The Disappearance (53 page)

“I go on at six in the morning, when we open, finish at two. The other shift works two until ten, when we close.” Even her voice is tired.

Walking to the witness stand, he takes an eight-by-ten color glossy out of a folder and hands it to her. “Did you see this man that morning, in your restaurant?”

She looks at the photograph. “Yes. I did.”

“You’re positive? There’s no doubt in your mind?”

“Absolutely not. He was there.”

He walks over to the jury box, holds the picture up for all to see: a head-shot photograph of Doug Lancaster. “This is the man,” he repeats, talking to her, but looking at the jurors.

“Yes.”

“When was he there? Do you recall the time?”

“Between seven-fifteen and eight, give or take ten minutes.”

“How can you be sure of the time?”

“We take a five-minute break every two hours,” she explains. “Like I said, I came on at six, so my break was at eight. He had left a few minutes before.”

Luke nods sagely. “How can you be so certain you aren’t mistaken about his identity?” he asks, turning back to her. “This happened over a year ago.”

“I know that. But he was very upset. He was sitting in a booth at my station and he looked like somebody who had just gone through something terrible. I didn’t know what, but I asked him if he was all right. I asked him twice.”

“What was his answer?”

“That he wanted to be left alone.”

“Did he have anything to eat?” Luke asks.

“He had black coffee. I refilled his cup twice.”

“You’re not an expert, of course,” Luke says, “but did it look to you like he might have been up all night?”

“Objection!” Logan calls out. “Speculative, calls for an opinion.”

“Overruled,” Ewing says immediately, surprising both men. He instructs the woman to answer the question.

“People come in all the time that’ve been up all night,” she says. “It’s easy to spot. Their clothes are wrinkled, their hair isn’t combed, they’re yawning.” She smiles. “You don’t have to be a genius to know if someone’s been up or not.”

“Waitress’s intuition,” Luke says warmly. This is a good witness; hell, this is a great witness. “So your answer is …?”

“The man in that picture looked to me like he had been up all night.”

“Good,” Luke says. He pauses for a moment, then continues. “Getting back to the identification. You said you know it was the man in the picture I just showed you because he had been visibly upset, and that drew your attention.”

“Yes.”

“But still, that was over a year ago. Over that long period of time, isn’t it possible you could be mistaken? That the man you thought you saw wasn’t really him, maybe it was someone who looked like him? Isn’t that possible?”

She shakes her head. “But that’s not why I know.”

He smiles at her. “And why is that?”

“Because two days later I saw him on the television set. He was talking about how his daughter had been kidnapped. It was such a shock, seeing him. I was watching with my girlfriend, another waitress from work, this was on the six o’clock news, and I said to her, ‘That man was in the restaurant two mornings ago. He was so upset then.’ That’s what I told her. And I thought, when I was watching him, that he was upset because she had disappeared.”

“And it wasn’t until later that you realized that he had been in your restaurant
before
she was discovered to be missing?” Luke asks, leading her on.

Her quiet “Yes” and Logan’s earsplitting objection come simultaneously.

“Overruled!” Ewing comes back with equal force.

Jesus, Luke thinks, standing there, this could actually work. “Please answer the question again, so the jury can hear you clearly,” he tells her.

“Yes,” she says. “He was in the restaurant that morning.”

It’s getting towards the close of day. Ray Logan worked Mrs. De Wilde over vigorously, cajoling, bullying, threatening, but she stuck to her story: She had personally served Doug Lancaster in her restaurant on the morning his daughter went missing from her bedroom. As far as she is concerned, there is absolutely no doubt about that.

Judge Ewing excuses her. He looks down at his witness sheet, then up at the clock. “Do you have any more witnesses you plan on calling?” he asks Luke.

Luke shakes his head. He’s done all he can do with what he has. He had thought, long and hard, about calling Doug Lancaster. Lancaster’s non-whereabouts on the night his daughter was abducted, now buttressed by this witness, could go a long way towards establishing good reasonable doubt in the minds of the jurors. And he was itching to tear into Lancaster, for reasons both professional and personal.

He and Judge Freddie had debated the situation at length.

