Defensive Wounds (16 page)

“I'm wrapping up my exam of the crime scene. I'll just be another—”

“Now.”

Her stomach began to knot from the bottom up. “Frank, what's wrong?”

“You have to get your daughter away from that guy.”

Theresa borrowed an empty maid's cart to secure the evidence and her equipment in the county station wagon, keeping only her camera and other rudimentary items. The cart reduced this chore to one trip, but it still took twenty precious minutes before she could ride the elevator to the lobby. Her heart began to pound. His own tendencies aside, her cousin usually tried to convince Theresa to be less protective of Rachael, not more. Something in William Rosedale's past must have changed his mind.

The lobby teemed with people, lawyers on break before the two-o'clock sessions began, and she did not see Frank among them. She didn't even know where he was coming from; if he'd called from his office, he would probably walk the two blocks instead of getting his car out of the police-headquarters garage and then having to find another space around Tower City. She moved through the crowd. Though most were dressed in casual clothes, she could tell by their glances that her scuffed sneakers and Target stretch khakis seemed to peg her as not belonging.

She passed by the front desk, where Rachael handed a key card to a tall man in African garb, and reached the lounge. Still no Frank, but she did see a familiar mop of dishwater-blond hair.

“Sonia!”

The attorney moved away from two young men with what sounded like a snarky comment, clutching an overstuffed briefcase with one broken handle. She squeezed through another clique of lawyers to reach Theresa. “Hey, how's it going? Any clues? I know you can't tell me, but please say you're going to catch this psycho.”

“Tell me about William Rosedale.”

White spots appeared in the perpetual flush of Sonia's cheeks. “I … I can't.”

“Can't or won't? It's because he's a client, isn't he?”

“He
was
a client, for about a half hour, and he was in shock at the time, poor kid, which is probably why he doesn't recognize me. But it's still privileged, Theresa—you know that. I'm sorry.” And indeed she did look sorry, so sorry that Theresa gripped the woman's elbow with little consideration for comfort and dragged her across the lounge, dropping her into a chair next to the window. It gave them a skinny view of the Cuyahoga River before the federal courthouse next door got in the way.

Theresa sat across from her, a round marble table between their knees. “Talk.”

“I can't tell you anything, Theresa. This isn't a witness stand, and I'm sorry, but you don't have the power to compel my testimony.”

“This is
my
witness stand, and it's my daughter. I'm compelling.”

Sonia's face settled into an expression of genuine empathy. Theresa wondered if her clients often saw this same look. “I very briefly represented William Rosedale, four years ago. It was a juvenile case and has been duly sealed. If you want to know more than that, you'll have to ask him.”

Theresa considered this, considered how seriously Sonia took her job, and sat back against the cobalt upholstery. The lawyer seemed to breathe a sigh of relief.

Besides, Theresa thought, she'd find out from Frank soon enough. Theresa surveyed the now-thinning crowd. No cousin.

“I have to get to my next seminar,” Sonia said. “ ‘Victory in Street-Crime Cases.' ”

“Be careful, Sonia. Have you heard from Surfer Girl? You should take any threat seriously.”

“Oh, please. She's frustrated and grieving. If I lost my fiancé to a drunk driver, I'd be frustrated and grieving, too—it hardly makes her a psycho sex slayer.”

“Don't be too sure. That empathetic heart is going to get you in trouble someday.”

“Has all my life. Why stop now? But what are you finding with Bruce? Is it the same person who killed Marie? It's got to be, right?”

“ ‘Bruce'? Did you know him? He was from Cleveland originally.”

“Um … no, not really. He was at the PD when I started there, but only for another month or two. Then he went to private.”

“Uh-huh. What else can you tell me about him?”

Sonia hesitated, no doubt wondering what part of an acquaintanceship could be considered privileged. “He wasn't a bad attorney. Sort of a steamroller, but he could come up with some pretty ingenious motions when he took the time to apply himself. He made one heck of a mens rea argument to get that ATM robber twenty years instead of life. You remember that one—the guy robbed a woman while she was making an ATM withdrawal and wound up shooting her.”

“
Wound up
shooting her? He shot her dead for fifty bucks, with her two children in the backseat. And somehow that's not his fault?”

“Of course it's his
fault
. But he didn't have the desire or purpose in mind to murder, only to rob.”

“I'm sorry, you take a gun to an ATM intending to rob somebody, then you can't just say ‘I didn't mean to' after pulling the trigger.”

“Legally, it makes a difference—at least it did to the jury. Anyway, that was Bruce.” A waitress in black pants and a snow-white shirt came by for drink orders, but they waved her off.

“Why did he move to Atlanta?” Theresa asked. “Did he accumulate too many enemies here?”

Sonia laughed. “He moved because a firm there offered him a larger salary. He didn't care about power, only money. When it came to money, he was as driven as Marie. Maybe that's why they got along.”

“They knew each other?”

Again that pause, as if deciding what she could share without abetting the enemy. “He and Marie dated for a short time. I mean, they hooked up for three or four months—I don't know if you'd call it dating. Marie never did anything as ordinary as
dating
. But they were tight for a while, both in and out of the courtroom.”

“While you were all at the public defender's office?”

“After that, I think. They worked for different firms, but they'd still show up in court on each other's cases occasionally. They made a good team, in their way. Bruce came up with the out-of-the-box thinking—wild, hyperaggressive tacks. Marie had the stage presence to make them work. They should have opened their own office. They could have gotten Vlad the Impaler off with time served.”

“Why didn't they?”

“Egos, I think. Too big to be in the same room for long, much less the same office.”

