Panther's Prey (14 page)

“Don't you think they'd be in here by now if there was?” She glanced over her shoulder but didn't pause, grabbing garments out of a drawer and pressing them down tightly into the suitcase to make them fit. By the size of the bag and the amount of clothing she was squeezing into it she didn't plan to return to the house for a long time. If ever.

The place was perfectly quiet. I'd been listening for sirens and heard nothing, but I couldn't shake the feeling that we were already being encircled by silent forces.

I could barely talk, and felt like my legs would give out. “Who was he?”

She shrugged helplessly. “The man who's been looking for Gary. He never bothered to introduce himself or show ID. So not a cop. Anyway, who are
you
and what do you want?”

I told her my name. “We've got to report this.” I also thought it was possible that one or both of us needed to be in the hospital.

“No, we don't. Once you went for his gun, it was the only thing we could do.”

We
. What was I doing now? Helping her? In any case, I hadn't yet called the police. “I went for his gun because I thought he was going to drown you. You shot him in self-defense. The thing is, it's not going to seem that way if you run away now without calling it in.”

She let the comment pass. “Bring the suitcase, please. You have your car?”

I could phone the cops and explain what had happened—the man drowning the woman in the hot tub when I arrived, my reasonable fear for her life …

“Do I need to say I'll shoot you if you don't do as I ask?”

I didn't believe she would. On the other hand, she seemed remarkably unfazed, considering she'd just killed a man.

“It's not here. I left it at the Café Deli off Alpine Road.” I figured she was probably in shock.

“Forget it, then. Put the bags in the trunk of the Beemer.”

It was simplest to do as she asked. She had his keys and we went out to the Yukon on the street.

It was empty, as bare as a rental inside. There was a cell phone on the center console. After making sure it was deactivated, she pocketed it. She'd done a fast change in the bedroom, slipping on dry clothes, but I was still sopping wet. I heard no sirens, saw no faces at any of the neighbors' windows as she backed out of the driveway.

“Your hands are shaking,” she said, glancing over at me as she drove.

“Yours aren't?”

“I've worn out my nerves, waiting for the earth to crack open and swallow me. Now that it has, all I feel is relief. And resolve.”

“Where will you go?”

“To Gary,” she said, and with a leaping sensation in my stomach, I glanced over at her, confirming that in fact he was alive.

Neither of us spoke for a while after that. She kept the car pointed north. Night had fallen before she told me where we were going. We were on Interstate 5, tucked into the ceaseless anonymous flow of traffic, mostly long-haul truckers.

“Before Gary disappeared, he mentioned once that if we were ever in danger, there's a cabin in the mountains we could hide at. A friend from a long time ago owns it, he said, a person no one would ever connect him with. He had me memorize the directions. It seemed strange at the time, but he must have known this day was coming. That's where we're going now.”

“Have you talked to him?”

“A week or so after they found the car, I got a call from a number I didn't recognize. A throwaway phone, obviously. It was Gary. He was furious at me for trying to persuade everyone he was still alive. I was going to ruin everything, he said. Yesterday he called again and told me where he was. He knew I understood which place
he meant; otherwise, they'd have gone straight to him instead of trying to make me tell them how to find him.”

We stopped for gas. Lydia went in to use the toilet and buy us something to eat while I filled the tank. She gave me a doubtful glance as she was getting out, like she knew better than to trust me by leaving me alone, but felt she had no alternative. She couldn't very well march me at gunpoint into the women's restroom with her. Or maybe she guessed that my ribs had tightened so badly there was no way I could stand on my own.

I was a lawyer. Though most of my clients were criminals, I believed in the rule of law. What had happened at the house had been self-defense, but the longer we went without reporting it, the more it looked like murder. If so, I'd be judged an accessory as of the moment Lydia came out and we drove on, any pretense of my being an unwilling hostage fading further with every mile in which I turned down the opportunity for escape.

