Murder One (36 page)

“Thank you,” Sloane said, leaving the unanswered question for the jury to ponder for the weekend.

Outside the courthouse, Sloane, Barclay, and Pendergrass ditched the media and found a corner to talk. They agreed to take the night off and start in again Saturday morning.

“I need to meet with an expert,” Sloane said. “He can’t meet over the weekend.”

“You want me to take the meeting?” Pendergrass asked.

“No. Go home and drink a beer. I mean it. I don’t want you even reading the newspaper accounts. We still have a lot of long days and nights ahead.” Sloane turned to Barclay. “My meeting is down south. I’ll stay at Three Tree and meet you at the office tomorrow morning.”

He watched as she and Pendergrass walked up the street together. When they turned the corner, he pulled out his cell phone.

“What do you have?” he asked.

G
OLDEN
D
RAGON
R
ESTAURANT
I
NTERNATIONAL
D
ISTRICT
S
EATTLE
, W
ASHINGTON

Micheal Hurley was not a man Sloane ever wanted to play poker with. The dark eyes—black, really—remained expressionless, as did the rest of his facial features. Hurley sat smoothing the snow-white goatee with his right hand, not the slightest hesitation when Sloane explained his theory. Sloane knew he was right, whether Hurley wanted to acknowledge the truth or not, and he had come prepared to explain why he was right, if Hurley denied it. Then it would be a matter of whether Hurley cared—the placid expression not of a poker player bluffing but of a poker player holding four aces, an unbeatable hand, and knowing there wasn’t a damn thing Sloane could say that would change that.

“Tell me why?” Hurley said. “Based upon the judge’s ruling, you can’t use it even if you’re right.”

Sloane couldn’t. Not in a court of law.

But before Sloane could respond, before he could tell Hurley that what had set the wheels spinning was when Cerrabone asked Officer Adderley whether he had tried to open the sliding-glass door and Adderley had responded, “No reason to,” a glimmer of light flickered in the black eyes, and the corner of Hurley’s mouth twitched beneath the facial hair. It was not a smile or even a grin but it served as a tacit acknowledgment that Sloane was right and that Hurley knew Sloane’s interest wasn’t about getting evidence admitted in a court of law.

Sloane just needed to know.

T
HREE
T
REE
P
OINT
B
URIEN
, W
ASHINGTON

Just after eight in the evening it was not too late for Sloane to drive to Barclay’s house, but he had felt the need to be alone, to process the information Micheal Hurley had confirmed: that the reason Julio Cruz’s fingerprints were on the slider was because, as Sloane had deduced, Cruz had slid open the door. Unlike Adderley, Cruz
had
a reason to open the door. He needed to go inside to retrieve the bug they had planted in Vasiliev’s den, which they couldn’t very well have left for the CSI team to discover.

What it meant, Sloane was not yet sure.

When Sloane turned the corner, he was surprised to see Barclay’s BMW parked perpendicular to the laurel hedge. He pushed through the gate to the side yard. The interior of the house remained dark, not a light on in any window, not even the lights on the timer.

He looked for her along the beach, but saw no one out walking.

Back at the house, Sloane pushed through the back door but kept his keys in hand rather than place them on the hook protruding from the life-size Larry Bird cardboard cutout. He put his briefcase on the kitchen counter, about to call her name, when he felt the presence of others. The floor creaked unnaturally. A movement in the dark. The lights burst in a flash.

“Surprise!”

Two voices.

When the black spots faded, Sloane saw Barclay. Beside her, wearing an uncertain smile, stood Jake.

“I didn’t want to say anything to you after court,” Barclay said. “I wanted it to be a surprise.”

After the initial shock, Sloane had held Jake in a fierce embrace. At sixteen, Jake was nearly as tall as Sloane, though still thin as a rail. “How did you do this?” Sloane asked.

“Ms. Reid—Barclay called me a few days ago. She said she thought it would be a nice surprise,” Jake said. “She said you needed something to perk you up.”

Sloane had not mentioned his and Barclay’s relationship to Jake, not sure the boy was ready to hear it. He was uncertain how he felt about Barclay doing so.

