Page 9

CHAPTER EIGHT

I don’t even know what to say.

“What?” Debbie says when we are back outside. “What happened?”

I don’t reply. We pick up my car from the valet. My head spins as I put it in drive. When we are down the block, I pull over and take out my phone.

“Kierce?”

I bring up the WhatsApp group called No Shit, Sherlock. I have the contact info for twenty-eight students. I pare it down to what I consider my top ten students—the Pink Panthers, Golfer Gary, Leisure Suit Lenny, Debbie, a couple of others. I call this new group No Shit Elite.

With a slightly shaky hand, I type a message:

Special Secret Class Tonight at 9 PM.

Group Project: We are going to try to solve one of the most famous cold cases of the twenty-first century: The kidnapping of Victoria Belmond. All students are expected to research the case and be prepared to present facts, evidence, and theories.

When I hit send, I hear a ding. That’s Debbie’s phone. She reads the message on her phone.

“What the hell, Kierce?”

I am wondering how to reply to that when my phone rings. It’s Arthur from White Shoe. I put a finger to my lips to signal that Debbie should stay quiet. She nods that she understands. I hit the answer button.

“What’s up?” I ask.

“I need you to come to the office.”

“You sound tense, Arthur.”

“When can you be here?”

“Look, if Courtney Booth is upset about me not sending the photos—”

“It’s not that—”

“—I can send her a bunch that don’t show what I don’t want to show.”

“It’s not about the Booth divorce, Kierce.”

“So what’s going on then?”

“Kelly Neumeier is here.”

The lawyer who sprung Tad Grayson.

“So?”

“So she asked me to make this call. She’s here with Tad Grayson.”

“Here as in…?”

“Our office. Tad Grayson wants to meet with you.”

Tad Grayson sits in the same chair that Peyton Booth had occupied just a few hours ago. Divorcées. Cop killers. This room handles it all, I guess. Tad’s hands—the hands that killed my fiancée—are folded on the long conference table. His eyes are down and on them. Kelly Neumeier smooths her gray pencil skirt and paces behind him.

I stand outside the windowed door with Arthur. They haven’t seen us yet.

“I’ll go in with you,” Arthur says.

“Why?”

“You should have counsel.”

“Why would I need counsel?” I ask.

“Out of an overabundance of caution.”

“You’re worried I’m going to do something stupid.”

“Definitely. But mostly”—Arthur gives a loose, young man’s shrug—“I don’t want you going in there alone. I want someone in there on your side, you know what I mean?”

I nod that I do and I’m grateful. We are both trying to make light of something that is anything but light. My heart is pounding hard in my chest. I want to slow it down. I reach for the door, trying to be all casual about it, but I haven’t been in the same room with this monster since I testified against him in court. I didn’t go to hear the verdict. I didn’t go for the sentencing. This man murdered my fiancée. I felt rage, of course. I wanted to tear him apart in so many ways. But back then I also felt something else when I was near Tad Grayson: Fear. Indistinct, blurry fear. I don’t know if that emanated from his obvious psychosis or the personal circumstance—or more, what I felt capable of doing to him. I haven’t felt that way since I left the courtroom, but now, as I open the door and Tad Grayson looks up at me, that fear is back.

It is Kelly Neumeier who speaks first. “Thank you for agreeing to see us, Mr. Kierce.”

I say nothing. Arthur towers over me like an overgrown weed. He stays right by my side. He even leans a little against me to show he is there for me. It comforts me, which is something of a surprise. Neumeier starts toward me, hand extended for me to shake.

“Let’s not,” I say.

She stops, looks at her extended hand, pulls it back. “Why don’t we sit?”

“No,” I say.

I look toward Tad Grayson. He finally raises his eyes. When our eyes meet, I feel the fear awaken in my chest and start slithering, making it hard to breathe. Tad’s eyes aren’t black—they are a prison-dull gray that had once been blue—but they feel black. The temperature in the room drops. I struggle not to blink, to maintain the eye contact, but I can feel something inside of me start to quake and give way.

There is snap in my tone. “What do you want, Tad?”

“I didn’t kill her.”

“Yeah, I heard your press conference. You did things you aren’t proud of. You sent awful texts, including the one that said you were going to put a bullet in her brain. But you didn’t kill her. Anything else you want to tell me?”

“My conviction,” Tad said slowly, “was set aside. Not overturned.”

“But—let me guess—you want to clear your name,” I say, my voice booming with sarcasm, “because gosh darn it, you didn’t do it and the killer is still out there!”

Tad doesn’t even blink. “Yes,” he says. “And no.”

I look up at Arthur as if to say, “Can you believe this crap?” Then I turn back to our adversaries. “Tad, whatever bullshit you’re peddling, I’m not buying. Your lawyer here”—I motion toward Kelly Neumeier—“I don’t think she buys it either. This wasn’t about guilty or innocent for her. She knows you did it. It’s about issues of procedure and what she sees as law enforcement abuses.”

Kelly Neumeier doesn’t like that. “Don’t speak for me, Mr. Kierce.”

“You’re the one who dragged me down here.”

“Exactly,” she says. “Do you think I would do that if I didn’t believe what Mr. Grayson had to say had merit?”

“Then I do apologize, Ms. Neumeier. Seems I was wrong about your motives. He’s snowed you too.”

“You’re missing my point,” Tad says.

“And what point is that, Tad?”

“The conviction was set aside, not overturned.”

“Yeah, you said that already.”

“That means,” he says, “I can be retried.”

