If Elizabeth was looking for further insight into Adrian, she didn’t find it in the first moments of court. He entered in full restraints, the nineteenth inmate in a row of twenty. He kept his eyes down, so she saw the top of his head, the line of his nose. Elizabeth watched him shuffle to his place on the long bench and tried to reconcile the man she saw with the video from the warden’s office. As disturbing as he’d appeared, he looked ten times better, now—not filled out but heavier, troubled but not insane. She willed him to look her way, and when the brown eyes came up, she felt the same shock of communication. She sensed so many things about him, not just willfulness and fear but a profound aloneness. All that flashed in an instant, then the din of court intervened, and his head dipped again as if weighted by all the stares heaped upon it. Cops. Reporters. Other defendants. They all got it. Everybody knew. Crowded as the room was—and it was packed—nothing brought the thunder like Adrian Wall.
“Holy shit. Look at this place.” Beckett slid in beside her, craning his neck at the double row of cameras and reporters. “I can’t believe the judge allowed this kind of circus. There’s what’s-her-face. Channel Three. Shit, she’s looking at you.”
Elizabeth glanced that way, face expressionless. The reporter was pretty and blond in bright nails and a tight red sweater. She made a call-me gesture and frowned when Elizabeth ignored it.
“Did you see the warden?” Beckett asked.
“You know what? Outside.” Elizabeth pushed against his shoulder and followed him off the bench. Eyes tracked them, but she didn’t care what Dyer or Randolph or any of the other cops thought. “You know, your buddy the warden is a real asshole.”
They rounded into the hall, a sea of people milling around them, parting at the sight of Beckett’s badge. Elizabeth crowded him into a corner beside a trash can and a tattooed kid sleeping on a bench.
“He’s not exactly my buddy,” Beckett said.
“Then, what?”
“He helped me once when I was in a bad place. That’s all. I thought he could help you, too.”
“Why was he at Nathan’s?”
“I don’t know. He just showed up.”
“What were you arguing about?”
“The fact I didn’t want him on my fucking crime scene. What’s going on here, Liz? You have no reason to be angry with me.”
He was right, and she knew it. Moving to a narrow window, Elizabeth wrapped her arms around her chest. Outside, the day was too perfect for what was coming. “He showed me the tape.”
“And the people Adrian killed?”
“The people he might have killed.”
“You don’t think he’s capable?”
Elizabeth stared through the glass. Adrian had been gentler than most, but like all good cops he had steel in his spine and an unflinching will. Could suffering such as his twist those things into something deformed and violent? Of course it could. But, had it? “People are rushing to judgment, Charlie. I feel it.”
“That’s not true.”
“Come on. When was the last time you saw so many cops at first appearance? I counted twenty-three, including the captain. What is it normally? Six or seven? Look at that.” She gestured at the crowd gathered at the courtroom door. It was twice as large as one might normally see: spectators and press, the angry, the curious.
“People are scared,” Beckett said. “Another woman. The same church.”
“This is a witch hunt.”
“Liz, wait.”
But she didn’t. She pushed through the crowd and found another seat in the area reserved for cops. People were still staring, but she didn’t care. Could Charlie be right? What was the path when your heart said one thing, and facts hinted at another? Adrian was tried in a courtroom very much like this, convicted by a jury of his peers. But they didn’t know everything, did they? There was a reason his DNA was under the dead woman’s nails.
Reasons and secrets, infidelity and death.
Adrian said no one knew he was sleeping with the victim, but was it really such a blur? What about Gideon’s father? If Adrian was sleeping with his wife, Robert Strange may have known. Sex. Betrayal. Wives had been murdered for less. If he framed her lover for the murder, it would be a neat little package: cheating wife dead, boyfriend locked away. But Robert Strange had an alibi. Beckett himself had verified it.
What about Adrian’s wife?
That was an interesting question. Did Catherine Wall know her husband was cheating? She was pregnant, possibly jealous. She wasn’t investigated because no one other than Adrian and his attorney knew about the affair.
What if that was not entirely true?
Against his own attorney’s advice, Adrian had refused to take the stand. Had he done so, he could have explained all the things that led to his conviction. He said he kept quiet because he didn’t wish to hurt his wife, and because no one would believe him, anyway. What if it was more than that? What if he didn’t want to implicate her? Take the stand against her?
Did Adrian go to prison to protect his wife?
If Catherine Wall knew of the affair, she had motive to kill Julia Strange. Did she have an alibi? Most likely, no one would ever know. The woman was gone, the case closed. So Elizabeth considered the crime itself. Manual strangulation took some strength. So did lifting bodies, posing them on altars. Could a woman do it?
Maybe.
If she was strong enough. Angry enough.