Stone Cold

Chapter Fifty-One

Alex trembled as she drove away. Judge West had made it clear that their secret partnership didn’t include a pass if he decided she was guilty. That he agreed to help her meant that he hadn’t made up his mind, but his offer came with a warning to be careful what she asked for. If Gloria was telling the truth, he wouldn’t hesitate to turn on Alex.

The judge and her defense team had one thing in common. They had shifted the burden of proof to her to convince them of her innocence, and she knew why. It was the facts. Claire had chipped away at the prosecution’s case, but the core facts had gone unchallenged.

She had gone to Odyessy’s house carrying a concealed weapon and looking for Dwayne after he threatened to rape Bonnie. If she had only wanted to inform Dwayne that she was withdrawing from his case, all she had to do was leave him a message. Instead, she shot him without giving him a chance to defend himself. Bad facts make for guilty verdicts.

Lou Mason called her when she was near downtown.

“What’s up?” Alex asked.

“Our luck might have just changed. Claire went to Ortiz’s office to talk to Gloria. When Claire got there, she was gone.”

“What do you mean, she was gone?”

“I mean that she told Ortiz she had to use the john and she never came back.”

Alex’s heart kicked into high gear, banging against her chest. “Christ! Didn’t Ortiz send someone with her to the bathroom?”

“Yes, a female rookie cop, and Gloria decked her. Ortiz knows that if the cops can’t find Gloria by morning, he’ll have to rest his case without her testimony.”

“Yeah, but if they can find her, he can call her as a rebuttal witness after we rest.”

“Not if we don’t put on any evidence. He rests, we rest, and then we go straight to the jury.”

Alex’s hands were shaking so badly she pulled into a parking lot. “Did Ortiz give Claire any more details about Gloria’s testimony?”

“No. He says it’s a moot point until they find her. That’s bullshit, but it won’t matter if everything breaks right for us in the morning.”

“My God, the whole thing is unbelievable.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It’s still a long way till morning, but I like our chances a whole lot better right now than I did a little while ago. I’ll keep you posted if anything else happens.”

Alex wished she agreed with Lou, but her gut wouldn’t let her. The police would blanket the east side looking for Gloria, and Hank Rossi would kick in every door to find her. When they did, she’d be back to square one except that Ortiz would have one more thing to hold over Gloria’s head and one more card to play with the jury, now that her reluctance to testify would make her more persuasive, just as it had with Jameer Henderson.

Sitting in the deserted parking lot mulling a series of possibilities, each one worse than the last, she got angry at being so helpless to do anything. Hoping that Rossi wouldn’t find Gloria only made her feel even more helpless, if that was possible. Desperate to do something, anything, she opened the one file from Gloria’s phone she had yet to review.

The file held photographs. Gloria was in a number of them. Alex recognized her from the photograph Mason had taken. There were pictures of a dog, pictures of people whom Alex assumed were Gloria’s friends and family, pictures of Gloria she took holding the camera in front of her, and pictures taken at a bar, people crowded together, raising beer bottles in a salute. There was nothing in the pictures of Gloria that jumped out at Alex. She was, to all appearances, an ordinary person, laughing and smiling in some of the photographs, caught in candid moments of surprise or reflection in others.

Scrolling through the pictures, she almost skipped over another photograph of Gloria. Alex had seen enough images of her that one more wasn’t worth studying, but the background in this photo caught her attention.

Gloria was standing in front of the door to a house. Something about the door looked familiar to Alex. She enlarged the image, her breath catching in her throat when she saw a horseshoe tacked to the wall above the frame. She’d seen a door with a horseshoe above it twice before. The first time was when she examined the crime scene photographs in the Wilfred Donaire case. He’d been murdered in his backyard. The horseshoe was mounted above the back door to his house. She saw it again when she and Grace Canfield visited the scene, Grace pointing out the horseshoe, saying how little luck it had brought Wilfred.

Alex looked at the photograph again. Gloria was wearing light tan ankle-high boots and was dressed in jeans and a heavy jacket zipped up to her neck. Using her fingers to enlarge and move the image, Alex saw that the grass around Gloria’s feet was a dull winter brown except in a few places that were streaked with something dark.

Zeroing in on the streaks, she saw what could be irregular palm prints, as if someone had wiped their hands on the ground. Keeping the image as enlarged as possible, she traced a trail of dark spots from Gloria’s boots to her jeans and onto her jacket. The streaks and the spots could have been anything, including water and mud, but she’d seen enough crime scene photographs to know that they could also be blood.

Alex leaned back against her car seat, closing her eyes and shaking her head. Wilfred Donaire had been murdered the year before in the dead of winter, and Gloria Temple had been there when he died.

Wilfred had done well enough in the drug business to buy his house, though not well enough to maintain it. It was boarded up after his murder and added to the city’s extensive inventory of abandoned houses on the east side. If Gloria needed to find a hiding place in a hurry, she could do a lot worse.

Rossi had worked the Donaire case long enough to recognize the horseshoe if he saw the photograph. That would be enough to send him to Donaire’s house. She could either hope that wouldn’t happen or make certain she got there first. If she did and if Gloria told her the truth, she’d have one more decision to make-what to do about Gloria. Her phone rang. It was Bonnie. As much as she wanted to hear her voice, she knew it was the wrong time to answer.