Wrong Chance (32 page)

“Sorry, Your Honor.”

“Objection overruled. Tread lightly, Mr. Bishop.”

“Scratch, a couple of hours before Yancee Taylor's time of death, did you see him alive and well?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you tell the homicide detectives this when they interviewed you?”

He nodded. “Yeah.”

“You also told them you saw Yancee with someone. Share with the court who you saw Yancee with before he was murdered.”

Scratch shrugged. “I don't know who she was, but she was a beautiful woman. Couldn't tell if she was white or mixed, but they drove off together.”

“No further questions.”

J
azz left the witness stand forty-five minutes after Scratch. She was so blown away by Cash's disorderly conduct, Jazz knew it was time to restore order in her life. She settled herself in the seat of her computer station.

Buank—

She shot a look toward the room's threshold.

“My bad,” Jaden said, entering her home office. “What are you doing?”

“Blowing the dust off this thing.” She set her tea cup on the desktop.

“Straight up?” he said, fingering the spine of a Brenda Hampton book on the shelf.

“Yeah. It's time. I feel it.” She pulled up a blank screen and positioned her fingers over the home row keys.

“Can I watch for a while?”

“As long as you don't start running off at the mouth and disturb my groove.”

“I won't. Promise.”

Jazz took in a deep breath and slowly let it go along with the hang-up that underlined the stagnation of her career. Her fingers started moving and it felt damn good.

HARM'S WAY

By Jazz Smith

CHAPTER ONE

Onica Everheart's life was in greater danger than ever before. She didn't know it, though, until she awoke to a raccoon clearing snow away from her face with its gross tongue. She screamed, then instantly started shivering from the thirty-seven-degree temperature. Then she screamed again through chattering teeth. The critter hissed and scurried away. Pissed that its lunch all of a sudden became uncooperative.

Onica couldn't feel her extremities; she was packed in snow the way meat was packed in a deep freezer to be kept fresh. Through her weakness and immense pain, a discomfort she didn't know the source of, Onica managed to pull herself free of the wintry grave. Although her head was smoggy and she definitely felt the side effect of a drug surging through her veins, she was acutely aware of the pounding of her heart. She heard it in her ears like a romantic whisper.

She was vigilant. Sepia eyes keen, scanning the woods for trouble. Then, Onica took off in a full-stride sprint. The fact that she was barefoot and naked didn't matter. She ran for her life and for the life of her unborn child, never once flinching when the forest floor tore into the pads of her feet. Adrenaline and the pure will to survive pumped her slender brown legs until she collapsed on the sleet-covered emergency lane of Interstate 90.

Jazz stopped typing for a moment to glance up at Jaden. He stood over her shoulder, reading. He smiled his approval.

The tension in the courtroom smothered the air like the seconds before the execution of a death row inmate.

“Call your next witness, Ms. Davenport,” Judge Ronald Adrine said in his thick rasp.

“The state calls Homicide Detective Hakeem Eubanks.”

The audience burst at the seams with members of the press looking to sensationalize murder, transform the despicable act from a sin to an art form, and elevate Chancellor Fox to perverse stardom in the process. Hakeem hated the media. He glanced at Gus Hobbs and did everything in his power to bite back his anger. Aspen gave him a gentle rub as he rose from his seat. Except for Chance's, every set of eyes in the place were on Hakeem as he passed through the gate, backing a pitty-wielding bailiff off with a head shake.

Hakeem was overly self-conscious about his lilting gait. Because of Chance, his leg was no longer able to fully straighten, which made him dependent on a walking cane to do simple things like walk from his seat to the witness box, a journey he'd made more times in his career than he could count. And now that he was saddled with a few extra pounds because the lame leg slowed him down didn't help matters. Hakeem looked the part of a veteran detective and seasoned trial witness: stony expression, sharp hair
cut, and an even sharper four-figure suit, but lurking closely beneath the iron-clad exterior was an exhausted man, worn out by the demons that stalked him during the night.

