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  As she aimlessly went through some papers on her desk, she couldn’t help but think of Stan’s reaction to her threat of leaving. After their last bitter argument two weeks earlier when he had gotten up and walked out in the middle the twins’ music recital, she had threatened to take the kids and go to her parents. But this time, she had wanted to tell him to get out.

  Confused as to how she really felt, she sifted through the unopened mail on her desk while waiting for her assistant to arrive. Maxine had expected Barbara forty-five minutes ago and was beginning to worry. Barbara was usually super punctual. She put the mail down and dialed Barbara’s home number but got a recorded message: “The number you have reached has been disconnected or is no longer in service.”

  Thinking she had dialed the number wrong, she tried again and got the same message. A bit panicked, she thought her cell phone might be the cause of the problem since cellular service was oftentimes iffy in her cinder-block campus office. She picked up her desk phone. About to enter Barbara’s number, she heard three stutter tones in the receiver, indicating she had a voice mail. She punched in her access code. The recording told her she had one new message, left at six a.m.:

  Maxine. Hi. It’s Barbara. I’m sorry to say I won’t be able to meet with you today. I can’t explain over the phone, but there is a letter waiting for you at the bottom of your mail pile. Thank you. Goodbye.

  Hanging up, Maxine searched through her stack of mail on the desk. At the bottom lay a sealed, plain white business envelope with professor kobe typed on it.

  Professor Kobe? She never calls me that.

  Maxine ripped it open. Inside was an unsigned, typed letter. It read:

  Dear Professor Kobe,

  I am so sorry to do this to you right in the middle of all the research, but I had to leave town unexpectedly. Unfortunately, I can’t explain the circumstances, but please know that if I could have stayed, I would have. I really did enjoy working with you.

  Regretfully,

  Barbara Reyes

  Maxine’s hands dropped to the desk, the letter still clutched tightly in them.

  Stan jumped from his chair at the kitchen table, happy to hear the whir from the garage door opener, signaling Maxine’s return. He hoped the time apart had calmed her down, as it usually did when they had this recurring argument. He couldn’t recall how many times they had fought over his erratic behavior, and each time it happened, he felt more and more guilty. As she walked through the door to the garage and into the kitchen, Stan stood there, hoping for reconciliation.

  “You’re back early. How’d your meeting go?”

  “We didn’t have a meeting,” Maxine said. “Barbara never showed up. She’s gone.”

  “Whadya mean ‘she’s gone’?”

  “Just what I said. She’s gone. Left town. Vamoosed. What part don’t you understand?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Here. She left me this. Read it for yourself.”

  She pulled the letter from her purse and handed it over to Stan. He skimmed the brief note and shook his head, saying, “Well, there must be some explanation. People don’t just up and leave for no reason.” He paused. “Barbara’s not like that.”

  “I know. That’s what was so great about her. She was the one person I was sure would never go MIA on me.”

  In the past, Stan had always chuckled when his wife used her sarcastic MIA acronym, which to her stood for: Missing in Arizona, a term she used for people who left town with no warning, something she had experienced numerous times since moving to the state. This time, though, he knew better than to laugh.

  He handed her the letter back. “Well, I’m really sorry to hear that, Max. I know how much you counted on her.”

  “Stan?”

  He could tell by the inflection in her voice she was going to ask him to do her a favor.

  “Yes, Max.”

  “Stan?” she sheepishly repeated.

  “What is it, honey? Just spit it out.”

  “Would you do me a huge favor and ask Brian to do a little snooping for me?”

  Glad she asked him, he hoped he could use a domestic version of quid pro quo to get him out of her doghouse. “And if I do?” He grabbed her around the waist and pulled her close. “Will you let me stay?”

  She forced a smile. “First, find out what happened to Barbara. This just doesn’t make sense.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “You will?” She put her arms around his neck. “I’m sorry about that silly argument this morning.”

  “You don’t need to apologize. I’m the horse’s ass. We’ve both been under a lot of pressure lately. Me with my caseload. You with your book. We need a little break.”

  “You’re right.” She pushed herself up on her tiptoes and whispered in his ear. “I got an idea of how we can take the edge off. Are the kids still at the zoo with my sister?”

  When Brian Hanley arrived at work Monday morning, his telephone rang as soon as he entered his office.

  “Homicide. Hanley.”

  “Hey, Brian, it’s me.”

  “Hey, Stan.”

  “Buddy, I wanted to say how sorry I am for acting like a moron at your party Saturday.”

  “Yeah. Well, you did act a little strange. What happened? I mean, you took one look at dad’s Dick Allen bat and—”

  “No. You’re wrong there. It wasn’t the bat. It’s just that I got sentimental there for a moment. Lots of feelings came rushing back of when I was a kid. I don’t really handle feelings too well. What guy does, right?”

  “You got that right, pardner.”

  “And I sure hope I didn’t offend you, you know, in what I said about your dad.”

  Relieved, Brian could hear the sincerity of his friend’s apology. “Hey. You’re my buddy. You can’t hurt my feelings. It’s over. No need to mention it ever again. As far as I’m concerned, it’s like it never happened.”

