Guilt by Association (20 page)

“Oh, you’re picking a jury, then? Let me know if you want me to come and look at anyone, give a second opinion.”

“No jury today, just motions,” Toni said simply.

The too-casual tone was the final tip-off.

“You’re in J. D. Morgan’s court,” I said, amused.

Toni struggled to keep her expression neutral. “I wanted to run this Miranda motion by you,” she said, sidestepping my cross-examination.
“It might be a problem.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Be glad to. In fact, why don’t we talk about it over dinner? We can hit Pace. My treat.”

Pace, Toni’s favorite restaurant, was an intimate dinner house in Laurel Canyon, tucked into a pocket behind the Country Store,
where Jim Morrison used to do his grocery shopping. Unflashy but tastefully boheme, with great food and wine, it was a popular
insider hang for the Hollywood crowd.

Toni gave me a hard look. “And if I don’t have any dish on J.D. and me, you still buying?” she challenged.

“Who are you kidding?” I said, amused. “There’d be a story to tell if all you did was pass each other in the hallway.”

Toni acknowledged the point with a rueful smile.

Her on-again, off-again commitment-phobic but never dull relationship with Judge J. D. Morgan was a great source of entertaining
material for me. Not that I blamed her for the attraction.

J.D. typified the description “rakishly handsome,” with steel-gray hair, blue eyes that really did twinkle, and a killer body
that came from his years on the force and love of amateur boxing. Decades ago, the transition from cop to superior court judge
was fairly common. But when the LAPD started to take hits for being unruly cowboys, governors became leery of appointing them
to the bench. Nowadays the LAPD has largely outgrown that rap, but it’s almost as hard to find an L.A. judge who’s a former
cop as it is to find a monogamous politician.

Even so, Judge Morgan was the kind of guy who’d have been appointed by any governor at any time. He wasn’t the intellectual
type, but he was whip-smart with life experience, and a born raconteur with an infectious laugh. Those qualities provided
him with an endless collection of invitations to parties thrown by an eclectic bunch of hosts, from hard-core gang detectives
to the L.A. Philharmonic crowd.

I’d met him when my arson case got sent to his court for trial. I was braced for a nasty slugfest. The defense attorney, whom
we called Snarol, a brand of snail poison—picture the face of a pissed-off snail; that’s what he looked like—was known for
his short temper and vicious personal attacks. On our first day of pretrial motions, Judge Morgan had asked what issues we
needed to resolve before we started picking a jury. Sure enough, Snarol had jumped to his feet, steam whistling out of his
ears.

“The prosecution has been hiding critical evidence! She just
handed me these transcripts of my client’s statement this morning!” he practically yelled, brandishing a sheaf of papers.
“This is outrageous misconduct, and I fully intend to take this to the State Bar!”

“Your Honor, I’ve given counsel those transcripts three times. Today is actually the fourth. There is no—”

J.D. held up his hand to stop me. “Ms. Knight, I’ve seen the proof of discovery. I know exactly when you turned them over.”
Then he looked at the defense attorney, his deep baritone relaxed, even congenial, but firm. “Counsel, I need you to hear
me loud and clear: we don’t try lawsuits that way in my court. I’m going to give you a piece of advice, and for your sake,
I hope you take it: When you go after the prosecutor like that, all I hear is you’ve got nothing—not the law and not the facts.
You want to win a motion in front of me, you’ll remember what I just said.” It was like magic. For the first time ever, Snarol
acted civilized. J.D. often admitted that he was no great legal scholar, yet he had a Zenlike sense of balance. As a result,
lawyers on both sides liked him because, in the end, everyone got a fair trial.

The story of Toni and J.D. began by accident. I was about to go into closing argument on my arson case when I realized I’d
forgotten a file I needed. With only ten minutes before the jury was due back in, I didn’t have time to go up to the office
and get it, so I’d asked Toni to bring it to me. The moment she walked into the courtroom and said, “Excuse me, Your Honor,”
I’d seen the light jump into his eyes. After that, they were hot and heavy for a few months, and they’d seemed to be perfect
together. As it turned out, a little too perfect.

