Missing Justice (20 page)

I probably should have waited before calling Roger, but I didn’t.

“Roger Kirkpatrick.” I could picture him in an office high above the Willamette, feet on his desk, answering the phone on speaker to avoid wasting his valuable time on extraneous hand movements.

“Roger, it’s Samantha.”

“I assume you’re calling about Easterbrook?” He still hadn’t picked up the receiver.

“Good guess, since I’ve never called you about anything else in the last three years. Now unless you’ve once again got your hands where they don’t belong, pick up the damn phone and get me off speaker.”

I heard a click and then his voice was directly in my ear. Perhaps I should have left well enough alone. “I had hoped you’d either squelch the hostilities, Samantha, or remove yourself from the case.”

He had no idea how much I had squelched. There was a time when I wanted to rip his guts out in public if not literally, then at least through well-placed billboards announcing that Mister Communitarian was a cheat and a liar. He liked to think his charitable donations and board memberships made him a good person, but Roger Kirkpatrick was a thief of the worst kind, no better than a con man. His grift began with the hours he spent with Nike’s newest spokesperson, the aforementioned volleyball pro. It was only after weeks of inner debate that I had finally asked him if I needed to worry. Surely, he had noticed that she was seventy-two inches of legs, breasts, muscle, and tan. Negotiations, he assured me.

And, with that, I had given him my trust, not just in the general way a wife trusts her husband, and not even just in the way I trusted Roger. I had given him the trust I have in myself, in my own ability to judge a man who looks me in the eye and tells me he’s for real.

Yes, Roger had gotten off easy. If I seemed a little brusque, he was going to have to deal.

“I wanted to make sure you knew that Jackson requested a prelim,” I said. “It’s Friday morning. I’ll need Townsend there at eight-thirty, just in case.”

“I know,” he said. “I sent a paralegal over this morning for the arraignment. I told Townsend to expect to be there. If you don’t mind, I’ll be with him.”

“Suit yourself. Easy billables, I suppose.” Eventually, Townsends retention of a defense attorney would look terrible in front of a jury, but it would be irrelevant to the judge who handled the prelim. “We also would like him to meet with us before we make a final decision about whether to seek the death penalty.”

He assured me they’d both be at the meeting the next day.

“Is that everything?” he asked.

“Johnson needs to talk to Townsend. Some evidence might come out at the prelim that could be disturbing.” I told Roger about the nonoxynol-9, my conversation with Tara, and Clarissa’s phone records.

“That’s a hell of a lot to dump on a guy, Samantha. Your cops didn’t think to mention any of this to him earlier?”

“Don’t blow this out of proportion. This is the usual way it’s done. We guard the information, but in the end the family hears it first from us. The only thing that’s making this hard is having to go through you to get to our victim’s husband.”

“When Johnson asked him the other night about barrier methods, Townsend assumed there must have been a sexual assault.”

“We still don’t know,” I said. “Maybe the nonoxynol’s Jackson’s. Either way, Tara seems to think Clarissa was seeing someone else. Think what you want about the phone calls.”

“I’ll tell him myself,” he said.

“I want to send someone over, Roger. You can pick whomever you’re most comfortable with, and you can be there. But I want a cop to tell him.” It was the first step to bridging the gap between Townsend and PPB, an accomplishment that would help the rest of the case run smoothly.

Roger wasn’t having it. “I’m not trying to be an ass, Samantha, but don’t tell yourself you’re doing this for Townsend. There’s not a man in the world who’d choose to hear something like that from a cop instead of someone he at least knows is on his side. You want the cop there to see his reaction, and it’s totally unnecessary. Townsend’s cleared. I’ll tell him myself.”

I had to admit it with Townsend’s alibi and poly, there was no compelling justification for having a detective present when he heard the news. “Fine,” I said, “but some words of advice?” He was silent during the pause. “When you break the news to Townsend, try to be a little more subtle than you were with me.”

I hung up, angry at myself for losing my cool. I wrote a memo for the file about my conversation with Tara and sent a duplicate and the phone records to the discovery desk. Now that Townsend would be getting the news, I could make the disclosure to Slip.

