Leader of the Pack (Andy Carpenter) (24 page)

Neither the Desimone trial, nor Andy Carpenter’s investigation, were of real concern to Ryerson anymore. The investigation, while worrisome at first, had so far made little progress, and the danger time was about to pass.

As far as Desimone was concerned, Ryerson was relatively uninterested in whether he stayed in prison or went free. Although there was always the danger that Joey, if he went free, would try to avenge his father’s murder.

Ryerson almost smiled at the thought. Good luck with that, Joey.

So all Ryerson could do was that which he hated to do … wait. There was a limit to how many times he could check things in Peru, and in the United States. There was a limit to how many times he could reassure his own nervous people that things were going to be fine, and a limit to how often he could go over the plans once the action began.

And then he got the call he wanted to hear.

It had started to rain.

Hard.

“If you still want to, then I think you should testify.” I tell this to Joey in our daily meeting before the start of the court day.

He doesn’t respond for a few moments, and then says, “Oh.”

I had expected him to be enthusiastic, but that’s not the reaction I’m seeing at all, so I ask him what he’s thinking.

“Well, I’m mostly glad you said that, because I definitely would like to testify, especially if you think I should. But the fact that you think I should means you think we’re in trouble.”

It’s an absolutely correct analysis, so I nod. “We’re definitely in trouble; if I had to quantify it I would say that we have a twenty-five percent chance of winning, maybe thirty.”

“Which means there’s a seventy-five percent chance I spend the rest of my life in prison.”

“If you testify, I think there is the potential to improve those odds. But there is always the chance that it can backfire, and that would mean disaster.”

“How could it backfire?” he asks.

“Dylan could trip you up. Make you look bad.”

“How can he trip me up? I’ll be telling the truth.”

“That matters, but not as much as you think,” I say. “Cross-examination is a game, maybe even an art, and Dylan has a lot more experience at it than you do.” I tap the table. “This table has more experience at it than you do.”

“I can handle it, Andy,” he says, and I believe that he probably can.

“OK.”

We make a plan to meet after court, to go over what his testimony will be. I don’t like to overrehearse a witness; we both already know what he’s going to say, and I don’t want to reduce the spontaneity with which he will say it. In fact, I don’t call them “rehearsals,” the way some lawyers do. That sounds too much like acting out prepared dialogue, which I do not want my witnesses to do.

I don’t have to play for time and call witnesses to fill out the day today, since Hatchet has notified us that another commitment is causing him to adjourn at two o’clock. That will give me time to meet with Joey, and let him get a good night’s sleep.

Tomorrow will be the most important day of his life.

My witness for today is Luther Karlsson, the shrimper who worked for Solarno, and who quit shortly before his death. I start by taking him through a little bit of his career, and then on to his job for Solarno. That job was fairly simple; it was to catch shrimp, just like he has been doing his entire life.

His testimony is actually somewhat poignant, although poignancy-recognizing has never been a specialty of mine. I don’t really have a way to detect poignancy on my own, so I judge it based on how other people react. If, for instance, women put their hand to their mouths, or someone gets teary-eyed, that’s a sure sign of it.

But I digress. Karlsson loves what he does, always has, and it comes through in the way he talks about it. And judging by the reaction of the jurors, I think they’re moved by it.

His love for his job also leads me to the obvious question, “Why did you leave?”

He describes a growing dissatisfaction, as over time Solarno Shrimp seemed to become less about the shrimping. Boats weren’t being sent out at optimum times and to optimum places; the shrimping seemed to not be the most important thing to the company.

“What was the most important thing?” I ask.

He shrugs and shakes his head. “Can’t say that I know.”

I take him through the day that he saw the boat loaded with armaments of various kinds. It was really by accident; he heard a strange noise in the motor of the boat as it came in, and decided to take a look and make sure everything was OK. He wound up seeing a lot more than the motor.

“What did you do after you saw the weapons?” I ask.

“I told them I didn’t want to work there no more.”

“Why?”

