some children don’t. Your sister barely spoke until she was three. But once she started, you couldn’t stop her.”

“Maybe it’s genetic.”

“What else would it be?”

Ben stretched out on his sofa. “I don’t know, Mother. I’m doing my best, but I don’t know very much about raising a kid.”

“No one does, Benjamin. It’s all trial and error.”

“Yeah.” He sighed. “I just don’t want my errors to destroy someone’s life.”

There was another long pause. “Benjamin, is something wrong?”

“Oh, no. Nothing. I’ve just been very busy lately.”

“Yes, I know.”

“You do?”

“How could I not? I see you on television constantly—scowling at reporters and refusing to comment. I can’t go anywhere without running into someone who wants the inside scoop. Majel Howard stopped me at Crescent Market yesterday and I thought I would never get away from her. She wanted to know all about my son, the famous celebrity. Can you imagine? My son, the famous celebrity. Who’d have thought?”

“I’m hardly famous. More like notorious.”

“Nonsense. But Majel kept pressing for information, so eventually I had to pretend that you and I talk occasionally and that consequently I might know something.”

“Mo-ther!”

“Sorry, Benjamin.”

“The trial starts soon.”

“Yes, so I’ve heard. Do you have your trial strategy mapped out?”

Ben hesitated. “Not exactly. We have a theory, but no way to prove it.”

“It must be very stressful. Handling such a high-profile case. Having reporters swarming around you every second.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“Well, you’ll think of something, Benjamin. I know you will.”

“I will?”

“Of course you will. We Kincaids aren’t quitters, are we?”

“No. I guess not.”

“Was there something else?”

There was, of course. What he wanted to say, what he really wanted deep deep down to say was “Mommy, I’m scared. Mommy, I think some bully wants to hurt me and I don’t know how to stop him.” But he couldn’t say that. That would never do.

“Benjamin?”

“Yes?”

“You know … sometimes your father would get so busy with his practice and his surgeries and his research that his head would swim. He wouldn’t know what to do next. But he never let it get the best of him. He’d smile, put his arm around me, and say, ‘We’ll get through this. If the creek don’t rise.’ ”

Ben smiled a little. “That’s nice. I wish he had said that to me.”

“Didn’t he?” There was a rustling on her end of the phone. “You know, when I visited you last, I tried to tell you everything I could remember about your father. But you haven’t mentioned him since then.”

“I’m sure you already know everything I could say.”

“But I don’t. I don’t know anything about when you visited him in the hospital that last time. Or when you saw him in … in … well.”

After all these years, she still couldn’t say it. In jail.

“There really isn’t much to tell, Mother. I barely remember myself.”

Ben couldn’t have been more surprised when his father showed up at his apartment. He had been opposed to Ben’s moving out of the family house. Why would you want to live in some grungy old apartment, he asked, when we have one of the biggest mansions in Nichols Hills not ten miles away? He had refused to visit. But now here he was, on Ben’s doorstep, just hours after Ben learned that his mentor, his father in situ, was trying to prosecute his father in fact on charges of criminal fraud and murder.

“Ben, I need your help.”

“Um, sure, come on in.” He was embarrassed by the condition of his apartment: barely any furniture, clothes and books and records strewn all over the place. He knew his father was a firm believer in the tenet that “you can tell a great deal about a person from the way he lives.”

“It’s not for me. Personally, I think this is all a load of crap. But your mother is quite upset about it, and I know you don’t want that.”

“No, of course not.” Ben pushed some clothes off a chair and motioned for his father to sit. He didn’t. “What’s the problem?”

“Well, don’t you know? You work there, don’t you?” A deep furrow crossed his forehead. “Ben, you haven’t screwed up another job, have you?”

Ben felt his jaw clenching. “No, I’m still at the DA’s office.”

“Then you know they’re trying to railroad me.”

“I found out about the grand jury investigation today.”

“You didn’t know till today?”

“No. They intentionally kept me out of it.”

“Well, hell’s bells. And I thought you were going to be such a big help. I’ve known about it for weeks. I probably know more about it than you do.”

