15 Seconds (13 page)
Authors: Andrew Gross
I
t took to the end of the day, but I did get a text message back from Marv. “Do you have a laptop handy?”
“Yes,” I wrote back from a Home Depot parking lot, trying to stay out of sight. “My iPad.”
“Check your e-mail.”
I found a document there, from the South Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles. I opened the attachment and ran my eyes over it like a starving man looking at a steak. There were names, addresses. All with plates beginning with ADJ-4.
Twelve of them.
Many were from towns I'd never heard of. Edgefield. Moncks Corner. I'd been in South Carolina only twice in my life. Once to Charleston, one of my favorite places, and once to Kiawah Island to play some golf with a bunch of doctor buddies.
Twelve
. . . I eagerly scanned the list of names because possibly one of them was the killer I was looking for.
“How did you get these?” I called Marv back.
“Does it matter? I know someone. There's a hundred ways to obtain things like this today. How much do you think a state employee actually makes for a living? But I'm hoping you're simply planning on handing these over to the police after you turn yourself in. I want to repeat, Henry, what you're doing is crazy. I know it seems like you're alone. I know you think this is your only option. But it's not. I did what I said I'd do; now it's up to you. All you're going to do is get yourself killed.”
I thought for a second about walking into a police station with my hands in the air and handing them this list. My gut reaction was that the cops would never even stoop to pick it up off the floor.
“I want to thank you for all this, Marv. I mean it. I'll be back with you when I know something.”
“My little speech didn't exactly move the needle, did it?”
“I wish I could tell you why I can't, Marv. But the needle's already moved. It's way too late to dial it back.”
We hung up and I opened the document again, running my eyes down the columns. Names from all over the state. Four of them were women. Grace Kittridge, in Manning. Sally Ann Jennings in Edgarfield. A Betty Smith. Moncks Corner. Just to narrow it, I chose to cross them off for the moment.
Two of the plates on the list had expired. One in the past year and the other in '06. Maybe they were just never turned in. Which didn't really matter. They could have been stolen. Just like mine. Hell, for all I knew, the blue car I was searching might be stolen too.
Still, the remote chance that one of these names led to that car was the best chance I had.
I went into the Home Depot and bought a few things with cash. The first two were more throwaway cell phones, and the other was scissors.
I went into the men's room toilet stall and started chopping my hair. Each lock of my long brown hair falling into the toilet was like a part of my life that might never come back. I had something I needed to do right now. I had someone who needed me more than I needed my old life. I was no longer someone who had been falsely accused of two murders. I was a dad, a dad who was trying to save the person he loved most in the world. I took one more glance at my old life floating there in the basinâand then I flushed.
I found a cash machine in the store and punched in my account number and password. I requested three hundred dollars. I knew it would likely trigger a response, probably just as it was happening.
Hell, there might even be a police team scrambling as I stood here now.
I didn't care.
I wouldn't be around long . . . and where I was heading, it wouldn't matter.
I left, found another ATM at a bank nearby, and took out another three hundred. I stuffed the cash in my pocket, pulled down my cap, and jumped back into the car.
I-95 was only a short drive away. I turned on Sirius radio and found the Bridge. A bunch of oldies I knew.
I called Liz from one of the phones I had bought. I didn't care about the risk. “I want you to know, I have a list. Of twelve cars, whose license plates begin with the number I saw. One of them has our daughter.”
“How, Henry?” she asked, surprised, but uplifted.
“Doesn't matter.”
The next stop was getting my daughter back.
You just hang on, Hallie. I'm coming.
Next stop, South Carolina.
T
he next morning Carrie knocked on Bill Akers's door.
“Carrie, come on in,” her boss said, moving some papers around. “There's been some news.”
“I've got something as well,” she said, pushing back the flutter in her stomach and taking a seat across from him. She placed the folder, which contained photos she had put together of the blue Mazda at both crimes scenes, on her lap.
Akers's walls were lined with framed criminology degrees, citations for merit, as well as photos of himself with prominent officials, including the mayor, and a former head of Homeland Security. Which only made what Carrie was about to share with him even harder to do.
She knew she had no greater supporter in the department than Bill. Truth was the community outreach effort had been one of his own personal initiatives. She also knew she'd need every bit of that support when it came to the budgetary cutbacks she'd heard were coming. She'd worn her most flattering suit, black pants and jacket, and a light blue tee. She wanted to look as proper and businesslike as she could for when the shit would hit the fan later.
