“Pretty good. I’ve graduated from sore to itchy.”
Rossi looked around the office. “I think this suits you.”
“You think?”
“Yeah. Someone like you will live a lot longer behind a desk.”
Alex chuckled. “Bonnie would agree, especially since she wants us to have a baby.”
“No kidding.”
Alex was surprised that she told Rossi, given their history, but she was getting a different vibe from him, like maybe he was ready for a cease-fire.
“Yeah. We’re going to do the whole turkey-baster thing as soon as we find a donor.”
“Speaking of kids, how’s Charlotte doing?”
“Child Protective Services was going to put her in foster care until Bonnie convinced them that the three of us could take care of her for now.”
“The three of you?”
“Bonnie, Gladys, and me.”
“That crazy old lady? You sure that’s a good idea?”
“No, but it’s working out so far. Gladys is the only person left that Charlotte has any kind of relationship with. The county sent a social worker to our house to observe them and said they’ve got a bond that she doesn’t want to screw up. So they’re both staying with us. Plus, Charlotte loves Quincy and it turns out that having a pet can help an autistic child develop some social skills.”
“What about Judge Steele? You going to find out if he’s Charlotte’s father?”
“He says he’ll agree to DNA testing, but we’ll see. He’s got his hands full right now. You heard he resigned from the bench so he could help with his wife’s defense?”
Rossi nodded. “Which is interesting since she set him up as her second option to take the fall for Robin’s murder.”
“Second option?”
“Robin’s ex, Ted Norris, was her first choice. She knew Ted kept a spare key hidden in the wheel well of his car. That’s how she stole it and used it to run Robin off the road. She left the car at the airport, and when she got out of the car, she was carrying her husband’s duffel bag, the one you saw in his chambers. She made sure it would be picked up on the airport security cameras. If we gave up on Ted, the duffel was going to be the first bread crumb leading us to the judge.”
“So why would he want to help with her defense?”
“Because he says he loves her and doesn’t believe she’d do that to him or that she’s guilty of anything except justifiable jealousy.” Rossi reached for the envelope. “Listen, there’s something I need to show you.”
He opened the envelope, removing a photograph encased in a plastic sleeve showing her kneeling over Dwayne Reed’s body. Alex gasped, her stomach grinding. She stared at the photograph, unable to speak or look at Rossi, her hands clenched in her lap.
“It came in the mail last Friday, addressed to me, no note, no explanation, just the photograph.”
Alex forced herself to look at him. “I. . I. . I can explain.”
“You don’t have to. It’s a fake.”
Alex blinked, slumping against the back of her chair. “How do you know that?”
“I gotta admit, when I first saw it, I thought I was gonna bust the buttons on my jeans. But you know what they say about things that are too good to be true. I had one of our forensic photographers check it out, and he said it had been Photoshopped. He pulled the photographs from Dwayne Reed’s file and showed me how it was done.”
“Wow.”
“Wow is right. So naturally I was curious about who sent the photograph to me and why, so I had it and the envelope it came in checked for prints.”
Alex swallowed. “And I take it you found some.”
“Big fat ones, one on the envelope and one on the picture. They were so clear and distinct, it was like somebody went out of their way to make sure we’d find them.”
“Could you identify them?”
Rossi nodded. “Yep. Ran them through the system and got a match.”
Alex was afraid to ask but knew Rossi wanted her to. “Whose are they?”
Rossi leaned back in his chair. “Millie West. Turns out she was arrested for disorderly conduct a few years ago and that’s how her prints got in the system.”
Alex’s chin dropped, her mouth hanging open. “What?”
“Nuts, right? So Friday night, I go see her. She and the judge are out at their horse farm, and man, that horseshit is nasty stuff. But I guess you know that from helping that friend of yours clean out their stables.”
Alex straightened, her relief ebbing away. “Go on.”
“So, like I was saying, I go out there to talk to Millie, and right away the judge is on my case, what’s this all about, and I tell him I need to talk to his wife and he says what for and I say that’s between her and me and he says if I think he’s going to let her talk to me alone, I’m out of my mind, so the three of us sit down at the dining room table and I put the photograph on the table. Don’t say a word. Just put it out there.”
Rossi’s eyes were dancing, a grin creeping out of the corners of his mouth. Alex didn’t know how to read him.
“What happened?”
“He about shit a brick and she started laughing, I mean cackling like a witch with a new broomstick on Halloween, and wouldn’t stop. He finally had to take her into another a room and give her a pill to calm her down. Then he comes back and tells me that she made the picture and sent it to me. I asked him why she’d do something like that and he said she’s bipolar and doesn’t always take her meds and when she doesn’t she goes kind of crazy.”
“Maybe that explains the disorderly conduct thing.”
“It does. But it doesn’t explain why she’d jack around with this photograph or how she even got ahold of the file photographs in the first place.”
“How did Judge West explain that?”
“He said there were copies of the pictures in the court file. He had the file at the ranch during the trial and that’s when she must have done it. I told him that explains the how but not the why, and you won’t believe what he said.”
“Try me.”
“He said that being bipolar and not taking her meds makes his wife paranoid and she became convinced that you and the judge were having an affair and that this was her way of getting even with both of you. She made sure her prints would be found so that he’d know what she’d done.”
Alex shook her head. “I’m stunned.”
“I know. It’s crazy. But here’s the really crazy part. How’d Millie know to put you in that picture in just the right way to prove that you murdered Dwayne Reed? I mean, if she wanted to embarrass you and the judge, why not doctor up some naked pictures of the two of you?”
Alex took a deep breath, letting it out. “I don’t know. I guess you’d have to ask her.”
“Kind of hard now that she blew her brains out. Besides, I don’t think she could tell me how your fingerprints also ended up on the photograph.”
There it was. Rossi wasn’t going to leave her alone. No matter that she’d helped him solve three murders. No matter that she and Bonnie had nearly been killed. No matter anything. Weariness swept over her. She couldn’t do this anymore. She couldn’t keep running from Dwayne Reed while she slept and from Rossi while she was awake.
“Go ahead. Ask me.”
“Did you shoot Dwayne Reed in self-defense?”
Alex flattened her hands on her desk and looked him in the eye. “No. I shot him and put his gun in his hand and pulled the trigger to make it look like he fired first.”
“What was going on between you and Judge West?”
Alex took another deep breath. “West had been shading cases in favor of the prosecution for years but doing it in ways that would stand up on appeal. He saw how upset I was after I got Dwayne acquitted and he murdered that family and he recruited me to throw my really awful clients under the bus without doing a bad enough job to give them grounds to appeal based on ineffective assistance of counsel. That night I ran into you at the Zoo, I’d been at his horse farm. I told him I was out, that I wasn’t going to do it anymore. He handed me that photograph in an envelope just like you did. That’s how my prints got on it. He told me he’d ruin me if I backed out. Then he told me Jared Bell would be my next case and that he’d use the photograph if I didn’t make sure Jared was convicted. I still don’t know how he knew about Jared.”