The Kill Clause (29 page)

The prosecutor slid the immunity grant past the media by pointing out that Bowrick was the least culpable co-conspirator and that his participation had been the least egregious. He slid it past his division chief by making clear that Bowrick, a twig of a kid with a lame arm and a limp, could play to jury sympathy and that all the evidence to prove up the premed was circumstantial. By providing independent corroboration, Bowrick could shore up the case.

After Bowrick testified, the brothers were convicted and fast-tracked for capital punishment. Bowrick walked with a plea to a lesser charge—accessory after the fact—and was granted a deal for probation and a thousand hours of community service, no time served.

“So that’s what a school shooting buys you these days.”

Mitchell joined in Tim’s disgust. “About the same sentence you’d get for spray-painting graffiti on your neighbor’s shiny new Volvo.”

“Let’s bear in mind that he was only an aider and abetter,” Robert said. His eyes, glassy and loose-focused, betrayed the slightest identification with Bowrick, the outsider.

“Maybe he didn’t fire the weapon because he couldn’t hold it properly with an atrophied arm,” Tim said.

“And regardless, Robert,” Rayner said, “an aider and abetter is subject to the same sentence as those who actually perpetrate the crime.”

“Less the gun enhancements,” Robert said.

“No one needs the gun enhancements. It was a capital-punishment case.”

Robert tilted his head, a gesture of concession. “Right,” he said. “That’s right.”

“The case precedent is pretty clear on this one,” Ananberg said, “particularly for accomplices of this type. Aiders and abetters have gotten dinged on special circumstances for everything from lying-in-wait allegations to multiple-murder allegations.”

Bowrick’s booking photo sat faceup to Tim’s right, the border nudging his knuckles. Despite Bowrick’s attempt to approximate good posture, the flare of his dishwater-blond bangs barely notched the five-foot-eight line painted on the wall behind him. A jagged half-coin pendant dangled from a thin gold necklace. Sullenness pervaded his features. He didn’t have the confidence to give off surly; his was the pasty-white face of hope beaten down to unhappy submission. He was sullen like a kicked dog, like the kid picked last, like a deflowered girl after her lover’s too-hasty departure.

Ananberg backed them up, and Rayner led them through the case from the beginning. They started by scouring the evidence reports—admissible and inadmissible. Their evaluative capabilities had drastically improved as they’d grown more familiar with Ananberg’s procedure, leading to sharper focus, more incisive arguments, and a wider exploration of potentialities. The deliberations were all the more impressive given the divisiveness at the meeting’s outset.

When the final document had made its way around the table, Tim slid it into the binder and glanced up at the others. “Let’s vote.”

Guilty. Unanimous. Ananberg, who’d cast her vote last, crossed her hands on the table, her expression oddly content.

“There is one major complication,” Rayner said. “After he went state’s evidence, Bowrick went into hiding.” He spread his hands, Jesus calming the seas. “The good news is, he didn’t go into witness
protection. Not formally. But he was getting death threats, his property vandalized. After someone tried to burn down his apartment, he switched his name and moved away. Only his probation officer knows where he is.”

“I’ll find him,” Tim said quietly.

“If he’s still under the thumb of his PO, he’s still laying his head somewhere in L.A.,” Robert said.

Mitchell’s fingers strummed on the table. Stopped. He looked at Rayner. “Can you pry where he’s staying from the PO?”

“Too messy,” Tim said before Rayner could respond. “Too many trails leading back to us.”

“We know he’s logging community-service hours,” Robert said. “Why don’t we run a check on what programs are up where, give a glance?”

“I said I’ll find him,” Tim said. “Without stoking any fires. I’ll take care of it quietly. You all sit tight and keep silent.”

Rayner was standing at the safe, his back to the others. Before Tim could move to rise, Rayner turned and let another black binder drop on the table. Tim’s eyes went past him to the last black binder in the safe. Kindell’s.

He wondered if Ananberg had even attempted to get him the public defender’s notes from Kindell’s binder.

Rayner followed Tim’s gaze behind him to the open safe. He smiled curtly, reached back, and closed it. Tim continued to find Rayner’s petty power plays galling, despite their transparency.

“What do you say we tackle one more case now while our brains are warmed up?”

Tim checked his watch. 11:57.

“I got nowhere to go,” Robert said.

Ananberg’s laugh, sharp and short, rang off the wood-paneled walls. “I don’t think any of us has anywhere to go. Tim, do you have to get home?”

