I slowly turned my back to Mark and sat cross-legged on the hospital bed. Should I hope that I was wrong? Then I’d have to continue the hunt for a killer without any leads.
Or should I hope that I was right? And then I was defending a guilty man. Hal had been injured trying to prove a guilty man innocent.
Mark was quiet long enough that I started to count in my head.
Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore. “You’re killing me, Smalls.”
“I know what I think, but I want you to see it too. Hand me your phone.”
I passed it back over my shoulder, and he handed me the picture of Jordan’s noose in return.
My phone made the snapshot sound that mimicked a traditional camera’s noise. Mark came around to my front and gave me the phone as well.
It wasn’t as easy to tell as it had been with the picture I’d taken of Otto Corder’s boat knot. The materials were different—rope vs cloth strings.
Even so, the loops were the same, and one string hung through the other. If I’d wanted to, I could have easily tightened or loosened the gown without risking the knot coming undone. It was perfect for a hospital gown, and it was perfect for a hangman’s noose.
I couldn’t look at it anymore. I hit the Home button on my phone. “They’re the same.”
Mark nodded, as if he didn’t want to say the words out loud. He knew what this meant to me. The odds were good that I was defending a guilty man. I’d gone back to the place I promised myself I’d never be unless it was to represent someone who wanted to confess, the way Toby’s first owner had.
“What are you going to do?” Mark asked.
I was going to call Zach and tell him he needed to be honest with me about what happened to Jordan—whether he was involved or not. I was going to lay out the evidence, tell him what I suspected, and see what he said.
But I was going to do all that tomorrow. Tonight, all I was going to do was whatever Margo needed. For all we knew, she was sitting there alone, waiting for someone to come tell her whether Hal was alive or dead. Her family lived out of state. His might as well.
No one should have to face what she was facing alone.
* * *
Zach hadn’t wanted to meet with me the next day. I told him it wasn’t optional. The outcome of his case was in jeopardy.
As soon as we’d settled into my office, I laid out my suspicions about what really happened to Jordan and why.
Part of me hoped he’d try to defend himself. Or that he’d have some reasonable explanation for why he looked so guilty—one that would assure me of his innocence.
He didn’t do any of that. He sat quietly through my whole presentation.
And then he smiled the first real smile I’d seen from him.
“I’m sorry I ever doubted your abilities. I didn’t think anyone would figure out the truth, but you did.” He leaned onto the arm of his chair, his posture relaxed. “Since you’re my lawyer, I suppose there’s no reason I can’t tell you the truth. You have to keep it confidential. You just seemed so determined to prove I was innocent, I thought it was kinder to let you believe it was true.”
My stomach cramped, and heat burned the back of my throat in a way that was much worse than morning sickness because the cause wasn’t physical.
He really had lied to me. He really had killed his sister.
As soon as he left, I was going to speak with Anderson and petition the court to be removed as Zach’s lawyer. Knowing that he’d lied, Anderson wasn’t going to want to represent him, either.
Anderson had modeled his whole practice on my parents’ business. That included the cardinal rule. Clients could lie to their family. They could even lie to the police. They couldn’t lie to their lawyer because you defended an innocent person differently than you did a guilty one.
Anderson would have explained that to Zach. Zach must have felt he knew better.
The sooner we extricated him from our practice, the better.
My lips wanted to curl at him. I clamped my teeth together so hard that a muscle jumped in my cheek, and I took a couple of breaths through my nose to calm down.
“Then why don’t you tell me the truth this time?” I said. “I’d like to hear it from you even though I think I’ve mostly figured it out.”
He bobbed his head. “From the sounds of it, you did. I’m sorry all your work had to be for nothing.”
That’s what he decided to apologize for? The extra work I’d put in?
My fingers tensed. Deep down inside me there was a desire to actually hit him. It wasn’t something I was proud of. I didn’t believe that an individual had the right to harm another individual. But I wanted to hit him. Hard.
“You’ll be charged for the time wasted, so it’s of no concern to the firm.” I couldn’t quite keep the snideness from my voice. “But please save me the time of having to figure out for myself anything else you should have told me from the start.”
Zach’s face seemed to harden around the edges. “I didn’t actually lie to you. I never said I didn’t kill Jordan, not even when you asked.”
That was true. He hadn’t. He’d said something about Jordan doing it to herself. In hindsight, I could see how he might think that wasn’t a lie, even if it had been dodging the actual question. He believed that Jordan brought this on herself because she wouldn’t keep the money.
“When did you and Jordan find out that your dad was involved with the Ironclad Armored Car Service robbery?”