“And for that reason,” Neumeier adds, “I have advised my client not to say anything to you. It leaves him unnecessarily exposed. I advised him to keep a low profile or perhaps leave the area, at least temporarily. With the illegally obtained evidence now thrown out, he is scot-free. There is currently no path toward retrying him, much less obtaining a conviction, so if my client takes counsel’s advice and just keeps his mouth shut, he will be in the clear. But despite all that, Mr. Grayson is ignoring what I’ve recommended and insists on talking to you.”

Tad gives me the pleading eyes. “I didn’t do it, Kierce, and yeah, I know you don’t believe me. I’d like you to, I guess, but in a sense, I don’t care either.”

“Then what do you want from me?”

“I want you to help me find Nicole’s killer.”

“Don’t say her name.” I feel the rage now. “Don’t you ever say her name.”

“I’ll answer any question,” Grayson babbles on. “I’ll take a lie detector test.” He rises slowly and walks creakily toward me. Like an old old man. I like that. I like that he’s weak and beaten. He keeps trudging forward. I make a fist. I want to hit him. I also want to step back, but then again I don’t want to show fear. So I stay where I am. I hold my ground. I let Tad Grayson come right up to me, face-to-face, so close I can smell the decay coming off him.

“And here’s the best part for you,” Tad Grayson says to me. “If the new evidence we find points to me, well, then you can use that to retry me. You want her killer in prison? Cool. Let’s find them. And if the killer ends up being me”—he spreads his hands—“then you’ll know that too. A fresh bite at the apple, Kierce. This is your only chance of getting enough evidence to send me back to prison.”

Everyone just stands there, all eyes on me.

“Ballistics matched your illegally purchased Walther PPK as the murder weapon,” I say, because I’m stupid and can’t help myself. “How do you explain that?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’ve had a long time to sit in a cell and think about it. No theories?”

“Just the obvious one: The killer stole the gun and framed me.”

“The gun you bought under a pseudonym at a gun show in Pennsylvania?”

“Yes.”

“Wearing a disguise. Trying hard to cover your tracks.”

“Yes.”

“Just one week before Nicole’s murder—and the day after you sent the text about putting a bullet in her brain?”

“Yes.”

“A gun—a Walther PPK, to be exact—that was dumped far away from your home and in a way that no one could trace it to you?”

For the first time, Tad Grayson smiles. “Oh, that’s not true.”

“What’s not true?”

“You said ‘no one could trace’ the gun to me.” His smile, his smile with tiny Tic-Tac teeth, grows. “And yet, somehow the police were able to do just that. Odd, don’t you think?”

So we are there now. The two of us. Standing at the precipice.

“Somehow,” Tad continues, “the police were able to find the gun and figure out that I was the owner of the gun, even though I, as you put it, wore a disguise and covered my tracks.”

I had heard his explanation for all this before. His ridiculous story was that the timing was just a coincidence, that he’d planned on buying a weapon this way (illegally) for months because he was already a convicted felon and New Jersey’s strict gun laws wouldn’t let him assert what he saw as his constitutional right to bear arms. And yes, sending a life-threatening text to Nicole was admittedly wrong and appalling, but perhaps the idea to send it had been subconsciously planted in his brain because he was on his way to buy a gun. When he sent the threatening text, he was, in fact, gassing up his car for his trip across state lines to buy the Walther PPK. So that explains it somehow.

Yes, that was his ridiculous defense.

Needless to say, the jury didn’t buy it.

“If we do nothing,” Tad Grayson says to me, “we know the outcome: The killer stays out of prison. There is never justice for… for her. Or you. Or perhaps me. If we investigate, there are three possibilities: One, nothing changes. Two, you gather enough new evidence to convict someone. Or three, you find enough new evidence to convict me.” He tries to meet my eye again, but I’m not in the mood. I step back. “Either way, I don’t see the big risk to you.”

“The risk,” I say, “is that I’ll have to be in the same room with you.”

Neumeier doesn’t like that. “Is that a threat?”

Arthur: “It most certainly wasn’t. My client is understandably disgusted by the idea of being in the same room with the man who murdered his fiancée and was just released on a technicality.”

“It wasn’t a technicality,” Neumeier counters. “The court found that most of the evidence against Mr. Grayson collected by the police, including former detective Kierce, was gathered in violation of a constitutional right.”

“That was not what was proven,” Arthur countered. “The case you presented was the flip side of guilt by association. Detective Kierce has been accused of police impropriety in a specific situation—therefore, you claimed, he is guilty of impropriety in every case he handled. The court’s decision was unconscionable.”

Kelly Neumeier is getting pissed. “Are you serious, Arthur? Need I remind you that you’re still only a junior partner—”

I’ve had enough. I interrupt with a forceful: “Are we done here?”

No one knows how to respond.

“Tell you what,” I say to them. Then I look directly at the scraps of a man that used to be Tad Grayson. “If you come up with some kind of evidence that points to someone other than you, I’ll listen. Until then, fuck all the way off.”

Arthur follows me to the elevator. He presses the down button and waits for me.

“Thanks for that,” I say to him.

Arthur nods. Something crosses his face.

“What?” I ask.

“Don’t bite my head off.”

“Go on.”

“I kinda believe him.”

“Psychopaths are good liars,” I tell him.

“Yeah, I know.”

The elevator dings and opens.

“Kierce?”

“What?”

“You’re a great cop. If Grayson is indeed the killer, you’ll find that out, so I’m not sure I see the problem with”—Arthur makes quote marks with his fingers—“‘helping’ him investigate.”

The elevator is empty. I’m thankful for that. I step in and let the door close on me without another word.