Murder in the Courthouse (35 page)

“I can't believe it either. The evidence was overwhelming. The Loves have to be crushed, and all because of one nut job. Wait . . . shh. Here come the Adamses.”

Hailey nodded her head back over his shoulder and held the door open as the Adamses slowly made their way through it, the mom dabbing at her eyes with Kleenex. Hailey and Finch waited to let them pass through the doors and out into the hall. They all made their way into the hallway as the crowd just outside the courtroom doors was thinning.

“You know where they're headed . . . home to try and raise a million dollars cash. Hey, let's go get tea or coffee, OK?” Hailey said. The thought of going back to her empty hotel room after a blow like this was too much.

“Coffee? Are you kidding? I need a drink after this!”

“OK. You get a drink. I've got a tea bag with me. I'm gonna duck into the ladies room. You get the car and I'll meet you in front of the courthouse?”

“Sure. Then I'll take you to get your rental car and you'll follow?”

“OK.” Hailey pushed the door open to the ladies room.

“And be careful when you come out the front door. I'm sure Mike Walker and
Snoop
are there to ambush you for a sound bite!”

“I'll be ready.” Hailey smiled. She was trying her best to hide her shock at the verdict. True, it wasn't a not guilty, but no matter how you sliced it, a hung jury was a huge setback for the state . . . and for Julie and Lily. Much less Dana and Malcolm Love.

She pulled out her cell phone to call home and tell her folks about the mistrial, but suddenly she spotted a lady's feet next to a silver canister on wheels under one of the two stall doors. She clicked off. She didn't want to say what she really thought about the Todd Adams mistrial with his mom in the very next stall beside her.

Hailey went into the remaining stall, balancing all her gear, and heard Tish Adams open the metal door beside her and roll the tank to the sink. The tiny, tiled bathroom was quiet now. The hall outside it was empty.

The night was dark outside the bathroom's one tiny window. It was late, the trial was done, the courthouse closed, and all the court watchers who had, for weeks on end, packed the Todd Adams courtroom were all gone home and back to their lives. The show was over.

Hailey heard the metallic twist of the water faucet over the white ceramic sinks and the sound of water in the sink. Opening the door, Hailey saw Tish Adams looking into the mirror over the sinks. Her face was pale and white in the mirror, her lips the only color on her face. Lipstick in one hand, Tish reached to turn the faucet off with the other and, juggling, her purse slid down her shoulder onto the tile. Its contents—Kleenex, powder, pill bottles, checkbook, and a sprinkling of other items—poured onto the tile. Tish started to lean down to put it all back in when Hailey interjected.

“No, let me, Mrs. Adams.”

“Thank you, Hailey,” she said it in somewhat of a stiff voice, which Hailey totally understood, given Hailey had been on the state's witness list in her son's murder prosecution. Hailey got it. Nevertheless, she knelt down to help the woman who seemed literally at the end of her rope after the trial.

Hailey picked up the items one by one, placing them back into the purse. The powder compact had come open and the powder puff had gotten loose. Putting it back in, Hailey saw the compact's mirror was cracked.

“Careful, your mirror's cracked.” Still on her knees, Hailey looked up at Tish Adams.

Then she saw it. Hailey's green eyes were directly even with Tish Adams's oxygen tank. And it was there. The knob on the top, the twist mechanism on top of the canister . . . she'd seen it before. Not the many, many times she'd watched Tish Adams leaning heavily on it in court or walking around the courthouse with it . . . she'd seen it somewhere else.

Black plastic, about the size of a Gatorade screw top but not quite, with a peculiar edge to it. An image flashed in her mind. An image of the floorboard in the back of her rental car, scattered with
trash from the otherwise immaculate yard of Alton Turner. The round rubber cap wasn't a bottle cap. It fit on Tish's tank.

A chill went across Hailey's arms. Tish Adams's open purse in her lap, Hailey looked down into it again, and there, peeking out from under a red leather ladies wallet beside a thin folded yellow scarf, was the pale green and gold edging of a tall pack of Virginia Slims. Hailey looked from the cigarettes to the oxygen tank's hard plastic valve cap, to the coppery-red lipstick on Tish Adams's lips and stood up, looking Adams unflinchingly in the eyes.

