The Disappearance (54 page)

The doctor shrugs. Like, who will ever know? “So what do you want to know now?” she asks wearily. “I’ve already testified, they’re done with me.”

“I want to know for me,” Riva tells her. “Outside of courtrooms, juries, laws. For the truth of it, whatever that is. If there can be said to be some, here.”

“So what is your question?”

“Who besides you would have known about Emma’s being pregnant? Who
could
have known?”

Lopez ponders the question. “That’s a hard one.”

“Other people working here?”

“Maybe.”

“Did you tell anyone?”

The doctor nods. “I told my colleague. Our other doctor, Sam Hablitt.”

“Who else?”

“No one else. She came in one day, and the next day she’d been kidnapped.”

“Okay. So you only told one other person.”

Lopez stares at her. “Yes.”

“Did you write anything down? Was there anything on paper?”

Lopez nods gravely. “I wrote it all down.”

“So someone could have found it, and told someone else, or taken some action.”

“No.” Lopez shakes her head vehemently.

“Why not?”

“It’s all in code. We never identify a patient by name. That way, the government or anyone else who’s trying to pry into our private affairs is stymied. It’s a huge privacy issue, particularly regarding AIDS patients and their employers and insurance companies, and we fight to maintain our autonomy and independence, tooth and nail.” Angrily, she adds, “These so-called conservatives in Washington. They’re always talking about less government, but when it comes to social programs that help poor or disadvantaged people, their pawprints are on everything. Anything to try and shut us down, the bastards!”

“I hear you,” Riva says. “So here’s my question: Who knows these codes? Or could get access to them?”

Luke, buried in work, his tension level mounting, regards Riva snappishly. “Just what I need—an overflowing new bowl of fresh distractions.”

Sunday evening, Mountain Drive. The true beginning of the end starts tomorrow. He’s fidgeting over a draft of his summation, staring intently at the screen of his laptop. As if the answer he’s looking for will leap off it, of its own volition.

“Sorrrry,” she comes back at him, miffed. “I thought you might be interested in this. Some of this, any of it.” She skitters away. “I worked my buns off all weekend, tracking this down. Try to help someone, and see the thanks you get.”

“I’m preparing my closing remarks, Riva. Only the most important summation I’ve ever made in my life.” He’s buying into his own hyperbole. “What am I supposed to do with all this?”

“Reopen the trial?” she asks hopefully.

He groans. “Reopening a trial’s serious business. You can’t waltz in there and say, ‘Listen up, Judge, I found out some new stuff that you might want to look at. Let’s stop everything and turn left ninety degrees.’ No judge in the world would ever consider that.”

“But this is important,” she argues vehemently. “It could be vital.”

“I agree. And if we’d known about it earlier, which I guess I should have, we might have found a way to use it—although it’s highly circumstantial. To go back in now and try to reopen would be an admission of incompetency.”

“You didn’t have the time to check out everything under the sun, Luke,” she reminds him. “Don’t get down on yourself again. It’s a luxury you don’t have time for. You know you were never supposed to win, Luke. You were supposed to tank this. Make it look good and exit gracefully into the night.”

His gut feels like he’s been shot, all over again. “I know.” He looks out into the night, the darkness of the canyon below them, the lights further down towards town, the oil-platform running lights out in the channel defining the horizon.

“Do you plan to do anything with my information?” she asks.

“I don’t know. It supports my theory that at the least someone additional is involved.” He sprawls out on the living room couch. “Under different circumstances I’d leak this to the press. But Doug Lancaster
is
the local press.”

“What about you?” she asks, flopping down opposite him, head to toe, presenting him with her bare feet to rub.

“What about me what?” He takes one foot in his hands, begins kneading the instep and ball.

She luxuriates in the delectable, rough caress. “There’s still someone out there who tried to kill you,” she says, moving in slow, libidinous rhythm with her foot massage.

“I know,” he replies somberly. Cocking his head towards the street: “My keepers are a constant reminder.”

“Shouldn’t you at least turn this over to the sheriff?” she asks breathily.