  “Thanks. I did call for another reason besides apologizing, though. I, well I should say, Maxine, needs a favor.”

  “You’re in luck. Mondays are my do a favor for my buddy with the gorgeous wife who’s too beautiful and too good for him day. What does she need? I mean besides a big strong Irishman who’s not afraid of his shadow like someone I know who shall remain nameless.”

  “Okay, okay. I deserved that. But seriously, I need you to trace someone. Got a pencil ready?”

  “Yep,” Brian replied.

  “Name’s Barbara Reyes, 705 West Balboa, Unit A. It’s a Tempe address. Phone is 480-555-9656. Find out what you can about her, wouldja?”

  “You got it. I’ll call you when I get a hit.”

  About an hour later, Brian called Stan in his downtown Phoenix office. “Hey, pardner. It’s me. I ran that name for you.”

  “That was quick. What you got?”

  “What do I got? I’ll tell you what I got. I got a big fat zero is what I got. Zilch. Nada.”

  “What do you mean nothing? That can’t be. She’s got a husband and a kid. Did you cross-reference her social? Did you spell her name right? It’s R-E-Y—”

  “Hey, I know how to do my job. Barbara Reyes, just like you told me. I ran it with multiple spellings, first and last, and there’s nothing on her. No SSN match. No credit history. No medical records. This babe doesn’t even have a friggin’ library card. It’s like she was never even born.”

  Brian rattled off the details of his search. When finished, he told Stan, “You know, champ, if I didn’t know better, I’d say she smells WP. She’s got all the red flags. And if she is WP, then you can bet someone’s wiped out her old ID and given her a new one already. Feds are real good at that stuff. Maybe she got flushed out?”

  Brian waited for Stan’s reply, but none came.

  “I know one thing for sure. That’s one ugly way to live, being in witness protection,” Brian added. “Everyone we’ve ever put into it, well, let’s just say, it fucks up your whole life.”

  St
an didn’t respond to Brian’s wry summation of one of the key programs used by lawyers in his office to get witnesses to talk: the promise of protection from whatever bad guys they needed to be protected from. Since he started working as a prosecuting attorney, Stan had never used Maricopa County’s Witness Protection Program.

  Brian had believed Stan didn’t like the program since Stan had always avoided using witness protection whenever the police or the County Attorney’s Office had recommended it for one of Stan’s witnesses whose life might be in jeopardy. He even went so far as to ask Stan about his seeming aversion to using witness protection. He recollected now how his buddy had blown him off saying, “I’d rather guarantee my witnesses a guilty verdict and maximum sentencing, assuring them the perp will never get to them in their lifetime. And if they don’t like that then I’ll try the case without their testimony.”

  For that matter, Brian didn’t like the program much himself. In his heart, he knew witness protection was a last resort. He was fully aware of the terrible consequences not only suffered by the individuals but by their entire families, prompting a very good chance of bringing about its eventual destruction. But the veteran detective also knew that in many times it was unavoidable.

  “Thanks for looking into it, Brian. Maxine will appreciate it.”

  When Stan arrived home that night, he reported Brian’s results to Maxine.

  “I had Brian do a search on Barbara today like you asked,” he said, sitting down at the kitchen table.

  She settled the twins in their chairs and pushed them up to the table. Then she grabbed a hot Pyrex dish, placing it on the table. “So, what did he find out?” she asked, wiping her hands on the cotton dishtowel she had used to hold the hot dish.

  “Nothing. He found out absolutely nothing. It’s as if she never existed.”

  “What are you saying? How could that be?”

  “I’m saying there’s no trace of her. No records, like a bank account or utility bill. He even checked for a student record at ASU. Zero there, too. And not only that, there’s no Social Security number with her name tied to it either.”

  “That’s impossible! I’ve worked side by side with this woman for six months. I’ve met her husband and child. I suppose they don’t exist either, huh?” She paused and stared at her husband for a moment. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”

  “Max, please don’t shoot the messenger. I’m just telling you what Brian told me. The only thing—”

  He stopped himself before he went any further. He realized all he could offer her was speculative at best.

  “What only thing?” she asked. “You are holding something back, aren’t you?”

  “Well … Brian thought …” He hesitated, not wanting to broach the subject.

  “What, Stan? Thought what?”

  “Well, he thought she had all the signs of being in witness protection.”

  “Witness protection? Barbara in witness protection? You’re kidding me. Right?”

  He chose his next words carefully and restarted his explanation.

  “I’m not saying she is. I’m just saying that Brian thinks that’s what it sounds like. That’s all.”

  “Why on God’s earth would she be in witness protection? What could she have done? Or what could she have possibly witnessed that would have put her and her family in witness protection. Do you think that’s why she got whisked away in the middle of the night?”

  “I don’t know, Max. People go into witness protection for lots of different reasons. There’s no pat answer.”

  “Well, that’s just not a good enough answer. If she is in witness protection like Brian seems to think, then how can she ever live a normal life? Do they expect her to just pull her child out of school? What about the family?”

