Double Tap

CHAPTER THREE

I introduce myself.

Ruiz smiles, a little sheepishly, and shakes my hand. But it is his first stated concern that would endear him to most lawyers.

“One question,” he says. “How the hell am I supposed to pay you guys? You do understand I’m out of a job right now?”

Except for his Army pension, which isn’t much at present, Ruiz has no means of support.

“For the moment somebody else is picking up the tab,” I tell him.

“Who?”

“An organization of retired military men. People like yourself. Some of them started businesses and have been quite successful. They set up a trust fund some years ago. Our firm has handled criminal cases for them in the past. We got the call on your case.”

“Kendal told me you would be coming by. You come well recommended.”

“I appreciate that.”

“So, you’ve done cases like this before?”

“You mean paid for out of the fund?”

“I mean a murder case.”

Though he doesn’t say it, what he means is a death case, a trial in which capital punishment could be the ultimate result.

“Yes, I have.”

“I hope you won them all.”

I smile. “I have never had a client executed, except once.”

He looks at me with a somewhat stark expression.

“I never took much pleasure in the result.” I change the subject. “This is my partner, Harry Hinds.”

He shakes Harry’s hand. “Mind if we sit? Ankle chains start to wear on me if I stand too long.”

“Please.”

Ruiz half steps, dragging the chains on the concrete floor toward the stainless-steel table with its welded benches on each side like a metal picnic table. It is bolted to the floor against one wall in the small conference room on the third floor of the jail.

As Ruiz angles himself onto one of the benches, Harry taps on the thick acrylic window in the door. The guard opens it and looks at him through the crack.

“Maybe you could take the ankle chains off our client,” Harry tells him.

The guard shakes his head. “Sorry. Can’t do it.”

“Why not?”

“Orders.”

“We see clients here all the time. This is the first time-”

“First time for everything.” The guard closes the door in Harry’s face.

Ruiz laughs. “That’s good, you talk to them. Kendal didn’t have any more luck than you just did. Only time they take the chains off is in court. And then there’s six of ‘em in uniform hanging over me like a dark cloud.”

“I’ll talk to the sheriff. If I have to, I’ll get a writ.” Harry makes a note.

“You’re hired.” Ruiz looks at me and smiles. “You wouldn’t have a cigarette, would you?”

I don’t, but Harry does. My partner’s fallen off the smokeless wagon again. He offers one to Ruiz, then lights it for him.

Ruiz takes a long drag, sucking the noxious vapor deep into his lungs, then settles back onto the bench seat and blows a smoke ring toward the ceiling. “Startin’ to like you guys already,” he says. “Now, if you could just get me a good-lookin’ woman. .” He takes another drag, holds the smoke for a few seconds, then expels it through his nose. “Good-lookin’, hell,” he says. “‘Bout now anything would look good. Four months in this hole. It’s not that I haven’t been in worse places, you understand. It’s just that in those other places, they did things every once in a while to keep you entertained-break the monotony, so to speak.”

“Where was this?”

“Different places. Other countries. You know what they say: ‘Join the Army, see the world.’ Or is that the Navy?”

“What exactly did they do to entertain you? In these other places?” Harry wants to know.

“Oh. Sometimes they might use your tongue for an ashtray, put out their cigarettes on it. Other times they’d clean your fingernails with a knife.” He holds up his right hand and waves the fingers as if to show us a ring. “Drive it right up in there,” says Ruiz. The nails from the middle two fingers are gone. Just a little cuticle and wrinkled skin remaining. “Then, for a little variation on the theme, they’d wake you in the morning with a good beating, either truncheons or a cane, depending whether they wanted to work on the bottom of your feet or your back and legs. But these assholes”-Ruiz gestures with a slight nod of the head toward the guard outside-“they just leave you in your cell twenty-three hours a day.”

“Some of my other clients claim they beat the crap out of them over here all the time,” says Harry. “If you like, I can talk to the guards, see what I can do.”

Ruiz laughs. “No, thanks. But maybe you can see if you can get me out of here. What are the chances of bail?”

This is not likely. A capital case involving a high-profile victim, a defendant with few contacts in the community, and a penchant for travel. . If Ruiz were to disappear, the judge who sprung him would have a lot of questions to answer. We put the issue of bail on the back burner for now.

He takes another drag, removes the cigarette from his mouth, and looks at it as he inhales the smoke deep into his lungs. “Kendal’s people, none of ‘em smoke,” he says. “Health nuts every one. Gonna live forever, I suppose. Fucking humorless bunch to boot. Don’t know why I miss ‘em so. Bit of a mystery, though.”