On the other hand, if Gary Cho was at the end of this long drive, I didn't want our trip to end here before we reached him. I was convinced he knew who'd killed Jordan and why.

I was still in the car when Lydia climbed back in behind the wheel. She'd bought several packets of Motrin and some sodas for us to share. I watched the rearview mirror the rest of the way, but no police car had appeared by the time we reached the end of a gravel road in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest late that night.

The headlights shone on a fairly primitive log cabin. Behind it, mountains blocked out the stars. There didn't appear to be anyone home, though the air was tinged with wood smoke. Beneath a rough overhang on one side of the house, wood was stacked. An axe stuck out from the chopping block out front, which was surrounded by split logs. A mountain bike hung upside down over the board porch beneath the overreaching eaves.

I needed help from Lydia to get out of the car. She was surprisingly strong for her size. On my feet, I found I was able to walk—haltingly at first, but better after a few steps. With the added exercise, however, breathing once again became a painful problem.

Inside, the place was a surprisingly large single room holding a queen bed, a table, a woodstove, and a basin. From the looks of it, the inhabitant had vacated, seemingly in haste. Flames still crackled in the woodstove. I found a battery-operated lantern and turned it on. “What now?”

“We wait.” Lydia went through the cabin discovering what she recognized as signs of her husband: a pair of running shoes, an Italian-style stovetop coffee percolator, a bottle of Knob Creek.

We'd been there half an hour when, without warning, the door was flung open and Cho came in. I jumped, earning another excruciating spasm from my ribs, but Lydia seemed unsurprised. I recognized him from online photos. He was a very tall, thin man with graying hair and a disparaging gaze. He wore ski pants, hiking boots, a hooded sweatshirt, and a waterproof jacket. He seemed to make no differentiation between his wife and me.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded.

“We weren't followed,” she assured him, answering an entirely different question from the one he'd asked.

“How can you be sure?”

“The one who's been following me is dead. That's how.”

Concern deepened in his eyes. Surprise yielded to tenderness, and he stepped forward, gathered her to his chest, and hugged her.

Self-conscious, I turned away, but they'd already parted, Cho turning his back.

At the stove, he opened the door and added a few hunks of split wood, then stabbed at the embers with a poker until the flames leapt up. He seemed to be studying them as if the solution to their problems might be found in that fiery belly. He closed the stove door again.

“Who are you?” he wanted to know.

I told him my name. Cho shared a look with his wife I couldn't read, an intense wordless communication. Then he said, “Leo and I are going to step outside.”

Lydia nodded. He held out his hand and she passed him the gun. I felt a shock like an electric charge as I realized the danger I might be in.

The night air was crisp, the temperature just above freezing. The scent of pines was overpowering, intoxicating. The moon had risen
above the mountains, making them seem almost near enough to touch, though they must have been miles away. The fissures and furrows of their stark topography remained in shadow, presenting a study in contrasts, like Japanese woodcut prints I'd seen.

He wanted to know: “Did you kill the guy or did she?”

I told him briefly what had happened. “It was self-defense, though the law may not see it that way,” I concluded.

“What were
you
doing there?”

“Jordan Walker,” I said simply.

The name seemed to have nearly as much of an effect on Cho as the news of his wife's lethal deed. He leaned his shoulder against the rough post that held up the roof of the porch and looked off toward the mountains. “I know who you are now. You're the boyfriend at the public defender's office. The one who was with her the night she died.”

“You mean the night she was
murdered
.”

Lydia chose this moment to join us. She'd changed into jeans and a sweatshirt from the suitcase we'd brought. I, on the other hand, was shivering.

I expected her presence to silence Cho, but he went on. “I was dead by then,” he said. The comment might have been flippant but his voice was mournful, nostalgic for a life to which he could never return.

“If you're implying I had something to do with her murder, I didn't,” he added.

“You were there, though, weren't you? You were the ‘client' she had to meet. ‘Get rid of him.' Isn't that what your text said?”

