The Viper

He got up, went to the bathroom, splashed cold water on his face; then put on jeans and a sweatshirt and went out to the kitchen. While his coffee brewed, he stood at the French doors and gazed out at the gray light of dawn over the eastern ridge. He opened one of the doors. The still air was damp and raw, but it attached him to the actual world around him.

There was just enough light to see the frost on the patio stones, frost on the grass beyond it, frost on the bird feeders. Soon the chickadees and nuthatches would be visiting, flitting back and forth from the apple tree. He began to shiver. He closed the door, got his coffee from the sink island, picked up the plain white envelope that Emma had left on the sideboard, and went into the den. In the light of his desk lamp, he opened the envelope and removed its single sheet of paper. On it were just two short items.

The first was the contact information for Ziko Slade’s defense attorney, Marcus Thorne. Thorne, Gurney recalled, had achieved his initial notoriety by demolishing the seemingly airtight prosecution case against Simeon Lorzco (a.k.a. the Kindergarten Killer), who moments after his controversial acquittal was fatally shot by the mother of one of the murdered children. Below Thorne’s phone number Emma had appended a handwritten comment: “He is still retained by Ziko and will answer any questions you have about the case.”

The second item was a link to New York State v. Slade on the video archive of Murder on Trial, the division of RAM-TV that streamed sensational homicide trials.

Rather than go directly to the video, Gurney decided to look at the media coverage of Ziko Slade, past and present. If he had spent years as the sort of tabloid celebrity Emma described, jurors would have held preconceptions of Slade that might have slanted the verdict.

Typing “Slade Tennis Star” on his laptop brought up articles from Sports Illustrated, Tennis Today, and the sports sections of major newspapers. These articles—with headlines like “Hottest Teen in Tennis” and “Ziko-Mania”—covered Slade’s career from ages fourteen to seventeen. The photos were action shots of him on the court—a graceful teenager with wavy hair, sinewy limbs, and an invincible grin.

The words “Slade Celebrity” led to articles covering his late teens and early twenties, a distinctly different phase of his life, in which the media’s attention shifted to his romantic relationships with female pop stars, his frequenting of glitzy art openings, and extravagant promotional events for his “Z” brand of sportswear. In the photos taken in this period his eyes were more knowing, his grin more suggestive. An article titled “Sexiest Man in Tennis” caught Gurney’s eye, mainly because of the writer’s name—Connie Clarke.

Back when Gurney was given an award for a record number of NYPD homicide arrests, Connie Clarke had written a piece about his career for New York Magazine. Its “Supercop” title and adulatory tone raised his department profile in ways he’d found endlessly embarrassing.

The search term “Slade Scandals” brought up stories revealing the dissolution of the twenty-three-year-old darling of society into a recklessly corrupt twenty-six-year-old. There were drug-related arrests, rumors of underage sex trafficking, accusations of statutory rape, links to disgraced politicians, and a succession of fashionable drug rehabs followed by spectacular public relapses.

An enlarged mugshot from this period showed his movie-star features marred by hard eyes and a smirking mouth. The final headline at the end of this chaotic time announced that he’d entered yet another recovery program—a private facility run by a controversial psychologist named Emma Martin. After that, the media lost interest in him, relegating him to the black hole reserved for troubled personalities no longer creating newsworthy trouble.

This period of invisibility ended explosively two years later with the news of his arrest for murder in what the tabloids were calling “The Case of the Headless Hunter.”

A brief announcement had run in The New York Times the previous November.

CELEBRITY ATHLETE CHARGED WITH MURDER

Former tennis prodigy and society bad-boy Ziko Slade has been arrested in the upstate town of Rexton, New York, for the murder of Leonard Lerman, a sometime employee of the Beer Monster, a local beverage retailer. Rexton Police Chief Desmond Rickles provided the following statement: