The Wrong Man

79

I completed my cross-examination in another hour. It was pretty predictable stuff, taking the prosecution’s theory of the case and stretching it and poking holes in it wherever I could. If Tom shot her first and then robbed her-the theory which made the most sense-how did he manage to steal her purse, her cell phone, and a chain off her neck without getting any of that pool of blood on himself? And if he robbed her first and then shot her-well, first of all, why did he move south of her before shooting her, when his ultimate escape was to the north? And why would he move ten feet away from her before shooting her? If he robbed her and for some reason wanted her dead, a close-up shot would have made the most sense.

That was, in essence, my closing argument, cloaked in a cross-examination. It was broken up in pieces and asked out of order, but I’d be sure to put those pieces together for the jury in my summation.

Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was an overarching so-what feeling to this last hour. There was no blood on him because he shot from a long distance, and he was simply careful when he stole her things. And as for the sequence of events, so what if nobody knows exactly which came first, the robbery or the shooting? Nobody saw it happen. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Those precise details weren’t crucial to the prosecution’s theory.

These were all points that Wendy Kotowski made on her redirect. I didn’t recross, and the prosecution rested. The jury went home for the weekend with a pretty strong feeling, I thought, that Tom Stoller was guilty of murder.

I spoke briefly with Tom before they carted him back to Boyd. Aunt Deidre thought my cross went well, but she wasn’t exactly unbiased. I gave it a solid B-plus but the score was still Prosecution 4, Defense 0.

I spent Saturday morning with Tom and Deidre, running through a direct examination in theory, but in practice trying to get Tom to open up to me about the events of January 13. To the extent I could get him to focus, he continued with his insistence that he didn’t remember. It was doubly frustrating because my client wasn’t helping me and because I was wasting my time that could have been spent tracking down the Global Harvest angle.

At eleven o’clock that morning, I made a decision.

“I can’t put him on,” I told Deidre outside the Boyd Center. “He’s no use to us. He won’t deny he killed her. And we can’t explain his lack of memory on mental illness. The judge shut us down because Tom wouldn’t cooperate with the prosecution’s shrinks.”

“Because he couldn’t,” she cried. “He can’t. He’s so sick, Jason.”

“I know that, I know that.” I put my hand on her shoulder. “The judge made a bad ruling. He screwed us. But it won’t do us any good crying about it now. So we focus on the deficiencies in the prosecution’s case. They have plenty. And I do whatever I can do between now and Monday morning to tie up everything I’m chasing down with Global Harvest.”

She searched my face for any semblance of hope. “You think the judge will let you use it? You said he’s considering it.”

“I do think he’s considering it. I do. But the stronger the case I give him, the better our chances. So I’m going to run now and see what my lawyers and investigators have come up with.”

She nodded silently. She needed more but the best thing I could do for her and her nephew was to get back to my office.

I called Shauna’s cell phone while driving. She didn’t answer but called me within thirty seconds.

“Sorry, didn’t pick up in time,” she said.

“How’s it going?”

“So far, not well.” Shauna was over at Bruce McCabe’s law firm with Kathy Rubinkowksi’s immediate supervisor, Tom Rangle, the man to whom Kathy had sent that long e-mail that somehow got intercepted and deleted before Tom could ever read it. She and Tom were trying to re-create what happened the day that e-mail was sent-where Bruce McCabe was that day, who opened and read that e-mail and where, in office or remotely.

“Keep at it, Shauna, and get us something good. Somebody kept that e-mail from making it to Tom Rangle. It must have been McCabe.”

When I got back to my law firm at noon on Saturday, we were thirty-six hours from the opening of the defense case. And I was now pinning Tom Stoller’s fate entirely on what we could find between now and then.