Buried Evidence Read online

  “I know,” Lily said. “I called the police, remember? You certainly didn’t do Shana any favors by getting yourself arrested.”

  John continued, “I wasn’t behind the wheel when they arrested me. Having a drink isn’t a crime.”

  Heaven help me, Lily thought, her thoughts racing. As soon as they concluded their conversation, she’d have to call and see if the court would allow him to post bail with a ten percent deposit. This was the general rule of thumb unless the judge specified that the defendant fork over the entire amount. Even then she didn’t have ten thousand dollars in cash. She’d have to get a loan from the credit union. Loans took time. She had to shut John up, though, and the only way was to meet his demands. “Were there any witnesses to this alleged hit-and-run accident?”

  “None that I know of,” he answered. “I mean, you’re the hotshot attorney. You know the cops never tell you these kind of things.”

  Lily massaged her forehead, attempting to analyze the situation objectively. When the evidence was weak, most prosecutors allowed the suspect to remain at large in the community until they had a chance to build an airtight case. Once they made an arrest, the clock began ticking, and if the case resulted in an acquittal, the suspect could never be tried for that particular crime again. Since Henry Middleton had been free for almost a year, Lily was baffled as to why they had locked up her ex-husband. “Why did they arrest you if they didn’t have a witness, or some type of concrete proof? I don’t even know how they identified you since the accident was a hit-and-run. Was there damage to your car?”

  “They found my wallet,” John said reluctantly. “I didn’t even realize it was gone. The police said they found it in the grass a few feet from the guy’s body. The public defender and I decided that whoever hit this person must have stolen my wallet, then dropped it at the scene of the accident.”

  Lily had a nasty taste in her mouth, as if she had just consumed a dozen rotten eggs. She knew John was guilty. He would have never called and threatened her if he was innocent. Now they were both murderers. “Let me go,” she said. “I’ll have to try to raise the money.”

  “I need money for an attorney as well.”

  “Didn’t you just tell me you’re being represented by the public defender?”

  “I had no choice at the arraignment,” John told her. “But even he told me I should hire someone else. He says he’s got more cases than he can handle. You know, I need one of those fancy attorneys who specializes in this kind of thing.”

  Lily started to ask about the victim, then stopped herself. She didn’t want to hear the details yet, not when she was being extorted to bail out the person who had killed him. “How can you do this to me?”

  “What?” he asked. “Ask you to help me? I’m the father of your child.”

  “You didn’t ask me, John,” she said, scribbling notes to herself on a yellow pad. “You threatened me. Isn’t that what we’re talking about here?”

  “If you’d killed the right guy,” he said. “I’d have given you a medal and never mentioned it again. The bastard who raped my daughter is back on the street, Lily. Why don’t you shoot him?”

  “You’re out of your mind,” she said. “Keep talking this way, and I won’t lift a finger to help you. And let’s get something straight right now. No matter what kind of ridiculous accusations you hurl at me, I have no intention of paying for your attorney. The district attorney in Los Angeles may not be able to charge you with driving under the influence, but you and I both know that this person would be alive if you’d remained sober.”

  John’s voice took on a sharper edge. “Oh, you’ll help me. You can’t afford not to help me. I know how much that job means to you, how scared you are of ending up in my situation. You know how dirty and cramped it is in prison. Just because you’re a woman doesn’t mean you’ll have a smooth ride. You’ve put your share of women behind bars.” He paused, then added, “Maybe a few of them would like to have a little talk with you, know what I mean?”

  Lily knew when she was defeated. She picked up a file and hurled it across the room, watching as the papers struck the wall, then scattered all over her office floor. She felt like leaping through the phone and strangling him. Only in the past year had she started to put her life back together. And there was Shana to consider.

  “I expect to be out of here by this evening,” he told her. “Do we understand each other?”

  Lily swallowed her pride. “I’ll do the best I can.”

