‘The Trial’ Chapters 29-34

To my eye, he looked as though he’d used up all his tricks and couldn’t believe he was actually on trial. By contrast, his attorney, Jake Penney, wore his pin-striped suit with aplomb. DA Leonard Parisi looked indomitable.

All stood to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, and then there was a prolonged rustle as seats were retaken. Someone coughed. A cell phone clattered to the floor. Conklin turned his head and we exchanged looks.

Kingfisher had threatened us since the nasty Finders Keepers case last year—and still he haunted my dreams. Would the jury find him guilty of killing Stone and Whittaker? Would this monstrous killer spend the rest of his life inside the high, razor-wired walls of Pelican Bay State Prison?

The bailiff called the court to order, and Judge Crispin asked Len Parisi if he was ready to present his case.

I felt pride in the big man as he walked out into the well. I could almost feel the floor shake. He welcomed the jury and thanked them for bearing down under unusually trying conditions in the interest of justice.

Then he launched into his opening statement.

 

CHAPTER 32

 

I’D NEVER BEFORE SEEN Len Parisi present a case to a jury. He was an intimidating man and a powerful one. As district attorney, he was responsible for investigating and prosecuting crime in this city and was at the head of three divisions: Operations, Victims Services, and Special Operations.

But he was never more impressive than he was today, standing in for our murdered friend and colleague, ADA Barry Schein.

Parisi held the jury’s attention with his presence and his intensity, and then he spoke.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, the defendant, Jorge Sierra, is a merciless killer. In the course of this trial you will hear witness testimony and see video evidence of the defendant in the act of shooting two innocent women to death.”

Parisi paused, but I didn’t think it was for effect. It seemed to me that he was inside the crime now, seeing the photos of the victims’ bloodied bodies at the Vault. He cleared his throat and began again.

“One of those women was Lucille Stone, twenty-eight years old. She worked in marketing, and for a long time she was one of Mr. Sierra’s girlfriends. She was unarmed when she was killed. Never carried a gun, and she had done nothing to Mr. Sierra. But, according to Lucy’s friends, she had decisively ended the relationship.

“Cameron Whittaker was Lucy’s friend. She was a substitute teacher, volunteered at a food bank, and had nothing whatsoever to do with Mr. Sierra or his associates. She was what is called collateral damage. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

I turned my eyes to the jury and they were with Len all the way. He walked along the railing that separated the jury box from the well of the courtroom.

He said, “One minute these friends were enjoying a girls’ night out in an upscale nightclub, sitting together at the bar. And the next minute they were shot to death by the defendant, who thought he could get away with murder in full sight of 150 people, some of whom aimed their cell phones and took damning videos of this classic example of premeditated murder.

“I say ‘premeditated’ because the shooting was conceived before the night in question when Lucy Stone rejected Mr. Sierra’s advances. He followed her. He found her. He taunted her and he menaced her. And then he put two bullet holes in her body and even more in the body of her friend.

“Lucy Stone didn’t know that when she refused to open her door to him, he immediately planned to enact his revenge—”

Parisi had his hands on the railing when an explosion cracked through the air inside the courtroom.

It was a stunning, deafening blast. I dove for the floor and covered the back of my neck with my hands. Screams followed the report. Chairs scraped back and toppled. I looked up and saw that the bomb had gone off behind me and had blown open the main doors.

Smoke filled the courtroom, obscuring my vision. The spectators panicked. They swarmed forward, away from the blast and toward the judge’s bench.

Someone yelled, “Your Honor, can you hear me?”

I heard shots coming from the well; one, then two more.

I was on my feet, but the shots sent the freaked-out spectators in the opposite direction, away from the bench, toward me and through the doors out into the hallway.

Who had fired those shots? The only guns that could have passed through metal detection into the Hall had to belong to law enforcement. Had anyone been hit?

As the room cleared and the smoke lifted, I took stock of the damage. The double main doors were nearly unhinged, but the destruction was slight. The bomb seemed more like a diversion than a forceful explosion meant to kill, maim, or destroy property.

A bailiff helped Parisi to his feet. Judge Crispin pulled himself up from behind the bench, and the jury was led out the side doorway. Conklin headed toward me as the last of the spectators flowed out the main doors and cops ran in.

“EMTs are on the way,” he said.

That’s when I saw that the defense table, where the King had been sitting with his attorney, had flipped onto its side.

Penney looked around and called out, “Help! I need help here!”

