Capitol murder

Chapter Thirty-nine

The next morning, Ginny arrived at the DOJ bright and early. She was taking off her coat when Terrence Crawford pushed a multitiered cart into her office. Ginny was surprised to see her boss doing a job that would normally be assigned to a secretary.

“Great news,” Crawford said. “I was able to rush through your security clearance, which means you are now able to organize these top-secret files.”

Crawford scanned the office. When he spotted Ginny’s hole punch, he grinned maliciously.

“Good, good,” he said. “You’ve got a hole punch and I’ve provided you with binders and tabs. When you’ve got the case file organized, bring it to my office. Say by tomorrow afternoon.”

“Tomorrow, but…”

“No buts. There’s a team of lawyers waiting for this material. I imagine this job will evoke fond memories of your days at Rankin, Lusk-the all-nighters, the Saturdays and Sundays at the office when normal people were at the beach or lying around at home doing the Times crossword.

“Well, enough of this idle chatter. I’m taking up valuable time.”

Crawford sped away before Ginny could protest any further. She was appalled by the joy he seemed to take in her discomfort. What a prick! She wondered if Crawford had any redeeming qualities. She sure couldn’t think of even one.

Ginny walked over to the cart. Its three shelves were loaded down with banker’s boxes. In addition to the boxes, three-ring binders were stacked on the bottom shelf. Ginny counted twenty boxes in all. She lifted the cover of one of them. It was filled to the top with paper. She groaned. This was going to take forever; only she did not have forever, she had until the next afternoon.

The first thought that sprang into her head was coffee. She was going to need a lot of it. On the way down to the basement cafeteria, something occurred to her. Security clearances had been discussed by Ginny’s coworkers on a few occasions, and Ginny had the impression that they took a while to get. On the day Crawford moved her over to Counterterrorism, he had mentioned that he was going to try to expedite the process, but he seemed to have pushed her clearance through in record time. She wondered why.

Ginny filled a thermos to the top with coffee and carried it back to her office. Just thinking about the daunting task she was facing was exhausting. She poured out a cup of caffeine and took a stiff drink. Then she carried the first box to her desk and pulled a stack of paper out of it so she could see what she was dealing with. It didn’t take her long to realize that she was looking at 302s-the FBI equivalent of a police report-in the FedEx case. She was still pissed off at Crawford but not as pissed off as she had been. Working at Justice might not pay as much as Rankin, Lusk, but no one at Rankin, Lusk would have the inside scoop on one of the biggest terror cases in American history.

Ginny read the first report. It was an interview with a person who worked at a concession stand at the football stadium. The interview concerned a fellow worker, but the name of the subject in whom the interviewer was interested was redacted. Ginny flipped through a few of the other reports. Names and other information-like an address in one case-were also blacked out. News stories on television and in the papers had reported that hawkers for several concessions were believed to be suicide bombers who were arrested before they were able to detonate their bombs. Ginny assumed that the terrorists were being held at a secret prison somewhere. She wondered what that would be like and she shuddered. She had read stories about waterboarding, and she’d seen the pictures from Abu Ghraib prison. She was certain that she couldn’t stand up under that type of pressure. Something else about the prisoners being held at a secret prison bothered her, only she couldn’t put her finger on it, so she got back to work.

A lot of the 302s in the first two boxes recounted interviews with people who worked at concession stands at FedEx Field. Ginny built a tower out of these reports on a corner of her desk. She would put them in a binder in alphabetical order when she had collected all of these interviews and the reports that concerned them.

Ginny was reading a report of an interview with a woman named Ann O’Hearn when she noticed that Keith Evans and Maggie Sparks were the agents who had conducted the interview. She smiled. It made this tedious work easier when she could connect with someone involved in the investigation.

Later on, Ginny came across a series of reports about a man named Lawrence Cooper who owned the concession stands where the suicide bombers had been employed. It came as a shock when she found out that he had been murdered. She thought about that. The terrorists had to figure out a way to get their people into FedEx Field. Maybe Cooper was part of the plot or a dupe who had been talked into hiring the suicide bombers. Maybe he was killed to prevent him from telling anyone who had arranged for him to hire the four bombers. Ginny felt proud of herself when she read a report by a detective who had drawn a similar conclusion.

B y the time six o’clock rolled around, Ginny’s head was swimming, her stomach was rumbling, and the lines on the reports were starting to blur. After calling Brad to tell him that he shouldn’t wait up for her, Ginny went down to the cafeteria. It was good to get away from the banker’s boxes, even if it was only for the time it would take her to buy her dinner. She carried a sandwich, two bags of chips, and more coffee back to her office.

Twenty minutes later, Ginny was finished with her sandwich and one of the bags of chips. She tossed her trash in the can under her desk and opened the next banker’s box. It contained transcripts of the interrogations of the suicide bombers. Ginny was surprised at how little most of the bombers knew. They were all from small villages and were educated in madrassas where they studied the Koran and little else. Their only exposure to a wider world had been in a training camp in Somalia, a day or two in a safe house in Karachi while they waited to be smuggled out of Pakistan, and their work in FedEx Field.

