The Zen Man (8 page)

Brianna Shephard felt better getting that off her chest, the same one that Mike Dowling, the Jeffco Deputy D.A. who sat across the desk from her, was staring at. She toyed with zipping up her leather bomber jacket, but with the heat cranking in here, she’d be broiling.

He managed to lift his gaze. “But I didn’t subpoena you. Just left a message that I would if you didn’t call me back.”

“I always do my duty on behalf of those who can’t speak.”

“That’s what makes you a great coroner.”

“Deputy coroner.”

Leaning back in his ergonomic chair, he stroked his wispy goatee. “C’mon, you and I both know you should be the big cheese. And when Ralph finally steps down, you’ll be a shoe-in to take his spot.”

“I’ll get there in due time.” She glanced at his notes, wishing she could read upside down. “I’m here because you said you wanted to prepare me for the Williamson case testimony.”

“Did I mention you look nice today?”

Her stretched goodwill snapped. “Let’s get something straight, Mike. It was just one night.”

“But…I thought…after this past year…maybe you’d want…”

It’d been a long, hard year since her husband’s murder. Nobody expected Lieutenant Joe Shepherd, one of Arapahoe County’s finest, to die. Didn’t make sense, never would, how a punk tweeker could snuff out his life like that.

She nodded to the papers in front of him. “Jefferson County Coroner was overwhelmed. Another murder on a summer weekend night. We got borrowed. Your vic, Jerry Williamson, had a forty-five degree angle of a gunshot wound, from a distance. Went into the chest, pierced the aorta, and he bled to death. And there you have my testimony for trial next week.”

“Right.” He ran his forefinger down the page, stopped. “In your autopsy report, you also noted he had…”

Mike finished counseling her on her testimony, they made small talk about their plans for Christmas, then she stood and picked up her bag. Mike had gotten the message she wasn’t interested, they’d made nice, time to split.

She was almost to the door when he spoke.

“I suppose you heard about the murder at Rick Levine’s place.”

Her breath froze in her lungs. “Rick’s…dead?”

“No!” Mike laughed uncomfortably. “His ex-wife is, and he’s been charged.”

She frowned, slowly turned. “Deborah Levine was
murdered
?” She remembered her—a loud woman with brassy blond hair who seemed to think squeezing her fleshy body into designer suits gave her class. When she wasn’t bragging about herself, she engaged in vicious repartee about others. All mouth, no substance. She’d never understood how Rick the Deadhead had hooked up with someone like that.

“Stabbed to death in a hot spring pool at Rick’s new place.”

“What new place?”

“Some bed and breakfast in Morrison. Seems he and his girlfriend were throwing a grand opening for the criminal defense attorneys association, lots of boozing, and Deborah was murdered in the midst of the partying.”

She was silent for a moment. “I thought Rick had cleaned up—what was he doing throwing such a party?”

“Don’t know. A lot of the attorneys at the party witnessed him holding a knife on Deborah earlier in the evening. Same knife was used to kill Deborah, or so the scuttlebutt goes. You know, it’s always someone the victim knows.”

“So…he was charged?”

“First degree. I have the crime scene photos.”

Their eyes locked. Lots of people knew she and Rick had been an item after his divorce from Deborah, and that Brianna eventually dumped him for Joe. One of those ugly, messy breakups that had fed the gossip machine for months.

Mike knew she’d stay longer to see those pictures. She hated that he knew that. Hated that he could use it to rein her back in. Hated it almost as much as she hated her reaction to the mention of Rick’s name.

She forced a small smile.

“Let’s see them.”

If you understand, things are just as they are; if you do not understand, things are just as they are.
—Zen proverb

T
he next day I was sitting in my armchair—only because Mavis was preoccupied elsewhere, jotting witness questions on a yellow writing pad when I heard a familiar male voice.

“My man, good to see you back!”

In the open kitchen door stood Garrett, wearing a dirt-colored T decorated with Bob Marley strumming a guitar. Some of Marley’s kinky locks stretched into the cursive words “Is This Love That I’m Feelin.” How Garrett had made a success of his one-man business, We Rock, where he created rock designs for pools, waterfalls, and gardens escaped Rick as the twenty-something guy had taken months designing—or
planning
the design—of a currently empty hot spring pool on their property.