“How do you know all this if you were only acquainted with them?”

A faint blush. “I told you, Cleveland's a big small town in a lot of ways. Scuttlebutt said Marie was pregnant at one point.”

“When was that?”

“After Bruce left the PD. But nothing came of it. I'll bet she actually ate dinner for a change and the bulge in her belly set someone's imagination running.”

But then Bruce moved to another city … “Did you ever hear gossip about their relationship getting … kinky?”

“You mean S&M, like how you found their bodies?”

“Yes.”

She expected Sonia to scoff, to agree with her theory that the sexual aspects of the murders had been staged to heap further humiliation upon the victims. But the lawyer said nothing, pensively tracing an ebony line through the glossy marble of the tabletop.

“Sonia? Don't tell me there's something to it? That there's really some secret dominatrix ring of criminal defense attorneys?”

“What? No, of course not.”

“Sonia, I'm not looking to smear their names. But if you want me to find out who killed them, you have to tell me what was going on in their lives. The killer left them trussed up for some reason. He wanted us to see them like that, and that fact could tell us who he is. Or she.”

Sonia merely chuckled, though without much mirth. “I hate to disappoint your colleagues, but there is no secret or even not-so-secret sex club of kinky defense lawyers. Do we have the same amount of office relationships, affairs, and meaningless hookups as any other profession? Yes, certainly. Probably even more so.” Sonia abruptly leaned forward, both palms flat on the cool stone. “You have to understand what it's like being an attorney. We're adrenaline junkies, like Navy SEALs or car salesmen. We love the stalking, the hunt, the triumph of winning. We like to argue.
I
like to argue. Why do you think I persist in this job where sometimes my own clients hate me even more than the cops do, because I'm white or because I'm female or because I got an education and they didn't? The victims think I'm a sellout to my own gender, and the judges treat me like I'm a high-school girl drawing bleeding hearts in her notebook.”

“Why do you, then?”

The woman gave her a crooked smile. “Because I love it. You probably think I'm nuts, but I love my job. I like to make deals. These people need me, even when they won't admit it. I love being able to get help for them, and even when I can't, at least someone tried on their behalf. If I quit, what would I do? Write up real-estate contracts? Manage a charity, spend my time begging rich people for money? I'd wake up every morning knowing that day would be a waste, and every day afterward.”

“Okay,” Theresa said.

“Anyway, it's like why cops date cops—because no one else understands the lousy hours. So if Bruce balanced being an asshole in court with letting someone beat on him in the bedroom, it's really not that surprising.”

Theresa blinked at her friend. “How did you know that?”

“Oops. This is one of those Perry Mason moments, isn't it? When the witness lets something slip? Because once or twice I was the one doing the beating, okay?”

The skin tingled at the nape of Theresa's neck. “
What?
You and Bruce …? I'm sorry. Are you okay?”

“Please, Theresa, it's not like I'm upset. Not everyone is like you—true blue, in it for love. Bruce and I got together years ago, because it was mutually convenient. Love wasn't part of the deal.
Dinner
wasn't part of the deal.”

“And leather accessories were?”

“Do you think I'd get a man into bed
without
wearing a mask?”

That was not the answer Theresa had expected. “Sonia, that's not fair, and it's not correct—”

“Don't even think about giving me the ‘but you have a lovely personality' bit!” Sonia snapped, as passionately as in any closing argument. “We roomed together for three years. How many dates did I have?”

Theresa refused to answer but thought,
One
. Maybe two.

“So don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about. Men hate my personality even more than they hate my looks—and I'm not interested in changing either. Besides, the masks, the accoutrements … it made it so different from the courtroom. I could pretend the sex happened in an alternate universe, that it wasn't really real.” She slumped back. “Not to mention that I didn't mind a chance to hit back, let someone else's heart or whatever bleed for a change.”

Theresa offered neither comfort nor censure, both of which would ring hollow. Like any woman, she didn't like certain aspects of her looks, but at least she'd never had to know how it felt to dislike every
single
aspect. “And that's all Bruce was to you?”

“Absolutely. He was a slightly more prudent choice than a complete stranger in a bar, who might be a disease-riddled psycho. That's all.”

Sonia spoke with utter finality, but still Theresa wondered if there might be some things she wouldn't admit, even to herself—and if Bruce Raffel had been one of those things. “So Bruce had a kinky side. What about Marie?”

“Don't know for sure, but I would doubt it. Rumors regarding Marie Corrigan have run the gamut from blackmailing a judge to eating babies, but S&M? No. You want to know about Marie Corrigan's proclivities, you'll have to ask Dennis Britton. And while you're there, ask him how his first wife died.”

“What? Sonia, I know you don't like him, but really—”

The attorney checked her watch, and Theresa glanced up to see Frank striding toward them.

“Her name was Ellie Baker,” Sonia said. “I met her my first week on the job. She eventually specialized in white-collar crimes, the lowly bookkeepers who snap one day and run off to the Bahamas with the monthly payroll. She was smart and tough and kind of a health nut. There's only one thing she wasn't, and that's why she's dead.”

Theresa raised an eyebrow.

“She wasn't rich.”

Then Sonia bailed out, of both the conversation and the room.

Not rich, Theresa thought. Unlike Mrs. Britton number two … No, Sonia's imagination had run away with her. Dennis Britton had married her friend, and then she died. He had coerced her client, and then he died. The same overboardness that made Sonia accuse cops of planting evidence on her misunderstood clients made her see patterns that didn't exist. Better to concentrate on the murders, which did.