The Victim (52 page)

Some stifled laughter from the jury box.

“
And it’s safe to say that you didn’t have your wits about you.”

“
I guess not.”

“
Alcohol affects your ability to accurately recall an event, right?”

“
I wasn’t blackout drunk if that’s what you’re implying.”

“
But you had been drinking,” he said firmly. “Ms. Brandt, yes or no, alcohol affects your ability to accurately recall an event?”

“
Yes, yes it does. Jeez.”

“
So…is it safe to say that your recollection of this night is questionable at best?”

“
No. Not at all.”

“
And why’s that?”

“
Because. I know what happened to me!” Tears filled her eyes. “It’s what he’d always do to me!” She turned to him, pointing her finger. “He knows! He knows what he did to me! He knows how many times he choked me, and hit me! And made me do those things he wanted me to do! Those awful, disgusting things! He knows about the video he made and showed to all his friends!” She trembled, shuddered. “Goddamnit, he was my
first!
I was just eighteen and he was twenty-one and he used me and humiliated me and slapped me around when I wouldn’t do what he wanted me to do!”

Anton’s head felt like a balloon. The world teetered back and forth. He wanted to close his eyes and go back in time. The last time he had felt like this he was standing on the side of a highway in Arizona.

“
Sidebar, Judge,” he said.

Melissa and Sylvia joined him at the steps beside the bench.

“
Your Honor,” he whispered, trying to keep his voice even. He could feel the pressure behind his eyes. He hoped he didn’t look like he was going to cry. “At this point, I’m moving for a mistrial. I asked the witness a very direct, very specific question about her recollection. In no way, shape, or form did my question call for this type of response. I believe that my client is prejudiced beyond the point of repair and cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, receive a fair trial by this jury.”

Morales turned to Sylvia. “State, your response?”

“
Your Honor, Mr. Mackey completely opened the door to this testimony through his open-ended question. And since Mr. Mackey insisted on adopting his client’s speedy demand, he didn’t have the benefit of deposing the witness so that he might have had this information beforehand. His
strategy
in filing a speedy demand, if you can call it that, comes with certain risks. This is precisely why we have the discovery process, to avoid surprises like this at trial. But Mr. Mackey and his client both waived that right and this court was satisfied enough with that waiver to grant them their speedy trial. The question did not call for a specific answer. Mr. Mackey asked the witness
‘why’s that?
’ Your Honor, he may not like the answer he got, but he sure got his answer.”

Judge Morales leaned back in her chair, signaling that the sidebar was over and that her ruling had been made.

“
Defense’s motion for a mistrial is denied. Mr. Mackey, you may continue with your cross-examination if you’d like.”

He could feel the eyes of the jury upon him as he walked to the podium. Pandora’s box had been opened. He quietly thanked the witness for her testimony and sat down, watching Sylvia spring up from her chair, chomping at the bit. Sylvia was well within her right to inquire about those other instances of violence on redirect. All those times he beat her, and choked her, and made her endure sexual humiliation.

“
You fucked up,” Bryan growled, flecks of spit pelting Anton’s ear. “It’s over. I’m fucking convicted.”

Anton didn’t argue. Hard to argue with someone who’s right.

CHAPTER 54

She was like a drug. No good. Every fiber of his being told him that he shouldn’t be there. But his inner voice had fallen upon deaf ears.

Mandy sat on her sofa, his feet propped up on the coffee table. She was in the bedroom getting dressed. After everything that had come to light he should have stayed far away. But he couldn’t. He felt like any one of the crack-addicted prostitutes he used to arrest, trolling for tourists up and down Ocean Drive. Selling their souls for brief pleasure.

“
I’ve got a mean craving for some orange chicken,” Daniella shouted through the open bedroom door. She stepped out into the living room, pulling a cashmere sweater over her head and arms. “C’mon, the State Attorney’s Office called. I’m not testifying until tomorrow. We could go grab some P.F. Chang’s if you’d like, maybe a few glasses of wine?”

Mandy knew that Anton lived forty-five miles away but he never wanted to run the risk of him seeing the two of them out in public. Which was why they had restricted their relationship to the confines of her apartment.

“
Why don’t you call it in and I’ll go pick it up.”

She smiled, her face radiating an after-sex glow. She turned and disappeared back into the bedroom.

He tinkered around on his phone, checking the local news. A
ding
alerted him to a new email. He tapped the email icon on his touchscreen and his inbox opened. A new message from a CBP.gov email address.

Mandy’s contact at Customs and Border Protection.

He looked over his shoulder before pulling the phone in tight to his chest, using his body to conceal the screen. His buddy had come through for him within twenty-four hours, having emailed him the passenger data information for Frank Wheaton’s March 16, 2003 travel plans.

The phone nearly slipped from his hands as he read the email.

“
They said it would be over an hour for take-out orders,” she called from the bedroom. Her voice startled him. He fumbled to catch his phone before it fell into his lap.

