Reilly 11 - Case of Lies (24 page)

“It has to be the same person!”

“We’ll ask him why he needed two guns, when we find him,” Cheney said. “Maybe he threw away the gun he used to kill Sarah Hanna two years ago, and bought another one recently. We’ll look into that.”

Sandy said, “Sorry to interrupt. Your eight o’clock is here. And your eight-thirty is, too.”

“I’ll be right out.”

“Good luck,” Cheney said, nodding a couple of times and then hauling himself up. “Keep in touch.”

Lunch hour. Nina closeted herself in the conference room with the computer and the law books. How could she force the witnesses to come to California to testify at a trial?

She started with Out-of-State Witnesses, Civil Subpoenas.

The Code of Civil Procedure was clear. Witnesses in a civil case can’t be subpoenaed to appear at a trial from outside the jurisdiction.

Material Witnesses. Nothing in the books that would help anyone but the police, and the police weren’t ready to use that power yet.

Flight from Jurisdiction. Those precedents only applied to defendants. Apparently witnesses can flee as far as they want. No problem, she thought angrily, just split and leave all that chaos behind.

She could go take their depositions in their states, but it would require a court commission. And that wouldn’t bring them to California for trial.

If only the witnesses were defendants. She leaned back, put her arms behind her head, thought of the Ace High Lodge, a defendant because of the long reach of the legal concept of negligence.

Negligence means you owe somebody a duty of care, even if it only amounts to a duty to act like a reasonable person around them. Negligence means that your act or omission results in unintended harm to that somebody. In the case of Ace High, the creative interpretation of negligence said you had a duty to keep your premises secure, and if you omitted to do that, and somebody got hurt, you were negligent.

What if the witnesses had been negligent in some sense? No, they had been victims. But what if-

Now she was thinking furiously, flipping through Witkin and looking for-

Yes. A robbery. The victim, defending himself. The assailant, shooting an innocent bystander during the struggle. What if the victim used unnecessary force on the assailant, or did something so rash in the course of self-defense that the victim could legally be said to have acted negligently when a bystander got hurt?

There were California cases, rare. A case in which the victim wrested the gun from the assailant and accidentally shot a bystander. That hadn’t happened here.

Though how did she know it hadn’t happened here? She went into her office, came back with her copy of the tape of Silke and Raj, and played it.

Wakefield had rushed the guy. Silke said so. There were shots, and Silke and Raj ran. The gun was missing, so who would know who actually shot Sarah Hanna?

“Could have been Wakefield,” she thought aloud. She listened to the tape again. Even if Wakefield hadn’t shot Sarah Hanna himself, had he been negligent in rushing an assailant with a gun?

You could allege that he was negligent. You could allege a lot of things, and at this stage of Dave Hanna’s decrepit case, at this time when a beautiful young woman had been killed for some obscure gratification, you might as well get creative.

What about Silke and Raj? How could she allege that they were negligent, too? That was tougher-they hadn’t done anything but get robbed, and run.

On the other hand, you can allege anything. Let the other side come in and defend, in a California court.

I’m going to force the issue, she thought, bring them back. Excitement lodged next to the sorrow and rage in her heart. Force the law to behave the way she needed it to behave. Stretch the negligence idea like the biggest piece of chewing gum ever, all the way to Boston and Washington State. Bring the kids back kicking and screaming, and find the shooter through them.

Sandy knocked.

“Coming.”

“Find anything?” she asked as Nina passed her.

“Could you find an order shortening time request, and model points and authorities? I’ll give you some facts and cases and you plug it in. I need to get it to Flaherty today for signing. And call Betty Jo Puckett. Say I’ll meet her at the courthouse at four-thirty. Tell her it’s an emergency motion relating to the witnesses in the Hanna case.”

“Can’t it wait until tomorrow?”

“What else do I have today?”

“Interrogatories to answer. Demurrer to a complaint. Four big phone messages.”

“How many of those can wait until morning?”

Sandy tugged at her lower lip and said, “If you don’t make two of those phone calls, you’re going to lose two cases.”

“It’s a deal. I’ll make those calls.” She went to her desk, sat down, made the calls and made them stick, and felt a hot rush of an emotion so foreign to her that at first she couldn’t give it a name.

Ah. Vengefulness!

