CUTTING ROOM -THE- (41 page)

‘You do know that Mr Varlack has filed a speedy demand?' the judge replied. ‘And that we've already lost considerable time due to the hurricane?'

‘My office has been swamped trying to get back up to speed after Artemis. It's been very difficult.'

‘Quite frankly, Mr Collier, that is not the defendant's problem. He's here. He's ready to proceed. Obviously, Ms DeBianchi is not doing hurricane relief work in Orlando. Perhaps she got lost at Disney World?'

‘Just so the court knows,' announced Joe Varlack haughtily, ‘Ms Simmons will not be attending the hearing today due to an unexpected illness. But
I
am still prepared and ready to go forward. Even if the plane loses an engine, it should still be able to fly.'

The courtroom doors swung open and George Schaible, the Chief of the SAO's Legal Unit walked in, accompanied by Daria's secretary. Gretchen looked real nervous. She stood at his side as he motioned for Vance to come over.

Manny had just walked in the courtroom himself, late as usual but only by about fifteen minutes, and dressed in the navy suit he and Daria had picked out on a rainy Sunday afternoon. He was surprised that the party was not in full swing. That Daria was not glaring at him with those fiery peepers of hers while she smiled in relief that he'd finally showed up. He figured he would mess with her head this morning. They still hadn't talked since she had drunk-dialed him. But now he watched as the frowning Chief of Legal shook his head at whatever Collier was saying and Daria's secretary kept shrugging. Daria was nowhere to be found. A horrible feeling was building in his stomach.

He had started out the morning being both angry and anxious to see her again. Over the past couple of days he'd thought about the other night far too often and had come to the conclusion that she was either fucking with his head or she really did love him and she couldn't swallow that big fat Italian pride of hers to call and tell him it when she was sober. That made him even more mad. And really anxious. So he wasn't sure what he was gonna do after the hearing — scream at her or pull her into a hallway and kiss her. But the anger was gone. Now he was just scared. He made his way up to the threesome in the gallery, as Vance turned back to address the judge.

‘Your Honor, we definitely have a problem and I am going to need a continuance till at least tomorrow,' Vance said.

‘This is absolutely ridiculous …' Varlack grumbled loudly.

‘Where is Ms DeBianchi?' the judge demanded.

‘That's what we're trying to find out, Your Honor,' answered Collier.

‘Is she hurt?'

‘We don't know, Your Honor. We don't know where she is. She was supposed to speak at a law enforcement conference in Orlando on Tuesday, but I have just learned that she did not. No one knows where she is at this moment.'

Manny felt like he had been shot in the gut. He had the urge to run and do something, but he couldn't move. He was frozen in place.

‘I would imagine that if she was in a car accident someone would have notified your office,' continued the judge skeptically.

‘I'm not sure what we're dealing with yet, Your Honor.'

Judge Becker sighed. ‘I don't mean to sound uncaring, but your office needs to get its act together. You have till two p.m. this afternoon, Mr Collier, to either find Ms DeBianchi, or handle this motion yourself. I'm not sure what stall tactics the state is trying, but I am out of patience, especially given Ms DeBianchi's previous disrespect of the court and defense counsel with that Brady violation.' She slapped the file closed on the bench and stood up.

‘Your Honor, that only gives me three hours,' protested Vance.

‘We're in recess till two,' replied the judge coldly.

Then she sailed off the bench.

‘She checked in. She did not check out. Her suitcase is still in the room. But her cell, her car and her purse are gone,' the Chief of Legal said somberly. ‘That's all we know right now.'

The four of them were standing in the hallway outside the courtroom: Gretchen, Vance, George and Manny. The door to the courtroom had been propped open slightly by Judge Becker's bailiff, who was transporting boxes to the clerk and didn't want it to lock automatically. Through the open sliver of doorway, Manny could see Lunders and his attorney joking and laughing with a couple of correction officers. Thank God the cameras had decided not to show up today. Even for blood-thirsty reporters, pre-trial motions were about as exciting as watching paint dry.

‘Have you checked the hospitals?' asked Vance.