“I don’t have a home, remember?”

Robert’s mustache shifted and rose. “That’s right. None of us do, do we, Mitch?”

“No home, no family, no records. We’re ghosts.”

The Stork emitted a wheezy little laugh. “No taxes either.”

“Ghosts.” Mitchell grinned. “We are ghosts, aren’t we? We just come out of our graves now and then to take care of business.”

Tim nodded at the binder. “What’s the case?”

Rayner folded his hands atop the binder and gave a magician’s pause. “Rhythm Jones.”

“Ah,” Mitchell said. “Rhythm.”

It would be difficult to live in L.A. County and not have at least a passing awareness of the Rhythm Jones–Dollie Andrews case. An exrapper of modest acclaim, Jones was a small-time dealer with a propensity for turning out girls. His first name derived from the fact that he was always bouncing, as if to a private beat. According to street lore, his mother had named him in the crib. As an adult he threw off a sloppily endearing vibe, all fat smile and bopping head. Usually he wore a Dodgers jersey, hanging open to reveal the
RHYTHM
tattoo stenciled in Gothic across his chest.

For a few chance weekends in his twenties, he’d spun vinyl with the East Side DJ set, but he’d quickly found himself back in his hometown, South Central. Three years and two hundred pounds later, he was the go-to man for shitty rock and petite white girls who’d hook for a twenty or a spoonful of liquid nirvana. He was a notoriously vicious sex addict; his charges had been known to hobble into emergency rooms, towels crammed down both sides of their pants to stanch the bleeding.

He’d been indicted on two counts of possession for sale and one count of pimping and pandering, but due to a combination of dumb luck and cowed witnesses, he’d never been convicted.

Until Dollie Andrews.

Andrews was an off-the-bus Ohioan who’d taken the archetypal Hollywood header, from waitressing actress to back-alley blow-jobber. But she’d finally gotten her dream: After her body had been found smeared into Jones’s ratty couch, punctured with seventy-seven knife wounds, her modeling eight-by-tens had been released to a ravenous press, and her short-cropped towhead curls and the just-right width of her hips had etched her persona posthumously into the zeitgeist.

Jones had been found sleeping off a PCP high one room over; he claimed complete amnesia regarding the past two days. None of Andrews’s blood had been found on his body, his clothes, or under his nails, though a crime-scene technician had discovered traces in the pipes beneath the shower drain. The weapon, bearing a clean set of ten-point prints, had been recovered from a trash can outside. Motive? The prosecutor had argued sexual rejection. One of Andrews’s colleagues had captured her on camcorder wholesomely proclaiming she’d never give it up for black meat. In certain boxcars composing the train wreck of public opinion, this was known to pass for virtue.

To Jones’s immense disadvantage was the egregious ineptitude of his lawyer, an acne-faced kid just out of school whom the overburdened public defender had thrown to the wolves on the nothing-to-gain case.
Given the circumstances under which the body had been found, several witnesses who claimed Jones had been stalking Andrews for weeks, and the unanimous testimony of two medical examiners that the stabber had been a forceful, right-handed male around five feet ten, Jones had been convicted by a jury after less than twenty minutes of deliberation.

The verdict had brought out the Leonard Jeffrieses and the Jesse Jacksons, who had proclaimed that, as a non-professional-athlete black male accused of killing a white woman, Jones wasn’t being given a fair shake. The resultant political pressures had accelerated Jones’s Writ for Ineffective Assistance of Counsel, which was granted.

Verdict overturned.

Meanwhile, some jackass in long-term record storage had misfiled the evidence and exhibits, which left the prosecutor with no forensic reports, no photos of the body to flash at the jury during the second trial, nothing more than the testimony of four white cops.

Verdict, not guilty.

The case files were discovered the following Monday, mistakenly filed under “Rhythm.”

Jones slipped out of sight, lost somewhere in the faceless obscurity of L.A. slums, protected from the heat of further inquiry by the generous parasol of double jeopardy.

As Rayner finished reviewing the specifics of the case, Tim’s eyes were drawn to the picture of Ginny, propped on the table before him. He glanced again at the other photos in sight—Ananberg’s mother, Dumone’s wife, and the Stork’s mother, an imperious-looking, heavy-set woman with an expression of disgruntled impatience common to pugs and Eastern European immigrants. This was their purgatory, Tim realized, to oversee deliberations about L.A.’s most vile crimes and criminals, to play silent chorus to a seedy drama. This was how Tim had chosen to honor his daughter.