Once word got out about the romance, everyone in the building started asking when they were going to set the date. Within
a week, they’d both started to backpedal away from each other faster than Russian circus bears. Because one of the main things
they had in common was an aversion to commitment. Yet they couldn’t completely
stay away from each other—that’s how good their chemistry was. So every time their paths crossed, they’d pick up where they’d
left off and have one hell of a great time—until one or the other got phobic again. Though they couldn’t date while the trial
was going on, Toni being in J.D.’s court meant they’d certainly get back together once it ended.

A shrink would have a field day with them… if either one would go.

“Give J.D. my best,” I said. As I turned to go, I added, “And I can see you’re already giving him yours.”

Toni’s pen hit the wall behind me as I walked out into the hall.

I unlocked my door, kicked up the doorstop, and sat down in front of my computer. I had a raft of e-mails from defense attorneys
and one from Master Control Freak, aka Daddy Dearest: [email protected]. I was surprised his address wasn’t
MasteroftheUniverse.com
. I’d been giving him periodic updates via e-mail to avoid talking to him in person. Even then, it took a lot of restraint
not to tell him what to do with his increasingly irritable, condescending, and amazingly long-winded communications about
our failure to bring the obvious culprit to justice.

I was reading the most recent example when my cell phone rang.

“You in your office?” Bailey asked.

“Yep.”

“Stay there,” she said, then hung up.

I tried to focus on the task at hand while I waited for Bailey to arrive—and failed miserably. What was so urgent and so secret
that she couldn’t say it on the phone? Fortunately for my impatient self, I didn’t have long to wait.

“You won’t believe this,” she began, striding briskly into my office. “We got a call about a burglary in progress in the Palisades
last night.”

I looked at her, my eyebrows raised. The Palisades again. I’m not a fan of coincidences, but on the other hand, a burglary
in a rich neighborhood is a fairly commonplace event.

“Close to Susan’s house?” I asked.

“Close enough. We caught the suspect hiding in another neighbor’s backyard.” Bailey paused to look at me meaningfully, making
sure she had my full attention. She did.

“Our perp is a baby gangster. And his crew?” she said, pausing for effect.

“The Sylmar Sevens,” I concluded.

So much for coincidence.

I sat back in my chair
with a thump. “The Sevens hitting the Palisades makes no sense at all.” A well-policed hood like that isn’t usually a gang’s
first choice, especially while there’s still heat on the shot-caller for a crime committed in that same area. The more I thought
about it, the more it seemed suicidal for them to hit the neighborhood so soon after Susan’s rape. It was like hanging a
GUILTY
sign around Luis Revelo’s neck.

Bailey had been watching my reaction. “My thoughts exactly,” she said.

“Anyone talk to the guy yet?” I asked.

“They tried. He clammed up, wants his lawyer.”

“He got one?”

“Not yet.”

Until his lawyer showed up and said otherwise, there’d be no talking. So unless the suspect asked to talk to the cops first—unlikely,
given his behavior so far—there was nothing we could do.

For the moment, the conundrum of what the Sylmar Sevens were doing in the Palisades would go unsolved. I turned my attention
to Jake’s case. “What are you hearing about the double?” I asked. “Any word on physical evidence, stray hairs? Fibers?”

“They’re not calling it a ‘double.’ ”

“Screw them. It’s not a murder-suicide until I say it is.”

“I’ll let the FBI know,” Bailey said, deadpan. “Anyway, I have no news. They’ve been keeping everything under lock and key.”
Bailey paused. A sly look crossed her face. “But I know someone you could ask…”

It dawned on me suddenly that I’d forgotten to tell her about my lunch with Graden. Much as I hated to play into her hands
after that innuendo, I couldn’t put it off and risk her hearing about it from someone else. That would hurt her feelings.
Besides, her innuendo actually was my game plan: I
did
intend to squeeze Graden for information.

“I forgot to tell you,” I began. I filled her in. When I finished, she looked at me in disbelief.

“You forgot?” she asked.

I shrugged. “And we got busy.”

Bailey shook her head, but she was smiling. “It’s you. I buy it.” She looked out the window for a moment before she said,
“It’s hard not to shit where you eat, isn’t it?”

