Wild Justice (12 page)

31 The first thing that Bobby Vasquez noticed when Sheriff Mills ushered him into the long, narrow interrogation room was the hand. It had been printed and cleaned up, then placed in a large jar, where it floated in preservative that gave the skin a faint yellow cast. The jar was at one end of a long table in front of Fred Scofield. Scofield was in shirtsleeves, his collar undone and his tie yanked down away from his fleshy neck. It was warm in the room, but Sean McCarthy was still wearing a suit jacket and his tie was knotted. To McCarthy s right was a guy named Ron Hutchins from Internal Affairs who dressed like a mortician and sported a goatee. Sheriff Mills was in uniform. Scofield pointed at the hand. What do you think, Bobby? Ugly mother, Vasquez answered. Whose is it? Don t you know? Scofield asked. What is this, Twenty Questions? Sit down, Bobby, McCarthy said in a kind, nonthreatening way. Vasquez slouched onto an unoccupied chair. The sheriff sat behind Hutchins s shoulder. They were all facing him now. The theory was that he would feel overwhelmed, but he didn t feel anything at all. How are you doing? McCarthy asked with real concern. As well as anyone whose career has been ruined and who s facing bankruptcy and jail, Vasquez responded with a weary smile. The homicide detective smiled back. I m glad to see you ve kept your sense of humor. It s the only thing I still own, amigo. Where s your lawyer? Scofield asked. He charges by the hour, and I don t need him. I know how to plead the Fifth if I have to. Fair enough, Scofield said. You want something to drink? McCarthy asked. Coke, a cup of coffee? Vasquez laughed. Who s playing the bad cop? McCarthy grinned. There isn t any bad cop, Bobby. Besides, how are we going to con you? You already know all the tricks. I m not thirsty. Vasquez turned his attention back to the hand. You still haven t told me who this belongs to. This is the right hand of Dr. Vincent Cardoni, McCarthy said, watching closely for his reaction. We found it in the basement of the Milton County cabin. You re kidding! McCarthy thought that Vasquez s surprise was genuine. Dr. Death himself, Scofield answered. The prints check out. Where s the rest of him? We don t know. Poetic justice. I call it cold-blooded murder, Scofield responded. We have the rule of law here, Bobby. Guilt is decided at a trial. You remember, a jury of your peers and all that shit? You think I did this? Vasquez asked, pointing at the jar and its ghoulish resident. You re a suspect, McCarthy answered. Mind telling me why? Vasquez asked. He leaned back in his chair, trying to look cool, but McCarthy could read the tension in his neck and shoulders. You had a real hard-on for Cardoni. You screwed up your career to get him. Then Prochaska shot you down and Cardoni walked. What? I m gonna kill everyone who beats one of my cases? You wanted this guy bad enough to burglarize his house and lie under oath. Vasquez looked down. I m not sorry Cardoni is dead, and I m not sorry he was chopped up. I hope the sick son-of-a-bitch suffered. But I wouldn t do it that way, Sean. Not torture. Where were you on Thursday night and Friday morning? Scofield asked. Home, by myself. And no, I don t have anyone who can vouch for me. And yes, I could have driven to the cabin, killed Cardoni and returned unnoticed. McCarthy studied Vasquez closely. He had means, motive and opportunity, just like they say in the detective movies, but would Vasquez saw off a man s hand for revenge? There McCarthy was undecided. And if they could not decide, they were left where they started, with suspects but no grounds for an arrest. Art Prochaska denied murdering the physician and even had an alibi. Prochaska s lawyer had faxed over a list of five witnesses who would swear that they were playing poker with Prochaska from six P.M. on Thursday night until four A.M. Friday morning. The problem with the alibi was that all five witnesses worked for Martin Breach. What s your next question? Vasquez asked. We don t have any for now, Scofield answered. Then let me ask you one. Why are you so certain that Cardoni is dead? McCarthy cocked his head to one side, and Scofield and Mills exchanged glances. Vasquez studied the hand. You ve moved to reopen the motion to suppress, right, Fred? Scofield nodded. What s the chance that Judge Brody will grant the motion and reverse the decision to suppress? Fifty-fifty. If you win, Cardoni goes back to jail. What are your chances at trial? If I get to trial with what we found in the cabin and his house in Portland, I ll send him to death row. Vasquez nodded. There s a rumor that Martin Breach has a contract out on Cardoni because he thinks Cardoni was Clifford Grant s partner and stiffed him on the deal at the airport. We ve heard the rumor. Where is this going? Can a doctor amputate his own hand? Vasquez asked. What? Sheriff Mills exclaimed. You think Cardoni chopped off his own hand? McCarthy asked simultaneously. He s got a contract out on him placed by the most relentless son of a bitch I ve ever dealt with. If he escapes Breach s hit men, he s looking at a stay on death row. The only way the law and Martin Breach will stop looking for Cardoni is if they believe that he s dead. That s ridiculous, Mills said. Is it, Sheriff? Vasquez paused and looked at the hand again. There are animals that will gnaw off their own limb to get out of a trap. Think about that.

