Above the Law (64 page)

She hesitated, considering possible courses of action. Then she came around the couch and sat back down, perched on the edge.

She tried a new tack. “You’re tired,” she said calmly. “I understand. You’ve had a monkey wrench thrown into the works. Go ahead. Ask me whatever you want to ask me. I have nothing to hide from you.” She paused. “From anyone.” She smiled at me, almost lasciviously. “Do you?”

“No,” I answered, feeling the churn in my gut, “but we’re not here for me.”

“You mean I have to show you mine, but you don’t have to show me yours.”

She was coming on to me. Not for the reasons she had before, but to embarrass me in front of Kate.

I forced a smile. “I don’t have anything to show you.”

She looked at Kate again. This time, she winked. “Oh, I’ll bet you do.”

Kate glanced at me, like asking,
What’s this?

I wasn’t going to get caught up in Nora’s emotional machinations. I threw her a curve. “Let’s talk about Dennis’s suicide.”

My tactic worked—she turned pale. “Dennis’s suicide? What does that have to do with anything? My God, Luke, isn’t that low? At a time like this?”

I took the autopsy report out of my pocket. “You found him.”

“Yes,” she said between clenched teeth, staring at the document in my hand.

“He shot himself with a gun. In the temple. A nine-millimeter Sig Sauer.” I looked up from the page. “Your gun.”

“I know all that!” she cried. “You don’t have to remind me. I’ve been living with it for five years.” She turned to Kate. “Please make him stop.”

Kate shook her head.

I carefully laid the autopsy report on the coffee table. “You never told me you had a gun, Nora. Why didn’t you tell me you had a gun? Why didn’t you tell me your husband killed himself with
your
gun?”

Her nails were digging into the palms of her hands. “What in the world does that have to do with any of this case?” She snatched up the report, crumpled it in her hand. “Yes, I have a gun. All D.A.’s in this county have guns, they’re given to you when you take the job, whether you want one or not. This is the old West up here, Luke. Everybody has a gun.”

She threw the paper across the room at me. “I didn’t want the fucking thing. I hate guns, they scare the shit out of me. They kill people.” She started crying, her face in her hands, loud, racking sobs. “Like Dennis,” she cried from behind her hands. “It was in a drawer, I’d forgotten I even had it.”

She sobbed harder.

Kate put a hand on my arm. “Should we stop for a while?” she whispered, concerned.

I was fresh out of pity. “Get her a glass of water.”

Kate went into the kitchen and came back with a half-full glass. She pressed it into Nora’s hands. Kate looked over at me—she was feeling sorry for Nora.

I wasn’t. “Come on, Nora. Pull it together.”

Her crying turned to sniffles. She took a swallow, handed the glass back to Kate. Kate put it on the coffee table and sat next to me again.

“I don’t know why you’re doing this, Luke.” Nora’s eyes were red-rimmed.

“You brought me up here to do a job. This is part of it.”

Her sigh came from way deep down. “Okay. Go ahead. I’ll be all right.” She reached for the water.

I went to my notes again. “Where were you the night of the raid?”

She looked at me incredulously; then she broke out laughing. “Now you’re really reaching.”

I sat there staring at her.

One of her legs was crossed over the other. Her foot jiggled up and down involuntarily. “I was home, of course. In my bed, asleep. It happened at four in the morning, for God’s sakes.”

“You didn’t know it was going down? Tom Miller didn’t call and tell you?”

The expression on her face told me I’d caught her in a lie.

She backtracked hastily. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. Yes, he called me.”

“When?”

“Around twelve or one. Somewhere in there. Of course he called me.”

“What did you do?”

She snorted a laugh. “Cussed. That bastard Jerome had cut us out until the last minute. But what could you expect?”

I was a metronome. “Then what?”

“Nothing.” Her foot had taken on a life of its own, twitching up and down. “There was nothing I could do. I hoped it would go all right. What else could I do?”

I rubbed my fingers on my forehead. “What does ‘go all right’ mean?”

“You know. That the raid would be successful.”

“That they’d catch these guys, the dealers,” I paused. “Including Juarez.”

