Page 9 of Shadow of Justice
In the first few, she was sitting at what looked like a cafeteria table. She was laughing, her head thrown back. It was taken in extreme close-up so I couldn’t make out who she was talking to or whether there was anyone beside her.
Another few photographs captured her sitting behind the wheel of her car. She had her head turned away from the camera at first, then in quick succession, she looked up. The photographer caught her lifting her hand to tuck a lock of hair behind her ear. Something might have drawn her attention. In another shot, she looked in the direction of the camera, scowling.
In the next series of photos, Ellie was walking out of the main entrance of the county hospital. She carried textbooks in her arms. The wind lifted her hair. She was beautiful. Young. Vibrant. She wore pink scrubs and a student ID badge.
One of the last series of photographs was more disturbing. They appeared to have been taken from a high-powered lens through a window. She was in her bedroom, wearing a robe, her hair wet, probably having just gotten out of the shower.
Gus laid another photograph down. In it, Ellie Luke had slipped out of her robe. She stood in front of her bedroom vanity running a brush through her wet locks. Though taken from behind, the door to her closet had a full-length mirror. She was stark naked in the reflection.
“My God,” I whispered. “He stalked her. There are date stamps on these. This was going on for months.”
Gus held the final photograph in his hands. His jaw clenched. He shuddered.
“Gus?” I asked.
He squeezed his eyes shut for an instant. Opening them, he slammed the last photograph on the table with the others.
“The date,” Gus said. “March 11th. The day before she died. That might be the last photograph ever taken of that poor kid alive.”
4
It was almost six before I made it back to the office. I expected it to be empty. But Caro and Hojo sat in the reception area waiting for me. Word had already made its way to them. Sam’s concerns about a leak appeared to be well founded.
Hojo pulled a rocks glass and a bottle of scotch I knew he kept in a hidden drawer. He only broke it out after verdicts came in on major trials. He poured two fingers and handed the glass to me.
“How much have you heard?” I asked, taking the glass. I didn’t generally like scotch, but appreciated the smooth warmth as I downed it.
“Don’t get excited,” Caro said. “I talked to Janine over in Judge Saul’s courtroom.”
“She told you about the warrant?” I asked. “Who else did she tell?”
“Nobody,” Caro assured me. “But you can’t think that’ll last for long. Gus pulled a warrant on a twenty-two-year-old cold case that freaked the whole town out.”
“Fill me in,” Hojo said. “How soon is this thing going to be something I’ll have to deal with?”
I kicked my heels off and perched myself on the empty desk next to Caro’s. Hojo sat in one of the reception chairs against the wall.
“Ellie Luke,” I said. “Her niece made a fairly convincing case that her own father murdered her and posed her body in a wooded area in Phillips Township. Out by Pine Ridge.”
I gave Caro and Hojo the highlights of Hayden Simmons’s story, ending with the contents of the box she took from her father’s hiding spot.
Hojo whistled. “Man. Caro, you were here then. What do you remember about it?”
“I knew Ellie’s mother a little. The Lukes are next-door neighbors to one of my bunco friends. I actually met Ellie once or twice when we played over there. She babysat for my friend’s son at the time. This was probably thirty years ago. Sweet girl, from what I recall. Her disappearance really turned things upside down around here for a while.”
Caro picked up a red file sitting on her desk. I hadn’t noticed it before but my pulse skipped when she handed it to me.
“I haven’t seen one of these in a while,” I said, thinking about asking Hojo for another shot of scotch. The red files were part of Phil Halsey’s idiosyncratic filing system. He used them for open but not active cases. He’d given me an entire box of the things on my first day of work for the prosecutor’s office. It felt like a million years ago now.
I opened the front flap and sucked in a breath. Phil loved his sticky notes. He color-coded them. Yellow for action items. Blue for important phone numbers. Pink for appointments or important deadlines. It used to drive Caro crazy collecting all of them and entering them into his digital case files.
“I know,” Caro said. “It jarred me a bit seeing those, too. And his writing.”
Phil Halsey had died by violent means right in front of me. I didn’t often think of it. But now, his last seconds flashed through my mind.
“What do you know about the new suspect?” Hojo asked.
I flipped through Phil’s notes as I answered him. There wasn’t much there beyond what Gus had already told me. A copy of Ellie Luke’s autopsy report, such as it was. Badly decomposed by the time they found her, there’d been no internal organs, DNA, or blood samples to take. No toxicology. No evidence of bullet wounds, stabbing, or strangulation. Only the massive defect to the back of her skull.
