Interest of Justice Read online

  Rickerson pulled her gently aside, dislodging the nightstick and giving the officer a dirty look.

  “Sorry,” the man said with a slight smile, raising his shoulders and moving on, unaware who the small, dark-haired woman was or what she was doing here.

  “Come on,” Rickerson said softly. “Let’s go out back. You need some fresh air.”

  “Where is she?” She waited, counting seconds in her mind: one, two, three, four, five, six. It was coming. She knew it. It began somewhere in the pit of her stomach and rose with a fury as she opened her mouth and screamed, “Get these fucking idiots out of here and let me see my sister. Now!”

  Almost every noise stopped. Everyone dropped what they were doing and stared at her. Some who were kneeling down stood so they could see what was going on. Sergeant Rickerson started waving his hands toward the front of the house and whispering in people’s ears. One by one, they headed for the front door, and soon the living room was empty. “In the master bedroom,” he said. “The medical examiner is in there now.”

  She was in a black tunnel. The bedroom door was at the end. In front of her on the end table was her own image in cap and gown at her graduation from UCLA. Next to it was a picture she and Ivory had taken at one of those booths at Knotts Berry Farm years ago where they were both dressed in costumes from the Old West. Ivory was holding a toy rifle.

  She saw the door frame passing over her head as she entered, almost as if she was being moved forward by a conveyor belt or a moving sidewalk at an amusement park. Somehow she had moved to this point without awareness of her body. She immediately placed her hand over her mouth to stifle her screams, digging her fingernails into the soft flesh of her cheeks. The walls were splattered with blood in strange designs like an abstract painting. Sam’s body was sprawled half on, half off the bed, face down, his head an unrecognizable mass of bloody tissue. The room smelled of death: coagulating blood, human excrement. The vision of what had occurred in this tiny space hung like a cloud of ash over them all. They all saw it, felt it, denied it was real.

  She didn’t see Ivory at first, and her heart leaped. They’d made a mistake. Ivory was alive. Someone had murdered her despicable husband, but Ivory was still alive.

  Then she saw her.

  Her body was on the floor by the bed. She was nude from the waist down yet wearing a flimsy bra. Her legs were spread obscenely. Both eyes were open and bulging. Her lips had a bluish tinge. Her mouth was tightly shut with a death-like grimace. Her black hair was matted with blood. The flawless skin was gray-blue, and streaks of blood ran down her forehead, her cheeks, covered her upper torso. Lara’s eyes jerked from her face and rested at her feet. She was wearing worn-out tennis shoes, the laces not tied.

  A man was crouched over the body; another man was snapping photos. The first one stood. He was wearing a white mask and surgical gloves. She focused on his busy eyebrows, bypassing his eyes. She was exhaling and then swallowing. Every time the camera clicked, Lara’s body twitched, almost like a spasm. She forced herself to inhale. She was sensitive to odors. This was death she smelled. Death and fear. Ivory’s death, her fear.

  “From what I can tell at this point, she was probably suffocated with a pillow. If you will note the bulging eyes, the red and blue hemorrhage streaks across the white conjunctiva, the bluish and contused lips. These are all indications of suffocation. The blood you see is his.” He glanced at Sam’s body on the bed. “I think we have the murder weapon for this fellow. Looks like someone bludgeoned him from behind with a twenty-pound free weight. Cracked his skull wide open. This cheesy stuff here is his brain tissue,” he said, picking up a glob of something off the bedspread with tweezers and dropping it into a plastic bag. To Lara, it looked like oatmeal.

  He stepped over Ivory’s body and moved to the other side of the bed. Lara dropped to her knees and tried to force her head down to her sister’s face. She could not. She stared at the man in the mask and gloves, now bending over Sam. Ivory’s hand was cold and limp, but soon it would be as rigid as a statue. Lara picked it up without looking at her and then dropped it. She had started tying her shoe laces when she felt someone’s hands under her arms, lifting her slowly to a standing position.

