The Last Plea Bargain (39 page)

90

Seven days later, I found myself ready for a picnic, wondering why I had agreed to go in the first place. I had on a pair of shorts, a tank top, and flip-flops. It was eighty-five degrees, so I put on some sunscreen and grabbed a few towels. Justice seemed to sense that something was up, and he started getting antsy. At least one of us was excited.

The doorbell rang at a few minutes after one, and I took a deep breath before heading to the front hall. Justice, on the other hand, sprinted to the door, barking like a maniac, ready for the day's great adventure. I opened the door, and Justice attacked with an exuberant display of dancing, licking, and hyperactive motion that nearly knocked my guest off his crutches.

“Sorry about that,” I said.

“We're buddies,” Mace James said. “Besides, I grew up with dogs.” He rubbed Justice's head. “Ready?” he asked me.

Not really.
“Sure.”

Mace crutched down the front steps and sidewalk. He beat me to the passenger door of his truck and held it open like a perfect gentleman. Justice, of course, jumped in first.

Mace hopped around to the driver's door, threw his crutches in the back, climbed into the driver's seat, and gingerly lifted his bad leg in with both hands. He scooted back in the seat at an angle so he could keep the left leg straight.

“You need me to drive?” I asked.

“Nah,” Mace said. “Once I get in, I'm fine.”

He drove to my favorite park on the Chattahoochee River. Before we ate lunch, Mace hobbled down to the river and started throwing a stick for Justice. Each throw went a little farther, and Justice seemed to be having the time of his life. Then Mace hobbled over to the woods next to the boat ramp and picked up a nice fat stick about three feet long. He stood on one leg and hurled it almost across the river. Justice did a flying belly flop into the water and swam like a bandit all the way to the stick, barely able to hold it out of the water as he swam back to Mace, proud of what he had done. Mace threw it again, and Justice took off. And the game was on. Mace seemed determined to eclipse his last throw every time, and Justice seemed equally determined to bring it back and beg for more. I eventually found a seat in the shade and caught myself smiling at the two alpha dogs trying to outdo each other.

When I finally thought Justice might drown if he went in one more time, I called off the dogs, so to speak, and suggested we start the picnic. Mace had gone all out. There was a cooler with a fruit salad, Gatorade to drink, a chef salad with sliced meat and eggs, and three kinds of dressing in little Tupperware containers. I wondered how he had carried the cooler to the truck in the first place. He'd also brought celery, carrots, and two PowerBars for dessert.

“What are you, some kind of health nut?” I asked.

“Basically.”

We spent the first half of lunch talking about workout routines and the second half trying to piece together exactly what had happened with Caleb Tate, Aaron Gillespie, and Antoine Marshall. I found it hard to stay mad at a man who had tried to save my life. I also discovered that Mace James was a lot less arrogant and more fun to be around than I had ever imagined.

Some things had become clear in the last seven days. Gillespie was the one who had been hypnotizing Caleb Tate's clients and helping them pass the polygraphs. With a little digging, detectives had found two former patients of Gillespie's who claimed he had taken advantage of them sexually during their counseling sessions. The working hypothesis at the DA's office was that he had done the same thing with Rikki Tate and that Caleb had found out. We assumed Caleb Tate had threatened to report Gillespie unless Gillespie played ball.

The women who had been abused by Gillespie, including Rikki Tate, all fit a similar pattern. They had been abused as children. They were prescribed narcotics by Gillespie. They were apparently in that 20 percent of people who were easily subjected to hypnosis. When I learned these facts, I thought about my relationship with Gillespie and it creeped me out. He had tried to pump me full of narcotics and had tried his suggestive routine on me as well, but fortunately it had not worked.

The link between my mom and Gillespie had also been clarified. By checking some old hard drives in storage at my mom's psychiatric center, investigators learned that Mom had at one time counseled Rikki Tate. The notes from those counseling sessions had been stolen the night of my mother's murder. But the existence of the counseling relationship and the fact that my mom had been researching psychiatrists who used narcotics and deep-trance hypnosis to sexually exploit their clients made it clear that Mom's death was no accident.

Antoine Marshall had obviously been working for Gillespie and Caleb Tate. Perhaps he had not expected my father to be home that night. Perhaps Marshall had been instructed to kill both my mom and my dad. Either way, my mom must have been ready to blow the whistle on Gillespie, and somehow he and Tate had found out.

Mace assumed that Antoine Marshall had been hypnotized and had committed the murder under hypnosis.

“Isn't it far more likely that they paid him to murder my mom and then hypnotized him afterward so he could pass the polygraph?” I asked.

Neither of us could prove our theory, and we agreed to disagree. “This much I know,” Mace said. “Antoine Marshall was a changed man in the end.”

I took a bite of the fruit salad. We were sitting at a picnic table under a pavilion, but even with the breeze, it was stifling hot.

“You're probably right,” I said.

Mace looked at me, his eyes registering surprise. “It takes a lot for you to say that.”

“My brother's been preaching at me all week,” I said. I didn't mention the fact that coming so close to death also had a way of forcing a person to reevaluate. “And I think he's right about something. Not being able to forgive someone is like a cancer. Even if you get revenge, it pretty much destroys your soul.”

“Spoken like a true defense lawyer,” Mace said.

“Let's not get carried away.”

We talked for a while about the prior Saturday night. From what Mace had learned, Gillespie and Tate had planned to make it look like a murder/suicide. The gun used to kill Mace James would have my fingerprints on it. Tate would claim I was waiting at the end of the sidewalk when they came out of the house. Mace started walking toward me, and I opened fire. I fired at Tate, and he fell to the ground. Thinking I killed him, I left. My body would be discovered, full of drugs, in my 4Runner on some abandoned road.

