Mercy (A Neon Lawyer Novel Book 2) Page 11

  On his end, he had Monica and Ted. The private investigator hadn’t found anybody else that had relevant information. Monica and Ted were the only two people who had ever heard Ruby ask for someone to kill her.

  Preparing Ted had been easy. Brigham didn’t want to go through too many questions, or even the actual ones he would be asking. The jury, he felt, could see through too much preparation. He wanted Ted’s responses authentic.

  Monica, on the other hand, had trouble getting two words out. She would only say “yes” or “no” wherever possible, and Brigham had to drag her testimony out of her, sentence by sentence. It was understandable, considering everything she’d been through. He wouldn’t want to relive it all in front of strangers, either.

  The day was exhausting, though in reality he’d done nothing more than sit at his desk and read cases and talk with people. He had begun preparing his opening when he remembered that his IT guy had downloaded all the videos Monica had taken. He closed his legal research portal and opened the first file.

  The first video must’ve been taken early in the progression of Ruby Montgomery’s disease. She was smiling and playing with her children, wearing jeans and a blouse, still an outpatient. Ted wasn’t there.

  He flipped to the next video. In this one, she was still at home, but something was different. She appeared pale and listless. He watched the video for a while. David attempted to play with her, but she brushed him away. There were several videos like that. And then he got to the first one of her hospitalized.

  Monica, holding her cell phone with the camera on, walked into her mother’s hospital room. Ruby was staring out the window. She had lost weight and seemed to have aged a decade, though it’d probably been only months. Turning her head slowly, she took in her children and smiled a weak smile. The children swarmed around her, not realizing their mother was too frail to respond. Ted was there in this one, and he sat across from her, working on his phone while the children played. He and his wife didn’t speak five words to each other.

  Brigham pictured long nights talking about her death. Talking and talking and talking, until there was nothing left to say. Each accepted the hand fate had dealt them and had emotionally shut down.

  Several of the videos were good examples to show to the jury, and Brigham attached them to emails and sent them to one of the paralegals, asking her to burn two discs and send one to the prosecutor. He then closed the media player and rose. The key video that he would attempt to play for the jury several times would be the video Monica had shown him. The one of Ruby asking Ted to end her life. It was painful to watch, but he’d have to play it as much as he could so the jury understood what choice Ted had had in front of him.

  His eyes hurt, and a headache had started at the front of his skull and was working its way back.

  He decided to call it a day and headed out. Scotty was flirting with one of their secretaries up front and followed him out to the elevators.

  “You okay?” he said.

  “Fine, why?” Brigham asked.

  “Because you look tired.”

  “I am tired.”

  “And you look like someone killed your pet turtle since Molly left.”

  He shook his head. “It was so fast. She dumped us like she didn’t even know us. She told me about it after she accepted the position.”

  “Have you seen her since then?”

  “No. I’ve been letting her calls go to voicemail.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  The elevator dinged and opened. Brigham rolled his bike on and pushed the button for the bottom floor. “Why not?”

  “Because we’re each fighting our own battles and need help sometimes. Even her.”

  The doors shut, and Brigham was left staring at his reflection in the polished steel. The elevators stopped on one other floor and a couple got on. They were groping each other and laughing, sharing kisses and then glancing back to him to see if he was watching. He kept his eyes on the numbers above the door.

  When they got off the elevator, he waited until they had left the building and then stood in the lobby for a minute. He rolled his bike over to the wall and leaned it there as he took a seat. The entrance was mostly glass, and he could see the bank across the street and the enormous amount of traffic between the buildings on Main Street.

  Finally, after about ten minutes, he sighed, rose, and headed out the entrance.

  25

  Jennifer Vest sat in her office until the sun had set and night overtook the city. She had stripped off her jacket and sat in a sleeveless shirt, exposing the tattoos that ran from her shoulder to her wrist on her right arm. She had begun the collection while growing up in the barrio in East Los Angeles. A tattoo shop near where she’d lived hadn’t asked for identification, and she and her friends had started getting tattoos there at thirteen.

  Back then, she was Jennifer Alvarez. At thirteen, she had an impending sense of her own doom: she would never leave the barrio alive.

  Being in a gang wasn’t optional. She could either be part of a gang or their victim. She saw too many girls beat up or worse every day because they didn’t join. Sometimes they got invited to parties and then were drugged by the girls and given to the guys to gang rape. The girls in the gangs thought that hilarious. Jennifer never took part in that, but every moment, she was scheming and plotting some way to get out of the barrio.

  Her mother worked in a factory from sunup to sundown, and she had no idea who her father was. Her mother had told her he was an army man she’d met when she was younger. He’d promised her the moon and the stars, but when she got pregnant, he was gone.

  At fifteen, Jennifer discovered the beauty of fake IDs. Her friends used them to get into bars, but she had another purpose for them: work. She started at fifteen and saved every penny. By the time she was seventeen, she had enough saved up to get her and her mother out of the barrio and into a decent apartment in Brentwood—away from her so-called friends and the gang.

