Shadow of Power (30 page)

We’ve lost him, and we know it.

The three of us sit there having drinks. We order dinner, and Harry and I begin discussing plans for an early return to San Diego. Herman makes a call to his process server in Washington and warns him that Ginnis may be on his way home shortly, so to watch his house and to try to serve him with a subpoena there.

We are talking over our meals. I’m seated with my back to the bar, looking out over the narrow inlet, the bright lights and neon from the buildings on the other side dancing off the water as Harry talks.

“We use the witnesses we have, draw out their testimony, and stall for time,” says Harry. “Sooner or later Ginnis has to pop up. The other members of the Court will be putting fire to his feet to make
him show up at work once they realize he’s not in recovery mode, he’s hiding.”

As Harry is talking, I’m so exhausted that my mind dances with the neon across the way. People walking, a small boutique hotel, next to it a bar all lit up. Jazz music floating across the water. People coming and going, tourists arriving, a few more leaving.

“We have to get out of here. We have to get home.” It doesn’t click in my mind until the figure hauling luggage is joined by the other two. Then I see the large, dark Town Car pull up in front of the steps under the bright orange neon.

“What’s wrong?” Harry is looking at me. His back is to the water. He turns around.

“It’s Ginnis….” I’m out of my chair before the words are out of my mouth. “Do you have the subpoena?”

Herman has it in his pocket. He’s still looking, but he doesn’t quite see what I’m looking at.

“There, under the hotel sign on the stairs. Aranda with the luggage, the man with the cane,” I say.

Then they see him. In a shot, Herman is through the restaurant and out the door. Harry and I empty our wallets onto the table. We don’t even have a bill.

We are fifty yards behind Herman on the sidewalk running along the waterway toward the floating bridge. A few seconds later, Herman is on it, clambering across. You can hear his heavy footsteps. None of us are up for this. Harry is falling behind. “Go on,” he says. “Don’t wait for me.”

As I look across the water, the tall, willowy figure is still at the top of the stairs. When you are tired, your mind plays funny tricks, but I swear that the other person hauling the luggage down to the car is Aranda.

Ginnis is wearing white slacks, a dark sport coat, and a panama hat drawn low over his face. In the distance I can see the head turning as he checks out the street in both directions, no doubt making sure that the media crews chasing him are not in sight. He isn’t even leaning on the cane. When he comes down the stairs, he has only the arm of the stout woman standing next to him for support. This would have to be Margaret.

Herman is nearly across, thirty yards from the quay on the other side, when the diesel engine starts. The bridge begins to rattle, and within seconds it swings free from the concrete dock and begins the long arc back across the water to where we started. Herman stops, puts his hands on his knees to catch his breath. Then he runs to the hut and the operator inside and pleads with him to close the bridge just for a second, long enough for him to jump onto the sidewalk on the other side.

“No, mon, there’s a freighter coming.”

We stand there and watch in total frustration as the arc of the bridge brings us within fifty yards of the dark Town Car, before the pontoons slide us away and across the water. By this time Ginnis and his wife are already in the backseat.

I cannot tell if he sees me or, if he does, whether he recognizes me, but when he looks this way, over the roof of the car, just before he slides behind the wheel and they pull away, there is no question that the driver is Alberto Aranda.

M
onday morning, and Harry and I are back in the office, still jet-lagged from the long flight home.

Saturday night after watching the Town Car disappear around the corner as we watched helplessly from the moving bridge, Harry, Herman, and I raced to the airport in Curaçao in hopes that maybe we would see the sleek, dark vehicle somewhere near the terminal. But if it was there, it was already secluded behind locked gates in a secure area. There was no sign of the car or any of its occupants. The three of us scoured the terminal, which isn’t that big.

Harry thinks Ginnis probably gave up the rental house the moment he discovered that the world was looking for him. They would have moved to the hotel in town for a day or two, just after Herman hit the island. They could have stayed in rooms rented probably in another name, killing time until they could coordinate their move off the island out of the sight of the press.

“God knows where they went,” says Harry, “because they didn’t go home.” Harry knows this because our processor server, who has been camped in his car outside Ginnis’s house in Chevy Chase, hasn’t seen hide nor hair of the justice or his wife.

And there’s more bad news.

Wednesday evening, about the time Harry and I were taking off for Curaçao, Judge Quinn, on his own motion, decided to sequester the jury.
After winning points with jurors, giving them what looked like a long weekend off, the judge was suddenly overwhelmed by second thoughts thanks to the budding news reports that Harv Smidt had filed on the AP wire.

Smidt no doubt had called the judge for a comment. The wire-service story about Scarborough’s having an important and perhaps historic letter in his possession when he was murdered, and mentioning in the same paragraph the name Arthur Ginnis, apparently sent shivers up Quinn’s spine. The fact that this story was obviously inspired by Quinn’s sharing clips from the restaurant video with some of his buds in black didn’t diminish the judge’s fear level.

