Prime Witness (41 page)

“Sure. How far back?”

“A year,” I say.

I give her James Sloan, spelling the last name. I hear the clicking of keys. Then: “Which one do you want?” she says.

“More than one James Sloan?” I say.

“One guy,” she says, “three convictions.”

“What for?”

“One count arson, reduced to malicious mischief, two counts vandalism . . .”

“Bingo,” I say. I get his social security number from Ester, thank her and punch the next line on the phone to call out again. This time I don’t dial, but hit one of the self-dialing numbers up top. Claude does not answer, but on the third ring I hear the voice of Denny Henderson.

He tells me that Claude is on his way over to my office. Dusalt is my first witness this afternoon. We will prep with him only briefly before heading back to court.

“Denny. I want you to pull the most recent booking sheet on one James Sloan.” I read him the social security number, and court file number from Ester.

“Right now?” he says.

“No, yesterday,” I say.

Some grumbling on the line, then dead air. I hold for what seems like ten minutes. Then he’s back on the line.

“Got it,” he says.

“See if there’s the mug photo,” I say.

Some shuffling on the other end. “Charming,” he says.

“You got it?”

“Yeah.”

“Let me guess, a purple do, done up in spikes, pock marks on the face like the bubbles in a sulfur pot?”

“You know the guy?” he says.

“In a manner,” I say.

The porcelain prince, I think. The men’s john at the courthouse the day I ran into Adrian, the punk with his schlong caught in the mesh of his zipper, Chambers’s erstwhile client.

It was the zippered jacket and weird hair. There was something incongruous in the name “James Sloan” when Chambers went through the charade of introducing us that day. This it seems has held the name like some computer batch file at the edges of my recall ever since.

“I want everything you’ve got on him, every arrest file, as soon as you can get it over here. Then I want you to go by the courthouse and get the depositions, the court files on the charges.”

“They won’t let me take the originals,” says Henderson.

“Then copy them.”

He counts up the arrests. “It’ll take all day,” he says.

“You got something better to do?” I tell him he can draw straws with Claude as to who gets this duty. He gives me a groan knowing already that he will come up short in this contest. Claude is in court. I hear a lot of grousing, like he’s about to hang up.

“And Denny.”

“Yeah.”

“Run a current rap sheet on the guy. See if he has any felony convictions anywhere else.” We hang up.

“It would be nice,” I tell Lenore, “if we could hang him out on a felony conviction.” This would be something with which to impeach his credibility before the jury. Convicted felons carry the scar for life.

“Then you know who it is?” says Lenore. “Chambers’s witness.”

“If I know Adrian,” I say.

“But how did he find the guy when we couldn’t?”

“You’re assuming,” I say, “that he did.”

She gives me a look.

“Adrian’s famous for producing witnesses of convenience,” I tell her, “better at curing the blind spots in his case than a faith healer.”

Watching Adrian in court over the years I have learned that the margin of victory is too often measured by the preponderance of perjury emitted by his witnesses, a stench like a good dose of mustard gas from the stand.

She looks at me wide-eyed, that any lawyer, an officer of the court, would do this knowingly, as a matter of course. For all of her street-smarts and barrio background, if you scratch the hard surface of Lenore, underneath you will find a romantic.

“If Adrian Chambers ate nails,” I tell her, “he would pass corkscrews. He does not simply torture the truth, he is more devious.”

Because I have seen it before, I can predict Adrian’s tactic with some confidence.

“When we put Claude on the stand,” I tell her, “to lay the foundation for the evidence of our investigation, Adrian will ask him about our theories on the vandal who broke the window, our futile efforts to find this witness. Thanks to Roland,” I say, “he will build his defense by fulfilling our own prophesies, and modifying the message. In his version, the witness broke the window, but can attest that none of the evidence was inside. It is Adrian’s ethic, any means to defeat the perfidious powers of the state.”

There’s a knock on my door.

“Come in.”

It’s Claude. He’s got a number of files under his arm, folders containing police reports and other business documents compiled during the course of our investigations. He will use these on the stand to refresh his memory in case any details are hazy.