“Thank you, Elizabeth Barrett Browning,” I said dryly. “I assume you mean it’s not so smart to date the guy who’s heading
up the murder investigation on Jake’s case.”

“No, I mean the opposite. The case won’t last forever. And we all work these crazy hours, so where else would we meet someone?
I mean, you almost have to shit where you eat.”

“You know, I was kind of hungry until you started talking.” This was Bailey’s way of endorsing the date with Graden, but it
was making me queasy.

“Come on, it’s just a figure of speech. ‘You don’t—’ ”

“Stop,” I said, holding up a hand. “Seriously. I’d like to find an appetite again by next week.”

Now it was Bailey’s turn to shrug. She stood to go but hit a more serious note. “You’re wearing your vest, right?”

“Yes, Mother.”

Unfazed, she replied, “Call me when you’re ready to roll.”

I hadn’t needed the reminder. Just this morning, the hotel manager had called to ask me, as delicately as possible, when I
intended to do something about my car. I had to admit, my little Accord hadn’t looked all that great next to the Benzes and
Rolls in that garage to begin with, but now that it’d been turned into a mobile tribute to the artistic renderings of Lil’
Loco, it stuck out like a Cracker Jack ring in a Tiffany display. I’d been putting it off, but I’d have to get it fixed up
soon. The bodywork was going to cost me a chunk of change.

But that wasn’t the only reason I hadn’t done anything about my little car. For all my solid logic as to why the shooting
had been random, the possibility that there might be someone out there gunning for me—literally—was unnerving. And so was
that train of thought. I prefer not to fixate on life-threatening problems I can’t fix, so my mind groped for an alternative.
It settled back on Jake’s case.

Maybe it was time to stop fighting the pedophile angle and go straight at it. I turned the problem over in my mind as I stared
out the window and watched the sidewalks fill with the 4:00 homebound crowd. Desiree, my favorite tranny, in thigh-high boots
with a leather miniskirt and her perennial long, wavy blond wig, was making her way up Spring Street in strong, confident
strides, looking straight ahead, daring all who passed to ignore her. She always made me smile.

By the time the office had cleared out, I had a plan. Turning to my computer, I tapped out an e-mail to PedoAlert, a vigilante
group headed by Clive Zorn that was dedicated to the capture of pedophiles and child pornographers. I met him during a child-murder
case I’d handled a few years back. The case had been presented to me as a battered-child case, and they’d arrested the nanny.
The injuries didn’t present a clear-cut case for murder, and there was a strong
possibility the jury might buy the nanny’s story that the child’s neck broke after a fall down the stairs—a scenario that
could’ve led to a complete acquittal.

Clive had called to alert me to the possibility that there might be sexual abuse involved. There were no overt signs of this
on the victim, and I’d been warned that Clive and his group were trying to make a name for themselves by claiming there was
sexual abuse on high-profile cases so they’d have an excuse to horn in. I’d been leery of him at first when Melia had given
me the message saying he’d called. But curiosity, combined with paranoia—at the thought that something might’ve been missed—made
me return his call anyway. When Clive told me that he didn’t want any publicity and that he just wanted to give me some tips
on what to look for, I’d been surprised. I was still suspicious, but I’d listened.

An hour and a half later, my hair was standing on end—I’d heard more than I ever thought there was to know about all the possible
signs of child molestation. I went back to the detectives and made specific requests for follow-up investigations. Among other
things, they found a hidden cache of kiddie porn that featured our victim. Since the age of two. Taken by her nanny. And,
in several, the nanny had shaken and abused the child in ways that left no bruises. A dicey case turned into a first-degree-murder
conviction that sent the nanny to prison for twenty-five years to life.

Since then, I’d recommended Zorn to every deputy I knew and talked him up to reporters every chance I got. Clive had been
effusive in his gratitude for my support, so I knew he’d be willing to help. Sure enough, within minutes of my hitting send,
my phone rang. I snatched it up after the first ring.

“DA’s office, Rachel Knight.”

“I’d say it was nice to hear from you, but I’m assuming it’s about another pedophile.” Clive’s surprisingly soft voice had
fooled more than one target during the group’s sting operations.

I told him what I knew about Jake’s case.

“And you want to know what we can find out about your victim, right?”