Immoral (28 page)

“Did you say yes?” Gale asked.

Kevin shook his head. “No. I told her I was already seeing Sally.”

“So you never actually went out together?”

“No.”

“How did Kerry take the rejection?” Gale asked.

“She was okay about it She said maybe another time.”

Gale nodded. “How about Sally? How did she like the idea of another girl asking you out? Just like Rachel did that night.”

“She was kind of pissed off. I told her it was nothing. We didn’t talk about it again.”

“And a week later, Kerry disappeared, just like Rachel did.”

Kevin swallowed. “Yes.”

“You don’t have very good luck with girls asking you out do you, Kevin?”

Dan shouted another objection, and this time Kassel directed her anger at Gale, sustaining the objection and instructing the jury to ignore the question. Gale raised his arms in surrender.

“I don’t have any more questions for you, Kevin,” Gale said quietly.

Before Kevin could get up, Dan quickly got to his feet “Redirect, Your Honor.”

Judge Kassel nodded. “Go ahead.”

“Kevin, please tell the court where you were on the night Kerry McGrath disappeared.”

“I was in Florida. I was at Disney World with my parents.”

“And on the night Rachel disappeared, what did you do after she left you in Canal Park?”

“I went home.”

“Did you see your parents there?”

Kevin nodded. “We watched a movie on television in the living room until after midnight.”

“Thank you, Kevin.”

“What the fuck was all that about?” Dan demanded, taking a bite from a portobello sandwich. “‘A vital part of his defense?’”

Stride played with a paper clip, folding and unfolding it. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? He’s going to try to paint Sally as a jealous serial killer. ‘Anyone comes after my boyfriend, they disappear.’”

“But you told me that’s a nonstarter,” Dan said. “You said she’s got an alibi.”

Stride nodded. “She does. I don’t know where he thinks he’s going with this, but he obviously thinks he can make it play with the jury.”

“Well, if I yank Sally off our list, we can’t put Graeme at the barn. Besides, Gale will just call her himself, which will make us look like we’re trying to hide something. That means in half an hour she goes on the stand. So you tell me, could this girl have done it? Should I be concerned?”

Maggie shook her head. “No way. I’ve talked to the girl. She may be a jealous bitch when it conies to Kevin, but I don’t see her taking girls off the street and killing them. And she wasn’t making it up about Graeme and the bam. I talked to her. The girl was telling the truth.”

“Then why the hell does Gale seem to think this is his Get Out of Jail Free card?” Dan asked. “Do we know where Sally was when Kerry disappeared?”

“No,” Stride said. “Her name never came up.”

“We know she wasn’t with Kevin,” Maggie pointed out slyly. “You made sure of that on redirect. He was in Florida.”

Stride intervened before Dan could explode. “She didn’t do it, Dan. But you can bet Gale has already checked, and Sally doesn’t have an alibi for that night Or she doesn’t remember where she was. Hell, it was almost two years ago. It’s still smoke and mirrors. A coincidence. Give the girl a chance. She convinced Maggie. She’ll convince the jury, too.”

Dan slammed his briefcase shut and gave Maggie a malevolent stare. “All right. We don’t change our strategy. We ignore the Kerry McGrath issue. By my estimate, we’re still ahead on points. If the jury went out now, they might think about it for a while, but they’d convict. But if Gale can muddle their brains with another false suspect, he might talk them into reasonable doubt. And let me make one thing very clear. If we lose this case, the two of you are going to be scraping bird shit off statues in public parks for the next ten years. So you better damn well hope you’ve given me enough to put this pervert behind bars.”

Stride and Maggie exchanged glances. They were both thinking the same thing.

What was Gale up to?

Or worse, what had they missed?

Jerry Gull couldn’t take it anymore. He had to go. Badly. And there was still a long stretch of empty road between him and Duluth.

He had guzzled coffee throughout the four-hour seminar in Hibbing, then rushed out of the hotel without using the bathroom. Jerry had a phobia about public bathrooms and generally didn’t go anywhere except at home or at the office. Normally, he would have made it home from Hibbing in plenty of time, but he was delayed by another hour on his return trip because he had to pick up Brunswick.

