“Say it!”
“Yeah, I understand.”
“If you get the slightest hint something is wrong, then you take care of it.” Morales rose and walked toward her door. “I want updates, but officially I don’t want to know anything. Do you get me?”
“Yeah, and you don’t want to know what happened at the-”
“Listen to me,” she interrupted him. “I don’t care what you two idiots did. I just want this situation fixed. It would be very, very bad for you if I had to suddenly discover what really happened.” She opened the door. “Now get out,” she spat out.
Russell muttered a profanity under his breath as he left.
Alvarez sounded despondent. “The judge denied everything?”
“Yes,” Corbin confirmed.
“But I thought you had a really good case? I thought the law was on your side on all this stuff?”
“It is. . it’s complicated. Just because you’re right about the law doesn’t mean the judge needs to agree with you. He can make his decisions any way he wants. If we think he’s wrong, then we need to appeal to prove it.”
“Are you going to appeal?”
“We can’t appeal until after the trial. There are only a couple states where you can appeal during the trial and this isn’t one of them. And with Beckett threatening to turn himself in, appealing just isn’t an option. So we’re gonna play the hand we’ve been dealt.”
“Does that mean it’s hopeless?”
“No, not at all. We had a chance to toss out some of the charges and some of the evidence, but the judge didn’t buy it. That’s all. So we move on.”
“That’s ok, I guess,” Alvarez said, still trying to figure out how this changed their odds of success.
“But that’s not the real problem.” Corbin paused before deliver the bad news. “They’ve added more charges. Beaumont’s now facing seventy-five years.”
“What?! Seventy-five years?!” Alvarez exclaimed. “Holy shit! Seventy-five years?! What the fuck!”
“Calm down”
“Don’t tell me to calm down, this is a fucking disaster!” Alvarez yelled into the phone. “Two years, that wasn’t a big deal. I could see a guy like Beaumont taking a deal for two years and this whole thing coming to an end. But there’s no way anyone can reach a deal if they want seventy-five years! Shit! Our risk just shot through the roof! We can’t wait anymore for Beckett to make his move. He could really fuck us now!”
“Calm down,” Corbin repeated.
“You need to act now!” Alvarez continued in the same panicked tone. He either didn’t hear or chose to ignore Corbin’s attempts to calm him. “You need to do something!”
“We can’t take that chance yet.”
“Can’t take a chance?” Alvarez let out a disbelieving laugh. “I don’t. . I don’t buy that. I’m sorry, but I don’t buy that. I’ve been thinking about this. I don’t see why it matters if he has the wallet. You’ve been investigating long enough that he could have gotten it from Beaumont for all anybody knows. There’s no way they could use the wallet to say we’re involved, no way!”
“Will you calm down! There’s no reason for us to take any chances yet.”
“There are seventy-five reasons-”
“Stop panicking! There’s no reason to take any chances yet,” Corbin repeated.
“Yes, there is,” Alvarez started again. “We need to act!
“Calm down,” Corbin growled.
“We need to act now-”
“Shut up!” Corbin finally ordered. Corbin’s words hit Alvarez like a slap across the face and he stopped talking. “I will take care of this one way or another. I’ll do what needs to be done, when it needs to be done, not before.”
Almost half a minute of silence passed before Alvarez spoke again. When he spoke, he spoke more calmly. “Can we even trust Beckett to wait until the trial is over?”
“What do you mean?”
“Who’s to say he waits until the jury gives their verdict before he does something? What if he stands up right after they say ‘guilty,’ and he says, ‘I want to confess’? What can you do about it then? Are you gonna shoot him in the courtroom? What if he stands up on day one of the trial and announces he did it? I say something needs to be done now because you can’t predict what this guy will do.”
Corbin took several deep breaths before responding. “I’m not convinced yet that he’ll turn himself in. We have time. We have time to see if there’s a settlement. We have time to see if the prosecution makes a mistake. We have time to see if Beckett changes his mind. We have time to see how everything plays out.” Corbin rubbed his temples. “There will come a point during the trial when it becomes clear the jury will convict Beaumont. If Beckett waits until that point to confess, then our problem solves itself. Anything he says after that will sound like the rantings of a depressed defense attorney who will say anything to save his client. Everyone’ll ask why he never came forward before things went wrong at trial, and they’ll discount any evidence he produces because they’ll assume he got it from Beaumont. I’ll back that up with stories of Beckett becoming despondent and ranting about doing whatever it takes to save Beaumont.”
“But what if the prosecution believes him?”
“They won’t. They want Beaumont, not Beckett. They’ve gone so far as to frame him to get him. They’re not going to ruin that by taking Beckett’s crazy bait.”
“But-”
Corbin cut him off. “
“Don’t wait too long.”
Chapter 30
The row house smelled like cat urine and cigarettes. The thick curtains kept out the sunlight. The small television blared out game shows. Retired police officer Richard Forte lit a cigarette. He looked at Beckett and coughed.
“I don’t remember much from back then, you gotta look at my report.” He knocked ash from his cigarette into an overly-full ashtray.
“I’m not looking for precise details, I just have some general questions,” Beckett replied.
Forte shrugged his shoulder. “Ok. Shoot, counselor.”
“Did anyone ever try to verify Beaumont’s story?”
“Naw, it was obvious he did it.”
“What makes you say that?”
Forte leaned forward. “By the time we found him, he washed his hands with ammonia and got rid of his clothes.” He jabbed his cigarette at Beckett to emphasize his words as he spoke. This caused the bright tip of the cigarette to appear to dance in the semi-darkness.
“Why is ammonia significant?”
“’Cause he used the ammonia to get rid of the gunpowder traces. That’s how he tried to hide he was shooting a gun.”
“So no one investigated because. .,” Beckett let his sentence drop off, hoping Forte would finish it; Forte didn’t disappoint.
“Because it was obvious he did it,” he said, followed by a series of coughs. “Why else would he leave the scene and go wash in ammonia? To get rid of the gunpowder, that’s why.”
“Did anyone test him for gunpowder? Maybe he missed something when he was cleaning?”
“Naw, we didn’t waste our time.”
