Panther's Prey (3 page)

As I returned from felony arraignments on Tuesday morning, Rebecca Lorenz appeared at my office door. “Have you seen Jordan?” she asked, with a concerned expression. She was an attractive African American woman, a felony attorney who'd graduated with Jordan in the same law school class. It was Rebecca who'd persuaded her to apply for the volunteer attorney program after Jordan had mentioned, over drinks one night, feeling burned out. She was Jordan's closest friend in the office. If anyone knew about our relationship, she'd be the one.

“Not since Saturday night,” I told her. “I left a message yesterday and another this morning.”

“You two didn't have some kind of fight, did you?”

“No. I don't know what happened.” I hesitated. Then, realizing she obviously knew about Jordan and me, I explained about Jordan getting a message from someone and sending me away.

She looked skeptical.

I thought a moment. “You haven't talked to her?”

“Nope. She hasn't called in, and she missed a hearing today. Something's definitely wrong. I'm freaking out. I was about to drive over to her place and check on her. I have her spare key. Do you want to come?”

As soon as she'd made the offer she looked like she wanted to take it back, but I didn't give her that chance. Rebecca was right. Jordan would never miss a hearing even if she was at death's door.

We retrieved Rebecca's aged Saab from its parking place down by the elevated freeway. As she drove, I learned a few more details about her friendship with Jordan. They'd shared many interests, including criminal law, and had taken a series of trial advocacy classes together, usually ending up on the same team. “I tried to get her to apply to the PD's office with me, but her father convinced her to take the law firm path. He's a city attorney down in Los Altos. Better late than never, I say.”

“Really?” I asked. “Do you think she's going to make the switch for good?”

“After that win you two pulled off last week? Who knows?”

I thought of what Jordan had implied about commitments she couldn't get free of, citing her “duty of confidentiality.” But I said nothing to Rebecca about any of these things. At Jordan's building she had to circle for nearly twenty minutes before finding a parking spot. Then, at the apartment, she looked over at me before rapping loudly. Receiving no answer, she shook her head and sighed. First looking at me again, she inserted the key in the lock.

The deadbolt wasn't engaged, I saw.

“She put that on when we left Saturday night,” I said. I explained about her dropping me off.

Taking a deep breath, then calling out Jordan's name, Rebecca pushed into the apartment. “Jordan? Are you okay?”

She stopped. “Oh, Jesus.”

A substance like brown paint had dripped on the tiles inside the apartment entrance. In the kitchen a chair was overturned.
Shattered glass was scattered over the countertop and floor. I had time to notice a handgun—it looked like my Bersa—on the floor. Rebecca had frozen, but I pushed past her and went jogging into the bedroom. The mattress was bare, the bed stripped. An icy shock went down my spine.

The door to the master bathroom was barricaded with a bookshelf and other furniture that had been toppled over, filling the space between the bathroom door and the foot of the bed. At the door I caught the corpse smell and knew it must be coming from inside. “No,” I cried. “No, no, no,” as my shaking hands moved the furniture out of the way, throwing designer bookshelves and a desk aside until I made a space for the door to swing free. Out flowed a sweet-rot stench I'd hoped never to smell again.

She was on the toilet, head hanging forward and slightly turned, her milky eyes staring at the door as if expecting rescue. Her arms slanted downward to meet beneath and behind the porcelain toilet bowl, where they were bound with duct tape. Her ankles had similarly been forced back behind the base of the toilet, with loops of duct tape wrapped around them, so that she was effectively hogtied around the commode. Her bindings had forced her breasts against her knees, the flesh a livid purple where skin met skin. Other than the duct tape that bound her and another strip that sealed her mouth, she was naked.

I became conscious of Rebecca standing beside me, mouth open with horror. Then her fingernails dug into my wrist and the scream came. Because of the direction of the corpse's eyes I'd had a moment's illusion that Jordan was still alive, that we'd come just in time to save her, but that illusion was now thoroughly dispelled. Her skin was swollen, mottled purple, her eyes lifeless.

No one could save her.

The situation, to me, was eerily familiar, with echoes running all through my life. At the age of ten I'd come home from school one day and discovered my mother's naked body in the front hallway of our Potrero Hill apartment, beaten to death with my aluminum baseball bat. My father, Lawrence, was arrested for her murder. He pleaded not guilty and was tried before a jury. The jury convicted him, and the judge sentenced him to life.

