The Wrong Man (31 page)

I sat on the hotel room bed and read over some notes I’d made on the witnesses the prosecution would call tomorrow, the first day of the trial. I liked to outline my cross-examinations by topic matter only. If I write down specific questions, I become wedded to them. Regardless, the endeavor wasn’t a difficult one. I didn’t have much I could do with the prosecution’s case. The responding police officer, the forensic pathologist, the ballistics expert, the detective in charge? Those were probably the only four witnesses Wendy Kotowski would call. They would be all she needed before she punted the case to me.

It was a circumstantial case. But it was a pretty decent one. Tom was found with the murder weapon and the victim’s possessions. He ran when the police confronted him, though it wasn’t particularly hard to explain away. He admitted the gun belonged to him and, according to the state, at least, he confessed to the murder. And the place he carved out as his home in Franzen Park was nearby, so it’s not like he had to travel long and far to commit this crime.

What made their case better was the lack of a defense. My client wouldn’t deny killing Kathy Rubinkowski, and I couldn’t explain away his lack of memory on post-traumatic stress disorder because the judge wouldn’t let me.

Jeez, the judge had really screwed me on that ruling. He had a little law on his side, but I really thought he made a mistake. The appellate court
would take a hard look at that one, I felt sure. But no defense lawyer made his money counting on a reversal of a murder conviction.

I jumped at the sound of a knock at my door. It was ten o’clock, and I hadn’t ordered room service. I reached into the nightstand and removed my gun. Then I walked over to the door.

I stood away from the frame of the door and called out, “Hello?”

“Room service,” said a woman’s sweet voice.

I was pretty sure I recognized the voice, even in disguise, but I checked the peephole.

I opened up the door. Tori was wearing that wonderful long white coat and, yes, another pair of knee-high boots.

“Hello, Ms. Martin.”

She raised her hands in mock surrender. “Please don’t shoot me. I come in peace.”

“We’ll see about that.” I let her in and returned my firearm to the nightstand.

“Nice digs,” she lied. One room, plus a bath, crappy view, and peeling wallpaper.

Bradley was staying in a hotel a block away. He had a suite, and his security guard slept on the couch. Shauna also had a suite but with a locked door between her and her detail. Me, I had this crappy room, but I’d slept in worse places, like my house growing up.

I had offered Tori the same deal as Bradley and Shauna—a hotel and bodyguard—but she had declined, because her condo was very secure and, she noted, I couldn’t threaten to take her off the case if she refused, since she wasn’t really on it to begin with.

Since the night Tori broke down and gave in to my irresistible charms, things had been weird between us. She was still helping out on the case but the wall had gone back up. There was some remorse there, I sensed, or fear, or both.

She stood near the bed—it was hard to stand anywhere in the room and not be near the bed—and looked a little awkward as she gathered her thoughts. “I wanted to… say something,” she said.

“Shoot.”

She walked over to me, took my face in her hands, and planted a warm
kiss on me. It started as something quick, but then it lingered, and our mouths parted, and then our fingers were running through each other’s hair and we were tugging at clothes. Actually, I was only wearing a T-shirt and boxers, but she required more work. As I’ve mentioned, I normally enjoy that part, the undressing, but this time the clothes seemed to be an annoyance. I lifted her onto the bed and pulled down her panties and wasted little time exploring every wonderful angle and curve of her body.

I’ll bet it was the best seven minutes of her life.

Afterward, we caught our breath and stared up at the ceiling, her head tucked against my chest. There was a berry scent to her hair that stirred a memory I couldn’t place, but it was a happy one. Her body was like an electric blanket against mine.

“Please don’t cry again,” I requested.

She laughed. “I’ve been acting weird. I do realize that, if you’re wondering. I’m not sure how to handle this. I just want to be careful. That’s really all I came here to say. I know everything starts tomorrow and you need to focus.”

“Focus is not my problem,” I said. “Lack of evidence is. Lack of time is.”

She adjusted herself, turned so she was facing me, supporting her chin with her hands. “Would you like me to stay?”

I looked at her. “I would like that very much, Tori. You may not have noticed, but I’m not as conflicted as you are about our relationship.”

