Free The Gray Zone by Daphna Edwards Ziman Page B

had worn a platinum blonde wig on the night of Porter’s murder. Jake laughed aloud. Not much of a connection. He pictured a hairstylist being cross-examined into admitting that any number of platinum blonde wigs could be combed into a Monroe style. Even so, he pressed the idea further. Kelly Jensen left her job—and her house—the day after Porter’s murder. Still not much of a connection. There had been blonde hairs in Porter’s hotel room bed. Kelly Jensen’s driver’s license said she had blonde hair. It was too ridiculous. Jake knew that even he could never lead a jury to connect those faint dots. So again the question raised itself, why was he here?
    A second later, someone was pounding on the front door. Jake flew behind the end of the couch and held his breath.
    “Who’s in there? I’ve got a bat.” A man’s voice.
Boom, boom, boom
. Something heavy, presumably the bat, struck the door. “Open up. We know you’re in there.”
    Jake tried to calculate the time it would take him to open the sliding-glass door, sprint across the weedy backyard, and scale the cinder-block wall.
    The front doorknob jiggled.
    “We seen your light,” came the man’s voice. There was some mumbling, and Jake thought he heard a woman’s voice, too. Even if he got across the yard and over the fence, he would have to come back for his car. He couldn’t risk doing that right away, with the man standing there, but he didn’t want to leave it either. Eventhough it was two houses down, the Mercedes was out of place in this neighborhood.
    “What do you mean, you
think
you saw the TV?”
    “Well, I thought I saw a flickering.”
    “Did you or didn’t you?”
    “I’m almost sure I did.”
    “Shit, woman. I’m calling the cops.”
Boom, boom, boom
. “You hear that? I’m calling the cops.” Jake heard more mumbling as footsteps receded off the porch.
    He sank even further into the floor until he was sure the people were off the porch. Then he crab-crawled to the sliding-glass door, opened it just enough to squeeze through, and ran like hell for the back wall. It was six feet tall, and he took it like a high jumper, vaulting over it, his body nearly horizontal. He landed in a crouch on the other side and waited. Nothing. No dog. No man with a bat. He raced across the neighbor’s backyard, took the next fence, then the next, and eventually exited through a gate.
    Knowing that to someone watching through a window, a man running to a car would look more suspicious than one walking, Jake forced himself to saunter out to the Mercedes. He hoped it would look as though he had come out of the house it was parked in front of. He fired the ignition, U-turned, and drove back down Kelly Jensen’s street. He saw no sign of the couple with the bat, and he was several streets away when he saw a police cruiser heading toward Manzanita Lane.
    Jake drove, his mind and pulse racing. He was too keyed up to go home. He swung his car into a Denny’s parking lot and killed the engine. He chose a booth with a view of the door, ordered black coffee, and spread the papers Shrake had given him on the table in front of him, willing the scanty information on the forms to give him a clue. He read and reread her name and address, scouring her handwritingfor insight into her personality. He looked at her address and thought again about her house, reviewing every detail one by one for something he might have missed. The coffee took the fuzz off his brain, and he began to twitch his foot absently against the table leg. What was it about this woman?
    Then, all of a sudden, he froze. What he saw was so startling, he had to keep himself from shouting out. As Kelly Jensen stared out defiantly from her driver’s license photograph, Jake suddenly realized why she was so familiar. He had seen those eyes, that mouth, those cheekbones. Seen them hundreds of times—in Porter’s office. One of the Sidney Randolph Maurer portraits.
    Jake threw some money on the