Stone Cold (29 page)

Judge West patted his horse again. “Here’s what I can do. You tell your lawyer to bitch like hell that Ortiz is holding out on her. Tell her to demand to see the files on whatever they’ve got on Gloria. I’ll order Ortiz to produce the records and I’ll give you and your lawyers a couple of hours to look them over.”

Alex grabbed his arm. “Thanks. That’s great. Really!”

He shook her hand off his arm. “You’re welcome, but remember one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“You said that we both want the same thing.”

“We do.”

“And that’s what?”

Alex swallowed hard. “Making sure guilty people go to jail for a long time.”

“Don’t forget that,” he said.

Chapter Fifty-One

ALEX TREMBLED AS SHE DROVE AWAY. Judge West had made it clear that their secret partnership didn’t include a pass if he decided she was guilty. That he agreed to help her meant that he hadn’t made up his mind, but his offer came with a warning to be careful what she asked for. If Gloria was telling the truth, he wouldn’t hesitate to turn on Alex.

The judge and her defense team had one thing in common. They had shifted the burden of proof to her to convince them of her innocence, and she knew why. It was the facts. Claire had chipped away at the prosecution’s case, but the core facts had gone unchallenged.

She had gone to Odyessy’s house carrying a concealed weapon and looking for Dwayne after he threatened to rape Bonnie. If she had only wanted to inform Dwayne that she was withdrawing from his case, all she had to do was leave him a message. Instead, she shot him without giving him a chance to defend himself. Bad facts make for guilty verdicts.

Lou Mason called her when she was near downtown.

“What’s up?” Alex asked.

“Our luck might have just changed. Claire went to Ortiz’s office to talk to Gloria. When Claire got there, she was gone.”

“What do you mean, she was gone?”

“I mean that she told Ortiz she had to use the john and she never came back.”

Alex’s heart kicked into high gear, banging against her chest. “Christ! Didn’t Ortiz send someone with her to the bathroom?”

“Yes, a female rookie cop, and Gloria decked her. Ortiz knows that if the cops can’t find Gloria by morning, he’ll have to rest his case without her testimony.”

“Yeah, but if they can find her, he can call her as a rebuttal witness after we rest.”

“Not if we don’t put on any evidence. He rests, we rest, and then we go straight to the jury.”

Alex’s hands were shaking so badly she pulled into a parking lot. “Did Ortiz give Claire any more details about Gloria’s testimony?”

“No. He says it’s a moot point until they find her. That’s bullshit, but it won’t matter if everything breaks right for us in the morning.”

“My God, the whole thing is unbelievable.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It’s still a long way till morning, but I like our chances a whole lot better right now than I did a little while ago. I’ll keep you posted if anything else happens.”

Alex wished she agreed with Lou, but her gut wouldn’t let her. The police would blanket the east side looking for Gloria, and Hank Rossi would kick in every door to find her. When they did, she’d be back to square one except that Ortiz would have one more thing to hold over Gloria’s head and one more card to play with the jury, now that her reluctance to testify would make her more persuasive, just as it had with Jameer Henderson.

Sitting in the deserted parking lot mulling a series of possibilities, each one worse than the last, she got angry at being so helpless to do anything. Hoping that Rossi wouldn’t find Gloria only made her feel even more helpless, if that was possible. Desperate to do something, anything, she opened the one file from Gloria’s phone she had yet to review.

The file held photographs. Gloria was in a number of them. Alex recognized her from the photograph Mason had taken. There were pictures of a dog, pictures of people whom Alex assumed were Gloria’s friends and family, pictures of Gloria she took holding the camera in front of her, and pictures taken at a bar, people crowded together, raising beer bottles in a salute. There was nothing in the pictures of Gloria that jumped out at Alex. She was, to all appearances, an ordinary person, laughing and smiling in some of the photographs, caught in candid moments of surprise or reflection in others.

Scrolling through the pictures, she almost skipped over another photograph of Gloria. Alex had seen enough images of her that one more wasn’t worth studying, but the background in this photo caught her attention.

