The Lawyer's Lawyer (5 page)

A
lice Jeffries was a lonely woman these days. Her husband, Sam, was spending fourteen- to sixteen-hour days at the office with
the occasional middle-of-the-night rendezvous at murder sites around the city of Oakville. It had started the night of the
first murder four months ago. Sam ran the homicide division at the Sheriff’s Department.
If all the murders are in Oakville, why is my husband, a captain in the Apache County Sheriff’s Department, responsible for
solving them when Oakville has its own police department?
Alice asked herself, usually in the middle of the night when he had gone out to a scene and she was left alone in their bed.
She knew the answer, but she asked the question anyway because she was angry and exasperated.

Oakville was
in
Apache County so it was part of the sheriff’s jurisdiction. Besides, this case was a different animal. Hell, the FBI was here.
And Sam was now the head of the whole investigation. That acknowledgment didn’t make her feel one bit better. Oh, she was
proud of Sam, but this murderer was killing their marriage along with those coeds.
I guess I’m being a little selfish
, she told herself from time to time.

Alice was the second-grade teacher at White Springs Elementary School, a five-minute drive from her house. She went to work
at seven every weekday morning during the school year and was home at four most days. Before the murders had begun, she would
often meet Sam as he was pulling into the driveway, his job hours being as predictable as hers. They’d married when they were
both twenty. It was a shotgun wedding with little Johnny arriving six months later. Kathleen was born two years after that.
The kids had gone off to college now and were pursuing their own careers, Johnny in D.C., and Kathleen in Miami. At the ripe
old age of forty-five, Alice was living in the proverbial empty nest.

It was fine when she and Sam were on the same schedule. They’d go out for a bite to eat, maybe a movie if they felt up to
it. Or they’d prepare a meal together at home. Cooking was a hobby they both enjoyed. After the first murder, Sam started
working ungodly hours. Alice just went home and amused herself with a good book or the television. A couple of months later,
however, she’d taken to going out a night or two during the weekend with some of her girlfriends from work. Nothing fancy,
just a few drinks at the local tavern. She overdid it a few times, but not very often. It was awkward at first since most
people knew she was the wife of a captain in the Sheriff’s Department. But after a while she fit right in. She’d always get
home early, well before Sam arrived.

Alice was a petite, pretty woman, with short brown hair and green eyes, and she maintained her figure with a strict diet and
regular exercise on her home treadmill. She and Sam made an odd couple because he was so massive. Many times when they were
out to eat she’d catch people looking at the two of them. She knew what they were wondering.
Yeah, I get on top
, she’d wanted to say,
and it’s great
.

This Saturday night, she’d had a little too much at the bar because a man she’d never met before—actually, she didn’t even
meet him that night—kept sending over drinks for her and her girlfriends. She’d swerved a little bit on the five-block drive
back to the house.
Keep it steady
, she told herself.
Sam would not be too happy if you got a DUI
.
Fuck you, Sam. No fuck me, Sam. Please. Just so I can remember what it feels like once again before I die.

It was a tad overdramatic, she knew. After all it had only been four months and there was a reason for it. Poor Sam was working
his ass off, night and day. Some couples their age never had sex. She stumbled out of the car and up to the doorway. It took
her almost two minutes to get the key into the door. She chuckled to herself as she kept missing the keyhole. Finally she
was in. She slammed the door behind her and headed upstairs to the bedroom. When Sam got home, she wanted to be asleep.
You can’t question a sleeping beauty
, she reasoned.

Standing in the bathroom in her bra and panties brushing her teeth with her eyes closed, Alice started dreaming about this
guy she’d met at the bar a couple of weeks back. He’d asked her to dance. She’d refused, of course, but she’d wanted to and
now she pictured herself on the dance floor twirling around, carefree.
You’re not an old maid
, she told herself as she swayed to the imaginary music.
You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.

