Beg for Mercy (50 page)

Then all bets were off.

Benson paused and stayed Krista with a hand on her arm. “I know the last few months have been hard on you, and I know it’s hard to drive forward after a mistake like that.”

“
mistake
? Mark, what happened to Sean Flynn was a catastrophe. And we were the engineers.”

Mark’s mouth flattened into a thin line. “We did the best we could with the evidence we were given. No prosecutor would have acted any differently.”

Krista couldn’t shrug it off so easily. “We didn’t have to go for the death penalty.”

Mark rubbed his thumb over the crease between his brows. “Mistakes were made. It’s going to happen. You have to get over it.”

Krista swallowed hard. Get over it? How could she get over it when all she saw when she closed her eyes was Sean Flynn’s haunted gaze across the table in that prison visitation room? They’d put that look in his eyes, sentencing him to death row, where he’d spent two years alone in his cell, an existence so miserable Sean had chosen to waive all appeals and let himself be killed rather than fight.

“You’ve lost that fire, that passion that got you to where you are, and where I know you want to go,” Benson said.

Oh, the fire was back, all right, but it had nothing to do with climbing the ladder or advancing her career.

“This is a big deal,” Benson continued, “being part of the Karev case, and I put you on it because I know you’re the best. This is your chance—our chance—to put the whole Sean Flynn disaster behind us and get this office’s reputation back on track.”

“And I appreciate that,” Krista said, knowing that was the only acceptable response. But there was a knot of dread that had settled in her belly shortly after Cole Williams had asked her to reexamine Sean Flynn’s case so many months ago. It had expanded in size every day as she became more convinced that while she’d spent her years in this office committed to justice, the people around her had much more selfish motivations.

She hated to believe that Mark, her mentor, who had hired her straight out of law school, cared about nothing but bolstering the reputation of “the office” and positioning himself for the next election. But with rumors swirling that he had his sights on the governor’s office, it was getting harder to ignore the feeling that this man she’d looked up to as a second father was not nearly as noble as she’d believed.

Krista wasn’t naïve. She knew a guy like Benson didn’t make it to where he was without playing politics. But lately the bitter taste had gotten stronger in her mouth, the compromises Benson made harder and harder to swallow, his ability to shrug off what happened to Sean and move on incomprehensible.

• • •

Six hours later, Krista’s gut was still churning as she entered the coffee shop where she was supposed to meet Jimmy Caparulo.

She ordered a latte and forced herself to stop brooding over today’s failure and instead focus on how she was going to salvage the case.

Jimmy was late, so she pulled out the case files to review while she waited. Her irritation escalated as eight turned into eight-thirty, then eight forty-five. Finally nine o’clock passed and still no sign of Jimmy Caparulo.

Two phone calls at the number he’d given her dumped straight into voice mail, and her texts went unanswered.

She swore under her breath as she looked up Jimmy’s address from the report Stew had given her. Jimmy was not the most stable person in the world, with documented PTSD and a history of alcohol and drug abuse. Most likely he went on a bender and either forgot about their meeting or passed out before he could meet her.

Which also made whatever information he provided less than reliable, she reminded herself as she walked the short distance to the house where Jimmy lived with his mother.

Still, it was a start, and maybe if it wasn’t all bona fide, he’d give her something—

Her inner monologue stopped short as she registered the flashing blue and yellow lights in the driveway halfway down the block. She bit back a curse when she saw it was Jimmy’s house.

As she got closer, she could hear the voices popping over the radios and the murmurs of the small crowd gathered on the small front lawn.

A woman was sobbing incoherently against the
shoulder of another woman. “It was awful, so awful. Thank God Angie wasn’t here to see it.”

Krista recognized one of the uniforms controlling the perimeter. “Roberts! What happened in there?”

Roberts looked at her in confusion. “What are you doing here?”

“I was supposed to meet with Jimmy Caparulo about an hour ago,” Krista admitted. So much for keeping their meeting secret until she’d built up her case, but with her number popping up all over his cell phone in the last hour, there was no way to keep a lid on it. “When he didn’t show, I decided to come by.”

Roberts let out a mirthless laugh. “Guess he was too busy blowing his brains out to keep your date.”

Krista’s stomach bottomed out at the news. “He killed himself?”

“They’re not gonna call it right now, but from where I’m standing, there isn’t much question he ate the business end of his Glock.”

She swallowed back a surge of bile. “Who found him?”

“Neighbor,” Roberts said, inclining his head in the direction of the sobbing woman. “She found him about fifteen minutes ago and called it in.”

“How’d she get in the house?”

“She has a key. She was a friend of Jimmy’s aunt, and since she died a couple weeks ago, neighbors have been taking turns bringing him dinner. Came over to deliver a plate of enchiladas and got one hell of a surprise.”

“Neighbors didn’t hear anything?” The houses on Caparulo’s street were close together. “Seems like someone would have heard a gunshot.”

“It’s an older neighborhood,” Roberts said, and as
Krista took a closer look at the crowd milling on the lawn, she saw a lot of white hair and hunched backs. “The lady next door says she might have heard it, but at the time she thought it was the TV.”

“She say what time?”

“About seven-thirty.”

Krista pulled her wool coat tighter around herself. All that time she had been waiting for Jimmy at the coffee shop, and he was already dead.

