The Associate Read online

  That video diary was soon ended, and a new one began. She began this diary entry like she began the last one, stating the date, which was October 18 of last year. This time, she was wearing some makeup and was dressed in a button-down and a jacket. Her lips were red, bright red and she was clearly wearing eye-shadow and mascara. “I’m sorry I didn’t make more entries,” she said. “I’ve been busy. Because, you know, life. But I’m on my way to a job, and I wanted to check in. I’m graduating this December, so yay.” She pumped both of her fists into the air. “And I got a job lined up with The Kansas City Star. I would like to think that I got that job because of my grades at MU, but I suspect that I got that job because Andrew is a huge benefactor.” She rolled her eyes. I recognized that the name “Andrew” was her father’s name, so she must have been referring to him. “Yeah, I’m not going to refer to him as ‘dad’ anymore, because he’s not. He hasn’t returned my phone calls in three months, so I’ve officially wiped him clean from my memory banks. Or something.”

  She ran her pinky along her lower lip, as if she was putting on lip gloss, and then appeared to adjust the camera a bit. “Anyhow, I have this job that I have to do.” She rolled her eyes. “I don’t want to do it, but I have to. I wish that I could just work my job at the Star and do my hacking, but it kinda looks like I’ll have to make more money so that Yasin and I can get married. Being poor sucks. I’ve never been poor, but I’m starting to experience what’s it’s like, and I think that I hate it. So, I’m going to do something to make sure that I’m not poor anymore.” Then there was a knock at her door. “Okay,” she said, taking a big breath. “Looks like it’s showtime. I’ll do another entry when I have something new to talk about. Bye.”

  I wondered why I was in possession of this video diary. I looked at the package, and it was anonymous. I didn’t know who sent it. I therefore didn’t know the motivation of the person who would have sent it. That bothered me. Somebody obviously wanted us to have it, but who? And why?

  I watched several more episodes of the video diary. It was much the same. She lamented about her life, talked about what she was doing for the newspaper, talked about working with the Gregorian clan and talked about marrying Yasin. She was animated when she spoke about working with the Gregorians. That seemed to make her come alive.

  “This is such a cool assignment they’ve given me,” she said in one of her video diaries that she made in February of this year. “They found out about my hacking skills, so they’ve arranged for me to go and work for the Gregorians. They’re an Armenian mob clan that’s operating on the East Side.” She rubbed her hands together with glee. “I need some excitement in my life. Yasin just started his medical school classes, and he’s never around. I knew that would happen, of course. He’s always in class or in the library studying. Either that, or he’s in labs.” She rolled her eyes. “And he’s going to be doing rotations in his third and fourth years. And then he’s going to be a resident working 100 hours a week. I’m obviously going to have to fill my time in some way. I’m going to have to satisfy my adrenaline-junkie side some way, and working for the Armenian mob is the perfect way to do it.”

  Her eyes got wide and she grinned. “I love to live with danger. Life is so boring without it. I love knowing that I might be killed at any moment for doing what I’m doing. I mean, I don’t want to die, but I love the possibility of it.”

  I took a deep breath, wondering what these video diaries meant. I was getting a good picture of Shelly the girl by these diaries. But it was weird that she never spoke directly about Wells. She talked about doing jobs in the evenings, but she never said what those jobs were. It was almost as if she was thinking ahead – she was thinking that these video diaries might one day be viewed by somebody other than herself, and she didn’t want to put it out there what she was doing.

  Then, in the last video diary, I suddenly understood why I was in possession of this thumb drive in the first place. For the last video entry told me everything that I needed to know.

  As I watched it, I suddenly understood. The person who sent this thumb drive to Harper wanted her to see this last video entry specifically.

  It was a video entry that sounded like a woman who was on the verge of suicide.