Brunswick was his girlfriend Arlene’s dog, a Newfoundland who weighed more than Jerry. Stretched out, he was probably taller than Jerry, too.

Arlene had been married for a short time. In the divorce, her ex-husband, who had a small hobby farm outside Hibbing, was awarded custody of the dog. Jerry had never met Brunswick, but he made the ultimate miscalculation of talking to Arlene about his seminar, and she, in turn, had cajoled him into a promise to stop at her ex-husband’s farm and bring Brunswick to her for a long weekend at her sister’s place just south of the city.

That was why, squeezed into the backseat of his Toyota Corolla, was a black moose the size of Canada.

Almost immediately the coffee began to work its magic. Jerry tried not to think about it and instead just drove faster. It wouldn’t have been hard to stop at a fast food restaurant along the way, but he wasn’t ready to confront his phobia, and he wasn’t sure he could get out of the car without Brunswick escaping.

By the time he began to dance in his seat, squirming to push his legs together, he was in the woods, a long way from any town. There was something about the dog, too, that made the urge to go even worse. He could smell him and feel him puffing, hot and foul, against his neck. The dog dispensed at least a gallon of drool, most of it down the shoulder of Jerry’s blue suit. His slobbering face rubbed against Jerry’s cheek affectionately and refused to leave him alone.

There was simply not enough room in the car for him, his bladder, and Brunswick.

Jerry eyed the shoulder of the highway, and like a miracle, a quarter mile ahead, he saw exactly what he wanted, a dirt country road winding back into the forest in the middle of nowhere. It looked like a road that got no traffic at all, except for an occasional farmer or hunter cutting over to a parallel highway.

He turned onto the dirt road, and the Corolla bounced and rocked. Brunswick’s jowls swung in a peculiarly compelling rhythm, spraying the car with drool. Some of it slopped onto Jerry’s glasses, and he rubbed them clean with his hand, groaning in disgust. Jerry drove more than a mile down the dirt road, finding a place where the forest was thick with birches and there wasn’t a sign of humanity anywhere.

His body was bursting with streams, rivers, waterfalls, and every kind of torrential, rushing body of water. He wasn’t sure he was going to make it.

Jerry swung open the driver’s door and literally ran from the car. He hurried around to the right-side shoulder, ran down into the trees, and began clutching for his zipper. His clumsy fingers reached for his penis and missed, and his eyes rolled as he tried to free it from within his briefs. Finally, blissfully, he got it out, where it began flooding immediately onto the spongy ground. He didn’t have to hold it or point it; it just doused the brush on its own like a fire hose.

The relief was so great his eyes teared up.

Then, when he was almost done, something huge and heavy hit him from behind, sending Jerry sprawling. He twisted and landed on his back on the wet ground—ground he had made wet—and meanwhile, his penis was still busily doing its work, spurting like a broken sprinkler over his pants, shirt, tie, and face. Jerry screamed, so caught up in the horror of the moment that he barely realized the culprit who had attacked him was Brunswick, shooting like a cannon deep into the forest.

“
Brunswick
!” Jerry bellowed, unleashing some of his anger.

He pushed himself off the ground, looking down at his sodden clothes. He couldn’t believe it. It was a nightmare. The worst part was, he had probably lost the dog forever, and Arlene would never forgive him. He really thought about getting into the car, driving away, and never going home.

Woof!

He heard a deep bark somewhere in the distance. Brunswick wasn’t gone for good, but he wasn’t very close by. By the sound of it, he was at least a hundred yards deep in the forest. Jerry called the dog again, then waited, hoping to hear the thunder of paws (which were more like hooves) trampling the ground as the dog rushed back.

No such luck.

Woof!

Jerry signed and started hiking. He kept calling for Brunswick, and the dog would periodically answer, helping Jerry to home in on him. Jerry was wet and dirty, and he smelled. The earth was soggy, and the tree branches scraped at his clothes and skin. His shoes were covered in mud. To add insult to injury, it was starting to rain.

“Brunswick!” Jerry called. He was losing patience.

Woof!

Jerry turned in the direction of the latest bark, squinting to see between the birch trees. This time, he caught a glimpse of a black beast, nose to the ground, paws digging frantically in the soft earth.

