Beck tore her gaze from the soulful eyes of the reporter in the back row, telling herself it was a coincidence she’d seen her twice in one day. She faced the crowded room and tried to drown out the voices in her head telling her she should run. She’d spent the past month living as a pariah among her brothers and sisters on the force, but she wasn’t ready to embrace the hero worship of the protestors who’d filled the rows in the gallery to get a glimpse at their new poster girl. Ultimately, none of it really mattered. This wasn’t her first time testifying in court, but she suspected it would be one of her last.
She’d done her job. It was that simple and that complex, but the consequences were life-altering. Her former partner, Jack Staples, a man she’d shared meals and conversation with, a man she’d trusted to have her back and with whom she’d trusted her life on numerous occasions, was sitting next to his lawyer a few feet away, staring her down with a flank of fellow officers in the rows behind him, all clearly signaling who they thought was on the right side of the law. She hadn’t spoken directly to Jack since a few days after the shooting, and it had long since become too late to bridge the gap between them. The difference between friendship and fatality had become clear in less than ten seconds, but the effects would linger for the rest of her life.
“Do you swear to tell the truth, so help you God?”
She took a moment to return Jack’s stare before she turned to the judge and injected her voice with an extra boost of confidence. “Yes. I do.”
The prosecutor, Lance Neely, remained seated while he took her through the preliminary round of questions. This was a hearing, not a trial, and there was no jury to impress, but beyond that there was nothing casual about this proceeding, and she remained tense even on the light background stuff.
“What was the exact message from the 911 dispatcher?”
“Another motorist had seen a car matching Mr. Aldridge’s vehicle, driving westbound on Highway 635 between Central Expressway and Preston Road. The dispatcher told us the car was swerving between lanes. We’d just finished our meal break at Central and Coit, so we took the call.”
“And what did you do next?”
She took him through their drive, switching lanes across Interstate 635 in an attempt to locate the reported erratic driver. “After about ten minutes, we pulled in behind a vehicle matching the description given by the 911 caller.”
“Did you immediately pull the vehicle over?”
Here we go. She took a deep breath. “We did not. We stayed back a couple of car lengths and followed the vehicle, observing its driving patterns.”
“And was the in-car camera operational at this time?”
She shifted in her seat. “I don’t know.”
“Why is that, Officer Ramsey?”
This would be the first cut. Would it hurt her more than him or the other way around? “I asked Officer Staples to turn on the camera when we first observed the vehicle.”
“Did you see him turn it on?”
“No. Later…after…it was determined that nothing was recorded either while we were on the road or at the scene.” She held up her hands. “If he turned it on, it wasn’t working. I didn’t know that at the time.” There. She’d given up the best bit of reasonable doubt she could. About the stop anyway, but the rest…
“Who made the decision to initiate lights and sirens and pull Mr. Aldridge over?”
That was easy. “Officer Staples did.”
“Did you disagree with his assessment?”
She started to parse the question. She hadn’t agreed. They’d observed nothing other than a car driving down the highway. No taillights out, no speeding, no signs of erratic driving. Other than the call to 911, they had nothing in the way of reasonable suspicion to pull him over and she’d said so to Jack at the time. “We discussed it, but Jack…Officer Staples made the decision to initiate the stop citing safety for the driver of the car.”
“You mean, Mr. Aldridge?”
She got the irony. She really did. Mr. Aldridge was dead and buried in the big cemetery off Forest Lane with no one left to tell his story. He should’ve at least gotten his day in court, but no—the guy who gunned him down was the only one getting access to justice. “Yes, Mr. Aldridge. Officer Staples specifically mentioned the community care-taking provision.”
“Tell the court what you mean by that.”
She hated this part. The judge knew the law and the prosecutor asking her to repeat it was for show. “An officer as part of their duty to ‘serve and protect’ may stop and assist an individual whom they believe is in need of help.”
“And you disagreed that this provision in the law supported the reason for the stop?”
She glanced at the judge, wishing he would do something to stop the repetition, but he seemed as riveted with anticipation as everyone else in the room. “I didn’t personally observe any circumstances that led me to believe it was necessary.”
“Thank you. Now—”
She couldn’t resist adding. “But I also didn’t believe it would be harmful.”
Neely glared at her for a moment before he caught the judge looking at him and then his expression morphed into an indulgent smile. “You didn’t believe it would be harmful to make the stop at the time, right? When you were still driving behind Mr. Aldridge’s car? But you eventually changed your opinion on that point, correct?”