“Probably.” Good, Ben thought. Let his father think he’s a moron. At least he wouldn’t ask him to do anything that…

“It’s like this,” his father explained. “You remember me telling you about the EKCV?”

He did. The Edward Kincaid cardiac valve. A synthetic implant designed to regulate and stimulate the flow of blood through the major arteries. For patients with fallen arterial veins or serious heart problems that couldn’t otherwise be repaired, it would be a godsend. What made it truly special— indeed, unique—was that although artificial, it was made from new synthetic materials that were all but indistinguishable from natural organic material. Compatibility was virtually universal.

“Last I heard,” Ben said, “you were trying to sell stock in a new corporation to raise funds to market the valve nationwide.”

“Right. That was Jim Gregory’s idea. You know lawyers—they always know how to come up with some cash. Well, except you, of course.”

Ben heard himself chanting a mantra like a yogi. Don’t let him get to you. Don’t let him get to you.

“So he puts out a prospectus, finds a brokerage firm, prepares an initial offering. All that lawyer stuff. Charges me nearly twenty thousand bucks. But boy, did it work. You wouldn’t believe it. We raised almost four million bucks on the first offering. Value of the stock shot up almost overnight.”

“You must have been very happy.”

“Damn straight. It was like a dream come true. Course, then we had to prove the damn thing worked. Make it viable.” He paused for a moment, glanced down at his hands. “I don’t know. Maybe we rushed it. Some bad information got out. Suddenly there was this big rumor that the emperor had no clothes, you know? Jim kept saying we needed results. Had to stave off a shareholder derivative action. So I agreed to put the EKCV into action.”

“You mean—on people?”

“Well, that’s the only way to know whether it really works. If you want to use it on people, eventually you’ve got to try it out on people. We chose our initial subjects very carefully. All were people with serious cardiac problems, people who otherwise had very little chance of living more than a year. All were willing volunteers.”

“What happened?”

“They died. Two of them. Not right away. Hell, no. Then we would have known we had problems. No, everything seemed to be fine and dandy for the first three weeks. But then the synthetic materials began to deteriorate. We still don’t know what caused it. Maybe it was stomach acids, maybe respiratory fluids. We just don’t know.”

“People died?”

“It happens. Experimentation always has risks.”

“But … they died.”

“They knew what they were getting into. They volunteered of their own free will. And we had every one of them sign waivers, thank God, or we’d be up to our armpits in civil suits. With the waivers, I thought we were free and clear. Who would’ve thought the DA would try to press criminal charges? They’re making a big deal out of the fact that we didn’t get FDA approval. And the hell of it is, they won’t even say what it is they’re going to charge me with. Don’t I have a right to know the charges against me?”

“For the moment, there are no charges against you. That’s for the grand jury to decide. What the DA plans to try for is a matter of strategy.”

“Strategy. That’s what I’d like to know about.”

The gnawing in Ben’s stomach intensified. “What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. Hell, they won’t tell us anything. I’m supposed to go into that jury room tomorrow all by my lonesome and they won’t tell me beans about what they want to know. How am I supposed to prepare?”

Ben tried to choose his words carefully. “If you don’t know the answer to a question, or don’t recall, just say so.”

“Oh, right. That’ll look good, won’t it? The grand jury will charge me in a heartbeat.”

“The truth of the matter is, grand juries usually do whatever the prosecutors want them to do. You should focus on the trial.”

“What a defeatist attitude. Typical of you.”

“What?”

“Face it, Ben. You’ve never had much fight in you. You’d rather run from a fight than win it. Do you know this pissant Jack Bullock?”

“Uh … yes.”

“What’s he got up his ass, anyway?”

“I’m not sure what …”

“This seems to be a vendetta for him. Has he got some problem with people who are richer than he is?”

“I don’t think so. He just can’t stand to let …” He struggled for a neutral word. “… people he believes have committed crimes get away with it.”

“A zealot, huh? Great. Just what I need, some goddamn whacked-out civil servant on my case.”

