Ransom River Read online

  Except the Ransom River Superior Courthouse had become center stage for a spectacle of murder. And Aurora Faith Mackenzie had been plucked from the voter registration pool and thrown into it. Juror number seven on the teen burglar execution trial.

  Twenty-four hours. If she had waited, even long enough to spit on the corporate hacks who slashed the funding for Asylum Action, she would have had an out. Please excuse me from jury duty. I’m overseas, assaulting heartless pricks. But cast adrift in Geneva and nearly broke, she’d grabbed the only escape route she had: her return airline ticket. She’d tried to outdistance her anger and dejection. So she ran straight ahead and in the wrong direction. Home. Where a jury summons waited.

  Juror number seven. Caucasian female, age twenty-nine. Slight, angular, with what her parents called Black Irish looks. Today she’d dressed conservatively, at least compared to her Peace Corps days. V-neck sweater with a tank beneath, hipster khaki jeans, boots. The press was getting an eyeful. The jurors’ names had not been made public, but a courtroom artist had sketched each of them, and one journalist had described her as having “night-sky hair and blue eyes with a challenging gleam.”

  She’d rolled those eyes at that.

  Beside her, Helen Ellis adjusted her bifocals. “They look so excited.”

  She was eyeing the public gallery. The crowd was Southern California exurban: women in mom jeans or in mom-jean shorts. Men in Tijera Sand and Gravel shirts. Ranch workers in denim. At least today nobody wore T-shirts with an agenda. No Justice! shirts, no Self-defense is our right. The first day of the trial several people had shown up in pro-defendant attire. Judge Wieland had put a stop to it. No shirts with messages, he decreed. No disruption from the gallery. Violators would be ejected.

  He’d clamped the lid down. Still, the atmosphere hovered between edgy and We’re going to Disneyland.

  “Bring on the popcorn vendors,” Rory said. And maybe the Reaper, dancing up the aisle playing his scythe like an electric guitar.

  Because the heart of this show was death. And its emissaries were the defendants. Behind the defense table, they took their time sitting down.

  Charged with murder, they were standing tall. Wearing civvies, they looked every inch the cops they were.

  Jared Smith shifted his shoulders inside the jacket of his suit as though it was too snug and his tie was choking him. He sat forward, like a plow. Like he expected other people to move aside for him.

  Lucy Elmendorf didn’t look at him. Sober and drawn, she sat with her hands laced together on the table.

  Helen Ellis leaned heavily toward Rory. “Check out Lucy’s husband.”

  Neil Elmendorf sat in the second row. Though his expression was stoic, he hunched, as though flinching. He seemed sandblasted with humiliation.

  “Telling, don’t you think?” Helen said.

  Rory didn’t respond. Elmendorf had put distance between himself and his wife. Maybe that lessened the anguish. After all, the man had to watch Lucy stand trial for murder. More than that, he had to endure her sitting beside the lover she’d been romping with when the gunfire began.

  And Rory wondered again why the defendants hadn’t had the sense to screw around in a motel across the county line. If Officer Lucy Elmendorf had handcuffed Jared Smith to a vibrating bed in Bakersfield instead of playing Bad Cop, Really Bad Cop at Smith’s house in Ransom River, the victim might still be breathing.

  And Rory wondered again how Smith and Elmendorf thought they could prove self-defense when they’d shot an unarmed sixteen-year-old kid in the back from point-blank range.

  Traffic on River Boulevard was light. This city didn’t really have a rush hour. Or rather, it did, at six a.m., when half the population hit the road to drag their asses onto the freeway and over the pass and into Los Angeles to punch a clock. Now, midmorning, the lights were green and the dark gold Blazer was rolling along at thirty-four miles per hour, just under the speed limit.

  Sylvester Church saw the courthouse ahead. Again.

  “Steady,” he said.

  Behind the wheel, Berrigan frowned. “I heard you the first time. And the seventeenth.”

  “And you’ll hear me the next twenty times, if I have to keep telling you.”

  The light ahead turned red. They stopped. Across the intersection, outside the courthouse, news vans were parked. Reporters and camera crews stood idle. Church scanned the cross street, the road ahead, the side mirror. No cops.