So this was what it felt like to be vengeful. Hard, fevered, superhumanly focused, like the skull is grinning inside the head, anticipating what it’s about to do… how interesting that personal fear had no place.

It’s a matter of honor, and behind that is the fact of humiliation. You don’t kill a human being in front of me and not deal with me, you son of a bitch, she told the shooter in her mind.

Sandy buzzed. “Okay, I have the Petition for Order Shortening Time, and I have a draft order here, and I have model points and authorities. But what’s the motion going to be? I need a title.”

“It’s a Motion to Amend the Complaint,” Nina said. “I’m going to add three new defendants after Shooter Doe I.”

There was a pause while Sandy digested this.

“And pull out three subpoenas for deposing defendants. I’m going to ask Flaherty to personally sign them.”

Nina opened the file and looked at the complaint in the case of
Hanna v. Ace High Lodge and Does I-X
. Doe I would be changed to the shooter’s name, when they found the shooter. She considered once more what she was about to do, suing three people who were going to be rather perturbed about it. And they had Braun and Branson to object.

So what? They had dodged involvement too long. They had no right to complain that she was getting dodgy, too.

She wrote on her legal pad, “Plaintiff David Hanna hereby substitutes for John Does II, III, and IV in the complaint, the following-named defendants.”

“Silke Kilmer.” A Jane Doe, actually.

“Sumaraj Das.”

“Elliott Wakefield.”

She looked out her window, at the black and lowering sky. November now ruled in the mountains, harsh and cold.

They were in for it.

19

THE LEGAL SYSTEM HAD ALWAYS VEERED toward the person with the strongest conviction. If a lawyer believed in a case very strongly, the usual obstacles fell away. That made it a good system, so long as the lawyer’s purpose was honorable, and that quality of honor would shine through, or it wouldn’t. Nina’s conviction overrode both Betty Jo and Judge Flaherty.

“All we want is out,” Betty Jo told the judge. “We are willing to pay the price. We are bystanders as much as the lady who was shot. Your Honor, please, just approve our settlement agreement and let Ms. Reilly pursue the real malfeasors.”

Great word,
malfeasors
. Nina wouldn’t have thought Betty Jo was up to a word like that.

Flaherty was about fifty. Nina knew that he worried about his heart, and how long he could continue dealing with all the stressful bullshit he was exposed to all day, every day. He didn’t like dodgy legal moves. He flipped through the file, finding no solutions there, then looked out the window, where rain fell. The enclosed paneled courtroom felt cozy after the drive through the dark afternoon.

“This ought to be a criminal matter,” he told Nina. “This court, and you and Ms. Puckett, shouldn’t be the ones trying to pursue this.”

“But here we are, Your Honor.”

“Two murders,” Flaherty said, shaking his head. “A civil case. Wrongful-death cases aren’t meant for this sort of thing. A senior citizen develops septicemia in her nursing home from bad care, and dies. That’s a wrongful-death case.”

“But here we are.”

“I don’t understand why the police aren’t taking a more active role.”

“Me neither,” Nina said. “But they aren’t.”

“Maybe I should at least let the motel out.”

“Maybe the motel’s involved.”

“You haven’t presented any facts in that regard,” Betty Jo protested.

“But two people are dead. The plaintiff needs, and the plaintiff deserves, every latitude the law permits. Let this case proceed, Your Honor. Let the motel remain as defendant. Allow me to bring the witnesses back to California to be deposed.”

“They have a lawyer. You didn’t serve him. You could have faxed him. I’m not sure about this ex parte stuff.” Flaherty appeared uncertain, but ready to blow the way the strongest wind blew.

“Technically, he’s not retained to represent them as defendants, to my knowledge,” Nina said. “Naturally I will cooperate fully with him when I’m notified that he will be involved in that capacity.” She turned back to her main point, adding urgently, “We have to find out who did this. The murder of Chelsi Freeman is an affront to the court. It’s an attempt to intimidate us into not pursuing the complaint. It’s the one thing, the one thing, Judge, we can never permit. Our justice system can’t flee from intimidation.”

Betty Jo said, “Your Honor, we see the steamroller and we would like to step to the side in time. Please. Let us out. We’re just a building, a series of room numbers. We don’t want to go two-dimensional during whatever attack Ms. Reilly has in mind.”

