Murder in the Courthouse (14 page)

“Make that one judge, one court reporter, and
three
sheriffs, Hailey.”

There was a long silence between them as they entered the elevator alone. “She obviously lived a very, um,” Hailey searched for the right word, “. . .
full
life.”

“Hailey?”

“Yes, Finch?”

“You should have been a diplomat. The UN could use you.”

“Shut up, Finch.”

The doors to the elevator swished open and outside, it looked warm and dazzlingly bright. Heading through the huge oak courthouse doors, they stepped into the sunshine.

“Hey, Finch? Is she the same Eleanor that Alton Turner kept emailing?”

CHAPTER TWELVE

“O
h, darn! I left my bag in there!” Finch and Hailey both stopped in their tracks. They had just made it up several flights of stairs and all the way to their rental car in the courthouse parking deck.

“What's in it, Hailey? I thought you brought it all with you to the cafeteria. I saw your iPad, I know, there on the table.” Finch looked over at her as if he couldn't believe that she, Hailey Dean, would ever make a fundamental mistake like leaving anything of value in an open courtroom. A courtroom usually full of criminals.

“Nothing really valuable. And you're right. I did bring my iPad, iPhone, and BlackBerry with me to lunch. But I left my shrug and carry bag of notes in the courtroom to save our seats. The bag is just the old canvas one I've had forever, nobody would want it. Or my notes on the trial . . . nobody would want those . . . but me!”

Side by side, the two headed back down the same flight of concrete stairs they'd just climbed up. It led to a side door to the front entrance. “OK. I'll walk back with you. But one thing . . . what's a
shrug
?”

“You have a wife and two daughters, right? It's a sweater, for Pete's sake!”

“Whatever. I'll go back with you even though you are cutting into our pizza time.”

“I never agreed to more pizza. Let's just get that on the record right now.” At the top of the granite steps, Finch tried the front center door.

“It's past closing time, Hailey. Door's locked.”

“Let me try the one on the side.” Hailey twisted the knob of the huge door on the right, one of three across the massive front façade.

The knob turned under her hand, and she pushed the big door forward. The doors opened into an anteroom leading to a massive lobby. Front and center was a huge walk-through metal detector positioned directly in front of the center door. The rest of the lobby was cordoned off, so Hailey and Finch had to go back through the machine again. Sitting beside it reading a magazine was a lone sheriff working the overnight shift.

“Hey, man. What's up?” Fincher greeted him.

“Hey Fincher, Miss Dean. What brings you back to the courthouse so soon? Didn't all the courtrooms adjourn right after Elle . . . I mean . . . did you guys hear about the excitement in the cafeteria?”

Fincher peeled three guns off his body (waist, shoulder, and ankle) to drop them one by one in battered white plastic bowls and put them on a conveyor belt for screening. Hailey put her iPad and phones in a plastic basket that followed along after Finch's guns.

“We didn't just hear about it, we were there,” Finch responded as they went, one by one, through the machine.

“Seriously, man? You were there?”

“Yep. We were there.” Finch spoke over his shoulder as he scooped his guns out of the plastic bowl and commenced strapping them back on, shoulder holster first. Hailey remained silent, reaching across the belt for her things, having no desire to rehash what she had just witnessed . . . the calendar clerk's untimely death and the futile struggle to keep her alive.

“Yeah, we're all pretty torn up about it. Elle was a nice lady. Always had a smile every morning, same thing every afternoon when she left work. Never had a bad word to say about a soul.” The night sheriff looked somber.

“Yeah. We heard she was pretty popular around the courthouse . . .” Finch egged him on and as a result, got a sharp jab to his right side as he bent over to strap his .38 back into his ankle holster.

“Not a word . . .
not a word
. . .” Hailey hissed it low into his ear. She didn't want to pass along pure conjecture about Eleanor Odom's “popularity.” Luckily, the night sheriff didn't catch her exchange with Fincher.

“Elle always organized Christmas parties, the annual walk-a-thon for needy kids, Toys for Tots . . . the works.” He reminisced out loud but in a lowered voice, still looking downcast.