  “Just get the job done,” John said. “After I begged you to keep it a secret, you called and told Shana I was broke, made her think her old man was nothing more than a burned-out loser. That’s why I fell off the wagon.”

  “An innocent person is dead,” Lily said. “I have to walk off my job, scrape together every penny I have, then run like a nut to Los Angeles to bail my ex-husband out of jail. All these years you’ve blamed me for the fact that Shana was raped; now you’re trying to blame this on me as well?”

  “Do you know what it feels like to be humiliated?” John said, his voice laced with venom. “You’re the woman who swore she’d stand by me until I died. Are you proud of yourself, Lily? Once again you’ve managed to rip our family apart.”

  10

  How did I do?” John asked, his hands clasped tightly on the arms of his chair. “I’d make a pretty good actor, don’t you think?” He was wearing the same clothes from the night before, and his face was covered with day-old stubble, his shirt wrinkled and stained. Seated at a table in an interview room at the Los Angeles Police Department, he had just concluded his phone call to Lily.

  Detective Mark Osborne tipped his chair back on its hind legs, glancing over at his partner. A thirty-one-year-old Hispanic divorcée, Hope Carruthers was a striking brunette with enormous brown eyes and olive skin. Born Esperanza Maria Cortez, she had decided to use the name of Hope after joining the police department. Not only did she like the connotation, it simplified things. When she had gone by Esperanza, she wasted time spelling her name every time she made a phone call.

  Mark Osborne, along with a slew of other officers in the department, thought Hope Carruthers was a dream walking. She could rebuild your carburetor, cook a better meal than your mother, possessed a beautiful, feminine, and shapely body, and no matter how much adversity life threw at her, she managed to show up every day with a smile on her face. Unfortunately, Hope had earned her detective shield the hard way. An unknown assailant had opened fire as she and several other officers were attempting to break up a fight in the South Central area of Los Angeles. The bullet had entered her back, barely missing her spinal cord, then zigzagged its way through the left side of her body. After five operations she still walked with a limp, but Osborne would hand over a year’s salary for one night in bed with her. Twirling his wedding band on his finger, he cleared his throat and attempted to focus on the business at hand. “To be honest,” he said, “I’m not certain what’s going on here.”

  Carruthers took over. “Both your wife and daughter were raped, Mr. Forrester, is that correct?”

  “Yes,” John said, his eyes misting over again. “That’s why I can’t let this accident thing go any further, don’t you see? My daughter needs me. She doesn’t depend on her mother. Her mother lives too far away, and she’s too caught up in her career.”

  “Maybe that’s because of the line of work she’s in,” Osborne said, wadding up a piece of paper and tossing it into the trash can.

  “Oh, I see,” John said, swiping his mouth with the back of his hand, “you guys don’t believe me because Lily’s a district attorney.”

  Osborne placed his arms on the table. “I don’t know your ex-wife, pal. Just because you twisted her arm to bail you out of jail doesn’t mean she’s a murderer.”

  “Lily doesn’t give a shit what happens to me,” John said, panicked that his plan might be backfiring. “Do you think she’d come running down here if what I told you wasn’t the truth? When she shows up, then
you’ll know. The guy in the jail told me you’d let me go if I helped you solve a murder, even set me up in one of those witness-protection programs where I get a new identity, a house, and enough money to get by on. All you’ve got against me is my wallet. I’m not as stupid as you people think. My wallet doesn’t prove I killed that kid.”

  Osborne pressed his index finger and thumb together, then moved them across his lips to simulate a zipper, letting his partner know that she shouldn’t respond to his statements. With a suspect as loose-lipped and desperate as Forrester, the best way to proceed was to keep them talking. The more they talked, the deeper the hole they dug. And the silent treatment would cause a guy like this to cough up even more information.

  “I certainly don’t want to be around when you arrest Lily,” John told them. “I just told you she killed a man! Why do you think our daughter lives with me instead of her mother?”