“Of course including Juarez,” she answered. “He was the reason for it.”

“Okay. So then what?”

“I went…” She hesitated. “I didn’t go back to sleep. I stayed up.”

“You were up all night.”

“Yes.”

“Here.”

“Yes. I sat by the phone. With a glass of Jack Daniel’s close at hand, I might add. It was a very tense time, as you can imagine.”

I was staccatoing my questions. “Until when?”

She thought for a moment. “Around six-thirty. Tom called and told me what had happened.”

“The raid. Juarez being caught. Escaping. Being killed.”

She nodded. “Everything.”

“So from midnight until six-thirty in the morning you were here, waiting by the telephone to hear what had happened.”

Another nod.

“You didn’t go out at all, make any calls, anything?”

“No. I stuck right here, by the telephone. I wanted to make sure I was here when Tom called back.”

I looked at the last page in my hand. “According to your telephone records, you made some phone calls between midnight and four in the morning. From your phone, here.”

I angled the page to Kate, out of Nora’s vision. She looked at it carefully, her eyes following my finger down the page.

There were no phone numbers in my notes. Records aren’t kept of local phone calls in California. I was counting on Nora not knowing that, or that I’d rattled her enough that she’d forget. Kate did a convincing job of playing her part, mouthing the phantom numbers to herself.

“Who were they to?” I asked.

Nora started shaking.

“I…I think …I don’t remember, but maybe I did. I think I was trying to call someone from the DEA to get more information, or…I don’t remember exactly, it was such a nervous time.”

Next to me, Kate’s body was vibrating. I could feel it, an electric impulse. I put my notes aside and threw my haymaker.

“You killed him.”

Nora fainted dead away. Kate propped her up, applied a damp dishtowel to her forehead until she revived. She sat on the couch, slumped over, her body limp. We sat close by, flanking her.

“When did you know?” she asked dully. Her eyes were glazed over, spittle was dribbling out the side of her mouth.

“Not until this morning, for sure. But last night, when I pulled Dennis’s autopsy report out and read it again, it hit me. The missing piece of the puzzle. A left-handed man would shoot himself in the left temple, not the right.”

She shook her head mournfully. “Nobody ever caught that. You’re the only one.”

“It was a lucky break. Although by itself, that wasn’t enough. It wasn’t until we arrested Wayne Bearpaw that I put it all together. I knew there had to be someone else involved, someone Juarez knew and would trust to help him get away.”

I looked at her. “That had to be you.”

Her head barely moved in acknowledgment.

She made a pact with the devil. Money for access and protection. It had taken a long time, his people feeling her out, plying her with small favors, making certain she was corruptible.

When the big offer came, it was too good to resist. Fifty thousand dollars a month in cash, for as long as they operated out of there and she was the D.A. She would see to it that they could run their business without police interference. Dennis was a bust, her parents had no money to leave her, she couldn’t go anywhere else and start over, she was too old, too many bridges had been burned. It was her only chance to ever make real money.

Tom Miller had been suspicious of what was going on out there. She had restrained him from investigating, citing financial considerations.

Louisa Bearpaw was in on it from her end, and Wayne. A Luciferian threesome.

When Jerome came on the scene, she was worried, but not as much as Juarez. Jerome had dedicated his career to finding Juarez and nailing him. Juarez had been staying away from Muir County since Jerome had centered his operation there, until the night the drug deal was supposed to go down. He had to come, the buyer had insisted on it. Too much money was at stake for him not to. It was going to be a one-night stayover, gone before dawn.

The timing of the raid caught her completely by surprise. She had assumed the DEA would notify her and Miller well in advance. The feds always work with the locals.

When Miller called her the first time and told her he was going on a raid with Jerome and his men that night, right away, she had called the compound to warn Juarez, but it was too late for him to run. The compound was surrounded, his avenues of escape were blocked. He was going to have to stay and fight it out. He had a huge cache of arms, and Jerome wasn’t expecting resistance. They had outfought the DEA before, they could do it again.

But they didn’t. He was caught and arrested.

All this she knew because Tom Miller, the consummate pro, was constantly in touch with her.

