The Murder List Read online

  “Do you have her résumé? Her personnel file?”

  “The senator would have that.” I wasn’t doing a very good job at this. So far, all my answers fit in the “I don’t know” category. Millin probably thought I was incompetent.

  “What if he said he didn’t have it?”

  “Did he?” Jack said. “Tell you that?”

  Millin ignored him. “Miz North? You’re chief of staff. You don’t have the files?”

  “It doesn’t work that way here,” I told him. Truthfully. “The senator handles that. And Human Resources. Annabella Rigalosa is the person’s name there, if you need it.”

  “Okay. And where were you, say, starting Saturday morning? Can you give me a quick accounting of your whereabouts?”

  “What? You think she was killed Saturday?” I’d clutched my pillow like a life preserver. They couldn’t suspect me. Why would they do that? “Why?”

  I felt Jack shift in his chair, and glanced at him. Was he trying to signal me? If he was trying to surreptitiously tell me to shut up, I had blown it.

  “Go ahead. Tell them.” Jack nodded encouragement. “You’ve got nothing to hide.”

  I remembered Jack had asked me at the crosswalk, oh-so-casually, whether I knew anything about Danielle’s death. Guess it wasn’t such a casual question. He not only wondered but also needed to know, for precisely such an eventuality. Lawyers.

  After I’d rattled off my schedule, which was easy, Millin folded his tents and flapped up his notebook with a “Let me know if you hear anything.” And he left.

  Did he think I was going to cough up a big piece of critical evidence? Or that some remorseful murderer was going to call me and confess?

  “I wish,” I said out loud now, answering myself. I took a sip of my carry-out coffee, but there was none left. Last night, Jack had offered to walk me home, and I’d agreed. What if the killer was still out there? Jack had stopped at my front door and said he’d call me to set up another meeting about the jury deliberations. Which at that point seemed like another lifetime.

  For a fleeting moment then, and maybe I was wrong, I’d thought he was going to ask me for a drink. Which would have been a bizarre ending to a bizarre day.

  Tuesday now. He hasn’t called. Yet. Was that a good thing or a bad thing?

  I instantly hated myself. Danielle Zander was dead. That was all that mattered.

  JACK KIRKLAND

  “Who knows about this?” Jack looked out the window of his corner office as he talked on the phone. Causeway Street was below, and then the Boston Garden arena, where nine hours from now the Celtics were playing the Knicks. Snow was beginning to fall, not the morning rush-hour blizzard those weather people had predicted, only a feathery promise. Jack was predicting the future, which, right now, was one hell of a mess. An interesting mess, but a mess.

  He punched his speakerphone louder so he could pace as he listened to Tom Rafferty. Rafferty had opened this morning’s conversation with “Shit. It’s a cluster.” From their college days together, Jack knew Rafferty didn’t sweat the little stuff. “Cluster” was not little. Whatever Rafferty was calling about, certainly regarding Danielle Zander, Jack had instantly predicted must be cataclysmic. It was. Cataclysmic and impossible.

  “Who the hell knows?” Rafferty’s voice threatened to blow out the cheap tin and paper speaker. “I’m not answering my phone. I told the office not to, either. Shit. I’m gonna have to resign. But even though you’re an asshole, you’re the best defense attorney in Boston.”

  The press would be all over this, unstoppable. Jack had to focus. He half expected his cell phone to ring any second, and it’d be Clea, wondering what he knew and when he knew it. Wheedling again, pretending her snide “My, my” comments Monday at the Rafferty news conference were simply good-natured teasing. But intimating he’d known about this, or suspected it all along, and that’s why he’d been there. Screw her.

  And now Rafferty was making it about himself, instead of about dead Danielle Zander. Which, Jack supposed, was true. It was about Rafferty.

  “Where do they have her now? At the cop shop? And she’s charged? Why?”

  “Yeah, at the cop shop. First-degree murder. Arraignment is today. This afternoon.” Rafferty’s voice seemed to catch as he spoke, whether from bluster or anger or fear, Jack couldn’t tell. “Who the hell knows why.”

  “Seriously, Tom,” and this was pivotal, “what’s the motive? What’s possibly the motive?”

