Jack Daniels and Associates: Snake Wine (9 page)

Tomorrow everything would be better, I told myself. Tomorrow, all of this would seem worth it, for sure.

7.

The day started around two o'clock in the morning, right after she'd just fallen into a state of floating semi-consciousness that had good potential. It felt like it might even finally lead to something resembling sleep, when the phone rang. She rolled over and squinted to see the name HERB BENEDICT HOME on the phone's screen and shot upright in bed, hammering the answer button. "You son of a bitch, where the hell have you been?" Jack shouted.

The woman's voice was quiet on the other line when she said, "It's Bernice, Jack."

"Jesus, I'm sorry," Jack said, pressing her hand to her face. She felt a dull throbbing in the side of her head from not sleeping. It was like someone was slowly carving out her skull with a spoon. "I thought he came home."

"No," Bernice whispered. "I need to ask you a question, and I need you to be honest with me."

"All right," Jack said.

"Was there ever another woman?"

Jack paused, squeezing her temples with her fingers, trying to stop them from throbbing.

"Jack? You're not answering me. I guess that's my answer."

"No," Jack said. "Not that I know of. I don't think so."

"Think?"

"I mean, not that he ever said."

"I've been married to a cop long enough to know when someone isn't telling the whole truth, Jack," Bernice said. "I need you to be honest with me. Please."

Jack lied back down on her bed and looked up at the ceiling fan. There was half an inch of dust on its blades. She closed her eyes and said, "We interviewed a bartender who said Herb was last seen talking to a pretty Asian woman. He might have left at the same time she did. Now, we're not sure if he did, and that doesn't mean they left together, you understand? It's just one witness's statement and they hardly ever turn out right. The most important thing is to stay positive and keep looking until we get an answer."

When Bernice didn't answer, Jack said, "You okay?"

Surprisingly, Bernice let out a small laugh and said, "A pretty Asian woman? That's preposterous. Herb?"

"I know, right?" Jack said, finding herself laughing now too.

"I mean, maybe if he thought she was going to cook for him."

"The only Asian that ever tempted Herb Benedict was a General named Tso."

"This is so crazy," Bernice said. Her laughter was gone then, a short-lived thing like a comet flashing across a dark sky, only to be swallowed instantly by thick storm clouds. "I can't believe he'd leave me like this. I just can't believe it."

"If it helps," Jack said, "I'm not ready to believe it either, and until I am, we're going to keep looking."

Even after she hung up the phone and closed her eyes, desperate to sleep off the throb in her head, she could not. She'd playfully teased her body with finally getting some rest, and it was now paying her back by refusing to fall for the same trick twice. At four in the morning, she got up and made food for the day. She sliced carrot sticks and cucumbers and packed them in a ziplock baggie to take with her to work, telling herself that even if she was making herself ill by not sleeping she would at least try to eat right.

At five in the morning, she took a shower and did her hair, taking her time to blow dry and brush it out and do it nice. She picked out a blouse, blazer and skirt for the day, then took the time to iron them until each crease was sharp enough to cut someone with.

She left the house at six thirty, picking up coffee and a newspaper and two aspirin powders. She didn't know if it was the caffeine or the aspirin, or maybe both, but the headache slowly subsided, a distant beat of jungle drums getting softer and softer as you floated downstream.

It wasn't so bad getting up super early, she thought. The day hadn't even started, and she was more productive than usual. Maybe I'll try this not sleeping thing full time, or at least until they lock me away in the loony bin once I start hallucinating.

The sun was rising into the sky as she pulled into the courthouse parking lot. It was empty, save for the personal cars of the overnight guards, and their windows were covered with dew. Jack sipped her coffee and spread the newspaper across her steering wheel, starting at the first page.

Reading the newspaper was something she'd always thought cops did. So was drinking coffee and smoking. For that matter, so was telling dirty stories and laughing about them, then taking a quick look around to see if anyone who shouldn't be hearing them was listening. That was how Jack heard all her first and finest curse words. Nobody could curse like cops. Not sailors, not construction workers, not nobody.

Jack remembered all the handsome detectives sitting at their desks back when she was kid, typing their reports on the huge old Olympia typewriters, making their bells ring with every carriage return, cursing bitterly whenever they messed up a word. "Hey, kid," they'd say to her. "You looking for your mom?"

They smelled like hair products and aftershave and gun leather. Some of them even wore hats, the old fedoras like detectives did in the movies.

Jack's fate had been sealed from the start. She was police all the way through and had been as long as she could remember.