“You.” Hailey uttered the one word, taking a step back from Adams, whose eyes were no longer tired-looking or teary. They were burning with a light . . . a zeal Hailey had never seen before in what appeared to be a frail and suffering middle-aged woman. A mother, for Pete's sake.

Somehow, Tish Adams was standing up straight now and at full height, no longer stooped over and shuffling, leaning on a portable oxygen tank. She was a good two inches taller than Hailey.

“I
what
, Hailey Dean?” Adams spit the words out, her eyes on Hailey, her lips hardening at the edges.

“You. The cigarette butts . . . the lipstick stains. You were in Alton Turner's yard, spying on him. Behind the trees, at the birdhouse. It was you . . . you all along. You killed Alton Turner . . . and . . .”

It hit Hailey like a brick. In a flash, Hailey saw what she couldn't see before. It all played out in her mind's eye. Alton taking a blow from behind after someone concealed in the yard, watching, waiting for the right moment, enters the garage. As Alton, unsuspecting, balancing his coffee for the commute to work, reaches for his car handle, the blow comes to the back of the head and he's down. Strength isn't required to swing a bat or a golf club.

Once he was down, the rest was easy. It was just a matter of dragging him a few feet to the garage door, slicing his gut open, and—with that rubber safety edging removed—grinding the metal into his torso to look like an accident until he bled . . . to death. It all looked like a stupid accident.

“And make no mistake, missy. I saw you that day. I knew you were on to me . . . you picked up the flowerpot and saw the key was gone . . . you knew it was me, didn't you?” The venom in her voice was pure evil. Her eyes looked totally possessed with hate.

Tish Adams stepped away from the sink and positioned herself between Hailey and the door to the hall. She yanked the thin plastic tubing off her face and threw it, skidding across the floor. Her memory sparked, Hailey recalled the moment she'd checked the flowerpot at Alton's back door just on a hunch . . . a hunch she'd thought was wrong when no key was hidden. But the hunch was right.

“But how would I have ever known . . .”

“Liar!” Adams's voice was now a guttural hiss coming from deep in her throat, her face contorted. “You saw me . . . in the window. Don't lie about it now. You've been gathering evidence . . . to destroy me just like you tried to destroy my son . . . to kill him . . . to burn him to death in the electric chair. You, Hailey Dean . . . you're the one that should die . . . not him! Not my son!”

Hailey instinctively backed away from her as if she were a rattlesnake about to strike. Her back pressed against the metal beam between the two bathroom stalls. She looked quickly around the tiny bathroom but there was nowhere to go.

“Turner had to die. He threatened Toddy . . . our family. We'd be ostracized, kicked out,
laughed at
if Todd was convicted. We'd be
nothing
in this town. I couldn't let that happen.”

Hailey stared, unmoving. She could feel sweat pooling, trickling down the front of her chest into her bra.

“I knew he was eavesdropping that day, hanging around, snooping, listening to Todd and I talk. Todd made a mistake . . . a mistake . . . Julie's death was an accident! She must have hit her head when they argued . . . Todd said so . . . and Alton Turner heard him . . . but it was her fault . . . she trapped him! With that horrible baby in her belly!
My Toddy's no murderer!
”

“But you heard it . . . there were marks on Julie's neck . . . she was strangled . . . ligature . . . someone strangled her . . . the autopsy . . .”
Hailey tried to reason with the woman that it was no accident, even though she realized Tish Adams was clearly insane.

“That was a setup! They set him up! It's not true! Turner heard what Toddy told me that day in lockup . . . he was listening! But I followed Turner . . . all through the courthouse halls straight to the DA's office. Oh yes, he couldn't
wait
to blurt out what he had heard.
And what was he? He was a nobody; he was nothing compared to Toddy. Don't you see he had to die?
Just like the courthouse whore. He told her, too, bragging to her sitting in his car in the parking deck that afternoon. I saw them. He thought she was his girlfriend, but she'd been with every man in the courthouse including a judge. Right under his wife's nose. Believe me, I know . . . I watched her.”

“But that doesn't mean Alton told Elle . . .”