My ears still rang from the blast. I made my way around overturned chairs to where Kingfisher lay on his side in a puddle of blood. He reached out his hand and beckoned to me.

“I’m here,” I said. “Talk to me.”

The King had been shot. There was a ragged bullet hole in his shoulder, blood pumping from his belly, and more blood pouring from a wound at the back of his head. There were shell casings on the floor.

He was in pain and maybe going into shock, but he was conscious.

His voice sounded like a whisper to my deafened ears. But I read him, loud and clear.

“Elena did this,” he said. “Elena, my little Elena.”

Then his face relaxed. His hand dropped. His eyes closed and he died.

 

CHAPTER 33

 

JORGE SIERRA’S FUNERAL WAS held at a Catholic cemetery in Crescent City, a small northwest California town on the ocean named for the crescent-shaped bay that defined it.

Among the seventy-five hundred people included in the census were the fifteen hundred inmates of nearby Pelican Bay State Prison.

It was either irony or payback, but Elena had picked this spot because her husband had asked to be imprisoned at Pelican Bay and now he would be within eight miles of it—forever.

The graveyard had been virtually abandoned. The ground was flat, bleak, with several old headstones that had been tipped over by vandals or by weather. The chapel needed paint, and just beyond the chapel was a potholed parking lot.

Several black cars, all government property, were parked there, and a dozen FBI agents stood in a loose perimeter around the grave site and beside the chapel within the parking lot with a view of the road.

I was with Conklin and Parisi. My partner and I had been told that Sierra was dead and buried once before. This time I had looked into the coffin. The King was cold and dead, but I still wanted to see the box go into the ground.

Conklin had suffered along with me when Sierra had terrorized me last year, and even though justice had been cheated, we were both relieved it was over.

The FBI had sent agents to the funeral to see who showed up. The King’s murder inside the courthouse was an unsolved mystery. The smoke and the surging crowd had blocked the camera’s view of the defense table. Elena Sierra and her father, Pedro Quintana, had been questioned separately within twelve hours of the shooting and had said that they had hit the floor after the blast, eyes down when the bullets were fired. They hadn’t seen the shooting.

So they said.

Both had come for Sierra’s send-off, and Elena had brought her children to say good-bye to their father.

Elena looked lovely in black. Eight-year-old Javier and six-year-old Alexa bowed their heads as the priest spoke over their father’s covered coffin at graveside. The little girl cried.

I studied this tableau.

Elena had many reasons to want her husband dead. But she had no military background, nothing that convinced me that she could lean over the railing and shoot her husband point-blank in the back of the head.

Her father, however, was a different story.

I’d done some research into Mexican gangsters and learned that Pedro Quintana was the retired head of Los Toros, the original gang that had raised and trained Sierra on his path to becoming the mightiest drug kingpin of them all.

Sierra had famously disposed of Quintana after he split off from Los Toros and formed Mala Sangre, the new and more powerful drug and crime cartel.

Both Elena and her father had motive to put Sierra down, but how had one or both of them pulled off this shooting in open court?

I’d called Joe last night to brainstorm with him. Despite the state of our marriage, Joe Molinari had background to spare as an agent in USA clandestine services, as well as from his stint as deputy to the director of Homeland Security.

He theorized that during the power outage in the Hall, a C-4 explosive charge had been slapped onto the hinges of Judge Crispin’s courtroom doors. It was plausible that one of the hundreds of law enforcement personnel prowling the Hall that night had been paid to set this charge, and it was possible for a lump of plastic explosive to go unnoticed.

A package containing a small gun, ammo, and a remote-controlled detonator could have been smuggled in at the same time, left where only Sierra’s killer could find it. It could even have been passed to the killer or killers the morning of the trial.

Had Elena and her father orchestrated this perfect act of retribution? If so, I thought they were going to get away with it.

These were my thoughts as I stood with Conklin and Parisi in the windswept and barren cemetery watching the lowering of the coffin, Elena throwing flowers into the grave, the first shovel of dirt, her children clinging to their mother’s skirt.

The moment ended when a limo pulled around a circular drive and Elena Sierra’s family went to it and got inside.

Rich said to me, “I’m going to hitch a ride back with Red Dog. Okay with you?”

I said it was. We hugged good-bye.

Another car, an aging Mercedes, swung around the circle of dead grass and stone. It stopped for me. I opened the back door and reached out to my baby girl in her car seat. She was wearing a pink sweater and matching hat knit for her by her lovely nanny. I gave Julie a big smooch and what we call a huggy-wuffle.