“What’s that?” says Harry.

“Why did Kendal quit the case?” he asks. “He pitched it in right after the preliminary hearing. I thought he did a pretty fair job. I mean, he couldn’t have expected to win there, what with all the evidence they had stacked up against us like that.”

“You think they’re out to get you?”

Ruiz is looking at the guard outside the door as I ask the question.

“What, him? No. He’s just doing his job. Working stiff like me. He’s gonna do whatever they tell him. But Kendal pisses me off. No excuse to cut and run. And I thought we hit it off pretty well. Then he ups and quits on me. I wasn’t mad at him for losing the prelim. Hell, anybody could have done that.”

“I trust you’ll cut us the same slack if we lose at trial,” says Harry.

“Your partner’s got a good sense of humor,” he tells me. “You I’m still trying to figure out.”

“According to what I understand, Mr. Kendal had a conflicted calendar. Two other trials coming up,” I tell him.

“Yeah, that was the story he told me, too.” Ruiz is busy bending over, sitting on the bench, adjusting the chains on one ankle, cigarette dangling from his lip as he glances up at me from under hooded lids. “Still, it would be nice to know exactly how they got to him.”

“Who’s ‘they’?” Harry wants to know.

“Who’s ‘they’?” says Ruiz. “Who do you think? The government, that’s who.”

“Why do you think the DA-”

“I’m not talking about the DA. I said the government. There’s only one government counts in this country, and that’s the federal government, as in U.S.”

Harry dances his pupils in my direction, the kind of look he normally reserves for clients relegated to a padded cell.

“Yeah, I know. But if you want to analyze me, at least let me lay on the table.” Ruiz sniffs Harry’s judgment from the ether in the room without even looking up. “We’ll see how long it takes them to reach you.”

“What makes you think the federal government is on your case?” I ask.

“That’s not it at all. They’re not out to get me. Not in the way you think. The fact is, I happen to be convenient. In the right place at the wrong time, so to speak. What they want is this thing with Chapman to go away and with as little fuss as possible. A quick conviction and a closed case, and right now I’m what you might call handy. Like a Kleenex. It’s nothing personal. Just another interchangeable unit to be used by people in high places.” He lets the ankle chains drop down over the tops of his canvas slip-on sneakers again and looks up at me to see if I’m following.

“You have to understand, I’ve been doing this for a long time, watching people get killed and killing people.”

“You what?” says Harry.

“In the military,” he says. “It’s called combat.”

“Oh. Right.”

“I didn’t kill Chapman, if that’s what you’re thinking. I would never do anything like that. I know it’s hard for some people to believe. They think somebody’s trained to kill and it’s like a switch they can’t turn off. They get out of the military and they have to satisfy some itch to kill. It’s not like that at all. Most soldiers I know could live very contented and happy lives if they never saw another drop of blood as long as they lived. But it’s a funny thing: You pull a trigger in combat and they give you a medal. Do it in civilian life and they put you behind bars, or worse. But in this one it wasn’t me on their radar screen; it was her.”

“Who?”

“The victim. The murderee. Who else? Madelyn. Excuse me-Miss Chapman. It won’t do for me to be too familiar with the victim, her being dead and all, and me being the one supposed to have killed her.” He suddenly stops and looks at me. “She is still dead?”

“Oh, she’s dead all right,” I tell him.

“You had me going there for a moment. Thought maybe the people at Spook Central had come up with a new program to raise the dead. At least they haven’t changed that part of the script.” He takes a drag and exhales some smoke. “Of course they start swapping out bodies on us, no tellin’ where we’ll end up. Get me for doin’ JFK from the grassy knoll before they’re done. The fact I wasn’t born till years after the deed is only a minor setback for these people. Blink and they’ll change reality for you.”

“You’re telling us the government had a hand in this?” I ask.

“Who knows? Anything’s possible.”

“How well did you know the victim?” says Harry.

“Not well enough. Otherwise I’d probably have a better idea who killed her. As for the list of her boy toys, if you want that, you’re gonna want to call in a stenographer to keep from getting writer’s cramp.”

“Sounds like you knew her pretty well,” I say.

“We had our moments. I provided security. She provided the surprises. There was a fleeting period she fit me into her schedule between her morning massage and her eleven-o’clock staff meeting. She liked to be on top. In control. That was Madelyn, always on top and always in control. She’d be up there, jumping up and down like she was breaking some bronco, gripping the hair on my chest with one hand while she waved her little digital dictator in the air with the other. In between groans of ecstasy and elation, she’d lift the pause button and spout a quick memo on some new project or government contract so her secretary could type it up between bouts.”