“Two-dimensional?” Flaherty said. “Oh, flattened.”

“That’s tough,” Nina said. “You could almost feel sorry for the Ace High clerk, E-mailing her boyfriend while a mother-to-be lost her life. She should have been at her desk. She should have called 911 sooner. Or how about that cul-de-sac, that tight vending-machine space, isolated and unsafe, set up by the Ace High. Or the three robberies in the past year on the premises.”

“Whatever our culpability,” Betty Jo said, “it’s not worth more than the settlement we have already offered. A failure to accept the settlement at this late date will amount to bad faith.”

“Then bad faith it is,” Nina said. “The case has changed. It’s about two deaths now, and nobody skates.”

“We’re good for fifty thousand, Your Honor. I thought Mr. Hanna took our offer. Where is Mr. Hanna, by the way? Hmm?” She turned toward Nina, her eyes narrow. Betty Jo was as aggravated as hell, and Nina didn’t blame her.

“Tell me again. What’s the problem with letting this party out of the case?” Flaherty asked Nina.

“We don’t know enough yet. We don’t know if someone from the Lodge might be involved somehow,” Nina said. “Mr. Hanna told me on the phone this morning that he understands we cannot go forward with a settlement right now.”

Betty Jo folded her arms and looked over the top of her specs at the judge. In a hard tone that Nina hadn’t heard before, she said, “Well, then, the settlement offer’s withdrawn, Your Honor. It’s off. It’s as off as three-day-old chicken left in a hot car trunk. We’ll stay in and request our attorney’s fees at the right time.” She didn’t look at Nina.

“Then there’s nothing before the court with regard to the settlement,” Nina said.

“I can still dismiss the case next week based on the court’s discretion, since two years will have passed,” Flaherty said.

“And let the whole world know this court bows to a killer?” Nina asked. Her words seemed to resound through the courtroom. The clerk looked scandalized and the lawyers lounging in their chairs, waiting for their own arguments to be heard, shifted and whispered.

“No need to grandstand, Counsel,” Flaherty said. “You still have another week. The court will consider any additional documents filed during that time that tend to show progress in bringing the matter to trial.”

“Very well,” Nina said. “Then I assume the court will execute the subpoenas requiring the newly named defendants to be deposed pursuant to our papers?”

“Any objection?” Flaherty asked Betty Jo.

“We’re just the sacrificial lamb on the side altar, Your Honor,” Betty Jo said. “Let’s get on with the immolation.”

“Immolation?” Flaherty said. “Do you object or not?”

“No objection. Bring ’em on.”

“Then it is so ordered. The signed papers will be available from the clerk’s office in an hour or so, Ms. Reilly.”

“Thank you, Your Honor.”

“Ms. Reilly-”

“Yes, Your Honor?”

“Be careful.”

“Thank you, Your Honor.”

Nina went out to the hall, Betty Jo at her heels. She tapped Nina on the shoulder. “Wait,” she said. “I have a question for you.”

“You should have raised it in front of the judge.”

“I thought about it. Thought about asking if your own client approved you throwing away fifty grand. Then I realized, no way did he approve this. You’re here blowin’ off the settlement, and your client’s in jail, ’cause he’s a sick alcoholic. Who’s backin’ you? That’s the question. Well, it’s none of my business. Bottom line, you’re never going to get a dime out of the Ace High now. I warned you.”

“It’s worth it, to have everybody still sitting together in the pot.”

“And you’re the little cannibal, stirrin’ it all up with a big wood spoon.”

“Sorry, Betty Jo.”

Betty Jo shrugged. “I’ll just tell Jimmy you’ve gone crazy. He’ll understand.”

Nina felt a rush of anger. She said, “A friend was shot to death three feet away from me. I am going to find and take down the shooter. I want you and your client with me on this. We can find the shooter and deal with him together. He’s caused you as much harm as he has me.”

“You want to ride piggyback on the Lodge,” Betty Jo said, unmoved. “That’s not an option. I won’t let Jimmy crouch down so you can take a ride on his money and his business. You’re on your own.”

“I would think you’d like to find the guy who shot up the Lodge.”

“You’d think wrong. The best strategy for the Lodge is to end all this. Every time you make a move, the
Tribune
reports it and Jimmy gets cancellations.”