  But there were undoubtedly CCTV cameras in the vicinity. They’d passed a bank ATM a couple of blocks back. He didn’t know whether the surveillance cameras there would be aimed at the street, but he had to assume this vehicle had been caught on video.

  Like the two defendants on trial up at the courthouse.

  “Lamebrains,” Church said.

  Berrigan frowned at him. “Who?”

  “Drive.”

  Berrigan was nervous. Church didn’t like the fact that it was so obvious.

  Church was also nervous. But he hid it. He erased all tells from his face, his voice, his posture. Years at the tables in Vegas had trained him well.

  He glanced in the back of the Blazer. The rear seats were down, creating one big open space behind darkly tinted windows. The glass kept the sunlight from reflecting off the toolboxes and their cargo of weapons.

  The light turned green. Berrigan eased away from the intersection toward the courthouse. Church unbuckled his seat belt.

  “Around to the back.”

  He set the timer on his watch. It began counting down.

  3

  Judge Wieland peered down at the prosecutor. “Mr. Oberlin, call your next witness.”

  Assistant District Attorney Cary Oberlin stood, reading his notes. He was deliberate and calm. He reminded Rory of a carpenter who carefully takes one nail, then another, and exactingly hammers them into a board. Slowly, point by point, he intended to nail the defendants to the wall.

  “The People call Samuel Koh,” he said.

  Today he was going to use a heavy hammer. Rory girded herself.

  The victim in the case had been killed by a single gunshot to the cervical spine. He died instantly and awfully. And the courtroom was about to see what that meant.

  Prospective jurors had been questioned about it during voir dire. Could you look at graphic crime-scene photos of the body?

  Rory had said yes. She’d seen blood before. She’d seen gore. Still, she braced herself.

  She wasn’t alone. In the front row of the public gallery, the victim’s father stirred. And when Grigor Mirkovic stirred, the whole courtroom seemed to shudder.

  Mirkovic sat surrounded by minions. Bodyguards, lawyers, personal assistants. He was banty and grim. His presence crackled like static electricity, itching, causing unease.

  Grigor Mirkovic had a reputation and seemed to thrive on its impact. He sneered at reporters who asked him about his sketchy business background. Or about his millions. Or about his criminal connections. Such innuendo was beneath contempt, he told them.

  It was all about Brad, he said. Brad, his son, his golden boy, his beautiful young man. Obrad Mirkovic, who would never attend the senior prom or walk across the stage at his high school graduation. Brad Mirkovic, who had been shot dead on Jared Smith’s patio at two in the morning, with Lucy Elmendorf’s fingers gripping his tangled hair.

  In the courtroom, Grigor Mirkovic’s walleyed glare never wavered from the defendants. The filthy cops who killed his boy, he called them.

  But his anguish couldn’t alter certain realities. Starting with the fact that Brad Mirkovic had died because he broke into Jared Smith’s home on a dare.

  The night he was shot, Brad had driven with friends to Ransom River from Beverly Hills, high on weed, cruising for kicks. They decided that improvisational burglary was their ticket to fun. It was a fatal decision.

  According to the defense, Jared Smith was awakened by the sound of men climbing through his kitchen window. And Officer Jared Smith, who had
an impeccable record as a Ransom River Police Department patrolman, had defended himself, his home, and his guest, Officer Lucy Elmendorf, with a legally registered handgun. He confronted Brad Mirkovic, informed him he was a police officer, and told Mirkovic he was under arrest.

  Mirkovic, according to the defense, resisted. And Jared Smith, fearing for his life and the life of Officer Elmendorf, fired his weapon.

  That story had problems. The first of which was Samuel Koh.

  Jared Smith claimed that Brad Mirkovic had brandished an object he reasonably believed to be a gun. In the urgency of the moment, confronted in the dark by thieves, outnumbered and about to be overpowered, he responded with deadly force.

  Everybody bought it. Until it turned out that Samuel Koh, Jared Smith’s neighbor, had a video surveillance camera mounted under the eaves of his house. The camera angle captured not just Koh’s backyard but Smith’s. The camera was motion activated. It had never caught anything more threatening than a coyote loping across Koh’s grass. Then it caught the shooting of Obrad Mirkovic.