“Because I didn’t want to work there no more.”

It makes perfect sense. In fact, I don’t question him anymore because I don’t want to question him anymore. Instead, I offer Dylan the opportunity.

“Mr. Karlsson, are you aware that arms smuggling is illegal?”

“I’m not sure what arms smuggling is, but I think it’s legal to own guns. I got three of my own.”

Dylan smiles, a little too condescendingly. “Based on your testimony, this was quite a few more than three, wouldn’t you say?”

“Wouldn’t I say what?”

“That this was quite a few more than three.”

“It sure was.”

“And you didn’t believe that to be illegal?” Dylan asks.

He pauses for a moment. “Didn’t really think about it much either way.”

“But you quit immediately?”

“The next day.”

“Because of the guns?”

Karllson nods his agreement with that. “That’s right.”

“What about the guns made you quit?”

“They weren’t shrimp.”

It doesn’t take much more like this for Dylan to let him off the stand; in fact, I think he’d like to throw him off the stand.

But the bottom line is that Karlsson did not do much damage to Dylan’s case. It’s been pretty well established that Solarno was dealing arms, and that’s really all Karlsson could testify to. Too bad he knows nothing about the actual killer of the Solarnos.

Once Karlsson is off the stand, Hatchet sends the jury out and asks me how much longer my case is going to take.

“We have one more witness, Your Honor.”

“Who might that be?”

“Joseph Desimone,” I say, and Dylan reacts.

“Well, that answers my next question,” Hatchet says. He was going to ask if Joey was testifying, since if he was not, Hatchet would have to instruct him that only Joey could make that decision. He’s asked the question a few times before, and I’ve left it open, saying that he might testify, but that we hadn’t decided yet. If Joey was not testifying, he would have to verbally say so to Hatchet, and confirm that he was told his options and voluntarily declined.

Dylan is obviously surprised, both at the fact that Joey will take the stand, and that I gave him a heads-up in this manner. I could have announced it tomorrow, and claimed that we decided it tonight. I wasn’t giving Dylan a break by breaking the news now, it was more an attempt to curry a little favor with Hatchet. Dylan is too good a lawyer not to have been prepared for the possibility of having to question Joey, so he’d be ready either way.

Of course Dylan, like all lawyers, believes that any lawyer who lets his client testify is nuts.

This time they all may be right.

Technically, the Montaro Dam should be called the Montaro Dams. While it is generally assumed to be a single dam, it is actually a series of four. There is the main one, amplified over the years on a number of occasions, and then three adjacent ones, added to reduce the pressure that has increased over time.

The purpose of the dams are twofold. They divert water into large reservoirs, which the entire central area of Peru lives off of during the dry season. But most important, they stop the water from descending down into the valley below, which by any standard would be a catastrophe.

During the dry season, the dam holds back about two hundred million cubic feet of water, a comparatively puny amount. Once it starts to rain in force, usually in November, that amount rises to an average of six hundred million cubic feet. At times, the total can rise to over eight hundred million, and the dam is graded as safe under a billion.

Inspections are done on a fairly regular basis, usually twice a year, in January and September. They are conducted by Peruvian army engineers, and the last one was done the week of September 18, just three weeks before the planting of the explosives.

The rains started three days ago, steady at first, then torrential. The villagers below the Montaro Dam took it in stride; this weather was nothing unusual, and certainly no cause for concern. The dam had protected them since before the oldest villager was born, and there was no reason to doubt its strength now.

The explosives were detonated remotely. There were thirty-eight detonations in all, executed one every forty-five seconds. It was done slowly so that it would not be noticed; the explosions themselves were each relatively small, and muffled by the fact that they were underwater, and there was a loud, driving storm above them.

By the eighteenth explosion, the dam was sufficiently weakened that it was barely holding back the water. By the twentieth, it gave way, and by the twenty-fourth, all parts of the dam were breached.