“Don’t do it,” De La Guerra had counseled, after they’d hashed the pros and cons over for half the night.

“He’s a sitting duck,” Luke had protested. “I can tear his ass up from here to Bakersfield.”

“You
think
you can,” the judge had retorted. “But are you positive, one hundred percent?”

“Meaning what?”

“What’s the old adage, Luke? You don’t ask a question if you don’t know what the answer’s going to be. Yes, he’s been stonewalling and lying from day one, and you may nail him, nail him good. But he could be lying in the weeds, waiting for you to come at him with this, and then slam you with something unexpected.”

It was too strong a point to ignore. In the end, he decided to err on the side of caution. He had this witness who had placed Doug within forty miles of his house a few hours after Emma had been kidnapped. He would use that in his closing statement, hammer it home. The father had lied, the father was close by. And there wouldn’t be any surprises. The only other thing he could do that he hasn’t is call Joe Allison to the stand, and hell will freeze over to the core of the earth before he does that.

“No, I don’t.” He pauses, then says the magic words: “Your Honor, pending rebuttal witnesses, the defense rests.”

A collective sigh of relief wafts up to the ceiling. Ewing makes a couple of notes to himself. “Tomorrow being Friday, our dark day, we will recess this trial until eight o’clock Monday morning, at which time I will instruct the jury. Counsel for both sides should be prepared for closing arguments immediately following.” One final whack of his gavel, and he sweeps out of the room.

Luke sits at the defense table, trying to make eye contact with the individual jurors as they’re led from the room. Starting tonight, they’ll be sequestered until they’ve reached a verdict.

Sitting next to him, Joe Allison leans in close. “You did great, Mr. Garrison. Thanks a lot.”

Luke doesn’t conceal what has become a growing distaste for the man. “Don’t thank me,” he says sourly. “It isn’t over, not by a long shot.”

The jail deputy leads Allison away. Luke remains sitting, waiting for the courtroom to empty out. He’s drained; he doesn’t want to face anyone this evening, especially the press. Finally, the chamber empty, he gathers his papers into his briefcase, rises wearily to his feet, and starts to leave.

One spectator still remains. Glenna Lancaster, in her ever-present black, is standing by the back door, watching him. Staring at him, no expression on her face.

A harpy, he thinks, in the classical sense, a guardian at the gate of her own private hell, standing watch over her daughter’s fate. Trying to will him to go away, him and Joe Allison. Especially Joe. The man she had befriended, taken to her bed, who then turned his back on her and took up with her daughter (that Allison had never been serious about her is out of her ken), who, Luke knows she’s convinced, abducted and killed her daughter.

He has to walk by her to get out. Well, no sense in postponing the inevitable. Trudging towards her, he looks at her, not aggressively, but warily, the way you eyeball a dangerous dog that’s planted itself in the middle of the sidewalk, right in your path. Move, please, he thinks, turn and go.

She holds her ground. He passes by her, no more than three feet separating them as he reaches the high, heavy door.

He’s going to have to say something; he can’t brush by her without an acknowledgment. It would be unspeakably rude, even cruel.

“Glenna …”

She says nothing.

“I’m sorry.” That’s all he can come up with.
I’m sorry. For everything, for everything, for everything.

L
UKE’S PREPARATION OF HIS
summation to the jury is going to take all his weekend time. He burrows himself in his office, reading over the transcripts, making notes, thinking about the angles. Maria Gonzalez seeing Allison on the property is deadly, a real bullet to the heart, especially when combined with the other evidence, which was killer stuff to begin with, but it’s still not an absolute smoking gun. He might be able to plant some slim doubts in the jurors’ minds about her credibility. No one actually saw Allison with her body, alive or dead, and no murder weapon has ever been found.

But the worst thing you can do is lie to yourself. The prosecution’s case, looking at it with a cold, objective eye, forswearing emotion and passion, is almost bulletproof. There’s motive: she was pregnant, she was going to blow the whistle on him. Opportunity: he was there, according to the eyewitness. And the strong circumstantial evidence—the key ring, the shoes, the condoms. Everything he’s known, and everything he’s learned, points in one straight line: a guilty verdict.

But he’s got to keep plugging away. The rules don’t change when you’re losing.