“Come on in,” Laura said from her chair, the laptop precariously balanced on her lap, “and close the door. It’s chilly this afternoon.”

She kept tapping away, researching backgrounds for the CrimDefs who’d been here the night of the murder. She was checking social networking sites, blogs, news articles, anything that might reveal a CrimDef’s reason to dislike Wicked.

Garrett’s boots clumped heavily as he stepped back and shut the door.

“I thought it was gonna snow last night,” he said turning around.

“Yeah,” I agreed, “so did the TV weatherman.”

He strolled across the kitchen floor. “Yeah. Ridiculous. So when you’d get out of the slammer?”

As he approached, I saw his eyes where a color of pink some people liked their steak cooked.

“Noon yesterday, in time to make my advisement hearing.”

He stopped at the butcher block table, snagged a stool. “What’s that?”

“It’s where they tell you your charges and set up more important hearings.”

I waited for him to ask more questions, but he didn’t. Just sat there, swinging his boots against the linoleum, staring at us. From the dining room came a low droning noise. Mavis snoring from her doggie bed.

“What’s up?” I finally asked.

He threw up his hands, the movement causing the red, green, and yellow-beaded bracelet to clatter slightly. “About the night that chick was…you know…” He squeezed shut his eyes, a pained expression on his face.

“Murdered?” I prompted.

He nodded, reopened his eyes. “Yeah. One eighty-seven.” He looked up at the ceiling, scratched his head as though confused by whatever he read up there. “I was there.”

I felt as though I’d been sucker punched. “What?”

He gestured lamely over his shoulder toward the window. “I was out there…that night.”

It flashed through my mind to grab the recorder, but I couldn’t remember if I’d left the damn thing in our bedroom upstairs or in the car. Didn’t matter. No way I’d interrupt this…confession? By the time I got back, he might have changed his mind about talking.

“When you say
out there,”
I asked, carefully modulating my voice, “where exactly do you mean?”

He squinted at me. “In the hot spring pool.”

“With Wicked?” shrilled Laura, half-rising. The laptop started to slide off her seat. She grabbed it and remained hunched over, clutching it to her thighs, a horrified look on her face.

“With Wi—Wicked?” repeated Garrett, also rising, looking as horrified as Laura.

“That’s the nickname of the woman who was killed,” I quickly explained. “Look…” I stood, too. Too weird. “Sit back down, everyone, let’s take this from the top.”

“Could one of you grab me a bottle of that fruit-flavored water? My mouth is, like, mothball-dry.” Garrett settled back onto his seat.

As Laura hustled to the fridge, I set my pad and pen on the table. “Mind if I take some notes?”

Garrett shrugged. “Go for it.”

I sat across from him, picked up the pen. “Take it from the beginning of the evening…” My heart jack-hammered against my ribs. Jesus, Garrett the murderer? If he couldn’t get it together to finish the rock design in that pool, how in the hell could he plan a killing?

“Word,” he murmured, accepting the bottle from Laura. He unscrewed the cap, took a long swig. Finally, he set down the bottle, burped, and looked at me dead-on.

“Well, man, I’d finished a long day at work…”

Laura, walking behind Garrett back to her chair, rolled her eyes on “long day at work.”

“Then Zig had to go to a wedding. He was the best man.”

Ziggy, Garrett’s side-kick, single employee, and fellow cannabis lover.

“What time did Ziggy leave here?”

Garrett shrugged. “Two or three, I guess.”

I thought back to that afternoon. Laura and I had been preparing for the retreat, washing wine glasses, looking out the kitchen window. I didn’t recall seeing either Garrett or Ziggy on the property that afternoon. Which seemed odd as all the hot pools were in easy view from the kitchen window.

“And what did you do after Ziggy left?”

“I was having visions of the most righteous rock design, then I crashed in the pit. You know, the unfinished pool. When I woke up, it was dark.”

“Do you know what time it was when you woke up?”

“Like, uh, six. Hadn’t slept much at all the night before. Big party at C.J.’s, had been up most of the night.”

“C.J.—?”

“Chris Jameson. Snowboarding buddy. Lives in Golden.”

I’d call Chris later, confirm the story. “So you woke up around six, and then what did you do?”