One prisoner, AB, was the only bomber who appeared to be of above-average intelligence. While reading the transcript of his interrogation, Ginny found out how the FBI had learned Ron Tolliver’s license plate number. An autopsy report let Ginny know that AB had committed suicide.

The next set of 302s dealt with the way Ron Tolliver had been tracked down, the raid on his house, and his transportation to the Department of Justice. Ginny sat up straight. That’s what had bothered her before. The suicide bombers had been captured at FedEx Field and immediately transported to a secret prison. Why was Ron Tolliver taken to the DOJ? If he’d been imprisoned in the secure facility where the other members of the cell were being held, Bobby Schatz would never have been able to find him. Ginny puzzled over this problem for a while, then gave up.

B y eleven, Ginny had developed a dull headache and her vision was blurred. She decided that she would finish reading the last pile of paper in the banker’s box on her desk, then call it a night. She was halfway through her last stack when she found a typed transcript that looked out of place among all the 302s. After finishing the first page, she realized that she was reading the transcript of Terrence Crawford’s interrogation of Ron Tolliver.

Crawford started off by insulting and threatening the prisoner. Ginny wasn’t surprised. If she studied a genome of Crawford’s DNA, she was certain she wouldn’t find the gene for subtlety. From the one-sided nature of the conversation, Ginny concluded that Tolliver had not been intimidated.

Ginny turned the page and smiled when Schatz appeared on the scene, brandishing his court order and demanding that the cameras and microphones be turned off. She could imagine what Crawford looked like when he was forced to leave the room.

By the time she had flipped to the next page, Ginny’s smile had morphed into a frown. The transcript should have ended when Crawford left the interrogation room, but it went on for many more pages. It was clear that the microphones had been off for a while, because the conversation between Schatz and Crawford ended abruptly as soon as Schatz made his demand that his attorney-client conference not be recorded. But the transcript continued in the middle of one of Schatz’s sentences. Someone had turned on the microphones again, and Ginny bet that it was her boss.

Was it legal for Crawford to listen in on a conversation between an attorney and his client? It had been made crystal clear in law school that the attorney-client privilege was a sacred cornerstone of the judicial system. Competent representation of a client was almost impossible if a client didn’t feel she could speak freely to her lawyer. Ginny could not imagine that there was an exception to the rule that would permit Crawford to eavesdrop on the discussion between Schatz and Tolliver.

Ginny turned to her computer and logged on to Westlaw, a tool for legal research. It didn’t take long to find cases that held that the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution provided a right to counsel for defendants in criminal cases and that a defendant’s rights under that amendment were violated if a prosecutor eavesdropped on an attorney-client meeting.

In Coplon v. United States, the defendant was convicted of giving United States intelligence reports to a Russian agent. The D.C. Court of Appeals reversed the conviction presuming prejudice when the defendant’s telephone conversations with her lawyer were monitored after her arrest.

In Caldwell v. United States, a government agent managed to get himself employed by the defendant’s lawyer. The agent learned confidential attorney-client communications, which he revealed to the United States attorney. The appellate court held that this intrusion was so serious that the defendant didn’t have to show actual prejudice to get the case reversed.

By the time Ginny logged off, she was convinced that taping an attorney-client conference was an act of prosecutorial misconduct so serious that a defendant didn’t even have to show that the taping prejudiced his case to win a dismissal.

Ginny was no longer tired. Her mind was racing. She finished reading the transcript, then she set it aside and read the rest of the documents in the box. Most of the reports she had reviewed in this box and the other boxes had some relationship to each other, but none of the other documents in the box with the transcript had anything to do with the interrogation of Tolliver or the attorney-client conference between Tolliver and his lawyer. So what was this ticking time bomb doing in the banker’s box? The only conclusion Ginny could draw was that the transcript had been included with the other documents by mistake.

Ginny’s heart was pounding. What should she do? If she made the violation public, she could lose her job. At minimum, it would destroy any chance of advancement she might have in the DOJ. But she couldn’t just put the transcript in a binder and let someone else worry about it. She was certain that would be a violation of her ethical responsibilities. She would have to tell someone about it, but whom?

Crawford was her boss, but he was probably the person who had intentionally violated Tolliver’s rights. Crawford would not want the transcript read by anyone. He might even destroy it. Then it would be her word against his, and she knew who would come out on top in that scenario if she didn’t have proof that the transcript existed.

Proof! If she made a copy of the transcript, she would have proof that Crawford had violated Tolliver’s constitutional rights. Crawford could argue that Ginny had faked the transcript but Schatz, and maybe even Tolliver, could tell a judge that the transcript was, word for word, what they had said in the interrogation room.

Ginny picked up the transcript. She felt sick to her stomach. She knew what she had to do, but she was paralyzed. After a few moments, she took a deep breath and forced herself to her feet. There was a copier down the hall. She walked toward it feeling a little like a death-row inmate on the way to her execution. She looked around nervously, ears alert for any sound, but it was so late that the only people on the floor would most likely be members of a cleaning crew or security guards. Even so, she couldn’t risk being seen by a witness.