“Good idea.” Abruptly he lets go her foot, gets up, goes over to the dining table, which he’s using for a desk. “When I see him tomorrow.” He sits down, begins assembling his papers, turning to the speech he’s composing.

“I’m going to take a bath.” She heaves up from the couch, pads into the bathroom.

He’s locked into his final argument, but he isn’t focused, not the way he needs to be. He’s thinking about Riva, how she’s so with him it’s almost heartbreaking. He wishes he’d pursued this angle more, but you can’t do everything. His job was to defend his client, not search out and identify every possible suspect. That’s the police’s job, and they weren’t thorough enough.

Tomorrow he’ll pass this on to Sheriff Williams. Maybe something will come of it. That’s not his concern now. His sole task is to get Joe Allison an acquittal. Then, if by some miracle he pulls that off, he’ll deal with everything else.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury …”

Ray Logan is the man of the hour. And he knows it. This is his chance to shine like he’s never shone before. To stamp his seal on his office, make it his own, once and for all. Luke Garrison will be his accomplice in this task—not a willing one, but a player all the same. The king is dead, long live the king. He’s even bought a new suit for the occasion, a dark blue Hugo Boss pinstripe, which hangs on him like a million bucks.

Everyone who needs to be here, is. Doug Lancaster’s back in his customary seat in the first row behind the prosecution table. Doug is looking calm, much calmer than he’s appeared since the trial began, calmer than he’s been for months. Luke, glancing over at him as they all wait for Judge Ewing to make his entrance, marvels at the man’s newly acquired self-control. Maybe he’s accepted whatever’s going to come, Luke thinks. Or he’s convinced himself that the verdict, once these last speeches are made, will go his way.

Glenna, too, is in her usual seat. Last row, closest to the door.

He had planned on handing over Riva’s newfound information to Sheriff Williams and taking a few minutes before the day officially started to explain and discuss it, particularly as it might apply to his own shooting, but Williams, who is customarily early, came in only a minute before the bailiff called the proceedings to order.

“All rise.”

Judge Ewing, looking formidably magisterial, sweeps in with the hem of his robe trailing on the floor. He’s had a fresh haircut over the weekend, and under the top of his judicial garment he’s wearing a new tie, Luke notices, silver and navy blue silk. He looks like a judge; there’s more than a passing resemblance to the late chief justice Warren Burger. Dignified, calm, in control.

“You may proceed,” he directs Ray Logan straightaway.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury …”

Ray Logan is organized. He is on top of this. He is smooth, confident, friendly, tough. He doesn’t talk down to the jurors, he doesn’t patronize them, he doesn’t bully or in any way intimidate them.

“The facts are incontrovertible. All you have to do is look at them. There was a young, impressionable girl who was befriended by an attractive older man. The man worked for her father, so she knew him as a friend for a long time, was comfortable with him, trusted him. And as she progressed from a twelve-year-old grade schooler with braces on her teeth to a fourteen-year-old almost-woman in bloom, and her beauty and sexuality became a tangible, alive thing, she could feel her own inner stirrings, and she aroused them in this man, who has no conscience. Did she enter into sexual congress with him willingly? Yes, in all probability she did. She had a crush on this local media star. Many girls her age had a similar crush. So when the opportunity arose, all too tragically and predictably, they became lovers.

“Which you do not do, ladies and gentlemen. Not if you are an adult person with any sense of morality, of right and wrong.

“She became pregnant. She was carrying their love child. Except this was no love child, this was a fetus from hell, an albatross growing in the womb. It would be a social disgrace for her and her family if it became known, though they could weather it, as a family. Maybe she’d have an abortion—she had looked into that. Or maybe not, maybe they’d send her away on some pretext, they have plenty of money, a few months going to school in France or Italy is a wonderful experience for a young girl. And the baby would be put up for adoption. No one would ever know. Emma would survive it and her life would go on. Remember that, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. Her life would go on.

“For Joe Allison, however, the scenario was very different. This was ruination for him. He had to stop this right now, “by whatever means necessary.” That’s a military phrase meaning you do what you have to do to get the job done and protect yourself.

“So that’s what he did. He murdered her.