“So you did have an affair with her?” There was some brief testimony at the preliminary regarding allegations, but since the defense never put on a case in this regard, it was unclear from the transcript what the line to be taken at trial would be.

“I don’t know that I’d go so far as to call it an affair,” says Ruiz. “Fact is, I probably wouldn’t have even mentioned it, except they have it on tape.”

“Let me get this straight,” says Harry. “You had a sexual relationship with the victim and the prosecution has a videotape of this?”

Ruiz makes a face, weighing and evaluating the terms used in the question, then shrugs his shoulders. “Yeah. That pretty much sums it up. It was one of those little cameras: you know, the kind about the size of an eraser on a pencil. Apparently one of our own people installed the thing in her office without checking. Caught the whole thing on tape. Unfortunately for me, the cops now have the tape.”

I can already tell what Harry is thinking. If the judge allows the DA to play that tape in front of the jury, moving pictures in living color of the defendant-who is now charged with murder-screwing the victim-who is now dead-chances of the state getting a conviction will go up about a thousand percent. And it won’t really matter who was on top.

“I take it this wasn’t part of the security contract,” says Harry.

Ruiz laughs. “No. It just sort of happened. Call it an after-hours thing. Off the books, you might say. Fact of the matter is, as I remember it, I was on my back, counting ceiling tiles, before I knew what she was doing.”

“She raped you,” Harry says. “There we go. We have a defense. The murder was a crime of revenge.” Harry looks at me and smiles.

“You’ll have to excuse my partner. He believes if you can’t defend a good murder case and have some fun in the process, you shouldn’t be doing it.”

“I see his point. The fact of the matter is, while I don’t exactly remember how it happened, I don’t remember saying no as I was laying there, either. And it’s not a case of repressed memory.” He says it before Harry can say anything.

“Oh, well,” says Harry.

“Not that it bothered me much. Consenting adults and all.”

“Still, you have to assume your employer might take a dim view,” I tell him.

“You, I suspect, must have a knack for business”-Ruiz points at me with the smoking cigarette, holding it between two fingers-“because that’s exactly the point Madelyn made when she came back for seconds a few days later and I said no.”

“She threatened you?”

“Not in so many words. She just wondered out loud what the people at Karr, Rufus would say if they heard I wasn’t servicing the contract to her satisfaction.”

“She said that to you?”

“In so many words, yes.”

“And what did you do?”

“We both laughed, and then she got on top.”

“I had an uncle was a night watchman,” says Harry. “He was always complaining it was such a boring job.”

“He didn’t work executive protection at Isotenics,” says Ruiz.

“So the prosecution is going to say that you had an affair with her and probably try to build on it from there.”

“How is that?” he asks.

“The usual scenario,” I say. “She tried to break it off. You refused. The jilted lover. A woman with lots of money. Fill in the blanks.”

“It was nothing like that.”

“Well, we’ll have our chance to tell the jury. But that’s likely to be their theory. That is, unless they have some other motive that’s better. Is there any other reason you might have wanted to kill her?”

“I didn’t kill her.”

“That’s not the point. The question is, did you have a motive?”

“No.” He shakes his head. “I liked her. Why would I want to kill her?”

“We could try a stipulation,” says Harry. “Admit that they had sexual relations. Specify the number of times this occurred. Try to sanitize it. Make it sound like an accountant’s audit report and hope we can glaze over the eyes of the jury. Try to keep the tape out of evidence.”

“I haven’t seen the tape, but I can’t imagine it’s all that bad,” says Ruiz.

“Fancy yourself a porn star, do you?” Harry quips.

“No, no. It’s nothing like that. I guarantee you, there’s nothing kinky on the tape unless somebody dubbed it in.”

“You’re thinking the federal government again?” Harry asks. “Do they have a federal office that does that kind of thing?”

“Come on, gimme a break,” says Ruiz. “We had a fling. A romp in the hay. I didn’t love her. She didn’t love me. Two adults, we enjoyed the moment. She went her way, I went mine. That’s all there was to it.”

“The problem is, she’s dead,” I say, “and somebody killed her.”

“But I didn’t do it.”