After 1983, with our mother dead and our father in San Quentin, Teddy was all the family I had left. He was twenty-two, just starting law school. He tolerated me at the periphery of his life, providing the material necessities but little emotional sustenance as he built his legal career. As a teenager I stifled my loneliness with punk rock music and bong hits. Later, I learned Teddy and our father had stayed in close contact, with my brother visiting him every few weeks.

By the time I finished college, Teddy had become one of the most notorious young criminal defense attorneys in San Francisco,
equally sought after and despised. His biggest client was Ricky Santorez, who, I later learned, had used Teddy as a front for his illicit businesses after he went to prison, counting on Teddy to plead his foot soldiers to low-level offenses while minimizing risk to those higher up. Knowing nothing about this side of Teddy's practice, idealizing him and seeking approval he wasn't inclined to give, I followed him to law school, persevering with my studies despite receiving no encouragement from him.

In 1999, the week after I learned I'd passed the bar, Teddy was shot in the head in a Civic Center restaurant during the lunch recess in one of his trials, the gunman reaching over my shoulder to pull the trigger. There were plenty of people in law enforcement who thought he had it coming and told me so. In fact, as I learned through my own inquiries, my brother was shot because he'd been about to reopen the case that had haunted my childhood. He'd tracked down our mother's real killer—the mentally ill son of her lover—and had planned to expose him. For this Teddy had nearly paid with his life. The shooter escaped but I tracked him down. He was now serving a lengthy prison sentence for attempted murder.

The neurosurgeons at San Francisco General Hospital had told me Teddy would never wake up. When he defied this expectation, their revised prognosis was that he'd remain a vegetable, unable to walk, speak, or care for himself. They were wrong. My brother spent months in the neurotrauma ward, nearly half a year after that in an inpatient brain-injury rehabilitation center, and then another year living with me in my Oakland condominium.

He'd changed, becoming a very different person from the ruthless charmer who'd once dominated the criminal courtrooms at San Francisco's Hall of Justice. The new Teddy would never again eviscerate a witness or coax jurors into a verdict that went against the facts. However, just as he'd relearned to feed and care for himself, he'd also taught himself to draft a decent brief through sheer repetitive determination, enabling him to earn a modest living as
an appellate lawyer after he regained his law license. Most significantly, he was now a family man, a transformation that astonished his ex-wife, Jeanie, me, and everyone else who'd been innocent bystanders to his former habits. Prior to his injuries, it hadn't been unusual for him to put in sixteen-hour days, sleeping in a room he kept at a residence hotel near his Tenderloin office rather than return home to Contra Costa County for a few hours' rest in the shell of the house he and Jeanie had never gotten around to finishing, plastic sheeting still covering the windows, unpainted drywall inside.

Teddy and his wife, Tamara, had met during their stay at the same brain-injury rehab center, where she was recovering from a virus that had ravaged her brain and left her without short-term memory. They now lived in a bungalow in Berkeley funded by a lawsuit I'd settled on Tamara's behalf. Their child, Carly, was three years old. Though Tamara's impairments remained severe, she, too, had improved, the demands of marriage and parenthood seeming to create new neural pathways, complementing the habits and practices they'd both learned to replace the capabilities they'd lost.

Through all of this, I'd tried to carry on my brother's work on our father's behalf. I'd shopped his case to the Innocence Project and other such organizations, but hadn't yet found a lawyer to take the case. With a full plate of my own cases, and not trusting my ability to represent my father impartially, I was reluctant to shoulder the burden myself. This unjust stasis was broken a few weeks after Teddy had regained his law license. One day he'd dropped a brief on my desk, a habeas petition arguing that my father's twenty-one-year-old conviction should be overturned based on stunning prosecutorial misconduct.

Imprisoned all these years after being convicted of my mother's murder in a tainted trial, Lawrence two years ago had finally been awarded his freedom thanks to Teddy's brief. His newfound freedom
didn't last long, however, before he was accused of the murder of Russell Bell, the star witness who'd been slated to testify against him in his retrial, a former cell mate who'd planned to tell the jury my father had spilled his guts.

Lawrence had an alibi for the time of Bell's shooting, thanks to his fiancée, Dot, whom he'd met while he was still behind bars. Due also to the excellent lawyering of his appointed counsel, he was acquitted of murdering my mother, and thus exonerated twenty-one years after the fact. However, the state could still charge him with the murder of Bell. The DA surely would press charges if the truth were known.

