Pop Goes the Weasel (32 page)
I had to push and literally inch my way through the crush of people up close to the courthouse steps. I ignored every question
from the press. I tried to avoid anyone with a camera in hand, or the hungry look of a reporter.
I entered the packed courtroom just before the jury filed back inside. “You almost missed it,” I said to myself.
Judge Fescoe spoke to the crowd as soon as everyone was seated. “There will be no demonstrations when this verdict is read.
If any demonstrations occur, marshals will clear this room immediately,” he instructed in a soft but clear voice.
I stood a few rows behind the prosecution team and tried to find a regular breathing pattern. It was inconceivable that Geoffrey
Shafer could be set free; there was no doubt in my mind that he’d murdered several people—not just Patsy Hampton, but at
least some of the Jane Does as well. He was a wanton pattern killer, one of the worst, and had been getting away with it for
years. I realized now that Shafer might be the most outrageous and daring of all the killers I’d faced. He played his game
with the pedal pressed to the floor. He absolutely refused to lose.
“Mr. Foreman, do you have a verdict for us?” Judge Fescoe asked in somber tones.
Raymond Horton, the foreman, replied, “Your Honor, we have a verdict.”
I glanced over at Shafer; he appeared confident. As he had since the trial began, he was dressed today in a tailored suit,
white shirt, and tie. He had no conscience whatsoever; he had no fear of anything that might happen to him. Maybe that was
a partial explanation for why he’d run free for so long.
Judge Fescoe looked unusually stern. “Very well. Will the defendant please rise?”
Geoffrey Shafer stood at the defense table, and his longish blond hair gleamed under the bright overhead lighting. He towered
over Jules Halpern and his daughter, Jane. Shafer held his hands behind him, as if he were cuffed. I wondered if he might
have a pair of twenty-sided dice clasped in them, the kind I had seen in his study.
Judge Fescoe addressed the foreman again. “As to count one of the indictment, Aggravated, Premeditated Murder in the First
Degree, how do you find?”
The foreman,
“Not guilty
, Your Honor.”
I felt as if my head had suddenly spun off. The audience packed into the small room went completely wild. The press rushed
to the bar. The judge had promised to clear the room, but he was already retreating to his chambers.
I saw Shafer walk toward the press, but then he quickly passed them by. What was he doing now? He noticed a man in the crowd
and nodded stiffly in his direction. Who was that?
Then Shafer continued toward where I was, in the fourth row. I wanted to vault over the chairs after him. I wanted him so
bad, and I knew I had just lost my chance to do it the right way.
“Detective Cross,” he said in his usual supercilious manner. “Detective Cross, there’s something I want to say. I’ve been
holding it in for months.”
The press closed in; the scene was becoming smothering and claustrophobic. Cameras flashed on all sides. Now that the trial
had ended, there was nothing to prevent picture-taking inside the courtroom. Shafer was aware of the rare photo opportunity;
of course he was. He spoke again, so that everyone gathered around us could hear. It was suddenly quiet where we stood, a
pocket of silence and foreboding expectation.
“You killed her,” he said, and stared deeply into my eyes, almost to the back of my skull.
“You killed her.”
I went numb. My legs were suddenly weak. I knew he didn’t mean Patsy Hampton.
He meant Christine.
She was dead.
Geoffrey Shafer had killed her. He had taken everything from me, just as he’d warned me he would.
He had won.
SHAFER WAS A FREE MAN, and he was enjoying the bloody hell out of it. He’d wagered his life. He had gambled, and he had won
big-time.
Big-time!
He had never felt anything quite like this exhilarating moment following the verdict.
Shafer accompanied Lucy and the children to a by-invitation-only press conference held in the pompous, high-ceilinged grand-jury
room. He posed for countless photos with his family. All of them hugged him again and again, and Lucy couldn’t stop crying
like the brain-dead, hopelessly spoiled and crazy child she was. If some people thought
he
was a drug abuser, they’d be shocked by Lucy’s intake. Christ, that was how he’d first learned about the amazing world of
pharmaceuticals.
He finally punched his arm into the air and held it there as a mocking sign of victory. Cameras flashed everywhere in the
room. They couldn’t get enough of him. There were nearly a hundred reporters wedged into the room. The women reporters loved
him most of all. He was a legitimate media star now, wasn’t he? He was a hero again.
