16 Souls

CHAPTER THIRTY ONE

Present Day — September 4

Office of the Managing Partner — Walters, Wilson, and Crandall, Denver

One of the primary reasons Judith Winston had accepted the post-law school job offer from Walters, Wilson, and Crandall so many years ago was the warmth of Jenks Walters, one of the cofounders. With a fearsome reputation as a corporate litigator, personally he was as jovial and friendly as he was a truly excellent lawyer. Compared to the only other living senior partner, Roger Crandall — who was cold, humorless, and always gave the impression of being royally pissed off about something — Jenks was somewhere between a grandfatherly entity and a very sharp colleague.

Now, Judith needed the latter.

She had spent the previous fifteen minutes briefing the senior partner on the Mitchell prosecution, and he had reviewed the pleadings as well as a particularly brilliant paper she had commissioned from an outside expert on the law pertaining to sea captains and airline captains and their emergency authority.

“Judith, great preparation as always. I said you’d have no trouble rising to the challenge of a criminal case, but… you’ve got to understand the basic equation here. Judge Gonzalez is an angry little man with a couple of huge chips on his shoulder who has little use for arcane legal theory. I tried a fairly simple corporate case before him several years ago and he, honest to God, actually told me to cut out all the ‘legal schmeegal’ arguments and just state the law. I was stating the law, but he didn’t have the patience, or perhaps the understanding, to follow.”

“He is a lawyer, right?”

“Yes, and I checked up on him. He was fairly high in his law class at UNM in Albuquerque. But he just doesn’t have the patience. And… that’s why I’m bringing this up. That paper you commissioned may only be useful on appeal. All it’s likely to do for Gonzalez is irritate him.”

Judith had been standing, more or less gazing out of the window toward the front range of the Rockies while Jenks sat back in his plush desk chair and studied her. With the last statement, Judith turned to face him, her stomach tightening as the slight bravado she’d felt evaporated.

“Jenks, you… you think we’re going to lose this?”

Jenks Walters looked at her for a long time before answering.

“Well, Gonzalez is going to let Richardson put on as much of a show as he wants, and Grant is more actor than lawyer so he’ll play to the jury, and you already expect him to read the criminal statute word for word which, as you know, clearly says that if the defendant knowingly caused a death he’s guilty of second degree. Judge Gonzales is not going to allow anything in regarding the broader law of the air and sea, and… on top of all that… while I don’t necessarily disagree about putting your captain on the stand…”

“Bottom line, Jenks?” she interrupted.

“They’ll convict him,” he shot back without a pause. “They won’t freaking have a choice, unless you can pull an entire warren of rabbits out of your hat… and you don’t normally wear hats, to torture the metaphor.”

“How about the success of an appeal?”

“You’ll have a better shot with an appeal, but it’s not a slam dunk. What’s really needed is a legislative change to prevent this kind of miscarriage of justice from ever happening again. Oh, and Judith, one more item. After you boy’s little mortality-threatening stunt on Long’s Peak? Expect Gonzalez to vacate bail and jail him immediately after the verdict as a flight risk, no pun intended.”

She sighed deeply, eyes averted downward as she thought about the agony of having to prepare Marty Mitchell for the worst.

“Judith, you breeding any rabbits?”

She jerked her head up suddenly. “Excuse me? Oh! Sorry. I… well, I’ve been puzzled by Grant Richardson’s conduct.” She outlined the refusal to offer a plea bargain and the apparent anger driving his prosecution and having unleashed the firm’s private investigator as early as possible to find reasons. “I just thought there might be some personal animus that I could use as a basis to seriously question the indictment on grounds of misconduct. I even stated that to the news people the day after Mitchell tried to kill himself.”

“Yes. I saw that performance, Judith. Very polished, very professional — and very dangerous. You know my thinking on trying cases in public.”

“I do, but I’m very worried and maybe a bit desperate to crack this. Jenks, you know him personally, don’t you?” she asked.

“We’re talking Richardson, right? Not the judge?”

“Grant Richardson, yes.”

“I know him, but I don’t like the little pontificating weasel. I even caught him cheating at golf.”

“Can you think of any connection he’d have with any of the victims of the crash? I ran every name through every possible connection or family link I could think of, but found nothing.”

“Grant’s an arrogant climber who wants to be president and doesn’t care who he steps on along the way. I don’t think the man has any principles, and of course we don’t need any more people like that in government. But I tell, you, Judith, it’s hard for me to imagine Richardson caring for anyone deeply enough to want to avenge their death. It’s just not like him. I wish I had a better forecast for you… I think the jury will have no choice but to convict, because you can be certain the jury instructions Gonzalez will approve are going to be simple and tough. You know, if there are clouds in the sky, you must convict. No latitude.”

“And no justice.”

“Hey, young lady,” he said with a grin. “Where do you get off thinking this is a system of true justice? We’re just working at it. That’s why we call it a practice.”

Near Denver International Airport

Perhaps it was the darkened interior of the large hangar-like warehouse, or maybe he was losing the ability to come up with creative adjectives. But the only word Scott Bogosian could think of to describe the atmosphere in the warehouse was ‘spooky.’

The Boeing 757 had not been torn to shreds in the crash, but the fuselage had broken along what was commonly called a ‘production splice,’ and the two major parts of the fuselage sat grotesquely twisted and forlorn on the concrete floor, the wings and engines removed, surrounded with a jumble of various tagged parts that had come off the bird.

The landing gear and the tires in particular were Scott’s main focus, and his escort — the head of the local office of the National Transportation Safety Board — had been more than accommodating when Scott called.

“I hate to bother you,” he’d begun, “…but there’s a part of the raw accident report on Regal Twelve that’s bothering me.”

In fact, it was two things: an unusual lateral cut on one side of a main gear tire mentioned in the factual report and almost visible in one of the color photos of the wreckage; and, the insistence of the captain that lights had suddenly appeared on the runway just ahead. The common assumption seemed to be that he’d mistaken a glimpse of the approach lights and misunderstood, thinking they came from a misplaced snowplow still on the runway. There must have been something unusual to explain why a competent captain would attempt a dangerous go-around on fumes and with a broken airframe on his right wing.

But where had that cut on the tire come from? Was it pre-existing, or had the 757 hit something other than the runway that night?

And then there was that one additional detail from his own memory that kept nudging Scott: Fresh tire tracks in the deepening snow that couldn’t have been made by a behemoth fire truck. He remembered them with crystal clarity. They had been small tracks, like those a car or pickup would make, going in one direction as the fire truck he’d been riding in turned in another. Admittedly, Scott thought, his sense of both direction and location that night were markedly poor. The tracks he saw could be easy to explain, and yet, considering the fact that the captain was adamant that lights had appeared on the runway ahead, the question was inevitable: was there any substantive proof that a vehicle had, in fact, been on the runway? What vehicle had made the tracks he saw, and why?

The NTSB rep had asked if Scott would like to take a closer look at the wreckage, and offered a field trip to the warehouse near Denver International where they were storing it pending the completion of the investigation.

“It’s all been tagged and photographed extensively so, I don’t want you touching or moving anything, but you can look at anything you like.”

“Where are the main gear tires?” Scott asked, following his host’s guidance to a jumble of twisted landing gear parts and tires. He moved carefully around each one, trying to recall which tire of the four on the right main landing gear had a lateral cut, but found it quickly.

Scott looked up at the investigator.

“Let me just sit here for a second and look at this and think, if you don’t mind,” Scott said.

“Sure,” was the response, and the NTSB rep paced slowly away, trying not to appear bored as Scott took out a pocket flashlight and began examining the cut.