She took that in without comment.

“Okay, okay,” I assured her. “Not meant to pressure you.”

A smile crept across her face. She didn’t seem too comfortable with happiness, but I got the sense she was warming to the concept. “You want to order some room service? You can bounce ideas off me or whatever. That’s fun when we do that.”

It was fun. It had been the best part of this case, and not just because I was insatiably attracted to her. The truth was, Tori had helped this case immensely with her comments and ideas.

The truth was, I had to admit, I was letting this woman get inside me.

“Kathy Rubinkowski was a twenty-three-year-old college graduate who wanted to be a research scientist. It was her passion. And so while working a day job as a paralegal at a law firm, she went to school at night to get a master’s degree. She was like so many other young people living in our city—ambitious, dedicated, hardworking. She was chasing her version of the American dream.”

Wendy Kotowski was dressed in a simple gray suit. She spoke slowly to the jury in her opening statement, with her customary blend of nine parts clinical and straightforward, one part emotion and outrage. She had to make sure the jury saw that she cared about what happened to Kathy Rubinkowski, but otherwise she didn’t want to be the focus—the facts would be.

“January thirteenth of this year should have been no different than any other day. Kathy woke up that morning in her condominium in Franzen Park, at the intersection of Gehringer and Mulligan streets. She went to work at her downtown law firm and stayed until five-thirty. Then she went to her organic chemistry classes at night school from six to ten.

“She drove home and parked her car at some time approximating eleven that night. We’ll never know exactly what she had planned for the rest of that evening. Maybe she was going to study. Maybe she was going to veg out in front of the television. Maybe she was going to sleep. Or maybe she was thinking about tomorrow, which would be her twenty-fourth birthday, and the plans she had with her friends.

“But as I said, we’ll never know. Because she never saw her twenty-fourth birthday. She never saw her condo again. She barely made it past getting her bag out of the trunk of her car. Because on January thirteenth, at approximately eleven o’clock at night, Kathy Rubinkowski was accosted by that man, the defendant, Thomas Stoller.”

Wendy pointed at Tom, who was sitting next to me. His aunt Deidre had purchased a suit at a secondhand store that fit him, more or less, and I had thrown in a tie that I haven’t worn in ten years. I wanted him to look decent so he didn’t appear disrespectful of the proceedings, but by no means did I want him to look polished or buttoned up. It was one of the many artifices of the courtroom. The jury was forming initial and perhaps lasting impressions of Tom based on an appearance that bore absolutely no resemblance to reality.

“The defendant robbed Kathy Rubinkowski on that dark, lonely street,” Wendy said. “The defendant took her purse. He took her necklace. He took her cell phone. And he took something far more valuable. He took her life. He shot her in the head. He shot this defenseless woman right between the eyes.”

Most of the jurors winced or reacted in some way to those last sentences. She had delivered them well, for maximum impact. I would have said
he shot her in the face
, which sounded even worse. But Wendy was always one for understatement.

I paid close attention to how she phrased it.
He took her purse, her necklace, her cell phone, her life.
She implied that the robbery came first, then the shooting, but she didn’t explicitly detail an order of events. She wasn’t boxing herself into one particular theory. I knew what she thought—that Tom killed her first, then stole her possessions. The evidence lined up that way. But she had some problems with that theory and obviously knew it, so she was keeping things general for the time being.

Wendy recited the facts that would support her case. The murder weapon found in Tom’s possession, and the other things the police found with Tom: her purse, her cell phone, her necklace with the clasp broken, presumably yanked from her neck. Wendy brought each of these out individually, as if item after item implicated him ever further. I, on the other hand, would try to make them a package deal in the jury’s mind—if one link failed, the whole chain did.

She completed her opening statement in twenty minutes. Her case was pretty simple and straightforward.

“She didn’t mention the confession,” said Shauna.

Right. She was saving it. Understating her case. That was Wendy’s style. It would be a pleasant surprise, I guess.