“Selected some tunes on my iPod, laid back to groove.”

“Must’ve been cold in that pit.”

“Oh no, man. I had a sleeping bag. Goose down. Good for up to twenty below.”

Considering it’d been in the thirties, he’d have been very comfortable. “Why’d you have a sleeping bag with you?”

“Thought I’d be heading up to go ‘boarding for the weekend, but felt too zonked, so thought I’d lie there for a bit, listen to some tunes and stare at the stars.”

“How long did you lie there, listening to tunes?”

“Long time, man. Probably an entire Sound Tribe show.”

I waited for more, but those glassy eyes just stared back at me.

“What time did you get out of the pit?”

“Maybe nine, ten. Not sure, exactly.”

Laura leaned forward. “
Four
…hours…you…lay…there?”

“Yeah. When I woke up, there was all kinds of commotion going on down by the first hot spring pool. Cops and lights and people. I saw those people with Coroner written on their jackets lifting that woman out of the water.” He squeezed shut his eyes and shuddered. “Freaked me out, man. She was so…”

“Don’t think about it. What happened next?”

He reopened his eyes. “I crawled out of the pit, walked the back way around the lodge to my ride in the lot.”

“Down the ravine on the north side?”

“Yeah.”

I thought about his story for a few moments. Sounded bizarre as hell, but this was Garrett, the stoned snowboarding gonzo, I was talking to. On several occasions I’d seen boards in the back of his van, no doubt to take off whenever the shredding urge hit. Explained his keeping things like sleeping bags and other gear in his van, too.

“Why didn’t you talk to the sheriffs that night, Garrett? Makes you look guilty to have sneaked the back way to the parking lot and driven off.”

“I didn’t sneak, man!”

“You said you crawled. Sounds like sneaking.”

He looked crestfallen for a moment, fidgeted with his bead bracelet. “I was stoned. Didn’t want to get into trouble.”

I started putting the real picture together. “Stoned on what?”

“Killer indica.” He shifted a little. “And maybe a little acid.”

I kept my voice low, reassuring. “Garrett when you leave a scene like that, and you don’t tell anyone, you aren’t a dude anymore. You’re more like a suspect for murder.”

“You’re shitting me.” He made a choking sound. “Man, I had nothing to do with whatever happened to that lady.” He shook his head so hard, dreadlocks were flying. Suddenly he stopped, gave me such a chilling stare, I wondered if he had had everything to do with “that lady.”

“There’s something else,” he murmured.

“What?”

“I…found something.” He tugged an object out of a back pocket of his cargo shorts, held it up.

“Somebody’s cell,” Laura murmured.

“No, well, sorta,” Garrett said, turning it over for inspection. “It’s a BlackBerry.”

I stood up. “Put it down!”

Garrett’s eyes widened as he set it down on the butcher block table.

“And don’t touch it again.” I puffed out a breath, staring at the BlackBerry. “Where’d you find it? And where has it been since you found it?”

“Near the Cottonwood pool. In my pocket.”

The hot spring pool near the Cottonwood tree, which we’d called the Cottonwood pool from day one. It was about twenty feet from the pool in which Wicked had been murdered.

“Who else has seen it or touched it?”

Garrett shook his head. “Only me. I mean, I just found it, so I brought it here, figured it was time to confess I was outside that night.”

His hands were visibly trembling. Hell, mine were, too.

“You gonna turn me in?” he asked.

“It’s not about turning you in, it’s about you coming forward to the sheriff, explaining where you were that night, and why you haven’t come forward before now.” I looked at the BlackBerry. “And what you found.”

“Man, I’m gonna be so busted.”

I realized I was scrawling little concentric circles with my pen on my pad, knots of visible black fear. I set aside the pen, stared at Garrett. “Look, I’m going to call my lawyer, explain everything you just said, and my guess is we’re going to be visiting the homicide unit within the hour. Leave your bud at home.”

As I punched the speed-dial for Sam, Garrett leaned forward, a goofy smile on his face.

“Another thing,” he said.

“I can’t take any more,” I muttered.

“I was thinking you two might need an apprentice, like that Watson guy was to Sherlock.” He pointed at himself. “If so, I’m your man. I’ve even got a sick name for myself. G-Man.”

Laura emitted a wispy shriek.