  Jack pictured the crime scene. That dumpster behind the statehouse. He stared out the window as his thoughts raced. Maybe that wasn’t where the murder happened.

  “Why would the victim’s body be left at the statehouse? It’s almost pointing to you. Or indicating an inside job. How’d she supposedly get her out there? Or in there? This is a hell of a narrative, Tom. They must have something. Did they tell you why they charged her? What evidence?”

  Silence on the other end. Which reminded him.

  “You told her not to talk, didn’t you?” Jack’s brain fried at the thought. All the suspects who figured they’d help their own cases by explaining. By describing to the cops, in excruciating detail, why they couldn’t possibly be the guilty party. And every damn time, in doing so, cooked their own goose. “I’m on my way,” Jack said.

  The first rule of innocence is shut the hell up. But Rafferty knew that. He’d certainly have warned her.

  Nina was, after all, his wife.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  RACHEL NORTH

  “You think this is wise? Going this early?” I hustled to keep up with Tom, his long strides eating up the sidewalk while I navigated the cobblestones in my stupid heels. He had burst into my office, the only way to put it, five minutes before. Had my coat in one hand and a briefcase in the other. He held my coat out at me, demanding.

  “Court,” he said.

  So here we were, on the way to Boston Municipal Court. But he was right that I should accompany him to his wife’s arraignment. I had to be there, and it was a command performance for him, too, perverse as it was. He’d have to master a facial expression that combined outrage and anger and absolute certainty of Nina’s innocence. And love. The press would rip him to shreds if he didn’t.

  We’d agreed on “no comment.” Maybe that would work.

  “Senator?” We hit the red light at a crosswalk. Seems like these days crosswalks were where I finally got a word in. Where people were forced to stop for thirty seconds. I talked as fast as I could. Hoping for answers. “Listen. I know you told me the police aren’t telling you anything. I mean, forgive me, but are they even revealing the cause of death? Or time? Do they know? Did you get to talk to—”

  The light changed, and Tom steamed ahead, not answering me. Two pedestrians headed the opposite direction flinched with recognition when they saw him. Didn’t even bother to hide it. The news, electrifying, had raced over the internet and interrupted regular programming the moment it hit, right after lunch today.

  WIFE OF SENATE PRESIDENT CHARGED WITH DUMPSTER MURDER, read the Globe website’s headlines. On television, the arrest was high drama. Breathless anchorpeople, who’d never met an alliteration they didn’t embrace, salivated in their chairs, exchanging knowing looks, as if this disaster were almost too delicious for words. “Beacon Hill bombshell,” one said. “Senate staffer shocker.” One red-and-white graphic asked IS MRS. MISTRESS MURDERER? With the obligatory question mark to shield it from being slander.

  “Mistress.” The word flashed neon in my brain. Danielle Zander. Mistress. Disgusting.

  The courthouse was a white concrete modern monstrosity, all acute angles and pointy corners. It looked like someone built it from plans drawn in vanishing perspective and then thought that was how it was supposed to appear in real life.

  We pushed through the heavy glass doors. Tom didn’t say a word. We both showed our state senate IDs and stepped into the high-ceilinged, marble-walled lobby, gloomy in dusty low-wattage chandeliers.
None of the security guards looked Tom in the eye as they gestured us through. I felt their suspicions drilling into my back as we hurried to the bank of silver art-deco elevators. One aluminum door swished open almost instantly. We stepped on—it was empty—and the doors closed us in. I’d almost convinced myself we were so early that no press would have arrived yet.

  The opening door proved me wrong. A wall of bodies and cameras and microphones pressed toward us, and a din of insistent voices engulfed us, questions echoing on the white brick walls, doubling the sound, tripling the sound. We almost couldn’t get out of the elevator. It crossed my mind to push the CLOSE DOOR button, escape, and sneak back into the courtroom some other way.

  “Let’s do this,” I said. I lifted my chin and powered ahead, carving a path for the senator, unstoppably determined, as if I were his personal fullback.

  “Is your wife a murderer, Senator?” “Why did she do it?” “Why would Nina kill Danielle Zander?” “Were you having an affair?” “Are you going to resign?”

