The Disappearance (55 page)

“We have motive, ladies and gentlemen. We have opportunity. And we have evidence. We have everything a jury would ever want to do the right thing.

“Joe Allison, a man who has absolutely no morals, had a sexual relationship with the fourteen-year-old daughter of his friend and employer. He made her pregnant. He killed her to shut her up, and hid her body. And then, to sink the rapier in even deeper, he pretended to be a grieving friend, a source of comfort and support. How do you think Emma’s parents felt when they found out that this man, who they thought was their friend—Doug Lancaster took Joe Allison out to dinner on the very night Allison was arrested and charged with his daughter’s murder—how do you think they felt when they found out that he was the one who seduced her, impregnated her, murdered her, and abandoned her to a lonely grave? Imagine yourself in their shoes, folks. It’s devastating beyond my ability to deal with, I can tell you that.”

Logan pauses for a deep breath. He’s almost home. “Your task is clear. It is to find Joe Allison guilty of first-degree murder and kidnapping, and to sentence him to death at the hand of the state. Any verdict less than that will be a gross miscarriage of justice, a betrayal of Emma Lancaster’s life, and a denial of her death.

“Don’t do that. Don’t deny her. I implore you. Her parents and all the people of the state of California implore you. Do not deny her death. If you do, you deny her life, deny that she ever existed. And she lived, ladies and gentlemen. Not for long, but she lived. She should be living still. Her murderer is. And if you let him go on living while she lies dead, you will be doing yourselves and all of us a terrible injustice.”

He turns and points a wrath-of-God finger at the defense table, homing in on Joe Allison.

“He killed her.” His voice is ablaze. “The laws of this state stipulate that when one human being murders another human being, wantonly and with malice, he should pay for that crime …
with his life
. Make this man pay the ultimate price, ladies and gentlemen. Because he made Emma Lancaster pay it.”

Well, Luke thinks, that was good. On a scale of one to ten, he’d give it an eight, eight and a half. It’s the best Luke’s ever seen Logan perform. Ray had to rise to the occasion, to prove that he is now “the man.” And he did, damn well.

He
almost
pulled it off. But this afternoon, after the jury has come back from lunch, well fed and rested, they’re going to hear the real thing.

The courtroom is empty. Luke alone is left in the big fancy chamber, to sit at his desk—the defense table—and review his speech one more time. Nothing Ray Logan said will change it, except to emphasize the issue Ray himself brought up—that not only
could
someone else have killed Emma, there is a surfeit of evidence to disprove, or at the least cast tremendous doubt on, Joe Allison’s having done so.

Was Allison there? Yes. But they don’t know that. No one knows that except him and Riva and the housekeeper Maria Gonzalez—Maria who owes her very existence to the Lancasters, Maria who saw Joe Allison at the house that night but didn’t come forward for more than a year? Who are we kidding, folks?

He’s ready. He wishes lunch was over, so he could jump into the saddle.

“Luke. Get out here! Right now!” Riva is running into the far doorway, calling to him from all the way back there.

Jumping from his chair, not knowing why but animated by the alarm in her voice, he rushes down the aisle and follows her outside into a sunlit noon where Doug Lancaster, standing on the sunken lawn outside the building, surrounded by news crews, is about to hold a press conference. The video people are setting their cameras in place—Doug’s station has the best position, of course—while the audio guys are testing their microphones, slipping different wind baffles and types of mikes on and off their booms, talking into the microphones to the recordists in the trucks parked along Anacapa and Anapamu streets.

What’s going on? Luke thinks. Looking around, he smells a setup.

He sees Ray Logan, standing to one side just out of the massed cameras’ vision, and next to him, the sheriff. The two men have taken identical stoic military-style postures, which look good to the camera in case they’re caught on screen; from where Luke is standing, in the shadow of the arched entrance forty yards away, he can see that beyond the for-show, impassive facade they’re presenting to the world, their inner emotions are far different. But what that means, exactly, he doesn’t know. He does know that this isn’t good for him.