“What happened to Italy?” he asked.

“The project ended early. And you can tell Charlie he was right. I’m sick of oil and vinegar.”

“Okay,” Barclay said. “I’m going to leave you two men to catch up.”

“Stay,” Sloane said.

She waved him off. “Not on your life.”

“Really, you don’t have to leave,” Jake agreed, but it sounded halfhearted.

She smiled. “You’re a polite young man. I can see that your mother did a wonderful job raising you. But a girl knows when men need their bonding time. I’ve taken enough of your father’s time these past months, and I’ll be seeing him a good deal more.”

Sloane walked her outside to the easement. “I don’t know what to say.”

“I really debated this,” she said. “I hope it wasn’t too bold of me. If it was, I apologize.”

“No, it was a very kind gesture.”

“You seemed down the last couple of days. I thought maybe you needed something to remind you of the good things in your life.”

“More than the watch?”

She looked up at the house as the light in Jake’s room came on.

“What did you tell him?” Sloane asked.

“I told him I was one of your clients, but he already knew all about it. He’s followed the story on the Internet. He didn’t say anything, but I’m sure he read the reports about us. Even if he hadn’t, he seems like a bright kid.”

“I didn’t mean to imply that I thought it was something we should hide—”

“He’s sixteen,” she said. “Carly wasn’t thrilled when I dated. I know it will take time, but I’m not in a rush. I’m hoping the three of us will have a lot of time to get to know one another.”

Back inside the house, Sloane found Jake with his head in the refrigerator. His hair had grown well past his ears and touched the hood of his 49ers sweatshirt.

“You hungry?” Sloane asked—a dumb question of a teenager with the metabolism of a jackrabbit.

Jake pulled out a tomato that had rotted and mildewed. “Not anymore. How are you still alive?”

“The life of a trial lawyer. I’ve been working late and eating at the office. Come on, we’ll go up to the Tin Room.”

Jake shook his head. “I think I’d like to stay home.”

Sloane detected melancholy in the comment. “How about my famous grilled cheese?”

“You mean the cardiac-arrest sandwich? Sure.”

As Sloane pulled the cheese, mayonnaise, and butter out of the fridge, Jake retrieved the cast-iron skillet, then jumped up and sat on the counter. Tina would have swatted him with a towel.

“She’s pretty cool,” Jake said.

Sloane kept his focus on the refrigerator. “Barclay? Yeah, she’s a good person.”

“So she’s innocent?”

Sloane closed the fridge and pulled open drawers, looking for the cheese slicer. “Yes, she’s innocent.”

“Really? Or it’s your job to defend her even if she isn’t?”

They’d had conversations about Sloane’s job, defending clients to the best of his abilities no matter his personal feelings about their innocence or guilt. “Really.” Sloane spread mayonnaise on one side of the bread, then added the cheese.

“So are you guys, like, dating?”

Sloane handed Jake a slice of cheese. “How would you feel about that?”

“The newspapers said you were.”

“Yes,” Sloane said. “We’re dating. You okay with that?”

“Kind of hard, you know?”

Sloane stopped making the sandwich. “Yeah, I know. It has been hard,” he said. “I miss your mom every day. I’ll miss her every day for the rest of my life. No one will ever take her place. But you get to the point”—how to say it?—“you don’t want to feel bad every morning you wake up. You just want to smile and mean it . . . laugh, feel good, and not feel guilty because you do. You know?”

Another nod.

“So what do you think of her?”

Jake stared at the floor. Then he looked up at Sloane. “What if she’s convicted?”

TWENTY - FIVE

M
ONDAY,
D
ECEMBER
5, 2011
K
ING
C
OUNTY
C
OURTHOUSE
S
EATTLE
, W
ASHINGTON

S
loane entered the courtroom Monday morning not as prepared as he would have liked but a great deal more refreshed than how he had felt Friday afternoon. Jake spent Saturday morning at the office doing his homework, studying for a calculus test, and hanging out with Alex and Charlie. Barclay had not come in, telling Sloane she had taken a box of documents home and would continue to go through them. Jake and Sloane left early and took the boat out trolling for salmon, without any luck. They ate dinner at a restaurant in Burien and watched a screening of
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
at the Tin Room’s new movie theater adjacent to the restaurant.