‘We're on it now,' said George.

‘Why are you only finding out about this now?' demanded Manny. ‘What day did she check in? What hotel is it?'

Gretchen nibbled anxiously on a thumbnail. ‘The Bonnet Creek Hilton in Buena Vista. She went up on Sunday.'

‘That's three days ago. She was supposed to speak yesterday and never showed up? When was the last time anybody actually saw her?'

‘Don't know that, either,' replied George.

‘Didn't the damn maid figure out she hadn't slept in her bed for three damn nights?' asked Manny. His thoughts went to that voicemail she had left him Sunday.

I'm at this conference, see, and it's a hotel and I thought of the first time we were ever together …

She hadn't picked up when he'd finally called her back. And she hadn't texted him, either.

‘There was a Do Not Disturb sign on her door,' Gretchen responded. ‘The hotel just extended her room stay another night, since the SMART convention doesn't end till this afternoon, anyway. So no one actually checked the room until this morning, when we called. As for speakers not showing up, that happens. The organizers figured she'd gotten wrapped up in something, so they just covered her part with another speaker who was on the sexual predator panel.'

‘I'm putting out a BOLO for her and her tag,' Manny said, reaching for his cell. A BOLO was police jargon for “be on the lookout for”.‘I'll have Fort Lauderdale PD go out to her house in Victoria Park. Maybe she came home. Maybe something's happened with her family. I know her dad's been sick.'

‘Was there a reason she would disappear? I know she's been stressed out about this, but, damn she's leaving us high and dry here,' Vance said with a heavy sigh. He looked more pissed off than concerned, and that was pissing off Manny.

Manny said nothing. All he could think about was that last phone call, how upset she sounded. How depressed. Alcohol and a broken heart don't mix. Jesus … A thousand bad scenarios were running through his head: Maybe she went out for a drive and was drunk and drove into a canal. Maybe she purposely drove into a canal.
No. No. Don't think like that.
Maybe she just got cold feet about the conference and the case and life in general and headed north on the Turnpike to see where it took her. Manny had thought about doing that a few times himself. Just up and walk out on everything, the way Dominick and C.J. had. And according to Dom, C.J. had gone and done it again.

But Daria hadn't answered her phone in three days. She hadn't texted him since Sunday. Right before they'd become lovers, she'd told him she'd never missed a day of work. Not one damn day. At the time he'd thought that was plain nuts — one more alarm he should be hearing that his firecracker prosecutor was a little OCD when it came to work.

‘I'm putting a cell search out on her phone,' Manny added as he dialed his lieutenant. ‘And I'm calling Orlando PD. I don't want no one touching that room till we get a crime-scene unit in there.' Something was wrong. Really wrong. He just knew it.

‘Jesus Christ, Detective, let's not jump to conclusions now,' Vance protested. ‘Especially crazy ones. We've had ASAs disappear before and the sky has not fallen in on them. All that's happened is that they had a personal meltdown — some people can't help folding when they find themselves under pressure.'

‘You mean like getting ready to take the heat for your bullshit decision to cut Bill Bantling a deal? Yeah, then she was under a lot of pressure.'

Vance's eyes became slits. ‘I'm not going to get into a war with you, Detective. I'm not saying Daria ran away from the pressures she was under — which included, I'm sure, any personal damage she or her family might have suffered in the catastrophic hurricane that we all just went through. And any pressure she may have felt in trying a very important, very difficult, very circumstantial murder that has commanded the attention of the press. What I am saying is please hand all this investigating off to your lieutenant or someone else in your department or in Orlando or Fort Lauderdale, because you and I need to focus on the hearing that's going to be happening this afternoon.'

George looked around to make sure no one was listening. ‘I have to ask this, Vance: was she on drugs?'

‘No!' Manny erupted. ‘What the fuck?'

George ignored the outburst. ‘The question's going to be asked. Did she have a problem with drugs or alcohol?'

Vance sighed and shrugged, replying to the Chief of Legal as if Manny wasn't there. ‘I don't know, George. I didn't know her very well outside the office. I hear she liked to party with the young ASAs, but does that mean she had a substance abuse problem? I don't know her well enough to say.'