  During his twenty-three years on the force, Mark Osborne had seen just about everything. The man sitting in front of him could very well be presenting them with information on a serious crime, but nonetheless, he made his stomach turn. He despised cowards. He’d rather deal with a professional killer than a man who would rat out the mother of his child. Regarding the hit-and-run, they might not have the right driver, but there was no doubt as to the car. An hour after John Forrester’s arraignment, the crime lab had reported finding pieces of the victim’s flesh trapped in the undercarriage of the Mustang. Antonio Vasquez had been a nineteen-year-old student from Argentina. From what his parents had said when Hope notified them of their son’s death, the young man had saved for years to come to the United States.

  When Osborne nodded, Hope attempted to clarify the situation. “The rapist isn’t the man your ex-wife killed, though, since I just heard you mention that he’s been released on parole.”

  “She shot the wrong person,” John said, using the edge of his shirt to blot the sweat on his face. “This guy she killed, Bobby Hernandez, looked exactly like the rapist.”

  Detective Carruthers heard someone knocking on the door. An officer whispered something to her, and she motioned for Osborne to step outside the room. “We managed to find a newspaper clipping in the on-line archives of a local Ventura county newspaper which confirms that an individual by the name of Bobby Hernandez was murdered six years ago in Oxnard on the date Forrester indicated.” She stopped to cough, covering her mouth with her hand. “We’ll have to get in touch with the police department in that area to verify all the particulars. From what we were able to determine, though, no one was ever charged or convicted of the crime. If they were, the victim wasn’t important enough to merit a follow-up article.”

  Mark Osborne had the same stoic expression on his face as before. They both returned to the interview room.

  John was squirming in his seat. “You’re going to let me go, aren’t you? I didn’t do anything wrong. Even if I was guilty of this… this crime…it wasn’t something intentional. I just handed you a murderer. People get famous over this type of deal, especially when the person is a public official like my ex-wife.”

  Detective Osborne checked the tape recorder to make certain it was recording properly. Now that they had confirmed that Forrester wasn’t simply talking out of his asshole, and a homicide had actually been committed, they had to proceed with greater caution. “We want to make ourselves perfectly clear here,” he said. “We never promised you anything. You requested that we monitor a phone call to your ex-wife. All we did was comply with your request.”

  John stared at the clock on the wall. “You’ve got to give me the car back,” he said, acting as if he hadn’t heard anything the detective had told him. “My daughter probably thinks someone stole it.”

  Osborne stood, shoving his chair back to the table. An enormous man in his mid-fifties, most of his muscles had turned to flab, yet he still posed a menacing presence. People at the department had given him the moniker of “Bulldog.” His face bore an almost permanent grimace, his eyes bulged in their sockets, and for a man who stood six-three and weighed over two hundred pounds, his face looked as if it had been compressed in a trash compactor. “According to the vehicle registration,” he said, “the Mustang we impounded is registered to Shana Forrester. Shana Forrester is your daughter, right? Does she still reside at 1145-B Maplewood Drive, the location where the patrol arrested you last night?”

  John momentarily stopped breathing. “God, no,” he exclaimed, gasping for air, “don’t tell me you think Shana had anything to do with this boy’s death. I told you a pickpocket must have lifted my wallet. I wasn’t even aware it was gone, or I would have called and canceled my credit cards. That’s the person who should be locked up, not me.”

  Mark Osborne walked over and gazed out the window, then turned back around. “How old is your daughter?”

  “Nineteen.”

  “Is she in college?”

  “Yes,” John told him, his hands locked between his thighs. “She goes to UCLA.”

  “Did she know the victim?”

  “The victim?” John repeated. “Bobby Hernandez? I keep trying to explain to you people that Hernandez wasn’t the rapist.”

  “We’re referring to Antonio Vasquez,” Osborne said, “the victim of the hit-and-run accident.”

  “How would Shana know this boy? Wasn’t he a street person or something?” As soon as the words left his mouth, John wanted to retract them.