“How about I go first?” Carrie said. She took in a breath. “I have an admission to make, Bill. I want to show you something . . .” She put the folder on his desk.
She had struggled all night over showing this to him. She knew what she had done would get her into a lot of hot water: withholding key evidence from the investigation, a murder investigation; and going around on her own obtaining confidential security tapes using a JSO ID.
Not to mention, how she was probably the only person here who harbored any doubts about Steadman's guilt, which she knew, politically, wasn't exactly a home run. She'd pretty much tossed and turned the whole night.
But in the morning, she'd awoken, sure in her heart that she was doing the right thing.
Carrie swallowed. “Look,
Bill . . .”
she began, trying to ignore the photo of Akers with the new Chief Hall directly in her line of sight, “I've had some thoughts . . . about what Steadman was saying the other day . . . How certain things just weren't adding up. Like why would he have shot Martinez in the first place? I know the others said he was being belligerent and argumentative, but by the time they all left, things had calmed down considerably, and Martinez was only writing up a warning and about to let him go . . .”
Akers nodded obligingly. Carrie judged his gaze as disappointed.
“Not to mention where any possible weapon would have come from. I mean, he'd just come off a plane, right? And how there's nothing in the guy's past to suggest he had these kinds of tendencies . . .”
Akers took off his reading glasses. “Carrie . . .”
A look of skepticism came over her boss's face, and she found herself suddenly rushing things, not giving him the chance to interrupt. “Then it kind of seemed crazy Steadman would kill his own friend? Who he knew from college. More likely he was going there because he had nowhere else to goâhe told us he only ran from the scene in the first place because the police fired on him. I mean, he did place a call to 911 . . . So I asked around . . . He'd also placed two calls to Dinofrio, minutes after he ran from the crime scene, so it seems possible, doesn't it, Bill, that he only headed there because Dinofrio was the only person he knew in town, not to mention an attorney, which kind of backs up his assertion that he only went there in the first place to turn himself in. And the second murder scene showed no sign of any struggle or altercationâ”
“I didn't realize he
had
said he was only going there to turn himself in.” Akers looked at her inquisitively. “You certainly sound like you've been following this case closely, Carrie.”
“I'm only pointing out that there are inconsistencies, Bill. You know how Steadman kept going on and on the other day about us looking for that blue car? With South Carolina plates?” She opened up the file. “I started thinkingâ”
“Look, Carrie.” Akers pushed himself back in his chair. “I appreciate all your thought on this, but have you given any thought to the possibility that maybe Steadman intended all along to kill his friend?”
“What? Why in the world would he want to do
that
?”
“I don't know. Maybe there was some history between them that will come out. And given what
has
come out, the other night, about his time in college, you may well be wrong about any predating âviolent tendencies.' And it's entirely possibly he could have planted the gun somewhere. Off the airport grounds. Maybe on a previous visit.”
“A previous visit?”
“Why not? That would give him a perfect alibi, right? To come up here to play golf with him . . . Then he stashed the gun somewhere when he ran from the scene. Or left it near Dinofrio's house. People are searching the areas now. And what if Martinez somehow found something? What if Steadman somehow felt Martinez was interfering with his plan?”
“He was up here to give a speech at a doctors' conference, Bill! Look, there's something you need to see.” Carrie blew out a breath, knowing there was no holding back now, and took out the first photo, the one of the blue Mazda racing from Martinez's murder scene.
Here goes the career,
she thought.
Akers put up his hand. “No, Carrie, I think you're the one who needs to see something . . .” He reached to the side of his desk and pushed a piece of paper across to her. “This came in just an hour ago.”
Carrie picked it up. It was an invoice of some kind. From something called Bud's Guns in Mount Holly, North Carolina.
An invoice for a Heckler & Koch 9mm handgun.
She saw whom the bill was made out to, and her stomach fell like a ten-ton weight hurled off a cliff.
Henry Steadman
3110 Palmetto Way
Palm Beach, Florida
Steadman's address.
An H&K 9mm, the same kind of gun that had killed both Dinofrio and Martinez. It was bought at a gun show, in Tracy, which made it perfectly legal to avoid providing certain IDs and background checks.
The invoice was dated March 2.
Just three weeks ago!