Gloria was standing in front of the door to a house. Something about the door looked familiar to Alex. She enlarged the image, her breath catching in her throat when she saw a horseshoe tacked to the wall above the frame. She’d seen a door with a horseshoe above it twice before. The first time was when she examined the crime scene photographs in the Wilfred Donaire case. He’d been murdered in his backyard. The horseshoe was mounted above the back door to his house. She saw it again when she and Grace Canfield visited the scene, Grace pointing out the horseshoe, saying how little luck it had brought Wilfred.

Alex looked at the photograph again. Gloria was wearing light tan ankle-high boots and was dressed in jeans and a heavy jacket zipped up to her neck. Using her fingers to enlarge and move the image, Alex saw that the grass around Gloria’s feet was a dull winter brown except in a few places that were streaked with something dark.

Zeroing in on the streaks, she saw what could be irregular palm prints, as if someone had wiped their hands on the ground. Keeping the image as enlarged as possible, she traced a trail of dark spots from Gloria’s boots to her jeans and onto her jacket. The streaks and the spots could have been anything, including water and mud, but she’d seen enough crime scene photographs to know that they could also be blood.

Alex leaned back against her car seat, closing her eyes and shaking her head. Wilfred Donaire had been murdered the year before in the dead of winter, and Gloria Temple had been there when he died.

Wilfred had done well enough in the drug business to buy his house, though not well enough to maintain it. It was boarded up after his murder and added to the city’s extensive inventory of abandoned houses on the east side. If Gloria needed to find a hiding place in a hurry, she could do a lot worse.

Rossi had worked the Donaire case long enough to recognize the horseshoe if he saw the photograph. That would be enough to send him to Donaire’s house. She could either hope that wouldn’t happen or make certain she got there first. If she did and if Gloria told her the truth, she’d have one more decision to make—what to do about Gloria. Her phone rang. It was Bonnie. As much as she wanted to hear her voice, she knew it was the wrong time to answer.

Chapter Fifty-Two

PARKED IN FRONT OF WILFRED DONAIRE’S HOUSE, Alex knew she was working without a plan and without a net. But Gloria Temple was the money and Alex couldn’t let Rossi and Ortiz cash her in without knowing what it would cost her.

It was a cold night, the moon bathing Donaire’s house with pale light. Two other abandoned houses flanked Donaire’s.

She rummaged for the flashlight she kept in her glove compartment before getting out of her car and shining it on the house. The last coat of paint had faded long ago to a ghostly gray. The roof sagged and the eaves hung low, worn and weary. The front of the house, its doors and windows sealed with plywood, was half-hidden from the street by overgrown shrubs and weeds, still brown from winter, their limbs and stalks twisted and braided into a thicket fence.

Alex made her way to the front porch. A wooded bench with broken legs and rotted slats lay turned on its side among crushed beer cans, empty whiskey bottles, and a scattering of used condoms and syringes. She tugged at the plywood on the windows and doors, but the boards were tight enough to keep people and light out. If Gloria was there, she’d found another way inside.

Circling around to the back, Alex stumbled into an unseen hole on the side of the house deep enough to catch her shoe and send her sprawling onto the rock-hard ground, her flashlight smacking against a bowling-ball chunk of stone, shattering the lens and the bulb. Her face slammed into the earth when she couldn’t get her hands out in front fast enough to break her fall. Dazed, she pushed herself to her knees and took inventory. Her chin stung, her lips throbbed, and warm, sticky blood was oozing from her nose.

She leaned her head back and pinched her nostrils together until the bleeding stopped, the cartilage wobbling, probably broken. After getting to her feet, she felt her front teeth, relieved that they were still firmly in place, and pulled her shirt to her face, wiping the blood off as best she could in the dark.

She picked her way to the back of the house, finding the door barricaded with plywood, the horseshoe still mounted overhead. To her left, she saw a two-foot-square piece of plywood leaning, but not nailed, against the house. Pulling it away, she saw a window into the basement, the glass broken out of the center, ragged shards sticking out around the frame.

