Looking to Nikki as she stood in front of me, I realized that was her exact issue too.
I glanced back at Oscar and waited for him to notice that I was staring at him. When he finally did, I offered him a smile and a knowing wink. He blushed and I motioned with my chin toward Nikki, then winked again, silently promising him that I’d put in a good word for him and see what little fires I could start for these two.
Oscar’s face reddened even more, but a sweet, grateful smile spread across his face, so I knew he was on board at least.
In answer to Candice’s knock, Maldonado opened the door to us and took a step back, his expression one of surprised delight.
“Are you ready to get this thing going?” Candice asked in that same rich, husky voice she’d used before. Before he could answer, she used her thumb to point to me and Nikki. “We’ve got plans later, and we’d like to wrap this up in the next hour or so if possible.”
Maldonado’s gaze traveled from Candice to Nikki and settled on me, where it lingered for an uncomfortable few seconds before he said, “You three are doing the interview?”
“We are,” I said, forcing myself to hold his gaze. I’ll freely admit that it felt really weird to appear so openly provocative to anyone but my husband.
Maldonado opened the door wide. “Please come in, ladies,” he said.
Candice went in first and took the chair to the left, Nikki took up the middle, directly across from Hekekia, and I took up the end, directly across from where Maldonado had placed his briefcase.
No surprise, the attorney moved his briefcase to the floor, and took up the chair across from me. Again I held his gaze as he sat. His eyes cut to the sizable emerald engagement ring on my left hand, and the wedding band with matching emeralds that hugged it.
I allowed a small smile to form on my lips, and moved my fingers subtly to shift the rings, hoping his interpretation was that I wasn’t as committed to my husband as my wedding set might suggest.
Maldonado sat back in his chair and puffed his chest out. All the unspoken messages in the room were saying more than actual words could.
To Maldonado’s right, Hekekia sat with his mouth agape. He was moving his eyes from the three of us to his attorney, then back to us, like he had no idea what the hell was going on.
It was exactly where we wanted the two men to be. Thrown off and distracted. Nikki started by opening a thick folder she’d prepared and pulling out a photo of Chris Wixom. “Remember him?” she said to Hekekia.
The Hawaiian didn’t even look at the photo, but he did glance at his lawyer, who was still staring at me like he couldn’t wait to get me alone somewhere. “No,” Hekekia said when his attorney said nothing.
“He remembers you,” said Nikki. “Picked your mug shot right out of a six-pack, Mr. Hekekia. He says you were the person who shot him and stole his property.”
Hekekia blinked lazily. “He’s lying.”
“Really?” she said. “Why would he do that?”
Hekekia shrugged. “Maybe he’s confused. You should ask Snake about him.”
“Snake,” she said. “You mean Mr. Gudziak?”
“Yeah,” Hekekia said. “He might know that guy.”
“I’d love to ask Mr. Gudziak about him, but your friend didn’t survive his heart attack.”
“Huh,” he said. “Too bad.”
“Yeah,” Nikki agreed. “A real tragedy.”
Nikki then pulled out two more photos: one of the set of watches that’d been in Wixom’s home, the other a photo of the watch that’d been on his wrist before being confiscated. “How about these timepieces?” Nikki asked. “Recognize them?”
Hekekia peered at the images and said, “Yeah. Those are the watches that Snake brought over to my place yesterday.”
“He brought them to you?” Nikki asked.
Maldonado kept his leering, smiling eyes on me as he said, “Asked and answered, Detective. Move on.”
So he was paying attention. “And what about this, Mr. Hekekia?” Nikki asked next, showing him a photo of the wall safe that had been found dismantled in his garage.
Hekekia looked to Maldonado, who merely nodded. “Snake showed up with that too.”
“Where’d he say it came from?”
Hekekia shrugged. “He said he found it in the middle of the road along with the watches.”
“What road?”
“He didn’t say.”