  “Let’s go new. There’s nothing you can do here,” Sergeant Rickerson said softly, his eyes full of compassion.

  “I need to wash her face,” Lara said, seeing the splattered blood, knowing she was being irrational but powerless to stop it. Ivory had always had such beautiful skin. Since birth, actually. Most infants have ruddy complexions, but according to their mother, Ivory’s was perfect from day one—smooth and white. It was why their mother had named her Ivory. Ivory wouldn’t want anyone to see her this way, Lara thought. She was proud of her lovely complexion. It was one of her best assets.

  “No, no,” Rickerson said. “That’s not necessary. Please, let’s go outside. Someone will get you a glass of water or a cup of coffee. Get some fresh air. You’ll feel better.” He was speaking low. He placed an arm around her shoulder as if he might embrace her.

  Lara looked up into his eyes and then looked away. She couldn’t remember anything…couldn’t think. She walked straight out of the house, the sergeant hurrying after her, her mind completely blank. She didn’t see the people still gathered in front of the house, the crowd growing larger and larger as people came home from work. Some of them had gone home and returned with cold sodas or beer cans—refreshments—as in the movie theater. She didn’t see the news van and camera crew that were there shooting her very image as she walked out the front door, her blouse soiled and stained, her face wet with perspiration, her face almost as rigid as marble. She didn’t hear the voice of the reporter speaking into a microphone only inches from her face.

  “We’re here in San Clemente, where the sister and brother-in-law of Orange County Superior Court Judge Lara Sanderstone have been brutally murdered. Judge Sanderstone,” he said, pointing the microphone at her, “can you give us a statement?”

  She walked by without even glancing in his direction and headed for her car. Rickerson stopped on the sidewalk and watched her until she drove off. Then he turned in the direction of the house. It was useless to try to interview her now anyway, he thought. She was in another world.

  The collection of investigators and uniformed police officers who had been standing on the front lawn in a tight group, some smoking cigarettes, others making notes on clipboards as they waited, turned and followed the detective back into the house.

  Judge Lara Sanderstone had forgotten all about her nephew. But so had Detective Sergeant Ted Rickerson. When an officer came in from the boy’s bedroom with a box of dumbbells, the same brand as the murder weapon, a matched set, all accounted for but one, the murder weapon, Sergeant Rickerson still didn’t think of fourteen-year-old Josh. Affixed to the outside of the box with Scotch tape was a torn piece of Christmas wrapping paper and a little tag. “to josh, from mom,” it read. One glance and Rickerson’s head jerked to the officer standing closest to him.

  “Get the kid,” he barked. “Get the fucking kid.”

  Chapter 6

  Lara drove without thought. Finally she pulled up to the thirty-year-old cottage in Dana Point where they had grown up and parked the car. It didn’t even look the same. The new owners—several, actually, in the ten years since their mother’s death—had added a second story and remodeled the one-car garage, making it into some type of playroom. It looked like many different houses all pieced together into one. Gone were the beautiful rose bushes her mother had tended to every single day, wearing her wide-brimmed hat and cloth gloves. A wrought-iron fence and a padlocked gate had been installed in front of the house to keep transients out. All beach communities had their share of transients and homeless. Dana Point, San Clemente, and San Juan Capistrano, only a few miles apart, had more than their share. Inside the fence was nothing but concrete. No grass, no flowers, no walkway to the door. Everything was turning to stone: Ivory’s once lovely hands, th
e front yard where they used to play. All stone now.

  She gunned the Jaguar and sped away. The past was over. Both of their parents were dead. They had waited too long to start a family; the children had been almost an afterthought. When Lara was born, her mother had been close to forty and her father in his mid-fifties. They were up in years before Lara even graduated from college, and her father didn’t live to see her complete law school. Now Ivory was dead too. There was no one to even remember the sunny days of years gone by, the happiness, the laughter, the hopes and expectations.