A few gate-crashing agents of fame and fortune pressed their cards at him, promising obscene amounts of money for his story.
He didn’t need any of their tawdry offers. Months before, he had picked out a powerful New York and Hollywood agent.
Christ, he was free as a bird! He was absolutely flying now. After the press conference, claiming concern for their safety,
he sent his wife and children ahead without him.
He stayed behind in the court law library and firmed up book-deal details with Jules Halpern and representatives from the
Bertelsmann Group, now the most powerful book-publishing conglomerate in the world. He had assured them that they would get
his story, but of course they weren’t going to get anything close to the truth. Wasn’t that the way with the so-called tell-all,
bare-all nonfiction published these days? The Bertelsmann people knew this, and still they’d paid him dearly.
After the meeting, he took the slow-riding lift down to the court’s indoor car park. He was still feeling incredibly high,
which could be dangerous. A set of twenty-sided dice was burning a hole in the pocket of his suit trousers.
He desperately wanted to play the game. Now! The Four Horsemen. Or better yet, Solipsis—
his
version of the game. He wouldn’t give in to that urge, though, not yet. It was too dangerous, even for him.
Since the beginning of the trial, he had been parking the Jaguar in the same spot; he
did
have his patterns, after all. He’d never bothered to put coins in the meter, not once. Every day there was a pile of five-dollar
tickets under the windshield wiper.
Today was no exception.
He grabbed the absurd parking tickets off the windshield and crumpled them into a ball in his fist. Then he dropped the wad
of paper onto the oil-stained concrete floor.
“I have diplomatic immunity,” he said aloud, and smiled as he climbed into his Jag.
SHAFER COULDN’T BELIEVE IT. He had made a very serious and perhaps irreversible mistake. The result wasn’t what he had expected,
and now his whole world seemed to be falling apart. At times he thought it couldn’t have been any worse had he gone to prison
for the cold-blooded murder of Patsy Hampton.
Shafer knew that he wasn’t just being paranoid or mad. Several of the pathetic wankers inside the embassy watched him every
bloody time he stepped out of his office. They seemed to resent and openly despise him, especially the women. Who had turned
them against him? Somebody surely was responsible.
He was the white, English O. J. Simpson. A weird, off-color joke to them. Guilty though proven innocent.
So Shafer mostly stayed inside his office with the door closed, sometimes locked. He performed his few remaining duties with
a growing sense of irritation and frustration, and a sense of the absurd. It was driving him mad to be trapped like this,
to be a pathetic spectacle for the embassy staff.
He idly played with his computer and waited for the game of the Four Horsemen to resume, but the other players had cut him
off. They insisted that it was too dangerous to play, even to communicate, and
not one of them
understood why this was the perfect time to play.
Shafer stared out onto Massachusetts Avenue for interminably long stretches during the day. He listened to call-in talk shows
on the radio. He was getting angrier and angrier. He needed to play.
Someone was knocking on the door of his office. He turned his head sharply and felt a spike of pain in the back of his neck.
The phone had begun to ring. He picked up and heard the temp he’d been assigned. Ms. Wynne Hamerman was on the intercom.
“Mr. Andrew Jones is here to see you,” she said.
Andrew Jones?
Shafer was shocked. Jones was a hot-shit director from the Security Service in London. Shafer hadn’t known he was in Washington.
What the hell was this visit about? Andrew Jones was a high-level, very tough prick who wouldn’t just drop by for tea and
biscuits.
Mustn’t keep him waiting too long
.
Jones was standing there, and he looked impatient, almost furious. What was this about? His steely blue eyes were cold and
hard; his face was as rigid as that of an English soldier posted in Belfast. In contrast, his brilliant red hair and mustache
made him look benign, almost jolly. He was called Andrew the Red back in London.
“Let’s go inside your office, shall we? Shut the door behind you,” Jones said in a low but commanding voice.
Shafer was just getting past his initial surprise, but he was also starting to lose it. Who did this pompous asshole think
he was to come barging into his office like this? By what right was he here? How dare he? The toad! The glorified lackey from
London.
