Justice Delayed: Southern California Legal Thriller #2

by Rachel Sinclair

  When Regina heard this, she wanted to find that girl’s mother and strangle her. If your husband leaves you in the lurch, you don’t send your child into prostitution. You move into a small apartment and you take whatever job you can get. But it sounded like this mother was not going to give up her lifestyle, no matter what, and Regina saw red about the whole situation.

  Worse still, Emma’s story was not even all that unusual. Other girls also came to work for Carl at the behest of their mother, or sometimes their father. She could never picture ever doing something like that to a child of hers.

  She was also slowly starting to understand the arrangement that Carl had with the prosecutors and the police in town. It wasn’t just that a lot of money changed hands, although that was true enough. But it was also that the Ivanovs owned certain prosecutors and policemen. The Ivanov family was very good at finding incriminating materials to blackmail just about everybody in town. They employed a team of computer hackers, who were able to find any kind of skeleton that any judge, policeman, or prosecutor would have in their closet. They knew all the corrupt actions that their judges, prosecutors, and policeman were undergoing. They knew who was dirty. They knew everybody who was downloading child pornography, everybody who was accepting bribes, everybody who had a drug problem. And, if anybody who they wanted on their team was squeaky clean, with nothing in their background that could make them vulnerable to being compromised, the Ivanovs made sure that they set them up. It was not unusual for the Ivanovs to follow a prosecutor to Vegas, put something in that prosecutor’s drink, plant a child in their bed, and take pictures.

  Regina even heard a tale of a dead hooker being planted in a policeman’s bed, just like in the movie The Godfather Part Two.

  One thing was for sure, the Ivanovs were ruthless, and they always got what they wanted, which was to get compromat on everybody and anybody who might try to bring them down.

  And then, one evening, Regina saw something that really made her want to cut a bitch.

  Paul Sharpton was attending one of the parties.

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  Chapter 6

  Avery

  Regina was keeping me apprised about everything that was going on over at the Carl Williams compound. She and I were slowly starting to put our plan together, and, at the same time, I was trying to figure out a way around the whole immunity-from-prosecution angle. I lost hope when Regina explained to me exactly how entangled the prosecutors, the cops, and the judges were with the Ivanov family. I knew that I was going to have to go with my other plan, as far as bringing down the Carl Williams organization. The only thing that was going to work was a lawsuit brought by the girls. And Regina was working on that.

  But Regina had something else that she had to tell me. She was very excited one evening, after one of the parties. “Can I come by?” she asked me.

  It was 10 o’clock, but I was still working on one of my cases. I had brought work home, as usual, because my dance card was full after my big win in the Esme Gutierrez case. People were pounding down my door to be represented by me, and I was able to pick and choose the cases I really believed in. And this was one of them.

  “Sure. I’ll probably be up until at least 1 o’clock in the morning.” I was still having problems with insomnia, and these problems had not abated at all. I was still seeing my therapist about it, but she didn’t know what to do for me. She tried to instruct me about how to do guided meditation and yoga, and she prescribed some herbs. I even tried hypnotism. But I still was only getting about four hours of sleep a night.

  I pet Lola and Harlow, both of whom were snoring next to me at on the balcony, which was where I brought my work. It was a nice evening, with a beautiful breeze. Clear and bright, even though I knew that winter was coming, and with it, came much chillier nights. Especially here on the coast. So, I knew it was only a matter of time before I would not be able to hang out on the balcony.

  Aidan was out for the evening. He had just taken his bar exam, and he passed it on the first try, bless his heart. I was very proud of him, because I knew that the California bar was not the easiest one to pass. He had started working for the personal injury firm, Pierce and Wright, working on class-action lawsuits. He was also continuing on his work with the wrongfully detained mental patients. That was the work that he was doing for his previous firm. It was work that he had come to know and love. He had an affinity for people who had mental problems, I guess because, as it turned out, our father had recently been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. That fit. I always thought that our father was a little bit off. When he was up, he was very up. When I was little, before he left, he used to stay up late at night, cooking and writing and painting. He would throw manic puppet shows for Aidan and me, which made both of us laugh.

  But our father also had a dark side. He would throw tantrums at very random times, screaming to my mother, me and Aidan, about a dish being a little bit dirty, or about the dog peeing in the house. He would shut himself in his room for weeks at a time, hardly coming out. Because of this, he worked only sporadically, unless he could possibly find a job where he didn’t have to leave the house. And he did find a job where he did leave the house, but it was doing surveys online, so it did not pay very much at all. That was part of the reason why my mother and me were so poor - my father could not send his child support, because he did not work very much.

  When my father finally got his diagnosis of bi-polar disorder, it was a relief for everybody. He was finally taking some meds, and I had hope that maybe, just maybe, he would finally get his act together and get a job and get a real life. At any rate, Aidan had a lot of sympathy for him. And that was one of the reasons why he enjoyed working with the mental patients. He told me that he always wanted to help our dad, but he never could, so he wanted to help these people instead.