As we'd learned soon after my father's acquittal, the truth was that without Lawrence's knowledge—but intending to benefit him—the leader of a white supremacist prison gang named Bo Wilder had ordered the snitch gunned down. Wilder, who'd protected my father in prison, wanted Lawrence working for him on the outside as recompense for Wilder's having eased his life behind bars—with my law practice serving as the front for a criminal enterprise spanning guns, drugs, and prostitution.

When I refused to play along, Bo had sent men to burn my office. After the fire my father had fled the country with Dot. Last I heard, they were in Croatia living off the settlement money I'd negotiated for his wrongful conviction, Croatia being one of the few countries with a decent standard of living and no extradition treaty with the United States.

Having been the one to find her body when I came home from school that fateful day at the age of twelve, most of my life I'd believed Lawrence guilty of her death. I'd suffered greatly during my childhood, but with my father's release and acquittal I'd had to face the fact that his suffering had been far worse. In my teenage years he was a convenient scapegoat for the howling loneliness of growing up fatherless and motherless, eating lonely mac-and-cheese dinners to punk rock music while Teddy worked late nights—but
through all the time I'd spent blaming him, my father had sat in San Quentin, wrongfully accused and falsely convicted, proclaiming his innocence to the world but never to me. I'd spent twenty years believing I was the one with the grievance, but now, I'd realized I owed
him
an apology.

As my father and I were finding out, it's far easier to forgive then to forget.

Eventually we were driven to the SFPD's Southern Station for interviews. Or I was, rather. They told me Rebecca was coming, but after I climbed into the back of the police car I didn't see her again. No doubt she'd reported what I'd told her about being with Jordan Saturday night. In any case, as Jordan's only known boyfriend, I was clearly a person of interest.

A guilty lawyer knows to keep his mouth shut, but an innocent one will talk his way into trouble like anyone else. I wanted to help the police investigation in any way possible, but this wasn't where my need to talk came from. It was part egoism, part loneliness. I had the feeling that what happened to Jordan was something that had happened in large part to me, isolating me from everyone who hadn't experienced it. That isolation fueled a need to talk about the experience with anyone who'd listen.

I was afraid they'd send in Cole, but evidently the SFPD had enough sense not to put me face-to-face with the detective whose credibility and competence I'd recently attempted to destroy in the
very public forum of a San Francisco criminal court. Instead, I was questioned by a younger detective, Mark Chen, who stood a slim six four or six five, like a Ralph Lauren model in a thousand-dollar suit.

“I'm sorry to have kept you waiting,” he said.

“It's all right.”

“I've just been looking at some preliminary forensics. Fingerprint analysis, mainly.”

“You'll find mine. I was with her a few hours before she was killed.” I concisely narrated the events of that evening, beginning with meeting for dinner, including our lovemaking at her apartment but not the substance of our conversation there. I reported that someone had contacted her, probably via text, after which her mood had changed.

“She mentioned something about her duty of confidentiality, like it had to do with a client. She wouldn't tell me anything more, but made clear it was time for me to go. She dropped me in a cab at my hotel around one
AM.”

Chen nodded, waiting for me to go on.

I hesitated, gauging the value of speaking the rest versus the risk of remaining silent. I quickly reached the conclusion that he already knew what I was considering telling him, or would soon know it. I'd been arrested before, so the police had my fingerprints on file. “I noticed a gun on the kitchen floor. The Bersa. You may find my prints on that as well.”

“I see.”

Before the police had arrived at Jordan's apartment I'd examined the Bersa to check whether it had been fired. There were no scorch marks. Though I hadn't touched it, it would have been easy enough to lie and tell Chen I'd held it in my hand, and claim I'd never seen it before handling it at Jordan's place. Apart from my scrupulous nature, the reason I hadn't tampered with the Bersa, or lied and said I'd done so, was because it seemed to me the police needed to know how it got there. I told Chen as much.

“You're telling me that gun in her apartment is yours?”

“It's not registered to me. Probably it's been reported stolen. All I'm saying is my fingerprints are likely on it. You knew that before you walked in here, I'm guessing.”

Chen was silent, seeming to process the implications of my admission that I'd handled the gun before, rather than after, Jordan's murder. If it'd been the murder weapon, he probably would have considered reading me my rights.

“Why would Jordan want to ditch a gun for you?”

“She thought it was a risk for me to have it. She was right. It was stupid of me, but it came into my hands at a time when I thought I needed protection.” Without delving into particulars, I explained about the arson fire and my belief someone wanted me dead.

