By the time he got home, Tim’s shirt was spotted through with sweat. He entered the house and slung his jacket over one of the kitchen chairs. Dray was sitting on his couch, watching the news. She turned, regarded him, and said, “Oh, no.”
Tim walked over and sat beside her. Not surprisingly, the chirpy KCOM news anchor, Melissa Yueh, had taken up the shooting. A graphic of a gun appeared in the upper right corner of the screen, in front of a shadowy outline of two hands high-fiving. Tim’s own personal logo. Beneath it stretched SLAUGHTER AT THE MARTIA DOMEZ HOTEL in block letters.
“Did it go as bad as you look?” Dray asked.
“They want to let drop I’ve enrolled in an anger-management course, then desk-jockey me till the storm blows over. It lets them cover their asses without admitting to liability or guilt.”
Dray reached over and laid a hand on his cheek. It felt warm and immensely comforting. “Screw them.”
“I resigned.”
“Of course. I’m glad.”
An attractive African-American reporter came on-screen, soliciting the takes of passersby on the shooting. An obese man with a skimpy goatee and a backward Dodgers cap-the archetypal Man on the Street for the market and time slot-offered his opinion gladly. “The way I see it, a guy’s running from the cops like that, he deserves to get shot. Drug dealers, cop killers, man, I say we execute ’em before the judge’s gavel drops. That U.S. Marshal guy, I hope he gets away with it.”
Great, Tim thought.
Next a woman with vivid green eyeliner added, “Our children are safer with drug dealers like that out of the picture. I don’t care how the police get them off the streets, as long as they’re gone.”
“Look at those people,” Tim said. “No idea what issues are in play.” The bitterness in his voice surprised him.
Dray looked over at him. “At least you have a few allies.”
“Allies like that are more dangerous than enemies.”
“They may not be the most well spoken bunch, but they seem to have a grasp of justice.”
“And no grasp of the law.”
She shifted on the couch, arms weaving together across her chest. “You think the law adds up to justice, but it doesn’t. There are cracks and fissures, loopholes and spin. There’s PR, perception, personal favors, and cluster fucks. Look at what just happened to you. Was that justice? Hell no. That was a big, self-cleaning machine clanking forward, squashing you beneath it. Look at how the investigation went into Ginny’s death. We’ll never know what really happened, who was involved.”
“So you’re mad at me because…?”
“Because my daughter got killed-”
“Our daughter.”
“-and you were in a position-a unique position-to see justice served. And instead, you served the law.”
“Justice will be served. Tomorrow.”
“What if he’s not executed?”
“Then he’ll rot in prison the rest of his life.”
Dray’s face was flushed, frighteningly intense. She ground a fist into an open hand. “I want him dead.”
“And I want him to talk. To cough out what really happened when he’s on the stand. So we can know if there’s someone else out there, someone else responsible for our daughter’s death.”
“If you had just shot him, instead of asking him, then we’d never have been burdened with this mystery. This unknown. It’s awful. It’s awful not knowing and thinking someone out there, someone who we could know or could see on the street and not ever guess…”
Her face creased, and Tim moved over to embrace her, but she pushed him away. She rose to head back to the bedroom but paused in the doorway. Her voice was cracked and husky. “I’m sorry about your job.”
He nodded.
“And I know it was more than a job.”
•The early-morning rain had vanished, leaving behind a moist, stifling heat that permeated the courthouse. Tim’s head throbbed with exhaustion and stress. He’d spent the night fidgeting on the couch in a kind of unsleep, sweating off his frustration about the shooting review board and obsessing about the upcoming hearing. He pictured the little girl in the Camry, her arms pale and thin. Ginny’s face at the morgue when he’d drawn back the sheet. The wisp of hair trapped in the corner of her mouth. Her fingernail they’d found at the crime scene, loosed in some desperate act of clawing or crawling.
His own mind had become hostile, a treacherous terrain. There was less and less of it he could inhabit peacefully.
Dray sat beside him, rigidly forward, her arms crossed on the bench back in front of them. They’d arrived early and sat in the last row, awash in an unspoken dread. When Kindell had been led in by a young sheriff’s deputy and the shoddily dressed public defender, he’d looked neither as menacing nor repugnant as Tim had remembered. This disappointed him. Like most Americans, he preferred to see evil embodied unequivocally.
The DA, a sharp, well-put-together woman in her early thirties, had sat with Tim and Dray for a few moments before the preliminary hearing had begun, offering further condolences and assurances. No, she wasn’t making a case for an accomplice, since that could open up the door to a reduced sentence for Kindell. Yes, she was going to nail Kindell’s ass to the wall.
Despite her prudish name-Constance Delaney-she was a tiger of a prosecutor, with a stellar track record. She opened strong, fending off the defense’s motion to reduce the high bail set at arraignment. She artfully examined Deputy Fowler, working to establish probable cause to bind the case over to trial, while trotting out as little of her case strategy as possible. Fowler spoke clearly, without sounding coached. He left out Tim and Bear’s presence at Kindell’s dwelling without committing anything to the record that could be contradicted. CSU’s delayed arrival to the crime scene did not arise.
Kindell sat erect, attentively watching all the proceedings, his head swinging back and forth from Delaney to Fowler.
It wasn’t until the cross that things came unwound.
“And of course you had a warrant to search Mr. Kindell’s property…?” The public defender shuffled closer to the witness stand, the sheaf of yellow legal-pad pages swaying in his hand. Delaney propped her chin on her fist, jotting notes.
“No. We knocked and introduced ourselves, asked him if we could take a look around. He clearly gave oral consent for us to search the area.”
“I see. And that’s when you discovered”-a few moments as the PD shuffled through the sheets of paper-“the hacksaw, the rags stained with what was later identified to be the victim’s blood, and the truck tires with tread that matched that at the scene of the crime?”
“Yes.”
“You discovered all of these things after he gave you consent to search the property?”
“Yes.”
“With no search warrant?”
“As I said-”
“Just yes or no, please, Deputy Fowler.”
“Yes.”
“At which point you began arrest procedures?”
“Yes.”
“You’re entirely certain, Deputy Fowler, that you Mirandized Mr. Kindell?”
“One hundred percent.”
“Was this before or after you cuffed Mr. Kindell?”
“I suppose during.”
“You suppose?” The public defender dropped a few of the sheets and crouched to pick them up. Tim was beginning to suspect that his bumbling-lawyer routine was just that.
“I read him his Miranda rights as I was cuffing him.”
“So he wasn’t facing you?”
“Not through all of it. He was turned around. We generally handcuff suspects from behind.”
“Uh-huh.” The PD’s pencil poked at his upper lip. “Are you aware, Deputy Fowler, that my client is legally deaf?”
Delaney’s hand slipped from her face, slapping the table and breaking the perfect silence of the superior court. Judge Everston, a small, pucker-faced woman in her late sixties, bristled in her black robes as if she’d been shocked. Dray’s hand pressed over her mouth so hard her nails left red imprints in her cheek.
Fowler stiffened. “No. He’s not. He understood everything we said to him.”