32 At eight o clock on a blustery Friday evening, Amanda Jaffe parked on the deserted street in front of the Multnomah County courthouse, showed her bar card to the guard and took the elevator to the third floor. Two weeks ago it had taken only one hour for the jury to find Timothy Dooling guilty of a horrible crime. The same jury had been out two and a half days deciding whether Dooling would live or die. What did that mean? She would soon find out. In the five years she had been working in her father s firm, the county courthouse had become Amanda s second home. During the day its corridors and courtrooms hummed with drama, high and low. Every so often there was even a little comedy. At night, absent the hustle and bustle, Amanda could hear the tap of her heels on the marble floor. As Amanda approached Judge Campbell s courtroom, she remembered the mob of reporters that had filled the Milton County courthouse during State v. Cardoni, her first death penalty case. The sad truth was that death penalty cases had become so common that Dooling s case merited the attention of only the Oregonian reporter with the courthouse beat. This was not the first time that Amanda had thought about Vincent Cardoni during the four years that had passed since his mysterious disappearance. The case had made her wonder whether she really wanted to practice criminal law. She stayed on the fence for two months. Then her legal arguments helped win the dismissal of unwarranted rape charges against a dirt-poor honor student who now attended an excellent college on scholarship instead of rotting in a cell for a crime he did not commit. The student s case convinced Amanda that she could do a lot of good as a defense attorney. It also helped her understand that every defendant was not like the deranged surgeon, although her present client came pretty close. Amanda paused at the courtroom door and watched Timothy Dooling through the glass. He was sitting in his chair at the counsel table, shackled and watched by two armed guards. It seemed absurd that anyone would be wary of a slip of a man barely out of his teens who tipped the scale at 140 pounds, but Amanda knew the guards had good reason to keep a careful watch on her client. The slight build, the wavy blond hair and the engaging smile did not fool her, as it had the young girl he had murdered. Even during those times when she felt relaxed in his company, the presence of the jail guards made her feel a lot more comfortable. She liked to think that Tim would never hurt her even if he had the chance, but she knew that was probably wishful thinking. The psychiatric reports and the biography Herb Cross had compiled made it very clear that Dooling was so badly broken that he could never be put together again. From the earliest age, his alcoholic mother had abused him physically. When he was barely out of diapers, one of her boyfriends had sexually assaulted him. Then he d been abandoned and placed in one foster home after another, where he had been the victim of more sexual and physical abuse. It was not an excuse for the rape and the murder, but it explained why Tim had become a monster. No one in her right mind would argue that Dooling should ever be let out of maximum security, but Amanda had argued that he should be allowed to live. There were good arguments against her position. Mike Greene, the prosecutor, had made all of them. Dooling turned when Amanda walked in and looked at her expectantly with big blue eyes that begged to be trusted. How are you feeling? Amanda asked as she set down her attachase and took her seat. I don t know. Scared, I guess. There were times, like now, when Amanda actually felt sorry for Dooling, and other times when she actually liked him. It was the craziest thing, something only another criminal attorney would understand. He was so dependent on her; in all likelihood she was Tim s only friend. How pathetically sad must a man s life be, Amanda thought, when his attorney was the only person in the world who cared about him? The bailiff rapped his gavel, and the Honorable Mary Campbell entered the courtroom through a door behind her bench. She was a bright, no-nonsense brunette in her early forties with short hair and a shorter temper who ran a tight ship. With Campbell running the show, her client had received a fair trial. That was bad news if the verdict was death. Bring in the jury, the judge told the bailiff. Across the way, Mike Greene looked grim. Amanda knew that he was feeling the tension as much as she was. She found this comforting, because Greene was a seasoned prosecutor. Amanda liked Greene, who had barely heard of her father when he moved to Portland from LA two years ago. It had been hard for Frank Jaffe s daughter to establish her own identity and reputation. Mike was one of the few DAs, lawyers and judges who did not think of her initially as Frank Jaffe s little girl. When the jurors filed in, Amanda kept her eyes forward. She had long ago quit trying to guess verdicts by studying the expressions on the faces of the jurors. What happens now? Dooling asked nervously, even though Amanda had explained the process to him several times. The judge gave the jurors four questions to answer. The questions are set out in the statute that governs sentencing in an aggravated murder case. The jury s answer to each question must be unanimous. If all of the jurors answer all of the questions with yes, the court has to impose a death sentence. If the answer of any juror to any of these questions is no, the judge has to give you life. A slender, middle-aged woman with gray hair stood up when Judge Campbell asked if the jury had a verdict. This was Vivian Tahan, a CPA with a large accounting firm. Amanda would never have let Tahan on if she d had a choice, but she had run out of peremptory challenges by the time Tahan was called and she had discovered no reason to ask for her dismissal for prejudice. The fact that the strong-willed Tahan was the foreperson made Amanda very nervous. Judge Campbell took the verdict forms from the bailiff and read through them. Amanda s eyes were riveted to the stack of paper. I m going