In Double Jeopardy Read online

  DEAD MAN STALKING

  Shy and reclusive medical student Elaine Ross is warned she might have trouble dating after her only sister is brutally murdered by her brother-in-law, Dirk Stoner. Dirk, a handsome golf pro and the son of a billionaire developer, was convicted and executed amid a media frenzy that rivaled the O.J. Simpson trial. So when Elaine is coerced out to a nightclub and is unsettled by the advances of Jonathan Lewis—a man whose mannerisms and gestures eerily remind her of Dirk—she refuses to succumb to her paranoid fears.

  But Elaine can’t conceive of the twisted trail of bribes, blackmail, and murder that Dirk’s billionaire father wove in an attempt to save his only son. She isn’t aware that an FBI investigation linking the deaths of Dirk’s prison doctor and a plastic surgeon has been inexplicably dropped. And Elaine has no way of knowing that the face in her nightmares is carrying a very real torch…for revenge.

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  Jonathan twirled his mixer in his drink and then took it out and licked it.

  A chill went down Elaine’s spine. Dirk used to do that: look as if he was making love to the mixer, hold it between his lips and swing his eyes at her suggestively.

  “Would you like to dance?” he asked.

  Elaine hesitated. “I’m not very good.”

  “That I can’t believe,” Jonathan said, sliding off the stool and taking her elbow.

  Elaine let him lead her onto the dance floor. He was very graceful and sexy, as sexy as. . . . She pushed the thought out of her mind.

  Exhausted but strangely energized after dancing, they ended up at a table far enough from the music to be able to hear each other talk.

  And then she saw it. In the better lighting, just under the hair at the back of his head, that small birthmark, difficult to notice. Dirk’s birthmark. She was sure she saw it. Or were the lights and shadows playing tricks on that twisted imagination of hers?

  In Double Jeopardy

  Books by Andrew Neiderman

  The Dark

  The Devil’s Advocate

  Immortals

  Imp

  Night Owl

  Tender Loving Care

  In Double Jeopardy

  Published by POCKET BOOKS

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS

  POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Copyright © 1998 by Andrew Neiderman

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  ISBN: 0-671-01561-3

  First Pocket Books printing November 1998

  POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

  Cover art by Danilo Ducak

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4516-8259-5 (ebook)

  For Hannah Rose—

  part of the legacy, the reason to be

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  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Epilogue

  In Double Jeopardy

  Prologue

  HARRY ROSS PAUSED AFTER HE entered the busy diner and gazed at the people seated on the black-and-silver counter stools, concentrating mainly on the men. A few glanced at him with vague interest. One, however, looked as if he recognized him. The man cupped his hand and leaned over to whisper something to the woman beside him. She turned quickly and widened her eyes as she nodded.

  Harry ignored them. He panned the black vinyl-covered booths until he spotted a slim red-haired man of about forty signaling inconspicuously from a booth.

  “Didn’t expect you’d be out of uniform,” Harry remarked as he slid into the bench seat across from Wayne Echert.

  The velvet tones of Toni Braxton came through the small speakers at the rear, her voice just under the chorus of conversation, the clank of dinnerware, and the periodic announcement of orders from the waitresses and countermen.

  “Correctional officer’s uniform would attract attention, Mr. Ross. I didn’t think you wanted that, with media hounds haunting you and your family all the time.”

  “I couldn’t give less of a shit about the media,” Harry said. Even he winced at his use of profanity. Up until Farah’s murder and the trial, he hadn’t been one to rely on profanity to express anger and dissatisfaction. He had his own puritanical words that ranked up there with “golly” and “gee whiz.” But those days were long gone. He had buried that old Harry Ross alongside his daughter over a year and a half ago, and he was beyond mourning for himself.

  “I want to hear about him, every gritty little detail,” Harry Ross said, eager to skip any small talk. That was another thing now absent from his life: idle chatter, moments of relaxation and hilarity. He couldn’t remember when he had last laughed, unless it was a laugh of sarcasm. He had become consumed by his need for retribution and revenge. Tales of his former son-in-law’s suffering had become Harry’s lifeblood. He fed on them like a vampire, sucking in every morsel of pain and discomfort Dirk Stoner endured.

  Wayne Echert nodded and quickly shifted his gaze down to his coffee cup. Despite all his years as a prison guard on death row, he had never quite grown comfortable with the look in a condemned man’s eyes. It was truly as if such men could see beyond death. That vision prematurely put the cold, glassy glint of a corpse into them. Those who were resigned to their fate moved like shadows of themselves—gaunt, dark afterthoughts, their every motion mechanical. They slept in coffins and heard the dirt fall on the lids.