  Technically, she had to be jumped out of a gang or else she wouldn’t be considered to have left. When she was considering informing them and asking to be jumped out, they said they had some work for her. A rival gang member was talking shit, they told her, and she needed to get wet. “Getting wet” was what they called killing someone because of the amount of blood that poured out.

  Jennifer knew it was time. She packed up and moved her mother in one day and didn’t tell anyone—not her school, not her friends, not even other family members.

  She earned her GED and decided to join the police force. It was the only option she thought made sense for her. She knew she didn’t have the study skills to excel in academia, but she did excel on the force. She was detective in less than four years and in Robbery-Homicide in another two.

  The hours were what forced her out. When she was on call, there were times she would work thirty or forty hours straight, sleep a few hours, and then get called out on another case. For someone who wanted a husband and children, it wasn’t a lifestyle she could maintain.

  When she met her husband and he convinced her they should move to Utah, the final pieces were in place and, for the first time in her life, she knew she’d truly pulled herself out of the barrio.

  Her cell phone buzzed on her desk, and she noticed for the first time that it was past eight. She answered.

  “Ramon,” she said, “little early for you to be awake. Parties don’t start until ten.”

  “Shit, I been up since morning. Running game on these bitches.”

  She grinned. “What’d you need?”

  “Word was you needed some dirt on that fuckin’ pig. Sean.”

  “Detective Henry Sean?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about him?”

  “I got some dirt, chiquita.”

  “What kinda dirt?”

  He chuckled. “The kind you wanna buy. Come down and see the homies.”

  “Don’t waste my time, Ramon.”

  “I ain’t
.”

  “All right. See ya in a few.”

  Her car, a black Cadillac CTS, was parked out in front of her building. She’d founded Investigations International with her husband, himself an ex-FBI agent in the terrorism task force. The company had grown when they branched out into bodyguards and began offering security details to celebrities during the Sundance Film Festival. As their reputation grew, they were hired full time for actors and actresses, musicians, and even a few politicians overseas. The building, once rented, was now hers as well.

  She didn’t have to do this part of it. If she wanted to, she could sit in her office and be an administrator. There was no need for her to do any investigation, and in fact, she’d cut back to no more than a handful of cases a year. But whenever Brigham called, she answered. She wasn’t exactly sure what he struck her as, but it was something she didn’t see in a lot of other clients. He was kind, cared in a way about everyone, and she enjoyed being around that. He didn’t seem to judge people for what they did, knowing that in similar circumstances, anyone might do the same thing. She loved that about him.

  Ramon lived in West Valley, about twenty minutes from her office. He was one of her many contacts. When she needed information about cops, she didn’t go to the cops. She knew they protected their own as much as they could. She went to the street. The true gangsters kept tabs on the cops in their territories. Ramon knew every detective in the Narcs unit by first name and had at least seen every other detective in Robbery-Homicide, Vice, and Special Victims. They were enemies, and Ramon didn’t like to fight his enemies blind.

  She stopped in front of the house and looked in. Several rough-looking Hispanic men were sitting on the porch drinking, thumping bass coming from inside the house. Jen walked up the steps and through them as though they weren’t there, showing no fear. They made a few disgusting comments, but she wasn’t worried. They knew what Ramon would do if they touched her.

  Inside, people were lying around on the couches, watching television and smoking joints. She crossed the living room and saw Ramon at a table in the kitchen with two other men, playing cards.

  “What’s up, chiquita?”

  “Let’s talk.”

  Ramon tossed his cards on the table and rose. He walked out the back door, and she followed him. Outside was a large, unkempt yard strewn with all sorts of garbage. Ramon sat in a deck chair, took a blunt out of his pocket, and lit it.

  “That dude Sean, holmes, he’s fuckin’ dirty as dirt.”

  “Let’s see it.”

  He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and opened a video. Jen watched it over his shoulder, the sweet but pungent odor of the blunt wafting up to her.

  The video had been shot on a cell phone and from a lower angle, as though someone held it at waist height. A group of men were standing around with Detective Henry Sean in the center, in plain clothes and sipping a beer. He was laughing and joking with the other men outside a bar.

  One of the men took out a vial and tipped some white powder from it onto the back of his hand. He snorted it and then offered the vial to Sean.

  The detective put some on his hand, snorted it, and then took the remnants on his finger and rubbed it on his gums.

  “Yo,” someone said, “there he is.”

  A car came to a stop next to them, and a large man stepped out. He was enormously muscular, his arms bulging inside his sleeves. He handed Sean a brown sack. Sean looked inside, rolled up the sack as tightly as he could, and tucked it into his pocket.

  “H, dawg,” the big man said, “as much as I’m payin’ you, maybe you should be runnin’ this shit.”

  The detective laughed.

  The video went on with another snort of cocaine and a promise of prostitutes later at someone’s house before it turned off. In total, it was thirty-eight seconds.

  “How did you get this?” Jen asked.

  “I know the big man was there, the one recording.”