“…reasonable doubt,” Mitchell was saying. “It’s not
no doubt
. There’s never
no doubt.
”

But Ananberg held strong. “If someone were planning to frame him, it would be the perfect way. He’s a known drug abuser with countless enemies. Get him when he’s high as a kite, hack up a body in his living room, and voilà.”

“Sure,” Robert said. “Forensic stab patterns are a breeze to fake. Especially seventy-seven punctures.”

Rayner’s head snapped up from the court transcript. “Oh, come on. We all know facts can be tailored. The public defender failed to produce a single expert witness for the defense.”

Robert’s hands were both spread on the table, white from the pressure. “Maybe there wasn’t one who could represent the defense’s version of the facts in…in—”

“—good faith,” Mitchell said.

“Please,” Ananberg said. “Expert witnesses are like whores, but more expensive.”

Rayner’s head jerked a bit at the simile.

Tim watched Robert closely. Robert’s fuse, for obvious reasons, was considerably shortened by murderers of women. Tim reflected on the firmness of his own conviction about Bowrick’s guilt and realized he held the same defensive rage for killers of children. Anger guarding trauma, ever vigilant. And—for purposes of the Commission—ever polluting.

“The verdict was overturned only because the evidence was misfiled and could not be presented.” The Stork flipped through the forensic report with one hand, and with his other he rubbed his thumb across the pads of his fingers, swift and ticlike. “It’s fairly conclusive.”

“This case was thrown out the first time around due to incompetent counsel,” Ananberg said. “By definition that means no respectable defense was mounted. There could have been considerations available that were never explored. Plus, the evidence is hardly damning—they found no blood whatsoever on his person. Seventy-seven stab wounds and no trace of blood on him? He was wacked-out on angel dust—I doubt he had the clarity of mind to burn his clothing and exfoliate with a loofa.”

Mitchell spoke very slowly, as if monitoring himself. “We have a body in his living room, a weapon bearing his fingerprints, and traces of the victim’s blood in his shower drain.”

“It is remarkably compelling physical evidence,” Tim said.

Ananberg regarded him, surprised, as if he were breaking some heretofore unspoken alliance.

“What the fuck do you want?” Robert said. “Live footage of the murder? If that evidence hadn’t been lost, this guy would’ve already been fried.” His voice was rising, his face starting to color. “He was caught dick deep
at the crime scene,
which happened to be his house. You’re overthinking this one, Ananberg.”

“He’s a pretty street-smart guy. And it’s such a stupid crime scene….” Ananberg shook her head. “The evidence doesn’t seemdamning to me. It seems convenient.”

They moved through the formal procedure swiftly, as it was obvious there would not be a unanimous decision. The vote went four to two; Rayner sided with Ananberg against the others.

“For fuck’s sake,” Robert said. “You’re letting the prick off the hook because of a bunch of stupid liberal bullshit.”

“This has nothing to do with politics,” Tim said.

Robert threw up his hands, bouncing forward in his chair so its arms knocked the table. The framed picture of his sister fell facefirst to the marble with a clap; Rayner’s water slopped over the side of the glass. “The guy’s a fucking sleazebag.”

“Which, last I checked, is not a capital offense.” Ananberg placed her hands palms down on the table, a vision of resolution. “I’m just not convinced he did it.”

Robert ran a hand through his bristling red-blond hair, leaving a flared Mohawk path like a dog’s raised hackles. He cocked back in his chair. His voice, low and muttering, held a startling element of malice. “If he didn’t, a nig like that’s guilty of something else.”

Tim leaned forward, chair creaking, willing his voice not to betray the full measure of his rage. “Is that what you believe?”

Robert looked away, his jaw clenched.

“Of course not,” Mitchell said.

“I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to your brother.”

When Robert turned back, Tim noticed that his eyes were strikingly bloodshot, pink veins radiating out from his pupils, leaving wakes in the white-sea haze of his sclera. “I didn’t mean it. It’s just after this thing, with Debuffier…I mean, the guy fucking kept her in a
refrigerator
.” He grabbed the fallen frame in front of him and smashed it down against the table once, twice, three times. His face dissolved, and he raised a hand to his eyes. Broken glass was spread across the table. His hand, cut from the glass, left a bloody smudge above one eyebrow. Mitchell reached over and kneaded the thick muscles of Robert’s neck.