Alex lay on the ground, peering through the window, seeing and hearing nothing. She had no idea if anyone was inside the house. She might find Gloria or she might find a coked up rapist or someone even worse. She clenched her eyes, trying to banish the nightmare images from her mind, thinking again about the people she’d represented, how so many had confused stupidity for bravery and how fear had driven them to do things they never could have imagined. And now she was truly one of them, unable to separate courage from foolishness, terrified to climb through the window and unwilling to turn back. She knocked the remaining glass out of the way and slid feet first into the basement, one shoe landing on a rat that shrieked and disappeared in the darkness.

The basement reeked of piss and shit mixed with musty mold. She would have covered her mouth except she needed both hands to feel her way. Trembling, one hand on the wall, the other stretched out in front of her, she felt her way around the basement perimeter until she found the stairs. Her heart pounding, she grasped the rail. Stopping on each step, she listened before climbing the next. Still she heard no footfalls, no scraping chairs, and no doors opening and closing.

When she reached the top of the stairs, her mouth was dry, her throat was tight and her palms were sweating. She didn’t move for a moment, taking steadying breaths and wiping her hands on her thighs.

Straightening her back and squaring her shoulders, she grasped the door handle both scared and relieved that it turned so easily. The hinges creaked as she began to ease the door open. She stopped again, waited, and listened to the silence before pressing her hand against the door, opening it the rest of the way, and stepping onto the first floor.

The room she was in was even darker than the basement, if that was possible. It was if she were inside a tomb, the sensation disorienting until a flicker of flame split the darkness and cold steel pressed against her wounded lips.

“That’s a gun up in yo’ face,” a woman said. “Now, who the fuck are you?”

Stunned, Alex’s head started to spin. She reached out to both sides, her hands grabbing air, her knees buckling.

“Oh, shit,” she said as she corkscrewed to the floor.

Chapter Fifty-Three

THE FLAME CAME FROM A LIGHTER that cast more shadow than light. The woman holding it crouched in front of Alex, pressing the barrel of her gun against Alex’s cheek. Sitting cross-legged, arms wrapped around her middle, Alex didn’t answer.

“I ain’t gonna ax you again. Who the fuck’re you?”

The room stopped spinning and Alex took a breath, then let it out and blinked, focusing on the now familiar face in front of her.

“I’m Alex Stone.”

Gloria scooted back, pulling the gun away but keeping it pointed at Alex. She rocked back on her heels, keeping the lighter on and thinking.

“Shit, girl, what happened to your face?”

“I fell. You’re Gloria Temple, aren’t you?”

“How you know my name?”

Alex dropped her hands in her lap, glancing around the room. The flame gave enough light to reveal something crawling across a couch, either a large rat or a small cat. Trash littered the floor. The sewer smell was stronger than in the basement, no doubt coming from an overflowing and backed-up toilet. There was a wall to her left, a foot away. She reached out her hand, bracing herself, and slowly stood. Gloria rose with her, keeping her gun trained on Alex.

“Put the gun down and I’ll tell you.”

Gloria shook her head. “Only way I’m puttin’ my gun down is if I decide not to kill you, and I ain’t decided. I know who you are. You was Dwayne’s lawyer.”

“Yes, I was. We need to talk, and I don’t like doing that while you’re pointing a gun at me.”

“Fuck you! You killed Dwayne.”

Alex nodded. “I didn’t mean to.”

“Bullshit, bitch!”

“It’s not bullshit.”

“I was there. I saw what you did.”

Alex didn’t want to go there, not yet. She wanted Gloria to be the one on the defensive. “And I know what you did. The question is whether the police know.”

“What the fuck’s that s’posed to mean?”

“It means that you were with Dwayne when he killed Wilfred Donaire.”

“How you know that?”

Alex expected a denial, not a confession. “I didn’t know it for sure, at least not until you just admitted it. You’ve got a picture on your phone of you standing in Wilfred’s backyard. You’re all bundled up because it was a cold day just like the day Dwayne killed Wilfred. A woman gave a gold necklace to Dwayne that belonged to Wilfred. That was you.”

“How you know what’s on my phone?”

“Doesn’t matter as long as I do. But here’s something I don’t get. Why did Kyrie Chapman make Jameer Henderson testify against Dwayne?”

“That fool thought if he could get Dwayne sent to jail, he’d have me to himself.”

“But you weren’t interested.”

“And I never was gonna be interested, but Kyrie, he never give up.”