Indefensible (2 page)

We went back into the office. “Tell you what, Captain Dorsey,” I said, “I'm kind of curious, too. I'll come along. You can ride with me, Ms. Randall. My daughter, Lizzy, is hanging with me today; she'd probably like some female company.” I looked over at Dorsey
and Chip. “If that's okay with you gentlemen,” I said, making it more of an assertion than a question. I felt guilty, strutting in front of Chip like that. But since Chip had the advantage of youth (his mid-forties to my early fifties), I was using my advantage of rank.

Cassandra stood and waited for us to tell her what to do, and I realized that she was actually quite frightened. I put a hand on her shoulder and said, “How are you holding up, Ms. Randall?”

“I'm okay,” she said softly, but then she had her head against my chest, and I had my arm around her in a half-hug, and I felt her ribs under my fingers and smelled her floral shampoo. “If it hadn't been for the yellow rail,” she said unsteadily, apparently believing that she might have joined the hypothetical body in the pit if the assassins had found her witnessing the burial. But a second later, she tapped on my chest in a way that said,
I'm fine now,
and she pushed away from me.

Before hitting the highway, I swung back to the office to pick up Lizzy, who just got out of school for the summer and spent all yesterday lying on my office couch reading
Northanger Abbey
and carrying on a whispered conversation with the characters (who irritate her as much as I do).

“Lizzy, road trip,” I said.

“Do you have any orange yarn?” she answered, holding a skinny braid where she could see it by looking cross-eyed. She had arranged a biosphere around herself on the couch, the contents of her backpack unloaded onto my office chairs, which were pulled within reach—books, journal, cell phone, water bottle, jog bra, running shoes, granola bars, yogurt, and Gatorade.

From my desk phone, I buzzed Kenny in the law library. “Hey, Kenny, there's something or someone that needs digging up out at the reservoir. Lizzy and I are on our way. Do you want to come?”

“If you need me.”

“Not a question of need, Kenny. Opportunity. Think of it as a day's pay for a walk in the woods.”

“Okay, if you want me to.”

Kenny is my unofficial foster son and our office gofer. He's
smart enough to do more—could probably even get a paralegal certificate—but he just clings to his comfortable nonachievement while I persist, like a Boy Scout in the rain, in trying to light a fire under him.

So it's four of us in the Volvo: Cassandra Randall and me in the front, Lizzy and Kenny in the back, off to look for a body in the woods on a beautiful spring day. Kenny dozed off as soon as we hit the highway. In the rearview, I see him slumped in the seat, head lolling.

“My baby brother,” Lizzy says of Kenny, who is in his mid-twenties, a dozen years older than she. Lizzy slips a couple of inches toward him so that if his head tips any farther, it will land on her shoulder. “I'm the big sister,” she says, “he's my baby brother, and we're in the family car riding to the country with Mom and Dad.”

This is typical of Lizzy, pretending to have a normal family. She's never lived in a two-parent home.

A
t the reservoir district, Cassandra directs me along miles of rural roads to where she'd parked her car this morning. I put two wheels on the shoulder and turn off the engine. Heat waves rise from the asphalt, which is black and silver in the sun, and the sun catches on the wings of butterflies crossing from the weeds on one side of the road to the weeds on the other. My window is open, and for a second I hear the trills and rattles of bugs doing whatever they do on hot woodsy spring days (eating one another and mating, most likely). “How peaceful,” I say in the second before the other cars pull up behind and my rearview lights up like the Vegas Strip. The bugs are drowned out by police radios and car doors and the swish-swish jingle of cops scurrying back and forth.

Dorsey immediately has his troopers walking the road in both directions, looking for anything of interest. “How far into the woods?” he asks Cassandra, and she says, “Five minutes. Maybe ten.”

“Listen up,” Dorsey says to his men. “We'll walk, eyes open for anything obvious, do a good survey before we dig. Leave it all untainted for forensics, in case we actually find something.”

I say, “You're the boss, Captain, just tell us what to do.” The truth is, I don't know squat about fieldwork and investigation. I'm just a prosecutor and administrator; Dorsey is the one with expertise, manpower, and high-tech laboratories.

Dorsey doesn't acknowledge my comment, but his granite jaw softens.