When Sloane took Jake to the airport Sunday morning, the boy’s hug lingered.

“I’ll see you soon,” Sloane said.

Jake entered the line for preboarding screening without a response but teary-eyed. Sloane waited until he reached the conveyor belt, about to leave, when Jake turned. “It’s how we heal, you know.”

“What’s that?”

“The pain.”

“What about it?”

“Feeling it every day . . . it’s not a bad thing. That’s how we heal,” he said. Then he slipped through the detector and did not look back.

Sloane had considered the comment much of Sunday. He knew Jake had been in counseling for over a year, and he deduced the
comment to be something his counselor had told him—that it was better to feel the pain and deal with it than to bury it. Given the trauma Sloane had endured as a result of burying the recollection of his mother’s murder when he was a boy, he agreed. Still, it seemed an odd comment, and Sloane wondered why Jake had chosen to bring it up just then.

Cerrabone began Monday morning with additional witnesses to confirm Carly had died of an overdose of heroin, that Reid had been upset that the police had not done more to find and charge the dealers who supplied Scott Parker, and that she had begun training for and participated in triathlons. The witnesses were largely uneventful, and Pendergrass handled the cross-examinations. That left Sloane to concentrate on the next witness, Earl Perkins, one of the King County sheriffs who worked with Freddy, the Belgian Malinois brought to the crime scene.

A small-framed man with a Scandinavian accent, Perkins testified that Freddy’s olfactory gland was the size of a walnut—as opposed to a human’s gland, which was no bigger than the tip of an eraser. He explained that this allowed the dog to track the fifty thousand skin cells humans shed every hour, cells that contained trace scents from the person’s eccrine gland—the human sweat gland—and the apocrine gland, which was activated by stress, fear, or anxiety and was sometimes referred to as a person’s “fear scent.”

Using the diagram of the property, Perkins explained that Freddy had picked up a scent at the water’s edge, trailed it to the back of the house, then followed it from the patio to a stand of trees before it continued back to the water.

“And is that where the scent ended?” Cerrabone asked.

Perkins used the diagram to explain his testimony. “Freddy continued to track the scent south along the beach until he reached this wall of the adjacent property and couldn’t go any farther.”

“What was Freddy scenting in the water?”

Perkins advised the jury that the dog continued to track the person’s skin cells, those that had floated to the shore on plant material and other debris. The jury looked duly impressed.

“And what conclusion can you draw from the evidence that the
scent trail continued along the beach, though you found no further footprints in the sand?” Cerrabone asked.

“That the person entered the water and swam south, parallel to the shoreline.”

The information set up the testimony of Detective Kaylee Wright, who followed Perkins to the stand.

Wright had the healthy look of someone who spent much of her time outdoors, which most people in the Pacific Northwest would equate to pleasure activities such as hiking and mountain climbing, or snow skiing in the winter. And though Wright may have participated in some or all of those activities, it became quickly apparent, as she recounted her employment history and training, that her muscular build and tan complexion had little to do with how she spent her leisure time. Wright spent her time outdoors searching for bodies, like some of the bodies Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, and other psychopaths, dumped in ravines, wooded areas, and other places not easily accessible.

“And how many officers work for you at present?” Cerrabone asked from his customary spot at the end of the jury box farthest from the witness chair.

“Fourteen duty officers.” She explained that the King County special operations unit consisted of multiple units with particular specialties—hazmat, bombs, marine, mountain climbing, and others.

“And what is it that your unit specializes in?”

“We’re sign cutters,” she said.

“What does it mean to have achieved the ranking of a sign cutter?”

“A sign cutter is someone who has spent a minimum of twelve hundred hours and ten years studying and training to see the physical evidence that a person leaves when they enter or exit a particular environment.”

“Can you explain the principle behind that?” Cerrabone asked.

Wright discussed the science of Locard’s principle—how a person cannot move around his environment without taking evidence of where he has been and transferring it to where he goes. Cerrabone eventually progressed to the morning Wright was called to Vasiliev’s home.