Page 77 of The 1 Lawyer

Ironically, my house was still equipped with the same security system that had been there when we’d bought it years ago. No camera, just alarms on the doors. I was careful to set them before I went to sleep at night. But now that Rue and I both came and went, we didn’t bother to set them in the daytime.

My neighbor spoke again, sounding defensive but not insincere: “But, Stafford Lee, the Biloxi police talked to everybody in the neighborhood. They came to our house the next day. I wasn’t there, but my wife was. She showed them the tape, said they could have it.”

I said, “Someone with the Biloxi PD took it?”

“That’s what my wife said. Like I told you, I wasn’t home.”

There was no reason for Shank or his wife to lie. From what he’d said, Sweeney had had the tape for over a year. Rue and I exchanged a look of disbelief.

Roland said, “Sorry I can’t help you.”

After I ended the call, I sat there trying to process the information. If the police had the tape, they must have noticed that two people were in Gates’s car that night. Why did they close the case? Why weren’t they looking for a witness or a coconspirator? If Jenny was right about Benjamin Gates, did that mean that another person had committed the murders in my house?

The questions went off in my brain like gunshots while I stared out at the water. I watched as the lone woman left her chair and waded into the surf, ignoring the red warning flag that meant no swimming.

Rue broke the silence. “So if the tape from your neighbor’s security system was in a closed police file, how did copies of those pictures make it to Benjamin Gates’s cousin?”

I didn’t respond; I was watching as the swimmer went farther from shore and encountered the current. Rue nudged me with her elbow. “Why have they closed your wife’s file if the cops have a tape showing another person at the scene of the crime?”

I couldn’t answer that. It didn’t make any sense at all. But my student intern had a better grasp of the issues than the detective in charge of my wife’s murder investigation.

That was a sobering thought.

The middle-aged swimmer was shoulder-deep in the ocean before she began to struggle. Though she wasn’t far from the shore, she floundered as she fought the current.

I stood, grabbed the rescue buoy, ran across the sand, and dived into the surf.

Her face was twisted with panic as she tried to fight the rip current pulling her deeper into the waters of the Gulf. By the time I reached her, she was terrified, shrieking for help.

“I’ve got you!” I shouted. “Stay calm.” I tried to hand over the rescue buoy, but instead of taking it, she grabbed my neck and clutched so tightly that she almost took me under.

Once I got her clinging to the buoy rather than my neck, we swam together, parallel to the beach. When the pull of the current eased, the waves began to push us toward the shore.

Back on the beach, she collapsed onto the sand and burst into tears, still clutching my hand. I knelt beside her while she recovered.

And people think that being a lifeguard is easy.

CHAPTER 59

A WEEK later, I sat at my desk, my fingers moving across the keyboard as I drafted pleadings for a new personal-injury case referred to me by Mason.

My office was quiet that day. Rue was in Gulfport attending her commercial law class. Jenny hadn’t checked in with me that morning, but I hoped she’d stop by later. Mason was planning to come by after a docket call in Eckhardt’s court. After Eckhardt’s unconscionable ruling in Alicia Holmes’s case, I’d filed motions for a change of judge in all my cases in his division.

My current client had sustained injuries in an auto accident. I was composing the final paragraph of the plaintiff’s petition when a call came in on my office line, a landline phone sitting on the credenza behind my desk. The screen read Caller Unknown.

Too many scammers and unwelcome solicitations out there. If Unknown wanted to talk to me, he’d have to leave a message.

I was back on the computer when the office phone hummed to signal a new message. I wrapped up the plaintiff’s petition for damages, saved it, hit Print. While the printer churned out the pages, I played the message on speaker. A male voice came on the line. It sounded robotic, as if it had been filtered through a voice-changer app: “Hey. This is for Stafford Lee Penney.”

The voice paused. I waited for the caller to identify himself. But he didn’t give a name.

The message continued. “It’s not smart, digging into the stuff that went down at your house. You’re lucky to be alive—you realize that, right?”

I pulled the chair up to the credenza and stared at the phone as the message played on.

“Just walk away, Counselor. You walked away once; shouldn’t be hard to do it again.”

I waited, listening, my complete attention focused on the phone. There was a long moment of silence and then a beep. The call had ended.

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