  “Sometimes it sounds like applause,” one condemned man had told him.

  Harry Ross had a similar look in his eyes. In a real sense, he too had been living on death row right beside the former son-in-law he despised so much.

  Wayne was about to speak when the waitress appeared.

  “What’ll you have?” She skipped any friendly banter because she was behind in the taking of orders. One of the other waitresses hadn’t shown up, and she had to cover her section. Consequently she didn’t really look at Harry Ross. If she had, she would have recognized him immediatel
y. She had followed the trial on Court TV whenever her work schedule had permitted and then had watched the recaps in the evening. Occasionally there was still an article appearing, especially when anything was continued through the legal system. It was one of those stories that defied death itself.

  “Just coffee,” Harry mumbled. The moment the waitress moved off, he focused on Wayne with all the intensity of a seasoned hunter fixing on his kill. “Well?”

  “Okay. Let’s start with his living conditions,” Wayne began. Now that he was here and actually face-to-face with the man, he wanted to get the conversation over with as quickly as possible. “The cell’s only about four feet by ten feet. He’s got a stainless-steel sink, a toilet, and a bed. His bed is made of metal and has a mattress an inch and a half thick at most. I don’t know how those guys sleep on them, and—”

  “So all this time he hasn’t been given anything special in the way of living quarters?” Harry asked impatiently. The muscles in his jaw twitched. His forehead tightened like a drum skin.

  Harry was skeptical about the reports he had been given. He distrusted the system, especially when it involved someone with as much money and power as Dirk’s father, Philip Stoner. That was why he had decided to seek information from someone who was right on the scene, a death row correction officer. Who better to describe the actual situation?

  “Hell, no. There’s no special setup on death row for anybody, but they do keep him away from even the other death row inmates as much as possible. They’re always afraid someone will kill a famous inmate just for the notoriety.”

  “But he has more than the others,” Harry said, nodding to confirm his own assumption. “Doesn’t he?”

  Wayne shifted his gaze as Harry smirked. “He gets more than the others because he has more money to spend,” Echert admitted.

  “He gets money from the outside regularly?” Harry asked with a painful grimace.

  “Look,” Wayne said, raising his hands as if he were defending his co-workers, “it’s a place of business.” He shrugged. “What isn’t a place of business these days?”

  Harry nodded, his face stolid, now the face of a man who had lost all warm human feeling. On his daughter’s tombstone he should have added, “Here lies a father’s heart.” He lived like a man whose heart had been ripped out of his body.

  “But so what?” Wayne continued, answering and arguing with himself. “What’s he getting? Better snacks, instant coffee, more stamps, extra toilet paper? He has a television set, but he doesn’t have cable. I mean, this guy is not on the Riviera by any means, Mr. Ross. The cells are so cold that the inmates have to wear layers of clothes in the winter, and in the warmer months some of them are nude just to stay cool.”

  Wayne paused and gazed at the other patrons in the diner, wondering if any had recognized Harry Ross and strained to hear their conversation. One couple toward the end kept looking their way.

  Wayne wasn’t comfortable talking to Ross; he wasn’t even comfortable taking the man’s money, but as he had just said, everything was business. Besides, the guy wanted information badly, and Wayne did feel like helping him. He did feel sorry for him. He too had watched some of the trial on television and had caught the pain in Harry Ross’s face when grisly details were given. Wayne had a twelve-year-old daughter and lived with the fear every father inherited the day the doctor said, “It’s a girl.”

  “Go on,” Harry said, annoyed with Wayne’s pauses. “You said you would tell me all of it.”

  “He still gets clean laundry only once a week. Before he can go out to the yard, he is strip-searched.”

  “How do you strip-search an inmate?” Harry asked quickly, anticipating some pleasure in the guard’s answer.

  “We look in his mouth, under his balls, and up his butt, Mr. Ross. Then we run a metal detector over him. There’s nothing dignified about it.”

  “Every time?”

  “Every time.”

  “How does he react to that?”

  Wayne shrugged, hesitant to reply. “How would anyone?”

  “I’m not interested in anyone. I’m interested in him,” Harry shot back, raising his voice a few decibels. The waitress brought him his coffee, but he didn’t acknowledge her. His eyes were frozen on Wayne.

  Wayne swallowed some of his coffee, looked at the remains of his bagel longingly, but decided not to bite into it. Harry Ross wouldn’t tolerate the moment it would take to chew it.

  “He’s cooperative,” Wayne continued, “but he has this shit-eating grin on his face that pisses us off.”

  “Yes,” Harry said, nodding as someone in the know would nod, “I did hear that he still had that confident grin.”

  Harry lifted his coffee cup, blew over the hot liquid, and then took a sip. Wayne Echert felt Harry Ross was staring through him now, not at him.