  Chapter 16

  Harper

  I answered my phone, seeing that it was Damien calling and I picked up. I was in the lobby of our building, waiting for the elevator. My pre-trial conference for my other murder case didn’t exactly go as planned. My client, David Wilson, was there and he informed me that he wasn’t going to take the prosecutor’s 30-year plea deal. I wanted to brain him when he said that, and I reminded him that he was facing the death penalty if we took the case to trial.

  No matter. He wanted his day in court.

  I had stewed about this case all the way to my office building, but, at the same time, Damien’s words rang in my ears. Be careful about taking an easy plea deal. The prosecutor probably knows something that you don’t. Or something like that. And that made sense. It did seem that the prosecutor was trying to get rid of this case. I hadn’t yet gotten her discovery on the case, either. I calmed down as I wondered exactly what Montel Jefferson, the prosecutor on this case, might be hiding.

  So, it looked like there was a possibility that I had another murder trial on my hands, and I felt like I was going to go bonkers.

  “Yeah, Damien,” I said, picking up the phone.

  “Harper, are you close to the office?” he asked.

  “I’m in the lobby, actually, waiting for the elevator. Why? What’s up?”

  “There’s something that you need to see.”

  I was immediately curious. “What?”

  “You’re in the lobby? You’ll be here soon enough. I’ll show it to you when you get here.”

  Now I was good and curious. I hoped that it was good news. After the day I had, I needed a pick-me-up.

  I got into the office suite and went to Damien’s office. He wasn’t there, so I went down to the conference room. He was in there, staring at his computer and shaking his head.

  “Hey,” I said. “What’s up?”

  Damien looked up at me. “What is the possibility that Shelly was suicidal?” he asked without preamble.

  “I don’t know, why?”

  “Somebody sent us this in the mail,” he said, taking out a thumb drive out of his computer and holding it up. “It’s a video diary. I’ve been watching it for the past several hours. It’s a fascinating look at Shelly’s life. She documented her frustrations, her fears and her dreams. She was really quite funny in a sarcastic type of way. But it’s her final video diary entry that I really want you to see.”

  I cocked my head and laid my bag on the conference room table. I went over to Damien’s computer, which was paused. Shelly’s pretty face was frozen on the screen. She had bags under her eyes, and it appeared that she had been crying.

  “Now,” Damien said. “I’ll give you a brief synopsis of what she was saying in her earlier entries. She talked about how she hates her father and how she was excited to get married to Yasin. She also seemed pretty amped about her job with Erik’s clan. She said that she loved danger and that she loved the feeling that she was endangering her life by working for the Gregorians. She was that type of girl, apparently, the thrill-seeker. The kind of person for whom boredom is the deadliest feeling of all. Bear in mind, in every single one of her entries, her demeanor was the same. She didn’t seem depressed in any of her entries. She seemed annoyed in a lot of them, happy in others, but not depressed. But look at this one.”

  He backed up the video several minutes and then Shelly came to life. Her shoulders were slumped and she had been crying. Most worrying of all, there was a large bruise that was covering her left eye. “He hit me,” she said, her voice cracking. She shook her head. “I don’t know what to do. I think that he’s dangerous. I never thought that he was dangerous. And I’m scared. I’m so scared, because I’ve been starting to feel that this
isn’t worth it anymore. None of this is worth it anymore. I’ve been having nightmares lately, nightmares about the baby. I don’t think that I want to be here anymore. I don’t want to give him the satisfaction of my death, but I feel that there’s nothing to live for here. There’s nothing here for me. Tell my mother that I’m sorry. Tell-“

  And it cut off.

  Damien looked up at me. I just shook my head. “Well, that muddies the waters. Couldn’t the girl be more clear about what she was thinking? And what was up with that video just cutting off like that in the middle of her speaking? Seriously.”

  Damien stood up. “It sounds like she was going to commit suicide to me.”

  “Yeah, maybe. It also sounds like she was afraid of somebody. And what’s up with that talk about ‘the baby?’ She wasn’t pregnant at the time that she was killed. If she were, I would have seen something about it. And who was being violent to her? She was going to say goodbye to different people, it sounded like, or that she was sorry. She was trying to apologize to her mother and it sounded like she was going to go down the list. Then she cut off.”