“Yeah, well, put that aside for the moment,” says Harry. “The more immediate problem is that videotape no doubt captures only a brief period in time when, as you say, the two of you were enjoying the moment. When passion was at its height, shall we say. That’s what the jury is going to see, and what they’re going to remember, not the rational attitude of two sober and mature adults after all the hedonism was over.” Harry pauses. “That leaves a lot of room for imagination. And therein lies a lot of room for mischief on the part of the wily prosecutor. Ordinarily I’d say they might not get the tape in, being as it’s so prejudicial. But in this case,” Harry reasons, “I might make an exception, because it may be the best evidence. In fact it may be the only evidence to substantiate their theory that you had an affair with the victim.”

“Ordinarily I’d say you’d be right,” Ruiz says, “but in this case. .”

“What?” Harry sits up straight. “You’re not gonna tell us you had an audience!”

“Not in so many words. But somebody did see us.”

“Who?”

“Chapman’s executive assistant. Gal by the name of Karen. I suspect that’s how the cops got the tape. I don’t know, but I suspect she probably gave it to them after the murder. She might have thought I had something to do with it.”

“Can’t imagine that,” says Harry. “Your gun being used, your holding over in the house with her, doing security.”

“You don’t think it’s looking too good,” says Ruiz.

“Let’s just put it this way: I don’t think anybody would have to threaten me to get me to drop out of the case.”

“You think Kendal took a hike because he didn’t believe he could win?”

Harry gives him a look that concedes the point.

Ruiz takes a deep breath and sighs.

“Let’s change gears for a moment. What is your marital status?” I ask.

“Why?”

“Are you married?” In the eyes of many jurors, cheating on his wife would compound the problem.

“Divorced,” he says.

“How long?”

“Almost six years.”

“Children?”

“Two. A boy and girl. My son is twelve, my daughter is seven. I don’t want them involved in this.”

“Children sitting in the courtroom can be a big plus,” says Harry. “They don’t have to be there every day.”

“You heard me: the answer is no. Besides, their mother is not gonna let you or anybody else put them through that.”

“What about your wife?”

“Ex-wife. Tracy is remarried. She was young when we got hitched. Military life did us in. I was always gone. Not that she wasn’t faithful, but you know how it is: she got lonely. I was away from home for months at a time. After a while it seemed like we didn’t even know each other anymore. She’s not gonna come sit in a courtroom, I can tell you that. And she’s not gonna let the kids do it. It’ll be hard enough what they see on television. If I know Tracy, she’ll be pulling the plug on the set and canceling the newspaper subscription to keep them from seeing it.”

“Well, at least you didn’t have any ties at the time keeping you away from Chapman,” says Harry. “That’s something.” Harry makes the best of little favors.

“I have to admit, Madelyn wasn’t what you would call discreet,” says Ruiz. “I mean, she didn’t tell the world or wear a sandwich board with pictures. But she didn’t lock her office door, either. I guess her attitude was she owned the place, so if people didn’t like it they could quit.

“The secretary walked in on us.” Ruiz is talking about Chapman’s executive assistant. “What can I say? We both moved pretty quickly to cover up, but the secretary has to have seen what was happening. She walked in, looked, turned, and walked out. She seemed to look right through me like I was part of the furniture. Maybe she was just stunned. I don’t know.”

“So it was the secretary who must have told the cops about the tape?” I say.

“I don’t know,” says Ruiz. “My guess is word would have gotten around pretty fast. I didn’t know the camera was there. If it was being monitored we had a live audience. If not, somebody would probably have seen it sooner or later. Like I say, it was only the two times. The first time she came on strong and I backed away. Nothing really happened. Not that anyone is going to believe me. Then the tape. Then her personal security detail was canceled, my assignment changed, and the problem went away. Or at least I thought it did.”

“Why did she cancel security?” I ask.

“Beats the hell out of me. Maybe she was frustrated.”

“As far as you know, did she have affairs with anyone else?”

“She had guys over, if that’s what you mean. I mean, she wasn’t trying to hide the fact. Whether they were friends, business acquaintances, whatever. Don’t know their names. But several times they spent the night bouncing off the walls down the hall. I heard ‘em. So did the guy on the detail with me.”

“Problem is, that cuts both ways,” says Harry. “If he knew she was having affairs with other men, it could have fueled jealousy. It feeds right into their theory.”

Harry is right. But it also provides other suspects, other men who might have had a reason to kill her if they saw something they wanted bad enough slipping away.

