Dog Tags (36 page)

I turn and leave the office and go to my car. It takes me a few seconds to get the key in the ignition, because my hands are
shaking so bad.

“I
HAVE NO IDEA WHAT TO DO.”
I make this admission to Laurie and Hike, gathered at the house for a Sunday-morning strategy session. “Usually I know what
the right thing to do legally and morally is, and then it’s up to me whether to do it or not. But this time I don’t even know
that.”

“So he implied that there was going to be another incident, and that you could help prevent it?” Hike asks.

“He did more than imply it; he beat me over the head with it. He said I don’t want to have this kind of blood on my hands.”

“Let’s take it legally first,” Laurie says. “Am I right that your first obligation is to your client?”

“In part; I have to defend him as best I can. I could be disbarred if I didn’t. But as a citizen, I also have the obligation
to do my best to prevent a future crime from happening.”

“You have no information about such a crime,” she says.

“Benson thinks I do.”

Laurie nods. “And two years from now you don’t want him saying it to some congressional committee, with the next day’s headline,
‘Carpenter Could Have Stopped Massacre.’”

I’m floundering here. “So I need to cave and tell him whatever I know?”

“I don’t think so,” Hike says. “He has the power to find out what you know by intervening in the trial. If he doesn’t, the
blood is on his hands, not yours.”

“Looking at it morally, it would be nice if we could stop blood from being on anyone’s hands,” Laurie says. “Including Billy’s.”

We decide to hold off on making a decision for now, mainly because we can’t come up with a satisfactory one. I don’t think
I’ve ever been in a situation like this before, and it’s scaring the hell out of me.

I don’t want to turn on the television and see breaking news about some catastrophe that’s killed a bunch of people, with
an imaginary graphic across the bottom saying “Andy Carpenter’s Fault.” But I also don’t want to wake up every morning for
the rest of my life knowing Billy’s waking up in a seven-by-ten cell.

For now, the only action I can take is to focus on figuring out what the hell is going on. To that end I call Sam, who says
he is working on the phone numbers, and should have the people that Chaplin called on the cell phone in a few hours.

“Good,” I say. “Then I’ve got another job for you.”

“What’s that?”

“You know how you told me C and F positioned itself to profit from the oil and rhodium events? How they formed positions in
it over some months?”

“What about it?” he asks.

“I want to know if it’s happening again; if they’ve put themselves in a similar position. And if they have, I want to know
what commodity they’re looking to profit from.”

“That’s not going to be easy, Andy. It’s a huge company operating in all different markets. And if I don’t know what I’m looking
for…”

“For now, limit it to the companies that bought the oil and rhodium. Only look at their trades. Does that make it easier?”

“Much,” he says, relief in his voice.

“Great. Call me when you have anything.”

When I get off the phone with Sam, I go into the office, where Laurie is sitting at the computer terminal. She’s also on the
phone, or at least she has it to her ear, though she’s not saying anything.

Finally she says, “Thanks, Rob,” and hangs up. She turns to me. “Chaplin didn’t file a robbery report. The guy is definitely
dirty.”

“Or maybe he’s still lying in the driveway.”

“If he’s not, he’s dirty. A guy gets mugged and robbed in the driveway of his house, in that neighborhood, and he doesn’t
even report it? That’s a guy who doesn’t want the police anywhere near him.”

When I get off the phone, I don’t do what I should do, which is prepare for my closing statement to the jury. Instead I obsess
over the meeting with Benson, and the predicament it’s left me in.

Benson is playing a game of chicken with me, and I feel like I’m losing. At some point I’m going to cave; my fear of being
even indirectly responsible for mass deaths is too great. I’m not ready to do it yet, which I realize on some level is silly.
The next disaster could come at any moment, and any delay could make me too late.

Intellectually, I know that Benson is under at least as much pressure as I am. He has the power to find out what I know, which
he believes could help avert a tragedy. Yet he is resisting doing so, just as I am resisting on my end.

I hope he’s as scared as me.

I finally get started on the preparation for my statement at nine o’clock, and Sam calls five minutes later. “I got something
good,” he says, which is one of my favorite ways for a conversation to start.

“I’m ready.”

“This guy uses his cell phone a lot. He made two hundred and
fifty-eight calls in the last six days. A lot of the calls were to the same number, so he called a hundred and sixty-one numbers.”

“You’ve got a printed list?” I ask.

“Sure. More than half of the numbers he called were companies, and they went through the company switchboards, so I can’t
know who he talked to. And of course, there’s no way for me to know exactly who he spoke to when he called personal phones;
more than one person could answer, you know?”

The Declaration of Independence has a longer preamble than this. “What happened to the I’ve-got-something-good part?”

“I’m getting there. There are three phone calls to a phone registered to Alan Landon.”

Alan Landon is a very prominent investor-financier, and evidence of that prominence is the fact that I’ve heard of him. That
is not a world that I understand or have much familiarity with. Even with Freddie’s help, I haven’t become wealthy by investing.
I’ve done it the old-fashioned way: I rolled up my sleeves and inherited it.

“You’re sure it’s
the
Alan Landon?” I ask, though it makes sense. Chaplin is a major player in that world; Landon is someone he could be expected
to talk with at least occasionally. For all I know, Landon could be a client.

