Prime Witness

Chapter Eighteen

“Let’s see what we’ve got,” I say.

“Not much from my end. Like I told ya, a pack a tree-huggers.” This is how Claude describes his telephone inquiries into the World Center for Birds of Prey.

Lenore’s back from the library, leaning against the edge of my desk. Claude’s in one of the client chairs on the other side.

“I checked with the Boise police,” says Dusalt. “It’s a research outfit, and a sanctuary for birds. Cops don’t know much about ’em. They pulled a few records for me, looked the place up on a map.”

“What do they do exactly?” I ask.

“According to the cops, they raise raptors.”

“You make it sound kinky.” Lenore winks at him.

“Birds of prey,” he says.

“I know.” She smiles.

“Hawks, falcons, birds of prey,” he says, “they hatch ’em, raise ’em, and let ’em go in the wild. A labor of love,” says Claude. “I’m told that the center is one of a kind. They take in birds from all over the world, breed them, and then do their thing to reorder the balance of nature.”

“Did you call the place, talk to anybody?”

“Yeah.” Claude looks at his notes again. “I tried for this guy William Rattigan.” If Nikki is right, this is the “Bill” from Karen Scofield’s computer files.

“He was away on business. I guess he runs the place. The director. That’s his title. The woman on the phone was cooperative, but she didn’t know a lot. Abbott Scofield was a regional representative for the center in this area, sat on its board of directors with Rattigan. They were involved in a number of projects together.”

“Did she say where Rattigan had gone?”

“East coast for a seminar. I got the number of the hotel he’s staying at. He was out so I left a message at the desk for him to call me back.”

“Anything else?” I ask.

He shakes his head and turns a blank page on his notebook.

I turn to Lenore. “What did you find?”

She’s been at the university library most of the afternoon.

“Guess how many listings?” she asks.

I shake my head, like I have no idea.

“Five,” she says.

Goya’s been playing with the computerized version of the Guide to Periodical Literature. Checking to see what she could find out about the center in any magazines or other publications.

She reaches into her purse and pulls out a long narrow sheaf of paper folded down the center. She opens it up. It’s several pages of letter-sized paper stapled together at the top left corner.

“This was the best of the lot,” she says, “out of Audubon.”

I open the photocopied article and read.

She takes it from my hands and turns a few more pages, then flips it around and drops it on the desk in front of me again, tapping one of the photos with her finger.

I look at the picture, a wooden tower built at the edge of some rocky precipice, a silhouetted figure climbing a makeshift ladder to the top. I read the cutline underneath.

On Idaho’s Grouse Peak, university ornithologist Abbott Scofield climbs to a hack box to place extra food for young peregrines.

“If you want my guess,” she says, “that’s the project he was working on when they were killed.”

Lenore has wandered into my office. “What are you doing for lunch?” she says.

I reach for my coat.

“My turn,” she says. She means to pay for lunch. The last two have been on me.

“I won’t argue.”

“You know,” she says, “the thing we talked about the other day. The Scofield evidence. There may be a way to get it in.” She means before the grand jury.

“Let’s walk and talk,” I say. We head out the door.

“It’s a little duplicitous,” she says.

I wrinkle an eyebrow.

“We’d be setting up the other side, just a bit.” She explains that there would be no deception on the court.

“All’s fair in that war,” I say. “Within limits. What’s your idea?”

“I’ve been doing a little research,” she says.

Neither of us is well versed in the aspects of a grand jury. To find the people best honed in this, you would have to go back through a generation of lawyers, most of whom are now retired.

“People v. Johnson,” she says. “What’s called a ‘Johnson letter,”’ she tells me.

I’ve seen the case before, somewhere, but can’t recall its rule.

She explains. It seems the courts have held that while the defendant has no right of representation before a grand jury, he has the right to insist that all exculpatory evidence, anything that could point to his innocence, be disclosed to the jury, which then can choose to look at it in detail, or not, as the jury chooses.

“What’s the ‘Johnson letter’?” I ask.

“It’s the mechanism the courts came up with to trigger the requirements of the case. If the defendant sends the prosecutor a letter,” she says, “demanding that certain evidence, deemed to be exculpatory, be given to the grand jury, the prosecutor has no choice. He has to disclose that evidence. If he doesn’t, it’s automatic reversal. The indictment will be quashed.”

I whistle, a high pitch. “A real silver bullet,” I say.

She nods.

We’re out the front door, down the steps.

“Where do you want to go?” I ask.

“How about Quiche Alley,” she says. This is the salad and soup spot a block away, light fare. We head in that direction.

“What I don’t understand,” she says, “is why you want to do it. The Scofield stuff could be dynamite. Confuse a jury with it and Chambers will turn it into the best defense going.”

“Very likely,” I say.

“We don’t charge his client with the Scofield murders, but instead admit that there’s probably another killer out there someplace, still on the loose. If I were defending, I’d love it,” she says.

“Exactly. You don’t think Chambers has already seen the possibilities in Scofield? He’d have to be a fool,” I say. “But it’s still an open question, how damaging the stuff would be.”

We walk a little further in silence. Then I speak.

“What are twelve innocent and objective souls going to say when they see the Scofield evidence at trial, when it’s mixed and stirred in a courtroom with the other testimony, the physical evidence? Is it going to explode in our faces, or go inert?”

She shrugs like she has no idea.

“Precisely,” I say. I look at her, a sideways glance as we walk down the street. “That’s why I want to take it in front of the grand jury,” I say, “to test-drive the case.”

She stops in mid stride and looks over at me, tracking on the strategy. She laughs a little. “Interesting,” she says, nodding her head. I can tell the wheels are turning upstairs. “He’s not there. Chambers isn’t there to see you do it.”

I smile. “Just like a shadow jury,” I say.

We start to move again, down the street.

It is the latest fad among the civil sharks who try the mega-buck tort cases. Hired, private focus groups, average citizens paid to be locked in a room for days with lawyers. There the attorneys sample their wares in advance of trial, their theories and evidence to see what will sell and what won’t, the best defenses. Mine is only a modest takeoff on this latest tool of litigation.

“But we won’t have to pay for it,” I say. “All we have to do is figure a way to get Chambers to ask that the Scofield evidence be played out in the grand jury.”

“That won’t be too hard,” she says.

I stop. I look at her.

“Simple,” she says. “We send him a letter telling him that it is not our intention to put the Scofield evidence before the grand jury, on grounds that it is irrelevant and could confuse jurors. We give him a citation to Johnson in the letter and let him read the law.”

I smile. Lenore Goya is becoming a quick study on the temperament and tactics of Adrian Chambers. Like blood to a shark, her correspondence will, no doubt, draw the quickest Johnson letter ever crafted by human hands in this state.

I smile at her. “My treat,” I say. Lenore has earned her lunch.