Good Morning, Killer

COUNTY: The dry cleaner was rude and you were angry and you encountered Ana Grey.

FORRESTER: I don’t remember any of that.

COUNTY: You dropped your dry cleaning, and she picked it up. Do you remember the incident?

FORRESTER: I’m not sure.

COUNTY: Is it true in the parking lot, when you were very upset about the dry cleaner who told you never to come back to his shop, you told Ana Grey that Detective Berringer was sleeping with Officer Sylvia Oberbeck?

FORRESTER: I thought she should know. Anyway, like the other gentleman said, it was “common knowledge,” I was not letting the cat out of the bag.

COUNTY: I see. You were only repeating what everybody knew.

FORRESTER: That’s right.

COUNTY: And did you also tell Special Agent Grey what everybody knew, which was that after your husband died, you had an affair with Detective Berringer, and that he would ultimately leave her as he had left you?

FORRESTER: No! Absolutely not! That is an insult, you are attacking me, you are attacking me and nobody is doing anything about it.

JUDGE: We’ll take a fifteen-minute recess.

COUNTY: Your Honor, I’m almost done, and then we can wrap it up for the day.

JUDGE: Do you think you can answer the questions, Mrs. Forrester?

COUNTY: Didn’t you say to Ana Grey, of Andrew Berringer and Officer Oberbeck, “I slept with him before that bitch,” or words to that effect?

JUDGE: Mrs. Forrester? Answer the question.

FORRESTER: She’s lying, she’s a liar, she is out to get me and I have no idea why.

COUNTY: Really? I think that statement should be reversed because, Mrs. Forrester, aren’t you the one who told the investigating officers Ana Grey shot Andrew Berringer? Aren’t you the one who first pointed the finger at Ana Grey?

FORRESTER: They asked if I had any thoughts on the subject.

COUNTY: You had “thoughts.”

FORRESTER: Yes, I did.

COUNTY: But no facts.

FORRESTER: I knew.

COUNTY: Were you there at the time of the shooting?

FORRESTER: No.

COUNTY: Did you have any direct knowledge of the shooting?

FORRESTER: No, I didn’t.

COUNTY: Then you couldn’t know. You guessed, is that right? You conjectured. You wished. You were jealous. You wanted revenge because this big strapping handsome detective was finished with you, and his current squeeze was Ana Grey. You told the police not out of knowledge but spite, is that correct?

RAUCH: I’m sorry, we have to stop—

COUNTY: That doesn’t make you a very objective source about Special Agent Grey’s behavior, does it?

JUDGE: I think this witness has had enough, Mr. County.

We stood in the corridor. The upturned car was gone, and traffic was jammed up as usual in the late afternoon. Devon’s cell kept ringing and he kept ignoring it. The two other attorneys were talking on their phones down the hall.

“The prosecution’s case was overwhelming,” I said. “The judge did not buy ours.”

“Don’t worry, the jury will. This was just practice.”

“Practice!”

“We know a lot more about their witnesses. We know how Andrew comes across in the courtroom—”

One of the young attorneys interrupted in a hurry. “Devon? Breaking news.”

“What’s up?”

“They found a body.”

I almost laughed. This, after all, was the criminal defense attorney’s gruesome stock and trade. Bodies here, bodies there. Must mean another client!

“Teenage girl,” he was saying, “in a park in Mar Vista. The crime scene guy is saying sexual assault.”

The door to the courtroom opened slowly, and Judge McIntyre and his twin came out and our little group stepped back.

“Good evening, Judge,” said Devon, and his associates echoed the courtesy.

“Good evening,” said the judge. Dressed in street clothes now, he looked like any number of anonymous older men who wear hats and go about their business with a certain air, a burden of knowledge, that says they may have had experiences that belong to a different time and place, but they have understood those experiences in a way that we, still in the midst of life, have not.

Slowly, Judge McIntyre led his twin by the hand. His brother, it was now apparent from the lopsided shuffle and darting eyes, was mentally retarded and needed guidance through the world.

Twenty-two

The river oaks had been planted in two rows, shading a dirt road that still ran along the far reaches of the park. Their slender trunks all tilted in the same direction, and the shape of their foliage was vertical and tall; as if once upon a time a family of gnomes fleeing an evil wind had become frozen in flight, and their stubby legs had been turned into tree trunks and their tangled masses of hair into leaves whooshing fearfully up.

It was spooky, this dark grove at the edge of the playing fields, out near an old white stucco wall long covered with tents of ivy. Blown leaves and granular red dirt had accumulated near the foot of the wall, forming a dry mulch thick enough to dig through, unlike the hard-packed earth of the baseball diamond whose backstop sat at the edge of the oak shadow.

A six-year-old boy chasing a foul ball had discovered the victim between the trees and the wall. In this narrow space, the killer could have worked unobserved all night. When the crime scene folks carted the leaves away, shovel marks were visible like uniform bites around the edge of the grave. The killer was meticulous. He had come prepared — yet the grave was shallow, as if meant to be discovered. This showed ambivalence about the death. The clothed body was curled on its side in a green trash bag that did not quite reach over the head, so long thick brown hair extruded in a bunch. The hair was the oddity that caught the boy’s attention, visible through the leaves. He had thought it was the tail of a dead animal, encrusted with flies and blood.

Her name was Arlene Harounian, sixteen years old. From the condition of the body the coroner estimated she had been dead four days. She lived in a worn-down working-class city called Inglewood, about six miles from the park, an hour bus ride and a world away from Laurel West Academy and the Third Street Promenade. The father reported her missing, and a detective, already working three homicides, had been assigned to the case. Arlene had been especially beautiful, with dark tanned skin that added to her exotic look, a wide smile and confident, infectious energy. She was a popular honor student with a 4.0 grade-point average, who also played basketball and ran track, described by friends as “independent” and “a person who knew what she wanted, which was to go to college and make a difference.” Newspaper photos showed grief-stricken classmates hugging one another on the steps of the high school. Arlene had been the kind of kid who could recharge a cynical, burned-out teacher just by walking into the room.

Everyone on my legal team had the same thought: What if Arlene Harounian were another victim of Ray Brennan? Although there was no obvious link between them, she and Juliana Meyer-Murphy were similar in age and appearance, and the coroner was talking sexual assault. If the two were connected, her death could yield important facts that might have bearing on the charges against me. I was hoping it was Brennan