Six cars are parked behind mine: two marked state police cars, Dorsey's black sedan, the black van, a pickup truck pulling a four-wheeler on a trailer, and the local sheriff 's vehicle. The sheriff is standing in the middle of the road in his many-pocketed vest, ready
to direct traffic. Never mind that this road probably averages one car a week in the busy season.

“Civilians will wait here,” Dorsey orders, clearly meaning Lizzy and Kenny and maybe even me, so I say, “Yes, Lizzy can help direct traffic, can't you, hon?”

“Sure, Daddy!” she says with saccharine enthusiasm, because I'd given her a chance to subtly ridicule the poor sheriff, whose forehead is already beading up with the first drops of sweat.

We start into the woods. Dorsey, Cassandra, Chip, and I walk in front, but the trail narrows immediately, so Chip drops back. Behind him are the uniformed troopers and the four-wheeler pulling a flat trailer with tarps and shovels. Within a couple of minutes, my morning coffee hits bottom, and I dodge off behind a tree while the procession keeps moving. Then I hurry to catch up. Now Chip is between Dorsey and Cassandra, so I step in behind them, and darned if Cassandra doesn't drop back to walk with me. She leans in, puts a hand on my shoulder, and whispers, “I'll be pretty embarrassed if there's nothing here.”

She seems at home in the woods, instinctively turning toward birdsong coming from the trees, and regarding flowers and shrubs with a knowledgeable eye.

“There,” she says suddenly. Everyone stops. “No, no,” she says, “just the bird. Hermit thrush. A pebble in a drainpipe. Listen.”

Tinga tinga tinga tinga ting.

It is a descending note. Dorsey tries to catch my eye with a
civilians are such idiots
glance, but I avoid him. Chip tips his head sideways, listening to the bird, and says more to himself than to us, “Drainpipe: exactly. That's brilliant.”

We walk in silence until Cassandra tells us we're getting close. She identifies a few landmarks and finally says, “Right here.” Dorsey pokes at the ground with a shovel. We establish what seems to be the perimeter of the disturbed area, but it's been skillfully concealed, so we can't be sure. One of the troopers lays out a tarp for the dirt, and they start digging. There is a sudden feeling of solemnity. My sense of adventure dies as the diggers work. The sound of their shovels,
the labored breathing as they dig, the notes of another thrush coming from the woods, it all comes together. I understand that there will be a body. Everything has fallen into place too easily for it to be otherwise. The sod has clearly been removed and replaced: The underlying dirt is loose, the grass matted. I look at Cassandra. She is ashen. I have the strange urge to take her hand, but of course I don't. Digging takes longer than I would expect, and there is almost a sense of release when the shovels hit something. Now the men work more carefully, clearing away dirt with hands and trowels, almost lovingly, and the shape of a body takes form in dark relief against the shadowy bottom of the hole.

D
orsey radios back to set things in motion. Troopers string yellow tape. The men clear dirt away from legs and ankles and one of the arms. The other arm is beneath the body, which lies curled on its side because the original hole wasn't big enough to allow a final slumber at full extension. He or she was tossed into the pit like garbage.

I am a federal prosecutor, head of the criminal division of the district U.S. Attorney's Office; I see it all. No, actually, I don't see it all; I prosecute it all. I'm aware of it all. I read crime scene reports and confessions and autopsy results and witness statements. I study eight-by-tens of the most horrible things; I describe the hideous actions of hideous people to juries. I occasionally even attend autopsies. But rarely do I get out to see the actual crime scene. And while this particular incident is probably no great shakes to field-weary guys like Captain Dorsey and FBI Agent Chip, it feels miles more real than what I'm accustomed to.

I feel—what shall I call it?—the chill. And before I know it, like a plant bending to the light or a dog curling up at the fire, I'm warming myself shoulder to shoulder with Cassandra.

“You okay?” I ask her. She nods but says nothing.

After the photographer has documented everything, they pull the arm out from under the body, and with a trooper at each leg and one at each arm, they lift the body from the hole and place it on a tarp. It is scraggly and male and at first looks of indeterminate age, but as dirt falls away from the face, I see he is not bearded and not scraggly. He is youthful, his features gentle, almost feminine, eyes maybe a bit too narrow but offset by a sharp jaw, sculpted nose, and strong cheekbones. His skin is unblemished and smooth except for the
whisker stubble. He looks peaceful and asleep, which is comforting, because last time I saw him, he looked like shit, haggard and scared, with eyes bloodshot from a sleepless, tearful night. The college boy.