“He’s not—”

“Ben, I want to know what the DA is planning. I’m particularly interested in whether they’ve talked to a guy named Perkins. Andrew Perkins. I want you to find out for me.”

“Me?”

“Yeah, you. Why not? You work there, for God’s sake. Hell, I helped you get the job.”

“You—No, I interviewed like everyone else.”

His father smirked. “Right. I bet that’s what won them over. You have such a dynamic personality.” He laughed. “I had Senator Abrams put in a good word for you.”

“You didn’t have any business—”

“You wanted the job, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but—”

“This is beside the point. You’re in the DA’s office, and I need help. From the inside. So are you going to help? If you hate me so much you can’t bring yourself to do it for me, do it for your mom. She’s really torn up over this thing.”

Ben bit down on his lower lip. “In the first place, they’ve kept me isolated from this case, so I don’t have any idea what they’re planning. In the second place, even if I did, I couldn’t tell you. I have an ethical obligation of confidentiality to the client I work for. And my client is the State of Oklahoma. Not you.”

“Shit.” Ben’s father threw his hands up in the air. “I should have known.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You must be loving this. At long last you have a chance to lord it over your dear old dad. For the first time, you have something I want. Something I need. So you’re not going to give it to me.”

“That doesn’t have anything to do with it!”

“In a pig’s eye. You’ve always been this way, Ben. Since day one. You take and take and take, but you never give.”

“That’s not—”

“What the hell did I send you to law school for, huh?” His rage was boiling. His face was turning a hot, vivid crimson. “Why did I pay all those bills, so you could throw your life away being a government whore? I tried to get you into a respectable occupation, and you, in your usual obstinate petty way, insisted on becoming a goddamn scum-of-the-earth fucking whore lawyer.” He picked up a chair pillow and threw it across the room. “And now that I actually need a lawyer, now that you could actually help the family and pay me back for all I’ve done for you, you refuse!”

The aching in Ben’s gut was so intense he could barely stand. “I don’t have any choice. I can’t help you.”

“Can’t? Or won’t?”

Ben hesitated. “Sometimes there isn’t any difference.”

Ben’s father exploded with white-hot rage. “Do you know what they’ll do to me?”

Ben didn’t answer, but he had a pretty good idea.

In the space of a heartbeat, his father’s fist was in the air. In the same instant, Ben flashed on every time he had seen that fist before, every time he had trembled and fallen into line in its presence. He held up his hands in front of his face.

“You goddamn coward. You disgust me.” His father’s hand dropped to his side, the threat unfulfilled. He took several deep breaths through great heaving lungs, slowly bringing himself back under control. The trembling throughout his body subsided.

He strode to the door, but stopped just before he passed through. “I don’t want anything more to do with you, Ben. Ever. Don’t even think about coming crawling back to me. It’s done. Over. I won’t even speak your name. You’re out of my will; you’re out of my life.”

And just before he passed through that door, he added one final sentence, one that haunted Ben then and still did today, years afterward, as he talked to his mother on the phone, every time he talked to his mother. It was the sentence she had never heard. It was the sentence Ben heard every day of his life.

“I don’t want anything to do with you,” he had said. “From now on, I don’t have a son.”

Ben sat up and cleared his eyes. “I’m sorry, Mother, I didn’t mean to keep you up so long. I’ll let you go.”

“Benjamin—”

“Yes?”

“I know I’ve said this before, but—it would make me very happy if you would just let me help you.”

“Financially? No.”

“Well, you can’t fault me for trying.” Another long pause. “Benjamin?”

“Yes.”

“Feel free to call. Anytime. Then I’d have something to tell Majel Howard next time I see her.”

“All right. I’ll try.”

“And, Benjamin?”

“Yes?”

“Try not to worry so much, all right? You’ve always taken things so hard, so … seriously. Problems have a way of working themselves out. I truly believe that. Things will turn out all right in the end.”

“I hope so, Mother. I hope so. And—”

“Yes, dear?”

The tiniest of smiles tugged at the corners of his lips. “Thanks.”