She thought about that.

“Near this time,” Jeff explained later, they spent a considerable amount of time “fine-tuning” and “hacking out” a final plan to kill Alan.

“Alan shows up. . . . We get him in the house. Shoot him. Do whatever. Load the body up. Cart things off. And dispose of it wherever it is going to be disposed of.”

“Torch the car,” Jeff said to Jessica in response to that comment, reminding her how important it was to burn the evidence. “That’s got to be part of it.”

Jessica was not convinced burning the car was going to be necessary.

“I brought fire up, you know, as a viable option,” Jeff said later. “I don’t know if she finally decided if that was the best way to do it or not.”

As for who would do the actual shooting, Jeff was under the impression all along that Jessica wanted him to be the triggerman. He was a cop. He had taken target practice. It seemed practical.

“I figured she would do . . . some of it, given that over time she’d fiddled around with some of my weapons.”

They slept well that night. The next morning, as Jessica got ready to leave for the deposition, they picked up the conversation. Jessica came up with a new idea, Jeff said. She told him that he should probably ditch his SUV somewhere. “So when Alan shows up, he won’t know you’re here.”

Made sense, Jeff surmised. Then he reminded Jessica that the space in the driveway would be helpful. “The way my driveway was set up,” he said later, “if both vehicles are there, you don’t have enough room to move another vehicle up close to the house to do whatever it is you’re going to do with it.”

After killing Alan, Jeff noted, they needed to get him out of the house as soon as possible. Pull his car up to the back porch so they could put him in the trunk.

“Yes,” Jessica agreed.

With the commitment to get rid of Jeff’s SUV out of the way, they focused on where to torch Alan’s car with his body and the evidence.

“Mississippi?” Jeff suggested.

“No. Gulf Coast of Florida!”

What the heck, Jeff said he thought at that moment, the woman likes the Gulf Coast.

“I think Georgia was finally settled on,” Jeff recalled, “because that was the known direction [Alan] was supposed to have been traveling, which, our thinking at the time, would have played into whatever story could have or might have been concocted.”

All of this—the car burned up and Alan shot—fit with what Jessica and Jeff believed authorities would think was a carjacking-gone-wrong scenario. That, or an old-fashioned robbery. Jeff was under the impression, given what Jessica had told him, that Alan had made some “other people” really mad and had been “screwing around,” she said, “with other people’s [wives] .” So law enforcement might think one of those jealous husbands had capped Alan and torched his car.

What about an alibi? Jeff brought up next. What were they going to come up with to protect themselves when cops came knocking? The number one problem was time, Jeff explained.

“How do we account for our time, Jess?”

They put their heads together.

“The movies,” she said excitedly.

“Yeah!”

“Southside.” There was a movie theater there. They could go and sit in on a movie. Jessica had always wanted to go to a strip club and watch Jeff’s reaction as he checked out the girls, she said. They could do that afterward.

“The PlayLate Club,” Jessica said. It was on Second Avenue in downtown Birmingham. Not far from the movie house.

From there they could go somewhere romantic. Take a walk. Waste some time. Then head over to the Home Depot when it opened and pick up some supplies to clean up the mess, which would fall in line with the remodeling project they had going on in the house, anyway.

“That’s it.”

So, as Jessica left for the deposition, a murder plan was in play. When Alan showed up to pick up the kids, he would walk up to the front door and see a sign directing him to the back. If Terra was with him, they’d deal with it. Jessica would invite him into the house under a ruse. The kids were not going to be home. They’d be up the street at Jessica’s mother’s. Jessica said she had a good idea regarding how to convince Alan to walk into a house he had never been allowed in before then.

Once inside, Jeff would surprise him.

Jessica could sit and watch her problem disappear with a few bright flashes.

46

Terra had a major paper due on Friday, February 15, 2002. It was part of the master’s program she had been working on at Goucher. So she got up early.

While Alan was getting ready, Terra faxed the paper over to Dr. Victoria Young’s office.

“Terra had hope in her voice,” Dr. Young said later. Young had spoken to Terra the previous afternoon about the paper. Terra mentioned the deposition. She said she was traveling to Alabama with Alan. She sounded upbeat. Positive. She felt good about how the case had progressed. It was, Young said, as if Alan and Terra had finally gotten the court to listen to them. The system was finally functioning the way it should have been from day one. Terra was comfortable with saying she felt the outcome would be in their favor.

Terra’s father, Tom Klugh, left his house early in the morning to go out and get his seasonal potato and onion seedlings at the local feed store in Georgia, near his home. He wanted to set them in the ground that day. He planned on buying a cell phone later on that afternoon, his first. He even promised to call Terra after the purchase.

Alan and Terra’s flight went as scheduled. They landed in Birmingham on time. Then they made it to the deposition downtown without a hitch. As Jessica had thought, they didn’t arrive the night before.

It was going to take all day, Frank Head told Alan. Prepare for a full day’s worth of, well, answering uncomfortable questions about the past seven years.

In Hoover, the mother of one of the girls’ friends stopped by to pick up Sam and McKenna and cart them off to school. The girls were scheduled to go from school (late that afternoon) to Jessica’s mother’s house. Brian and Sara would head to day care until Jessica’s mother got out of work and could pick them up. With the day (and night) off, Jeff was at home when the girls’ ride to school showed up.

The plan Jessica and Jeff had finalized included Jessica and Jeff saying that Alan, “as usual,” had not picked up the kids per a scheduled visitation pickup time at 6:00 P.M. So the children had to be dropped off at Jessica’s mother’s house. Jessica said she was even going to tell her mother that Alan didn’t show up. Ask her to watch the kids that night so she and Jeff could celebrate a belated Valentine’s Day. She would pick them up in the morning.

This would open up that window of opportunity to commit murder.

The plan appeared infallible.

David Dorn had advised Jessica to settle her case out of court if she could. He didn’t like to see his clients go to trial. Trials never turned out the way either party wanted. It was always better to come to some sort of amicable agreement pretrial.

Jessica said no way. She wanted to see this to the end.

The depositions started at 9:42 A.M., according to the court reporter hired to record what was said.

Jessica went first. She sat. Frank Head asked questions. Standard divorce stuff that lawyers go through all the time.

There was a break late in the morning, somewhere near ten-thirty. Jessica called Jeff. There was a slight, little problem with their plan, she whispered into the phone.

“What’s wrong?” Jeff asked.

“Just for your information,” Jessica reported, “Terra’s here.”

Jeff went silent. Even though they had discussed what to do if Terra showed up with Alan, they thought for certain she was staying in Maryland.