Invasion of Privacy (13 page)

"I want to see her," Nina said.

"No. There’s no reason."

"She’s my client, and she’s been killed. I want to see her." She said it calmly, professionally, so Collier would understand. She would not make a scene unless he turned her down. He tried once more to move her along, but she crossed her arms, saying, "I’m not leaving." She didn’t have time to make him understand. She had to see Terry for herself.

Casting one more unhappy look at the news crew unloading the van and beginning to make their approach, he said, "Come on." To the officer at the door, he said, "Hey, Mike, don’t let the press in, whatever you do. Let me know as soon as the medical examiner arrives." He kept a hard grip on her arm, pulling her along with him, then drew her inside and closed the door.

She was back again in the long white room where Terry had shown off her equipment collection so proudly. But this time two homicide detectives and a fireman leaned against the wall, waiting for the photographer to finish.

Terry lay on her back on the carpet, close to an extended wing shelf, her right arm crumpled under her, her left arm flung out.

Nina noted the black pants and the billowing white cotton shirt bibbed with blood.

Starting with thick clots at the neck, a reddish-brown river had flowed down the side of her body, onto the slightly uneven floor, into streams several feet long.

The fireman left, and the remaining detectives watched Nina, keeping their feet carefully out of the evidence.

Terry’s dark yellow eyes gazed up toward the ceiling, emptied of personality. Another gusher of dried blood had flowed from the right side of her mouth, the direction in which her head, resting on a bloody pillow, tilted. Between her legs, a videocamera was propped.

A photographer in a khaki vest loaded with pockets moved slowly around Terry, dropping to her knees, leaning forward, documenting every feature of this final indignity, in close-up, in wide angle. With and without flash. Camera cases, a jacket, and a black baseball cap were stacked near the door, away from the mayhem, presumably hers.

The wall behind the counter, too, had been splattered with blood and tissue, seemed to have a hole in it....

The lights were so bright, and something smelled bad in here with the door closed, wet and hot and ...

Collier’s hand appeared in the confusion of talk and light, reaching out and taking hers, leading her to the door and opening it. She was outside, dazed. Neighbors and newspeople were asking questions, their faces ugly with curiosity.

"When can I see you?" Collier said, the suggestion sounding as incongruous to her after what she had seen as the rustle of the wind through the pines outside Terry’s studio.

"What?" Nina asked, startled out of her reverie by the question.

"I need to know everything you know," said Collier. "How about first thing Monday morning?"

12

TWO UNIFORMED OFFICERS CAME OUT OF COLLIER Hallowell’s office, too intent on their instructions to notice Nina. "You can go in now," the woman receptionist said. Nina waited for the buzzer and walked back into the joyless world of criminal justice, which she had never wanted to enter again.

In the large front room the secretaries hung on the phones, fighting to keep the frantic scheduling of witnesses and court under control, taking messages for the deputy district attorneys who were usually in court, soothing victims and processing paperwork. On the right side, the attorneys worked in cubicles in a line from front to back, forming an obscure status system she couldn’t fathom. Collier’s office was second from the back. He stepped out, arguing vigorously into the phone he held to his ear, and beckoned her in.

The office hadn’t changed since the last time she’d seen it: twice as much paper littering an office half as large as hers; nondescript paint flaking here and there; desk buried under teetering files; stuffed bookshelves; bare, scratched flooring; no paintings, plants, or curios; a phone, a computer, a fax, and one prosecutor conducting the state’s business from a swivel chair—disheveled, genial or grave as the circumstances demanded, perceptive, overcaffeinated, and potent.

"Tell them we don’t have the money to do that sort of thing anymore," Collier said to the phone. "Tell ’em not to fuck around. If they insist, I’ll talk to them directly." On that softly threatening note, he hung up.

Before Nina sat down, she spotted the only personal item in the office, the photograph that he looked at all day long, the one of his dead wife. A dark-haired girl, athletic, straight-backed, seated on a horse with High Sierra peaks in the background. He must have taken the picture, so the smile was for him.

"Are those the same papers that were here last time I saw you here, last summer? Or do you freshen them up once in a while?" asked Nina, tapping the side of one stack, unable to budge it. "Solid as a brick fence."

"Oh, they change weekly. There’ll never be enough room until I get the corner office I covet."

"Which leads me to ask, did you ever decide to run for D.A.?"

"I announced last week. I guess you missed it."

"Good luck. I mean that."

"I appreciate it. Before we start, I wanted to tell you I’m sorry about your client."

How should she respond to that? I’m not? Or Thanks, like a grieving relative?

She nodded and said nothing.

"Thanks for coming." His gray eyes drifted over the paperwork on his desk. He held a pen in his mouth, which hung like an exotic black cigarette, and chewed on its plastic tip.

