The Woman From Death Row

By Peter Hogenkamp

Jade Collins grew up on the seedy side of Los Angeles, but her tenacious nature pushes her to strive for a better life. After attending college and earning her medical degree, she feels good about where her life is going. But, bad things happen to good people, and Jade finds herself on death row after killing a man who had been abusing one of her patients.

Just three years after his marriage, Dr. Mark Brand’s wife passes away and his life is sent into a downward spiral. Depression steals everything from him—his medical license, his livelihood and his will to go on. Only a reunion with a powerful man he once knew gives Mark the strength to pick himself up again. He has a new job and a new life, but he is paying a steep price for his second chance. Nothing in life is free and this powerful man has plans for Mark.

Mark is sent to San Quentin to meet Jade and offers to get her off death row if she agrees to team up with him in a dangerous assignment. With no other choice, Jade agrees but aims to get out of the game at the first opportunity. Mark wants out too, but he's sold his soul to the man who rescued him, and his only option is to follow orders and get the job done.

As danger mounts, Mark is pitted against the man who saved him and he's forced to rely on Jade, a woman he hardly knows and doesn't fully trust. The situation is made worse by the feelings he's developing for her.

Will the opportunist destroy Mark’s life once more?

Will this game put Jade back on death row?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tirgearr Publishing
• Release date: Jun 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215946787

Peter Hogenkamp

Peter Hogenkamp is a practicing physician, public speaker and author of medical fiction and thrillers living in Rutland, Vermont. He is also the creator, producer and host of Your Health Matters, a health information program, which airs on cable television and streams on YouTube.Peter’s writing credits include The Intern (TouchPoint Press) and the Marco Venetti Thrillers (Bookouture/HachetteUK), and he was a finalist for the prestigious 2019 Killer Nashville Claymore Award as well as the 2020 Vermont Writer’s Prize.Against the wishes of his wife, four children and feisty Cairn Terrier, Hermione, Peter tweets about his life on Twitter. He can be found online at the links below or by email at: [e-mail].

Book preview

Chapter 1

Jade

Jade’s mother was beautiful, even in death.

She sat down next to her on the cot, putting her hand to her mother’s high-boned cheek; her skin, which gleamed white even in the dim light of the room, had already grown cool. Her mother’s long brown hair waved in a gust of wind blowing in through the open window, liberating several of the strands of tinsel her mother had tied into her hair to sparkle in the beam of light that played over her while she was on stage. The sheet, threadbare and unwashed, was balled up at the foot of the bed. Jade leaned over her mother to grab it, before pulling it over her body, which was as stiff as the mannequin that stood in the corner of the room, showing off the Wonder Woman costume—complete with tiara—that her mother would have worn for her first set.

She reached over to the nightstand and grabbed her mother’s emerald bandana—the one that matched the color of her wide eyes, now closed forever—rescuing it from the company of the empty pill bottles and half-smoked cigarettes clogging the glass and used it to dab the tears that welled in the corner of her eyes. It made her angry with herself to cry—she had made a promise that she would not—but she was powerless to stop the tears. The more she wiped them away, the faster they fell, trickling down her cheeks and past her nose until they seeped, salty and warm, into her mouth. Her shoulders quaked. Her chest heaved. Her abdomen quivered. The sobs started quietly at first, but built quickly, increasing in both force and volume, until her entire body was a great convulsion of grief.

Resistance was futile; she gave up trying to stop the outpouring of emotion and let it overwhelm her. She slumped down, ending up next to her mother on the cot, in closer contact with her than she had been in the entirety of her memory. Jade’s first instinct was to recoil from the intimacy of the moment, but some force more powerful than instinct held her there, soaking up what was left of her mother’s body heat and inhaling the last vestiges of her cheap perfume.

After a time, the tears dried up, the sobbing ebbed and then ceased altogether, and her breathing quieted, but she remained where she was, lying on a thin slice of the worn mattress with her head stuck between her mother’s hard shoulder and the sharp edge of the nightstand. It wasn’t very comfortable, but she had suffered so much discomfort in her life she just ignored it, thinking about what life must be like for girls whose mothers weren’t OxyContin addicts. But, having known nothing else, her imagination sputtered and her focus turned to the contingency plan she had been formulating for years.

Jade had always known she would come home one day to find her mother dead, and so she had planned for that eventuality, much like a squirrel caches nuts to keep it sustained through the long winter it knows is coming. But it was one thing to plan something for years and another to execute it, even if she had been practicing on a regular basis, going to the point of stealing into the pawn shop next door and rehearsing with the snub-nosed revolver from the shoebox underneath the cash register.

It would be easier—and certainly a lot less complicated—to leave town without killing the man who had snuffed out her mother’s life, but she had been thinking about it for so long she couldn’t stomach the idea of letting him slither away to ruin some other girl’s life. She would proceed as planned.