Steadman had lied. He said he'd never even owned a gun. Her breath felt cut in half. Carrie was afraid to lift her eyes.
“So what exactly do you have in there that's so important for me to see?” Akers asked her with a sharpness in his voice. Acting more like a superior officer than a colleague.
“Nothing . . .”
Carrie swallowed, her mouth completely dry. She closed the file. “This makes it all pretty clear.”
I
had just about made it through Georgia when I heard the news.
I'd spent the night in Hinesville, a few miles south of Savannah. I pulled off the highway in need of a night's sleep and, even more, a shower, and drove until I found a motel that looked even sleepier than me. The woman who checked me in seemed as anxious to get back to the tea she was brewing as I was to avoid her direct sight. Ten minutes later I was bathed and gone to the world, a
King of Queens
rerun on the TV. Glad to just be in a bed after two nights. When I woke up, the housekeeper was knocking on the door. It was close to ten. The news was on,
Libyan Rebels Advancing on the Capital of Tripoli
. I closed my eyes again, wondering if I'd hear an update about me.
What came on almost sent me into cardiac arrest.
“Florida double homicide suspect purchased a nine-millimeter murder handgun at North Carolina gun show.”
I shot up in bed, as a pretty, down-home anchorwoman told the world how on March 2, only three weeks ago, I had bought a Heckler & Koch 9mm handgun, apparently the same gun that killed both Martinez and Mike, from a local dealer at a gun show in North Carolina.
I leaped out of the bed and put my face close to the screen.
What I saw was a supposed bill of sale from an outfit called Bud's Guns, in Mount Holly. The report claimed that the weapon had been paid for in cash at the Mid-Carolina Gun Fair almost three weeks earlier, which, it explained, avoided the requirement for a more detailed background check and ID.
My heart almost came up my throat. I'd never been to a gun show in my life! And I'd only been to North Carolina once in the past several years, to Duke University, for a conference on rebuilding facial bone structure.
But there it was. My name on the invoice. My address in Palm Beach. Having paid cash, as if I was trying to avoid detection. Three weeks ago. Before the murders. For the entire world to see!
If there was even a sliver of hope that someone might believe me that I wasn't guilty, that was now dashed. My mind flashed to Carrie Holmes. It had taken everything just to convince her that the Amherst incident had been twisted maliciously.
What would she be thinking now?
I reached over to the night table and found one of my disposable phones.
This was part of the setup! It had to be. How could someone have my name and address on a bill of sale, buying the identical gun used in the killings, three weeks before the crime? How would anyone have known I'd be in Jacksonville? How would anyone have planted me there?
Suddenly the truth settled into me and my eyes went wide.
The sonovabitch who had been orchestrating this whole thing, who had Hallie . . . he'd been planning it for weeks.
How? . . . Why?
I turned off the TV and sat back in a daze, mentally rewinding through everything that had happened since the moment I'd arrived in Jacksonville two days before.
Martinez pulling me over; ordering me out of my car; telling me I was going to jail. All those questions, as if I'd committed some serious crime. As if they were hunting someone.
And Mike. How would anyone have known about him? Or put us together? That
that
was where I'd head in a panic? My head was throbbing.
Who? Why?
Were Martinez and Mike killed merely to make it appear that I was a murderer?
But then I suddenly realized, the bastard had gone one step too far.
I took the phone and punched in the number for the sheriff's office. Carrie had told me not to call her. But I had to. By now, I was damn sure she thought I was guiltier than ever. Everyone would. My heart began to race as I waited for the call to go through. Finally, a receptionist answered.
“Carrie Holmes . . .” I said.
A fear kicked up that she was probably waiting for me. They probably had a trace set up as soon as they heard my call. It might even be a trap. A plant. Knowing I'd call in. I couldn't blame her now.
And I didn't care. I didn't care if the cops barged in here right now and took me away. I just wanted one fucking person in this world to believe me. As long as I had one person to help me clear my name . . .
“Community Outreach. Carrie Hol
â
”
“I didn't do it, Carrie!”
I didn't give her a second to interrupt. “I don't care what it looks like. I don't care how it makes me seem. I didn't buy that gun. I've never been to a gun show. Someone is setting me up, Carrie. That's what I couldn't tell you the other day. Why I couldn't turn myself in.
“But this time I'm pretty sure I can prove it!”