“I
was never her client. I was the guy Jacob Mauldin cheated out of his life's work, then out of his life, with the help of Tom Benton and a crew of lawyers. Including your girlfriend,” he said bitterly. “Or should I say Tom Benton's girlfriend. But yes, I was in San Francisco that night. And you're correct that I spoke with her after you left.”

I wondered why Jordan had made the comment about attorneyclient privilege. Maybe in her mind she'd switched sides by that point, never mind that the most inviolable rule of our profession is that no lawyer ever gets to switch sides.

Perhaps, for Jordan, this fundamental lesson had come too late.

“Did she know the reason you'd faked your death?”

“She knew I'd have been arrested and charged with a sex crime, and that the evidence against me was completely fabricated. At least, I
hope
I made her understand that.”

“Why'd you tell your secrets to Jordan?”

“Who else? Getting
someone
to turn was my only chance at being able to come home someday. She was in a position to obtain evidence showing the case against me was a straight-up fraud. And, unlike the rest of them, she seemed to have a conscience.”

“I talked to your lawyer, Ma. He told me you maintained throughout the trial that the video was false, that the kid's testimony was bought. What made you think she'd believe you now, let alone betray her client, when you hadn't convinced her or anyone else the first time?”

“Because she'd left the firm. It seemed to me she wouldn't have done it the way she did, right after her big success, unless she knew what had happened wasn't right. The fact that she left told me she was a person who might well put her principles into action. If she knew the full scope of what Kairos had done, how Mauldin and Benton perpetrated a fraud on the court and now were using the same false evidence to try to get me arrested and thrown in prison, I thought she might feel obligated to blow the whistle.” He grimaced, indicating his awareness of his own role in Jordan's elimination.

“She was going back to the law firm so that she could try to satisfy herself one way or another about the truth of what you'd told her. Is that basically it?”

Cho nodded. “She couldn't take my word for it any more than she did at the trial. Also, she wasn't going to turn against her client without solid proof. But she sensed there was truth in what I was telling her. I think she already knew.”

“Sounds to me like you did a pretty good job of manipulating her.” I felt a sudden, irrational anger at the way this man—Jordan's former opponent—had been willing to put her at such risk in service of his own interests. “If you were innocent, you could have stayed to stand trial. Instead, you convinced Jordan to be brave in your place.”

Lydia, watching silently up to now, joined the conversation. “When a civil litigant rigs a trial with perjured testimony and manufactured evidence,” she said, “it's a fraud on the court and a federal crime. When business interests conspire with gangsters to siphon public money for private profit, it's a national headline.
If
anyone finds out. The stakes were too high. He'd have been found dead in his cell.”

“What conspiracy?” I was skeptical. It still seemed possible to me it could have been Cho who'd killed her.

“Mauldin and the Chinatown mafia,” Cho said. “How do you think Mauldin got the contract in the first place?
He's
the one who's connected.”

“So you're telling me they rigged the trial. But why go to the trouble?”

“If the jury believed me, they'd have been out of the project. I was meant to play ball and keep my mouth shut, but I wouldn't, and they decided to set me up. And because I'm Chinese, the jury bought it.”

I drew his attention to what I felt his self-justifications sought to hide. “Nothing you're telling me changes the fact that it's your fault she's dead.”

Lydia slipped her arms around her husband's waist. The gun was in his hand, resting on the deck rail. Jordan was dead but they
were alive, her protective embrace seemed to say. No doubt to her it was a trade worth making, or it would have been if Jordan had lived long enough to exonerate her husband.

“Can you tell me more about what kind of money we're talking here,” I asked them.

“These guys own half the property in Hunters Point. They've been buying it up for years. The retail space they're planning … Whoever ends up in control of that is going to make more money than God. And then there's the residential units … “

“So setting you up was just about protecting an investment,” I said.