After he was sworn in, County Prosecutor Scenario Davenport approached the witness box. “Detective Eubanks, would you please state your occupation for the record.”

“I'm a homicide detective for Cuyahoga County. I work out of Cleveland's Homicide Unit.” He wished that Aspen was on the stand. But since she couldn't control her temper, Davenport decided to call her
only
if necessary.

“And because of your job, you and your partner, Detective Aspen Skye, were charged with investigating the Hieroglyphic Hacker murders?”

“Yes.” Hakeem couldn't help but to admire her beauty. Anyone in their right mind would take a few moments to appreciate the work God put into her creation.

“How did that investigation lead you to suspect Mr. Chancellor Fox is the Hieroglyphic Hacker?”

Hakeem fixed his stony expression on the defense table. Chance sat there with a gleaming bald head and a suit just as expensive as his own. “Ultimately the initials ‘C.F.' made him good for it.” He wanted to knock that silly grin off Chance's face.

“A set of initials? How so, Detective?”

“Early in our investigation, Mr. Fox became a person of interest. We traced him to the secluded area Yancee Taylor's body was found in.” He saw Africa Taylor wipe her tears. “Only natives of the area knew it existed.”

“Would you be more specific, Detective Eubanks?”

“Three decades ago, the middle-schoolers of Cleveland Heights cut through a wooded area that encases a synagogue as a shortcut to get to school. They made a path.”

“Only kids used this path?”

“Yes, and it's still used as a shortcut today. Our profile suggested the killer was a white male in his early thirties, which means he would have used the path between nineteen ninety and ninety-five.”

“What did you do with that information?”

A
lready Chance was sick of listening to the twit in the decked-out suit. He really wished he could kick Detective Eubanks' drawers up the crack of his ass in front of the whole courtroom and show everyone how easy it was. This time, though, he'd apply Law 15: Crush Your Enemy Totally. Chance whispered a very detailed set of instructions to Stormie, then he forced himself to tune into Detective Eubanks' baloney.

“Actually,” the twit said, “it was Aspen who put us on the scent of Mr. Fox. We learned from Yancee Taylor's autopsy that the hieroglyphics cut into his body were done by a skilled surgeon's hand. Some sort of doctor. Detective Skye cross-referenced all the male students who went to Monticello Junior High School in the early nineties against those who turned out professions in the medical/health care field. One of the two white males who made the list was Mr. Fox, because he's a practicing veterinarian. But that dead-ended on us.”

Aspen's a smart little cunt, Chance thought. He made a mental note to himself to never again dump a body anywhere that the location could come back and bite him on the turd cutter no matter how remote the possibility.

“Would you tell the court about the evidence discovered on April twenty-seventh of this year.”

“We located Yancee's car.” The twit paused for a brief moment, as if he were remembering the day. “Inside the car we found a note Yancee had written to himself.”

“What was on the note?”

His wife played her role to a tee; it made Chance grin.

“It had the words ‘wood chips 4:30, Thursday,' written on it
.
Yancee went missing on April twenty-first, which was a Thursday.”

“Was there anything else?”

“Yes, he wrote the initials C.F.”

Chance whispered to Stormie again as the star character of his production, County Prosecutor Scenario Davenport, collected a document from the state's table.

She approached Bridgette, the clerk of courts, a bimbo with bee-sting tits and a cottage-cheese complexion who wore a skirt too high above the knees to be considered appropriate. Chance had been imagining different ways he could fuck her ever since they led him in the courtroom. Each time he winked at her, she smiled. He dug her lip piercing, and the bottled auburn hair let him know that Bridgette had a little
wild
in her blood.

Scenario handed the object of his present lust the document. “The state enters People's Exhibit A into the record, the note Yancee Taylor wrote to himself.” She turned back to the twit. “Detective Eubanks, what do the initials C.F. stand for?”

Chance elbowed Stormie.

“Objection, Your Honor.” Stormie shot to his feet, biting back the pain. “Speculation. Without Yancee Taylor, no one can definitively know what C.F. stands for. It could stand for that new gentlemens club, Chocolate Factory, for all we know.”