“You can sit down, Shafer,” Jones said. Another imperious command. “I’ll be brief and to the point.”
“Of course,” Shafer answered. He remained standing. “Please do be brief and get to the point. I’m sure we’re both busy.”
Jones lit up a cigarette, took a long puff, then let the smoke out slowly.
“That’s illegal here in Washington,” Shafer goaded him.
“You’ll receive orders to return to England in thirty days’ time,” said Jones as he continued to puff on his cigarette. “You’re
an embarrassment here in Washington, as you will be in London. Of course, over there the tabloids have recreated you as a
martyr of the brutal and inefficient American police and judicial systems. They like to think of this as ‘D.C. Confidential,’
more evidence of wholesale corruption and naïveté in the States. Which we both know, in this case, is complete crap.”
Shafer sneered. “How dare you come in here and talk to me like this, Jones? I was framed for a heinous crime I didn’t commit.
I was acquitted by an American jury. Have you forgotten that?”
Jones frowned and stared him down. “Only because crucial evidence wasn’t allowed in the trial. The blood on your trousers?
That poor woman’s blood in the bathroom drain at your mistress’s?” He blew smoke out the side of his mouth. “We know everything,
you pathetic fool. We know you’re a stonecold killing freak. So you’ll
go
back to London and stay there—until we catch you at something. Which we will, Shafer. We’ll make something up if we have
to.
“I feel sick to my stomach just being in the same room with you. Legally, you’ve escaped punishment this time, but we’re watching
you so very closely now. We will get you somewhere, and someday soon.”
Shafer looked amused. He couldn’t hold back a smile. He knew he shouldn’t, but he couldn’t resist the play. “You can try,
you insufferable, sanctimonious shit. You can certainly try. But get in line. And now, if you please, I have work to do.”
Andrew Jones shook his head. “Well, actually, you
don’t
have any work to do, Shafer. But I am happy to leave. The stench in here is absolutely overpowering. When was the last time
you bathed?” He laughed contemptuously. “Christ, you’ve completely lost it.”
THAT AFTERNOON, I met with Jones and three of his agents at the Willard Hotel, near the White House. I had called the meeting.
Sampson was there, too. He’d been reinstated in the department, but that didn’t stop him from doing what had originally gotten
him into trouble.
“I believe he’s crazy,” Jones said of Shafer. “He smells like a commode at boot camp. He’s definitely going down for the count.
What’s your take on his mental state?”
I knew Geoffrey Shafer inside and out by now. I’d read about his family: his brothers, his long-suffering mother, his domineering
father. Their travels from military base to military base until he was twelve. “Here’s what I think. It started with a serious
bipolar disorder, what used to be called manic depression. He had it when he was a kid. Now he’s strung out on pharmaceutical
drugs: Xanax, Benadryl, Haldol, Ativan, Valium, Librium, several others. It’s quite a cocktail. Available from local doctors
for the right price. I’m surprised he can function at all. But he survives. He doesn’t go down. He always wins.”
“I told Geoff he has to leave Washington. How do you think he’ll take it?” Jones asked me. “I swear his office smelled as
if a dead body had been festering there for a couple of days.”
“Actually, his disorder can involve an accompanying odor, but it’s usually steely, like metal—very pungent, sticks to your
nostrils. He probably isn’t bathing. But his instincts for playing the game, for winning and surviving, are amazing,” I said.
“He won’t stop.”
“What’s happening with the other players?” Sampson inquired. “The so-called Horsemen?”
“They claim that the game is over, and that it was only a fantasy game for them,” Jones told him. “Oliver Highsmith stays
in touch, mostly to keep tabs on us, I’m sure. He’s actually a scary bastard in his own right. Says he’s saddened by the murder
of Detective Hampton. He’s still not a hundred percent sure that Shafer is the killer. Urges me to keep my mind open on that
one.”
“Is your mind open on it?” I asked, looking around the room at the others.
Jones didn’t hesitate. “I have no doubt that Geoffrey Shafer is a multiple murderer. We’ve seen enough and heard enough from
you. He is quite possibly a homicidal maniac beyond anything we’ve ever known. And I also have no doubt that eventually he’s
going down.”