Ginny ducked into the room with the copier. She thought about turning on the lights but decided against it. The machine was close enough to the door so she could read the controls in the light from the corridor. The copier had been turned off for the night. Ginny flipped a switch and waited for the copier to warm up. She had just put the transcript in the copier and pressed the button to activate it when she heard footsteps. Her heart rocketed into her throat.

“I thought I heard a noise.”

A security guard was standing in the doorway.

Ginny forced a smile. “Hi, Ray,” she said to Ray Boyle, a heavyset man in his midfifties with whom Ginny had exchanged pleasantries on a few of the occasions when she had worked late.

“You’re putting in the hours.”

“Crime never sleeps, so someone has to protect the likes of you,” Ginny said.

Boyle laughed. “I can take care of myself. You should head home and get some rest.”

“I’m out of here as soon as I make these copies.”

“Well, good night,” Boyle said as he walked off. Ginny’s knees buckled, and she took a deep breath to calm herself. When she looked at the copier, she saw that the job had been completed. She took the original and the two copies she had made and returned to her office. She put the copies in separate envelopes and put the original at the bottom of the pile she had made out of the materials in the banker box. She would put the 302s in a binder in the morning. That would give her the night to think about what she would do with the original.

G inny let herself in the apartment as quietly as possible and tiptoed into the bedroom so she wouldn’t wake up Brad. It didn’t work. When she was halfway to the closet, he mumbled, “Hi.”

“Did I wake you?” Ginny asked as she stripped off her clothes.

“Not really. I can never get comfortable if you’re not in bed.”

Ginny washed up in the bathroom; then she slipped under the covers.

“You’re burning the midnight oil,” Brad said. “What have they got you working on?”

“Crawford has me organizing reports for the FedEx trial team.”

“That sounds interesting.”

“It’s not. It’s scut work. A secretary should be doing it, but I have the privilege because I have a Top Secret clearance.”

“Congratulations. Say, can you find out if the government is really keeping aliens in area fifty-one?”

“Yes, but I can’t tell you because you do not have a Top Secret clearance.”

“So that’s the way it’s going to be, huh?”

“I can’t help it if you’re unimportant.”

Brad slapped Ginny playfully on her rump. “This marriage is definitely on the rocks,” he said. Then he rolled over and snuggled with Ginny. They held each other quietly for a while. Then Ginny took her head off Brad’s shoulder and looked at him.

“There’s something I want to ask you,” she said.

“Shoot.”

“Let’s say you were working on a case at Reed, Briggs and you discovered some information that would win the case for the other side.”

“What kind of information?”

“Something illegal that the firm had done. Maybe you found proof that a partner had falsified evidence. What would you do?”

“If it was really serious, I guess I’d call the bar and ask for an ethics opinion.”

“What if they told you that you had an ethical duty to make the violation known but you knew that going public would probably lose the case for a client and get you fired?”

“Whoa, that’s a tough one, but I guess the bottom line is that you have to do the right thing. My folks call it the mirror test. You always have to live with the consequences of your actions, so you have to be able to look at yourself in the mirror. If you think about doing something and you know that the end result is that you won’t be able to hold your head up and look yourself in the eye, then you don’t do it. It’s pretty simple.”

“In theory, but not so simple sometimes in real life.”

“I made the choice to pursue the Little case even after Susan Tuchman told me I’d be fired if I did.”

“But you didn’t care if she fired you. You hated working at Reed, Briggs.”

“That’s true.”

“What if you loved that job? What if it was the only job you ever wanted and you knew you’d lose it if you kept investigating Little’s case?”

Brad went quiet. Ginny had just asked a really hard question, but he thought he knew the right answer.

“Maybe I thought I’d love the job, and maybe I did love it up until I had to make my choice, but I don’t think I would love a job if I had to do something illegal or unethical to keep it.

“Now, what prompted these questions?” Brad asked. “Are you in some kind of trouble at work?”

“Not yet, but I could be.”

“Talk to me. Tell me what’s bothering you.”

“I wish I could, but this is a problem I’m going to have to solve on my own. Now I’ve got to get to sleep or my eyes will fall out of my head.”

Ginny kissed Brad and rolled over. She was dead tired, but she was too wound up to sleep. The job at the Department of Justice was not her dream job. She had taken it because she was fed up with corporate law and prosecuting criminals sounded interesting. So far, the job had been a mixed bag. Some of the things she’d done were challenging, while other tasks were sheer drudgery, like the task Crawford had assigned her. To be honest, working for Crawford, an overbearing egotist, was as bad as working for Susan Tuchman at Reed, Briggs and almost as bad as working for Dennis Masterson at Rankin, Lusk. Still, she wanted to keep her job at Justice, but she wouldn’t be able to if she told Bobby Schatz about the transcript and Crawford discovered that she was responsible for the leak. Ginny was still undecided about what she should do when exhaustion finally dragged her into a troubled sleep.