  That video should have been my saving grace. If Shelly were suicidal, and she actually did commit suicide, then that would explain why she was traveling at a high rate of speed and crossed the median. That was one way to kill yourself. I always hated people who did that, though, because they often took out others. It was like an airline pilot who deliberately crashes a plane because he’s suicidal. Yes, kill yourself, but don’t bring others into it. If Shelly killed herself by crashing her car, that’s what she was doing – she was endangering other people because she herself wanted to die. That wasn’t right.

  “Let me get the report back from my car expert,” I said. “Savolo is supposed to look at the car in a couple of days. He can tell me if there was some kind of a defect. If there wasn’t, then maybe you’re right. Maybe Shelly did commit suicide. But there’s not enough here on the video to establish that. And we’re still faced with the fact that somebody had the intent to kill her. We don’t yet know who it is, but if there’s one thing I do know, it’s this – it makes zero sense for a suicidal person to tamper with her own brakes. If she was suicidal, and she wanted to die in a car accident, she would have just driven recklessly and crashed her car. Right?”

  Damien shook his head. “No. Maybe she wanted to frame somebody for murdering her.”

  “If that were the case, then wouldn’t she have made that last video diary entry a little bit different? For instance, if she was trying to frame, let’s say, Yasin, for killing her, then she would have come out and say Yasin’s name. She would have said ‘Yasin is violent and I’m afraid of him. He hit me, causing this bruise on my eye. And then, just so that there wasn’t any question, she would have probably said something like ‘If something happens to me, Yasin did it.’ At least, that’s how I would have done it if I was trying to frame somebody for my murder.”

  For some reason, watching that video diary entry was irritating me. I wished that the girl had stated who she was afraid of. Who hit her. Explained more about the baby. And I wished that she would have figured out when her recorder had quit recording.

  “I’m sorry, Damien, but it’s not a smoking gun. I’ll have a look at the rest of the video entries and see what I can glean from them. It sounded like she was suicidal, but it also sounded like she was afraid of somebody. We don’t know who she was afraid of just yet, but she was obviously afraid of somebody. I do wonder why she didn’t name that person, though. At this point, it could be that she was afraid of Yasin, Wells, Erik or even her father. I just don’t think that she would have cut her own brakes, though, so I think that we’re going to have to come up with a better defense than suicide.”

  I had to admit, Damien looked pretty crushed when I said those things. He seemed to really believe that Shelly committed suicide, and that it was a matter of convincing the prosecutor of that fact. If he thought that Nick Wright was going to go for that and just dismiss the case, though, Damien had another thing coming. Nick wasn’t the type who was going to back down from a fight, and a fight was exactly what he had on his hands. He really had a hard-on for Erik, too. He wanted to put Erik away, mainly because he knew that Erik was good for so many crimes that he couldn’t touch him on.

  Crimes that he couldn’t touch him on. Nobody had been able to touch Erik yet on anything that he did. Yet the DA’s office was able to get to Erik on this one. Why was that? Once again, the name “Sargis” popped into my head. Why wasn’t Sargis protecting Erik on this murder? Sargis apparently was able to protect Erik against every other charge that might have been brought against him. Why was that protection taken off for this case?

  There was still a thread there. There was a confusing web of people who were surrounding this murder, and none of them exactly seemed to be related to one another. Some of the people that I suspected were related – Yasin and Andrew McMason, Shelly’s father, had a thread tying them together. They hated one another, and Shelly seemed to hate her father, too. Erik stood alone in this web, unless you considered that Sargis might have also been involved. And then there was Wells. He had a connection to Irina, who also had a connection to Sargis. But that might be playing six degrees of separation there. Just because Wells had a connection with Irina and Irina had a connection with Sargis did not mean that Sargis and Wells were connected.