“Sustained.”

“No problem, Your Honor. I'll rephrase,” Scenario said. “What do the initials mean to you, Detective Eubanks?”

“Until Mr. Fox showed up at my house with the intentions of harming Ms. Smith, my partner and I thought the initials stood for Cashmaire Fox.”

“Really? How so?”

S
cenario Davenport felt the first bead of perspiration drip from her armpit. She knew this line of questioning was the first step in freeing her husband and burying Cashmaire Fox forever.

“It was confusing at first, because the wood chips is a playground that Chance, Yancee, and Leon used to frequent together as children. Ms. Gail Taylor, Yancee's mother, provided us with that information during the investigation. That connected the deaths of Yancee and Leon together and then to Chance, and then connected them all to their college roommate Anderson Smith. But as Scratch testified, Yancee was last seen with a woman. In the call log of Yancee's cell phone, there were several calls placed between Yancee and a number registered to Cashmaire Fox. One call was shared between them twenty minutes prior to when Yancee was last seen alive.”

Scenario paced in front of the jurors while Hakeem talked.

“At seven thirty-six of the same morning Yancee didn't come home from work, a red Infiniti blew through the Ohio turnpike, entering the state with an expired E-Z Pass. The E-Z Pass cameras photographed the license plate. The car is registered to Cashmaire Fox. As Scratch testified, he saw the same make and model car being driven away from the wood chips later that day with a woman fitting Mrs. Fox's description.”

“So you concluded that Yancee and Cashmaire drove away together in her car, and Yancee's car was towed by the city of Euclid because he left it illegally parked for an extended period of time, obviously because he had been murdered.”

Hakeem nodded. “Yes, but that was just the beginning of our theory.”

“Please explain, Detective.” Scenario perched herself on the state's table and folded her arms. She couldn't wait until this was over so she and Chance could settle into their new home in their new world and adopt a family.

“Once we linked one body to Mr. Fox,” Detective Eubanks said, “we linked them all to an intimate group of friends.”

“Please share the names of that group with the court, Detective.”

“Yancee Taylor, Anderson Smith, Leon Page, Jazz Smith, Cashmaire Fox, and Chancellor Fox. Two were dead when we discovered this web of people. Leon Page was murdered a few hours afterward. Our efforts or the efforts of the authorities in Denver couldn't locate Mr. or Mrs. Fox, but we had proof she was in Cleveland.”

“Because of the E-Z Pass and where the cell towers put her when the calls were made between her cell phone and Yancee's.”

“Yes, and as I stated earlier, the description of the woman Yancee was last seen with matches Mrs. Fox.”

“But Mr. Fox is on trial here, not his wife.”

“That's correct. Once we narrowed the deaths to one group of people, we knew that Jazz Smith was potentially in danger of the same fate, and we assumed that Mr. Fox was already dead and his body just hadn't been discovered.”

She knew the jury and press would love to hear the answer to her next question. “What switched your focus to Mr. Fox?”

“Mrs. Fox didn't show up trying to kill Ms. Smith; Mr. Fox did.”

“Why, what motive did he have to kill off his friends?”

“He doesn't need one,” Hakeem said with energy. “Look at him, he's crazy. He carves messages in people's bodies, for God's sake.”

“Objection, Your Honor,” Stormie said. “I move to have that inflammatory statement stricken from the record.”

“Sustained.” The judge instructed the jury to disregard the comment. Then he said, “Watch it, Detective Eubanks.”

“You sustained a permanent injury when Mr. Fox attacked you in your home in his pursuit of Ms. Smith.”

“Objection,” Stormie said. “My client was not the aggressor.”

“I'll hear it,” the judge said. “Overruled.”

“Yes,” Hakeem said, staring blankly at her, probably remembering the intense pain each time he felt his leg break under the force of the door. “My leg was broken in six places. My femur and tibia bones are held together by surgical screws and I have ligament damage. When I received these injuries, I also realized our theory was the exact opposite. That it was Cashmaire Fox who was missing.”