I needed a pick-me-up. Fortunately, I had saved the best call for last. Chuck answered at MCT.

“I was wondering when I’d hear from you,” he said. “You find my note last night?”

“Pretty cute. I’m not sure Vinnie enjoyed being the messenger, though. Looked like he tried to chew it off of his collar.”

“He was probably trying to eat the damn thing. Greedy mutt snarfs down anything within a three-foot radius.”

“Takes after his mommy that way. Now, as much as I’m enjoying deconstructing my little man’s eating habits, can you please share the good news? I didn’t appreciate the cliff-hanger.”

“I am pleased to announce that Heidi Chung, famed PPB crime lab specialist, will testify that blood on the hammer Johnson took from Jackson’s apartment belonged to Clarissa Easterbrook. The ME says it’s consistent with her injuries.”

“Yes! I knew we’d get it.” Even so, I felt relieved to have the news officially in. Establishing probable cause against Jackson would be a breeze.

“Ah, but there’s more,” he said. “A little surprise to end your day with.”

I kicked my door shut with my foot and dropped my voice low. “It’s not exactly a surprise if you tell me about it ahead of time.”

“Get your mind out of the gutter, Kincaid. This surprise is from Chung. She got Jackson’s prints from his booking. Matched his right index and middle to two of the unidentified latents on the Easterbrooks’ door knocker.”

I let out a small scream. It always felt good when a case came together, but it was particularly satisfying to have my first murder case wrapped up with a tidy little bow on top. I told him to ask the crime lab to get the reports to me ASAP so I could include them in Slip’s discovery package.

“Now,” he said, “if you want to get back to that conversation you started a second ago, I’m up for it. But I charge two ninety-nine for the first minute and one ninety-nine thereafter.”

“As tempting as that sounds,” I said, “I think I’m in the mood for something a little more personal.”

“I could probably handle that. Maybe come up with a surprise or two of my own.”

“You’re on. Seven o’clock, my house. Bring your toothbrush. This one might be an overnight.”

Eight.

With the evidence in against Jackson and the charges formally filed, I finally got a taste of a regular MCU morning on Thursday. It was just like a morning in DVD, but instead of grinding out morning drug custodies, I was churning through the night’s assault arrests.

As required, I finished the misdemeanor screening cases first. I held back only one to issue as a felony. Robert Jenkins, a thirty-seven-year-old man with a prior trespass conviction at an elementary school, was tackled by the father of a four-year-old girl after the father found Jenkins taking pictures of his daughter at the park. The girl remained clothed the entire time, but Jenkins had manipulated her into various poses that revealed his Chester the Molester ways. When the responding police officer perused the other shots in the guy’s digital camera, he found forty photographs of eight different kids. Bent over, legs spread, fingers in their open mouths; the details varied, but the gist was always the same. Jenkins admitted to the officer that he used the pictures to pleasure himself sexually and did not consider them to be art.

A single line at the end of the police report hinted at the problem with the case: “I decided to arrest the suspect for harassment, since he touched the vie to achieve the desired pose, and such touching was offensive under the circumstances.” It wasn’t obvious what to charge the defendant with, but I wasn’t about to let a guy like Jenkins off the hook with the misdemeanor of harassment.

I flipped through the penal code to confirm my recollection, but the child sex abuse laws all required physical contact or at least nudity. I reread the victim’s statement. For the photograph of her straddling the slide, she said Jenkins told her to climb up the ladder, then pulled her feet on either side of the slide before she went down. She said the slide hurt her skin and she didn’t know why she couldn’t keep her dress beneath her legs. The officer noted some redness on the backs of her thighs. Good enough for me. An assault on a four-year-old is a felony, and I had an appellate case saying a red mark is enough to get an assault charge before a jury, which I’d pack full of parents. Jenkins could make all the arguments he wanted about strict statutory definitions, but the charge would stick.

I sent a follow-up request to a detective I knew in the child sex abuse unit asking him to run Jenkins’s other photographs by the DARE officers who worked the schools near the park. Even if finding the other kids didn’t lead to more charges, telling the parents seemed like the right thing to do. They were probably convinced that the “don’t talk to strangers” talk had been enough to protect their kids. It never is.