She didn’t see the lights go out because her eyes were closed and she was more than a little drunk. In her dreamlike state,
she didn’t even hear the click of the switch. The first sign of trouble for Alice was when she felt a sharp pain at her throat.
Suddenly she was yanked off the ground by something around her neck. She opened her eyes then but couldn’t see anything. She
felt him behind her and tried to turn and grab him, but she had no leverage. The pain was unbearable now. She was gasping
for breath and flailing her arms. Whatever it was around her neck was cutting her badly. She tried to grab hold of it and
release the pressure but she couldn’t. It was a wire! She made a last-ditch effort to scratch his face but it was too late.
She felt herself slipping into unconsciousness.

Sam came home a half hour later. He headed for the kitchen and made himself a ham sandwich. Then he turned on the TV in the
living room and watched it for an hour or so before heading up to bed. As he flipped on the light switch in the bathroom to
take his last piss of the evening, he almost fell over Alice’s corpse.

“Jesus!” he exclaimed, recoiling from the body on the floor. He could feel himself starting to hyperventilate as Alice’s cold
dead eyes seemed to stare right at him. Then the cop took over. He knelt down and checked her pulse. There was no doubt she
was dead. He called 911 and made his report. After that, he checked the entire house for clues.

When he was finished, the twenty-year veteran who had recently presided over so many ghastly crime scenes of young women went
back up to the bathroom, sat down next to his wife, held her cold, rigid hand in his, and wept.

A
fter she checked out the crime scene with the other members of the task force, Danni went looking for Sam. She found him downstairs
in his den with the door closed, sitting at his desk smoking a cigarette. Sam was not a smoker.

When she walked in, Sam stood up and gave her a hug and started weeping again with his head on her shoulder.

“I don’t want anybody to see me like this.”

“They’re your friends, Sam. They understand.”

Sam let her go at that point and sat back down in his chair. “It’s funny—up until a few minutes ago I believed wholeheartedly
what you just said. We’re in the business of murder. We understand. The reality is I never understood all those people who
were crying over
their
loved ones. I never got it until now. Now it’s my Alice.” He fought back the tears again. “Twenty-five years we were together.
Twenty-five years. What am I going to tell my kids?”

Danni didn’t know what to say so she said nothing, just stood next to him with her hand on his shoulder. They stayed there
like that for several minutes.

“We’ve gotta get that bastard,” Sam finally said.

“We will, Sam. We will.”

“If he finds out where your daughter is, he’s going to kill her. You know that, don’t you?”

It was the first thing Danni had thought about when she heard about Alice. “Yes, I know.”

“I should have gotten that search warrant for you. I don’t know if that kid is innocent or guilty, but we can’t leave any
stone unturned. I know how you feel now.”

“It’s too late for that, Sam, but we’ll catch this guy.”

Sam wasn’t listening though. He was in his own nightmare.

“I put you off,” he said, standing up and walking around the room. He was such a big man that he immediately made the room
look smaller. “I sent you to Jane and then I sent her a memo basically telling her to give you lip service. She told you she
was going to go to the judge but she did the same thing with him that I did with her. People are dying out there and she’s
sitting with the judge telling him about a hysterical police officer. What the hell were we thinking?”

Danni had already figured out how the search warrant deal had gone down so she was not all that upset by Sam’s confession.
She was worried about him though. He was losing it. She stopped him and put her hands on his shoulders as she looked him in
the eye.

“Look, you were right about the search warrant. Besides, it’s not important now. You’ve got to pull yourself together, Sam.
Your kids are going to need your strength. They’re going to look for it.”

Sam loved his kids. Danni expected him to straighten up when she mentioned them but he didn’t. The head lowered again.

“I don’t know what to say to them.”

“You’ll find the words.”

“I can’t.”

“I’ll help you. Now, I know this is not going to sound that reassuring, but I want you to give me your gun.”

Sam lifted his head and gave her a quizzical look. “My gun? What do you think I’m going to do?”

“Nothing, but I don’t know for sure. Neither do you. Nobody knows how they will handle a situation like this. Give it to me.
I’ll hold it for seventy-two hours, then I’ll give it back to you. I’ll tell the sheriff informally what I’ve done so they
don’t try to do anything formally.”