Wayne Bearpaw was on the phone with her as soon as he left the war zone. She gave him his instructions: Find a way to sneak into that trailer and break Juarez loose—take the handcuffs off, unlock the trailer door. Kill whoever’s guarding him if you have to, Juarez has to be sprung loose. If Juarez could get out, he might be able to make his way to a prearranged spot and get away. It would be risky, but it was his only chance. That’s what she told Bearpaw. She didn’t say who might be at this prearranged location, or where it was.

Bearpaw was scared out of his wits to do it—the place was an armed camp, those agents would shoot at anything that moved. But she forced him to. If he didn’t, all three of them—him, his mother, her—were finished.

Somehow, he did his part.

She was at the designated spot, waiting. Juarez had planned this out before, long ago—I may have to come to you for help, he’d said. She’d agreed to it—she hadn’t thought it would actually ever happen. But it had, and now she had to fulfill her end of the bargain.

She was standing at the edge of the grown-over fire trail, in the clump of trees. She knew the area well—she had selected it because of its proximity to the fire road.

Juarez came running to her. He was shaking with exhaustion and fear. He bent over, hands on knees, gasping for breath. She leaned him up against the tree for support.

They could hear the DEA agents chasing around, running in all different directions. The feds didn’t know this terrain as well as she did, they weren’t close enough to find Juarez and her before the two of them could get to her car and get away.

Juarez never saw her raise her automatic, point the barrel an inch from his head, and pull the trigger.

I was numb. “You have no soul.”

She didn’t respond.

“You have no comprehension of your own depravity, do you?”

She shrugged, as if to say,
So what?

“I have a question.” Kate spoke. She was trembling.

Nora turned to her blankly.

“Why did you kill him?” Kate asked. “Why didn’t you spirit him away, like you’d planned?”

Nora laughed harshly.

“What was I going to do with him, stick him in the guest bedroom? I couldn’t take the chance he wouldn’t get caught again. That was the strongest thing he had going for him—that he could never be captured. But now he had. His shield of invulnerability had been shattered. He was just another drug dealer on the run now. Sooner or later, Jerome would have caught up with him. Or one of many others who had been after him.”

She continued. “After that night, he was useless to me. Worse than useless, he was dangerous. He wasn’t going to be paying me anymore, his people wouldn’t be able to operate out of Muir County. And he would have turned on me if he’d been caught. A district attorney on a drug dealer’s payroll? They would have sent me to jail forever.”

She took a sip of her water. It was incredible how calm and detailed she was in telling us this. It made the situation, and her, even harder to take.

“I thought for sure he’d be killed, trying to escape. I had to think Jerome could get that much of it straight. I never thought he’d actually get away.” She sighed. “But he did. With sixty men at his disposal, Jerome couldn’t even do that one thing right. Talk about a loser.”

She smiled at Kate and me, as if we were all sharing a wonderful secret.

“Killing him was my only option. Surely you understand that.”

I didn’t want to hear any more. I didn’t want to be in her sick, loathsome presence. But I had to know the rest.

“But why did you kill Dennis? He wasn’t involved in any of this…was he?” I asked fearfully. How deep did this go? I thought. How widespread was this corruption?

Her face was a dark mask of pure contempt.

“Dennis involved in this? That fucking pussy. By the time this chance came he was so beaten down he didn’t have the guts to cross the street by himself, let alone take any kind of risk.”

She shook her head as if trying to clear away a bad memory. “I wanted him to be with me in it, I begged him. It was a chance for us to have the kind of life we’d always wanted, the only chance we’d ever have.”

She cleared her throat, took a sip of water. “He didn’t want any part of it. After all I’d done for him.”

Her voice was thick with vitriol. “In all the years we were together I only asked him one goddamn thing. One lousy favor. And he wouldn’t do it. He wouldn’t lift one lousy finger to help me.” The scorn was in her eyes. “He was going to blow the whistle on me, all of us. It wasn’t enough that he wouldn’t be there for me when I needed him the most. He was going to stop me. His own wife, who had sacrificed everything for him. My career, my chance at having children, everything.”