How do you complain to a judge about his own violation of his own gag order?

Understandably, Quinn wanted to corral the jury before they piled up at the newsstands to buy Harv’s story. The judge dispatched half the county sheriff’s office and part of the highway patrol to round up all the jurors and have them get their toothbrushes and pajamas. He now has them all incarcerated in a hotel downtown, where they get to read censored newspapers with rectangles cut out of them and play around-the-clock Parcheesi with seven armed bailiffs.

Sequester a jury and the rule of probability is they will take it out on one person—the defendant.

Harry is seated across the table from me in my office as I paw through a stack of papers and envelopes in the middle of my desk, mail that showed up Thursday and Friday when we were gone.

I flip Harry a couple of catalogs—he likes to shop but never buys—and scan through the correspondence, which is already opened by my secretary, with the envelopes stapled to the backs of the letters in case we ever need proof of a postal date on anything.

I work my way to the bottom of the stack, and there is a large manila envelope with my name and office address printed neatly on a label. Just below this, in bold caps across the bottom of the label, are the words
PERSONAL & CONFIDENTIAL
, the reason the secretary didn’t open it. There is no return address. No stamp or postage-meter tape.

Herman has just arrived in the outer office. I can hear him chatting
with Jennifer, the paralegal. The rest of the staff is off. It’s a holiday. All the government offices, including the courts, are closed. Jennifer should be home as well, but by now she is attached to Arnsberg’s case in the way a magnet attaches to metal.

“Where did this come from?” I look at Harry, who is still paging through one of the catalogs.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Jennifer, you out there?” says Harry. “Come in here for a second.”

A second later she slips her head around the corner of the door.

“Any idea where this came from?” I hold up the envelope.

She looks at it, then comes in and takes a closer look.

“How you guys feeling?” Herman comes in and leans up against the book cabinet inside my office.

“I could use a few more hours’ sleep, but other than that, a signed declaration showing proof of service for a subpoena on Arthur Ginnis and everything is chipper,” says Harry.

“Oh, that,” says Jennifer. “It was under the door when I got to work Thursday morning.”

Whatever is inside, I’m guessing a business envelope containing more than one page, based on the heft and the fact that it’s sliding around, too small for the larger manila outer envelope.

I can feel it in my bones. Tuchio is laying something on us at the last minute. I’ve been expecting it for days, the midnight motion. I talk with Harry as I slit the top of the manila envelope with my letter opener. I peer inside for the business envelope, looking for the district attorney’s printed address in the corner.

My fingers are halfway into the manila opening when I see what’s inside. Instantly I stop what I’m doing and withdraw my hand.

Harry reads my face and looks at the envelope as if maybe there’s a snake inside. “What’s the matter?”

Carefully I lay the envelope back down on the desk.

Harry and Herman are both looking at me, like maybe they should run.

“Do we still have those tweezers, the big forceps we use on the printer?”

“I think so. What is it?”

“Just get them, and a towel, something clean.”

In seconds Harry is back. He hands me the forceps, large tweezers about seven inches long. Harry bought these a few years ago in a hardware store. We use them for plucking small pieces of torn paper from the printer when it jams. I check them to make sure there is no ink or toner powder on the metal. He hands me a small, square cotton dust cloth from the cleaning closet, where the janitor keeps a supply in a bag.

“You’re sure it’s clean?”

“Got it out of the bag,” says Harry.

With the cloth I gently hold the manila envelope to the top of the desk and slip the forceps inside. I snag the folded pages and slide them from the envelope. With the folded letter now exposed on my desk, you can see it clearly: a fine, rust-colored filigree, oblong ringlets of blood where kinetic energy had stretched them as they collided with the paper and later dried.

This delicate, lacelike pattern is interrupted by four bloody dots, spaced in a slight arc in the middle of the folded page. I lift the pages with the forceps and check the other side: a single rust-colored dot near the bottom edge, where the killer’s thumb gripped the envelope on this side as he used the blood-soaked gloves to snatch it from the leather portfolio. The existence of this thumb mark on the letter explains the slight smear of blood at the lower boundary of the rectangle on the portfolio, made when the killer grabbed the letter.

“See if you can find something for that.” Using the cloth, I slide the envelope across the surface of my desk toward Harry. “Maybe a legal-size folder. Or something bigger.”

Jennifer’s fingerprints and my own are already on it, along with how many others, we don’t know.

I lay the folded pages, four of them from what I can see, on the blotter in the center of the desk.

The side of the paper facing up is covered by countless tiny, hollow, oblong ringlets in rust where it was spattered by Scarborough’s blood as it lay on top of the portfolio by the television in his hotel room.