Then I got into the front passenger seat. Joe was driving.

“Zoo?” he said.

“Zoooooooo,” came from behind.

“It’s unanimous,” I said. “The zoos have it.”

Joe put his hand behind my neck and pulled me toward him. I hadn’t kissed him in a long time. But I kissed him then.

There’d be plenty of time to talk later.

 

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER 34

 

THE LIMO DRIVER WHO was bringing Elena Sierra and the children back from a shopping trip couldn’t park at the entrance to her apartment building. A long-used family car was stopped right in front of the walkway, where an elderly man was helping his wife out of the car with her walker. The doorman ran outside to help the old couple with their cumbersome luggage.

Elena told her driver, “Leave us right here, Harlan. Thanks. See you in the morning.”

After opening the doors for herself and her children, Elena took the two shopping bags from her driver, saying, “I’ve got it. Thanks.”

Doors closed with solid thunks, the limo pulled away, and the kids surrounded their mother, asking her for money to buy churros from the ice cream shop down the block at the corner.

She said, “We don’t need churros. We have milk and granola cookies.” But she finally relented, set down the groceries, found a five-dollar bill in her purse, and gave it to Javier.

“Please get me one, too,” she called after her little boy.

Elena picked up her grocery bags, and as she stood up, she saw two men in bulky jackets—one with a black scarf covering the bottom of his face and the other with a knit cap—crossing the street toward her.

She recognized them as Jorge’s men and knew without a doubt that they were coming to kill her. Mercifully, the children were running and were now far down the block.

The one with the scarf, Alejandro, aimed his gun at the doorman and fired. The gun had a suppressor, and the sound of the discharge was so soft the old man hadn’t heard it, didn’t understand what had happened. He tried to attend to the fallen doorman, while Elena said to the soldier wearing the cap, “Not out here. Please.”

Invoking what residual status she might have as the King’s widow, Elena turned and walked into the modern, beautifully appointed lobby, her back prickling with expectation of a bullet to her spine.

She walked past the young couple sitting on a love seat, past the young man leashing his dog, and pressed the elevator button. The doors instantly slid open and the two men followed her inside.

The doors closed.

Elena stood at the rear with one armed man standing to her left and the other to her right. She looked straight ahead, thinking about the next few minutes as the elevator rose upward, then chimed as it opened directly into her living room.

Esteban, the shooter with the knit cap, had the words Mala Sangre inked on the side of his neck. He stepped ahead of her into the room, looked around at the antiques, the books, the art on the walls. He went to the plate-glass window overlooking the Transamerica Pyramid and the great bay.

“Nice view, Mrs. Sierra,” he said with a booming voice. “Maybe you’d like to be looking out the window now. That would be easiest.”

“Don’t hurt my children,” she said. “They are Jorge’s. His blood.”

She went to the window and placed her hands on the glass. She heard a door open inside the apartment. A familiar voice said loudly, “Drop your guns. Do it now.”

Alejandro whipped around, but before he could fire, Elena’s father cut him down with a shot to the throat, two more to the chest as he fell.

Pedro Quintana said to the man with the cap, who was holding his hands above his head, “Esteban, get down on your knees while I am deciding what to do with you.”

Esteban obeyed, dropping to his knees, keeping his hands up while facing Elena’s father, and beseeching him in Spanish.

“Pedro, please. I have known you for twenty years. I named my oldest son for you. I was loyal, but Jorge, he threatened my family. I can prove myself. Elena, I’m sorry. Por favor.”

Elena walked around the dead man, who was bleeding on her fine Persian carpet where her children liked to play, and took the gun from her father’s hand.

She aimed at Esteban and fired into his chest. He fell sideways, grabbed at his wound, and grunted, “Dios.”

Elena shot him three more times.

When her husband’s soldiers were dead, Elena made calls: First to Harlan to pick up the children immediately and keep them in the car. “Papa will meet you on the corner in five minutes. Wait for him. Take directions from him.”

Then she called the police and told them that she had shot two intruders who had attempted to murder her.

Her father stretched out his arms and Elena went in for a hug. Her father said, “Finish what we started. It’s yours now, Elena.”

“Thank you, Papa.”

She went to the bar and poured out two drinks, gave one glass to her father.

They toasted. “Viva Los Toros.”

Their cartel would be at the top again. This was the way it was always meant to be.

—THE END —

 

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