Her stomach rumbled. She got up and walked over to the mini fridge sitting atop a milk crate full of stiletto heels. A jug of curdled milk, a trio of Wasatch lagers—her mother’s only connection to the city of her birth—and a tub of leftover General Tso’s chicken were the only occupants. She wolfed the food down, oblivious of the mold that spiked feather-like from the sides of the container. After cracking open a can of beer, she washed her meal down, and then threw the empty can into the corner where it joined a dozen others. She didn’t like beer, but it was the only thing to drink other than the brown water that leaked out of the faucet in her mother’s bathroom.

She went back to her mother’s bed, noticing her cell phone sticking out from underneath the pillow. Flipping through her mother’s text messages, she found the one she was looking for. It was from Tre, the disgusting parasite of a human being she loathed with every fiber of her body. She thumbed a short message, hit send and got up to stand in front of the window to wait for the reply.

It was January, and even in southern California the darkness had come early. Jade had spent so much of her fourteen years in darkness she’d come to like it. There was something comforting about the dark, something that made her less ashamed of her life. She scanned the dusty parking lot behind their residence, confirming there were no cars parked there. It was only seven in the evening. Flashdancer’s Gentlemen’s Club didn’t open until eight p.m., and even the regulars didn’t show up until nine o’clock.

A beep indicated an incoming text. She grabbed the phone and read the text, then thumbed a reply with the adroitness of young, nimble fingers. The reply came quickly. She read it, then wiped the phone off and dropped it on the nightstand next to the alarm clock. She got up, went to the closet and opened the door, revealing the only living space she’d ever known. In contrast to the rest of the room, it was neat and orderly. Her thin futon was folded in one corner, the American Girl doll she’d bought at the Goodwill store with money she’d stolen from her mother’s cashbox rested on top. A milk crate with her school supplies was next to the futon, and next to that were two more milk crates with her clothes and personal belongings. The clothes were folded crisply and what few personal belongings she had were labeled with a black Sharpie and stacked in order, smallest to biggest from front to back.

Her backpack hung from a hook on the door. She grabbed it and began loading it with half of her clothes and a few of her personal belongings. Her school supplies remained where they were; as much as she would have loved to take the whole box, she was going to need to travel light. She exited the closet with the backpack, set it on the chair next to the door and jumped up on her mother’s bed. She pushed up one of the sound-insulating tiles and reached into the space, groping blindly. At first, she couldn’t feel anything, and she feared someone else—probably that lower form of life who supplied her mother with pills—had found her stash. But her concerns were unrealized and she pulled the strongbox out and replaced the tile.

A cipher lock guarded the contents, but her mother had spilled the combination to her years ago, on some random night—it could have been any night, really—she was too stoned to think straight. The passcode was 84602, the zip of her mother’s hometown, Provo, Utah. There was a small chance she’d changed it, but Jade doubted it. It wasn’t her mother’s way. She stuck with things that worked for her, like the stage name she had given herself (and then given her daughter) and the beer she’d grown up drinking.

Jade dialed in the combination and opened the box, revealing a wad of bills and a single photograph. She counted the money; just shy of three hundred dollars. It wasn’t as much as she’d hoped, but it was enough to get her to Utah if things went well. She stuffed the money into the pocket of her jeans and looked at the photograph. There were four people in the picture; her mother, a younger version of her mother Jade figured must be her mother’s sister, and two middle-aged people she presumed were her grandparents. She had never met her mother’s parents, and the only thing she knew about them—and this from one of the other strippers—was that they still lived in Provo, Utah. She zipped the picture into the top compartment of her backpack and went outside.

Flashdancer’s was a shitty strip club in a shitty part of town, wedged in between a shitty pawn shop and a shitty place to cash checks. Jade slipped under the fence and walked into the parking lot behind the pawn shop. There, she found a hiding spot in between the dumpster she used to climb on when she was a kid and the rusted-out classic Chevy Caprice that had shown up one morning and never left. That was how things went in El Sereno, she thought, you got dumped here, and you stayed here forever, slowly rusting out for the duration of your days.

The pawn shop closed at eight, but Jade knew from experience they often closed early when—like now—there wasn’t anyone in the store. Twenty minutes later the back door opened and two people filed out. She recognized one of them, a short, fat guy with a long beard who owned the pawn shop but spent most of his time at the strip club. The other guy she didn’t know.

They hopped into the only other car in the lot and peeled out around the corner, raising clouds of dust which whipped in the strengthening wind. She waited for ten minutes and then slipped over to the back door. She fetched the spare key from underneath an empty oil drum next to the door and went inside. Leaving the lights off, she navigated with her pen light, over which she had secured duct tape to constrict the beam to the width of a pencil. In the dark environs of the pawn shop, it looked like one of the laser beams her mother used to dramatize her entrance onto the stage.

