Prime Witness

Chapter Thirty

While I may be on the outs with the city’s power structure, at least today I have the admiring eye of Claude Dusalt. In the way that only happens in a small town, word has now filtered to the organs of law enforcement concerning my meeting with Ingel, the news that I’ve rejected a proposed plea bargain to spare the Russian’s life.

“How did you find out so fast?” I ask him. “I mean we didn’t finish the meeting till late yesterday afternoon.”

“If the judge doesn’t want things to get around,” he says, “he shouldn’t talk in front of his people.”

In Davenport County the Sheriff’s Department staffs the courts for security.

“Ingel’s bailiff,” I say.

Claude won’t say. But the answer is clear.

This news is probably all over the city by now. Dirt in the average cop shop travels faster than telepathy, and is generally more accurate than CNN.

“I thought such people took blood oaths,” I say, “I mean to work in the courts?” This is generally considered privileged duty.

“Working for Derek Ingel is not considered a choice assignment,” he tells me. “My source drew the short straw.”

From the inception Claude has been scrupulous in his dealings with me, tireless in his efforts to pursue every item of evidence I have requested. But there has also been a certain reserve in his attitude toward me, something more than the mere deference paid to a prosecutor. In his cop’s eyes, I think, I was marked by the sign of Cain; after all, I came from the criminal defense side of the bar. Nothing was ever said, but in his eyes, the subtle gestures of conversation, Claude revealed doubts concerning my commitment, whether I would go the last mile in this case.

My meeting with Ingel and Chambers, telling the judge to put his deal where the sun don’t shine, has put an end to Claude’s qualms.

He sits behind the wheel of his unmarked police unit, doing nearly seventy, on the ribbon of highway that rolls from the foothills down toward Capital City and Davenport beyond.

This morning’s errand was not one either of us much enjoyed. We have deposited Nikki and Sarah in what Claude now ridicules as our “safe house,” not his choice, but a compromise made necessary by Nikki’s continuing anger.

This morning she was fingerprinted at the Sheriff’s Department, a procedure required to eliminate her prints on the threatening letter, envelope and photo deposited in our mailbox. Still the cops found only one other set of latents when they dusted, my own, placed on the letter before I realized its contents.

Nikki feels violated, forced to be printed in the little room at the jail next to junkies and other collars waiting to be booked. She knows this is necessary, but still she wonders how and why she and Sarah have been ensnared in all of this. She is being forced to burn limited vacation time from her job until the trial is over. Her employer says he will carry her, off-salary, once all paid leave is consumed. This was time she’d been saving for an extended vacation for the family. Now it will be gone.

Nikki has exacted a price for all of this. “If I’m on vacation,” she told us, “then I’m going to stay in a resort.”

It is fortunate for me that my wife’s sense of high living is a small bed and breakfast in the little town of Coloma, the place where Sutter found gold and started the stampede to this state that has never ended.

We spent an anniversary there three years ago. Now Nikki is holed up there with Sarah and a pile of kindergarten workbooks, in a room with a brass bed, playing tutor to my daughter, at the Vineyard House. The building is a mammoth white pseudo-Victorian, dating from the nineteenth century, overgrown with wisteria and other clinging vines. It is said to be haunted by the ghost of a former owner, a man who suffered from dementia and was chained in the basement by his wife. This is a fate I fear for myself if I do not put a quick end to this trial. Such is Nikki’s growing sense of ire.

“I don’t know about that place,” says Claude.

“They’ll be fine,” I say. “They’re comfortable, and safe.”

“It’s too public for me,” he says. “A private house or an apartment would have been better.

“I’ve arranged periodic security,” he tells me. “El Dorado County Sheriff will keep a car patrolling in the area.” In the next breath he tells me that this is probably unnecessary.

Nikki is there, registered under an assumed name. We have paid cash for the room and I will be traveling to and from this place daily more than an hour’s ride each way during the trial, so she will not be alone at night.

Claude tells me that this is probably all overkill, needless precautions.

I look at him as if to say “why the hell are we doing it then?”

“Still, a good investment in some peace of mind,” he says.

Then without missing a beat he slides something across the seat in my direction. This has come from under the flap of his coat near the seat belt, like he’s waiting for just the right moment to reveal it.

“I thought maybe you could use this,” he says. There’s a disturbed look, a little chagrin on his face as he pushes this toward me.

As he removes his hand, I’m looking down at the lustrous blued-steel of a small revolver, wrapped in its tight leather holster.

“In the glove box,” he says, “is a permit, so you can carry it concealed. Emil issued it last night.”

So much for peace of mind.

It’s a truism that in the trial of any case, something will always go wrong, though usually it does not occur on the eve of opening argument as it has here. This maxim has now struck my own case, dead center and below the proverbial waterline.

The commercial photo lab hired by Kay Sellig to upgrade the quality of our photos to be put before the jury has misplaced a critical piece of evidence, a short length of cord used in one of the murders. Sellig has me on the phone, giving me this news.

“How in the hell?” I say.

“They are looking for it,” she says, “turning the place upside-down.” She’s trying to calm me down. She tells me that they are confident they will find it.

“When?” I say.

“That’s the big question,” she tells me.

“We have crystal clear colored photos of all of the pieces,” she says. Apparently the lab lost the missing piece of plastic sheathing after their processing was finished.

I wonder aloud whether they could have thrown this out without thinking.

Sellig cannot be sure, but tells me she doesn’t think this is the case. “They knew what it was for,” she says. “That it was important.”