But I still wasn't sure I believed it was a setup. Like Ma, I'd heard such stories often enough from clients who insisted the evidence against them was fabricated, that it was a conspiracy to frame them for crimes they'd never think of committing. I'd always treated these tales with the disregard they seemed to deserve, viewing them as extraordinary fabrications no different, in my mind, from admissions of guilt. Except that they further decreased the trustworthiness of the person who told them.

The consequence of not believing Cho was to accept that the opposite was true, that he was the one with the organized crime connections, and that he'd leveraged those connections for illicit sexual favors. Which led me once again to the conclusion that I was now in great danger. Once more my eyes went to the gun.

“Why'd you file a whistle-blower case instead of going to the DA?”

His answer was surprisingly honest. “There's no payday in going to the DA. A whistle-blower, on the other hand, stands to reap a substantial reward, a cut of the money recovered on behalf of the government.” A consolation prize, perhaps, for someone who'd missed out on the graft. “I knew if I succeeded, the criminal investigation would come.”

“And when things turned bad, why didn't you drop the case?”

“I had the chance. It's true,” Cho said. “One evening, a few months before trial, I came down to the parking garage from my lawyer's office and found two men waiting for me. They forced me to drive with them up to Twin Peaks. There they explained I had two choices. Either I could be arrested for sex with a minor, or I could drop the case.

“I refused because I thought we could turn it against them, use the threat as a means of convincing the jury that the accounting records they'd produced were manufactured. However, the next week they sent my lawyer the video and an affidavit from the kid I was supposedly with. As I said, it was completely false, but the judge allowed it into evidence.

“The week after the verdict, I was arrested. After I made bail I decided not to stick around. One afternoon I left my car at the bridge, stuck a suicide note in the driver's seat, and stole a van. Eventually I worked my way here. The place belongs to an old friend.”

Lydia's arms had tightened around him.

“Tell me about Jordan,” I said.

“Since I've been here, I've bought the
Chronicle
whenever I make my weekly supply run to town. I had enough cash to last well into the winter if I needed to. I was biding my time. I didn't know what I was waiting for, but I recognized it when it came. It was the Rodriguez case. There was a story in the
Chronicle,
and it mentioned Jordan's name and yours as Rodriguez's attorneys.

“During the Kairos trial, Jordan was one of Tom Benton's associates, a corporate attorney neck-deep in the fraud for all I knew.” He paused. “Now, it seemed, she was working for the public defender's office. The only way to explain the change was that she'd gotten a whiff of what they'd been up to and decided she didn't want any more part of it. The few times I'd met her she'd struck me as cut from a different cloth from the rest of her colleagues. I think it was simply that she seemed honest.

“They'd destroyed me, taken away the possibility of ever working in business again. And they'd threatened me with more than that. I wanted revenge, but I also wanted my life back. I didn't think, acting alone, that I could have both those things.”

I said nothing, letting him continue.

“I decided to contact Jordan. The first time I spoke with her was right before the Rodriguez trial. I called her at your office. She didn't want to talk to me at first, but in the end her curiosity got the better of her distrust. I told her much of what I've explained to you. She was skeptical, and wary of the situation. She had no reason to believe what I was telling her, yet at the same time she didn't seem surprised. She wanted to meet in person, make sure I was who I claimed to be. So I agreed to come into the city.

“We set the meeting for a Friday night a week after the Rodriguez trial ended. I was keeping watch, and saw her bring you back to her apartment. I was certain I hadn't been followed, that I'd taken every necessary precaution with our communications. Still, I remained very concerned Jordan might be under surveillance. After all, she'd made such a sudden exit from the firm, Mauldin was likely to have arrived at the same conclusions I had.

“Having observed her building for a long period and seen nothing, I texted her. ‘Get rid of him.'”

Just as Benton had said.

“She was aware of the possible danger, and so took a long cab ride, she told me later, having the driver make all sorts of turns and stops. Her destination, of course, was her apartment, right back where she'd started. It seemed safer to both of us than meeting out in public. I waited until she got out, then met her at the building entrance, where she let me in.”