to read the questions posed to the jurors and their answers to each, Judge Campbell said. I note for the record that each juror has signed the verdict form. On the first charge in the indictment, to the first question, Was the conduct of the defendant, Timothy Roger Dooling, that caused the death of Mary Elizabeth Blair committed deliberately and with the reasonable expectation that death of the deceased would result? the jurors have unanimously answered yes. During the guilt phase, the jury had found that Dooling acted intentionally when he strangled Mary Blair to death. There was a legal distinction between intent and deliberation, but it was the width of a hair. While the yes finding did not surprise Amanda, it still caused her heart to skip a beat. On the second question, Is there a probability that the defendant, Timothy Roger Dooling, will commit criminal acts of violence that would constitute a continuing threat to society? the jurors have unanimously answered yes. There were still no surprises. Timothy Dooling s first violent act occurred in third grade, when he set a dog on fire. They had never stopped, and they had gotten progressively more serious. The third question asked whether the defendant s action in killing the deceased was an unreasonable response to the provocation, if any, of the deceased. The only time this became an issue in a case was in situations of self-defense or long-term abuse. Dooling s victim had been kidnapped, held hostage for days and systematically raped and murdered. It was no shock that the jurors had unanimously found Dooling s conduct unreasonable. Amanda and Mike Greene leaned forward when Judge Campbell started to read the last question and the jury s answer to it. Question four was the only important one in most cases. The question, Should the defendant receive a death sentence? opened the door for defense counsel to present any argument against death that could be supported by evidence. Amanda had presented witness after witness to attest to the horrors of Timothy Dooling s childhood, and she had argued that the mother who gave him life had handcrafted him from birth to be the monster he had become. If one of the twelve jurors agreed with her arguments, Tim Dooling would live. To question four, Judge Campbell said, the jury has answered no by a vote of three to nine. Dooling sat stone still. Amanda did not move either. It was only when she saw the prosecutor s head bow that she knew that she had convinced three of the jurors that Dooling s life was worth saving. Did we win? Tim asked her, his eyes wide with disbelief. We won. Ain t that something. Tim was grinning. That s the first time I ever won anything in my whole life. Amanda returned to her loft at ten-thirty, exhausted but ecstatic at having beaten back her first death verdict. The loft was twelve hundred square feet of open space in a converted red-brick warehouse in Portland s Pearl District. The floors were hardwood, the windows were tall and wide and the ceiling was high. There were two art galleries on the ground floor and good restaurants and coffeehouses nearby. She could walk to work in fifteen minutes when the weather was good. Amanda had filled the loft with furniture and fixtures she loved. A solemn Sally Haley pear in a pewter bowl that cost a month s salary hung across from a bright and cheery abstract painted by an artist she had met in one of the street-level galleries. Amanda had discovered her oak sideboard in an antique store two blocks away, but her dining table had been crafted in a woodworker s studio on the coast. It was made of planks the artisan had salvaged from a fishing vessel that had run aground in Newport during a storm. Amanda flipped on the lights and threw her jacket onto the couch. She was too excited to go to sleep and too distracted for TV, so she poured herself a glass of milk and put two slices of bread in the toaster before collapsing in her favorite easy chair. Tim Dooling s case was her first capital murder as lead counsel. The pressure on her during the past nine months had been tremendous. Nothing had prepared her to handle a case where one mistake could result in the death of a client. When the verdict was read Amanda had not experienced the manic surge she d felt when she won her first PAC-10 swimming title; she had simply felt relieved, as if someone had removed an immense burden from her shoulders. The toaster dinged, and Amanda dragged herself to her feet. As she crossed the room she suddenly noticed how quiet it was in her loft. Amanda enjoyed her solitude, but there were times, like tonight, when it would have been nice to have someone with whom she could share her triumph. She had dated a few men since moving back to Portland. There had been a six-month affair with a stockbroker that had died a mutually agreeable death and a longer relationship with a lawyer from one of Portland s large firms who had asked her to marry him. Amanda had asked for time to consider the proposal, then realized that she wouldn t have to think at all if he was the one. Amanda wouldn t have minded having Frank to crow to, but he was in California with Elsie Davis, a schoolteacher who had been a character witness for a student Frank had defended. While interviewing her, Frank discovered that she had lost her husband to cancer and had stayed single for twelve years because she had never found anyone to take his place. Their cautious friendship had blossomed into a serious relationship, and they were on their first vacation together. Amanda buttered her toast at the kitchen table. While she sipped her milk she took stock of her life. On the whole she was happy. Her career was going well, she had money in the bank and a place she loved to live in, but she was lonely at times. Two of her girlfriends had married during the past year, and she was beginning to feel isolated. Couples went out with couples. Soon there would be children to occupy their time. Amanda sighed. She didn t feel incomplete without a man. It was more a question of companionship. Just having someone to talk to, who would be around to share her triumphs and help her up when she fell.