“So, let me get this straight,” Nikki said. “Your friend, a fellow felon, shows up at your door with a wall safe and some stolen watches, and you just let him in and tell him to make himself at home?”
“Hey, I didn’t know he was a felon,” Hekekia said. “Man, I met him a couple weeks ago at a bar.”
“Don’t you mean a couple of years ago, Mr. Hekekia?” Candice interrupted. “Didn’t the two of you serve time together in the Arizona State Prison Complex?”
Hekekia scratched his head like her question was a real thinker. “ASPC is a big place. Over six hundred bros run through there. But you can check my records to see that we never shared a cell or work duty or anything like that.”
My eyes narrowed. His answer sounded very confident and rehearsed. He wasn’t lying about never having shared a cell with Gudziak, but every single other thing he said was total bullshit.
Nikki pointed to the three of us. “So you expect us to believe that the first time you met Gudziak was at a bar here in Austin, population nine hundred thousand, and not under the roof of the same penitentiary where you both were serving time?”
Hekekia shrugged. “Yeah,” he said simply.
I shook my head subtly. What a load of crap.
“What bar?” Nikki pressed.
“Don’t remember.”
“Okay, then where was it located? Maybe we can Google it.”
“Don’t remember,” Hekekia said. “I only remember being at the bar when he sat down and we had a drink and started talking.”
“And the subject of your mutual time in prison never came up?” Nikki said, as if she couldn’t imagine that wasn’t a topic of conversation between the two.
Maldonado tore his eyes away from me to look at Nikki. “He didn’t know he was associating with a felon, Detective, which, if he had known, would’ve been a clear violation of his parole.”
“Yes,” she said. “It would.” Still, she let the topic drop and reached back into the folder to pull out a photo of the drugs confiscated from Hekekia’s garage. “Know what is also a clear violation of his parole, Counselor? This.”
Nikki slapped the photo down on the table, but Maldonado gave it no more than a cursory glance. “Kaapo, tell them about the drugs.”
“They were Snake’s,” Hekekia said. “He bought them, used them, and didn’t tell me he’d hidden them in my garage. When I found out he had them in there, I told him to take his shit and get out of my house.”
“Really?” Nikki said, as if she were fascinated by all the tall tales. “And did he?”
“No. He started giving me a story about how he stole the drugs from some drug dealers and was afraid they’d followed him to my place. That’s when we heard the yelling outside and saw you guys breaking into the house across the street. We thought you guys were the drug dealers and that’s why we ran.”
Candice shook her head and rolled her eyes. “You thought I was a drug dealer?” she said.
“Yeah!” he insisted. “I don’t know who you are if you don’t say something like, ‘Stop! Federal officer!’”
My eyes narrowed again. I realized that Maldonado had coached Hekekia pretty well before our interview. Candice had never called for Hekekia to halt, or announced herself as a federal employee. She’d just raced after him until he’d pulled a gun on her.
“You tried to kill her!” I spat, pointing at the despicable criminal.
/> “I thought she was trying to kill me! And then, you went all crazy on me! Pulling my hair, scratching me! Biting me!”
I felt my cheeks redden and my attention was momentarily diverted to Maldonado. He’d lowered his lids seductively and mouthed, Wow, to me.
I nearly punched him in the piehole, but managed to keep my cool. “Sounds like you’ve got an explanation for everything, Mr. Hekekia,” I said.
“It’s the truth!” he replied.
Of course, it wasn’t the truth. It wasn’t even in the same neighborhood as the truth, but Hekekia had probably been lying and manipulating people his whole life. Truth meant little to him; in fact, it became whatever he said it was. I realized quickly that he’d never admit to wrongdoing and go to his grave denying he was involved in any crime whatsoever.
Still, Nikki asked several more questions, trying to get Hekekia to crack, but he stuck to his story that he’d innocently offered a down-on-his-luck friend a place to stay for a little while, and said friend had turned out to be nothing but bad news, which was really a shame because Hekekia was now a model citizen trying to turn his life around.
