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Buck nodded and went back to his bourbon. Over the years Alex had grown accustomed to the dark valleys Buck Jordan occasionally descended into. Certain subjects seemed to pull him into an abyss of anger and depression. The episodes were always fueled by alcohol. She knew that Buck was concerned about her having been in Byron Zell’s apartment, and that he was currently teetering on the edge of a meltdown because he considered Alex his responsibility—at least as far as her work at Lancaster & Jordan was concerned.
Alex looked back at Hank.
“Zell came looking for representation against embezzlement charges. I was looking into his finances.”
“A kiddie predator and a thief. Lancaster and Jordan is attracting quite the clientele these days.”
“We didn’t know about the pedo stuff when we agreed to rep him, Hank. And we cut ties as soon as we learned about it.”
“Immediately,” Buck added.
“If you look closely,” Alex said, “you’ll see that it was Garrett Lancaster who originally brought the child pornography to the police.”
“Really? How’d that come about?”
“Uh,” Alex said, lifting her glass and taking a sip of water. She and Buck stole a glance at each other. “Zell accidentally sent the dirty pictures to Garrett Lancaster.”
“Accidentally?”
“The pictures were included in a batch of financial documents he sent to Lancaster and Jordan. Apparently, the guy hid his porn in the financial files on his computer.”
“And Lancaster turned him in?”
“Garrett turned over the illegal files to the police. That’s all I know about it.”
“So we’ve got a thief, a child predator, and an idiot.”
“Well,” Alex said, “for what it’s worth, it looks like he wasn’t embezzling funds from his company.”
“Gee, let’s throw the guy a parade.”
“Tell us what you know about the homicide, Hank,” Buck said.
“There’s not much to tell. Our guys got called to the scene by one of Zell’s relatives—a niece, I think. She’d been unable to get a hold of him for a couple of days, so she convinced the super to let her into Zell’s apartment to check on him. Found him dead in the kitchen. Two gunshot wounds. One to the face, one to the chest. Uniforms arrived, roped the place off. Crime scene folks documented everything, then my guys got there.”
“And?”
“And what, Buck? You want a blow-by-blow?”
“Just an overview,” Buck said. “We need to know what you found in the guy’s apartment.”
“ME said the guy died quickly. The shot to the face was first and would have killed him by itself, but the second through the heart made sure of it. Gun was a forty-caliber Smith and Wesson. Forensic guys are looking to trace it, but no hits yet. That’s about it so far.”
Buck looked at Alex and nodded before taking a sip of whiskey.
“Oh, there was something interesting. The CSI guys found kiddie porn around the guy, so we’re tracking that for now. Trying to ID the kids in the pictures to see if maybe it was an angry parent of one of the kids.”
Alex looked at Hank, her eyelids squinted and her head tilted in a curious posture. “There were pictures around the body?” she asked.
Hank nodded. “Initial angle is that whoever pulled the trigger placed the photos around the body as sort of an explanation for the killing. The photos were printed from Zell’s computer. The forensic guys found the images on his hard drive. The geeks are looking now. New computer, incidentally. His old one had been confiscated, so it looks like he was at it again.”
Alex’s heart began to pound as beads of sweat sprouted on her forehead. She thought about her evidence board, on which she had fruitlessly worked over the years, pinning any fringe detail to the board, believing that someday the details would make sense and lead to her family’s killer. It had been years, though, since she’d found anything meaningful. Years since she’d made her last inch of progress. But now, ten years after her family had been killed, she’d stumbled across Byron Zell, whose murder looked vaguely similar to her parents’. There were thousands of shooting homicides each year in the United States, so Alex couldn’t count that as a similarity. But the photos definitely were. Her family’s killer had also placed photos around her parents’ bodies—photos of three women thought to be victims of sexual abuse and trafficking.
“You okay?” Hank asked. “You’re white as a ghost.”
“Christ, kid,” Buck said. “Don’t faint on me. Have a sip of your water.” Now it was Buck who lowered his voice. “You got nothing to worry about. If they were going to find anything to link you to that apartment, they’d have found it by now.”
Alex closed her eyes and worked to regain her composure. Her presence inside Byron Zell’s apartment was the farthest thing from her mind.