The dwarf had been bragging for years about keeping a piece at work because of the number of times the pawn shop had been held up. It had occurred to her—before the first time she had stolen inside to see—that he might have fabricated the whole story just to get attention or to look big to the others at the bar, but she had always suspected he was telling the truth. Deciphering the truth was something she had become good at, lying in her closet early in the morning with the door closed listening to the men her mother had brought into her room with her after the club had shut down. She liked to listen to them talk about themselves, and decide which things were true and which were false. It was a given they lied about their names, where they lived and what they did for a living, but truth could be found weaved in and out of everything else that emanated from their mouths. When it came right down to it, people—or at least the men and the occasional woman that accompanied her mother into her bedroom—just weren’t that creative.

She played the laser beam over the floor and followed the trail worn into the carpet, which led through the breakroom in the back, past the bathroom, which smelled as though it hadn’t been properly cleaned in a decade, and out into the area behind the long glass sales counter. The .38 revolver that looked like it had been stolen from a bad crime movie was still there, lying as always in the bottom of a shoe box underneath the register. She opened the gun, confirming it was loaded. She was going to need at least two bullets to achieve her objectives; there were four brass cartridges snuggled into the cylinder. After removing them with the same procedure she had used each time—using her thumb and index finger to take one out at a time and line them up on the glass counter—she snapped the cylinder into position, grabbed the grip with her shooting hand and pointed the gun at a long leather coat that looked like the one Tre wore that hung from a coat rack behind the counter. Centering the front sight on the lapel, she fingered the trigger and pulled it back; the gun shook as the hammer fell with a dull click.

On a peg next to the rack, a flat-brimmed Dodger cap dangled; she snagged it, placed it on the hook above the coat, then used her mother’s emerald handkerchief to cover up the metal pole, much the same way Tre used a purple one to hide his scrawny neck. As she raised the gun and pointed it, it didn’t take a lot of imagination to picture Tre filling the sights of the revolver. But the gun wobbled as she pulled the trigger; the more pressure she used, the more the sight danced away from the target. When the hammer finally fell, the gun was aimed at a display case of vintage political buttons.

A police car screamed down the street outside, flashers twirling. She ducked underneath the counter reflexively and waited to make sure the cops weren’t coming for her. When it was clear they weren’t, she stood up and rehearsed again and again, until she could raise the gun, point it at the target and pull the trigger with just a slight tremor of her hand. Satisfied, she put the accessories back where she found them, returned to the counter, wiped off the bullets with the bandana and inserted them back in the cylinder. After making sure the hammer was down, she stuffed the pistol into her jeans and went out.

The clock in front of the shitty bank across the street proclaimed it was eight p.m. Tre wouldn’t be arriving for another two hours. She slipped back into their room, left the door unlocked, and stood there in the darkness, in the tiny space between the door and the living area. There was no chance he would see her when he burst through the door like he owned the place—as if that were anything to strut about—and walked over to the bed. In the dark, with the sheet pulled over her mother’s head, he wouldn’t be able to see that anything was amiss. He would just assume she had passed out again in the drug and alcohol-induced slumber in which she had spent half of her time in Los Angeles.

In her mind’s eye, Jade watched him crossing the small distance between the door and her mother’s bed, calling out her name with increasing intensity. Molly came on at ten, and her intro was Ozzy Osbourne’s Crazy Train, speakers amped to the max, and it was hard to think, much less hear. He would lean over the bed to pull the sheet back, and that was when she would sneak up behind him, unseen and unheard against the cacophony of Ozzy’s deafening guitar riff. He would never know what happened to him, which was a shame really, because she wanted him to suffer. Her mother may have been lying in a bed of her own making, literally and figuratively, but she was still the only mother Jade would ever have and Tre had stolen her away.

Time passed slowly, marked by the crunch of tires on the gravel drive outside and the sweep of headlights against the pawn shop. By nine-thirty, long rows of vehicles had assembled in the lot. The vehicles were a mixture of old cars and beat-up pickups, with a smattering of sleek European sedans like the one her father had driven. It was one of a very few things she knew about her father, about whom her mother refused to speak. According to Molly—her mother’s only friend besides OxyContin—Jade’s father had driven a navy-blue BMW, which he parked in the far corner of the lot every Saturday night when he drove down from Pasadena, where he worked as an aeronautical engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Laughter burst from the bar. Bar stools complained about being dragged into position. The speakers opened up around quarter to the hour; she could feel the bass vibrations in the cheap flooring. Inspiration grabbed her at five minutes before the hour, and she delved inside her living space one last time to retrieve the thick pillow on which her doll sat. She took the doll off the pillow, placed it into the cubby hole in the back-left corner of the closet, and eased the broken piece of wallboard over the cubby. She grabbed the pillow on her way out of the closet and returned to her post, peering through the slats of the window shades, waiting for Tre.

