For some reason Norton’s words—and his aggrieved tone of voice—struck me as funny. He ranted on, while I took a few seconds to control the urge to giggle. Then I hung up on him.
He called back again immediately. I stared at the screen, waiting for his call to go to voicemail, after which I could block him. Though not before screenshotting his phone number so I could warn anyone else who might be hearing from him.
Ophelia and Amber noticed what I was doing.
“Junk call?” Ophelia asked.
“You could say that.” I held up my phone so they could see it.
“What have you got against poor Mr. Name Unavailable?” Amber asked.
“It’s Godfrey Norton, calling to inform me that I need to tell Cordelia to stop trying to silence him.” I gave way to the temptation to echo the Gadfly’s outraged tone.
“‘Help! Help! I’m being repressed!’” Ophelia exclaimed, in what I recognized as a quote from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
“‘Come and see the violence inherent in the system!’” I quoted back, and we both burst into laughter.
Amber looked thoughtful.
“I know he’s annoying,” she said. “But I worry that kicking him out could backfire. I mean, if word gets around that he was kicked out for trying to express unpopular opinions—”
“But he wasn’t kicked out for expressing unpopular opinions,” I pointed out. “He was kicked out for abusing an animal and harassing his fellow attendees.”
“Not to mention trying to keep anyone else from expressing any opinion he disagrees with,” Ophelia added.
“I know,” Amber said. “And believe me, I’d have been really glad if he hadn’t come to begin with. But you know how good he is at warping the truth. Before you know it, he’ll have the rest of the world thinking we kicked him out because we didn’t want him to present his convincing evidence against me, and Ezekiel and what’s-her-name—that redheaded girl. Whatever her name is.”
“Madelaine,” I said.
“Right.” Amber frowned slightly. “She didn’t actually bump off anyone, did she?”
“No,” I said. “She’s working to help her mother, who’s in prison for killing her husband. Madelaine’s stepfather.”
“Lucky lady,” Amber said. “With four people showing up to plead her case.”
“Four people?” Ophelia sounded puzzled.
“Madelaine and the older redhead and the two little old ladies,” Amber explained. “They’re always hanging around together.”
“Oh, right,” Ophelia said. “They seem to have hit it off together, but they’re not here about the same case. Two different cases—Festus is trying to decide which one to tackle next. Madelaine and her aunt—the redheads—are here about Madelaine’s mother’s case. The two older ladies—Ginny and Janet—are working to help an old high-school friend of theirs.”
“What’s the old friend supposed to have done?” Amber asked.
“You’d have to ask them,” Ophelia said.
I wondered if she really didn’t know or if she was just being discreet. After all, she worked for Festus, and if Ginny and Janet were talking to Festus about their friend’s case, she might have heard information that fell under attorney-client privilege.
“Probably a murder case,” Amber said. “That’s mostly the kind of case people consider it worth working for exoneration. And it could be worse—at least Virginia’s not a death-penalty state.”
“They’re going to present the case in a roundtable session while they’re here,” Ophelia added. “You could try to catch that.”
“I’ll look for it,” Amber said. “Maybe a good thing Norton won’t be here for that. He’d try to twist everything they say. Probably will anyway.”
“And Kevin and Casey will do what they can to get the real story around,” I said.
“Yeah, but the more people see Norton, the more they realize what a jerk he is.” Amber made a face, as if suddenly noticing a bad smell. “And what a liar. I’m wondering if Cordelia should have let him stay, if only to make sure everyone at the whole conference knows it.”
“If anyone here hasn’t figured it out by now, they’re not paying attention,” Ophelia said.
“But now he’ll have something he can make look like a legitimate grievance,” Amber said.
“He can try.” I held up my phone to show that the Gadfly was calling again. “Might not work, though. Especially if he leaves a few more salty, self-entitled voicemails.”
“I think even online people eventually figure him out,” Ophelia said.
“I hope so, but I just don’t know.” Amber shook her head. “He’s not the only miserable troll in the true-crime community, but he’s one of the worst. Have you checked out his YouTube channel? Or his Facebook group?”
“No,” I said. “But please tell me what they’re called, so I can shun them.”
“I hear you.” Amber laughed. “His YouTube channel and his main Facebook group are both called Godfrey for Justice. Trust me, you’re better off not seeing them. And you should also avoid The Real Scooparino, on Facebook or Reddit or Discord.”
“You mentioned The Real Scooparino before,” I said. “Another of Norton’s aliases?”
“No, the leader of another group of nutcases who need to get a life instead of spending most of their waking hours spreading misinformation about the cases they’re obsessed with.”
“So allies of Godfrey’s.”