“Where’s Gudziak’s truck?” Nikki asked him.
“What truck?”
“Gudziak drove a black pickup, right?”
“He didn’t have a truck,” Hekekia said. “Or a car. He showed up at my place on foot.”
“With a wall safe weighing over forty pounds and a collection of watches?” Nikki reiterated.
“Asked and answered, Detective,” Maldonado said, his eyes roving the V-neck of my outfit as if he could find an angle to allow him to see inside my bra.
Nikki shook her head and went back to her folder. She pulled out several gruesome photographs that I immediately recognized, and laid them out in front of Hekekia. “Remember this?”
“Oh, man,” said the Hawaiian. “That looks rough.”
“You should know,” she said. “You were there.”
Maldonado diverted his attention from my bustline to the photos. “You have proof linking my client to the Roswells’ murder?”
It surprised me that he would recognize where the gruesome images had come from. Andy and Robin Roswell had been rendered unrecognizable after such a violent death. “We’re working on the connection,” Nikki assured him, keeping her focus on Hekekia.
Kaapo shrugged again. “Don’t know ’em,” he said. “Or what happened to them.”
Nikki produced more photos of the scene.
I couldn’t help but glance at them all too. My stomach muscles clenched and my appetite disappeared. I’d seen the scene up close, but the trauma of it had blocked out almost all the worst memories of it until I saw the photos spread out on the table.
For his part Hekekia kept his eyes staring sightlessly ahead. He made no effort to take a closer look as Nikki set out photo after photo on the table. She finally ended by setting down a photo of Andy Roswell, so handsome in life with a beaming smile, and next to it one of his beautiful wife, Robin. “Look!” she demanded, as she slapped down the photos. “Andy, Robin, and their faithful employee, Rosa Torrez, who’d been caught fleeing for her life just past the stairs . . .”
Hekekia cast a lazy glance at the photos being slapped onto the table, doing his best to look bored.
“. . . and Mario Tremblee, who’d been innocently working in the backyard and probably never even knew you and Gudziak were inside killing the couple he worked for! You were there, Kaapo! You and Snake.”
I was watching Hekekia as his gaze moved across the photos and then there was something about his expression that shifted for a moment when his eyes rested on the Roswells’ gardener. I glanced quickly at the image of the very handsome young man with deep, soulful eyes and black hair, and when I looked back up to Hekekia, I couldn’t really say for sure, but as he took in Mario’s image, all of a sudden he seemed to look confused. Or maybe surprised. It was hard to say. It was over in a flash, however, and it left me wondering if I’d really caught a reaction or not. Maybe he’d just been reacting to what Nikki was yelling at him, and that made me wonder if he’d actually been there. I mean, we didn’t know for sure that he had. We were only fairly certain that Gudziak had been involved, given his meeting with Chris Wixom when he was impersonating Dave the day of the murders at the Roswell residence.
“Detective,” Maldonado said in a commanding voice. “My client has already told you that he has no knowledge of these murders, or the attempted murder of Chris Wixom. And you have no proof to tie him to them, so shall we move on?”
“No proof?” she said, her eyes sparkling with anger. “You mean, other than Chris Wixom’s witness statement that your client was one of the men who violently invaded his home, shot him in the back, and looted his house of personal items?!”
“You have the word of a man who’s been through a terrible trauma, and is probably still high as a kite on painkillers. How trustworthy is his eyewitness testimony?” he asked. “And my client has already given you an explanation for how Wixom’s belongings ended up in his home. He had no idea these items had been stolen. Or that Mr. Gudziak—a man he barely knew—was a felon.”
Nikki furiously gathered up the photos and put them back into the file. I could see how frustrated she was because we hadn’t gotten anything useful out of Hekekia. He was, after all, a seasoned criminal who knew how to come up with explanations that would cast doubt on the evidence, and he had a really good lawyer. Distracted as he was, Maldonado was still very much a player in the interview, which made me even more worried about how talented he might be in a courtroom.