“Positive. And
the
Alan Landon is the person that Chaplin called four minutes after you left his office. They talked for fourteen minutes, and
then again the next morning for seven.”

“Sam, you’re a genius.”

“You’re just figuring that out?”

Sam gets off the phone to get back to work on studying C&F’s recent trades, and I relate the information he gave me to Laurie.
She is even more excited by it than I am, which is really saying something.

“So you meet with him, he’s on the way to a black-tie dinner, and
you scare the hell out of him. Then you leave, and he immediately makes a fourteen-minute phone call.”

“It could have been a call he was making for business,” I say. “It might have had nothing to do with me.”

“That’s true,” she says. “That’s what he might have done if he was innocent. If he’s guilty, he’d be doing something to protect
himself in those moments. Even if it meant just sitting and thinking of a way out of the problem you created for him. Or if
it meant calling someone he thought could help him.”

“If Chaplin were innocent, he would have reported the mugging,” I say. “We know too much about him at this point to believe
he’s innocent.”

“Yes, we do.”

“And under the you-have-to-have-money-to-make-money principle, Landon fits perfectly. He’s a guy with the resources to make
those kinds of investments in oil and rhodium.”

“We’re getting somewhere with this, Andy.”

“We’d better hurry up. The world could blow up any minute.”

“T
HERE ARE MANY, MANY VICTIMS IN THIS CASE”
is how I start my closing statement. “There have been at least twenty-one deaths of people drawn together by fate or bad
luck. Probably more. Most of the victims were innocent. Some were not.

“Mr. Morrison has told you that you should be focusing on only one of those deaths, that of Mr. Erskine, and he is partly
right. That is the crime you are here to rule on, to decide beyond a reasonable doubt whether Mr. Zimmerman is guilty.

“But common sense requires you to look further. Because eighteen people died in the explosion that cost Billy Zimmerman his
leg. And at least three people were murdered after Mr. Erskine, while Billy was sitting in a jail cell. If you know that others
killed twenty of those people, how can you believe beyond a reasonable doubt that Billy Zimmerman killed the twenty-first?

“I said it in my opening statement, and I’ll say it again. Billy is not perfect; he committed three thefts. But balance that
against all the good he has done, as a decorated police officer and a combat veteran. And while you’re doing the balancing,
throw in the shameful
way that we as a society treated him after he protected us for so long. After he lost his leg in the horror that was Iraq.

“We may never know who pulled the trigger in front of the bar that night. We may never know the identities of the men who
appeared mysteriously after the shot was fired, only to run off and never be seen again. The police decided they had the killer
and looked no farther. They may have been well intentioned, but they were hasty, and they were wrong. It is a wrong that you
have the power to right.

“In the interests of justice, please right that wrong.”

I sit down at the defense table, and Billy leans over and says, “Outstanding.” Hike hands me a note that says, “You’re as
good as Kevin said you were.”

But I’m not paying attention to what they are saying, nor am I doing what I usually do after my closing statement. I ordinarily
obsess that I haven’t done enough and panic at the fact that there’s nothing left for me to do. There is nothing I hate more
than when a case goes to the jury’s hands, and that’s what is happening now.

This time, however, I’m thinking of something different, something I realized when I was talking about the men running onto
the scene of Erskine’s murder that night.

I had been assuming that the men were FBI agents, following Harris but losing him in the chaos after the murder. The way Billy
described the scene, though, three men came out of nowhere, as if they had been lying in wait.

I can’t imagine the bureau would have the inclination or manpower to have three people following a guy like Harris, nor do
I know how they would have known to follow him in the first place. Pete described him as a hired gun out of Philadelphia;
M likely employed him on a freelance basis.

To use that much manpower, and to have them in place as they
did, must mean that they were watching Erskine. And there is a damn good likelihood that Erskine knew they were there. That
he even planned for them to be there.

Erskine was smart; he was not the kind of guy to walk around with a truckload of FBI guys following him, watching him commit
illegal acts. He would have been much more careful, if he had any reason to be.

If I’m right, Erskine was working with the FBI. Maybe he was getting immunity in return for turning in his bosses, and the
apparent blackmail was part of a sting operation. I’m far from sure about why they were working together, but I still feel
like I’ve figured out another piece of the puzzle.

Our game of chicken has a long way to go.

Judge Catchings gives a standard charge to the jury, and since it is almost four o’clock when he finishes, he sends them home.
Neither Eli nor I had made a request to have them sequestered, not that I think the judge would have agreed anyway. Sequestering
is pretty rare these days, and in the absence of special circumstances, judges usually don’t force it on juries.

He does, however, give them a strong dose of the same admonition he’s been giving throughout the trial: that they are to scrupulously
avoid all media coverage of the case. I’ve never believed that jurors completely do that; I know I wouldn’t. I’d hide in the
basement and watch everything.

The jurors all nod as he says this. My guess is they’d nod an agreement to stick toothpicks in their eyes if that’s what it
would take not to get stuck in a local hotel. Then off they go, to reconvene tomorrow morning and start deciding whether Billy
Zimmerman is going to live the rest of his life in a cage.