  Ivory was going to grow up and become an actress—a movie star. Everyone really believed it, even Pop, and he barely believed Lara would make it through college when she’d made straight A’s since the first grade. He was far from an optimist, but he truly believed his gorgeous younger daughter, the light of his life, would one day be on the silver screen. She was so pretty, so fun-loving, so eager to please people. She loved to pose for the camera. How could the world not love her as much as they did?

  Before Charley died and after their mother had passed away, Lara used to call Ivory and suggest they meet somewhere for lunch. She wanted to stay close, keep the family together. Ivory would always say, Til have to call Charley and call you back.” They had argued. Lara was so independent, so strong, so opinionated. Even though she liked Charley, had even had a big crush on him in high school before Ivory started going out with him, she couldn’t tolerate the fact that her sister let him control her entire life, that the woman couldn’t make a simple decision to have lunch without consulting her husband. She knew her sister was immature and not terribly bright, but every adult had to have opinions of their own, some sense of their own identity. All Ivory espoused were Charley’s opinions. When Charley died, she was like a lost child, easy prey for a man like Sam Perkins—for any man, really.

  In only a matter of months Sam had squandered every dime Ivory had: Charley’s life insurance money, the savings account he’d had for Josh’s education. He’d even taken out loans on their little house in San Clemente that Charley had purchased when he and Ivory were first married.

  Lara was now on the freeway headed north to Santa Ana. At lunch, she’d made arrangements to move into the condominium across the courtyard from Emmet’s. Before she went to work, she’d gone to her house and tossed a bunch of clothes in the trunk. She hadn’t even told the detective about the break-in, the threats in the courtroom. The two incidents couldn’t possibly be related, she told herself. How would anyone know Ivory was her sister? Her mind was spinning, still awash in blinding sorrow and denial. She was only blocks from the congested civic center area that housed the courts and other city and county office complexes as well as dozen of private law firms.

  Then she thought of Josh.

  They had no relatives. An aunt maybe in Georgia, but she had to be in her eighties now, a few cousins somewhere.

  She would have to take Josh.

  She gripped the steering wheel until her knuckles turned white and almost rear-ended the car in front of her. The poor kid. They hardly knew each other. Ivory had forbidden her to even see the boy for at least two years. But Lara had no excuse for what she’d done. She’d walked away and left him there without so much as a word.

  Her eyes searched for the exit ramp in the string of cars in front of her. They weren’t moving. Traffic was so congested that they were practically standing still. She couldn’t go back to the house in San Clemente. Some things a person just couldn’t do, and this was one of them. She forgot the exit ramp and seized the car phone from the console. Who should she call? The police, of course. She’d tell them to bring Josh to the condo. Then she’d figure it all out tomorrow.

  Funeral arrangements had to be made. People had to be called. Plans had to be formulated. Although the sun was still out, the sky had clouded over and her vision was blurred. Like a nightmare, a case she’d handled or heard in the courtroom, Lara told herself someone else’s sister had been murdered back there. Not her sister. The tears started to fall. They felt like hot acid, etching themselves into her face, the skin far from flawless, nothing at all like beautiful Ivory’s.

  She called the police station on her car phone, but Rickerson hadn’t arrived. She asked the dispatcher to get him on the radio and find out where her nephew was. The girl put her on hold. She waited.

  “He said the boy is being brought to the station here. He wants to know if you’re coming to pick him up.”

  “Tell Rickerson to call me.” She’d have them bring him to the condo. She gave them Emmet’s phone number and the number of the car phone. “If he doesn’t reach me. I’ll call him back.”

  She replaced the car phone and took the First Street exit to the condo, glancing at the fast-food restaurants as she drove, her mind jumbled and unfocused. He’d have to eat. She needed food. She had nowhere for him to sleep. The place she had rented was a one-bedroom condominium. She’d have to go back to her home.

  No, she thought, she couldn’t go home. Not now, not after what had happened to Ivory and Sam. Fear seemed to be surrounding her. She felt trapped, paralyzed. Maybe they were after her, wanted to kill her and her entire family. It could be the boy who had threatened her in the courtroom…anyone. She was terrified, completely panicked. You have to stop it, she told herself. She had to find her inner strength, put her sister’s pathetic body out of her mind long enough to find the condo, figure out what to do about her nephew.

