Ransom River Read Free Page A

clock. Now, midmorning, the lights were green and the dark gold Blazer was rolling along at thirty-four miles per hour, just under the speed limit.
    Sylvester Church saw the courthouse ahead. Again.
    “Steady,” he said.
    Behind the wheel, Berrigan frowned. “I heard you the first time. And the seventeenth.”
    “And you’ll hear me the next twenty times, if I have to keep telling you.”
    The light ahead turned red. They stopped. Across the intersection, outside the courthouse, news vans were parked. Reporters and camera crews stood idle. Church scanned the cross street, the road ahead, the side mirror. No cops.
    But there were undoubtedly CCTV cameras in the vicinity. They’d passed a bank ATM a couple of blocks back. He didn’t know whether the surveillance cameras there would be aimed at the street, but he had to assume this vehicle had been caught on video.
    Like the two defendants on trial up at the courthouse.
    “Lamebrains,” Church said.
    Berrigan frowned at him. “Who?”
    “Drive.”
    Berrigan was nervous. Church didn’t like the fact that it was so obvious.
    Church was also nervous. But he hid it. He erased all tells from his face, his voice, his posture. Years at the tables in Vegas had trained him well.
    He glanced in the back of the Blazer. The rear seats were down, creating one big open space behind darkly tinted windows. The glass kept the sunlight from reflecting off the toolboxes and their cargo of weapons.
    The light turned green. Berrigan eased away from the intersection toward the courthouse. Church unbuckled his seat belt.
    “Around to the back.”
    He set the timer on his watch. It began counting down.

3

    J udge Wieland peered down at the prosecutor. “Mr. Oberlin, call your next witness.”
    Assistant District Attorney Cary Oberlin stood, reading his notes. He was deliberate and calm. He reminded Rory of a carpenter who carefully takes one nail, then another, and exactingly hammers them into a board. Slowly, point by point, he intended to nail the defendants to the wall.
    “The People call Samuel Koh,” he said.
    Today he was going to use a heavy hammer. Rory girded herself.
    The victim in the case had been killed by a single gunshot to the cervical spine. He died instantly and awfully. And the courtroom was about to see what that meant.
    Prospective jurors had been questioned about it during voir dire.
Could you look at graphic crime-scene photos of the body?
    Rory had said yes. She’d seen blood before. She’d seen gore. Still, she braced herself.
    She wasn’t alone. In the front row of the public gallery, the victim’s father stirred. And when Grigor Mirkovic stirred, the whole courtroom seemed to shudder.
    Mirkovic sat surrounded by minions. Bodyguards, lawyers, personal assistants. He was banty and grim. His presence crackled like static electricity, itching, causing unease.
    Grigor Mirkovic had a reputation and seemed to thrive on its impact.He sneered at reporters who asked him about his sketchy business background. Or about his millions. Or about his criminal connections. Such innuendo was beneath contempt, he told them.
    It was all about Brad, he said. Brad, his son, his golden boy, his beautiful young man. Obrad Mirkovic, who would never attend the senior prom or walk across the stage at his high school graduation. Brad Mirkovic, who had been shot dead on Jared Smith’s patio at two in the morning, with Lucy Elmendorf’s fingers gripping his tangled hair.
    In the courtroom, Grigor Mirkovic’s walleyed glare never wavered from the defendants. The filthy cops who killed his boy, he called them.
    But his anguish couldn’t alter certain realities. Starting with the fact that Brad Mirkovic had died because he broke into Jared Smith’s home on a dare.
    The night he was shot, Brad had driven with friends to Ransom River from Beverly Hills, high on weed, cruising for kicks. They decided that improvisational burglary was their ticket to fun. It was a fatal