Somehow, sitting in her car, drinking her coffee, reading her newspaper, it all reminded her of those throwback cops of bygone days. They'd worked their cases and made their pinches and nothing had slowed them down. I'm cut from that cloth, she thought. If somebody zapped me through a time machine, I'd walk right into one of those offices, grab a desk and start punching up reports. Jack pulled the rearview mirror down and checked her face. She took a good, long look at it and thought about those old cops, and she knew that if somebody had messed with one of them, they messed with all of them.

Nobody is taking my partner from me, she thought. Nobody.

Jack was sitting in the courtroom at the prosecutor's table, waiting as people began to file into the court room. She was there when the tipstaff arrived and the bailiff and the sheriff's deputies. She was there when Alan Davidson came into the court carrying his briefcase and there when Keenan Marvin was brought in, shuffling uncomfortably in his leg irons. Jack reached into her pocket and shut down her cellphone. She'd heard stories about Judge Ceparullo seizing people's phones if they rang in court, and she couldn't afford to lose hers.

The judge entered the court and the bailiff tapped the podium with the gavel and said, "All rise."

They all stood up.

The judge sat down.

They all sat down.

Judge Ceparullo looked at the empty seat next to Jack and said, "I don't believe this shit." He immediately covered the microphone in front of him and said, "Strike that. Lieutenant Daniels, where is Mr. Roth?"

"I don't know, your honor," Jack said.

Ceparullo sighed and said, "Put this on the record. All parties were advised to be in court today at eight AM. It is now eight oh two. Mr. Roth is hereby fined five hundred dollars for being in contempt, payable to the sheriffs immediately upon his arrival, or he will be taken into custody for−"

The doors burst open at the front of the court and Jack spun in her chair to see Joel Roth barging in, calling out, "I'm here! I'm here, your honor, sorry I'm late."

"You are in contempt, Mr. Roth," the judge said. He snapped his fingers at one of the deputies standing behind Keenan Marvin and said, "Extract the fine from him or take him into custody."

"Your honor," Roth gasped. "How much is the fine?"

"Five hundred dollars."

"I don't have five hundred dollars on me."

"Oh well, you should have thought of that before you came late to my court."

Roth turned to look at the deputy and said, "Do you guys take credit cards?"

"Nope," the deputy said.

Roth reached into his pocket and dug out his wallet. He started to count out his cash and said, "I've got eighty one, no, eighty two dollars on me right now. I will get the rest as soon as we break for lunch, sir, I promise, but I have a very good reason to be late!"

"You'd better come up with four hundred and eighteen good reasons to stay, Mr. Roth," Judge Ceparullo snapped.

Roth looked pleadingly at Jack, who stood and opened her purse to pull out her wallet. "Here, I think I've got some," she said. She pulled out two hundred dollar bills and said, "You're lucky I didn't go to the bank yet."

"You're still short," Ceparullo said. The deputy reached behind his gun belt to remove a set of handcuffs. 

"Come on, your honor," Roth whined.

Jack turned in her seat to search the audience for friendly faces. She saw two uniformed cops and waved them over. They came up with a combined total of sixty-three dollars and seventy two cents.

It wasn't enough.

The deputy said, "Turn around and put your hands behind your back, sir."

Roth whimpered, doing as he did as he was told and the judge said, "Let this be a lesson to you and every other attorney in this county. When this court gives you an instruction, it expects it to be followed. You can be released when someone from your office brings you the rest of the money."

Judge Ceparullo reached for his gavel and Joel looked down at Alan Davidson. Davidson had been quietly smiling the entire time as the events unfolded, a happy spectator. Roth groaned and said, "Alan, can you please help me out?"

"You want me to help you out?" Davidson smirked.

"Yes. As a professional courtesy. Please."

"Will you let me win?" Davidson said.

"No. But I promise that when I beat you, I'll only humiliate you a little instead of a lot."

Their eyes met and Davidson sighed as he reached into his pocket and said, "Your honor, I've got the rest of it as a professional courtesy to the prosecutor here." He held up the money toward the deputy and said, "Anyway, I think the court has suffered enough shenanigans as a result of this trial already, don't you agree?"

"Quite," the judge said.

The deputy un cuffed Joel Roth, who rubbed his wrists and inspected the red marks ringed around them, wincing as he sat down in his seat.

Keenan Marvin leaned forward in his chair from across the aisle and said, "Hurts, don't it?"

Mr. Ford was back on the stand, in full view of the jury, as Alan Davidson finished questioning him about the particulars of the incident. "Just to summarize, Mr. Ford, for the benefit of the jury, can you please state for the record whether or not the bullet holes found in the walls and in the bodies of the deceased victims can accurately be attributed to a Glock nine millimeter model nineteen?"