  I got out a piece of paper and drew a diagram of all the key players in this drama, and also wrote the word “baby?” in the middle of it. For now, I was not going to consider the issue of suicide. Considering that just confused me and took the whole thing off-kilter. And then I handed the paper to Damien.

  “Here,” I said. “Here are all the people who might have had a reason to off Shelly. We need to not eliminate any one of them until we can get more evidence in this case. We might never eliminate any of them. But I think that we have enough here that we can confuse the jury. We have enough reasonable culprits that we can put reasonable doubt in their minds. That’s all that we’re going for, remember - reasonable doubt.

  “Tell me what you’re thinking,” Damien said. “Tell me each of your theories for each of these people.”

  “Yasin, that’s obvious. He was the boyfriend, and Shelly was having sex with Wells, possibly still for money. There’s no indication that the people in her normal life, the life that included Yasin, knew about Wells. There’s also no indication that the people in her alter life, the life that included Wells, knew about Yasin. She was good about keeping the two worlds separate. But if Yasin found out about what she was doing…” I sliced my hand across my neck. “So, that’s a possible motive that I’m going to tease out.”

  Damien nodded his head. “Go on…”

  “Wells, same thing. Let’s say that he fell in love with Shelly, but he didn’t know that she had a fiancé. That would give him reason to kill her if he found out the truth.”

  Damien made some notes. “And…”

  “Erik, our client, had motive because she was going to expose his organization. So, there’s that. There’s always that.”

  “And Sargis…”

  “Maybe he wanted his son out of the way. So, he kills Shelly and lets Erik take the fall. Again, I don’t quite know how that theory holds up. We’ll have to have Garrett do some investigating to find if there was a rift between father and son, but that does seem like a possibility.”

  “Don’t forget Abdullah Ahmadi, Yasin’s father,” Damien said. “He might have killed her when he found out about Shelly’s extracurricular activities. Protecting Yasin’s honor and all that.”

  “Right.” I wrote that down. “And then there’s Andrew McMason.”

  “And why would he have wanted her killed?”

  “Because he’s a bastard. And she mentioned a baby. What if Andrew was raping her and he impregnated her? He’s not just a bastard, but he’s a wealthy bastard. That would give him reason.”

  “But Shelly wasn’t pregnant at the time she was
killed.”

  “I know. But maybe it happened in the past. Maybe something came up and she was threatening to expose him. You never know.”

  I was just throwing theories out there, saying them out loud to see if any of them sounded just right. So far, none of them did, but at least I was throwing them out there. It was all a part of the creative process for me. I had to bounce theories off of people. Throw the ball to them and see if they ran with any of them. In this case, Damien wasn’t jumping on any of the theories. He seemed skeptical about all of them.

  “What are your theories? Besides suicide, I mean?”

  He shrugged. “I think that you’ve come up with good ones. Preliminarily, at least. None of them sound quite right, yet all of them sound right. None stands out above the rest. I still think that there is something that we’re missing here.”

  “Maybe so. We have time, though, to develop our theories more. With some more intense investigation and maybe some pre-trial discovery, we can find something that might stick. That’s the hope, anyhow.”

  Damien nodded, not seeming convinced. “That’s always the hope.”

  Chapter 17

  Damien

  I think that I found my smoking gun on my medical malpractice case. In fact, I was certain of it. I picked up my newspaper in the morning, intending to read it with my morning coffee and a bagel, same as every other day. Then I saw it.

  Angel of Mercy, Angel of Death. First page of the paper. I read past the headlines and I saw what the article was about: Dr. Kim. He had just been arrested and had confessed to what he said were “Mercy Killings.” According to his confession, he had deliberately killed 35 patients by giving them either overdoses or giving them medicine that he knew the patient was allergic to. He stated in his confession that he had done this with terminal patients, because he wanted to end their suffering. He had apparently seen both of his parents die a slow death from cancer, and he didn’t want any other family to experience that kind of agony. He stated that he knew that what he had done was legally wrong, but that he felt in his heart that he was doing the just and moral action.