The Wrong Man

66

Judge Nash kept us in court until after five o’clock, and with the third thirty-person venire panel, we completed our set of fifteen jurors, three of whom would be alternates. Of the twelve regular jurors, eight were women. Five were African-American. One was Pakistani and another half Chinese. They ranged in age from nineteen to sixty-one. One was a podiatrist, one a caterer. There was a waitress and an industrial painter, two stay-at-home moms, a daycare operator, a human resources manager, an accountant, a pharmaceutical salesman, a product manager for medical supplies, and then my favorite, Jack Strauss. He was retired.

Retired military, that is. A colonel in the U. S. Marines who saw action in Grenada and limited time in Operation Desert Storm in the early nineties.

Wendy had run dry of her peremptory challenges with the second venire panel. She’d gambled that we’d be done after that panel, but she lost-four spots remained, the twelfth spot on the regular jury and the three alternates. And when we opened up the third panel, juror sixty-one was Jack Strauss. Wendy did her best to probe for bias, but the guy wasn’t exactly a shrinking violet, and there was no cause to exclude him. It was the first break I got in this case to date.

I had to find a way to get Tom on the stand to talk about Iraq. I needed Colonel Jack Strauss to know that Tom was a war veteran and a hero.

…

Shauna and I made it back to the office by a quarter to six, with Shauna’s security detail, a guy who looked like a pro wrestler, along for the ride. (Cowboy that I was, I didn’t have a security guy; then again, I also owned my own gun.)

Bradley John was waiting for us in the conference room.

“She was an organic chemistry major,” he said to us.

“What?”

“Kathy Rubinkowski. She was getting a master’s in organic chemistry, right? I never factored that in.”

Bradley had a copy of Kathy’s handwritten scrawl on the back of the document she mailed her father: AN NM??

“The symbol AN stands for ammonium nitrate,” he said. “It’s the primary compound in fertilizer.”

“Which Global Harvest sold, obviously,” I said.

“Right. And NM stands for nitromethane,” said Bradley. “Nitromethane is used in drugs, cleaning solvents, pesticides. But here’s the really big thing: You put ammonium nitrate together with nitromethane and you get one of the most powerful mixtures of explosives known to man.”

I looked at Shauna. “Explosives,” I repeated. “Jesus.”

I checked Kathy Rubinkowski’s note again. It made sense. A chemistry student would have used the shorthand terminology.

“ That’s why the federal and state governments monitor sales of fertilizer,” said Bradley.

I steadied my hands. My juices were flowing, but I had to synthesize this into a formal presentation in court. “Let’s take this slow,” I said. “Ammonium nitrate, there’s no doubt Global Harvest sold it. I mean, that’s their business-fertilizer, right?”

“Sure.”

“But what about nitromethane? Does Global Harvest sell that?”

He shook his head. “Not as far as I can tell, no.”

“Then-where’s the connection? Why did Kathy write down NM at all?”

“I don’t know, Jason, but we have to assume that if she wrote-”

“No, no, no. We can’t assume anything, Bradley. All we know right now is the universally acknowledged and entirely unsurprising fact that Global Harvest International sells fertilizer. I can’t roll with this. Connect some dots for me and I can use it. See what I’m saying?”

He looked downcast, but he wasn’t giving up. “I do, yeah.”

I shook his shoulder. “This could be what we’re looking for, my friend. But I need more. Start with Summerset Farms. They were the ones receiving the fertilizer. Maybe they were getting the nitromethane, too.”

“I’m on it.”

“Oh, and Bradley,” I called to him. “Remember I said it’s a marathon, not a sprint?”

“Yeah?”

“Now it’s a sprint.”

“Got it.” Bradley left Shauna and me standing in the conference room.

Shauna raised her eyebrows at me. “Look at what we’re getting into,” she said.

“After the other night, seeing them doing target practice, I thought they were gunrunners,” I said. “I figured the fertilizer shipments were some kind of cover for smuggling of weapons. But maybe I have it wrong.” I looked over the symbols scribbled by Kathy Rubinkowski.

“Maybe they’re building a bomb,” I said.