  Regina got to my apartment at 11 o’clock. She was smiling, the first real smile I had seen on her face in a while. She had a bottle of scotch in her hand, and two rocks glasses.

  She came on out onto the balcony, looking at the work I had spread in front of me, and informed me that it was time to put this work away, because we were going to celebrate.

  I had to admit, I was very curious about what she was going to want to celebrate.

  “You’ll find out.” She poured me a glass of scotch, and herself as well. “Okay. Here’s the deal.” She took a sip of the scotch, so did I. It was dry, woody and smooth. “Damn that’s good. Anyhow, here’s the deal. Your prosecutor, Paul Sharpton, he’s a freak. He’s a nasty freak, because he was at the party tonight. He was at the party tonight, and he was getting down and dirty with the girls.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely positive.” I had shown Regina a picture of Paul, actually I’d shown her many pictures of him. She knew exactly what he looked like. But, the beauty of it was, he did not know her. He had no idea who she was. Even though she was working for a lot of other attorneys in the area, she worked behind the scenes. Therefore, Paul would not necessarily recognize her if she was at a party.

  I bit my lower lip, thinking about what that meant.

  “You see, here’s the thing. I did my investigation of Paul, and I did not find anything on him. I had Christian hack his files, his computer, and I did not find anything that made me think that he was dirty. I was trying to figure out exactly why it would be that he would be so willing to throw you under the bus like that. And, now I know. He apparently wants to get his freak on with these children. He wants to do this in the privacy of Carl’s compound, and he knows that anybody else who is there who might see him, would also have something up their sleeve. You know, you see somebody at a sex club, you’re not necessarily going to tell anybody about it, because why were you there in the first place? So yeah, this guy’s as dirty as hell.”

  “Okay. So he’s dirty. And what do you mean, he was getting down and dirty with the girls?”

  “See, this is what happens at these parties. I’ve gone to enough of them t
hat I know the score. The game. Everybody kind of meets each other at these parties. Sometimes the parties are out by the pool, sometimes they’re inside, but the whole point of these parties is that they are meet and greets. These old geezers, they are there for one reason and one reason only – to meet these kids. And that’s what they are, kids. Everybody starts talking, and then, one by one, an old coot will disappear with a young girl, and come back out, find another girl, and then disappear with her. Sometimes a single old perv will disappear with three or four girls in the same night. And, that’s what I saw this Paul person do. He disappeared with two different girls over the course of a night. I watched him. I saw him do it.”

  I folded my arms. “You know, that makes sense. I’ve always wondered why it was that he moved out here right after my trial. It fits - perhaps Carl promised him a lifetime membership or something in exchange for him railroading me into prison.” I took another sip of my Scotch. “Now, how are we going to use this information?”

  “Well, here’s the beauty of it all. Paul was drinking a lot, and, trust me, I was on him like white on rice all night. I was trying to figure out if he would say something that might give me some kind of information we could use. Because you’re right, just the fact that he is a client of this Carl person doesn’t necessarily give us a way to bring them down. However, I did hear him say something that made me sit up and take notice.”

  “What was that?” I asked her.

  “He has a brother. His brother’s name is Max. The girl that he was talking to, the child he was talking to, was asking if he wanted to take pictures of her in the nude. And he was saying that he wanted to do that, and then he was telling her that he liked to take pictures of girls like her, but that he used his brother Max’s computer to store them. Then I figured out that the reason why he was doing that to his brother Max was because his brother Max is in prison. He’s in prison for drug possession.”

  “In prison for drug possession? I don’t understand. Paul’s a prosecutor. Drug possession is a minor crime. I wonder why Paul did not use his influence to keep his brother out of prison for something like that? What kind of drugs did he possess, did he say?”

  Regina was shaking her head. “You don’t get it, do you? Here’s what I’m thinking happened. Paul wanted his brother to go to prison, because he wanted to use his brother’s computer, his passwords, his security firewalls, everything, because he wanted to have all these child porn images, but he did not want them on his own computer. So, he throws Max in the clink, and he commandeers Max’s computer for his dirty deeds. He makes sure that Max goes to prison for something relatively minor, uses Max’s computer to put his child porn on, and, if the feds ever raid, he has plausible deniability. It’s ingenious, really. Completely psychotic and royally f’d up, but ingenious.”

  “So, let’s put together this plan as to how we are going to bring this guy down,” I said. “Obviously, the first thing we’re going to have to do is find the brother in prison. I would imagine that he has no idea what his brother Paul is doing. Because, you know, if the FBI does a sting, he’ll be the one who’s on the hook, not his sleazy brother Paul.”

  Then again, that didn’t really make sense, either. Max was in prison. The images that Paul put on Max’s computer had to have been time-stamped. It would seem that Max would have an airtight alibi for these images, if anybody ever deigned to raid. But it would also be difficult to show that Paul was the culprit.

  It was then that I got an idea about how it was I was going to prove that Paul was the one downloading the images onto Max’s computer.