Thanks to a grand jury appearance and an overdue response to a motion to suppress, I didn’t finish reviewing the rest of the custodies until nearly noon. I apologized to Alice as I put them on her desk. For her to finalize the paperwork in time for arraignments, she’d have to work through lunch.

“The least I can do is bring you something,” I offered. She told me it wasn’t necessary. If the attorneys here paid for lunch every time they screwed over the staff, we’d all be broke, and they’d all be fat. But, after the polite amount of argument, she accepted.

Alice estimated she had another hour of work, so I decided to take in a quick run. Jessica Walters was also in the locker room and asked if I wanted to join her for a loop around the waterfront.

Whenever I run with someone new, I let them set the pace. We were clocking about an eight-minute mile, which was comfortable for me, but I couldn’t tell if she was holding back.

We crossed the Willamette over the Morrison Bridge, saving the prettiest, downtown side of the loop for last. Once the noise of the bridge was past us and we had dropped down to the river’s edge, she asked me if I had ever tried to run with the office’s Hood-to-Coast team.

The Hood-to-Coast is Oregon’s annual relay race from Mount Hood to the Pacific coast. At one time, there had been an official District Attorney team. When Duncan found out that the members wore T-shirts bearing electric chairs, one for each defendant the runner had placed on death row, he pulled the plug.

I reminded Jessica that the group was no longer the official office team, making no effort to hide my sarcasm.

“Whatever. Have you ever run with them?”

“I didn’t think I was eligible.” My impression was that a team member needed to have a reliable eight-minute mile, the ability and willingness to drink mass quantities of alcohol, and a penis. Two out of three didn’t cut it. “In any event, I figure you choose your battles.” If I was going to become the office’s rabble-rouser, it wasn’t going to be for the privilege of running with a group that likes to polish off the day by watching each other light their gas.

We had started a subtle incline but hadn’t dropped the pace. Jessica didn’t say anything until the path flattened out again.

“How’s the evidence against Jackson looking?” she asked. She was winded but could still get the words out.

I gave her the abbreviated version. “I know the case is strong, but ever since I issued it, I’ve been finding myself getting worried. Frist thinks I might regret telling the defense about the affair.”

“It’s your first murder case,” she said, “so you’re worrying more than you need to. It’s normal. You’ll feel great by the day of trial.”

She was right. A case is always strongest at the beginning, when all you’ve got is what the police have given you. As you move toward trial, your job and the defense’s is to pick, poke, and prod at every last thread, any possible wrinkle that might turn out to be the glove that won’t stretch over the defendant’s hand. But by the first day of trial, you’ve tucked in the loose strings and ironed out the wrinkles, and the case is clearer than ever.

“I also still wonder why she was calling you,” I said, “and if it had anything to do with the murder. Maybe because of the gang unit? Do you work with public housing at all?” It wasn’t unusual for us to work with other agencies on long-term crime reduction plans.

She shook her head. “The community prosecution unit will call HAP sometimes if they know of a problem in the projects, but we stay out of that stuff in the trial unit. Hard enough to get cooperation on cases without getting people worried about losing their apartment.”

When I didn’t respond, she looked over at me and laughed.

“You need to chill out, Kincaid. It’s just a phone call. I called twenty people this morning, and if someone chops me up in little pieces tonight, I guarantee you it won’t have anything to do with any of them.”

“It just seems weird to call someone you don’t know, leave a message, and not say what you’re calling about,” I said. “And that number she left you was her cell, by the way.”

“It was?” Jessicas tone told me she found that unusual too.

They say murder cases are like any other criminal case, but with one important difference: Your most important witness, the victim, is gone forever. The reason for Clarissa’s phone call was lost with her death, along with all the other information she took with her.

We picked up the pace as we passed the courtyard at the north end of the waterfront, then began the slow jog through downtown back to the courthouse. She stopped at the Plaza Blocks to stretch, and I put in about thirty seconds with her before I grew impatient. My doctor says I’ve got the heart of a healthy horse but the bones of a ninety-year-old man. Regardless of his warnings, I still spend every exercise minute I can spare going after every calorie I can burn.