“A couple of times she had us escort her to parties. You know, business things. On the way home she’d want to stop at this club downtown. We’d sit at one table, she’d sit at another. Guys would come up and talk to her. If she wasn’t interested she’d nod toward us and tell the guy that the bulge under our armpits wasn’t swollen lymph nodes and the fucker would vanish like vapor. When she got the one she wanted we’d all head home, my partner or I driving while she and her new friend did warm-ups in the backseat.”

“Sounds like the security detail didn’t cramp her sense of privacy,” I say.

Ruiz laughs. “The fact she had an audience probably added a whole new dimension as far as Madelyn was concerned.”

“And, of course, you didn’t mind?” I ask. “I mean, you didn’t feel in any way jilted?”

“What? That I wasn’t being used like a mechanical bull anymore? No. I grant you she was a good-looking woman, but as far as emotions were concerned, anything with Madelyn had all the depth of a kiddie pool. She could have gotten the same thing from a mannequin.”

We change the subject. “What do you know about the Information for Security program?” I ask.

“You know I signed a piece of paper when I went to work at Isotenics. It was given to me by my supervisor at Karr, Rufus. It said I wouldn’t discuss any what they call ‘proprietary information’ that I might have overheard when I was on duty. So I don’t know if I’m supposed to tell you.”

“They fired your ass and you’re facing a murder charge,” Harry points out. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“Yeah. You’re right.”

“So what did you hear?” says Harry.

“About IFS? That’s all they talked about. Information for Security. From what I gather, it was huge. Biggest project they had. Every time something broke in the press, some committee in Congress started cryin’ over privacy rights and people at Isotenics would all start filling sandbags and barricading the doors. They were busy stiffing two congressional investigating committees. I mean, you could hear them talking about it on the phones.”

“So you knew they were writing the software?”

He nods. “Sure. You hear things. Little bits here and there. You’re driving a car and they’re in the back on the cell phone, you can’t help but hear.”

“Do you know what the software is, how it works?”

He shakes his head. “Seen the stuff in the newspaper, that’s all. I’d read the stories ‘cuz I knew there was a connection. But other than that, when it comes to computers, I’m a man from Mars.”

“Did you ever meet any of the people involved in the program from the government side?” I ask.

“It’s possible. They had us pick up people at the airport from time to time. A few times we went out to the base at Miramar and picked up some uniforms coming in on military flights. Drove them out to Software City for meetings. But all you got was a name. They never told us what they were working on. There was one guy, though. I do remember him and his name did pop up on the program you’re talking about.”

“Who was that?”

“Retired general. Name of Gerald Satz. I’d seen his name in the papers. According to the articles, he was in charge of this IFS thing. From what I read he was hired as a civilian consultant. Thought it was sort of a strange selection myself. You know who the guy is?”

I nod. Gerald Satz, aka “Poster Boy for Perjury,” according to liberals in Congress; a stand-up warrior and top-notch soldier, according to his fans.

“I knew the name,” says Ruiz, “‘cuz I remembered hearing about him when I was in the Army and reading about it in the paper. According to what I heard, he had a long history working with spooks, intel agencies, black-bag shit. Satz had contacts buried in the bowels of governments on every continent. A man knows where the bodies are buried because he put half of them there. And he knows how to dig them up whenever it serves his purposes, or maybe the purposes of his prince. Satz is what some people might call a true believer.

“Some years back-I was a kid, so I don’t know the details-Congress got caught screwing with Satz’s constitutional rights,” Ruiz continues. “A committee took his testimony under oath. When they couldn’t get him on perjury, they tried to use his own testimony to indict him. The courts said they couldn’t do it.”

“It’s called use immunity,” I tell him. “You looked this up and read about it?”

He nods. “When one of our people was assigned to go pick him up at the airport. The man was coming to a meeting at Isotenics. I got curious and checked his history online. Sounds like maybe he beat the charges on technical grounds.”

“Suppose you could call that technical,” says Harry. “But from where I’m usually sitting, I’d call it a good result.” My partner has a problem with a political system that gives members of Congress a monopoly on lying.

“Still, it ruined his career. Forced him out of the military and still he’s hanging around. That’s what I call survival. Man sounds like a tough nut to crack. But what I found interesting is the fact that Satz and Chapman went back a long way.”

Harry raises an eyebrow and looks up from his notepad.

“Back twenty years ago, Madelyn came out of nowhere. Graduated from a small school in the Midwest with a degree in computer engineering and software design. She took a job working as a GS-3 for the government in Washington and three years later she was a technical adviser on the White House staff.” Ruiz looks at me and winks.

“Where I come from, they call that upward mobility,” says Harry.

