“Shut up, you big baby,” the older of the DUIs called over when the murder defendant complained about the filthy conditions of his holding cell. “Your dad sold me a lemon and I might just take it out on you.”
As Emily continued to work on what she knew was a thin case, she skipped out on the arraignment and the bail hearing the next day. While it was true she was busy, she also saw no need to see Cary McConnell argue on behalf of his client. It would be, she thought, like a barracuda cuddling up with a great white shark.
Camille Hazelton called her from the courthouse. Emily could hear the sound of the prosecutor’s heels as they smacked the marble floor.
“Interesting morning in court,” she said.
“I’m guessing that he’s already out.”
“You’d be guessing wrong then.”
“How much?” Emily expected the bail figure to be around $1 million. There weren’t many murder cases in the history of Cherrystone, but the few such cases in recent memory usually ended up with the suspect behind bars pending the outcome of their trials. Few had the means of a successful businessman like Mitch Crawford.
Camille presented her words like she was pulling a tablecloth from under a china tea set.
“I asked for—and got—five million.”
“You’re kidding. How did you manage that?”
“I really don’t know. I mean, I know I’m persuasive, but even I didn’t expect that. I threw the number out, stating all that was true—flight risk, private plane, more money than God. Cary objected, of course, but he didn’t challenge me on the flight-risk aspect, which was key. He told the judge that his client’s wealth shouldn’t hold him to a higher standard, but it was halfhearted.”
“I love it when Cary has an off day.”
“Yeah, there aren’t too many of them.”
“How long do you think it will take for Crawford to raise the money?”
“It’ll take some doing. We’ve seen his finances. Very few of his assets are liquid. I’m not sure he’ll put up the dealership—and I’m not sure if he can. Seems that his stepmother still owns a chunk of the place. And they haven’t spoken in ten years.”
Chapter Thirty-six
Garden Grove
The first time that Olivia Barton saw the news clipping in her husband’s wallet, she was doing laundry in the basement of their tidy house in Garden Grove, California. Olivia was an exceedingly organized woman who somehow managed to get all the laundry done, folded, and put away before her Saturday was shot. She hung sheets and towels outside because she and Michael liked the crispness that came with a line-dry. Darks were tumbled because no one liked a pair of jeans that stood on their own.
That morning Danny and Carla were watching the Cartoon Network with cups of Cheerios and apple juice drink boxes. From the downstairs, she could hear the TV and the relentless laugh track. It was the comforting soundtrack of her weekends.
Michael had left his wallet inside his jeans pocket and when she pulled it out, a small laminated newspaper clipping protruded. She’d never have opened his wallet to see what was inside. She’d learned from her own mother’s mistakes—“Never look into something that doesn’t concern you…you just might find something that does.”
It was silly advice, convoluted, like most of her mother’s, but she got the essence of it.
Don’t look for things that will break your heart.
That day she did just that, and her heart indeed shattered. It wasn’t because of a motel receipt or a canceled check for an expensive gift that he never gave to her. That she could deal with. That she could scream about.
Not this. She looked at the clipping and started to cry. The picture of a little boy and a toddler girl wearing Mickey Mouse ears and sitting in a police station shook her. The boy looked like her son, though she knew it wasn’t.
It was her husband.
Boy, Girl Abandoned at Disneyland
By Gwen Trexler, SEA BREEZE GAZETTE Reporter
Disneyland is supposed to be “The Happiest Place on Earth” but not for two children who were abandoned there Wednesday when a woman—presumed to be their mother—asked an amusement park attendee to watch her son and daughter while she searched for a phone.
“She said she had an emergency call to make,” Martina Montoya of Tustin said Thursday morning when contacted by the SEA BREEZE GAZETTE. “I waited for an hour. She never came back. I hope she’s okay.”
The park closed an hour later and Disney security searched for the missing woman. Her children, ages believed to be 10 and 2, are now in police custody.
Olivia wanted to cry, but with her own children around, she held it together. She couldn’t fathom why Michael’s mother had left her children. How could anyone do that to a child? Michael had told her only snippets about his past, including the fact that he’d had a sister that had been adopted by another family.
Later that afternoon, Michael, all sweaty from planting two small date palms and an enormous fan-shaped bird of paradise plant along the crisp white stucco wall that ran along the backside of the property, came inside.
Olivia’s expression told him something was wrong, though she hadn’t tried to show it.
“You OK?” he asked, pulling a gritty T-shirt over his head and tossing it into the now-empty laundry basket.
“I’m fine,” she said.
There were things they never talked about. Things about his past that just seemed to be silent between them. Olivia’s parents had known great hardship when they sneaked across the border at Nogales and made their way up to Washington State’s Yakima Valley, where they picked apples and sent as much of the money home to Mexico as they could. That meant no new clothes, no books, no “extras” of any kind. There were days when they had nothing to eat but blocks of government surplus cheese and pinto beans.
Olivia made light of those days.
“Try living in a two-room shack with five brothers who have eaten nothing but beans, and you’ll know what a nightmare really is,” she’d say in her canned answer to those who asked about her past. It was always said with a laugh. Yet there was hurt there, too.
She’d been the reason her family came across the border that night. Her mother had her a week later in a motel outside of El Paso. When she was well enough to travel, they swaddled her and took a bus up north. In the years since, her three oldest brothers became naturalized citizens and successful businessmen. The two youngest never bothered.
All of that was an open book. It had to be. She needed her own children to understand where she had come from in order to be more than she’d ever dared to dream.
But not her husband. Michael was closed off from his past and even the slightest nudge toward some information about it brought rebuke. Sometimes even anger.
“I saw the clipping in your wallet,” she said, her voice tentative. Her big eyes stayed fixed on him.
“That was a long time ago,” he said.
“I know. But you’ve never told me about it. About your mom. What happened?”
“I’m not going to start now, Olivia.”
He pulled off his jeans and took off his underwear, toe-kicking it into the basket. He was a pretty good shot and if she hadn’t been trying to uncover more of his life she might have said so just then. She might even have said something about his physique. The workout in the yard left his muscles bulging and he’d looked more like an underwear model, sans underwear, than he did a computer systems geek. He turned on the shower and stepped inside, keeping his distance from the icy spray while waiting for it to warm.