Sam knew the protocol. He knew they could put him on leave and ask him for his gun. Danni was trying to save him from all
of that.

“I don’t want to miss a day looking for this guy.”

“Come on, Sam. You’ve got to bury your wife. You have to tend to your children. You need at least a couple of weeks.”

“I’m not taking that long.” He almost shouted the words. “I’m gonna get this piece of shit.”

“We’ll see. For now, give me your gun for seventy-two hours.”

Sam took his Glock out of his holster and reluctantly handed it to her.

“I’m sure this isn’t the only gun you have,” she said as she took the Glock.

Sam looked at her again. “Do you want to leave me defenseless?”

“He’s not coming after you, Sam. You’re the wrong sex. Now where’s your other gun?”

Sam reached into the top drawer of his desk and pulled out a key. “I’ve got a few,” he said and opened the door to what appeared
to be a closet. Danni watched, expecting him to pull a gun out of his shoebox or something. Instead, he walked into the closet,
which was free of clothing, reached down to an almost invisible latch on the right-hand side of the back wall, inserted the
key, turned it, and the wall became a sliding door revealing a small room on the other side that contained a mini arsenal.
Sam entered the room with Danni right behind him. There was a rifle with a scope (Danni couldn’t make out the model) mounted
on the wall with several shotguns, and an AK-47. Sam had built a long thin table underneath the mounted guns. In the middle
of the table were some tools, cleaning materials, two high-intensity lamps, and a chair for Sam to sit in while he was doing
his work. On each side of the chair, laid out in a row, were five semiautomatic guns: two to the left, three to the right.

“I built this den with my own hands,” Sam said. “And I put this little room in for myself. Nobody knew about it but Alice,
and now you.”

“What the hell are you getting ready for, World War III?” Danni asked.

“I’m a collector. It’s my hobby. Rifles, shotguns, semiautomatic weapons.”

“No revolvers?” Danni asked for no particular reason.

“I don’t like revolvers,” Sam replied.

Danni thought for a brief moment about how Sam had dismissed her argument that Thomas Felton might have been a collector of
exotic knives, but she let it pass. This was not the time. She put the Glock on the left side of the table to make the distribution
even.

“Is that the only key to this room?” she asked.

“It sure as hell is.”

“Why don’t you lock up and give me the key.”

To Danni’s surprise, Sam did exactly as she requested, which made her believe he had another gun hidden somewhere else.

“I’ll give this back to you in a few days, I promise.”

“I wouldn’t have given it to you if I didn’t trust you, Danni.”

V
anessa Brock and Pedro “Pete” Diaz had their own plan to deal with the danger and peril associated with a serial killer loose
in the city of Oakville. Vanessa told the plan to her parents, who were insisting that she come home to Missouri. Both she
and Pete were seniors and very anxious to graduate and get on with their lives—she as a teacher and Pete to go to graduate
school for his MBA.

“We’ll be fine,” Vanessa said. “Pete is going to stay at my apartment and sleep on the couch. He’s got a license to carry
a gun and he knows how to use it. He goes to the firing range every week and he says he won’t let me out of his sight.”

Vanessa’s parents knew the sleeping on the couch part was a lie, but they weren’t going to call their daughter out on that
one. The rest sounded mildly reassuring. Vanessa had always been headstrong and they weren’t going to talk her out of anything
she wanted to do anyway. And Pete was a barrel-chested powerful young man. They had met him several times on their visits
to Oakville. So they accepted her assurances.

Except for the couch part, the rest of the story was substantially true. Pete didn’t have a gun permit but he did have a gun
that he kept under their bed at the apartment. He did go to the range regularly to shoot and he was not going to let Vanessa
out of his sight. That part wasn’t hard for Pete. He worshipped the ground she walked on. Nobody was going to get near Vanessa
while he was still alive.