She could hear the gotcha in his voice, underscoring what she’d known all along—she had no friends on either side. The only thing she could do now was answer as honestly and completely as possible and hope it was over soon. “Correct.”
His next few questions took her through what happened after the stop. Both she and Jack had gotten out of the car. She’d walked around to the passenger side and shone a flashlight inside while Jack had approached the driver’s window. She heard most of the conversation that had gone down, but nothing that supported Jack’s decision to demand that Aldridge exit his vehicle.
“Did he exit the car when ordered to do so?”
“He opened the door and started to get out.”
“What happened then?”
She’d replayed the event a thousand times. The first few times had been a tangled mess of movements and shouting and confusion, but over time the threads had started to unravel and now she could see the Technicolor short film play out in her head and she’d memorized every moment. “He had one leg out of the car and was starting to stand up. His right hand swung slowly toward Jack, like this.” She raised her hand from her lap and mimicked the motion she’d seen. “Officer Staples yelled for him to place his hands in the air.”
“Did Mr. Aldridge comply?”
He hadn’t. Not immediately, but it was kind of hard to place your hands in the air when you were using them to push your way out of the car. The conflicting demands might have been the cause for confusion, if confusion was what it really was. “He didn’t at first.”
“How did Officer Staples respond?”
“He drew his weapon and again shouted for Mr. Aldridge to show his hands.” She paused, replaying the details in her head. He’d whipped his head around, clearly afraid and unsure how to deal with the conflicting demands. “He lifted his left arm and he extended his right hand toward Officer Staples.”
“Was there anything in his hand that you could see at the time?”
“Yes.”
“Could you make out what it was?”
It was hard to separate what she knew now from what she knew then, no matter how hard she’d worked to draw a line between the two, but she was convinced her memory was accurate. “Yes, it was a phone.”
“Why do you think that was the case?”
“I could see the screen light up when he lifted it from the seat.” She’d never forget the image on the screen—a small child, with a big smile, playing on a jungle gym. Such specific detail for the few seconds of time she’d had to see it, but the picture was burned in her memory as a symbol of the loss caused on that fateful night.
“What happened next?”
His job was so easy. All he had to do was prompt her, question and answer, to end her career and everything that defined her. “Officer Staples shouted ‘gun’ and he fired his weapon.”
“Do you know how many times he fired?”
In the chaos of the moment, it could have been once or fifty. But she’d read the report since then and now knew it had been five. Five loud, quick shots fired directly into the center of Mr. Aldridge’s chest. Five shots that ensured he’d never be pulled over or harassed by the police again. Five shots that robbed the little boy in the picture of a father. Robbed his wife of a husband. His parents of a son.
“Five. He fired five times.”
A hush fell over the courtroom. She wasn’t sure why since she hadn’t said much of anything yet that hadn’t already been reported in the news. She surveyed the crowd of cops, daring all of them to meet her eyes. Few did and probably because they knew what was coming next.
“At any time from the moment you and Officer Staples made the stop to the moment Officer Staples fired his weapon, did you see Mr. Aldridge in possession of a gun?”
Neely injected a ton of portent in the question, leaning forward, staring into her eyes, his voice deeper than it had been moments ago. But she wasn’t buying into the drama. She turned in her seat and delivered her answer directly to the judge. “No, I did not.”
When he finally passed her as a witness, Jack’s attorney sprang out of his seat and waved his hand in the air for emphasis. “Is it your contention that just because you didn’t see a gun, it wasn’t there at all?”
“No.”
“Well, I’m certain that’s what Mr. Neely wants this judge and potentially a jury to infer.”
Jack shouldn’t have hired such a jackass to represent him. “I have no idea what Mr. Neely wants, but if the judge or anyone else wants to know the truth about this case, here it is. We shouldn’t have made the stop, we didn’t need to ask Mr. Aldridge to get out of his car, and I think we can infer from the fact that no gun or any other weapon was found at the scene that my recollection is correct. Mr. Aldridge never had a gun.”
She leaned back as much as the stiff chair would allow and crossed her arms. She didn’t care if the press depicted her as pissed off. She was pissed off and she knew she had to stop caring so much about what other people thought about her if she was ever going to recover from this ordeal.
The rest of the questions were a blur, all designed to lay a foundation for either side at trial. She responded honestly, but kept her answers tight and lean, her only goal to get this over with as soon as possible. When the hearing was over, the judge continued Jack on his current bond, and the minute he gaveled the session closed, she started to bolt from her seat, but Neely motioned for her to stay as he walked toward her.