  Koh came through the heavy wooden doors of the courtroom, neat and tired in his gray suit. He passed through the gate to the witness stand and was sworn. He waited, face pinched.

  Rory felt for him. Going up against two police officers had taken a toll. Attitudes about cops and authority were sharp undercurrents in the case. In voir dire, the most unsettling questions hadn’t been about death, but power.

  Do you have relatives in law enforcement, Ms. Mackenzie?

  No, she’d said. Thinking: Almost, once. But not anymore.

  Could you send a police officer to prison for the rest of his life?

  Yes.

  They believed her. They didn’t even strike her for being a lawyer.

  She figured she’d been chosen for the jury because she had only cursory knowledge of the case. When Brad Mirkovic died she was six thousand miles away, trying to erase Ransom River from her memory.

  Now she was about to see the evidence. Maybe even the truth. If she glimpsed it, then no matter what the cops thought, or the victim’s father, or the media, or the other jurors, she had to call it. She wondered if that made her the court jester.

  At the prosecution table Cary Oberlin held up a DVD. He said in his mild, leaden voice, “Mr. Koh, can you identify this disc?”

  Koh leaned toward the microphone. “It’s mine. It contains a recording from the CCTV camera outside my house.”

  Koh’s pained eyes said what his testimony probably would not: He wished he had never looked at the video. He wished he had never installed a camera on his back porch. Then he would feel safe. Then nobody would have threatened his life anonymously over the phone, or set his car on fire while he was in the supermarket.

  He would not have seen Brad Mirkovic die.

  Berrigan nudged the Blazer past the courthouse at a steady twenty-five miles per hour. The sun glared off the hood. Church eyed the scene as they passed.

  “Nice and easy,” he said.

  The courthouse took up the entire block, with a back exit one street over. That door was a fire exit: It would be locked from the outside but not barred. It could be opened from the inside. And when they needed that door, they’d be inside heading out. At speed.

  Berrigan gripped the wheel like it was the only thing keeping him from blowing out an airlock into space. Though Berrigan was wearing gloves, Church bet the man’s knuckles were as white as gristle.

  Berrigan signaled and turned to head around the block. He was sweating. That worried Church.

  Church himself had showered and scrubbed his skin hard and shaved and trimmed his nails and run a clipper over his head so his hair was a quarter inch long. He didn’t want DNA left behind. As long as he didn’t bleed, he was okay.

  He was wearing new clothes bought from Walmart, the store’s own brand. He had another set of clothes in a duffel bag, for later, when he was done with this thing and could shed his shirt and pants and burn them, along with the Blazer itself.

  But Berrigan was sweating. He licked his lips and touched his shirt pocket. Inside it a squarish shape was outlined.

  “You brought smokes?” Church said.

  Berrigan quickly put his hand back on the wheel. “I’m not gonna smoke until—”

  Church reached across the Blazer and dug the cigarette pack from Berrigan’s pocket. A mostly used-up pack of Winstons.

  “Jesus, you been pushing cigarettes out of this thing, straight into your mouth? You probably left spit all over it.” He shook his head. “Pull over.”

  “It’s for good luck,” Berrigan said. “My thing, I always keep a pack in my pocket, for luck.”

  “And how’s that worked out for you so far?”

  That shut him up.

  Berrigan eased the Blazer to the curb behind the courthouse, directly outside the back exit. Church got out, opened the back door, and reached inside for his toolbox.

  “If we want to get out of here alive, we need more than luck,” he said. Idiot.

  He grabbed the toolbox and headed along the sidewalk. He passed a trash can, crumpled the cigarette pack, and threw it inside.

  Berrigan caught up. Side by side, they walked toward the front entrance of the courthouse. The sun was shining. Traffic was light. Church stared straight ahead and felt the morning sharpen to a point.

  Samuel Koh hunched toward the microphone. “When I watched the video, I realized what it had recorded. I copied it onto the disc and took it to the police.”

  Cary Oberlin entered Koh’s DVD into evidence. Then he prepared to play it for the court. The room grew hushed. Rory held her pen suspended above her notebook. The sun streamed through the windows behind her.