  “You know if I use this, that detective will be fired. Your boy won’t have him anymore.”

  “Shit, that big man, that fool’s a punk. And this pig helpin’ him, he ain’t helpin’ me. I ain’t give a shit about him.”

  Jen stood up. She’d seen corruption up close with her time in the LAPD, but every time she saw it again, it made her blood boil. Those who were trusted by the public to protect them but who then went off and worked for the people they should have been arresting made her want to put on the badge again, join Internal Affairs, and hunt them down.

  “How much?” she asked.

  “For you? Two thousand.”

  “That video ain’t worth two thousand.”

  He shrugged. “Ask your man.”

  She sighed and pulled out her phone and brought up Brigham in her contacts.

  26

  Brigham stood in front of Molly’s condo door. Down the hall, it sounded like a party was going on. Music blared, muffled only slightly by the walls, and after a few moments a girl came stumbling out, giggling. She glanced over at Brigham and flicked her hair away from her eyes.

  “’Sup, cutie,” she slurred.

  “Hi.”

  The girl was dragged back inside by another girl who appeared even more drunk, and the door closed. Brigham breathed in deeply, let it out through his nose, and then knocked on the door. Molly opened it, wearing her UCLA sweatshirt. She grinned and said, “Your phone must not be working.”

  “Must not be.”

  She opened the door and let him come in. He flopped on the couch nearest the windows overlooking the city. The sky was clear, no clouds, and the moonlight bathed the room in a dim glow.

  “Do you know, moonlight doesn’t actually exist,” he said. “It’s the sun’s light reflecting off the moon. But it feels different. It feels like it’s something different. Our senses can be completely wrong.”

  “But it doesn’t make it any less beautiful, does it?”

  He shook his head. “That’s the scariest part—that we could be completely wrong and happy in our ignorance.”

  She sat next to him and lightly touched his shoulder. Her soft hand sent a small shock through him as her fingers moved up to his neck. They sat in silence a long time, so long that he felt himself drifting off to sleep. He forced himself awake by sitting up and leaning his elbows on his thighs.

  “How’s work?” he said.

  She grinned. “Do you really want to know?”

  “Yes, I really do.”

  “So far I’ve had about a thousand homeless people arrested for things that shouldn’t really be crimes. I appeared in court once, prosecuting a drug dealer for stealing the money of another drug dealer. Oh, and I inherited a case of a domestic violence victim who didn’t show up to court to testify against her scumbag husband, so my direct boss is making me arrest and prosecute her for failing to appear on a court order.”

  “Sounds fun.”

  “It is,” she said, her tone making it clear that that was exactly what it wasn’t. She curled her legs up under her.

  “No one’s forcing you to stay there.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I jumped the gun, but I want to give it some time.”

  Brigham felt sleep coming over him as if someone were pouring warm water over his head and he was slipping into a bath. Her condo always had that effect on him. Soft New Age music played through speakers that must’ve been in the walls. She got cold easily, so she kept the temperature above normal.

  “Stay the night with me,” she said.

  He nodded, and as he leaned in to kiss her, his cell phone vibrated in his pocket. She must’ve felt it, too, because she smiled and rested her forehead against his. He took the phone out and saw that it was Jen.

  “Hey,” he said. “Kind of a bad time.”

  “If that was true, you wouldn’t have answered.”

  “I hate how smart you are. What did you need?”

  “The Ted Montgomery case. There’s something you need to see. Something we’re gonna have to pay for. Bu
t I want you to see it first.”

  “What?”

  “I think it’s best you see it. And bring your checkbook.”

  As they got off the freeway, Brigham glanced over at Molly. She was the perfect beauty, nothing plastic or artificial. She looked alluring with or without makeup, and her confidence and fierce intelligence shone through like a beacon. One thing Brigham had noticed whenever he went out with her was that men didn’t stare or hit on her as much as he thought they would.

  He had been puzzled by it for a long time. There was a difference between sultry and slutty, and he wondered if men only responded to the slutty and not the sultry. It wasn’t until months into their relationship that he figured out what it was: men didn’t see it.

  The powerful intellect, the confidence that required no one else’s approval, the assertiveness and strength… most men couldn’t see it. That wasn’t what they looked for in women, and so when they came across it, they had no idea what it was.

  Suddenly, with that one thought, Brigham pitied Molly. He could picture a lifetime of neglect and bullying by people who were her intellectual inferior, the whole time Molly questioning what was wrong with her when the problem actually lay with others.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t have driven a luxury car into West Valley in the middle of the night,” he said.

  “It’s hardly the middle of the night. And I’ve got a gun in the glove box.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since three days ago when I began prosecuting people.”

  They passed Valley Fair Mall, a run-down mall the city had recently renovated. It didn’t appear any better off than before. Brigham looked at the list of movies playing at the mall’s theater.

  “You know, I haven’t been to a movie in like three years,” he said.

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, how about this Friday?”

  “I did kind of want to see the new Spiderman.”

  She chuckled. “Why aren’t I surprised?”