The Victim (56 page)

“
Okay, okay! Fuck!” His skin blistered and oozed. “Kelsie wasn’t on the fucking flight!
She
was using Kelsie’s driver’s license. That was their plan! She was gonna be first. They were gonna follow.”

“
What plan?”

“
Plan to leave.” He was breathing hard, gritting his teeth in agony. His arm stretched behind him at an unnatural angle. “Those kids. The shit they had been through. My niece had it worst of all. First those fucking coward Romans shoot my brother in the dead of night when he’s riding solo. I used to wear a Romans patch, until they turned on Danny. Fuck them. They’re still gunnin’ for me. But Lola wasn’t born yet. He knew shit was gonna go south when he got busted by the feds. Look, call him a snitch or not, he was doing what he had to do for his family. He had a little girl on the way.

“
God, I was just a kid at the time, in my twenties, when he asked me to look after Lola if anything should happen to him. I’d do anything for Danny. He was fifteen when I was born. We didn’t have no dad around. Danny was it. He knew the risks of cooperating. He was okay with it. You ride like an outlaw you prepare to die like one, son. Goddamn, this fucking hurts.” He rolled side to side. “But that mom of hers, Anita? She was a big time junkie. Can’t say it’s her fault. Think my brother turned her onto the stuff. She was just a kid herself when my brother knocked her up. Too young to be some outlaw’s old lady. But after Danny died, she hit bottom. Lola was born and just an endless line of freeloading, pipe-hitting boyfriends. A few of them were into kids, know what I mean? When I found out I made a few calls and they were never seen or heard from again.”

Wheaton hunched forward, pulling his shoulders off the floor, glaring at Anton with his corpse’s stare. Instantly Anton knew he was dead serious. This guy could make people disappear.

“
Look, Anita didn’t want me hanging around. I was her baby daddy’s kid brother. Outlaw, criminal, riding with a new club. I kept it cool. I wouldn’t interfere with her business but Lola was my big brother’s kid. She was my blood. I knew the Romans were gunnin’ for Anita but they also knew who I was and who had my back. The Warmasters don’t fuck around. The Romans weren’t gonna start an all-out war. My brother got killed and we all had to live with it. Snitches get stitches as the niggers say.”

Anton set the Lysol can down, feeling the onset of shame. His heartbeat returned to a human level.

“
So you kept a relationship with Lola throughout her life?”

“
Yeah,” he groaned, trying to get comfortable. The burns glistened as they settled. “But I wasn’t no parent. I was locked up so many times there would be years where she wouldn’t see me. I’d move out and have to track her down ’cause her momma went and got ’em kicked out of some place. By that time, she was a teenager and gettin’ into trouble. Finally screwed up one too many times as a juvey and got sent away by the court.”

Anton looked at Jack. “Miles of Mountains.”

“
Yeah,” Frank said. “
That
place. Court sends these kids up to Flagstaff to set ’em straight. Man, they beat her, starved her. She practically froze to death. A couple girls were raped. She couldn’t contact anyone, but she reached out to me once she got away. A whole group of them just up and left one night. I didn’t hear from her for a while until she called me from jail. She’d been arrested for shoplifting.”

“
And you bonded her out.”

“
Fuck yeah, I did. Took me a few days of creative enterprising to put together the scratch for bail. But I did it. When she got out she told me she and these friends of hers from that program were just wandering around with these two dudes. Ex-military guys. I could tell when I saw her that she was turning into her mother. Hangin’ ’round a couple of meth heads. Living out of cheap motels, going place to place. She was using, too. I could tell. She’d lost so much weight. Lola’d always been a chubby girl. I guess that and being starved for two months up in the cold-ass mountains.”

Anton started to piece things together.

“
Did her mom know that she was out of the program and wandering around Arizona?”

He nodded. “I tole her that. Even got the names of the guys so we could run their records. I didn’t want my niece getting caught up with no bad dudes, prior military or not. I ride with plenty of vets, son. They ain’t no better than the rest of us.”

“
Did you run their records?”

“’
Course. I’m a con myself. I know the system. If you got a sheet or you’re a kiddie fiddler your info’s public record. Sure as shit, one of the dude’s she’s shacking up with is a goddamn SO,” he said.

Anton recognized the prison slang for sex offender.

“
So Lola knew that this guy, his name was Osvaldo Garcia, was a registered sex offender?”

“
She did. C’mon, you’re a lawyer, right? Shit’s public; you can find it on the Internet.”

Anton nodded. Ever since the nineties state and federal agencies had been publishing sex offender information online.

“
What about tattoos?” Jack said, taking a cautious step forward. “When Lola went missing, the photo was of a chubby, sullen-looking sixteen-year-old girl. You saw she had lost weight from drugs and being starved up in the mountains. She also had a tattoo on her wrist. Her missing persons report said nothing about it; but her arrest report from Flagstaff said she did. Letters on her wrist: B-A-E-B-A. Same with the other kids.”

“
Yeah,” Wheaton said. “They had gotten tattoos. After they ran away from the mountains. Some shit that had some meaning between them.”

“
All four of them?” Anton asked.

Wheaton lifted his head off the tile, confusion furrowing his forehead. “What the hell are you talking ’bout, son?