Ford leaned forward in the podium, turned to face the jury, and said, "No, it cannot. Not with any degree of scientific accuracy or certainty."

"Is it fair then to say that the bullet holes could have been made by any nine millimeter?"

"Yes, that is correct."

Davidson turned to glance at Joel Roth, eyeing him carefully. Roth had been uncharacteristically silent during Mr. Ford's testimony. In fact, he hadn't raised a single objection. "Your honor, I have no more questions for this witness."

Judge Ceparullo waited for Alan Davidson to cross the aisle and then looked at the prosecutor. "Do you have any cross-examination, counselor?"

"I do, sir."

"You may proceed."

Joel Roth stood up and walked around the table, buttoning his suit coat as he came to stand before the jury. "Mr. Ford, yesterday I asked you how many cases you had worked where you examined a Glock nine millimeter model nineteen, do you remember?"

"Yes, I do."

"And you said, five hundred, true?"

"I said that I believed it was five hundred, give or take."

"And when I asked if you could back up your claim you said you could, that you were certain of it. And then today, you testified as an expert on behalf of Keenan Marvin and said we could not prove his gun was the one used to kill both victims."

"Yes, I did say that," Ford replied.

"Did you say it with the same degree of certainty?" Roth asked.

Ford shrugged and said, "There's really only two degrees of certainty, I suppose. You either are or you aren't."

Joel Roth nodded and raised his hand in the air and snapped his fingers over his shoulder like a magician giving a signal to his assistant. The courtroom doors opened and three young women came through, each carrying boxes of the same files Ford had delivered the day before. Joel thanked the women as they deposited the boxes on the prosecutor's table and he waited for them to leave before he turned again to look at the witness. "Then can you please tell the jury why you lied about how many cases you'd examined?"

"Excuse me?" Ford said indignantly.

Roth laid his hand over the top of one of the boxes and said, "I went through all these last night. In fact, I stayed up until three in the morning and slept through my alarm, just so I could be certain. But in every single one of the boxes on this table are files and files of cases where you examined a Glock seventeen. Not a nineteen. Can you explain that?"

The faces on the men and women sitting in the jury panel displayed varying expressions of surprise, from outright shock to a single cocked eyebrow. Mr. Ford shifted nervously in his chair and sputtered, "Well, that's an honest mistake, see. They're extremely similar weapons, and both nine millimeters, and it hardly makes any difference, really. That shouldn't affect anything."

"Shouldn't?" Roth said sharply.

"They're similar enough to provide an accurate profile."

"I asked you if you were certain, and you said there were two degrees of certainty, Mr. Ford. Certain or not. Similarity didn't come into it!"

Alan Davidson called out several objections as the witness and prosecutor both shouted over one another, all of them raising their voices loud enough that Judge Ceparullo finally smacked his gavel and said, "Order."

When everyone fell silent, Ceparullo looked at Joel Roth and said, "Do you have any further questions for this witness?"

"No, your honor."

The judge looked at Alan Davidson, "Do you have any redirect?"

"No, your honor," Davidson said, glaring at the flustered-looking witness. "But I would like him to wait outside for me until I have a moment to speak with him."

"I am sure you would," Ceparullo said. He dismissed the witness and the jury, then waited until they filed past him and out of the room before he loosened his tie and took a deep breath. He looked at Alan Davidson, "Your next witness is an expert on blood spatter, correct?"

"Yes, your honor."

Judge Ceparullo looked at Joel Roth, "And since your little gambit paid off, I'm assuming you are going to want to review all the cases this witness claims to have examined?"

Joel looked sideways at Jack Daniels and she muttered, "You can bet your sweet patootie."

The judge dismissed them early for the weekend. He made it a point of apologizing to the jury, but was equal in his blame of both the prosecutor for being lamentably overzealous and of the defense for not better qualifying its experts. All the jurors heard were that they were being let out early on a Friday. A few of them even smiled.

As Joel Roth followed Jack out to her car, he said, "I don't suppose you want to get together over the weekend and help me look through those cases, right? I about used up all my favors last night making everybody in the office stay late."

"I'd love to, Joel, but I can't. I have too much other work to do."

He tried not to look disappointed. "Did you ever hear from Herb Benedict?" he asked. "Nobody has seen him in the witness room. I checked. He's technically in violation of his subpoena."

Jack grabbed her keys out of her pocket and said, "I'll see you Monday morning, Joel. Get some rest. You look tired."