“We, as a matter of fact,” Finch replied, “were in the cafeteria when she had her stroke, heart attack, whatever it was, poor lady, and we walked out without going back to where Hailey left her sweater and notes on a bench to save our seats during lunch. Mind if we go up and get them?”

“What courtroom was it?” the sheriff asked, still sitting in his chair, magazine now folded shut in his lap.

“Hmm. Let me see . . . what courtroom was it, Hailey?”

“Judge Alverson's. Luther Alverson, seventh floor.”

“Right. The Todd Adams trial? You guys on that one?” The sheriff's eyes sparked with interest.

“Yep. I made the collar on Adams in Atlanta and Hailey's here as an expert witness.”

“For the defense? You're a witness for the defense? You're the lady prosecutor from Atlanta, right?”

“
Was
a lady prosecutor in Atlanta.
Was
.”

“Never lost a case, right? Read about you. You're a witness for the defense now? I hear DelVecchio pays his witnesses pretty good.”

Hailey bristled. “I'm a witness for the state. There are some things money can't buy,
officer
.”

He looked embarrassed. “Right. I shoulda known you wouldn't turn coat. I just thought, you know, once somebody's out of the system, they can turn all that time in the trenches around for a lot of money, right?”

Hailey relented. “Right.” She threw him a bone, a little smile.

“So, we'll head up to the courtroom if that's OK with you.” Fincher switched gears, tactfully, for once in his life.

“Well, yeah, about that. The courtroom's been cleared and locked. If you left anything in there, it's in lost and found now. It's right over there across the lobby in the clerk's office. I'm right out here, so it's still unlocked. I can't leave my post; just walk through those double doors and go straight back through the cubicles. You'll see a sign on
the wall. Everything left in courtrooms or elsewhere will be in that big bin under a sign. You can't miss it.”

“OK.” Finch nodded his head.

“They usually won't let you back there without a courthouse employee, but seeing as you're law enforcement, I guess I don't need to escort you. Just don't steal anything or it'll be my hide.”

“OK, thanks, man. We promise not to steal a thing.”

“Thanks, Sheriff.” Hailey echoed Finch over her shoulder as they headed past austere-looking portraits of decades of past sitting Chatham County judges and across the lobby toward the central elevator bank. Veering left, they came to a set of double doors with a placard reading “Clerk's Office” overhead.

Fincher pushed through and Hailey followed him into a large open office area full of at least sixty cubicles in neat rows divided by carpeted footpaths. More placard signs hung down from a particleboard ceiling, dividing the open area into clerks, sheriff intake, transport, marriage licenses, and certified documents. Each section housed multiple cubicles.

At the far end of the room, just as the night sheriff said, was a big sign reading “Lost and Found” over a huge bin. Arrows pointed down toward the bin. They headed toward it through the maze of cubes, passing row after row of work stations; each, in its own way, a thumbprint, a snapshot of the occupant's life.

Photos, certificates, trophies, and mini-posters adorned every cube. Most of the cubes had nameplates on them on the top corners of the partitions. It brought back memories of Hailey's courthouse days in a rush . . . all these people, so different yet so alike, working for the justice system. Each one a cog in a big, big wheel.

“Oh my stars, look at this, Finch. It's Alton Turner's cube. Look, it's neat as a pin, just like I thought it would be.” Finch walked back to where Hailey stood, staring at Turner's workspace, her hands lightly resting on the wheeled office chair pushed under the desktop.

While the space was inordinately neat, several photos were thumbtacked to the dividing partitions making walls of a sort around Turner's space. There were several shots of Turner with other sheriffs,
at the shooting range, a softball team, a bowling team, too. Men and women law enforcement officers standing together, smiling at the camera. Looking closely at the smiling faces, Hailey saw the woman in the center holding a team softball trophy next to Alton Turner was none other than Eleanor Odom.

Next to his keyboard was a tickler file of prisoners to be transported to various courtrooms, filed day by day. Beside that was a larger framed photo of Turner and his mom standing in front of the Grand Canyon. Even if Hailey hadn't seen the oil painting in Alton's home, anyone could see their connection. Her eyes, chin, and nose matched Alton's exactly. In this shot, Alton had his arm around his mom's shoulders protectively. They were smiling at the camera, squinting into the sunshine. Another was a shot of her, bust up, taken by a professional photographer that could have easily come from the church directory, like the one over Alton's mantle.

