Dark Justice (2 page)

“No, of course not.”

“But I couldn’t move. As soon as I saw your client race down the corridor, I told Kelly to uncuff me, but it took her a while to, um, stop what she was doing and find the key. By the time I was free, your client was gone.”

“I see. Thank you for clearing that up.” Ben eagerly turned another page in his trial notebook. It was all downhill from here.

Bullock rose to his feet. “Your honor, are we going to continue prying into this man’s personal life? This is of no interest whatsoever.”

The judge smiled. “If it was of no interest, you wouldn’t be trying to shut it down.”

“It’s all right, your honor,” Ben said. “I’m moving on.” He returned his attention to the witness. “You know, Mr. Taulbert, there’s one detail I haven’t been able to clarify. The local Chesterson police received
two
911 phone calls that night, one around two
A.M.
, the other just after three. Unfortunately, they did not yet have Caller ID trace capability, so the operator did not get an automatic record of the calls’ places of origin. The first call was so garbled and incoherent they couldn’t understand it. The second was the one that brought them to your lab.”

“My call would have been the second.”

“I can see where you would want us to think that. The 911 operator reported that the first call was an ‘incoherent blast from a man either frightened out of his wits or totally insane who wasn’t even able to tell us where he was.’ ”

“Clearly that wasn’t me.”

“Ah, but here’s the rub, Mr. Taulbert. I think it was. I think you saw my client around two, when he was still there and Dr. Dodd was still very much alive. I think later, when you read the police report, you changed your testimony so your call would be thought to be the one that brought the police to the scene, not the one from the man ‘either frightened out of his wits or totally insane.’ ”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I think I do.”

“I have never been incoherent in my entire life, much less totally insane.”

“Well, sometimes in a difficult situation—”

“I am perfectly capable of handling a difficult situation!”

“Mr. Taulbert, the way I see it, you saw the intruder or intruders and panicked.”

“I most certainly did not. You should be careful what you say, young man. There are laws against libel.”

“Uh-huh. Against perjury, too.”

“I have given you my testimony, and I’m sticking by it.”

“But I still think you made the two o’clock call.”

“Don’t you think I know what time it was when I called?”

“How could you?”

“How could I? I made a note the moment I saw the man in the corridor.”

“Made a note of what?”

“Of the time, of course.”

“But how? I’ve seen pictures of your office. There are no clocks.”

“I didn’t need a clock, you fool. I had a wristwatch.”

“You did?”

“Of course I did. Every lab clinician does.”

“Where was it?”

“On my wrist, you nincompoop. Hence the name.”

“You’re sure about this?”

“Absolutely positive.”

“And that’s how you know when you saw my client.”

“Exactly.”

“Because you had a watch.”

“It was the only timepiece in the room.”

“And you checked it?”

“The second I saw the man race down the corridor.”

Ben paused, drew a breath. “Mr. Taulbert, would you please explain how you could check your wristwatch when your hands were cuffed behind your back?”

All at once the agitated bobbing of his head ceased. His lips froze as if in mid-thought.

“As I recall, you said you couldn’t budge an inch. So how could you possibly look at your watch?”

“Well—uh—”

“Excuse me?”

“I—uh—”

Ben turned toward the jury box and smiled. “Is the word you’re searching for by any chance
oops
?”

Ben had almost made it out of the courtroom and into the elevator when Bullock stopped him.

“Well, Kincaid, I guess you’re—”

“Stop right there. I know the drill. You complain because I had the audacity to defend the accused and actually win. I say that every man has a right to a zealous defense. You say that doesn’t mean I have to put crooks back on the street. I point out that my client was working for a good cause and should never have been charged, since the only real evidence against him was unreliable, as you probably knew from the start. Eventually we start shouting and calling each other names till the bailiffs drag one or both of us out of the courthouse. Neither of us convinces the other of anything. So why don’t we just skip it this time, okay?”

Bullock pursed his lips together. “Think you’re pretty smart, don’t you?”