CHAPTER 60

Jack and Anton left the house with Frank Wheaton still tied to the drainpipe. They weren’t going to risk letting him up, not after what had been done to him.

Jack drove, the car rumbling over the bridge, across the nearly empty Colorado, back into California.

Anton felt his phone vibrating on his belt. He checked the screen. It was Bryan, calling again from Metro West. Anton let it go to voicemail, as he had with the five others.

Anton and Jack didn’t say a word to one another. They took the drive in silence, trying to take in everything that had happened. Everything that Frank had told them.

The waning adrenaline made Anton’s hands tremble. He gripped the edges of Mandy’s iPad, trying to hold it still. He picked up a fleeting Wi-Fi signal and opened Google Maps. He searched
payson arizona
. A pale green topographic map filled the screen. State Road 87—the Beeline Highway—snaked northbound out of the Phoenix metro area, veering to the northwest at Payson, forming a Y with Highway 260, splitting off into the east and into Show Low. Anton traced his finger along Highway 260, running across the northern rim of the Tonto National Forest, the place where Osvaldo Garcia was found camping out.

Anton placed his finger on the other arm of the Y, the site just east of Tonto Natural Bridge State Park where the RV had been parked. He followed the Beeline south, just beneath the convergence of the two highways, the spot where the crash occurred.

Frank was right.

“
You know,” Jack said out of the corner of his mouth. Dried blood lined his lips. Bruising settled around his chin. “Under normal circumstances that guy would’ve kicked your ass.”

Anton watched as the control tower at Blythe Airport rose over the sloping horizon.

“
These aren’t ordinary circumstances.”

CHAPTER 61

Judge Morales’s whole demeanor changed the moment she saw Jack sitting second chair.

“
Mr. Savarese, what a surprise.”

Jack stood up. His wife had done a bang-up job of applying concealer to his bruise. His cracked tooth would have to wait for a visit to the dentist.

“
Always a pleasure to be before the lovely Sonia Morales,” he said, bowing his head in her direction. “I still remember doing battle with you when you were a feisty young prosecutor. Back before you were the Honorable Sonia Morales.”

She smiled. “I was always honorable.”

Jack chuckled. “That you were, sweetheart.”

Jack was one of a handful of Gerstein Building regulars who could get away such panache. Anton would be held in contempt and thrown in jail if he ever called Sonia Morales
sweetheart
.

“
Well then, Mr. Savarese, are you going to be sitting in on the rest of this trial?”

Jack stood again, casting his eyes upon the courtroom. He winked at Sylvia.

“
The chance to match wits with Sylvia Kaplan? You betcha! I’ve been trying cases against her since
she
was a feisty young prosecutor.”

Only Jack could penetrate Sylvia’s stone-cold facade.

“
Okay, now I feel old,” she said, breaking into a rare but sincere smile. “More the merrier. Good to have you, Jack.”

He pointed to the empty jury box. “Let’s dance.”

Morales asked Diego to bring in the jury. Everyone rose, paying respect to the jurors, the judges of the facts of the case.

The jurors took their seats. Anton noticed that even though the weekend had passed, they all seemed to find the same seats they had taken during the previous week. Some sense of familiarity, maybe. The enduring nature of human routine. The more studious jurors held their pens and legal pads. The ones who looked like they couldn’t wait for this to be over left theirs on their laps.

Morales nodded to her court reporter and announced that they were back on the record. She read the style into the record and had all parties announce their appearances for the record. After acknowledging that the defendant was present she invited the state to call their next witness.

Sylvia stood, a smug gleam in her eyes. “Your Honor, State calls Daniella Avery.”

As Diego went out to get her, Bryan leaned behind Jack’s chair, which had been positioned in the middle as a buffer.

“
I tried to call you all weekend? What the hell?”

Anton held up a
shush
finger. “I’ll take care of her, don’t worry.”

Diego ushered Daniella into the witness box. The jury watched, their eyes shifting between her and Bryan, trying to gauge a size comparison. Daniella wore her hair down and just a little makeup that highlighted her features without masking them. She wore the same gray knife-pleat skirt she had worn during the Arthur Hearing and a white blouse with a ruffled collar.

Anton clung to the hope that no crime had yet been proven. Daniella was the only witness who could directly prove that Bryan had broken into her apartment and tried to kill her. Officer Villarreal had only proven the crime of resisting an officer with violence, if the jury were to discount the toxicology report showing benzodiazapine in Bryan’s blood. Vicki Brandt, and the records custodian from FIU who had given quick testimony for the purpose of laying the foundation for the admission of Brandt’s student financial records, had only proven a previous, collateral incident. The judge would instruct the jury that they could only use evidence of prior bad acts for the limited purpose of proving that Bryan had carried out his crime relying on the same motive, opportunity, and plan that he had used to commit a separate and unrelated crime. The judge would remind the jury that Bryan was not on trial for the crime against Vicki Brandt.

The hope fleeted as he recalled Thursday afternoon. The hours-long testimony on redirect of Vicki Brandt while Sylvia meticulously dissected each and every vile indiscretion the freshman girl had been subjected to. Acts that couldn’t even be classified as consensual sex. It was degradation and shame. It was a form of rape.