Nikki retrieved two last photos and laid them on the table. “We need to find these two,” she said simply.
Dave’s and Gwen’s driver’s license photos stared up at us from the tabletop, and I felt my eyes well. It was an emotional thing seeing their photos being presented to one of the men responsible for abducting them.
I think we were all a little surprised when Hekekia put his finger on Dave’s picture and said, “I’ve seen this guy,” he said. “His name’s McKenzie, right?”
“Where have you seen him?” Candice demanded.
Hekekia tapped the photo again and said, “He’s a friend of Snake’s. Or he was. Maybe he was part of all this stuff you guys are trying to accuse me of.”
My breath caught in my throat. Sweet Jesus, Hekekia had just played us brilliantly. Chris Wixom had already given a statement to the police that Dave McKenzie was the man who’d tried to shoot and kill him, and even though we knew that Gudziak had been impersonating Dave on the initial visit to Chris’s home, Maldonado was certainly going to insist that Wixom hadn’t been mistaken about Dave being the one to invade his home and attempt to kill him. He’d been mistaken about seeing Hekekia there.
Further, it would give even more credit to the theory that Dave and Gudziak had both murdered the Roswells. Gudziak’s fingerprint on the casing at Wixom’s house, and Dave’s bloody handprint at the Roswells’.
Suddenly, I could see it clearly through the eyes of a jury, and knowing that Hekekia could very well get off for the crime of attempted murder while Dave was found guilty was like being splashed in the face with ice water.
“Where can we find this guy?” Nikki pressed, tapping Dave’s photo herself.
Hekekia scratched his head. “I think he left town.”
“Why do you think that?” she pressed.
“Something Snake said. He told me that he and McKenzie had a fight and McKenzie left town.”
“And where did he say that McKenzie was going?” Nikki said next.
Hekekia gave another one of those lazy shrugs. “No clue. If Snake were still alive, you probably could’ve asked him.”
Maldonado rested his laced fingers on the table and eyed the three of us smugly. The interview had been a huge mistake; I could see that now. Not only did we have nothing to
gain from it, but Hekekia and Maldonado had just played us by inserting a connection between Gudziak and Dave into the official record.
Still, Nikki continued to try to get something, anything, out of Hekekia for the next forty minutes, but eventually, Maldonado’s constant, “Asked and answered, Detective, move on,” was the only thing coming from their side.
Finally, Nikki packed up all her photographic evidence and glared moodily at Hekekia. We all knew the interview was over, and even though we’d still charge Hekekia with everything we could think of, we’d be leaving the interview the definite losers.
Candice spoke before we officially ended it, though. She said, almost casually, “I’ve seen you out and around downtown, haven’t I, Counselor?”
Maldonado was packing his legal pad and pen into his briefcase. “Maybe,” he said. “I get out when I can.”
Candice snapped her fingers, as if she suddenly remembered something. “I know where I’ve seen you. You were at Murielle McKenna’s birthday party at . . . where was it? Oh, yeah, at Backbeat, right?”
Maldonado smiled wide. “That was a great night,” he said with a fond shake of his head. “But I should’ve remembered seeing you there.”
She laughed like they were old friends. “I think you were busy with some triplets.”
Maldonado’s grin turned wolfish. “Like I said. Great night.”
Candice nodded, and next to Maldonado, Hekekia showed the first signs of becoming uncomfortable with the direction of the conversation. “Yeah,” Candice continued, “you looked like you were having the time of your life. Not sure about the triplets, but I’m sure you were everything they expected that night.”
“And more,” he said, his voice low and sounding pleased with himself.
Candice laughed lightly. “You know,” she said, “Murielle is sure a great party to be around. How does one get invited into her inner circle?”
Maldonado’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. He seemed to know what she was up to. “I’ll never tell,” he said, getting up and scooting his chair in. “Attorney-client privilege, you know.”