And he just happened to kill himself on the day he was supposed to meet me.

A shiver that had nothing to do with the damp spring night slithered down her spine. “Okay if I go inside?”

Roberts frowned. “The ME’s still in there, and they haven’t even moved him yet—”

Krista cut him off with a wave of her hand. “I’ve seen worse.”

Yet Krista could see a thousand bloody crime scenes and nothing could ever prepare her for the smell. She was brutally reminded of that the second she stepped into the small, one-story house. She flashed her ID at a uniform and didn’t bother to ask where Jimmy was.

It was all too easy to follow the odor of violent death. Sickly sweet, metallic blood and excrement mixed with an indescribable stink, like she could smell the body already rotting though he’d been dead for less than two hours.

She followed the smell and sounds of activity down a short hallway, past a bathroom on the left and through the second door on the right. Like a homing beacon, her gaze skipped right to the headboard of the double bed and the wall above. A wall that was painted white but now
displayed a splatter of blood punctuated with the occasional pieces of gray brain.

Despite the cavalier attitude she’d shown Roberts, Krista’s knees went a little wobbly and her vision started to tunnel. She leaned carefully against the doorjamb and took a deep, quiet breath as she kept an iron-clawed grip on her composure. She’d worked for the prosecuting attorney’s office for seven years, dealt with some of the bloodiest crime scenes imaginable, and had never shown even a hint of weakness. She wasn’t about to start now.

She forced herself to look at the scene analytically. She knew the crime scene guys would do a thorough investigation, but she wanted to take her own look around and see if there was anything going on here that would indicate it was anything other than a gory suicide scene.

Jimmy was flopped back on the bed, his booted feet resting on the floor, knees bent over the edge of the mattress. His right hand was flung out to the side, and there was a chalk mark on the bed to indicate where the gun had fallen.

Flashbulbs popped as the techs took pictures of the scene, and she recognized Medina from the coroner’s office leaning over Jimmy’s body. She greeted him and immediately regretted it when he straightened up, giving her a good look at Jimmy’s face—what was left of it anyway. Her stomach lurchnd she pinned her stare to a blank spot on the wall until she was sure she wasn’t going to hurl up the coffee she’d drank.

“This guy wasn’t screwing around,” Medina said as he snapped off his gloves and dropped them into a biowaste container. “We’ll need ballistics to confirm it, but judging from the way it took off half of his skullcap, Mr. Caparulo used a hollow point, which expanded on impact.”

“Roberts said the Glock was registered to him.”

Medina nodded. “I guess so—that’s for these guys to figure out.” He gestured at the crime scene techs.

“You’re sure he did it himself?”

Medina frowned like the question confused him. “I need to do a full postmortem, and the forensics will have to confirm it, but he has powder residue on his hands.”

A cold breeze wafted through the room, providing momentary relief from the suffocating stench. The shade flapped against the window frame. “The window’s open.” Krista lifted the shade and saw the screen was still in place. She turned to one of the techs, an Asian woman wearing wire-frame glasses who dusting Jimmy’s desk for fingerprints. “Was it like that when you got here?”

“I’m not sure. You’ll have to ask whoever was first on the scene.”

Krista started to ask who that was when her gaze snagged on a silver-framed photo on Jimmy’s desk. She recognized Jimmy Caparulo, dressed in army fatigues. He looked younger, smiling into the camera with his arms slung over the shoulders of the two other men in the photo. Her breath caught as she recognized the other two.

Flanking Jimmy on the left, looking like a fallen angel with his dark hair and piercing eyes, was the man whose face had haunted her, waking and sleeping, from the day she’d watched him walk out of the courtroom a free man.

But the man in the picture wasn’t the Sean Flynn she knew. Gone were the deep, grim lines in his cheeks, the tight mouth, the eyes dark with anger.

In the picture was a Sean Krista had never seen. Eyes sparking with humor, mouth wide open and laughing, his teeth bright white in contrast to his sunbaked skin.
So happy and gorgeous it was hard to believe she’d ever believed him a murderer.

And on Jimmy’s right, Nate Brewster, the epitome of an American hero, his blond-hair, blue-eyed perfection hiding the well of evil at the root of his soul. Evil that had ruined the lives of the men who had considered him a friend.

Now Jimmy was dead, just as he had been about to tell her secrets that Brewster had killed to keep.

Despite Medina’s assessment, Krista knew in her gut it was no coincidence. “Make sure you check the window outside for signs of forced entry,” she said to the tech dusting for fingerprints, who looked confused by the order but nodded in agreement.

Who else could be hurt by the information Jimmy had? What were they missing?

Before she could ponder the question further, her phone rang. When she recognized Stew’s number, she ducked out of the bedroom and into the bathroom across the hall, closing the door before she picked up.

“Jimmy Caparulo’s dead,” she said.

“I know,” Stew said. “They’re speculating he killed himself after the trauma of being framed for the Slasher murders.”

“Conveniently on the same night he was going to meet me,” Krista said. “I don’t care how the ruling ends up. I don’t think this was a suicide.”

“I’ll look into it. But that’s not why I called you. I think I found something.”

“Yeah?”

“I’ve been tracking Brewster’s financials, and I think I’ve found something. Something big.”