Stone Cold (22 page)

He banged his gavel and everyone rose as he left the courtroom. Alex grabbed Claire’s sleeve.

“That was great, but you made it pretty hard for me not to testify.”

“We knew that going in,” Mason said. “She had to give them another version. We can’t count on discrediting Odyessy Shelburne.”

“And the jury,” Kate said, “was paying attention. They didn’t take their eyes off of Claire.”

“So we’re in good shape?” Alex asked.

Claire raised her eyebrows. “Not until we know what Ortiz is so excited about that he refused to make a deal. If it’s as good as he’s letting me think it is, your testimony will make as much difference as a politician’s promise.”

Chapter Thirty-Eight

DETECTIVE HANK ROSSI SAT in his unmarked sedan up the street from the entrance to Chouteau Courts, sipping a cup of cold convenience store coffee while Patrick Ortiz and Claire Mason made their opening statements. It was his day off, and since the chief hadn’t lifted the ban on overtime, he was there on his own dime.

Dwayne Reed’s death hadn’t ended the investigation into either the Chapman or Henderson murder. Gloria Temple had been Rossi’s best lead since he found the aluminum bat in her bedroom closet in Virginia Sprague’s house. Forensics had confirmed that the bat had been used to shatter the skulls of the Henderson kids and rape Mary Henderson. There were multiple fingerprints on the bat, none clear enough for certain identification.

The bat was one of several tantalizing and frustrating pieces of evidence. The bullet extracted from Jameer Henderson’s head hadn’t matched the gun recovered from Dwayne Reed’s body. The fragment of burned fabric Lena Kirk had plucked from Odyessy Shelburne’s fireplace had contained Mary Henderson’s DNA but no one else’s. The fabric came from a sweatshirt of the same type worn by Dwayne Reed, but they hadn’t been able to prove that it came from one he owned.

None of that meant that Dwayne Reed hadn’t killed the Hendersons, but all of it couldn’t prove that he had. Finding the bat in Gloria Temple’s closet had to mean that there was a connection between her and the killer. Maybe he’d given the bat to Gloria after the murders. Maybe he’d stashed it in Gloria’s closet without her knowing about it.

Rossi, Gardiner Harris, and the gang squad had blanketed the east side, showing pictures of Dwayne and Gloria to anyone—kids hanging on street corners, gangbangers, and civilians. No one admitted seeing them together. And no one had seen Gloria since the weekend Kyrie Chapman and the Hendersons died, at least no one willing to talk to the police.

The most conclusive evidence they’d found was in the Kyrie Chapman case, not the Henderson case. Ballistic tests had confirmed that the gun Dwayne Reed was holding when Rossi burst into the living room was the same gun used to kill Chapman. Had Alex Stone not killed Dwayne, that would have been enough evidence for a conviction.

Rossi had made no further progress on either case in the months since the murders. Other crimes had been committed that would have pushed the Henderson murders deep into the stack of unsolved cases had it not been for Patrick Ortiz, who had been calling Rossi a couple of times a week for updates.

He’d worked with Ortiz on a lot of cases when Ortiz was the prosecutor, each of them doing their job, neither sending the other a Christmas card. Ortiz didn’t like Rossi’s freewheeling style and Rossi didn’t like that Ortiz had let him twist in the wind before clearing him on a couple of excessive force complaints. But the job was the job.

“What’s the Henderson case got to do with Alex Stone killing Dwayne Reed?” Rossi asked the first time Ortiz called him. “That’s pretty straight up. She shot him and you’ve got an eyewitness who makes it premeditated.”

“I’ve got an eyewitness who’s a crackhead and a prostitute who also happens to be the victim’s mother. I need more.”

“I get that,” Rossi said, “but how is closing out the Henderson case going to do that for you?”

“I don’t know—not yet anyway. Alex Stone defended Dwayne Reed and that got Reed killed. So I’m interested in anything having to do with the two of them, including everything that happened in the Donaire trial. Keep me posted if you find anything new. Day or night,” Ortiz said, giving Rossi his office, home, and cell numbers.

Rossi hadn’t needed Ortiz’s numbers until two weeks ago. He was lying in bed with Lena Kirk, who had finally accepted his offer to have dinner and the other offers it came with. They were talking about the Henderson case, and Rossi kept coming back to finding the aluminum bat in Gloria Temple’s closet.