It took six and a half minutes for the water to reach the first village, and another twenty seconds for that village to cease to exist. Reaching the last of the twenty-two villages in its path took another fourteen minutes, and later estimates would be that twenty-eight thousand lives were lost in that timeframe.

For the next forty minutes, in an act of irony that no one appreciated, the rain stopped and the sun came out.

Way too late.

It was fourteen minutes later that recently appointed Minister of the Interior Omar Cruz received the shocking emergency phone call he knew was coming.

Within eleven minutes after that, he had notified the president and all of his fellow cabinet ministers. The president followed his suggestion to declare the situation to be a national emergency, and to appeal to other nations and world relief organizations for help.

Due to the remoteness of some of the affected areas, it would be some time before the full scope of the disaster became known.

But one thing was certain. Peru would need help to deal with it. They would need all kinds of provisions and emergency supplies, in what would have to be a full-scale international relief effort.

They would have to come in by the planeload.

Many, many planeloads.

The preparatory session with Joey goes very well. I bring Hike with me, and we divide the work into two parts. I take Joey through the direct portion of his testimony first. I don’t ask him specific questions; I just tell him the type of questions I will ask. And Joey, in turn, discusses how he will answer in general terms, so as not to affect the spontaneity at trial.

Next I have Hike conduct a mock cross-examination, and I instruct him to come at Joey as hard as he can. Hike is actually very good at it. His mind is capable of intense focus, and he possesses an ability to detect and hone in on inconsistencies.

Additionally, the fact that Hike can be the most annoying person on the planet helps his cross-examination technique. You want the witness to get angry and frustrated, so that he might make a key mistake. Hike is easy to get angry at, and he’s a walking, talking frustration machine.

But Joey holds up well; he answers the questions in a straightforward manner, never letting himself be goaded into anger. Of course, at the end of the day he knows Hike’s on our side; Dylan will be a different case, since Joey is well aware that Dylan is trying to keep him in a cage for the rest of his life.

When we finish, I say to Joey, “OK. Time to decide whether or not you want to testify.”

“I thought we already decided that,” he says.

“We did. But that doesn’t mean you can’t change your mind. So tomorrow morning will be another time to decide.”

“You think I’m going to do OK?” he asks.

I nod. “I think you probably will.”

Joey turns to Hike. “What about you?”

I cringe. Knowing Hike, he’ll probably predict that Joey will do so badly that New Jersey will make an exception and reinstitute the death penalty for this one case.

“I think you’ll kick Dylan’s ass,” Hike says.

Go figure.

Hike and I head back to the office, since that’s where his car is. On the way, I ask, “You think this is a good idea?”

“His testifying? I do. I think it might be our only chance.”

I turn on the radio to listen to the news. I have satellite radio, so I get all the cable news stations. The trial has been a fairly big story on those stations throughout, mainly because Joey is Carmine’s son. But my expectation is that announcing he will testify will ramp up the coverage significantly.

But for now, news about the trial is nowhere to be found. The networks are covering a humanitarian disaster in Peru, apparently a dam broke and the toll of human life and property is feared to be enormous.

I think about Carolyn Greenwell, the woman from the State Department that I met with in Washington. She had said she was soon going to be in Peru, and I hope she wasn’t caught in the disaster.

I also wonder if the situation will interfere with whatever Ryerson is planning, since I do believe it involves South America, and he had visited Peru on a number of occasions. Since I don’t know what he’s planning, it’s hard to even speculate on whether this disaster will impact it.

Hike launches into a dissertation on how extreme weather is going to destroy the planet, and that there’s nothing we can do about it. “We’re history,” he says.

“Are we going to make it to the end of the trial?”

He shrugs. “Hard to say.”

“Then we’ll put Joey on the stand, just in case.”

Another shrug. “Might as well.”

A jolt is waiting for me when I get home. There, in the living room, is the dreaded Christmas tree, freshly cut by some Christmas tree cutter, and purchased by Laurie. And there, on the dining room table, are the four million lights and two billion ornaments that Laurie will be putting on that poor tree.