“That didn’t stop them from losing it.”

She is silent on the other end of the line. Sellig had advised against allowing the evidence out of our possession, but I pushed for better enlargements as this was the centerpiece of our case. I am now paying the price for not heeding her warning.

She tells me that she’s about to leave for the lab, to talk to the owner, to help them look.

“If we can’t find it,” she says, “maybe the court would allow us to use the photos instead, as the best evidence,” she says.

This is not likely, I tell her. “The defense has an absolute right to have the cord examined by its own experts. I wouldn’t count on it,” I say.

Tomorrow morning I start my case-in-chief, opening argument. We have spent the last two days selecting our jury, or rather the judge has. Ingel, true to his promise not to cut any slack, pressed us to the wall, finally insisting on doing the voir dire himself, posing questions we submitted in writing, at least the ones he thought appropriate. Judges in criminal cases are permitted to do this under an initiative adopted by voters a few years ago, though unlike Ingel, most still allow the lawyers to ask critical questions.

Chambers stomped up and down the courtroom railing about this, his exclusion from the jury selection process. He got nowhere, except perhaps the listing of another ground for appeal. That Ingel completed this task in two days was no mean feat, probably a record. In a capital case the jury must be “death qualified”-questions must be posed to assure that if convicted as charged, the panel would have no qualms about imposing the death penalty.

The haste with which this process was completed has turned it into a dry exercise. Neither Goya nor I have any real feel for this group, our panel of twelve jurors and six alternates. I suspect that Chambers is equally blind, but no more so than one of the prospective jurors.

When the man with the white cane appeared in the box, I objected, told Ingel that a major portion of our case was demonstrative in nature, photos of evidence that required visual acuity on the part of the trier of fact. He hammered me down, citing a code section that does not permit the exclusion of a juror because of impaired sight. I was ultimately forced to burn a peremptory challenge to remove the man from the panel. With this Ingel smiled, as if to say now I could deal with the wrath of the sight-impaired lobby.

He knew as well as I that no reader could describe our photographic evidence to the juror without making the fundamental judgment for the juror, the question whether the pictures portrayed what they purported to or not.

I hold my breath and ask Sellig the critical legal question about the missing evidence, the piece of cord.

“Do you know which piece it is?” I say. “The missing length of sheathing from the cord?”

The sections of clothesline cord, sixteen in all, used on the victims, seventeen if you count the coiled length discovered in the Russian’s van, are the critical links in our chain of evidence. Taken together, piece-by-piece they form a continuum connecting the four college victims with the coiled length of cord found in the vehicle. The question is at what point this chain is now broken. This will tell me how many of the counts of murder may be in jeopardy if we cannot find the missing length.

Sellig is scrambling through her notes on the other end of the line, breathing heavily into the phone as she looks for the information. She has coded these pieces by number and letter, marking them for identification. It takes her several seconds to locate what she’s looking for, the legend for this code.

“It looks like. Yes,” she says. “It was two-D.”

This means nothing to me.

She explains that four pieces of cord were used on each victim, two to tie off the ankles, and two more to bind the wrists. Each of these pieces has been lettered in sequence, A through D.

“The number assigned represents the order of the victims,” she says. “This is from the second victim, the last section of cord used on that victim.”

“Julie Park,” I say.

“Yes.”

This means the evidentiary link is broken between Park and the third victim. Unless we can find the missing piece of cord, I could be compelled to dismiss the charges involving the murders of Julie Park and the first victim, her boyfriend Jonathan Snider. Without the cord there is nothing linking them to Iganovich other than a similar MO in the commission of the crimes. Chambers, who is keying on the Scofield murders and the similar fact pattern there, would chew me up in such an argument.

I lean back in my chair, suck a lot of air, and look up at the tiny perforated holes in the ceiling. I wonder how I would ever garner the courage to break this news to Kim Park, and pray that it will not be necessary.

“Keep me posted,” I tell Sellig. “Call me as soon as you talk to the people at the lab.” I hang up.

Lenore is waiting patiently to talk to me, sitting in one of the chairs across from my desk; she has tuned in to a portion of my phone conversation.

“They lost part of the rope?” she says.

I nod. “We could be forced to dump the counts relating to Julie Park and the Snider kid,” I say.

“Damn it.” Goya gives me a pained expression. Then she quickly picks up the broken pieces of this equation and puts a face on it, I think for my benefit.

“I guess it could be worse,” she says. “They could have lost the last piece.” She means the slender length of cord linking all the others to the coiled rope in the van. With this our entire case would have evaporated.

“We’re not out of the woods,” I say. “Our case may only be marginally better than none at all.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean Chambers is already keying on the Scofield cases. If we’re forced to dismiss the Park and Snider counts, we have only one set of murders to the jury.”

A look comes over her face as if she sees where I’m going. There is nothing left to distinguish the second set of student killings from the Scofield crimes. In both cases the killer used consecutive sections of cord to tie down the couples, though the cord between cases doesn’t match up. The metal stakes used in the second murders are a match, as are the stakes used on the Scofields. But as between these two crimes, again, the stakes are different.

“It makes it look as if the killer changed his tools with each set of murders,” she says.

“We can forget our expert on criminal profiling,” I tell her. “Without Park and Snider we no longer have pattern crimes, just an isolated set of gruesome killings. And if Chambers can put his man in Canada at the time of the Scofield murders. .” I let the thought trail off, the conclusion obvious. It is the trouble with a theory built entirely around circumstantial evidence: remove one of the critical pins holding it together and your case can fall apart.