Ben rolled his eyes. “Smart enough to avoid this conversation.” He stepped around Bullock and punched the Down button for the elevator.

Bullock didn’t disappear. “You made a mistake in there today, Kincaid. You set a dangerous man free.”

“Dangerous? He’s an animal lover, for Pete’s sake. He protects chimpanzees! He’s harmless.”

“You’re wrong. I looked deep into the man’s eyes. And I didn’t like what I saw.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

The bell rang and the elevator doors opened. Ben started to step inside, but Bullock grabbed his arm. “Remember this, Kincaid. If that man kills again—and I think he will—it’ll be on your head. It’ll be your fault.”

Ben brushed Bullock away. “Stop being so damn melodramatic. You’re just bitter because you can’t stand to lose a case.” He entered the elevator. “The truth is, we’ll probably never hear from the man again.”

The elevator doors closed and Bullock faded, first from Ben’s vision, then from his consciousness. Only years later would Ben learn that, of his last two statements, although the first was certainly true, the last was altogether, absolutely, wrong.

T
ESS O’CONNELL PUSHED THE
thick foliage out of her path, but her hand snagged on a sharp thorn. She yelped, then let go. A tree branch came crashing back into her face, knocking her onto her backside.

Mumbling unrepeatable obscenities under her breath, Tess brushed the dark, dank loam off her pant legs and pushed herself back to her feet. She hated the Great Outdoors. Hated it with a passion. When she found out who volunteered her for this gig deep in the forests of northwest Washington, miles and miles from civilization as she knew it …

She detoured off the path, avoiding the unbreachable thicket of thorns and bramble. She knew there was a clearing somewhere—wasn’t there? It was so dark out here at night, even with a flashlight. Fear began to creep into her brain, making her breathing accelerate and her palms sweat. What if she never found the way out? What if something else found her? She had heard that grizzlies liked to roam at night.

She tried to put all those what-ifs out of her head. First things first: she needed to find the clearing. She couldn’t see where she was going and she was constantly bumping into things that were dirty, squishy, or alive. Her clothes were a mess, and her hair was a disaster. And she itched almost everywhere there was to itch. She had inadvertently stepped into a nest of seed ticks the day before, and she still hadn’t managed to scrape all those tiny black crawling dots off her skin. And trees were everywhere—densely packed huge trees, everywhere she looked. All day long she’d heard the sound of high-powered machinery clear-cutting trees at a breathtaking rate. So why was it she couldn’t see anything but trees?

She should’ve known better than to come out here at night. On a good day, she was—how to say it?—geographically challenged. And this wasn’t a good day. And she had no experience with woods or wildlife or whatever it was that kept making that creepy
ooh-ooh
noise. Even as a girl, she had never gone in for Girl Scouts or camp-outs or any of that living-off-the-land rot. So why was she stuck out here, lugging two cameras around the Crescent National Forest, all by herself?

Granted it had been a lousy year for the
National Whisper
. Their circulation figures had been dead last of all supermarket tabloids, and being the lowest of the tabloids was pretty low indeed. Tess had watched the rag sink lower and lower in its increasingly desperate attempts to pump up sales. The paper had gone from covers featuring movie stars and royalty to alien abductions and two-headed babies.

And as the paper goes, so go its reporters. Tess had sunk from stalking celebrities to unearthing freaks, misfits, and mutants.

And then there was Sasquatch. Honestly, did anyone still believe there was some big hairy ape wandering around the timberline? Surely that one had died out with the Loch Ness Monster and the human face on the moon. But there had been a flurry of Sasquatch spottings in this forest during the past month. And no story was too stupid for the
National Whisper
, right? So here she was—desperately seeking Sasquatch.

She’d been here for three days, and so far all shed managed to discover was sunburn, mosquito bites, and poison ivy. And seed ticks. She constantly wanted to scratch, including some places you couldn’t scratch in polite society. But she hadn’t given up. Every day at sunup, she had stumbled out of her motel room and plunged back into the forest, tracing and retracing the paths from which campers had made their sightings. It seemed like a futile, foolish quest, but by God, if there was a Sasquatch, Tess was going to be the one who found him.