Riva, antsy, is sleuthing on her own. It’s way late in the day, but she doesn’t have much else to do, and she has her own theory that she can’t let go of—that Allison slept with Emma, knocked her up, but didn’t kill her.

Nicole Rogers, of course, is on her mind. And with that suspicion, she’s started pursuing another element. It’s a hit-and-miss kind of investigation, what she’s doing. She isn’t a real detective with an established private investigator’s tools at her disposal—networking, computer programs, contacts in and out of law enforcement. Although she has the smarts of one and the curiosity as well, she lacks the resources—plus, she’s pregnant and is often, to her annoyance, tired, which makes her cranky; she’s a woman of action, she doesn’t like being tired, sapped of energy—and she has nothing tangible to go on. It’s all intuition. The truth is out there, as her favorite television show proclaims. But where?

What’s the old rule? Follow the money. Joe Allison is the money in this case. So recreate a couple of typical days in his life and follow him.

One problem: his place of employment, the television station, took a lot of his time, and she can’t tread in those waters, so she tools around the periphery: where he worked out, where he hung out, ate, drank, socialized. The organizations he belonged to, his community work.

Kris & Jerry’s is a popular upscale bar where many of the city’s hipper young professionals gather. The habitués knew Joe Allison as a steady customer. The barman, a buffed UCSB grad student, recalls that one woman who drank with Allison on a couple of occasions was a bourbon drinker. Designer bourbon—Maker’s Mark, she asked for it specifically. The bartender remembers her because rare is the California woman whose choice of alcohol is bourbon. He doesn’t recall her name; he doesn’t know if he was ever told. She was only with Allison those few times. “I had the idea they worked together. After work, people from the office having a drink together, the usual thing.”

Maker’s Mark bourbon. The same kind of bourbon, seal cracked, found in Joe Allison’s car. Interesting coincidence.

The woman is a friend of Glenna’s. She’s receiving Riva in her Montecito home, a few blocks from where the Lancasters used to live.

“Glenna was in an agitated state. She was drinking. She drank more than she should have.”

“You were with her?” Riva asks. “You have firsthand knowledge?”

“Yes. There were a few of us together, late that night.”

“Did she say why she was upset?”

The woman frowns. “No. Something had come up, something that had thrown her for a loop.” Riva’s interviewee, talking with the strict proviso that this conversation is off the record, lights up a Virginia Slim, sucks in a nervous drag. “I should quit.” Another vigorous puff. “I shouldn’t be talking about this.”

“Was it about a man?” Riva asks.

“I don’t think so—not this time. Not this time, but there sure were others.” The woman snorts derisively. “What we do to ourselves in the name of love. I’ve been in that position, I know.”

“This agitated state. It happened the night Emma Lancaster was abducted?”

“The very same.”

Damn, Riva’s thinking, where was I with this a month, two months ago? She doesn’t know if Luke’s going to be happy that she uncovered this stuff or upset that she did it so late. Too late to help, really. He’s rested his case. The reason this information hasn’t been found out is that they didn’t have the time or the manpower to do everything they wanted to do: they live in a finite world. And Luke has a client who never came clean, only shedding light on the truth when it was forced out of him.

If they lose the case, and this information might have made the difference, Joe Allison will have no one to blame but himself. He could’ve remembered if he drank bourbon with his lady friend, and how upset she truly was over his leaving town.

“Hello, Janet.” They’re friends now, she calls the woman by her first name.

“Hello, Riva.”

“Are you nervous, Janet? Your knee’s doing the two-step mambo.”

Doctor Lopez’s knee is bouncing up and down to a spasmodic rhythm. “I shouldn’t have talked to you. I should never have talked to anyone. I should have preserved the patient-doctor confidentiality.”

It’s Sunday afternoon. The clinic is closed. Lopez has come in at Riva’s urgent request.

“You had no choice. Her parents waived the confidentiality.”

“I should have resisted them.”

Riva commiserates with the woman. They’re sisters in their ethnicity, in this time and place a strong bond. And she likes her, she likes someone who’s trying to do the right thing. “In the end it would’ve been forced out of you, so don’t beat yourself up about it,
hermana
.”