“He told her the whole thing! The little whore emailed him about his meeting with the DA! I saw it with my own eyes at Turner's house . . . their disgusting emails back and forth about Toddy. She even made a crack that Turner could sell Toddy's ‘confession' to that gossip rag
Snoop
! That Toddy confessed to me he did it! Oh it was no joke . . . I knew better! I knew she wanted headlines and money! Her picture on the cover! But all she got was a cemetery plot! Nobody will miss her . . . they're all glad she's dead and out of their hair. You think the judge isn't glad she's gone? Or his wife? They're thrilled. Trust me.”

Tish Adams's eyes looked like they'd popped right out of her head and had taken on a glazed-over quality. Her hair fell in dark tendrils around her face. Her lower jaw thrust out as her teeth clenched, giving her a piranha's underbite. She focused on Hailey with a malevolent intensity that hung in the tiny room.

“Then I saw you with
Snoop
on the courthouse steps and I put two and two together
—you were in on the whole thing
. All because of Alton Turner eavesdropping. And that little courthouse tramp Elle Odom. She died all right, like the pig she was . . . on the floor of a cafeteria with her tongue swollen up and her face turned purple. She can rot in hell for what she tried to do to Toddy!”

Hailey couldn't help but glance at the trash can, now full of refuse from the day. Tish followed her eyes.

“Smart girl, aren't you, Hailey Dean? Yes, I hid it. The purse with the EpiPen. Right there in the trash. And the fools nearly let it go to the dump. It was easy enough to find out about the nut allergy. Anybody could read the girl's babbling about herself online. Just go to the cafeteria, dump a little almond milk in the milk pitchers, and voila! Nobody even glanced twice at the coffee bar. Then she goes into shock and dies in minutes. One of the happiest moments in my life was when she choked dead on her own tongue.”

Tish Adams's voice was shrill now, her eyes wide and crazy. “And then there was that idiot . . . that moron . . . Snodgrass. They all sat side by side at work gossiping . . . about my Toddy! I saw it myself on Turner's home computer where he emailed Snodgrass he'd be late for work the next morning because
he had a meeting with the DA
. . . that Turner would
‘fill him in on the whole thing
' when he got there. But he never made it. And don't think there's an email trail. I watch TV; I deleted them all.” She was actually bragging now.

“That sniveling dunce . . . sticking his nose in Toddy's business. Snodgrass was on to the purse, sending that email asking who found it. But I took care of him too . . . it was easy. A fake ‘prize' to Gator World, a syringe full of GHB . . . you know what that is, right, Hailey Dean? Gamma hydroxybutyrate. Odorless, colorless, induces sudden sleep? Ring a bell?”

“But . . . how did you . . .”

“I was almost a nurse, Hailey. If I hadn't gotten pregnant, who knows, I may have gone to med school. But that was ruined for me, wasn't it?
Wasn't it?
You think I can't get my hands on a syringe and some meds? Think again.”

“The day you fainted on the witness stand . . .” All the pieces were fitting together now.

“Yes! Smart girl. For once, anyway. And you all fell for it, even Alverson. I had to get to Snodgrass by dark. It was the only way. I knew in my gut he was in on it. They were all going to frame my boy. I wouldn't let that happen.”

Tish Adams reached down to her purse with ease, showing no sign of the physical ailments she'd been milking in the courtroom. They'd all bought into her act . . . the judge, the jury, even Hailey. Adams reached to the bottom of her purse and from within the yellow scarf, she pulled out a .22.

With sudden clarity, Hailey knew without a doubt Tish Adams was not insane; she was a cold-blooded killer. Nothing and nobody would ruin her life, her social position, her prop of a family.

“Wondering how I got this through the metal detector? Because of the oxygen tank . . . stashed underneath between the wheels! They never even looked under there. The stupid idiot sheriffs felt sorry for me.”

A numbness crept across Hailey's face. Enclosed here in the tiny bathroom with her back against a wall, there was nowhere to go.

“In fact, now that I think about it . . . you're all stupid. Nobody will ever miss Turner
or
the whore. And certainly not that moron Snodgrass. Or you, Hailey. Nobody's going to miss you. You think I can let you go now? Think again.”

Tish Adams, finger on the trigger, raised the gun to Hailey's face. “Last words? Want to say bye-bye to mommy and daddy? I'm afraid I can't let you do that.”

Quick as a snake when it strikes to kill, in one defining moment, Hailey dove hard and down to miss the roaring bullet and grabbed the only thing she could. The tank.