After three days, she was about ready to give up. She had pored over her files, looking for something to give her an edge, something she had missed before. It was the third time through before she picked up on it—all the sightings had occurred at night. Could it be Sasquatch was a nocturnal beast? More related to the owl than the ape? Or could it be a survival instinct? She had read that grizzly bears now mostly traveled at night—to avoid humans. It was a classic example of natural selection; those that learned to move at night survived, while those that didn’t—didn’t. Could Bigfoot have evolved the same way? Even if it was a long shot, it merited a nighttime excursion. She just wished nighttime in the forest wasn’t so incredibly … dark.

Up ahead, she detected a break in the brush. A few steps closer and she could see moonlight streaming through the tree branches. A few more steps and she was out of the woods.

It was almost as if she had stepped onto a foreign planet. Where before the path had been so thick with green she could barely move, the tableau now before her was so barren a stranger might wonder if anything had ever grown here or ever could again. Only when Tess lowered her eyes did she see the telltale signs of former life—low-cut stumps dotting the ground, the last remnants of thousands and thousands of trees.

Her eyes were diverted by faint traces of life, down the slope about five hundred feet or so. She saw a large tree cutter, one just like the dozens she had seen since she came to the forest. And beside the tree cutter, she saw two silhouetted figures. One was much larger than the other. Both were moving slightly; one had his arms raised above his head.

Tess strained her eyes, trying to see more clearly. Were they talking or arguing or what?

She started moving down the steep incline. She had to move carefully, one cautious step at a time. The ground was covered with branches and debris, and there was nothing to hold for support.

The larger of the two figures turned sideways as she approached; its profile was backlit by the moon. The silhouette was massive and irregular, wild and hairy—

Sasquatch?

Tess moved faster down the incline, still watching the spectacle below. She could hear a voice now, loud and angry, shouting, but she couldn’t pick up any of the words.

Tess hit something—she never knew what it was—and started to tumble. She was rolling down the hill feet first, unable to stop herself, her camera bag alternately pounding the ground and her head.

She reached around on all sides, desperately grabbing for something to stop her fall. Her hands finally managed to light on a thick tree root half protruding from the dirt. She clamped the root and braced herself.

She felt like her arm was being ripped out of the socket, but fortunately, the root held. She stopped sliding. Slowly she lifted herself to her feet.

Sasquatch and the other silhouetted figure were definitely fighting—and not just with words. Blows were being exchanged. Sasquatch seemed to be getting the worst of it; the other figure was landing punch after punch. It was almost as if the poor beast didn’t have his heart in it, didn’t want to fight back. Sasquatch was getting creamed.

The other man landed a sharp blow, sending Sasquatch reeling backward against the huge mechanical tree cutter. The man picked up a long metal object—a crowbar, she thought, or maybe a tire iron. Sasquatch was pinned down and trapped. He was a goner—or so Tess thought.

Out of nowhere, Sasquatch raised his hairy arm, and this time it was holding a gun. She winced as the sound of a shot echoed through the clearing. She heard a sickening cracking noise as the other man crumpled to the ground. He must be dead, she thought, shot at such close range. But no—the fallen figure was moving, if slowly. He was still alive.

Sasquatch started running, away from both his opponent and Tess.

Tess kept moving cautiously forward. She didn’t know what was going on, but there was bound to be a story in it. Maybe even a story for the
National Whisper
; after all, it did feature Sasquatch. And besides, this was a heck of a lot more interesting than traipsing through the woods.

The man left behind slowly climbed up to the cab of the tree cutter.
What on earth?
Tess wondered. Was he planning to chase Bigfoot in the tree cutter? She kept moving forward and was less than a hundred feet away when the man turned the ignition.

The night sky was suddenly illuminated by a hot white flash. An instant later, a huge booming sound rocked the clearing. The force of the explosion knocked Tess off her feet, left her clutching red dirt for dear life. She kept her head down while smoke and metal debris flew through the air.