  In the front row of the public gallery, Grigor Mirkovic stood up. Face blank, he turned and marched down the center aisle. His entourage seemed caught flat-footed by the unexpected move. They scrambled to their feet and followed him.

  Helen Ellis watched them go. “Goodness.”

  Frankie Ortega’s hoodie was drooping over his forehead like a monk’s cowl. He pushed it back. “Whoa.”

  Mirkovic threw open the doors and swept into the hallway and out of sight. The minions disappeared after him. The static electricity, the building unease in the courtroom, snapped, relieved as if by the crack of lightning.

  Rory realized she was holding her breath. She exhaled. She couldn’t blame Mirkovic. Who could stand to watch footage of his own child being shot to death, in grainy, slow-motion detail?

  The heavy wooden doors creaked shut. Against the murmurs of the crowd, Judge Wieland banged his gavel.

  “Order,” he said.

  The crowd quieted. Wieland nodded at the prosecutor. “Proceed.”

  Oberlin pressed Play.

  Church and Berrigan strolled toward the front entrance of the courthouse. Jackets zipped, shades and caps on, steady, relaxed. Two workmen coming to perform repairs. From forty yards away, Church could see everything perfectly.

  This was the Criminal Division. In earlier times, a couple of decades back, a man could walk straight into a courthouse without being stopped or searched or monitored. Access to the justice system for all. Now, with street gangs and paramilitary policing and a state security apparatus that pulled in millions by bleating Homeland Security and whispering terrorism, criminal courthouses put up barriers. Especially courthouses where douche-ass cops were on trial for murder.

  Church licked his lips and tried to swallow. His throat locked. Beside him, Berrigan kept pace. The man seemed to have a hitch in his step.

  “Easy,” Church said.

  Outside the courthouse was a sign: WEAPONS CHECKPOINT. Little pictures of every sharp object and firearm you had to leave behind. Inside the doors, milling aimlessly in the empty foyer, were two security screeners. County employees but not sworn deputies, guys in their sixties wearing blue blazers and gray slacks and cheap ties. They were loitering between the X-ray machine and the metal detector. Plexiglas partitions on either side of
them, so people coming in had to funnel through the middle of the building.

  Church and Berrigan had two ways into the courthouse. One: a door on the left side of the building’s glass front. It was locked, with NO ENTRY signs on it. Exit only. Everybody leaving the courthouse came through that door. It was outside the foyer’s Plexiglas security box. Church could wait for a lawyer to breeze through it, some guy distracted by a phone call, maybe headed to the mall for coffee. Grab the door before it shut. Then he could sweep inside and completely bypass security. That would give him a head start on Homer Simpson and Ned Flanders at the weapons checkpoint. By the time they saw him, he’d be past them. But to do that he needed luck. Needed an unobservant lawyer coming this way. And there was none.

  Then a group of men slammed through the door into the daylight. Men in suits, surrounding a smaller, strutting man in a suit. Church nearly tripped. He recognized the guy. Grigor Mirkovic.

  Mirkovic, right there. Small and nasty and powerful and vivid.

  And with his goons holding the door open. Church sped up.

  Berrigan grabbed his arm. “Christ, don’t run.”

  Church checked himself. Yeah. Don’t draw undo attention. He forced himself to walk casually.

  Mirkovic and his posse swarmed down the sidewalk to a waiting SUV. And the side door shut behind them.

  Dammit.

  That left the second way into the building: directly at the security screeners. Right through them.

  Church said, “Code names only.”

  Berrigan nodded.

  Would Berrigan bolt? Church assessed the man’s walk, the tremor in his hand, the pale look on his face. The guy was shit scared. But no—he wouldn’t run out on this. Not in this lifetime.

  Church’s balaclava was in the inside pocket of his jacket but would have to wait. “I’m going in straight ahead,” he said. “Peel off. Go round to the back door. I’ll let you in.”

  Berrigan kept walking, toolkit in hand. Church turned and ambled through the front entrance. He set his toolbox on the X-ray conveyor belt and strolled to the metal detector.