Gillespie would testify about my psychotic break. A ranting e-mail sent to Bill Masterson from my own computer earlier that evening would confirm that I had snapped. An eyewitness. The word of a psychiatrist. Fingerprints on the gun. An incriminating e-mail. What more did they need?

That night, Gillespie apparently had a change of heart. Instead of giving me a fatal drug overdose, he knocked me out with ketamine. He obviously had some kind of plan to keep me alive and make the deaths of Caleb Tate, Mace James, and Rafael Rivera look like a gang killing. None of us could figure out the details of how that plan would work.

In a way, the events of last Saturday night had brought some closure, but in another way, they just raised a new set of questions. And there would be no trial to sort it out; all of the conspirators were dead, killed in a shoot-out that occurred while I was lying unconscious on the ground.

“I understand you were quite a hero,” I said to Mace.

“If you call getting shot in the leg and crying like a baby heroic,” Mace said. He decided to change the subject. “Tell me how you ended up with Justice.”

I told Mace the story of my first dog, how Snowball had been poisoned when I was in law school. A few weeks later, some friends brought Justice by in a crate and left him outside my door. They had their own suggestions for names, but I decided to call him Justice.

On the way home, Mace James earned some more brownie points when he stopped at the local PetSmart.

“What are we doing here?” I asked.

“You're going to turn Justice into a girlie dog if we don't get him a real bone,” Mace said. I put Justice on his leash, and Mace got out on his crutches. The three of us walked around the store and looked at the puppies that had been brought in by the SPCA.

“What kind of dog did you have as a kid?” I asked Mace.

“A mutt. A big mutt.”

“Shocker.”

Eventually, Mace found what he was looking for. It was the biggest bone in the store. First the biggest stick on the bank of the river and now this. “Here you go, boy,” he said to Justice. He peeled back some of the plastic so Justice could sniff the bone, and the two boys cemented their friendship on the spot.

On the way home, Justice sat behind us in the second seat of the cab, chewing on his new bone and wondering if the day could possibly get any better.

Mace seemed to think this was the perfect moment to discuss a little business. “We've still got our deal with Rashad Reed, right? He gets out in two based on his help in Caleb Tate's case?”

“Is that what this was all about? A picnic in the park to soften me up on Rashad Reed?”

“Yeah. And I figured taking a bullet in the leg trying to save your life wouldn't hurt either.”

“Okay. Point taken. I'll go for three.”

“Three?”

“Rashad Reed really didn't do anything in Tate's case,” I said. “But at least my dog likes his lawyer.”

“If it wasn't for Rashad Reed and David Brewster, Gillespie and Tate might have gotten away with everything. I think you're getting a gift at two.”

I didn't respond right away. I had every intention of honoring the original deal, but I wanted to make Mace sweat it out a little. After all, I didn't want the word spreading around that I was getting soft.

News of Rashad Reed's likely deal had spurred a few others in the past week. Masterson was pretty sure the logjam was broken now that Caleb Tate wasn't around to keep the gang leaders together.

“All right,” I said, after waiting a sufficient amount of time. “But don't get used to it. I gave you my word, so I'll honor our deal. But, Mace James, that's your last plea bargain. At least with me.”

“Man,” Mace moaned, “no wonder Masterson had a hard time finding a pulse. It's hard for a body to pump blood without a heart.”

I punched him in the arm, but I was pretty sure he didn't feel it.

He was seven years older than me and he worked on the dark side of the law. But he was a man of faith, and he knew that the way to a woman's heart was straight through her dog. I could get used to spending time with Mace James, I decided.

The next morning, I woke up to somebody ringing the doorbell at 8 a.m. I had finally gotten back into a normal sleep pattern without drugs, and I didn't appreciate somebody coming by that early on a Sunday morning. Justice and I marched down to the door, opened it, and almost tripped over the cage sitting in front of us.

Oh no. Without even looking, I knew what was happening. I had been through this same routine with Justice. I didn't have time to train another puppy. I was perfectly happy with the dog I already had.

When I knelt down, the brown little furry thing in the cage was as cute as he could be. I opened the card on top of the cage. Apparently it wasn't a “he” after all.

I thought maybe Justice could use a little sister. I'm not a purebred like him, but the SPCA says I'll be just as big. I've got a little brown Lab in me if that helps. And, oh, by the way, they also said they would have to put me down if I didn't find a home.

I know you've got a big heart, and I felt like maybe you needed somebody who could keep Justice company. Maybe you could call me Grace.

“You are so cute,” I said, sticking my finger in the cage. Justice was sniffing Grace as if welcoming this new little girl into our home already. But I knew we wouldn't have to. At the bottom of the note, there was a PS:

If you're too busy to puppy-train right now, maybe you could pawn me off on a defense lawyer I know. He says that he'll be at the river at noon and that you have to come if you want to give me back.

I carried the cage inside, smiling to myself. I sent a text message to Mace James confirming that his ransom note had paid off. He texted back, inviting me to church before our rendezvous at the river. I surprised myself by accepting.

I also replied to another text, this one from LA. He wanted to hang out that afternoon.

LA seemed perfect for me. He believed in law and order, just like I did. He was younger and had a full head of hair and could have stepped from police work straight into modeling. Plus, he was another dog lover.

I sent a message telling him that I would be busy. Grace started barking and wanted to get out and play. I shook my head, knowing what I was getting into. Justice and Grace, they would make for some intriguing companions.