"You told me to."

He opened a file folder with her name on it and said, "Mind if I record this?" Though she should have expected it, this question irritated her, bringing her back into her role of prickly defense attorney.

"Do I have a choice?"

This time he came around the desk and sat on it, facing her, catching her eye. "I’ve never gotten used to going out to murder scenes. Fragile, is how it makes me feel. All those people out there working at that house on Coyote Road may have looked callous to you, but they all felt the same—fragile. How did you feel?"

"Shocked. Angry."

"You want to tell me about it?"

She thought for a long time before saying anything. "I got shot in that courtroom last year. I saw people shot. So I said, never again. I’ll arrange my life so I never see that again. And Terry came to me with a problem that spiraled back down toward a place I tried to escape. Before I could pull out, she died. I suppose this will sound selfish, but I can’t grieve for her. I hardly knew her, and what I knew I didn’t like."

"I understand," Collier said. "You’re over the physical effects of the shooting? I mean—"

"You mean when I got shot? Yes."

"But there are other effects. I don’t mean to insult you—I really don’t. But you don’t look like yourself."

"Fragile’s one word for it. How about expendable? How about targeted?"

"And now you’ve been yanked back to that moment of terror like you’re hooked to a bungee cord."

She nodded again, feeling relieved to talk about it. Collier inspired confessions. That was his job. She should keep that in mind. "My family gets yanked back too. It’s as though we’re walking on narrow planks above an abyss—but it’s not empty like an abyss, it’s fulminating with violence and insanity. Have you ever been to Lassen and walked that trail into Bumpass Hell?"

"Yes, I have. Bumpass is the guy who fell in and got boiled, right?"

"I think so. Anyway, for the first mile or so of the trail you’ve got these spectacular views of Lassen, Diller, and Diamond Peaks. On a clear day you can see all the way to the Sierra, almost to Tahoe. It’s all the deceptively benevolent world on display for your viewing pleasure. Then you reach a summit. You drop into a hydrothermal area. Steam billows out of the ground. You get hotter and hotter. Pits of mud bubble and spit at you. They warn you not to step off the trail because the earth’s crust is so thin there, you would sink in and be scalded.

"There’s a volcano under you all the time. Whether you feel it or see it, it’s there, alive and waiting. Terry’s death reminded me of that place, where it’s hot and potentially lethal, waiting to get you if you step off the trail, or if the planks you’re walking on break through. That kind of sudden disaster is always out there."

Collier said, "I see it in my work every day."

"Yet ... you stay."

"I do."

"Why?"

"For the same reason you do."

"I get sucked in!"

"You may not want to admit it to yourself, but you make a decision about it, just as I do."

"I’d much rather move to a South Seas island and live on piña coladas. Be a bartender at a thatched-roof bar."

"Then why don’t you? Because hiding doesn’t work. Already been tried. Marlon Brando bought himself an island, but trouble found him anyway."

"Well," Nina said. "Here’s a short bounce of the bungee. I brought my copy of the film, and I’ll answer any questions you have. Then I’m going to go back to my office and draft the dullest trust instrument you ever saw, and forget all about Terry London." She leaned over and laid the film canister on his desk.

"Tell me about the last time you saw her," Collier said. He was still sitting on his desk, and she had to crane her head up to see him. She got up and moved toward the bookcases, closer to the books on homicide investigation, criminology, criminal law, evidence ... fascinating books in the abstract. He worked in Bumpass Hell, all day, every day.

"The last time? That would be on March thirtieth, at the regular law and motion session of the Superior Court. Jeff Riesner had filed a motion to clarify the language of the proposed order I had drafted. Milne ordered us to meet again and submit a joint order."

"Terry was present throughout?"

"She was there, but we hardly spoke until the hearing was over. She became very irate in the hall, irrational, I would say. I couldn’t calm her down. I walked away from her and she followed behind me. Then ... "

"Then ...?"

"She ran out to the parking lot and pushed past me. I didn’t see her drive off. I’d forgotten some papers and had to go back inside."

The phone buzzed. Collier ignored it. "Why was she angry?"

"Her case ... the delay ..."

"Was she going to lose money? How serious was the delay?"

"Not serious. She had sold the film to a TV show, but the date for airing it hadn’t been set. The producers were working with her on it."

"Then why? What was the source of her anger?"

"She was angry at me." Nina explained as well as she could the disintegration of that particular lawyer-client relationship. When she told him about the burglary, Collier closed his eyes, leaning back as though trying to comprehend.

His eyes still closed, he said, "How did you know Terry was the burglar?"

"I knew right away it was personal when I saw the condition of my room. She was the one who was mad at me at the moment."

"Why didn’t you tell the police who it was?"