"I sleep better next to someone," he said quickly, before she could walk away. "Maybe you would too."

Jack looked back at him and shook her head, "You are persistent. I'll give you that much."

"When it's a worthy cause, yeah."

"I’m not a worthy cause, Joel. Trust me."

Whiskey?

No, too typical, she thought.

Rum, then?

She was out of Coke.

She walked into the wine section and started to browse. There were signs for French wine, South American wine, dessert wine, fruit wines, chilled white wines, saki, and Napa Valley specials. The aisle was crowded with couples who all stood gazing at individual bottles with their arms draped around one another, like they were envisioning the greatest of all evenings spent in front of a fireplace while snow lightly drifted down the mountainside.

Bastards, Jack thought. She went back to the whiskey.

The store was crowded, even for a Friday night, which meant the cops were going to be unusually busy. She wasn't on call because of the trial, and she had nowhere to be on Saturday. Passing out from being drunk is one way to fall asleep, she decided, and picked up a bottle of Jameson's. She got into the line and reached into her pocket for her cash, only to realize with sudden horror that she'd never turned her phone back on.

Jack immediately put the bottle on the counter and whipped out her phone, pressing in the power button so rapidly it came on and shut off twice before she finally forced herself to stop and wait for it to cycle. The clerk swept the bottle of Jameson's under his scanner and told her how much it was. Jack absent-mindedly handed him a twenty and didn't pay any attention to how much he gave her in change.

There were two voicemails.

"Jack, it's Phillips. The Crime Scene Unit called looking for you. I told them you were in court."

"Shit, oh shit," Jack muttered.

The next message was a woman's voice. "Lieutenant Daniels? This is Beth Armstrong from CSU. I analyzed your cellphone. We found something."

Jack ran all the way up to the front door of the Crime Scene Unit, stopping to catch her breath in the lobby before she knocked on the intake window. It was the same guy from the night before, wearing the same 'what now' expression. "I'm here to see Beth Armstrong," Jack huffed.

"I'll see if she's still in."

Several minutes later, the front door buzzed and Jack pulled the handle, letting herself in. A heavyset, short woman with spiky black hair came walking down the hall in a white overcoat. "Lieutenant Daniels?"

"Yes," Jack nodded. "You said you found something on the cellphone?"

Armstrong smiled strangely and said, "You can say that again."

"Well?" Jack said, losing her patience. "Well?"

Armstrong waved her hand for Jack to follow her and said, "Let me show you something."

Jack followed the woman into one of the lab rooms where there were a series of images displayed on a whiteboard with multiple hand-drawn notes and symbols scribbled around it. One of the images was a tall blue and red coil of DNA marked
Ophiophagus Hannah
.

Armstrong stopped in front of that picture and tapped it with a proud smile. "It took a bit of doing, but this is what I found on your cellphone."

Jack squinted at the twisting genetic strands and the name and said, "Is this supposed to mean something to me?"

Armstrong walked over to the desk and slid on a pair of rubber gloves before she picked up a glass microscope slide and held it up to the light. "This was on your phone. It was in powder form and cut with a few other substances, but this is the main ingredient, right here."

Jack leaned forward to see it and said, "What is it?"

"Don't get too close and don't touch it," Armstrong said. "Ophiophagus Hannah is toxic even in this small of a dose."

"Look, not for nothing, but can we skip the biology lecture. What is Oreo Hannah Montana, or whatever you call it?"

"King cobra. The most poisonous snake in the world. Specifically, this is the powdered form of the king cobra's venom."

Jack turned from the slide to look back at the diagram on the wall, thoughts turning in her head so quickly that she felt like the room was swaying. "The rat," Jack whispered. "When I found the phone a rat licked the surface and went into some sort of convulsion."

"I'm not surprised," Armstrong said. "For something that small, this amount would be almost instantly fatal. For larger animals, it has various effects."

"But…why the hell would powdered cobra venom be on Herb's phone?"

"Was he sick?" Armstrong said.

"Not that I know of? He's a big guy, so I'm sure he's not in the best of health. What does that have to do with anything?"

Armstrong shrugged and said, "Believe it or not, powdered cobra venom is a homeopathic drug used in many parts of the world. People use it to prevent kidney failure, treat addiction, all sorts of things."

"I thought the whole point of venom was that it killed you," Jack said.

"It normally has to be injected subcutaneously. That means under the skin."

"I know what that means," Jack said. "So a snake has to bite you for it to really take effect."

"Exactly. In powder form, it could be for a dozen different beneficial things. They think it might even kill cancer cells or act as a pain blocker."