“Where I come from that kind of upward mobility usually requires connections,” I say.

“Bingo,” says Ruiz. “General Gerald Satz. From the little bit I heard and saw, he was the key.”

“Did you ever meet him? Satz, I mean.”

“Heard about him a lot. He was what you might call a legend. Had a reputation for loyalty, not that that’s a vice. But in his case it bordered on fanatical. People convicted of crimes, if they were doing something everybody knew was illegal, but to Satz and others it was necessary, he’d stand up for them. Do it publicly. All the rest of the brass would be ducking for cover. Satz would be right there. It made him popular among the enlisted men, the NCOs. I was impressed when I first heard Madelyn mention his name.”

“How old is this guy?” says Harry.

“Satz? I don’t know. Probably early sixties. Don’t get the wrong idea: I don’t think there was anything physical going on between them. From what I know, it was more in the nature of what you would call paternal guidance. She worked for him. Did whatever he asked, long hours, never complained. In return he introduced her around. Madelyn did the rest.

“If you knew her, which of course you didn’t, you’d come to understand that with Madelyn, all it took was an opening, a crack in the door, and she was in. She had a natural talent for self-promotion. If you had a vital project, lives depending on it, and you were looking for somebody to put in a forty-hour workday to get it done before men died, Madelyn was your cookie. She could be efficient to the point of obsession.”

“Sounds like you knew her pretty well,” says Harry.

“Nobody knew Madelyn. Not really. Not if you mean the heaving, heaping boiler-stoked-with-white-hot-coals, engine-of-ambition Madelyn. And that’s what she was ninety-eight percent of the time.”

“And the other two percent?” I ask.

He looks at me but doesn’t respond.

“Where did you get all this information, the history on her and Satz?” I ask.

“Part of it came from Madelyn. Partly, bits and pieces, what I heard.”

“Go on.”

“The rest,” he explains, “requires a bit of faith. I don’t have any solid information. You sort of have to piece things together. Toward the end Madelyn was scared. Not all the time, mind you, but at times. Something was happening. I don’t know the details. But I do know that she and Satz had some kind of a falling-out. A serious disagreement. I don’t know what it was about, but it’s not a long leap to assume that it had something to do with this IFS thing, Information for Security. She was angry, she was pissed, but most of all she was scared. Madelyn was used to getting her way. But something had gone wrong.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. But from what I saw and heard, she was in a box and was having trouble finding her way out. Satz asked her to do him a personal favor. She told him she couldn’t do it.”

“She told you this?”

“Not in so many words. But I’m fairly certain.”

“What kind of favor?” Harry presses.

“I’m not sure. It had something to do with business. I assumed it had to do with IFS. The newspapers were full of it at the time. The news out of Washington was that Congress was going to kill the program unless they could find some fix for privacy issues. They don’t care if a few hundred soldiers get killed hunting. From what I heard, whatever it was that Satz wanted her to do, there were risks-more than she wanted to take-and their relationship, Chapman and Satz’s, had changed. She wasn’t some young staffer at the Pentagon anymore. Madelyn was big business, with a multibillion-dollar stake, and if I had to guess, given the sweat she was in, whatever Satz was asking her to do was threatening to put all that in jeopardy.”

“But you don’t know what it was that he was asking?” I persist.

Ruiz shakes his head.

“The last I heard, she was about to tell him she couldn’t do it. That was the last time I saw her.”

“When was that?”

“About two weeks before she was killed.” He looks at me as he says it, reading the expression on my face, which is one of surprise. This information is not in the file. Nor was it in any of Kendal’s notes that he passed to me. If Ruiz told any of his other lawyers about this, they knew better than to reduce it to writing.

Suddenly there’s a deafening sound, loud enough that it feels as if someone has driven a spike through my eardrums. Ruiz’s lips move but I can’t hear a word. I look at Harry and he has both hands over his ears. The Klaxon, a buzzer in a box high on the wall behind us, has erupted, drowning out everything else in the room.

The guard comes in waving his arms. He makes a motion, one finger across his throat. The interview is over.

Harry cups a hand over his mouth and then to my ear and, loud enough that I can just hear him, says: “Lockdown.”

Something has happened. Another guard comes into the room and we are quickly ushered toward the door. The last thing I see over my shoulder is Ruiz shaking his head, muffling his ears with his hands as the two guards pull them down and cuff them behind his back; he looks at me, wondering, I am sure, if and when he will see us again. Harry and I, my briefcase half open with papers sticking out, are hustled down the hall to the elevator.