‘What are you two saying?' Manny slapped the wall behind him in frustration. ‘Jesus Christ! I can tell you that Daria did not have a substance problem. She didn't do drugs and …' He turned toward the door. ‘She didn't even smoke. I'm not gonna sit around and let you smear her. I won't. I know her better than anyone else standing here. And she didn't just disappear to do lines or stretch her wings or get away from all of this shit and all of us. There is something wrong.'

‘I agree,' Gretchen said quietly. ‘I never saw or heard of Daria doing drugs or stuff. I do know she was under a lot of pressure from this case, though.'

This case.

Manny suddenly remembered the conversation he'd had with Lunders. He looked through the door into the courtroom, where Talbot was laughing with his attorneys as his smiling mommy in a low-cut blouse looked on.

It's a real shame that cute little prosecutor of mine couldn't be here … Little Lena needs to tend to that garden.

He remembered Daria's frightened reaction when he'd delivered Lunders's cryptic message to her, when she'd told him of the roses that had been massacred in her backyard, her once-colorful garden reduced to a graveyard of stems and thorns. Manny had dismissed it at the time, but now …

He looked back at Vance and his crony from Legal. He motioned to the courtroom. ‘Where the hell has he been for the past three days?'

‘Lunders? House arrest,' answered Vance, turning himself to look in the courtroom. ‘You think he's involved?'

‘Maybe … yes, I definitely think it's a possibility.'

‘I'll check right now with Probation, but he's confined to his house on weekends and after-work hours, monitored twenty-four/seven with a GPS-equipped ankle bracelet that alerts his probation officer should he step one big toe off his family's compound. If that had happened, particularly on the eve of a court hearing, I would have had a phone call, and this morning I would've had a condition of release violation sitting on my desk, along with a request he be taken back into custody.' He reached for his cell and dialed. ‘This is Chief Assistant Vance Collier with the Miami-Dade State Attorneys' Office,' he began, as he walked off down the hall.

Manny, Gretchen and George looked at each other for a long moment. It was Daria's secretary who finally said what everyone was now thinking. ‘I hope she's okay, is all.'

Minutes later, Vance was back.

‘I'm headed up to Fort Lauderdale—' Manny began.

‘The hell you are. Didn't you hear Judge Becker?'

‘Yeah. And I also heard your lead prosecutor is missing.'

Vance shook his head. ‘As cold as this might sound, Detective, we have a hearing in three hours. A hearing that's happening whether we want it to or not. I'm not waiting for Daria to walk back in and save the day at one fifty-nine p.m. And I'm not going to lose this motion. If that happens, a murderer is going to go free, and I won't let that happen. So you and I need to get familiar with what it is you're going to testify to so we can at least get one scumbag back off the streets.'

Manny looked in the direction of the courtroom. ‘Where was he?'

‘He was home all night with his mother,' Vance replied quietly. ‘It's just the two of them — his father's overseas on a business trip. Your boy hasn't even been going into work. His probation officer did a fly-by on the house last night; he was home and everything looked okay. Said the most Talbot Lunders did was watch movies and surf the Internet.'

For the first time in a very long time, Chief Felony Assistant Vance Collier was sweating in a courtroom, even though the air conditioning was working just fine. The motion to suppress the search warrant of Abby Lunders's Mercedes was to have been handled by Daria. She'd never expressed a real concern with losing it. As a Division Chief, she'd handled her fair share of motions and knew the basic law when it came to challenging a warrant. But she was not here and, as Judge Becker had insisted, the show must go on. So Vance had done his best speed-read through Lunders's motion, Daria's response, the search warrant itself and Manny Alvarez's accompanying affidavit. And the first thing he'd noticed was the very fine, very particular, and very troubling problem that everyone had apparently missed, including defense counsel, because he hadn't raised it in his motion. For Vance, though, it was like looking at a misspelled word in the title of an otherwise perfect thesis. His brain kept returning to the mistake, again and again, wondering when everyone else was finally going to spot it, too.