“Eyewitnesses place my client and the victim at the carnival on Saturday afternoon and evening, and again on Sunday morning, and report them having an argument. Pepper and the victim have a past. And he did time in a military stockade,” Fred Meecham said, acknowledging me with a nod.
I picked it up. “When they were in New Jersey, Flora Nuñez had an abortion, apparently, and told Pepper after the fact. He got angry and upset. He admits it. That’s why she left and why she applied for the restraining order once she got here.”
Meecham was rubbing at a spot on the arm of his desk chair. “That’s going to be a tough hurdle to get over,” he said.
“He told me he’d never have hurt her.”
“Do you believe him?”
“I believe he means it. Which isn’t the same thing.”
“No, and not a distinction that’s likely to be worth much in court.”
Courtney glanced up from taking notes on a legal pad. “Don’t sell your feelings short, Alex. I think they’re important to how you work.” I gave her a tired grin.
“All right,” Meecham resumed, “for the sake of argument, let’s suppose
a different killer. If someone else did it and planned it to coincide with Troy Pepper’s being in town, it raises questions. Like how did the killer know Pepper was in Lowell? Or was it just an opportunity that had presented itself? ‘Let’s blame it on the former boyfriend? Tie him up for the murder.’ No—it’s a stretch, and no jury is going to buy it. Not unless we can come up with an identity for this phantom killer and establish a clear MOM.”
Courtney frowned. “A what?”
“Motive, opportunity, and means,” said Meecham.
Here the latter two were mostly clear, but motive wasn’t. The police theory was that the pair had some past history and had acted on that—that Pepper had drawn Flora Nuñez to the carnival and killed her. As Meecham was growing inclined to argue, it had not been a premeditated act; the woman had gone there, and while she was there, something—which was still unclear—had set him off, and in a fit of anger he’d strangled her.
I thought about bringing up Vanthan Sok, the badass St. Onge had warned me about, and tossing him into the mix. Would someone have paid him to shake me up? To scare me off? What for? Why not just shoot me? And what did any of it have to do with Flora Nuñez’s murder? Nothing as far as I could see, and we had enough of nothing to deal with without it. The one thing I did bring up was what the young hunters had told me about seeing a green car, possibly a Mitsubishi, on the day of the murder, in the woods behind the meadow where the body had been found. Flora Nuñez drove a green Mitsubishi. Could someone have used it to drive her, perhaps already dead, from somewhere else to dump her and then park the car where it was later found? We kicked that around inconclusively for a while and then quit. Flapping your gums only got you so far; then you had to lay down some feet.