Supreme Justice (13 page)

“It’s definitely him,” Arnie Lasswell told Max Dietz.

Dietz’s eyes moved back and forth between a crime-scene photo of the dead man and a still from the DVD. When he was satisfied that he’d seen enough, his lips curled into a malevolent smile.

“The bitch killed him,” Dietz said. He needed Sarah Woodruff to be guilty almost as much as he needed air. After the Woodruff fiasco, Jack Stamm had humiliated him by taking him out of Homicide and putting him back in the drug unit.

“Max, please don’t jump to conclusions again,” Lasswell warned. “I brought this to you because you were lead counsel on the first case. Don’t make me sorry.”

“She probably figures that we wouldn’t charge her again after what happened in her first case,” Dietz said, more to himself than Lasswell, “but she’s not going to get away with this.”

“We don’t have any evidence pointing to Sarah Woodruff as our killer,” Lasswell warned.

“Of course, we’ve got to do a thorough investigation,” Dietz said to placate the detective, who would have been a pretty poor detective if he didn’t see that Dietz’s answer was completely lacking in sincerity. Before Lasswell could respond, his cell phone rang.

“Remember Ann Paulus, the neighbor who called 911 the first time Woodruff was arrested?” Lasswell said when the call ended.

“Yeah.”

“She wants to talk to me about something she saw at Woodruff’s condo about a week ago.”

Ann Paulus, a trim blonde in her midthirties, worked as a nurse at Oregon Health & Science University, the large hospital that sprawled across the southwest hills just above downtown Portland. Paulus met Lasswell and Dietz in the lobby of OHSU’s main medical building and led them to a sitting area near the counter where patients checked in.

“This is very strange, isn’t it?” Paulus said.

“Strange how?” Lasswell asked.

“Well, it’s déjà vu, like the first time all over again. There’s a fight at Sarah Woodruff’s house. I call. The police come. It’s like time rewound. The first time Finley wasn’t dead, but now he is.”

“I see what you mean. How similar are we talking about?”

“Very. They were arguing . . .”

“You saw Mr. Finley and Ms. Woodruff arguing?” the detective asked.

“No, but I heard the argument.”

“But you saw Finley go into Woodruff’s place?”

“Yes. It was around eleven. I was getting ready to go to bed and I went into my kitchen to get a glass of milk. The curtains were open. He was going inside.”

“And you’re certain it was Finley?”

“It was only a brief glimpse, but I’m pretty certain.”

“OK, so what did you hear?”

“Yelling and a loud bang, maybe two bangs.”

“Gunshots?”

“That I can’t say. But it was a bang.”

“Could it have been something slamming into a wall or something breaking?” Lasswell asked.

“It was more like a crack than something slamming into a wall, but I want to be fair. I don’t want to guess.”

“Which is good. But I have a question. The first time, when we were mistaken about Mr. Finley being murdered, you called the police right away. This time you waited several days. Why?”

“To tell you the truth, I felt very guilty after it turned out that Mr. Finley was alive. If I hadn’t called, Miss Woodruff wouldn’t have been in trouble. It must have been awful for her—the publicity, the trial, everyone thinking she was a murderer when she wasn’t. And I felt responsible for all of it. So I decided to keep out of it this time.”

“But you did call.”

She nodded. “When I heard that he’d been murdered, I knew I had to.”

“Mr. Finley’s body was found on Wednesday morning,” Lasswell said. “When did you hear the argument?”

“Well, that’s the thing. Today is Tuesday, and I didn’t call until today because I didn’t know that Mr. Finley was dead. I didn’t read the paper that had the story. This morning, Joan Pang, another nurse, asked me what I thought about Finley being killed. She was off last week, and I didn’t see her yesterday, so we didn’t talk. So I didn’t know about this until this morning. Then I tried to think back to when I heard the fight, and I think it was last Tuesday, but I’m not one hundred percent sure.”

“But you did see Finley?”

Paulus nodded.

“What about Miss Woodruff?” Dietz asked. “Did you see her when Finley went inside?”

“No.”

“So you can’t say Finley was in the house with Woodruff?” Lasswell said.

“No, it could have been someone else in her house. But who would it be?”

Lasswell and Dietz talked to Paulus for twenty more minutes before thanking her for her help and walking back to their car.

“What do you think?” Lasswell asked the deputy DA.

“I think we’ve got enough for a search warrant, and this time I’m going to get her, Arnie. I can smell it.”

Jack Stamm was a bachelor whose passions were law and distance running. He had thinning wavy brown hair, kind blue eyes, and a ready smile that made voters forget that he was north of forty.