“Let’s follow the facts together. Emma Lancaster had missed her last two periods. She went to a clinic where her parents wouldn’t find out about her possible condition. The clinic confirmed that she was three months pregnant. That was Saturday afternoon. Immediately she tried to call Joe Allison, the father of her unborn child. They kept missing each other. Finally, after two in the morning, they connected.

“He came to the house immediately. He took her right out of her bedroom. A witness saw him do it. They went somewhere to talk about it, probably the gazebo on her parents’ property where they had made love before. We know that because the contraceptives he had used there matched the ones found a year later in his house. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here.

“Something happened between them. Maybe she wasn’t going to have an abortion after all. She was going to have the baby. And who was the father? People would want to know. Sooner or later, that would come out. Or maybe she was going to tell her father what was going on. Do you have any doubt what would have happened if she had done that? Joe Allison, up there in the gazebo with his fourteen-year-old pregnant mistress at three in the morning, had no doubts.

“There was only one way out for Joe Allison.

“We know he was there that night, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. Because a courageous woman, who initially entered this country illegally and has always been afraid of what might happen to her if she ‘got involved,’ overcame her fears and came forward. But that too would happen later.

“A year went by. For Douglas and Glenna Lancaster, a year of continuous, nonstop grieving. A year in which their lives fell apart. And during that year, their friend Joe Allison was by their side, giving comfort and support.

“And then a miracle. We admit it, folks. It wasn’t dogged police work that solved this case, this horrible, unthinkable crime. We probably would have solved it sooner or later, but there are no assurances. We were blessed. Which proves there is a God after all, I firmly believe that.

“The miracle is that Joe Allison got stopped on that drunk-driving violation. Which led to the search—all done legally, ladies and gentlemen, there is not one shred of illegality in any of the police work done in connection with this case, so cast that out of your minds, it’s a clever smokescreen to try to stop you from seeing the plain truth. But you’re more clever than that technical, desperate ploy, you see right though it.

“Allison was pulled over legally. And in his car was the key ring that had vanished from Emma Lancaster’s bedroom the year before, on the night of her murder. And when the police saw that, and then searched his house, all done legally, ladies and gentlemen, what did they find? The shoes that had made the prints found on the property and later, where the body was found. The shoes that made a deep imprint, because the wearer of them had been carrying a girl, a dead girl, who weighed more than a hundred pounds, so of course they would leave a significant imprint, they were bearing close to three hundred pounds. And that’s why the shoes are so significant.

“But there’s more. Condoms found in Joe Allison’s domicile are the exact same kind found in the gazebo. He used them for his illicit affair, with fourteen-year-old Emma Lancaster! Except one time when, in the heat of passion, he forgot to use them—or one broke, who knows, who cares?”

Logan is coming to the end.

Luke, sitting next to Joe Allison at the defense table, is watching and listening intently. This is good, he thinks. This is straightforward, solid, utterly persuasive. His adversary has even hit the bullseye on information he doesn’t know firsthand, like how Allison knocked her up. He’s got a jury that wants to convict, if they’re given a reason to and instructions on how. And Ray Logan has done that. Done it beautifully.

“There is one issue that was raised by the defense that I want to get rid of right now. That is the idea that someone else committed this brutal crime. The defense has recklessly implied that it could be Emma’s father, who loved her with a love only a father can have for a child.” Logan turns back and looks at Luke, sitting attentively at the defense table. “That didn’t happen, ladies and gentlemen of the jury.” His voice is heavy with contempt and disdain. “It’s vile, and you know it.” He pauses. “You know it.” Said almost wistfully, his voice, saying those three words, dropping to a whisper, looking out in the room, finding Doug Lancaster, making eye contact.

Logan is finishing, the final punching up. “You have everything you need for conviction, ladies and gentlemen, short of a videotape of the murder. I literally mean that. The accused was there—two witnesses saw him. That in itself is enough to convict, more than enough. But look at what else you have to take into the jury room with you, when you begin your deliberations. Emma’s key ring, missing from that day. Joe Allison’s shoes, that made the distinctive print found at the murder site and where her body was found. And the condoms found in his house that are the same ones found in the gazebo.