"No proof. But my son was missing, so I went to her house. This was about two weeks before the hearing. I think I frightened her. If she’d hurt Bobby ... but as it turned out, he’d run off to Monterey. She returned my letters. I had what I’d come for. I left."

"Was anyone else there?"

"No ... oh, at first, when I came in. A neighbor. Ralph Kettrick, I think it was. He lives next door with his father."

"Jerry Kettrick," Collier said for the tape’s benefit, and Nina thought, maybe one of them saw something. The cops must have talked to them, because Collier already knew all about them.

"I’d like to see the letters you took back from her. I may have to see them."

"They’re gone, Collier. I burned them."

He didn’t believe her. She didn’t care. She had put them into a safe-deposit box and intended to leave them there for herself, till she had a home of her own someday. He would need a court order to go after them even if he knew they existed, and nobody was going to know except her and the bank.

"This may surprise you, Nina, but you may have been Terry London’s main contact with the human race during her last weeks. She handled her business by phone and fax. She doesn’t seem to have had any close friends. Her parents and her older sister were killed in a plane crash in the early seventies."

"You mean to tell me she had no men friends? She was attractive. We never talked about her past."

"No boyfriends that we’ve found. We’re looking into her past now. I need to know who you think might have killed her. Your speculations could be important. I’m sure you’ve thought about it—"

"Not really. But there are four people who were fighting to suppress that film. The plaintiffs—Jessica and Jon Sweet, Tamara Sweet’s parents, and Michael Ordway and his wife, Doreen. They must have spent a ton of money on this case, and they had essentially lost it. The thing is ..."

"Go ahead, I’m interested in your thoughts."

"Well, in the same way that Terry’s motives for making and distributing the film seemed obscure to me, their motives for suing her seemed obscure. I mean, they had stated surface motives. It’s just that I felt undercurrents from both sides. Maybe one of them ..."

"Killed Tamara Sweet," Collier said. "I look forward to seeing what kind of evidence she’d gathered."

"You won’t see much hard evidence, although everything in the film is based on fact. It’s impressionistic, moody, an art piece as well as an investigative piece. And the stuff about the other three girls who disappeared seems tacked on. I guess what I’m saying is, the film’s not that threatening to any of them. You figure it out. "

"Oh, I will. At the very least, we’ll be looking again at all four of the disappearances."

He was rubbing his cheek, as if he had realized he needed a shave. When he didn’t speak again, Nina said, "Anything else?"

"One thing. Did you notice anything missing at Terry’s?"

"No, but I was so shocked."

"Okay. That’s it for now." Loud knocks at the door. Collier’s next customer had come calling.

"Oh, no you don’t," Nina said. "Before I go, I want you to give me one honest-to-God straight and sincere answer."

"What other kind have I ever given you?"

"I want to know if there is any danger at all to me or my family, based on everything you know to this point."

"No," Collier said. "I believe not. We have a suspect in custody, seen running from the house after the shots were fired."

"Great. Who is it?"

"Can’t give that out yet. But this person will be locked up. So you can relax."

"Oka
^y
."

"Drop by sometime after court. We’ll talk."

"It could happen." He let her out and a frizzlyhaired policewoman in. As the door closed, Nina heard her say, "You’re not going to believe this, Collier," so naturally she stopped and leaned up close to the door.

Faintly, through the door, she heard the policewoman say, "The London case? Do you believe this? The victim turned on her video camera after she was shot."

"She was still conscious?"

"Still conscious—and she made a fuckin’ tape."

"Can I help you?" said the secretary at her elbow. Nina let herself be led to the door, full of unanswered questions.

Out in the courtyard between the county offices and the courthouse, Nina saw Riesner heading her way. He didn’t extend his hand. She hadn’t planned to shake it anyway.

"Provocative, your client getting knocked off like that," he said.

"In what way?"

"Because the police have made an arrest in the murder, and I have been contacted regarding representation. So, if you learn anything new regarding the murder, I expect to be contacted immediately."

"It’s more likely I’d be contacting Collier Hallowell," Nina said. "Sorry, but anybody you represent is probably guilty, and I have an interest in assuring that the person who killed my client is put away. Who has been arrested, anyway?"

"I don’t know why I even do you the courtesy of telling you. However, his name is Kurt Scott. I will be talking with him later on today. And stay out of it. You’re on notice." Without another word, he walked past her. She saw him beep open the lock on his red BMW, get in, and roar off.

Her breathing had stopped. She leaned against the courthouse wall for a minute or two, looking blankly after him. She looked at her watch. Eleven-fifteen. She went inside to the bank of phones and called her office. "Sandy, I’m going to go over to the jail for a while," she said. "I’m not sure when I’ll be back."

"You’ve got a deposition here at three. The doc in your malpractice case."

"I’ll be back."

"You better."