The judge gave me the opportunity to give my opening. I’d already indicated that I would defer my opening until the defense case, because I wanted the element of surprise. I had lost Sergeant Hilton as a witness, but I had an idea as to how I could still use Dr. Sofian Baraniq, my expert. It was a gamble, but it was all I had.

“I’d like to defer my opening,” I told the judge. On balance, I thought, it was still the smart play.

I looked behind me. I caught Aunt Deidre’s eye, but that wasn’t the one I was looking for. I found him in the back row of the courtroom: Special Agent Lee Tucker of the FBI.

“Judge, I wonder if we could take a short break,” I said. We’d gotten a late start today, and it was coming up on eleven, so he probably wouldn’t give it to me. Lee would have to wait.

“Let’s try to get in a witness before lunch,” said the judge. “Ms. Kotowski?”

Wendy Kotowski stood.

“The state calls Officer Francis Crespo,” she said.

Officer Francis Crespo was a ten-year veteran of the city police department. He was built like a brick house and had dark features and a mustache. He was one of the patrolmen in the area when reports came in of the shooting on Gehringer Street.

“We weren’t the first to arrive,” he explained. “But we got the nod when the call came through about a sighting of a homeless man running through Franzen Park with a gun.”

“You ‘got the nod’?” Wendy asked.

“We were dispatched by the detective-in-charge on the scene to investigate. My patrol and Officer Downing’s. Cars eighteen and twenty-three.”

“Go on, Officer.”

“My partner and I proceeded by vehicle to Franzen Park.”

“Why a vehicle?” Wendy asked. “Wasn’t Franzen Park just a block away?”

“That’s correct, ma’am, but it’s a city block wide and long. So the northeast end of the park was a quarter-mile away. It made sense to drive there and be mobile by vehicle once there.”

“Fair enough, Officer. Where did you travel?”

“Officer Downing’s patrol took the south end of the park, and my partner and I searched the north end. When we searched behind the park district building, we found an individual sitting between two dumpsters. He had—”

“Excuse me, Officer. Do you see that person in court today?”

“That’s correct, ma’am. It was the defendant, seated there.” He pointed at Tom.

“Stipulate to identification,” I said.

“Go on, Officer.”

“Ma’am, he—the defendant had a purse in his lap and was rummaging through it. I shined my Maglite—my flashlight—I put my flashlight beam on him and announced my office. I saw to his immediate left a firearm sitting in the grass. A Glock pistol. My partner and I drew our weapons. I told the subject to raise his hands where I could see them.”

“His hands were in the purse?”

“That’s correct.”

“What did he do when you told him to raise his hands?”

“For a moment, nothing. I ordered him again to remove his hands from the purse. He did not.”

“But then—”

“But then his right hand came free and he looked up into the flashlight beam. His gun was to his left, so he wasn’t a threat to go for that weapon.”

He was covering his ass here.

“And then in one very quick motion, he lifted a two-by-four sitting next to him and threw it at me. Kind of a boomerang throw. He hit me in the chest and knocked my flashlight out of my hand.”

“And what happened next?”

“I fell backward, ma’am, and my partner had been circling around me from behind, so I fell into her.”

“The defendant got away on foot?” Wendy said, helpfully.

“That’s correct, ma’am. It’s embarrassing. But he got away. He ran west, and we chased him. He jumped the fence and ran north on Gehringer Street for approximately three blocks. We had radioed for backup, and two squad cars cut him off.”

“And then what happened?”

“The subject—the defendant—dropped to his knees and put his hands behind his head.”

“You took him into custody.”

“That’s correct, ma’am.”

Wendy took the officer through the retrieval of the evidence—the murder weapon, the purse, the necklace. They also found where Tom “lived,” so to speak, in Franzen Park, but they didn’t find anything related to the case there. Finally, she questioned him on the process of submitting the evidence at the police station.

The direct was finished at a quarter to noon. I was eager to talk to Lee Tucker, so I hoped the judge would recess.

“Cross-examination, Mr. Kolarich?” he asked.

“It will take us past the hour, Your Honor.”

“Cross-examination, Mr. Kolarich?” he repeated.

I got to my feet. A searing pain shot through my knee. I liked to move around the courtroom as I cross, but today it would be painful.