“Let the bailiff clear the room and then he’ll show you out the back. You don’t want to wind up in the middle of this mess.”
She watched the protestors pushing toward the cops as they funneled out of the room. He was right, but his admonition was one more unpleasant reminder of how much her life had changed in the last month and how much more it was likely to change as things went on. “What’s next after this?”
“We’ll have a few court sittings to try to work something out, and if we can’t, we’ll set a trial date.”
“He’s not going to take a plea.”
“He might.”
“I’m telling you he won’t. Jack doesn’t back down. He may know in his heart of hearts that he was wrong, but he’s not the kind of guy who likes to admit it. And I’m assuming you’d make giving up his TCLOSE certification as a condition of any deal, right?”
“Probably.”
He didn’t make eye contact and she knew he was hedging. “No cop is going to voluntarily give up their entire career. He’s ten years in.”
“He could be looking at life if he gets a guilty verdict.”
“You and I both know juries don’t give cops the max if they convict at all. He’s going to know it too and he’s going to take his chances at trial.”
Neely clasped her on the shoulder. “Then I guess it’s a good thing I have a really good eyewitness.”
She shrugged out of his grasp and stepped away as the bailiff approached. “Yeah, whatever.” Without waiting for a response, she followed the bailiff out the back door of the courtroom and down a hall past the judge’s chambers to an exit about twenty yards from where the rest of the courtroom crowd had dumped out. She wished she’d thought to bring street clothes to change into to make it more likely she would blend into the crowd, but she had a meeting with her lieutenant in an hour and the best thing she could do right now was to get out of here as quickly as possible.
She’d turned the corner, toward the hallway when she heard a voice call out to her.
“Officer Ramsey?”
Instinctively, she turned toward the sound, but she didn’t answer. She recognized the woman as the one from the lake this morning, the one who’d been seated in the back row of the courtroom. The one who’d caught her eye and, she hated to admit, piqued her interest, despite her profession. And that was the only reason she slowed her pace. She glanced around, but they were alone.
The woman stuck out her hand. “I’m Macy Moran with the Dallas Gazette. We met this morning. May I walk with you?”
“Free country.” Beck paused for a moment. A pretty reporter was still a reporter. Ultimately, she decided to ignore Macy’s outstretched hand and kept walking, picking up the pace and hoping she could outdistance the shorter woman.
Macy didn’t seem deterred by her fast pace. “I was hoping I could get a statement from you.”
“You were in court. I’m sure you got plenty of fodder to use in there.”
“You were partners with Jack Staples for years. Were you friends too?”
Beck lost her gait at the unexpected question. Plenty of reporters had shouted questions at her since the shooting, but they all asked the usual stuff, mostly wanting a minute breakdown of every aspect of the traffic stop and everything that followed. Their persistence had made her persona non grata at her apartment complex, and whenever things with the case ramped up, she’d resorted to bunking in at her brother’s place to duck the throngs of journalists who would not let the story die. Yet not a one of them had thought to ask her if she and Jack had been friends, and Macy’s question stabbed her to the core. She’d always considered Jack a friend, but the public shunning she’d received from him and the rest of the force signaled she’d been dead wrong, which led her to question what else she’d been wrong about over the course of her career.
But she wasn’t going to discuss her life, her feelings, with a stranger, especially not one who was likely to print the personal details of her life in the pages of her paper. She answered with the words her union rep had made her practice over and over again. “No comment.”
Undeterred, Macy followed her out of the building, into the garage, and to her car. The walk was strange since neither one of them said another word the whole way. When they reached her Jeep, Beck reached into her pocket, fished out her keys, and pressed the button to unlock the door. She turned to face Macy. “Are you going to follow me home? Because I have a couple of stops along the way and I wouldn’t want you to get lost, although I’m sure you know where I live along with everything else about me.”
Macy jammed her notebook into her bag and cocked her head. “I doubt that. I’m thinking whatever spurred you to speak up about your partner of many years is a well that runs deep, and even Jack Staples, the man who rode alongside you all that time, never saw it coming. I can figure out the rest, but the thing I really want to know is, was this the first time you witnessed something like this from him, or was it just the straw that broke the camel’s back?”
Whoa. She hadn’t seen that coming. Chalk it up to one more instance of her instincts failing her. She shook her head and got in the car, gripping the steering wheel tightly to ground herself. To everyone else she’d either been the traitor or the hero, but to Macy Moran, she was apparently nothing more than a coward who’d finally had enough. Maybe that was true. She wasn’t sure, but did know this: Macy Moran was trouble and she was going to steer clear.