“Sit down,” Stamm said, motioning Monte Pike, Max Dietz, and Arnie Lasswell toward three chairs that had been set up on the other side of his desk.

“Monte,” the DA said, “we’ve had an interesting development in an old case. Fill him in, Arnie.”

Lasswell turned toward Pike. “A hiker discovered a dead man on a trail in Tryon Creek State Park.”

“I heard about that,” Pike said.

“The man had been shot somewhere else and dumped in the park along with a duffel bag that contained clothing and a handgun. Also in the duffel were four passports and other ID. They were all for the dead man but in different names. One of the names was John Finley.”

“John Finley, like the guy who rose from the grave?” Pike asked.

“The same,” the detective said.

“Holy shit!” Pike’s eyes were bright and a huge grin spread across his face.

“Yesterday, Ann Paulus, Sarah Woodruff’s neighbor, told me that she saw Finley going into Woodruff’s condo. She’s not a hundred percent certain of the day, but she’s pretty sure it was the evening he was killed. She also heard an argument and a loud bang—maybe two—from the apartment.

“This morning, Dick Frazier called me from the crime lab with some very interesting news. During Finley’s autopsy, the medical examiner found two hollow-nose, Smith & Wesson 140-gram bullets. She sent them over to the crime lab. Dick made a digital image of the bullets by putting them on a microscope and rotating it. Then he scanned the images into a computer and ran them through IBIS, the Integrated Ballistics Identification System.

“Three years ago, we investigated a gang- and drug-related murder. The victim was killed by a hollow-nose Smith and Wesson 140-gram bullet fired from a .38 Special. According to IBIS, the bullets that killed Finley and the bullet that killed the victim in the gang slaying were fired from the same gun. When I went down to the evidence room to retrieve the gun it wasn’t there.”

“Where is it?” Pike asked.

“That is a mystery. It was introduced during the trial, but we don’t know what happened after the conviction, although I now have a strong suspicion. According to the log sheet, the gun was returned to the evidence room after the trial, and there is no record of it being taken out after that. The verdict was appealed, so I thought the gun might still be in the court of appeals, but they don’t have it. What’s important here, though, is that Sarah Woodruff was one of the officers who worked on the gang slaying, and the log sheet showing that the gun was returned has her signature on it.”

“You think Woodruff logged in the gun but stole it?” Pike said.

Lasswell nodded.

“Then killed her boyfriend,
again
?” Pike asked gleefully.

“Right now, she’s our prime suspect,” Lasswell said.

“I’m already working the case with Arnie,” Dietz told Stamm. “I’d like to prosecute.”

“I know you would,” Jack Stamm said. “That’s why I called you in here. I wanted you to hear this from me, not secondhand. I’m giving this case to Monte.”

“But—” Dietz started.

Stamm held up his hand. “You want to redeem yourself. That’s natural. But you’re too emotional about Woodruff.”

Dietz cast a quick glance at Arnie Lasswell. Had the detective complained about him to Stamm?

“I want someone with an open mind handling the case,” Stamm continued. “Monte is going to be lead counsel, and you’re not going to be involved. I know that’s harsh, but I’ve given this a lot of thought, and that’s how it’s going to be.”

Anger darkened Dietz’s complexion. “If that’s your decision . . . ?”

“It is,” Stamm said.

“I was preparing for a trial,” Dietz said. “If you don’t need me anymore . . .”

“Sure, Max,” Stamm said. “And don’t think my decision affects my high opinion of your work as a whole. I just don’t think you’re the best person for this case.”

Dietz was too furious to speak, so he just stood up and left the room.

Stamm turned his attention to Pike. “Tread carefully, Monte. This blew up in our faces the first time through. I do not want to find myself on national television apologizing to Sarah Woodruff again.”

Max Dietz stomped back to his office with his shoulders hunched and his fists clenched. A pulse beat in his temple. When he’d shut the door and slumped onto his chair, he closed his eyes and took long, deep breaths to get his emotions under control. He knew he had to do something if he didn’t want his career to unravel completely, and he couldn’t think in his present state.

When he was relatively calm, Dietz took stock of his situation. He had been in Stamm’s doghouse ever since the debacle that was the first Woodruff case. Convicting Sarah Woodruff of murder would save his career, but he wasn’t going to get that chance. Max had once been the heir apparent to Stamm’s throne. Now Pike was Stamm’s new golden boy. What could he do about that?