“Good heavens, no!” She gave the kind of laugh that makes you smile and want to join in, even if you have no idea what’s funny. “They hate each other, Godfrey and the Scooparino. When they get tired of harassing and doxxing people like me and Ezekiel Blaine, they go to town on each other. It can be a pretty toxic place, the internet. I am not looking forward to reading what Norton posts about his brief time here.”
“Same here,” I said. “And I only just met him. I can’t imagine how you feel.”
“Oh, yes.” She closed her eyes for a moment. Then she opened them, straightened her shoulders, and put a cheerful expression on her face. “Well, as my mother would have said, never borrow trouble. Let’s just enjoy the peace and quiet his absence will bring and hope for the best.”
Ophelia and I nodded.
“Ooh,” I said. “Look what he just texted me: ‘How can you do this to me? Don’t be such a grinch.’”
“He’s one to talk,” Amber said.
“I wish he’d lay off long enough for me to block him,” I muttered.
“Where’s your Christmas spirit?” she countered.
“Cancel the kitchen scraps for lepers and orphans, no more merciful beheadings, and call off Christmas,” I quoted.
“Something from Monty Python?” Amber asked.
“Alan Rickman as the Sheriff of Nottingham,” Ophelia exclaimed. “He was the best part of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.”
“The only part worth watching,” I said. “There. I’ve blocked Norton. Time for the chief’s session on working harmoniously with law enforcement,” I added, seeing the time on my phone’s screen.
“Ooh, yes,” Amber said. “I definitely want to hear that. Not that there’s much hope of me going back and building a harmonious relationship with the cops who investigated my case. But maybe I didn’t handle it well when they first started interrogating me. The idea that I would even think of doing anything to my poor husband just seemed like such a farce that I laughed out loud at it. And I don’t think cops like being laughed at.”
Her words stirred my curiosity, so while the crowd was settling down to hear the chief, I took a seat in the back of the room, then pulled out my phone and did a search to find the details of Amber’s case.
And it was an interesting one. At the tender age of twenty-two, she had married a man thirty years her senior—a prominent and affluent Virginia Beach attorney. They moved into a million-dollar house with a view of the Lynnhaven Bay and began taking their place in the local social scene. Then one cold winter night, Amber stayed home with a migraine while her husband went to dinner at his country club. The next day, a little before noon, a friend who had come by to collect the husband for their regular Sunday morning tee time found the front door open a crack and the husband lying on the living-room floor, dead from a gunshot wound. The house had visibly been ransacked, and a lot of small valuables had been taken—silverware, small electronics, and Amber’s jewelry chest, full of the sort of pricey baubles a doting husband would give to a trophy wife. Which is what the prosecutor had called Amber, in spite of testimony from a number of their friends that she and the husband had appeared to have had a mutually loving relationship. Amber herself was so deeply asleep that the husband’s friend thought, at first, that she had also been killed. But it turned out that she’d taken a sleeping pill on top of her migraine medicine and hadn’t even awakened when the intruder rifled the master bedroom.
The cops didn’t believe her story from the get-go. The evidence they produced was largely circumstantial—witnesses who had overheard the couple arguing, a friend who claimed the husband had confided that he’d made a mistake and was going to retain a divorce attorney, and the fact that the house’s state-of-the-art security had been turned off after the husband left for the country club. The prosecutor was particularly scornful at Amber’s assertion that before taking her sleeping pill and crawling into bed she had nervously checked to make sure the system was on and must have accidentally disarmed it.
Not exactly a slam-dunk case, but Amber was convicted. And then had her conviction overturned on a Brady violation.
I’d been listening to Kevin’s podcast long enough to know that a Brady violation was when the prosecution failed to turn over to the defense attorney evidence that might help prove the defendant’s innocence. In this case, the fact that a few months after the husband’s murder, the police had recovered some of the stolen jewelry from the squalid apartment where a known fence had been found dead of a drug overdose.
So Amber was out on bail until the Virginia Beach authorities either scheduled a new trial or issued a nolle prosequi notice—which the article I was reading helpfully translated as meaning “we shall no longer prosecute.” I felt a pang of sympathy for Amber. If she was innocent—and the evidence did appear thin—she was in limbo, not knowing if she’d be going on trial again. Was there some kind of deadline by which the prosecution had to notify her and her attorney if they wanted to retry her? I made a mental note to ask Festus.
I thought of looking up the Gadfly’s online presence, to see what he had to say about the case. But even if I was forewarned—by others in addition to Amber—that he was prone to spreading unfounded rumors and even making things up out of whole cloth, I wasn’t sure I wanted to read what he had to say. Maybe later.
So I focused back on the chief, who was now answering questions.
“No,” he was saying. “I don’t assume someone who asked for an attorney is guilty. I assume they’ve read the Constitution. Or at least watched a few episodes of Law & Order.”
This was greeted with laughter.
