The Lawyer's Lawyer

CHAPTER Twelve



Vanessa Brock and Pedro “Pete” Diaz had their own plan to deal with the danger and peril associated with a serial killer loose in the city of Oakville. Vanessa told the plan to her parents, who were insisting that she come home to Missouri. Both she and Pete were seniors and very anxious to graduate and get on with their lives—she as a teacher and Pete to go to graduate school for his MBA.

“We’ll be fine,” Vanessa said. “Pete is going to stay at my apartment and sleep on the couch. He’s got a license to carry a gun and he knows how to use it. He goes to the firing range every week and he says he won’t let me out of his sight.”

Vanessa’s parents knew the sleeping on the couch part was a lie, but they weren’t going to call their daughter out on that one. The rest sounded mildly reassuring. Vanessa had always been headstrong and they weren’t going to talk her out of anything she wanted to do anyway. And Pete was a barrel-chested powerful young man. They had met him several times on their visits to Oakville. So they accepted her assurances.

Except for the couch part, the rest of the story was substantially true. Pete didn’t have a gun permit but he did have a gun that he kept under their bed at the apartment. He did go to the range regularly to shoot and he was not going to let Vanessa out of his sight. That part wasn’t hard for Pete. He worshipped the ground she walked on. Nobody was going to get near Vanessa while he was still alive.

On Saturday night, Vanessa and Pete returned home after watching the football game at The Swamp. There hadn’t been a murder in a couple of weeks and there was a fairly decent crowd at the bar. It was almost as if everybody had learned collectively to deal with the fact that they lived in a city under siege, so they continued to go about their daily lives—working, going to school, drinking, watching football. Somewhere in the recesses of their brains, however, they knew that murder and mayhem could, and probably would, rear its ugly head again, but that did not deter them. They still had to live and breathe and play.

Pete had had a little too much to drink. He was okay when he stuck to beer but the lemon drop shooters always did him in. Vanessa drove home although she was a little tipsy herself. It was only nine o’clock but they stripped their clothes off in a matter of seconds and practically passed out in bed. Neither one of them heard the telephone ring at ten, or ten thirty, or eleven.

Somewhere around midnight, Pete woke up to take a leak. His head was pounding as he fumbled in the dark to find the bathroom. Vanessa did not stir although he was making a racket on his journey.

Ten minutes later he was back in bed sidling up next to her naked body. She moaned when she felt him put his arm around her and pull her close. She was half asleep as she felt him working his way inside her. It was almost like a dream when they started moving in rhythm although it felt somehow different this time. Pete felt different. Not bad, just different. Then she felt a sharp pain in her stomach and another one. What is going on? Oh my God, what’s happening?

It was already too late. His hand went to her mouth to stifle any scream she might attempt as he stuck the long thin blade one last time through an opening in her rib cage into her heart.

* * *

Danni got the call at five that morning. It came from Allan.

“We’ve got a double homicide,” he said.

“Is it our guy?” Danni asked. This was the first double homicide.

“Can’t say for sure, but I think so. She was a student at the university and they were both stabbed.”

“That’s close enough,” Danni replied. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

When she arrived forty minutes later, there were cops everywhere—and reporters and crowds behind the barricades that the police now knew to set up at each murder site.

“Where’ve you been?” Allan asked. “I expected you a half hour ago.”

“I made the mistake of lying back down in bed,” Danni told him. “Did I miss anything?”

“Absolutely nothing. The mother called the station when she couldn’t get her daughter on the phone. She was frantic, so two uniforms came over to check. They found the bodies just like they are now, the boyfriend in the bathroom and the girl in the bed. He had one stab wound in the back that went right into his heart. He must have died instantly. She had several stab wounds in the stomach and chest. There were no signs of a struggle. Jeffries postulates that the killer was in the apartment waiting for them when they got home. The boyfriend probably got up in the middle of the night to take a whizz—there’s urine in the toilet, probably his. The killer took care of him and then got in bed with her, maybe even had sex with her before he killed her.”

“What a sicko.”

“Goes without saying,” Allan replied.

“So Jeffries is here?”

“Yeah. He must have been listening on the radio. He got here right after the uniforms. He’s outside searching the perimeter right now.”

It had been two weeks since Alice Jeffries died. Since that day Sam Jeffries had taken time off to be with his kids. He’d only appeared in the office once. Danni had seen him leaving in the middle of the afternoon. She had no idea why he had been there.

She also saw him at Alice’s funeral.

“I’m taking your advice,” he told her. “The kids are going to be home for at least a week. I’m not going near the office while they’re here.”

Danni gave him his key back the day of the funeral and had not seen him since. Apparently the kids had gone back to their own lives.

“Anything we can use?” Danni asked Allan.

“Nope. The coroner may come up with something if they had sex but the place is clean as usual.

Just then there was a commotion outside.

“Somebody found something!” Danni heard an officer say. It was a little after six and the sun was just rising. She followed the crowd out of the apartment and into the backyard toward a thicket of woods. The group were all professionals so they moved slowly, not wanting their peers to think they were excited or anything. A few feet into the thicket she saw Sam Jeffries standing over something and directing traffic. As she drew closer, she heard his voice.

“Be careful getting it out of there. If there are prints, we don’t want to smudge them.”

Two men were on their knees on the ground, carefully moving the dirt away from the object. Allan pressed forward to see what it was. Danni followed.

There on the ground, obscured slightly by some plants, was a large bowie knife: The handle was carved in the shape of a gargoyle!