A sudden thought jolted Dietz upright in his chair. He knew something Pike and Arnie Lasswell didn’t. He knew about the
China Sea
. He hadn’t told anyone about Tom Oswald’s information. If anyone had gotten the bright idea that it was
Brady
material, he would have been forced to tell Mary Garrett what he knew, and Garrett would have argued to the jurors that John Finley was killed by drug dealers or spies.

But what if Finley
had
been killed by drug dealers or spies? What if Monte Pike indicted Sarah Woodruff and took her to trial, and it turned out that drug dealers or government assassins had killed Finley? Monte Pike wouldn’t look like such a hotshot then, would he? The little prick would suffer the same humiliation Dietz had suffered, and Max would be the smart one again.

Dietz pulled out a legal pad and started to jot down ideas. He needed information, and the only people who could provide information in a situation like this were insiders. Dietz wrote the names of contacts in the FBI, the U.S. Attorney’s office, and . . . Dietz grinned.

Max had met Denise Blailock four years ago while they were working on a joint task force investigating Miguel Fuentes, the advance man for a Guatemalan cartel that was trying to make inroads into the local heroin trade. The DEA agent was pale and plain with washed-out brown hair, but she had a nice smile and a body that had attracted the DA’s attention the minute she’d entered the conference room.

Dietz’s second wife had walked out on him two months before he met Denise, and he hadn’t been laid since. When the task force meeting broke up, Blailock and Dietz had dined at a local steak house. During a dinner of T-bones and scotch, Dietz learned several important things about the federal agent. First, she was totally devoted to her career in the Drug Enforcement Administration. Second, as a result of a brief, savage, and regrettable teenage marriage, the only serious relationship she was interested in was the one she had with her job. Third, she was a strong proponent of recreational sex, in which the couple had engaged after dinner at a motel by the airport.

Dietz and Blailock had seen each other occasionally since their first tryst, the longest stretch being a week in Las Vegas the previous winter. Dietz dialed DEA headquarters and asked Blailock if she was doing anything after work. Over dinner, the DA filled in his friend on the downward path his career had taken since the Woodruff fiasco and his plan to restore his fortunes. Blailock told him that she’d never heard of the
China Sea
or the incident in Shelby, but she promised to poke around.

Mary Garrett had been expecting a call from Sarah Woodruff ever since she’d read about John Finley’s murder. The first words Sarah spoke were tinged with panic.

“Mary, Arnie Lasswell is here—at my house—with another detective. They have a search warrant, and they want to question me.”

“Don’t say a thing, and put Arnie on the line.”

“Hey, Mary,” Lasswell said. The two knew each other because the detective had investigated a number of cases Mary had defended.

“What’s up, Arnie?” Mary asked.

“We have a warrant to search your client’s house and car in connection with John Finley’s murder. We’d also like to talk to her.”

“Can you tell me anything else, like why she’s a suspect?”

“Monte Pike is running the show. You’ll have to ask him.”

“What happened to Max?”

“I guess Jack wanted to try someone new this time around.”

“OK. Look, I’m coming over. I don’t want anyone talking to Sarah, understood?”

“Gotcha. I put her in the kitchen with a cup of coffee.”

“OK, and be gentle during the search, OK? Make sure nothing is broken or torn. You guys screwed up the first time. If Sarah is innocent this time, too, you won’t want to put the bureau and the DA’s office in an even worse light.”

“She’s a fellow officer, Mary, and I
am
sorry for what she went through. I’ll be gentle as a lamb.”

It took Mary twenty-five minutes to get to Sarah’s house. When the uniform at the front door let her in, she saw a team of police officers working their way through the living room and heard drawers and closet doors opening and closing on the floor above. Arnie Lasswell came down for a few minutes and laid out the ground rules, which included staying in the kitchen with her client and staying out of everybody’s way.

Mary made small talk with Sarah for a few minutes, then called Monte Pike on her cell phone. She’d had two cases with Pike, which ended in pleas, so she had not had a chance to see the young DA in action, but Mary’s impressions of the prosecutor were positive. Mary thought that Pike saw law as a game like chess and didn’t take his work personally. He was definitely smart and honest; he worked hard, but he had a good sense of humor.

“Monte, it’s Mary Garrett,” she said when they were connected.

“Yeah, Arnie said you were coming over to make sure his boys don’t steal the silverware.”

“With the mayor cutting down on overtime, I hear the rank and file are getting desperate.”

Monte laughed. “So, what can I do for you?”

“How about you tell me why you’re sifting through Ms. Woodruff’s lingerie.”

“Why did I think that would be your first question? God, I hate being right all the time.”

“And?”