“Ready to do it?” I say.

He makes a face, like no big deal.

“Something for you,” he says. He hands me a slip of paper pulled from one of the files under his arm, a lab report from the State Department of Justice.

“Present from Kay Sellig,” he says.

I read, but it means nothing to me.

“Her people analyzed the paper and clippings that made up the note delivered to your house.” Claude’s talking about the threat delivered with the photo of Sarah.

“Whoever did it got a little sloppy,” he tells us. “One of the word groups clipped out and pasted to the note contained a trademark symbol and a small piece of a logo in one corner. Microscopic,” he says. “But we got lucky. A lab assistant recognized the snippet of logo.”

I look at him, like how was this possible?

“The guy has seen the publication a lot,” he says. “It’s off the title page, the cover sheet to a publication produced for law enforcement agencies. The state
Criminal Law Reporter
,” says Claude.

I know this publication. Cop shops around the state use it to keep abreast of the latest court decisions in the areas of arrest, and the search and seizure of evidence. I am a subscriber myself, as are a growing legion of lawyers practicing in the field.

“Any ideas?” I say.

Claude wrinkles an eyebrow, like he has his own theories. “We might want to check to see if the Davenport Police subscribe to this thing,” he says. I know what he is thinking: Jess Amara.

“Do it.”

We change gears for the moment, as we are running out of time. I warn him about Adrian’s likely tactic on cross, that he will fish for details on our theory that a vandal may have broken the window of the van, that thanks to the loose tongue of Roland, this now plays a part in the defense case.

He uses a few expletives to describe Overroy. But then he tells me that Roland may have problems of his own. One of the investigators Claude has assigned to Sellig to help her search for the missing piece of cord has talked to the photographer who was processing the stuff the day it disappeared.

“The guy tells us there was somebody hanging around in your library the day they were doing the job, shooting the cord. He was interested in cameras, taking up a hobby, fingering all of their lenses. They got to talkin’,” says Claude.

“Then this guy leaves and an hour later when they go to close up shop they notice that the cord is gone.”

“Let me guess,” I say. “Roland.”

“Suddenly he’s a regular shutterbug,” says Dusalt.

This would not surprise me. Embittered by my rejection of his brokered settlement offer, it would be like Roland to take a half measure, not the cord that links all of the murders to the Russian, just some of them. Spread a little pain, sit back and watch.

We will probably find the missing cord the day before the close of our case when I will have to crawl on my knees to Ingel pleading.

Claude looks at Goya. “Did you tell him?” he says.

“Not yet.”

I look at them. “What now?”

It is what Lenore has been waiting to talk to me about. She and Claude have been paring down Adrian’s witness list for two days now, searching for the anticipated alibi, the person or persons who could testify to place Iganovich in Canada at the time of the Scofield murders. If we amend to charge his client, he will want this witness available. Even if we don’t charge he may use the witness, pour water on our case to erode the factual discrepancies between the murders, and then show that his client was out of town for the last one.

“There’s nobody that fits the bill,” she tells me.

We go over the list. Lenore is operating on the theory that any likely witness would be a resident of Canada, someone who saw him up there and who could testify as to the date. The list contains not a single Canadian address.

“What about ticketing agents in this country? Could be a local name who sold him the ticket and would remember him.”

She shakes her head. “We checked that. And something more,” she says. “Some weeks ago Claude checked with the airlines. They just got back to him yesterday. The flights out of Capital City to Canada, there’re four each day. One of the flight attendants on an Air Canada flight thinks she remembers seeing somebody who looked like Iganovich. From a picture,” she says.

“Well then that’s it,” I say.

“The problem is,” says Claude, “when the lady checked her flight schedule, the particular flight in question left Capital City the day
after
the Scofield murders. She’d been off on maternity leave until that date.”