  “He’s the most relaxed condemned man on the block,” Wayne admitted, knowing full well it wasn’t something Harry Ross wanted to hear. “I think he’s fucking crazy.”

  “As crazy as a fox,” Harry murmured. “I don’t know why he stopped his appeals.”

  Wayne shrugged. “He knew he wasn’t going to win. All he was doing was prolonging the inevitable, and no matter what you heard, it’s pretty close to hell living on death row, Mr. Ross. You oughta hear the cheers that go up at midnight on New Year’s Eve, when they all realize they’ve survived one more year.

  “You know what Dirk Stoner reminds me of now, Mr. Ross? He reminds me of one of Kevorkian’s patients.”

  Harry thought about that. Philip Stoner had complained in the newspapers about his son’s decision to stop fighting his execution.

  “I can’t force him to do anything he doesn’t want to do,” Philip Stoner had claimed. “I’m sorry for him, sorry for everyone,” he’d added.

  It was a little too late for that, Harry had thought.

  He sat back. He had taken only the one sip of his coffee and didn’t seem interested in taking another.

  “He ain’t gonna win any mercy from the governor, Mr. Ross. Everyone’s watching this one. You did a good job of keeping the media on it, and all his father’s money and all his fame as a so-called world-class golfer isn’t going to help him now. We’re in countdown. You won’t have to wait much longer.”

  “We’ll see,” Harry Ross said, lighting up again. His lower lip trembled a bit. Nervousness, like an insidious serpent, had wound its way through the caverns and arteries of his six-foot, two-inch stout frame to curl up in his heart. It reared its ugly head every time he heard a mention of Dirk Stoner’s death sentence being mitigated.

  It hadn’t been the trial of the century, and it hadn’t been as long as the O.J. trial, but it had been one of the more popular ones on Court TV, and it had received considerable media coverage because of Dirk Stoner’s victories on the golf circuit and his father’s great wealth.

  All through it, and especially afterward, during the sentencing hearing, Harry had aligned himself with representatives of minorities who were crying for equal justice.

  “Let’s see if a rich, famous white boy can get the death penalty for first-degree murder” was a statement often repeated. Harry didn’t hesitate to second it.

  As one of the most successful developers in Los Angeles, Philip Stoner was a confidant of the rich and powerful, of politicians and government officials. He was a chief contributor to the governor’s reelection campaign and was said to have the ear of the White House when he needed it. With all that muscle, the cynics assumed he would get his son off death row.

  Ironically, it had almost become a political necessity to convict and execute Dirk Stoner. Riots had occurred after the Not Guilty verdicts in the Rodney King incident, and the same sorts of riots were feared if the rich white boy escaped the fate that was so often and so easily meted out to poor minority men. There wasn’t a politician in town or in the state who wanted to be associated with manipulating the legal system, not while all these eyes were focused on it.

  Ph
ilip Stoner’s army of attorneys, attempting to follow in the footsteps of O. J. Simpson’s dream team, had challenged the forensic evidence. They made a little headway, but were unable to shake off the eyewitness who was every prosecutor’s and defense lawyer’s dream witness: a middle-aged female teacher with an Ivory soap-pure background who happened to be at the scene of the crime, who happened to get a full, close view of the assailant, and who happened to have excellent eyesight.

  When the defense attorneys tried to discredit her testimony by implying she had seen Dirk’s face so often on television and in papers that she just mistook it, she revealed that she didn’t even know what a hole-in-one was. Golf was a bigger mystery to her than the universe. She couldn’t name or identify a single professional player, and she hated sports—all sports. In fact, she rarely watched television.

  She nailed Dirk Stoner, placed him at the crime scene, and shook her head as if she had just caught one of her young pupils committing an act of vandalism. With her long, bony forefinger, she pointed to Stoner in the courtroom.

  “I have no doubt that is the man I saw leaving Ms. Ross’s apartment. I couldn’t sit here and swear to something I didn’t believe completely. I am well aware of the importance of my testimony.”

  And she was a churchgoer.

  Ten thousand dollars’ worth of designer suits suffered near fatal creases.

  Defiant to the end, Dirk refused to consider a plea, and the trial went the distance.

  After the guilty verdict came the death penalty proceedings. Philip Stoner’s attorneys brought forward an impressive list of witnesses to testify to his son’s character. Dirk had nothing in the way of a police record, not even a speeding ticket, but there was the clear implication that his father had taken care of any of that.

  What did the prosecution have?

  A vicious premeditated crime with no chance of reasonable doubt and no sign of remorse, a number of witnesses who testified to Dirk’s often violent behavior, threats, stalking, arrogant displays of power, and money.