“Look at this. He's across the path from Eleanor Odom.” Finch pointed right behind them. Hailey turned around to see two cubicles apparently merged into one large cube. Multiple photos of Eleanor were plastered to its walls. Her in what looked to be a glamour shot, at a Christmas party dressed in a black velvet mini with black heels and a tiny matching clutch, her hair done in a Farrah Fawcett-style'do. Roller skating with a tall, mustached guy Hailey immediately recognized as the suntanned sheriff crying in the cafeteria hallway.

Another showed her jogging, clearly in a race of some sort, crossing the finish line with other courthouse personnel, including Deputy Marks from the cafeteria. A huge bouquet of long-stemmed pink roses stood in a clear crystal vase to the left of her keyboard, the tiny rectangular card still stuck in a tall plastic fork emerging from between delicate pink blooms. It read, “Lots of love, B.R.”

Looking at it carefully, Hailey and Finch exchanged glances. “Guess we know who sent that. B.R. isn't much of a secret. It's her married judge, Bill Regard, right, Hailey?” Finch gazed back at the flowers.

“Yep.” Hailey acknowledged his find. “I bet dating a married man is a lonely life. A life you fill up with bowling and softball.”

“And toy drives,” Finch added.

“Yep, toy drives.”

They stood a moment looking at the display. “Hey look, Hailey. Her email's still up.”

“Finch, get out of her business! The woman's dead.” But even as she spoke, Hailey craned over to see the list of emails up on the screen.

“Check out all these emails from Alton Turner!” Finch exclaimed.

“That doesn't mean anything, they worked together, practically on top of each other.” As she said the words, she spotted what Fincher meant. At least twenty to thirty emails, one after the next, from Turner. They had been opened.

“But Turner's been dead for two days now. She was just reading them?”

“Well,” Hailey began, “. . . I think she was
re-reading
them. Look.” Hailey clicked open one of the emails. “See, she opened this one yesterday, Monday, when she got to work. Look at the date, he sent these the morning before he died.”

“So she was re-reading them just before she went up to the cafeteria then. What do they say?”

“Finch, I don't think we should read her . . .”

“OK. In this one, he's just saying they should get a sandwich for lunch. That's innocent enough. But look, now he's telling her she's making a bad decision. It's got to be about the judge. And look, Hailey, here he is asking her if she wants to see a movie. I think he had a crush on her.”

“Well, who wouldn't?” Hailey countered. “She's young, she's beautiful, she jogs, plays softball . . .”

“She runs the toy drive and dates a married judge plus one court reporter and three sheriffs that we know of . . .”

“You made your point! I get it! I'm going to stop spying on a dead woman and get my sweater and bag, I hope.” Hailey turned and headed down the row toward the lost and found bin and looked in.

It was surprisingly full of items left behind throughout the courthouse . . . jackets; a backpack; a little black beaded shoulder bag just big enough for a few items; several lined notepads covered in scribbled
writing, probably lawyers' notes; a kid's green LeapFrog computer; and a brown leather briefcase.

And sure enough, there it was, right on top of the pile of forgotten belongings. Hailey's sweater was neatly folded and placed on her old canvas bag.

“See? Somebody turned it in. There are
still
good people in this world.” Hailey called over her shoulder as she bent over to get her things.

“Finch! Get out of her email!” He was still standing at Elle's space when Hailey turned around.

“I'm not in her email anymore! I'm at another cubicle looking at alligators!”

“What? Did you just say you're looking at alligators?”

“Yep. Alligators. I'm at the cubicle next to hers. Look at this inmate transport guy's space! All these postcards and pictures of all sorts of wild animals. And here's an old one of Steve Irwin. And here's one of that other wild animal guy . . . Jack Hanna.”

Hailey paused briefly, looking at all the exotic animals and photo safari shots. By the huge stack of inmate transport sheets next to his computer screen, he clearly was not afraid of handling dangerous animals.