“Did you search the rest of the house?” Lena asked him.

“You know we did. We gathered up every article of Gloria’s clothing and had them tested, but there was nothing to tie her to either the Chapman or Henderson murder scenes.”

“Hmmm.”

“Hmmm, what?”

Lena propped herself up on one elbow. “You remember that day Dwayne caught his leg on the fence and you had me pull those fabric fragments from the fireplace?”

“For all the good it did.”

“Well, maybe the day wasn’t a total bust.”

“Meaning what?”

“I went over the house, inside and out, in case there was anything else that might help with the murder investigations.”

“And found a whole lot of nothing,” Rossi said, sitting up.

“Only because we didn’t know what we were looking for.”

“A connection between Gloria and Dwayne.”

“Exactly. There were a bunch of footprints in the mud around the back door of the house. Some of them were clean enough for a molding. One of them was a woman’s shoe, but it didn’t match the shoes Odyessy was wearing. Did you find any of Gloria’s shoes when you searched Virginia’s house?”

“Yeah, three or four.”

They looked at each other, grinning, and jumped out of bed. An hour later they were in the lab. Lena compared the moldings to a pair of Gloria’s shoes.

“It’s a match,” she said, “right down to the dried mud on Gloria’s shoe.”

Rossi called Patrick Ortiz, waking him.

“It’s the middle of the night, Rossi,” Ortiz said. “This better be good.”

“We can place Gloria Temple at Odyessy Shelburne’s house,” Rossi said, explaining about the shoes and the molding. “The Hendersons were killed during the night. She had to have been at Odyessy’s house sometime between when they were murdered and when I went there to question Dwayne and he tried to run away.”

Ortiz thought for a moment. “Thank you, Detective. That’s a start. Call me back when you find Gloria Temple.”

Rossi had kept looking for Gloria Temple, but not because of Ortiz. She was the only one who could fill in the blanks on the Henderson case—if she was still alive. An entire family was in the ground way ahead of God’s schedule, and Rossi couldn’t leave that alone. He was convinced that Dwayne Reed had murdered them, but that wasn’t enough to close the case. He needed proof.

After Lena did her magic with Gloria’s shoe, he’d gone back over all the interviews, all the leads, and all the tips from CIs that hadn’t been worth the money the department had paid for them. He went back to the CIs, pushing for anything new. The effort had paid off Sunday night when one of the CIs said he’d seen Gloria the night before outside a crack house. He found Ortiz’s numbers.

“We’ve got a line on Gloria Temple,” he said, telling Ortiz the rest.

“How reliable is the CI?”

“What can I tell you? He’s a CI, but he peddles a lot less bullshit than most of them. And, he treats this shit like a business, not like a strung-out junkie looking to get high. He knows if he gives me bad information it’s bad for his business.”

“So what now?”

“This feels right. Gardiner Harris will watch the crack house and I’ll sit on Virginia Sprague’s apartment. Gloria shows up, we’ll bring her in.”

“Why not just knock on Sprague’s door?”

It was a lawyer’s question. A cop wouldn’t ask it. “Because if she’s not there, Virginia will tell her we’re looking for her and Gloria will vanish again. And if she is there, chances are Virginia will lie to us and we’ll end up in the same place. Better to watch and wait.”

Three days had passed and they had yet to catch up to Gloria. Rossi took another sip of his coffee when his phone rang.

“We just finished opening statements and the judge adjourned for the day,” Ortiz said. “Have you found her?”

“Nope.”

“That’s not very helpful.”

“Wasn’t meant to be.”

“What are you doing?”

“What I told you I was going to do. Watch the apartment at Choteau Courts.”

“That’s the best idea you’ve got?”

“When I get a better one, I’ll let you know.”

“I’m counting on that. We’ll be to the jury by Friday, Monday at the latest. After that, it’ll be too late to do me any good. I already punted on a plea bargain because I thought you’d find her by now. Don’t make me sorry I did.”

Rossi didn’t like Ortiz busting his balls while he was busting his hump on his day off. “You’re so worried, make the deal and I’ll go home.”

“Screw you, Rossi. Find the girl.”