Zach’s face had gone back to the blank mask that seemed to be his default. I clearly wouldn’t be able to tell if he were telling me the truth or not. I hadn’t been able to spot his dodges earlier.
But he had no reason to lie to me now. He was right. As his lawyer, there was nothing I could do about his lies.
Except recuse myself from the case the way I planned to do. Few people realized that lawyers needed to be as unbiased as jurors when they were defending a guilty client. If they felt disgust or distaste for their client and they weren’t able to hide it, it’d bleed through.
I’d proven that I couldn’t adequately defend a guilty client.
Zach didn’t smile again, and I was grateful for that. If he’d seemed in the least bit cocky, I might have told him what I thought of him.
“We were clearing out his belongings after he died.” Zach’s gaze shifted, so that he was looking beside me rather than looking me in the eye. Like he didn’t want me to see any emotion that might show up there. “He’d kept a ton of old stuff in the attic that Jordan wanted to pull out and donate to Goodwill before mice got into it. We found the bag of money stuffed behind some insulation in the attic rafters. There was a newspaper clipping from the Courier Press about an armored car robbery inside.”
I’d been right that Jordan had found something while she was clearing out her dad’s things. What I hadn’t counted on was that Zach had been helping her. I’d assumed she’d been doing the task alone. That was probably my own bias showing through, since I’d sorted through what my Uncle Stan left behind by myself.
I’d let my own bias influence a lot of what happened in this case. Because Zach had been kind to me when I’d been scared, I’d assumed he cared about all human life and wasn’t the kind of person who would murder a family member over money.
I just wanted this to be over with.
“So Jordan went to the Courier Press archives to see if she could find out anything more about the robbery and how it connected to your dad.” I phrased it as a statement rather than a question. Jordan’s actions seemed self-explanatory now.
Zach’s eyebrows twitched in a way that made me think he wanted to roll his eyes at what he considered silliness, but he wouldn’t give that much away. “I told her it didn’t matter where the money came from. We hadn’t had anything to do with it.”
I knew that Jordan must have insisted on turning the money in. But given how Zach had sidestepped the truth so many times, I needed to say it out loud. “Once she was convinced that your dad stole the money, Jordan wanted to turn the money in to the police, and that’s why you killed her?”
Zach nodded. Casually. Like I’d asked him if he had a sandwich for lunch. “Dad had that money the whole time I was struggling to pay for school and was buried under debt. He had it the whole time I stayed an extra two years with Stephanie because I didn’t want to have to pay alimony along with my student loans. He had it the whole time I picked up extra shifts to help cover his medical bills at the end.”
The controlled tone of his voice slipped away like a Band-Aid coming off to reveal an oozing wound.
“He could have made our lives so much easier and better. I told Jordan that. I told her we should keep the money. No one cared about it now. We weren’t hurting anyone by keeping it.”
Jordan must have said no.
And Zach must have known his sister well enough to know that time wouldn’t change her mind. She was the woman who did the right thing when she found out about a potential drug scandal at her job. She couldn’t have known when she started investigating that Papyrus Medical wasn’t aware of what Dexter Ruffalo had done. She’d been willing to put her career on the line to right a wrong.
She’d called Otto once she realized that her dad’s partner must have been in on it. She’d wanted to give him a chance to do the right thing and confess rather than simply turning the money in and having the police show up on Otto’s doorstep, unannounced, with questions again.
She’d probably even opened the door to her brother the day she died, hoping he’d changed his mind and would go with her to take the money to the police.
She’d been a good person. Her main mistake was trusting her brother.
He knew her, but she hadn’t known him.
I couldn’t defend a man who’d killed someone like that and admitted it and still sounded like he thought he’d done the right thing.
I wouldn’t defend a man like that.
“You already figured out the rest,” Zach said. “I pocketed the leftover SUX from work. I didn’t need much. Then I posed it all to look like a suicide. I obviously didn’t understand well enough how much crime scene forensics could tell, or I would have done an even better job.”
He stood up and brushed his hands down his pants in a smoothing motion, almost like he was brushing the whole dirty business away from himself. “One good thing came out of me not telling you all this from the start. You managed to create strong reasonable doubt with Otto Corder. No one will believe Jordan was killed by her brother when she could have been killed by the man who already confessed to two crimes.” He stilled. “How’s your private investigator doing?”
Nope. I couldn’t. He had no right to ask about Hal. Hal was run down by Otto because Zach lied to us. Zach had no right to know that the doctors anticipated Hal would have a full recovery. He had no right to pretend that his lies weren’t the impetus for everything that happened even if he hadn’t been the one behind the wheel.
I moved past Zach and out of my office. I banged on Anderson’s door and kept banging until he opened it.
From this moment on, he could deal with Zach Williams.