  “Hey, slow down. We don’t even know if she’s in witness protection. You’re getting yourself all riled up for nothing.”

  “For nothing? You think her sending me that letter, disappearing like this, is nothing?”

  “Well, that’s not what I meant to say.” Too late to retract his statement, he readied himself for her verbal onslaught.

  “Well, then what did you mean when you said I’m getting all riled up for nothing? What if this was your family, Stan? What if I was in witness protection, and one night they knocked on our door and said, ‘Oh, sorry to disturb you Mr. and Mrs. Kobe, but we need to move you and your family to another secret location immediately. You’ve been compromised.’ “Maxine paused and caught her breath as tears welled in her eyes. “How about it? What if it happened to us? How would you feel?” She paused again, deepening her stare. “’Course, how would I know? You never share your feelings! Sometimes, it’s as if I don’t even know you!”

  Her accusation bothered him not because she was wrong, but because he couldn’t deny that he believed she was right—he really wasn’t sure he knew himself either.

  CHAPTER 4

  “I don’t believe in defendants having a right to plea out their crime, Gabe.”

  Stan Kobe had uttered this proclamation almost two decades ago on his very first day on the job in Arizona’s Maricopa County Attorney’s Office.

  “You may have graduated at the top of your class, Kobe, but you’re living in a dream world, my friend. Pleading out cases is ninety percent of what we do here in this office. I suppose you just want a defendant to say, ‘I did it,’ then lock him up and be done with it?”

  Stan’s new office partner, veteran Assistant County Attorney Gabriel Lowen, didn’t hold back on the rookie. Stan thought for a moment about Lowen’s comment.

  “Hey, call me crazy,” Stan replied, “but I just don’t believe criminals should have a right to a plea bargain. You probably think that just because I’m new I can’t be old school. But I don’t care. That’s my belief. That’s who I am.” Stan pointed his pen in a jabbing motion at his new colleague. “I say, once we have them behind bars we keep them there and don’t give them a chance to get back out on the streets.”

  From the very first day he entered law school Stan had always been a contrarian on this philosophy of how criminals were maneuvered through the judicial system. Indeed, Stan was contrary to all who had come before him. In 1988, he had become the first African-American to graduate magna cum laude from Arizona State University’s School of Law. He married a girl completing her Ph.D. at the same Tempe school, and when he was offered a job as a county prosecuting attorney, it sealed the deal on deciding once and for all to remain in Phoenix’s “Valley of the Sun.” Although he had dreamt of leaving this “godforsaken place”—his own words for how he felt about where he lived since moving there with his family more than a dozen years before—Arizona was now home.

  During his first year on the job at the County Attorney’s Office, the most frequent cases assigned to Stan dealt with minor crimes like burglary, parole violation, unlawful use of a weapon, DUI, and the like. He relished these mundane prosecutions as they helped him hone his legal skills. He performed most of his own research, not relying upon law clerks to miss something and screw up his chance to win. He doggedly handled every case. If his case involved a victim, especially one harmed in the commission of the crime, he relentlessly pursued a full conviction. The overused and status quo approach of plea bargaining had no place in this rookie prosecutor’s legal approach.

  Stan Kobe was a rising star and he let nothing or no one stop his historic flight.

  As the years progressed, so did Stan Kobe. He challenged and often circumvented the rules in his position as an officer of the court, becoming the most successful prosecuting attorney in the nation’s forty-eighth state. And, as the lone black man in the lily-white office, he had much to prove. To say that Arizona was a little behind the times in terms of affirmative action was an under-statement. Arizona wouldn’t recognize the national holiday for Martin Luther King until 1993, ten years after it was passed as the law of the land, and was the second to last state to acknowledge the federal holiday. St
an personally led the challenge to successfully impeach then-Governor Evan Mecham, an open bigot, who had cancelled recognition of the federal holiday on the state level.

  To prove his competency to those who believed a person of his color was inherently inferior, he prosecuted every criminal so they got the harshest penalty available by law. Neither the circumstance of their case nor the color of their skin mattered in Stan’s approach.

  “Someone must have done you wrong, Kobe,” defense attorney John Barclay had accused him once after losing to Stan in a benchmark case. Stan had won the litigation on the state’s behalf and put the defendant behind bars for twenty years in a second-degree deadly DUI case.

  “Nobody’s ever done me any wrong, John. I just believe in doing what’s right. Upholding the truth. Protecting the innocent. I wish you could do the same thing, but it will never happen when all you do is represent scum. I sleep at night.”

  By the early nineties Stan Kobe would come to be known not only as Maricopa County’s most successful prosecutor, but its toughest. He welcomed the state legislature’s passing that decade of Arizona’s mandatory sentencing laws, which became some of the toughest in the nation. Defense attorneys and public defenders cringed when they found out Stan Kobe had been assigned to prosecute their case.

  “Stan, you’re the most unreasonable prosecutor I’ve ever met.” His opponent again was his old nemesis, John Barclay. The stodgy defense attorney had uttered those words in the hallway outside the county courthouse the umpteenth time the two faced each other. Barclay had tangled with Stan many times during their careers, always ending up on the short end of the stick.