Rossi closed his phone and pressed his back against the seat, letting out a sigh. He drained the last of his coffee, sitting up when he saw two people coming out of Choteau Courts. One of them was a middle-aged black woman who looked vaguely familiar, though from a distance, he couldn’t place her. The other was Wilson Bluestone, Jr., an ex-cop everyone but Rossi called Blues. Rossi called him a pain in the ass.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

WHEN BLUES WAS A COP, people lumped him and Rossi together. They were big men, each pushing six-five and 250, unafraid and quick with their fists and their guns. People stopped making the comparison when Blues resigned rather than face an Internal Affairs probe on a shooting that was far from righteous.

Since then, Blues had tended bar, played piano, and done unlicensed, freelance PI work, proving more than one cop to have been sloppy, stupid, or bent. Rossi didn’t like outsiders, especially Blues, showing up his brothers even if they deserved it. Blues returned the love, never passing up a chance to stick his finger in Rossi’s eye.

Rossi knew that Blues was Lou Mason’s running mate and that Mason’s aunt was Alex Stone’s lawyer. He doubted that Blues lived at Choteau Courts, and the odds were against him being there to visit a friend. But Blues could have gone there to find Gloria Temple.

Rossi hadn’t seen Blues go into the apartment complex, but there was more than one entrance and he couldn’t watch them all. Blues and the woman walked down the street away from Rossi, stopping to shake hands before the woman got into her car and drove away before he had a chance to take down her license tag. Blues continued down the street and around the corner, out of Rossi’s view.

Rossi put his car in gear and eased down the block until he could see Blues’s car around the corner. He had to decide whether to stay where he was or stick with Blues. Staking out Virginia’s apartment had gotten him nowhere, but Blues gave him another option. He waited until Blues pulled out, giving him a decent lead before following him.

Blues drove to his bar, Blues on Broadway, parking in a back alley and disappearing through the rear entrance. Rossi circled back to Broadway, parked, and went in through the front door. Blues wasn’t there.

It was late afternoon and business was slow, one man in a booth nursing a beer and nibbling at a hamburger, a bartender watching a television hung from the ceiling. From the street, Rossi had seen lights on in a room above the bar, but he didn’t see a stairway to the second floor.

He left and walked around to the rear alley and tried the back door Blues had used. It was unlocked. He stepped inside and found himself in a narrow hallway, the entrance to the kitchen on his right, a steep staircase to his left. The kitchen was empty, so he started up the stairs.

A hallway divided the second floor, two rooms on each side and another at the end. The door was open to the first room on his right. It was an office, papers scattered across a desk, a computer screen on a credenza behind it. An electric keyboard lying on the floor told him this was probably Blues’s office, but he wasn’t there.

The other doors were closed and unmarked except for the door at the end of the hall, which was open a couple of inches. The nameplate mounted on the wall next to the doorframe read
Lou Mason
. Lights were on inside the office, and he heard voices coming from the other side of the door. Rossi soft-stepped his way to the door, listening.

“Detective Rossi, are you going to stand out there eavesdropping or come in?” Lou Mason said.

Red faced and hating it, Rossi pushed the door open. Mason was sitting behind his desk, Blues on a sofa crowded with files stuffed in banker’s boxes and rumpled sweatpants and sweatshirts and a rugby ball. A rowing machine was pushed up against the wall opposite the sofa. A closed wooden cabinet was mounted above it. He didn’t see the overnight bag Blues had been carrying.

“Took you long enough,” Blues said.

Rossi shrugged. “Just being careful. When did you make me?”

“The night you were conceived.”

Rossi let it pass. He was there for information, not to pick a fight. “What were you doing at Choteau Courts?”

“My business, not yours,” Blues said.

They stared at each other, faces hardening, until Mason intervened.

“What can we do for you, Detective?”

“I’m looking for Gloria Temple.”

Mason spread his arms wide. “Well, as you can see, she isn’t here.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“Why are you looking for her?”

“She’s a material witness.”

“In what case?” Mason asked.

“The murders of Jameer Henderson and his family.”

“Sorry, I can’t help you,” Mason said. “That’s not my case.”

“You don’t have any cases, not since you were disbarred.”

Mason smiled. “True enough. Not a case that I’m interested in. How’s that?”

“She’s also a witness in Alex Stone’s case,” Rossi said.

“And that’s a case I am interested in. But she’s on the prosecution’s witness list, not ours. Why don’t you ask Patrick Ortiz where she is?”