22

For the next two days, I retreated behind my cell’s reinforced safety glass and ate by myself. All day long the shouts and laughter from the other inmates echoed through the thick cement walls. At night, the shouts turned more forsaken and angry. My only break from the din was an hour alone in the common room each morning. As I walked down the passageway toward the stairs, the smells of body odor and disinfectant assaulted me. The other inmates yelled to come closer so we could talk. But I didn’t go near those thick windows or the open space below the doors. I scanned 360 degrees around me. Even in the common area someone might be waiting, someone whose cell door had been “inadvertently” left open.

I only spoke by phone once with my attorney. Marta Gutierrez was waiting for the evidence from discovery. But she managed to have the San Diego Union-Tribune delivered to the jail for me. Sometimes it even arrived without being torn up or spit on. Maybe she’d started to believe in me. The Union-Tribune hadn’t. My picture stared out from the newspaper’s front page just about every day.

It was hard not to fill that empty time with worry. There were so many ways a psychopath could attack my family. Not to mention the terrible shame my arrest had brought down on them. At night I could block out the shouts from the other prisoners, but I couldn’t stop the scrape of my thoughts. I needed the vape pen. I needed the bourbon. Rage at my killer became a kind of distraction.

On the afternoon of my sixth day in jail, Attorney Gutierrez and I met again in the same small, stark room. Without a word, she plopped down opposite me at the steel table and flicked through a thick file.

“What happened?” I said.

She gave me an icy stare. “The forensics investigators found someone else’s hair on Elizabeth Morton’s body. Along with your hair. More of both in your trunk.”

“I don’t know how my hair, or anyone else’s, got there.”

“That’s not all. Drops of her blood were in your trunk.”

“Do you actually think I had an accomplice?” I said.

Gutierrez’s arms thudded against the table. “The report says you never denied carrying your revolver to the park.”

“I never denied that because I’m innocent. And I did carry it.”

“Jesus, William. You don’t have a concealed weapon permit and you went within a few hundred yards of a school. The DA could throw you in jail just for those two things.”

She wasn’t finished. Not even close. Armed with a search warrant, the police had found dirt from the park in my closet. Footprints next to the body matched a pair of my shoes. They’d also found the shovel used to bury Elizabeth. In our garage.

It was as if I’d been an accomplice to Elizabeth’s murder without knowing. I imagined the horror on Jill’s face and my whole body jerked. Gutierrez shrank back, eyes flown wide. In that flinch, I saw just what my attorney really thought of me.

She squinted as if in pain. “For God’s sake, William, we’ve got to try to save your life now. For your kids.” She curled up her fingers as if she wanted to slash me with her flesh-colored nails.

“I told you. He was in my house.”

Her black eyebrows rose to show just how ludicrous I sounded. “Look, maybe I’m not the right attorney to represent you. Maybe you need someone more famous, someone who’s fought these kinds of cases.”

“An attorney who can work with a guy like me—someone who likes to get together with his buddy and cut up women?”

Her resolute stare condemned me as thoroughly as any words. I was even going to lose Gutierrez. My leg jiggled under the table. Needle circled through my mind.

I forced my shoulders to relax. I had to be an analytical banker. “Look, I don’t mean to tell you how to do your job, but let me lay out some things.”

One shoulder gave a half-shrug.

“Let’s think about the actual evidence.”

She folded her hands on the table, as if forcing herself to stay in that room.

I spoke as I would to answer a tough question in loan committee. “Let’s just imagine what could have happened. A man somehow gets the code for our alarm. He sneaks into our house while I’m at work and my family’s at school. He steals an old pair of shoes from my closet. There’s a shovel in my garage, and he takes that too. Then he snatches a bag from the garbage can outside. He grabs Elizabeth Morton. Kills her. Moves her body to the park. All while wearing my shoes and using my shovel. He picks the lock on my car and drips the blood inside the trunk.”

She didn’t say anything. I went on. “He cut her up. Where the hell would I have taken her for that? I go to work and I come home. That’s it. No one’s mentioned finding a strange woman’s blood in my house, right?”

Nothing. No reaction. The same stiff face and back. Did she believe even a part of what I’d said? Her nails softly tapped the stainless-steel table.

I continued. “At the park, he covers her with just enough dirt that the body will be found in a day or two. And the coup de grace … he places her in the garbage bag he stole from me, a bag with my fingerprints on it.”

Gutierrez picked up her pen and stared at it. “And then I assume he takes the shoes back to your closet and puts the shovel in your garage.”

“Yes.”

She half smiled. Tapped the pen against the steel table. “The tip to the police about your car … it was anonymous.”

My eyes widened. My head straightened. “I’ll bet it came from a throw-away phone bought at some convenience store.”

She nodded. Studied her pen. “But what about the second person’s hair? Is it his?”

He was too careful for that. Saying it was his hair would sabotage my whole theory about his meticulousness. Unless …

“I think I know what happened there too,” I said.