  What these people were asking, what they were demanding, what they were thinking, was outrageous. Insensitive. Demeaning. Disrespectful. And, though I hated myself for it, exactly what I wanted to know myself.

  “No comment no comment, the senator has no comment,” I repeated. I was a robot, a talking robot, but I felt Tom Rafferty silent and seething behind me. We made it to the tall wooden courtroom doors of room 226. I pulled one of the metal door handles. Nothing. Tried the other one. Nothing. And again. Nothing. Locked.

  “No comment no comment no comment,” I said as I kept trying, rattling the curved handles with one hand, knocking like crazy with the other. Tom and I were trapped here, sandwiched between the closed doors and the insistent reporters. Not a good battle strategy.

  I almost fell over when one of the doors opened right onto me, and I stumbled a step backward, almost tripping on the senator, who stood close behind me. A scowling court officer, a head taller than I was and shoulders twice as broad, appeared in the doorway, clearly ready to order us away. He stopped mid-command. Closed his mouth. Regrouped.

  “Get in here,” he muttered, waving us through.

  I went first, ducking my head, then the senator. I felt the crowd behind us surging as a group, trying to follow.

  “Get back!” the officer instructed. His bulk blocked the open door, arms crossed over his chest. “Courtroom stays closed until one thirty. Rules are rules.”

  “Come on, Hector,” someone whined from the back of the hallway. “If they can go in, we can go in.”

  “He’s the president of the senate,” the court officer hissed.

  “Not for long!” someone called out.

  JACK KIRKLAND

  “Court calls Commonwealth versus Nina Perini Rafferty.”

  The court clerk’s voice, as always, betrayed not a whit of the enormity of this. The notoriety. The inescapable headlines. Jack knew they were trained to treat every case exactly the same way. Beside him, at the defense table, Nina Rafferty, straight-backed and without a hair or pearl out of place, stood as instructed. Her pale-manicured fingertips grazed the counsel table. She looked stolidly ahead.

  “Jack Kirkland for the defendant, Your Honor,” Jack said.

  “Martha Gardiner for the Commonwealth, Your Honor,” Gardiner said.

  “Be seated,” the clerk instructed.

  Gardiner didn’t deign to glance at Jack, as if to telegraph her disdain for the whole process. To the prosecutor’s way of thinking, Jack figured, being charged equated to being guilty. Which meant being a defense attorney equated to being extraneous.

  With a scrape of wooden chairs on marble floor, they all took their places. Up on the bench, the black-robed judge paged through a file of documents, methodically turning one page after the other, as if he were alone and without a responsibility in the world. Ralph Drybrough, short-tempered and short-fused, was not about to suck up to the senate president’s wife. In fact, Jack had learned in a quick Google search, Drybrough had been appointed by one of Rafferty’s political rivals, a now-retired governor who’d left this hanging judge as his legal legacy. Jack imagined the judge and Martha Gardiner as country-club dining cronies, tête-á-tête-ing over premium martinis, sharing the soufflé, lording it over the waitstaff in preparation for lording it over innocent defendants. Who knew how far those two had gone. How far Martha would go to get what she wanted. To win.

  Instead of clutching Jack’s arm, as some female defendants did, or moving closer to feel protected, Nina Rafferty kept a foot of inviolable personal space between them. As if the taint of the court emanated from him as well. That he wasn’t her savior. That he was a necessary evil. She’d articulated it herself an hour ago in the courthouse’s attorney-client room.

  Jack had been there many times with his murder-list cases, often with some poor soul who professed innocence even in the face of ridiculously damning evidence. Some poor schlub who’d gotten the short straw in a drug deal or who’d gotten too greedy with the local scumbags and gangbangers, and hotheaded or pumped full of controlled substances, got grabbed up for murder. They all had an excuse, a rationale, a reason. Some, sure, were guilty as hell. Murder-list clients often were.

  But not always. Sometimes the prosecution simply couldn’t prove it. But sometimes, more often than most murder-listers, Jack won. Purely won. Sometimes, because of him, a truly innocent person went home, free and safe. That’s what kept him going. Not the money. The truth. The victory.