This sets like molten lead in my veins. A moment of dazed silence. We have been operating from the beginning on the belief that Iganovich could produce an absolute alibi for his whereabouts on the day the Scofields were killed, that he was a thousand miles away. Now on the opening day of trial, Claude and Lenore are telling me that this assumption may be wrong. Our theory in Scofield is beginning to settle in deep squish, grounded on the touchy-feely surmises of the shrinks, their prognostications and profiles for the serial mind. The fact that the Russian was available in town at the time of the murders is, in my book, worth more than a thousand Rorschach tests and psych-evals.

“It may explain,” says Lenore, “why Chambers was so willing to cop a plea on the Scofield counts. Maybe he knows his client did ’em,” she says.

“Damn it,” I say. I’m up out of my chair, pacing behind the desk. “Why is this information just coming in now?” I say.

“Took a while to find the flight attendant. She was out of town. Stays in Capital City on a rotating basis only once every three weeks.” Claude’s got a list of excuses. “Besides,” he says, “she’s equivocal. She thinks it’s him. Not absolutely certain.”

“Still,” I say, “we should have talked to her sooner.”

“Maybe we should charge him.” Lenore’s getting nervous.

I look at Claude. “What kind of a witness would your flight attendant make?”

“You want me to be honest.”

“Brutally,” I tell him.

“Not solid enough to put on the stand,” he says. “Chambers would have her for lunch, ‘maybe it’s him, maybe it’s not.”’

I’m leaning over the desk, looking down at the two of them.

“You can be sure if we charge him, Adrian will pull another witness from his hat,” I say, “some ten-time loser who will testify that he put Iganovich on the plane, kissed him on both cheeks and strapped him in his seat two days before the Scofields bought it.” Silence falls on our little group like a dark cloud. Given the evidence, I would rather have Chambers’s side of this case at this moment.

“How much leeway will Ingel give to amend?” says Lenore. She’s talking about an amendment to add the Scofield charges against Iganovich.

“Maybe to the close of our case-in-chief. Not beyond that,” I say. “Maybe not even that far. It would depend on the evidence. We’d have to have something hot.”

“A percipient witness,” she says, “somebody who saw the Scofields go down, with their own eyes.”

We both look at Claude. He knows what we’re thinking. The prime witness in the trees.

“Give me a lead and I’ll chase it,” he says.

“What have you got on him so far?”

“The spotting scope. Couldn’t trace it to the point of purchase, no usable prints, just one smudged, looked like a thumb,” he says. “Same result with the climbing gear, too common to trace. According to the information from Rattigan at the Center for Birds of Prey, their best guess is that the witness was a poacher, using an owl to kill peregrine falcons, adults and chicks. He figures this was done so whoever it was could work under cover of darkness, with no noisy gunshots to rouse the neighbors. Why they were killing the birds, Rattigan has no idea. He says he could understand if they were taking ’em alive. The birds apparently have some value. In good condition, Rattigan says a mature peregrine is worth in the neighborhood of fifty thousand.”

“Dollars?” I say.

He nods. “We’re in the wrong business. From the bits and pieces,” he says, “bones and feathers we found up in the blind and on the ground, whoever was in those trees that night killed a cool half million on the wing.”

But from what Claude is telling me, in terms of our search for a witness, it all adds up to zero.

“Something I want you to check,” I tell Claude. “Have one of your guys do a title search, over at the county recorder’s office, on the property where the Scofields were killed. I’d like to know who owns it.”

Claude makes a note. “Why?” he says.

“Just a hunch,” I say. “Maybe we’ve been working from the wrong end on this.”

Claude looks at me.

“Maybe we should be working backward from the other end, from the Scofields on the ground back the other way,” I say. “What do we have there?”

“Mice and pellets used to feed the birds, at least according to Rattigan,” says Claude. “Reams of working papers, unfortunately destroyed by Jeanette Scofield and Amara. And the travel claim I gave you. That’s it. Not much.”

I spin around in my chair, paw through a pile of items on the credenza behind me and come up with a single manilla folder. I put it on the desk and open it. Inside is the travel claim made out for Abbott Scofield, but never signed, and the attached receipts. I pick through these. The hotel bill and restaurant receipts. When Lenore looks at me I’m holding the two torn tickets, the ones reading “San Diego Wild Animal Park.”