He arrived on time. Tre was prompt, she gave him that. She watched his light purple Cadillac drive past the window and park next to their door as the speakers crackled to life with the first few bars of Crazy Train. Having watched her do it a hundred times, Jade could picture Molly sauntering onto the stage in her cheerleader’s uniform, her two-sizes-too-small sweater stretched precariously over her massive chest. The music was deafening as the stagehand cranked up the volume. She couldn’t even hear the enthusiastic shouting of the patrons as Molly tugged at her sweater.

Jade drew the revolver out of her jeans. Sweat dripped into her eyes as she pulled back the hammer, threatening to foil her aim. The grip almost slipped out of her wet palm. Tre pushed open the door, causing her heart to thump with wild abandon. He yelled something, but his shout was indecipherable in the din. He flung the door closed and crossed the room to the bed as she followed in his wake, her legs wobbly and unsteady. She raised her left arm as he bent over, bringing the pillow into position. And then she jammed the gun into the pillow, forced it against the base of his skull, and pulled the trigger, just as she had practiced, only this time with a bullet in the chamber.

Tre fell as if someone had flipped a switch in his body, landing on her mother’s corpse. She dropped the pillow, which flipped over and came to rest on the bed. Blood saturated the sheet covering her mother’s body. Her ears rang, although she couldn’t recall hearing the report of the gun. She shoved the revolver into her jeans, a task which was made difficult by the shaking of her hands and the mad thumping of her heart, and pulled her sweatshirt down to conceal it.

She slipped out the door into the hall and peered through the crack in the wall that abutted the stage and bar room. As she had suspected, Molly was wrestling with her sweater, encouraged by the raucous cries of the patrons. It was a Saturday night, and, as on all Saturday nights, Flashdancer’s was standing room only. The crowd was animated and vocal, like it always was: if anyone had heard the gunshot, they hadn’t recognized it for what it was.

She passed down the hall and hit the stairs, taking them two at a time. Crazy Train was running short, and the next song in Molly’s routine was played at a much softer volume. Panic didn’t overwhelm her until she reached the landing at the top of the stairs, from which led the door to the main office, which the girls called the cage because it was lined with metal bars. Inside the cage, Brett, the owner’s son, a horrible troll of a human being, would be counting and processing the bags of cash that were delivered upstairs from the bar every hour.

A moment of indecision struck her, and she stumbled to a halt, her hands still shaking with the adrenaline coursing through her veins. Her ears still rang and her stomach roiled with waves of nausea. She grabbed the bandana, wiped the sweat that was now pouring into her eyes and forced herself to recall the time Brett had come calling a few months ago when her mother had been on stage. She had tried to fight him off as best she could, but despite the strength desperation had afforded to her long frame, he’d just been too strong. The worst part was his suggestion, which he uttered afterwards as he pulled on his neatly starched khakis, that she’d enjoyed it more than he had. ‘That won’t be the last time,’ he’d said, but it had been, courtesy of the iron bar she laid across the inside of the door frame every night before she nestled into her futon, like the captain of some beleaguered medieval outpost barring the gate.

Gaining her nerve, she rapped on the door and called Brett to answer. Her voice was indistinguishable from that of her mother’s, and in the din, Brett would never be able to determine the difference until he had opened the door. But when the door opened a minute later, it wasn’t Brett who opened it. It was his father. She was so taken aback by his absence she didn’t say a word.

You shouldn’t be up here, Jade.

Where’s Brett?

Out sick.

The door slammed in her face, and she booked out of there and returned to their room in a flash. Her backpack was sitting on the chair where she had left it; she tossed it over her shoulder and went outside. Nothing moved in the parking lot. She scooted through the breach in the fence and went back inside the pawn shop, wiped the revolver clean with the bandana and returned it to the box. According to the bus schedule hanging on the poster board in the breakroom, there was a bus headed downtown in five minutes. She left the pawn shop again—this time for good—and went around the other side of the building to the bus stop.

In an unusual display of punctuality, the bus arrived right on time. Pulling the hood of her sweatshirt over her head, she hopped on and sat in the back, stuffing her hands into the pockets of her jeans to stop their jerking. The bus lurched away in a cloud of diesel exhaust. As it accelerated past the only home she’d ever known, she turned her head, pursed her lips and blew her mother a farewell kiss.

Chapter 2

Jade, Eighteen years later

She was lying on the exam table when I walked into the room, crumpled up like a small brown doll thrown into the corner.