The Wrong Man

29

The conference room in our law firm had become the unofficial war room for the Stoller trial. We had blow-up photos of the crime scene on tripods in one corner. A television rested in another corner, with a DVD of Tom Stoller’s interrogation ready to play at any time. A few boxes rested on the conference room table.

The room was more than we needed. As these matters go, this wasn’t a document-intensive case. Most of the paper was the physical evidence and forensic reports concerning the same. At the moment, there wasn’t much for witnesses, either. We had Dr. Sofian Baraniq and Bobby Hilton, the Army Ranger buddy. Then there was a guy named Sheldon Pierson who lived right by where the murder occurred on Gehringer Avenue. He estimated that he was probably outside during the time of the murder, but he couldn’t add much because he couldn’t hear or see a damn thing.

But I thought he could add a lot for me.

I was reviewing the responding police officer’s write-up while Bradley was poring through the case file of LabelTek Industries Inc. v. Global Harvest International Inc. Yesterday, after my interview with the Rubinkowskis, I’d told Bradley to pull the entire file from the circuit court.

I was about to check on his progress when Shauna burst into the room like she had news.

“Yes, Ms. Tasker?” I said.

She held up a document. “Motion from the prosecution. You’re not going to like it.”

“Are you sure I’m not going to like it?”

“Pretty darn sure, yeah.”

“She’s moving to bar the insanity defense,” I said.

Shauna cocked her head. “How did you know that? Did she tell you?”

“No, but it’s what I would have done.” I nodded and held out my hand for the document. “She’s claiming lack of cooperation, right?”

“Right.” She handed me the motion.

I was actually surprised Wendy Kotowski had waited this long. When you plead insanity, you place your mental condition at issue, and you must permit the government’s shrinks to evaluate you. Tom had been as stingy with the prosecution’s doctors as he had been with Dr. Baraniq-and with me. The state was arguing that the defendant was making it impossible for them to fully evaluate him, and, thus, he should not be permitted to assert the insanity defense.

Bradley grabbed Shauna’s copy and read it over. “What does Nash do with this?” he asked.

“Grants it, probably,” I said.

“And you’re calm about this.”

“Does it help if I freak out?” I read the motion in its entirety. It was well done. Wendy was always a good writer. Before she started first-chairing in the felony courtrooms, a lot of the other ACAs would turn to her for help on briefs. There is a “brief bank” in the county attorney’s office where samples of various motions and briefs are kept, and many of them were penned by Wendy Kotowski.

Besides, she’d had plenty of time to draft this thing. She knew months ago she was going to argue this. Why not? It’s a free shot on goal. Knock out the defendant’s legal theory and he’s left with nothing. And even if you lose, you tie up defense counsel on the eve of trial, make him scramble to respond to this motion instead of preparing for trial testimony. Wendy knew full well how thinly staffed we were at the law offices of Tasker amp; Kolarich.

“If she wins on this, she goes after Hilton next,” I said. “She argues that there’s no relevance to his testimony because if PTSD is out of the game, it doesn’t matter what kind of shit Tom went through in Iraq. His war experience is irrelevant.”

“And then we’re fucked,” said Bradley.

I tossed my football in the air, putting some English on it. “Not necessarily,” I said.

“Why not necessarily?”

“For one thing, we can revisit fitness.”

“Fitness-for trial? What does that have to do with this?”

“Young Bradley, what is the standard for fitness for trial?”

“Fitness for… The defendant is able to…” He paused. “The defendant has to be able to assist his lawyers in the preparation of his defense.”

“Correct. And what’s his defense, young Bradley, in this case?”

“Well, insanity.”

“And if he won’t talk to me about the case, is that assisting me?”

Young Bradley paused. I winked at Shauna. “Wait for it,” I said.

“Oh,” Bradley said. “Oh, so now the prosecution’s saying the same thing as us.”

“There you go.”

Shauna piped in. “So we join with the prosecution in arguing that Tom won’t talk about the case. We renew our motion that Tom isn’t fit to stand trial, and now we have Wendy Kotowski corroborating our position.”

“We do.” I threw the football too high in the air and almost didn’t reach it coming back down. “This will play right into Nash’s wheelhouse. He loves to see lawyers tie themselves in knots with their own words.”

“And this does what?” Shauna asked. “It just buys us time, right?”

“Right. It buys us time so my brilliant team of lawyers and investigators can discover hidden jewels of information that will reveal the innocence of our client.”

Shauna took a seat and looked at me crosswise. “So that’s why you wanted to keep the insanity notice on the books. Even though you didn’t like it. You didn’t plan on using it. You just wanted to bait the prosecution.”

I waved her off. “Hey, before we break our arms congratulating ourselves, we have one very big variable,” I said. “That obstacle goes by the name of Bertrand Nash.”