Chen wanted to know where I'd gotten the gun.

“The point isn't why I needed the gun, or where I got it,” I said. “The point is that Jordan wanted me to leave it with her. The question is why she thought
she
needed it.”

“You think she was afraid of somebody.”

“I didn't pick up on this at the time, but it seems likely. She wanted me to bring the gun to her apartment—supposedly so we could get rid of it together. Then she received a text on her phone and showed me the door, reminding me to leave the Bersa.”

“Janelle Fitzpatrick thinks Randall Rodriguez is pretty scary. You think Jordan might have been worried about him?”

“Randall'd never have done something like this, showed up at her apartment. He isn't capable of it, any more than he was capable of the Fitzpatrick rape.” Even as I said these words I felt a tremor of doubt. He'd probably spent the day sifting trash bins for clean copies of newspapers from which to create new versions of his precious scrapbooks, and for the chess puzzles. These scrapbooks would have included articles about his own case—maybe even yesterday's scathing column blaming the police and the DA for botching the investigation. The whole city knew a confessed rapist had walked free.

According to our expert witness, freedom was the last thing Rodriguez had wanted.

“You must have noticed the shared elements with Fitzpatrick,” Chen said. “First, the apparent sexual assault, with the bedding stripped and taken away, and the victim locked in the bathroom to keep her from reporting the crime immediately. Of course, our intruder did a better job with the tape this time.
Too
good, as it turns out.”

I closed my eyes, suddenly confronted again with the imagined scene I'd tried to shut out all afternoon: Jordan trapped in that bathroom, bound, her legs cramping and finally going numb, her breath forced for hours through the tiny passages of her nostrils, knowing at every moment that if she panicked, she would suffocate and die, hoping only that someone would discover her in time. No one had, and thus appeared to be, for the rapist, a stroke of luck.

“I'm sorry if these questions disturb you. But, as you pointed out in the trial, if he didn't do this, the real rapist is still out there. If that's true, Ms. Fitzpatrick's case can no longer be considered closed. Now, shortly after your client's release from custody, there occurs a second crime that follows the same pattern as the first. Put yourself in my shoes.”

Inadvertently complying, I thought of what I'd seen in the courtroom the day of the verdict—Rodriguez standing behind the counsel table after Jordan had taken his hand. And, a few days earlier, his wink, like we'd shared a secret he knew I'd never tell.

“We found this on her desk.” The detective took out a file folder and from it removed two clear evidence bags. One contained a ripped-open blue envelope, the other the card that must have come with it. On the envelope, stamped by the post office the day after the verdict, Jordan's home address was printed in block letters. The card was a generic thank-you card like an old lady might send, with a pastel rainbow on the front. Blue fingerprint dust stained both items. “It's blank inside,” Chen said. “Unsigned. You ever see it?”

“No.”

“You didn't receive one?”

“I didn't. Have you identified the fingerprints?”

“Rodriguez's are on both the card and the envelope. Jordan's address was unlisted, but evidently he was able to find out where she lived and send her this card. The way you spun things at the trial, you'd think he didn't have the mental wherewithal to find her even if she was in the phone book. Now I'm wondering if the picture you painted was accurate.”

I didn't tell him about Randall's chess skills, the wink he'd given me, or his reaction before the verdict to Jordan's touch. “He's no imbecile,” I confessed.

That seemed to be all Chen needed. “Just for the file, where were you Sunday?”

“Most of the day I was alone. I left a message for Jordan in the morning. I took BART to Oakland around nine and went for a bike ride in the hills, stopped at my brother's in Berkeley for lunch, and rode BART home in the afternoon.” I fished out my wallet and pulled out my Bay Area Rapid Transit ticket, which I'd saved because it still had a dollar-and-a-half credit. “Here.”

He slipped it into the chest pocket of his shirt and rose. “Thank you. We'd like to talk to Mr. Rodriguez. You wouldn't happen to know how to reach him?”

“Try the shelters. Under freeway overpasses. I doubt he'll be hard to find.”

I felt my grief and anger boil over and knew I was getting out of this little room just in time, but I couldn't resist delivering unwanted advice. “Do me a favor. Videotape the interrogation this time,” I said as Chen walked me to the front desk. “Document Rodriguez telling you something you didn't already know. Because if you guys had done the job right the first time …”

Chen made no response, just opened the door for me and held it. As it clicked shut between us, I had a sudden fleeting feeling I was standing on the wrong side.