  How old was he anyway? She didn’t remember. He was a sweet kid. He reminded her of Charley, but she hardly knew him.

  She’d always wanted a child of her own, dreamed she would someday have a family. In some ways Sam had been right when he told Ivory that Lara was jealous. She’d envied Ivory for having a child, a family. Finally, a few years ago Lara had reconciled herself to her childlessness by telling herself she was doing the things that had to be done in the world to keep it safe. Ironic, she thought. Ivory’s death made it all seem like smoke. Blown away. Just like that. Gone. The whole premise she had based her life on had been eradicated. If she couldn’t keep an unknown person from snuffing out her sister’s life, it was all a big zero.

  She crossed the parking lot to Emmet’s condo. That morning she hadn’t even looked to see if the place she had rented had a phone. She was certain it didn’t. It was a small complex, only about forty units. Emmet’s unit was on the ground floor, a quick walk to the parking lot. The one she had rented was right across the grassy courtyard. It wasn’t even a security building, and the area around here was riddled with crime. She looked around her, behind her. She cursed herself for not carrying a gun. A lot of the judges did. She knocked on Emmet’s door and waited.

  He didn’t answer. She started beating on the door. He still didn’t answer. She was trembling, shaking. She didn’t know whether to go to the condo across the courtyard or drive to the San Clemente P.D. Finally the door clicked open and she entered, closing the door behind her and leaning back against it. “Emmet,” she yelled, “are you in there?”

  He appeared in the hallway. “Sorry,” he said. “I…was in the…bathroom.” Then he saw her tear-stained face, the look in her eyes. “What’s…wrong?”

  Lara put her hand to her mouth. For a few moments she couldn’t say the words. Emmet hit a button on the wheelchair and crossed the room to her. Reaching out, he touched her shoulder. Then his hand fell away. “Tell…me.

  “My sister, Emmet,” Lara stammered. “My sister and brother-in-law were murdered.”

  “Murdered?” he repeated. “Oh, no…How…terrible.”

  She told him all that she knew, rattling off the details in a manic series of jumbled sentences. She rushed to the window to peer outside. “It could be over me. They may want me, Emmet. They may have even followed me here and be out there right now.” Her heart was pounding, pressing against her chest. She didn’t even ask. She simply grabbed Emmet’s phone and called the police station again. This time she got through to Sergeant Rickerson.

&n
bsp; She spoke rapidly, standing in Emmet’s living room, turning around in small circles. “I didn’t tell you that someone broke into my house the other day. The investigating officer thought they were looking for me, that it was more than a burglary. And I was threatened about three weeks ago…a case I handled. The Henderson homicide. You may have read about it.”

  “Calm down,” the detective said. “Where are you?”

  “I’m at a friend’s house in Santa Ana. I rented a small condo in his complex. The officer told me to move out until this blows over, not to stay at my house. I’m not sure, but this could all be related. They could have killed Sam and Ivory to hurt me.”

  “If you feel you’re up to the drive, you can come to the station. I have your nephew. You can give me all the details.”

  “Do you think this is related to what happened to my sister and Sam?” Lara had wrapped the phone cord around her and had to turn in the opposite direction to get free. Emmet was sitting quietly a few feet away.

  Rickerson answered, “It could be, but then you might have been a victim of an ordinary burglary.” He was trying to reassure her.

  “I’m coming there to get my nephew.”

  “That sounds like a good idea. We have to interview him, and we’d like to interview you. I was going to wait and do it tomorrow, but if you come—”

  “I’ll come,” Lara said, her hands trembling on the phone, grasping it with both hands to keep it steady. “He’s just a kid. This is so terrible for him. I forgot all about him. I didn’t think.”

  She decided that the one place she’d like to be right now was a police station. Besides, she should have never left without Josh. This was all that was left that she could do for her sister—take care of her precious child, arrange her funeral.