  Nina Rafferty was a different story. First, she’d promised him an initial personal check for fifty thou. She hadn’t wept, not even one tear. The cops picked her up at home this morning, she’d told him, arriving after her husband left for the statehouse. Tom was her one phone call. As a result, Rafferty called Jack. Within half an hour, Jack was at the cop shop, where a surly cadet with a scrawny mustache escorted Jack to Nina, sitting alone behind bars in a concrete holding cell. She wore the clothes she’d apparently been arrested in—black pants, a black sweater Jack bet was cashmere, and a pearl necklace. Black flat shoes. She also wore a frown. Her posture indicated she was attempting not to touch any of the surfaces in the room.

  “These people are insane,” she said. She narrowed her eyes at the cop who’d accompanied them to the cramped meeting room, not caring whether he heard her sneer. A screen panel, tiny squares of metal mesh, kept her physically separate from Jack, but her animosity had no barriers. “Get me out of this.”

  “I’ll do my best, Nina. And push hard to get bail.” Jack tried to calm the waters, waited until the officer closed them in. A heater kicked on, rattling the vents above them. Again, as always, Jack wondered if they were being watched or taped. That would be illegal, but Jack wouldn’t be surprised.

  “We’re supposed to have total privacy here, so you can tell me whatever you like,” Jack went on, pulling out a legal pad from his briefcase. “But as always, let me warn you not to say anything to anyone except me. Not anything. ‘Please’ and ‘thank you,’ if you can manage it. And you can answer ‘How are you?’ with ‘I’m fine.’ But nothing more, not a word, to anyone else you might meet.”

  “I’m not going to be here long enough to ‘meet’ anyone,” Nina had pronounced. “And I can’t even imagine talking to anyone.”

  “Okay, Nina. Good,” Jack said. She was angry, and part of his job was to let her vent. When it was appropriate. “Your arraignment’s in about an hour. We don’t have much time. First. Let me ask you, did you tell the detectives anything? What did you tell them?”

  Nina raised one eyebrow. “Do you think I’m an idiot?”

  Jack had paused a beat before answering. Possibly, and he’d seen it happen, her reaction was bravado, borne of fear and anxiety. She was facing life in prison if convicted, and she, clearly not an idiot, knew that. Maybe this was simply her method of managing her emotions. Or maybe she was simply a self-centered bitch.

  But she was his responsibility now.

  “I know you’re
upset,” Jack began, attempting empathy, but it only resulted in Nina rolling her eyes. “So, no, correct? You didn’t say a word?”

  “I asked for a lawyer,” she said. “Everyone knows that’s what one does.”

  “Good.” Jack didn’t bother to contradict her. “Did they tell you anything? Ask you anything? What did they seem to care about?”

  Nina templed her fingers, put the point under her chin. Possibly this was one of her boardroom power moves. But none of that studied body language would be effective here. And if she was smart, she’d understand that.

  “I’ll tell you from the beginning. Won’t that be more efficient?” She didn’t wait for him to agree. “I answered the door. One of the men there introduced himself as Detective Odman, Odgren, something, from the Boston Police Department, homicide division. I was so—surprised. I mean, it must have been about poor Danielle, correct? And I frankly was worried they suspected Tom.”

  Jack nodded. “Okay. Makes sense. Then what?”

  “They asked if they could come in and talk to me. I said, about what? And they said Danielle Zander. Of course, then I assumed even more strongly it was about Tom. And I wasn’t about to say a word. I was polite, naturally, and said I’d prefer to call a lawyer to advise me.”

  She pursed her lips, as if mentally replaying the scene. “And then they asked me where I was Sunday night.”

  Jack nodded again. That was bull. The cops always pushed the boundaries. But the rules were clear. After a person asked for a lawyer, there could be no more questions. He made a note of that on his pad. Plus, it meant they thought the murder was Sunday night. “And you said?”

  “Please. What do you take me for? I reiterated that I wanted a lawyer. I said something about having made that clear.”

  “And then?”

  “And then the moron arrested me. It was—insane. Surreal. Read me my rights. Standing there, in my doorway! Brought out handcuffs, then dragged me to the car he’d parked in the damn street, so I had to walk all that way. In public. I couldn’t even get a coat.”