•  •  •

College boy, whose real name is—was—Zander Phippin, was a shy and likable kid who was selling pot to pay his college tuition. At first he was just selling a few bags on his floor of the college dorm, but when his immediate supplier finished a BA in cultural anthropology and moved away to grad school, Zander stepped up to fill the vacancy. He was in over his head, obtaining his product from some very bad people. When he came to our attention, we let him cook overnight without bail before having a sit-down with him in the morning. The crimes that we could nail him on were minor, good for eighteen months in minimum at most, and normally, we'd have just let the state handle it. But we were itching to get our hands on those suppliers.

Our conversation with him was cordial. His biggest worry was how disappointed his parents were going to be. “They aren't, like, hostile,” he said of them. “They just don't know what to do with me. They, you know, had in mind a kid who could read, for one thing, and who wanted to sleep with girls instead of boys, for another.”

“Zander has rather pronounced dyslexia,” his lawyer said.

He seemed like an average kid, if you can call a gay dyslexic drug peddler average. After graduating from a high school for kids with learning disabilities, he had moved first to Provincetown, then to San Francisco, and finally back home.

“I wanted to try college, get a business degree,” he said. “Maybe I would have followed in my dad's footsteps after all.” And he began sobbing.

I have a softness for mixed-up boys (evidence: Kenny), so I was glad to have a lifeline to toss him—forgiveness in exchange for cooperation.

Who was the contact?
Zander didn't know any names.
How did they communicate?
The supplier called Zander's cell to set up exchanges.
How had they met?
The anthropology student had hooked them up.
Would Zander help us nab the contact?

“No.”

So Chip explained how, even though we knew Zander did nothing but sell pot, he could be charged as a conspirator in the criminal enterprise of his suppliers. Meaning he could be implicated in all of their crimes, including but not necessarily limited to selling crack cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine, as well as extortion, murder, kiddie porn, and prostitution, to name a few.

“You help us, we'll help you,” Chip said to Zander.

The idea was to have Zander inform us of the next exchange. We'd spot the contact, surveil him, pick him up at a later time (to protect Zander), and hopefully work our way up the chain to some bigwigs. Zander would walk away clean. He wouldn't even have to tell his parents.

Zander agreed.

I left him and his lawyer to discuss particulars with Chip, so I wasn't there when Zander walked out the smoked-glass front doors of the FBI building, but I bet he stood breathing in the exhaust-y afternoon air of the city, feeling awed by his freedom. Certainly, he realized it could have gone differently; he could have been up for eighteen months of three hots and a cot at Club Fed just on the possession charges—life if we'd tied him in to a conspiracy. I hope he exulted in however many hours of freedom he got before they picked him up.

A
t the Drowntown Café near the reservoir, we talk about how to play it. I'm in shirtsleeves, my tie loosened. Dorsey and Chip are still wearing suit jackets, as guys with holsters do in public. Chip's is a belt holster, and Dorsey has a shoulder holster with his jacket semi-intentionally pushed back, making the gun as inconspicuous as a panther in a petting zoo.

It's a huge advantage—finding the body the same day it was ditched, with the bad guys still thinking it'll never turn up. We just have to figure out how to put our advantage to work.

“Dollars to doughnuts,” Dorsey says, “we won't find anything on the body. Zilch. Clean as a whistle. You'll see.”

I'm feeling on edge. I'm irritated by Dorsey and Chip, and I want to move over one table to where Cassandra and Lizzy sit with Kenny, all of them eating strawberry rhubarb pie. I want to be with them, not with the cops. I recognize how foolish it was to bring Lizzy on this excursion, a lapse of both parental and professional judgment. I've always tried to keep her far from the nitty-gritty of my job, because there are evils afoot in the world that fourteen-year-old girls don't need to know about. It gnaws at me, the stupidity—I feel as though I've ushered her into a sphere of danger. And I know how it happened: I was beguiled by Cassandra. Maybe Lizzy isn't the only one pretending to have a normal family life.