On Saturday night, Vanessa and Pete returned home after watching the football game at The Swamp. There hadn’t been a murder
in a couple of weeks and there was a fairly decent crowd at the bar. It was almost as if everybody had learned collectively
to deal with the fact that they lived in a city under siege, so they continued to go about their daily lives—working, going
to school, drinking, watching football. Somewhere in the recesses of their brains, however, they knew that murder and mayhem
could, and probably would, rear its ugly head again, but that did not deter them. They still had to live and breathe and play.

Pete had had a little too much to drink. He was okay when he stuck to beer but the lemon drop shooters always did him in.
Vanessa drove home although she was a little tipsy herself. It was only nine o’clock but they stripped their clothes off in
a matter of seconds and practically passed out in bed. Neither one of them heard the telephone ring at ten, or ten thirty,
or eleven.

Somewhere around midnight, Pete woke up to take a leak. His head was pounding as he fumbled in the dark to find the bathroom.
Vanessa did not stir although he was making a racket on his journey.

Ten minutes later he was back in bed sidling up next to her naked body. She moaned when she felt him put his arm around her
and pull her close. She was half asleep as she felt him working his way inside her. It was almost like a dream when they started
moving in rhythm although it felt somehow different this time.
Pete
felt different. Not bad, just different. Then she felt a sharp pain in her stomach and another one.
What is going on? Oh my God, what’s happening?

It was already too late. His hand went to her mouth to stifle any scream she might attempt as he stuck the long thin blade
one last time through an opening in her rib cage into her heart.

Danni got the call at five that morning. It came from Allan.

“We’ve got a double homicide,” he said.

“Is it our guy?” Danni asked. This was the first double homicide.

“Can’t say for sure, but I think so. She was a student at the university and they were both stabbed.”

“That’s close enough,” Danni replied. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

When she arrived forty minutes later, there were cops everywhere—and reporters and crowds behind the barricades that the police
now knew to set up at each murder site.

“Where’ve you been?” Allan asked. “I expected you a half hour ago.”

“I made the mistake of lying back down in bed,” Danni told him. “Did I miss anything?”

“Absolutely nothing. The mother called the station when she couldn’t get her daughter on the phone. She was frantic, so two
uniforms came over to check. They found the bodies just like they are now, the boyfriend in the bathroom and the girl in the
bed. He had one stab wound in the back that went right into his heart. He must have died instantly. She had several stab wounds
in the stomach and chest. There were no signs of a struggle. Jeffries postulates that the killer was in the apartment waiting
for them when they got home. The boyfriend probably got up in the middle of the night to take a whizz—there’s urine in the
toilet, probably his. The killer took care of him and then got in bed with her, maybe even had sex with her before he killed
her.”

“What a sicko.”

“Goes without saying,” Allan replied.

“So Jeffries is here?”

“Yeah. He must have been listening on the radio. He got here right after the uniforms. He’s outside searching the perimeter
right now.”

It had been two weeks since Alice Jeffries died. Since that day Sam Jeffries had taken time off to be with his kids. He’d
only appeared in the office once. Danni had seen him leaving in the middle of the afternoon. She had no idea why he had been
there.

She also saw him at Alice’s funeral.

“I’m taking your advice,” he told her. “The kids are going to be home for at least a week. I’m not going near the office while
they’re here.”

Danni gave him his key back the day of the funeral and had not seen him since. Apparently the kids had gone back to their
own lives.

“Anything we can use?” Danni asked Allan.

“Nope. The coroner may come up with something if they had sex but the place is clean as usual.

Just then there was a commotion outside.

“Somebody found something!” Danni heard an officer say. It was a little after six and the sun was just rising. She followed
the crowd out of the apartment and into the backyard toward a thicket of woods. The group were all professionals so they moved
slowly, not wanting their peers to think they were excited or anything. A few feet into the thicket she saw Sam Jeffries standing
over something and directing traffic. As she drew closer, she heard his voice.

“Be careful getting it out of there. If there are prints, we don’t want to smudge them.”

Two men were on their knees on the ground, carefully moving the dirt away from the object. Allan pressed forward to see what
it was. Danni followed.

There on the ground, obscured slightly by some plants, was a large bowie knife: The handle was carved in the shape of a gargoyle!