  The detective removed his pocket knife, then began cleaning his fingernails. No information had been released at this point relating to the victim. “Vasquez was a freshman at UCLA, Forrester. That’s how patrol identified him. They found his school ID in his pocket. What made you think he was a street person?”

  John was momentarily speechless. They were tricking him, making things up, attempting to confuse him so he would confess. He’d been certain the young boy he’d struck had been a street person, possibly even a male prostitute. A muscle in his face twitched. He felt a sudden urge to urinate, as if an unseen force had punched him in his lower abdomen. “I don’t know…something the cops said…” A student! He had killed a college student! His guilt had somehow been diluted by his assumption that the young man he had left to die had either been living in despair as a homeless person or risking his life selling his body for sex.

  Osborne continued, “Where was your daughter last night?”

  “At home.”

  “With you, right?”

  All the color drained from John’s face. By the time the police had picked him up in front of the duplex, he’d consumed the entire pint of Jack Daniel’s. He couldn’t recall what he’d told the arresting officers regarding his whereabouts at the time of the crime. He couldn’t even remember what he had said to the public defender that morning prior to the arraignment. The attorney had been in such a hurry, they had exchanged only a few words. “I—I want my attorney,” he stammered. “I refuse to answer any more questions.”

  Hope depressed the stop button on the tape recorder, then left the room to arrange for the prisoner to be transported back to the jail. Detective Osborne turned back to the window. He’d interrogated fourteen-year-old gang members who were more sophisticated. Had John Forrester been behind the wheel of the Mustang? At this stage of the game, he couldn’t be certain. A nineteen-year-old college student could easily have borrowed her father’s wallet, then headed out for a night of partying. And a girl who had been viciously raped just might have grown hard enough to hit someone with her car, then flee the scene of the crime. The prisons were full of people who had been victimized during their childhood. This didn’t mean they shouldn’t be held accountable for their actions, but it did bear testament to the far-reaching consequences of crime.

  ONCE THEIR prisoner was handcuffed and escorted out of the interview room, Osborne told Carruthers, “We need to interview the girl right away. Call UCLA and find out what her last class was, then instruct dispatch to send a patrol unit to pick her up.”

  “G
od, Mark,” she said, “after all this young woman has been through, don’t you think we should wait a few days? The lab just got started on the car this morning. Once they sift through all the evidence, we may be able to exclude her as a suspect.”

  Osborne shook his head. These were the kind of days when he asked himself why he’d ever pursued a career in law enforcement. “We know we’re going to find the daughter’s fingerprints because it’s her car. And we know the father drove it as well. Any additional forensic evidence will be located on the exterior portion of the vehicle.”

  “You may be wrong,” Hope countered, attempting to come up with an alternative scenario. “Whoever hit Vasquez could have placed him inside the car, thinking they’d drive him to the hospital. He wasn’t that heavy, Mark. I think the coroner said he only weighed a hundred and twenty-three pounds. Also, they believe he was alive for at least an hour after he incurred the injuries. Perhaps when the driver realized that his victim had died and what type of charges he was facing, he dumped his body out near the shopping center. That means we might find more evidence inside the car.”

  “We have to talk to the girl,” Mark Osborne said. “The only way we’re going to find evidence inside that car would be if we’re looking at something far more complex than a fatal hit-and-run.”

  “Just because the victim and Forrester’s daughter both attend UCLA doesn’t mean a great deal,” she reasoned. “It’s a big university, Mark. That’s like saying there’s a connection because they both lived in the same city.”

  “It’s a close call, Hope,” he said. “For all we know, Shana Forrester went out on a date with Vasquez. Since his family said he didn’t own a car, she could have picked him up in the Mustang. What if he tried to force her to have sex with him? With her history, she could have easily gone berserk, pushing him out of the car and then running over him. “

  “But her father has a serious drinking problem,” Hope said, disagreeing with him. “I don’t even have to look at his blood alcohol to tell you Forrester was tanked to the gills last night. The damn stuff is oozing from his pores. Between that and his body odor, being in the same room with him made me feel like I was going to gag.”