“Finally,” he muttered.

He came up on the dog softly, not wanting to spook him and send him running away again, but Brunswick was intent on his work and didn’t seem to notice Jerry at all. The dog had found something of great interest in a tiny clearing, and he was scooping out the ground with gusto. Every now and then, he would shove his whole huge head into the hole he had created.

Jerry reached down tentatively, taking the dog’s collar in his hand.

“You are a bad dog,” he said, stroking the matted black fur.

Brunswick, finally feeling Jerry beside him, looked up happily, drool spilling from his jowls. The Newfoundland’s broad mouth clutched something long and white.

“So what was worth all this trouble, Brunswick?” Jerry asked him.

He reached down to take the object from the dog’s mouth, and Brunswick, after a slight tussle, released it.

It took Jerry a minute, looking at the thing in his hand, to figure out what it was.

Then, with growing fear, he looked in the hole to see what else the dog had found.

“Holy shit,” he said.

Sally looked young on the witness stand. She was dressed demurely in a white cotton sweater with a round collar and a blue skirt. The sweater was loose enough to avoid drawing attention to her chest. Her full hair was pulled back and tied neatly behind her head. Her face was pink, but without makeup. She didn’t wear any jewelry, just a plain gold watch.

Stride looked at her. Was he wrong? He allowed a shadow of doubt to pass over him, considering the crazy possibility that they had all misjudged the case. Sally was jealous and possessive. Could she have crossed over the line into murder?

Twice?

He simply didn’t believe it.

“Sally, I’d like you to tell the jury about an incident that happened to you last summer. Can you describe it for us?”

Sally nodded. Her face was serious and composed. “It was a Sunday morning in July. I drove my car north of the city and turned off on one of the rural highways. I parked there and began biking.”

“How long did you bike?” Dan asked.

“Maybe half an hour, I guess. I was listening to my iPod and not really paying attention to the time. But then the chain on my bike broke. I was probably ten or fifteen miles from my car. So I turned around and started pushing it back.”

“Did you go all the way to your car?”

Sally shook her head. “No. A mini van passed me on the road. The driver stopped and honked at me. It was Rachel’s stepfather. Graeme Stoner.”

“How well did you know Mr. Stoner?”

Sally shrugged. “Oh, we knew each other enough to talk. I had been over to Rachel’s house a few times with my boyfriend. Kevin.”

“Go on, Sally.”

“He offered to drive me and my bike to my car.”

“Did you accept?”

“Yes. I was tired. It sounded great to have a ride back to the car. So I got in the van, but then we sat there for several minutes. He didn’t make any effort to start the van. It was a little weird. He just asked me a lot of questions. Personal stuff.”

“Tell us what he asked you.”

Sally hesitated. “He said he saw me with Kevin a lot. He asked whether he was my boyfriend.”

“What did you say?”

“I said yes, he was. Then he asked me whether Kevin and I were being careful. He was kind of grinning.”

“What did you take that to mean?”

Gale stood up. “Objection, Your Honor. Assuming this conversation ever took place, the witness is not in a position to act as a mind reader.”

“Sustained, but leave out the aside next time, Mr. Gale,” Judge Kassel instructed him.

Gale, with a tiny smile, sat down.

“Were you uncomfortable?”

“Well, not at first But it dragged on. We must have been sitting there for five minutes or so, with him just firing all these questions at me. I started dropping hints, you know? I said we’d better go. I told him I needed to get back to the city. Finally, he started the engine, and we headed off. But I realized he was going very slowly. I looked over, and he was only doing forty. Most people usually do sixty or seventy on those roads.”

“Did Mr. Stoner continue talking to you as he drove?”

“Yes. He told me that I was very pretty. That he liked my hair. That I had such nice skin. All the time, he was looking at me. But not really at my face, you know?”

“Tell us what he was looking at, Sally.”

She glanced nervously at the jury. “He was staring at my breasts. He kept sneaking looks at them. I tried crossing my arms, but it looked funny. Instead, I kind of twisted my body so he didn’t have much of a view.”

“How did you feel?”

“It made roe uncomfortable.”