Logan senses Luke’s presence and looks over to where Luke’s standing on the stairs, behind where the microphones have been set, looking down at the event, at Doug Lancaster’s back. He makes eye contact with Luke, then nudges the sheriff, who looks in Luke’s direction also. Williams’s face is a tight mask, his eyes crinkling against the sun.

Everything is in place. Doug Lancaster steps to the bank of microphones.

Yes, I was right, Luke thinks to himself. I’m being set up.

“I wish to make an announcement,” Doug begins. His voice, amplified over dozens of microphones, booms out into the large grassy sunken amphitheater that is formed by the three sides of the courthouse.

Luke edges around the side of the massed throng, wanting to get a better look at the man. The sun is sitting way up in the sky, the sky so sharp, so brilliantly blue to look up at, it makes your eyes hurt. There are no clouds.

Luke feels the bile rising in his upper chest and throat. All these news crews were alerted for a reason, and it wasn’t to hear Doug tell how he was the one who had really killed his daughter.

And then he sees her. Helena Buchinsky, the woman he interviewed in Malibu. Lancaster’s mistress. Standing off to the side near the front, on the other side of Doug from the sheriff and the district attorney. Wearing a large floppy straw hat to shield her face from the sun. Dressed plainly, a simple shirtwaist dress, sensible heels. No jewelry. There is no erotic thrust coming from her.

Riva comes up next to him. She takes his hand. They grip each other firmly.

“An issue has been raised in this trial,” Doug says. “About where I was on the night my daughter Emma was taken from her room, and subsequently murdered.”

The crowd, most of which is press, is listening intently. This is going to be hot.

“In particular, the defense has raised this issue to try and cloud the true nature of this case. There has been a strong implication, because I wasn’t home that night and gave a misleading statement to the police regarding where I was, that I was involved in my daughter’s death.” He pauses, clears his throat, looks over to Helena Buchinsky, who is standing rigid as a mannequin. She looks back at him briefly, then away.

“This is a horrible, scurrilous, disgraceful allegation,” Doug says into the microphones. “But because I did lie to the police, on the day of her kidnapping, I have fallen under suspicion.” A brief pause. “I did lie. I lied for a reason. It was to protect some innocent people.

“But I have decided, finally, to come clean about this, because I was not involved, in any way, in my daughter Emma’s death, and I don’t want the man who really killed her to be a beneficiary of my lie, even though, as I said, it was for a good reason.”

It’s warm out. He’s dressed in a dark suit, starched white shirt, tie. He dabs at his forehead with a handkerchief.

“On the night in question I was, in fact, with my child. But it was not my daughter, Emma. I was with my son. His name is Mark. He is eleven years old.”

The institution always knew where to find him. He made sure of that. The call came to the hotel late that night. His son had contracted some kind of virus very suddenly. He was extremely ill, there could be complications—his temperature was almost 105—he might die, given his weak condition. They were taking him to the emergency room at the hospital in Camarillo, the closest hospital to where the boy lived and was cared for.

He called the boy’s mother and told her. Then he phoned down and ordered his car brought around. He threw on any old clothes and rushed downstairs. His car was waiting. He jumped in and peeled out of the hotel parking lot, heading for the freeways that would take him up the coast to Camarillo. It was late, slightly after one in the morning.

He got to Camarillo a little before two. She was already there; she lived closer, in Malibu.

The doctors were working on their son. His heart had stopped, but they had gotten it started again. His breathing was labored, they needed to help it with a respirator. It was going to be nip and tuck.

This had happened before. Someday the boy’s heart would stop and there would be no way to start it again. It was a flawed heart, as so much of him was flawed. His brain was flawed
—
it was barely a brain, his IQ was unmeasurable, certainly below twenty. His tortured little body, when it had come from her womb, was all twisted and broken. He had so many abnormalities
—
spina bifida, hydrocephalus, bones so bereft of calcium that a firm poke could break them. Over his ten years, he had broken dozens of bones, sometimes from activity no more strenuous than rolling over in his sleep.

It took four hours of intensive work, but the hospital staff miraculously stabilized him. Got his heart working again, spiked the virus that had almost caused his brain to fry.

There was nothing more they could do for him. There had never been anything they could do for him, from the moment of his birth.