Overall, his session went well, as did the following presentation by the University of Virginia Law School’s Innocence Project. And the surprise hit of the day was Horace’s hands-on crime-scene demonstration. Kevin and Casey set up a fictitious crime scene in the Lafayette Room, complete with a wide range of clues and red herrings. They’d used a five-foot-tall plush flamingo as the corpse, and I thought the way they handled the blood evidence was a particularly nice touch—instead of trying to make the blood a realistic reddish brown, Kevin and Casey used washable paint in a vivid hot pink, with blood pools cut out of matching construction paper.
“You couldn’t find any blood-red paint and paper?” Amber asked. She was leaning against the wall of the room right beside Kevin. In fact, that had become her default mode, hanging around near Kevin. Or, perhaps more accurately, hanging around wherever she was had become his default mode. Kevin didn’t wear his emotions on his sleeve—in fact, he usually kept them buried deep under several layers of sarcasm and cynicism—but anyone who knew him could tell he wasn’t indifferent to Amber’s charms.
“The pink was a deliberate choice,” Kevin said.
“To match the flamingo?”
“To avoid triggering anyone,” Kevin said. “I mean, what if someone here has actually had to witness a bloody crime scene?”
“If someone would be triggered by a bunch of red paint and construction paper, maybe they need to work on getting over it,” she said. “Toughen up so they can handle the next curveball life throws them.”
Kevin frowned slightly, as if he didn’t quite like this attitude. I didn’t like it myself.
And Amber noticed his expression.
“Don’t mind me,” she said, smiling and patting his arm. “With everything that’s happened over the last few years, I’ve had to grow a pretty tough shell.”
That seemed to satisfy Kevin, but I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. I made a mental note to see what else I could find out about Amber.
And almost immediately found myself feeling slightly guilty. It was the season of peace on Earth and goodwill to all—was I suddenly turning into a grinch?
No, just being a protective aunt. My sister, Pam, Kevin’s mother, had married an Australian architect and lived in Sydney—on the other side of the world. She’d never come right out and said it, but I knew she expected me and Mother to be there for her kids who’d settled in the US, even though they were all adults now. And I well remembered how stressful it had been when I’d had to introduce Michael to the sprawling hordes of the Hollingsworth clan, Mother’s family. If it turned out that Kevin was serious about Amber, he might be grateful to have a trusted ally who could say, “Don’t worry—I’ve checked her out and it’s all fine.”
Kevin and Casey had obviously enjoyed creating their crime scene, throwing in a lot of silly props like a rubber chicken, a whoopie cushion, and a toy gun that, when you pulled the trigger, emitted a large bright red flag with BANG! printed on it. I had fun with it, too. I was trying to follow Cordelia’s instructions and take lots of pictures, but I had long since run out of interesting ways to take photos of the speakers, the audience, and the groups of conference attendees chatting between sessions. And my photos of Horace working the crime scene were all the more amusing since he maintained an utterly serious demeanor. He photographed the bits of evidence just as he would at a real scene. He explained about securing evidence in the proper container—usually brown paper bags. He demonstrated dusting for fingerprints, swabbing for DNA, and using various chemicals to determine the presence of blood. And along the way, he explained a lot of the ways less savvy and methodical criminalists could mess up a case.
It was great fun. But it had been a long day, and I wasn’t disappointed when he eventually wrapped up his presentation and I could head for home. When I walked out of the meeting room, I was momentarily surprised to see how dark it was outside the big glass wall in the Gathering Area. It was only a little past five. But, of course, tomorrow was the winter solstice. That made today the second shortest day of the year, didn’t it? I’d long ago decided it was a good thing we celebrated the Christmas season with light and song, to brighten what could otherwise be a rather dark and depressing time of year. Even so, I was glad to be heading home. Cordelia had been wise, declaring that Friday night’s dinner was on your own.
Of course, I suspected the boys would want to hang around the hotel. If I couldn’t talk them into leaving now—
“Mom?”
Josh, Jamie, and Adam appeared, all three struggling into their coats, hats, gloves, and scarves.
“You’re impatient to leave?” I tried not to sound surprised.
“We volunteered you to take Gran-gran to see the Christmas lights,” Jamie said. “And then drop Adam off at his house before we go home.”
“Sounds like fun,” I said.
“Ready when you are.” Cordelia appeared, holding not only her own wraps but also mine. “The boys are going to make sure you take me to see all the best decorations.”
“And Dad’s fetching dinner,” Josh said. “He won’t say what, but he promises we’ll all like it. Probably pizza again.”
“But that’s okay,” Jamie said quickly, no doubt worried that I’d interpret Josh’s comment as a criticism. “We really like pizza.”
“I never say no to pizza,” I replied.
So we all piled into the Twinmobile and set out to see the Christmas decorations.