“I’ll tell you some stuff but not everything. A grand jury hasn’t even been convened—and it may never be—so I’m going to keep some info close to the vest. I will tell you that Ann Paulus, the neighbor who called 911 in the first case, saw Finley go into your client’s house. She’s pretty certain it was the evening of the murder.”

“Why only pretty certain?”

“That’s for me to know and you to find out until I’m required to give you discovery. But I will tell you she heard arguing and what she thought might have been a shot or two. And that’s it for now.”

“OK. Will you give me the courtesy of telling me if you indict Ms. Woodruff?”

“Sure thing.”

“Will you let her surrender herself?”

“I guess she’s entitled to a little leeway in light of the mess we made last time.”

“Are you certain you’re not stepping in it again?”

“Unlike some people who shall remain nameless, I don’t shoot first and ask questions later.”

“What are you thinking about for a charge?”

“You want to know if I’m going for a lethal injection?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know enough to answer that question right now.”

“Fair enough.”

“Honestly, Mary, I sincerely hope this search is an exercise in futility. I don’t enjoy making life difficult for someone who’s already had one awful experience with the justice system. But I’ll go after Ms. Woodruff full-bore if I believe, beyond a reasonable doubt, that she murdered John Finley.”

As soon as the last police car was out of sight, Mary got down to business.

“Monte Pike is in charge of your case, and he isn’t a loose cannon like Max Dietz. This guy is very bright and very methodical. He didn’t tell me much, but he did tell me that your neighbor, Ann Paulus, will testify that she saw Finley go into your condo around the time he was killed. Was he here?”

“Yes. The bastard broke in.”

“Why would he do that?”

“He said he was on the run.”

“From whom?”

“He wouldn’t tell me. He said I would be in danger if I knew.”

“If he was on the run, why did he go to your place?”

“He came back for his duffel bag. He said there were passports and ID in different names he could use. He’d hidden the bag in my house just before he was kidnapped.”

“Pike told me the neighbor heard an argument and possibly shots.”

“There was an argument, but I didn’t shoot John, even though I was tempted. When I caught the bastard sneaking around my house, I thought he was a burglar. I fired a shot into the floor at his feet.”

Mary had seen an officer digging something out of the floor in the hall. She made a note to ask if it was a bullet.

“When I saw who it was, I went ballistic. The son of a bitch ruined my life, Mary. I’m pushing papers, my chances of making detective are slim and none, I was humiliated and forced to stand trial. I let John know what I thought of him. That’s when he explained what happened and why he couldn’t help me right away. I calmed down a little after that and told him to take the duffel bag and get out. When he left, he was alive and well.”

“What did Finley tell you?”

“He said he was a navy SEAL with contacts in the CIA. After he left the military, he freelanced for the Agency on occasion, and they took him off the books so anyone who checked on him wouldn’t know about his background. TA Enterprises was created to purchase and refit the
China Sea
and to provide money to finance the operation that almost got John killed.”

“Tell me about that.”

“John told me that the
China Sea
was anchored in the Columbia River near Shelby. On the night he was kidnapped, she had just returned from a rendezvous at sea where she’d picked up a cargo of hashish from a freighter from Karachi, Pakistan. John guessed that the hashish was going to be sold to pay for covert operations that couldn’t be financed from budgeted funds because they were illegal.

“John told me that a crew member named Talbot murdered the rest of the crew. John killed him in a gunfight, but he was wounded. My house was the only place he could think of, so he drove here. He still had a key. He’d just finished hiding the duffel bag when two men broke in and attacked him.

“John thought that Talbot didn’t know that the CIA was behind the smuggling operation and thought John was just another drug dealer. He thought Talbot cut a deal with a Mexican named Hector Gomez to steal the hashish. John’s kidnappers worked for Gomez. They took him to a deserted spot and were going to kill him, but a team of government agents rescued him. Everything that happened on the ship was kept quiet so the people who were going to buy the hashish wouldn’t get alarmed and back out.”

“Why didn’t John come forward earlier?”

“He couldn’t stop my prosecution without blowing the deal. After he sold the hashish, he insisted on helping me. That’s when he made that video.”

“If I can corroborate your story, I might be able to convince Pike to drop the case against you.”

“God, Mary, I hope so. I can’t go through another trial.”

Woodruff had been fighting to keep her composure, but she suddenly burst into tears and buried her face in her hands. Mary felt helpless as she watched her shoulders shake with each wrenching sob.

“I didn’t do anything. You have to believe me. If anyone killed John, it would be the drug dealers or the CIA. I just wanted John out of my life.”

“Well, he’s back in it. Hopefully, he won’t be for long.”