The boy’s mother drove back to her Malibu beach house. He grabbed a cup of coffee at a Carrow’s near the hospital, then drove back to Santa Monica. He was a wreck, physically and emotionally, but he had to keep up appearances. He had to play a round of golf with some business associates, a few hours after leaving his son, who had never spoken a word, who had never in his entire life given one sign that he recognized his father, that he recognized anyone.

And then, that afternoon, the call had come to say that his daughter had been kidnapped; his healthy, beautiful daughter, his legitimate daughter.

Doug Lancaster looks out over the microphones. “A dozen years ago, I had an affair. I was married, I had a baby daughter. Emma.”

For a moment he chokes, then he continues. “The woman became pregnant. She was not married. She is married now, to a close friend of mine.” He pauses. “That marriage is now in jeopardy, because of what I have just told you.”

Luke is listening, and his knees are shaking.

“She couldn’t keep Mark with her. Not because she wasn’t married—she would have, under different circumstances, she wanted to, that’s why she didn’t abort her pregnancy. She’s Catholic, she doesn’t believe in abortion. But given his extreme condition, his multitude of acute, incurable physical problems, his total mental retardation, we had to find the best place we could for him, where he could be cared for as well as possible.”

He swallows hard, goes on. “Mark has been institutionalized his entire life. He will be institutionalized for the rest of his life, which, God willing, won’t be much longer, because he has suffered every day of his life. When he was born, the doctor asked if we wanted to let him go. It would have been easy. In hindsight, it would have been the humane thing to do. Certainly the expedient thing to do. We chose, his mother and I, not to let him go. And since then, we have done our best not to let him go.”

He starts to break down, catches himself, presses on. “No one has ever known about our son. My former wife Glenna did not know. My daughter Emma didn’t know she had a brother. No one in the world knew, except the few people at the institution who had to know—and Mrs. Buchinsky and me.”

One last pause. Then his voice takes on a defiant cast.

“No one was ever going to know. There was no reason anyone had to—this was a private matter, between two people. And it should have been kept secret, forever.” More angrily now: “But because the defense lawyer in this case decided to cast me as the villain in my own child’s trial, I am now forced to come public with this terrible secret.”

Brandishing a document in his hand, he says, “This is an affidavit from the director of the institution that cares for my son Mark. I will distribute it to the press after I’m done, so that you’ll know what I’m telling you is true, painfully true. Thank you.”

Ferdinand De La Guerra, who has been so unobtrusive as to be invisible in the actual trial proceedings, joins Luke in Judge Ewing’s chambers—an unsubtle reminder that there are establishment heavies behind the scenes here, particularly the former head judge in the county’s legal system.

As they were walking towards Ewing’s cubicle, De La Guerra had commented on Doug Lancaster’s devastating press conference. “Aren’t you glad now that you didn’t call him as a witness?”

“What’s the difference,” Luke moaned. “I got run over by a truck instead of being shot in the head. Either way, I’m still dead.”

“The jury didn’t hear him,” the former judge reminded him. “Nothing he said is part of the trial record. Huge difference.”

That is true; but it brings scant solace.

They’re joined by Ray Logan and two of his top aides, his senior deputy assistant D.A., and the in-house consultant, who specializes in legal issues.

Ewing is hot under the collar—literally. His robe is off, draped carelessly on a chair. He’s loosened his handsome new tie. His dress shirt, the top collar unbuttoned, is pocked with sweat blotches.

“In all the years I sat on the bench, including the dozen when I was the senior jurist,” De La Guerra says to his former colleague, “I never saw such an egregious violation of professional ethics.” Turning to Ray Logan: “What in the world were you thinking? Have you no scruples regarding your judicial conduct? Mr. Lancaster’s utterances could be grounds for a mistrial.”

“With all due respect, Judge De La Guerra,” Logan shoots back, “I don’t think so.” He’s stung by the onslaught from a man who is considered above reproach. “This wasn’t prearranged, I swear it. I didn’t know a thing about this until Doug Lancaster corralled me on the way out after my summation and told me he was going to hold a press conference in five minutes and the sheriff and I needed to be there.”