She watched him from the bedroom doorway.

“
Uh, okay.” He set the phone down on the coffee table, his hands shaking. “We’ll, uh, do something else then.”

She batted her eyes. “First, can you help me? The bathroom sink’s not draining for some reason.”

He stood up, looking at his cell phone on the glass coffee table. “Sure, I’ll take a look.”

She kissed him on the cheek as he sidestepped by her in the doorway. She closed the bedroom door behind him.

She looked at his phone on the table.

What was he looking at that had made him so nervous?

She tiptoed over to the coffee table and picked up his phone. It was passcode-protected but she bypassed the screen in three tries. It wasn’t hard to guess that the four-digit number was his birth year.

She opened his text messages, saw nothing. Checked his web browser. Nothing. She opened his inbox.

There it was. The most recent message. An email sent from a Customs and Border Protection address?

She clicked on the message, scanning the content and the PDF attachment. A passenger data information sheet.

She closed her eyes, mentally counting to ten to bring her heart rate back to normal.

She felt the onset of tears but she would not cry. No, she would not cry.

He had left his belongings on the kitchen counter, as usual. His wallet, his keys. His gun, tucked inside his black nylon holster.

She turned the phone off and set it down on the coffee table.

She slipped the gun out of its holster. She held it up, wrapping her fingers around its textured grip. It was a Glock; she knew that by reading the imprint stamped onto the barrel. .45 caliber. She wasn’t sure what that meant but the weight of the gun in her hand indicated that it was loaded.

Macho Cuban
, she thought.
The gun’s just an extension of his prick.

“
Yo, your sink is fine,” she heard him shouting from behind the closed bedroom door. He opened it and stood in the doorway.

He froze, his eyes fixed on the bore of the .45 caliber, glaring at him like an angry eye.

She extended both arms, eyes squinted to line up her shot in the front and rear sights. She slid the tip of her index finger around the trigger, breathed, and squeezed.

The blast filled the room with deafening sound. The muzzle flashed, her arms jerked upward on the discharge. A hot brass casing spewed from the open breech, rolling, tinkling on the marble floor.

The hollow-point hit him in the center of his forehead, fragmenting on impact, the exit wound blowing out the back of his skull in a mist of blood and bone slivers. Pinkish gobs of brain matter splattered the doorway. Wisps of smoke rose from the entry wound, which seemed no larger than a dime. He was dead on his feet. He rocked on his heels for a good five seconds before crumpling to the floor.

CHAPTER 55

The condolences offered were forced and insincere, but Jack took no offense. He sat at a small table at Au Bon Pain, sipping a
cafe con leche
, shaking hands and exchanging solemn nods with attorneys who dropped by to say that they had heard about Mandy.

“
Of course they heard,” Anton said under his breath as two attorneys walked away. “Every local news outlet in South Florida’s been covering it since two a.m. Morales will declare a mistrial.”

Jack waved at a lawyer mouthing an
I’m sorry
from across the room.

“
Sounds like a mistrial’s the best you can hope for right now.”

Anton leaned over the table, his face enveloped by the plume of steam rising up from his cup of coffee.

“
I opened the door. Price I pay for going to trial without deposing a single witness. Man, Sylvia killed me on redirect. Got into everything. God, Bryan used to make this girl lie down in his tub so he could piss on her. The girl was a virgin before she met him. He routinely humiliated and sexually disgraced her for his own pleasure. When she got the nerve to say no, he’d slap her a few times, maybe clamp his hand around her throat. Tell her she was just a white trash slut who didn’t deserve to be treated like a lady. He once made her wear a paper bag over her head during sex. Videotaped it on a hidden camera and showed all his friends.”

“
So like I said,” Jack reasoned, his rising pitch suggesting he should look on the bright side. “Your investigator’s been screwing the state’s key witness. Apparently he gets rough with her, she grabs his gun and shoots him. Textbook self-defense, in her own apartment no less. Cops will never arrest, state will never file. But damn shame. I’ll still miss him.”

The media had been the only source of information on Mandy’s death. Since neither Jack nor Anton were immediate family, it was all they could get.

Security records from the Templeton showed that Armando Guerrero had been a registered guest of Daniella Avery’s roughly fifty times since January 14, 2014.

“
He lied to me, Jack. To both of us. He’s been supposedly investigating her claims. He knows she set me up for the P.I.F. hit, but he’s creeping around behind our backs, sleeping with her?”

“
And his old demons return and he gets himself killed.”

The resignation agreement between Mandy and the Miami Beach Police Department signed back in 2007 had been kept quiet, no press releases leaked to the media. But a public servant’s personnel file is still subject to disclosure, even in death.

The press had gotten to it.

Her name was Desiree Jackson, although the Crime Suppression Team cops who worked prostitution stings on Miami Beach knew her as Desire. She wasn’t a streetwalker. She placed provocative listings in the
escort services
section on classified advertisements websites.