Harry gets two more cloth dust towels and hands the rest of the bag to Herman in case we need more. Instead of a legal-size folder, which would be too small to encase and protect the entire manila envelope, Harry has an empty transfer box with the lid already off. Using two of the cloth towels, he picks up the manila envelope by the edges, carefully compressing the two edges between his hands to lift it, and when he does, an item I had missed inside slides out and falls onto my desk.

It is a tiny Ziploc bag, maybe two by three inches in size. I don’t touch it, but I look closely as it lies on the surface of my desk. Inside are what appear to be several short strands of blond hair.

“All of you saw it,” I say. “Where it came from?”

There are nodding heads all around, Herman, Harry, and Jennifer.

Twenty minutes later I’m on the phone. Judge Quinn is calling from his house. We have had to go through the bailiff’s office at the courthouse, staffed by only a skeleton crew on a holiday, to have them call Quinn at home and have him call me at my office, an emergency.

Before I can say a word: “Mr. Madriani, if you’re looking for more time, the answer is no.”

When I tell him what has happened, there is a moment of stone silence from the other end of the line. “Have you told Mr. Tuchio about this?”

“I don’t know how to get ahold of him on a holiday,” I say.

“Leave that to me,” he says. “He’ll have to have somebody from his office or forensics pick it up.”

“Good.”

“Stay there until they come. Be in chambers before court tomorrow morning. Let’s make it seven
A.M.
,” he says. “In the meantime don’t touch the damn thing. Leave it for forensics.”

We hang up. There’s little sense in telling him, since I already have touched it, at least with the tweezers.

Before I talked to Quinn on the phone, I dispatched Herman to call our forensics expert, to track him down at home so that he can be here when Tuchio’s people show up to take the letter and the hairs back to the police crime lab. I don’t want the letter or the little bag of hairs going anywhere unless our own expert is glued to them.

Then I spend ten minutes with Harry hovering over the desk as I
pry open the folded pages using the forceps and the rag. It is ordinary twenty-pound copy paper, the kind you can buy in any OfficeMax. As soon as I got it open, I knew. Whoever made it used a color copier. The elegant hand-scripted letters bore the tobacco-colored hue of the original ink. The script had obviously been reduced in size, though it was still quite readable. The four pages are stapled at the top left-hand corner. It is identical to the image I recall from the video over the restaurant table, the letter laid open as Scarborough and Ginnis talked.

On the copy you could see the outline of the outside edges of the original, larger page on which the script was written, freehand with no lines. I tried to remember. On a trip to Williamsburg with Sarah several years ago, hearing a name for the page size commonly used in Jefferson’s day—a quarto or a folio, something like that. I wondered if this was it.

I had Harry clean the glass surface on the copy machine, no chemicals just a damp cloth and elbow grease. Then he dried it thoroughly.

We both checked to make sure there were no fibers from the cloth left behind on the glass that might stick to a page and send the crime lab on a wild-goose chase. Then I took the pages.

Harry and I agreed that we could not remove the staple. The holes and the missing staple are something forensics would pick up on immediately. Also, if the dinner video of Scarborough and Ginnis comes into evidence, the missing staple becomes a problem in terms of comparison. And we wouldn’t dare try to replace it. You could never get it precisely in the same place, not so that a forensics expert wouldn’t know, and there is no doubt evidence of blood on the original staple.

Consequently we were left to ham-hand the copying process. With Harry helping me, four ham hands being better than two, I held each scripted page down on the screen of the copier as Harry supported the other pages, trying not to bend or tear them from the stapled corner. Each page was copied with the copier cover up and out of the way. Doing this, holding the pages between pieces of cotton cloth took more than five minutes. Harry was sweating so profusely that he was afraid he might drip on one of the pages.

We took particular care with the last page, the one with the filigree of blood on the center fold on the back. I knew that this would be critical, that the pattern of these little spots was now most likely the key
item of evidence in our entire case. I tried to copy the scripted side as best I could without entirely flattening the paper.

I also copied the front of the large envelope with the label, not that it was going to tell us much without a return address or postmark.

Then I took a long, deep breath. I wasn’t sure this was a good thing to do, but I was going to do it anyhow. The way you might gingerly handle a touchy detonator on a bomb, I carefully laid the back of the last page on the glass surface of the copier. This was the side with the filigree of blood across the center. I left the other two folds, the top and bottom third of the page, sticking straight up, and with the cover of the copier lifted, I pushed the “copy” button again. As the heat of the light element from the copier warmed my face, I prayed that it would do nothing to impair or destroy the spiderwebs of dried blood touching the glass.

After taking photos of the pages, including the blood on the back of the last page, I placed the call and waited for Quinn to call back.

Ninety minutes later, with our forensics expert already at the office, a uniformed officer and a plainclothes investigator from the D.A.’s office arrived to collect the transfer box with the Jefferson Letter, the envelope, and the small Ziploc bag containing the strands of hair. Together with our forensics expert, the whole caboodle headed for the crime lab.