  Chapter 7

  I found Max easily enough. He was serving time in the federal prison in Bakersfield. He was fortunate enough to be serving time in a minimum security prison, so there was not fencing around the building, the housing was dormitory style, and the emphasis was on work and program orientations. I knew that he was serving time for possession of cocaine, with intent to distribute, in that he had more than an ounce on his person at the time of the raid.

  I found out that Max was working for a tobacco shop that was a front for a drug operation in the back, and, according to the statement of information in his file, he insisted that he had no idea that the drugs were back there. From what I gathered about his case, it seemed as if his brother wanted him to be put away, but his brother also wanted him to not have to suffer too much, which was the reason why he was in a minimum security prison and not something that was higher security. I knew something about federal prisons, and the prison where he was in was really more of Club Fed. The inmates were not violent ones - they were mainly white-collar criminals who were serving time for tax evasion, embezzlement, perjury, and crimes like that. There were a few people who were in there for drug possession, but not as many who were in there for possession with intent to distribute, as was the case with Max.

  I went to the penitentiary, told the guard who I was seeing, and, because it was during visiting hours, it wasn’t a problem actually getting a chance to talk with him. I was able to speak with him one-on-one, because I was an attorney, and also because that was apparently how the prisoners in this place took their visits. There was a large room with tables all around, and I got a chance to sit there and wait for him to come out and see me.

  Max came out about half an hour after I got there. He had never seen me before, and he had no idea why I was there, so he looked confused when he came out. He was dressed in a light beige jumpsuit, his dark wavy hair appeared to be freshly cut, and he was clean-shaven. He was a nice-looking guy, as was his brother, even though his brother, to me, was amazingly sleazy. He looked to be about my age. Paul was probably in his early 40s, because I knew that he was around 25 when he prosecuted my case. I was one of the first murder trials that he prosecuted.

  I stood up when Max came out. I held out my hand. He shook it, looking very confused as to why I was there. “Max, my name is Avery Collins. I’m an attorney. Thank you very much for meeting me.”

  We both sat down. “Of course I’m going to meet you, what else am I going to do? I was told I had a visitor, that’s all I knew. Now, you say you’re an attorney? I guess I don’t understand. I’m all out of appeals. I’m serving time here for the next five years, and I really don’t understand why it is that you’re here.”

  “I’m here because I needed to ask you a few questions about your brother Paul.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about Paul. Paul screwed me over. Big time. You say I have a brother named Paul. I say don’t have a brother named Paul anymore. In fact, I have no brothers at all. I have a couple of sisters, however. Eileen and Nora. Identical twins, younger than me, they come and visit me all the time. But Paul, he don’t visit me, he don’t visit me because he knows what he did to me.”

  “What did Paul do to you?”

  “How long you got? Nevermind, I only have about a half-hour to speak with you anyways. At least, that’s what the guard told me. I can only talk to you for a half hour.”

  I looked at my watch. “Okay. Then let’s get rolling. Now, I took a look at your file, and I see that you were working for a head shop that was selling tobacco products and marijuana paraphernalia, and, in the back, they were selling cocaine. How did you come to work for this place?”

  He leaned forward a little bit. His hands were not handcuffed, and he clasped them in front of him. “My brother, Paul. Oh, sorry, my former brother, Paul, he got me the job. He told me to work for this guy, Harry.” He shook his head. “Only Harry, he did not get charged in this case. He was the one who was dealing drugs. He never told me about it. I had no idea. The drugs were in a locked closet in the back of the store, and I did not have access to this closet. I did not have keys to the closet, and Harry never let me open the closet. So, I had no idea that there were drugs back there, but here comes the feds, questioning me after hours.”

  “Who tipped the feds off about what was going on?” I had a feeling that it was Paul himself who tipped the feds
off, and I had a strong feeling that the reason why Harry was not prosecuted was because Paul made sure that Harry was not prosecuted. It was evidently a sting operation, and Paul must’ve had some kind of pull in the prosecutor’s office to make sure that Harry himself was not prosecuted for this crime.

  “I never did find out. It was an anonymous tip. Anyhow, they threw the book at me. Five years in prison for something I did not do. But my brother, he must’ve pulled some strings and got me here, so there’s that. At least I’m not serving time in some maximum-security hellhole. Small graces, as they preach to us here in church.”

  “Okay. You you said you got five years in prison for something you didn’t do. And yet you just told me that you’re to be here for the next five years. You’ve already served five years in prison. How did you get your time extended?”

  “I caught a new case. My brother, he came to me one day and told me that our mother was dying, and that she wanted to see me. Well, I couldn’t get a furlough to go see her, and, I just left. I left, hitchhiked my way back to San Diego, went to my mother’s house to find out that she was just fine. I mean, I’m glad that she’s fine, and all. But, I had no idea why Paul would’ve said that to me if she was perfectly healthy. Well, I hitchhiked back to the prison, and I was in trouble. I had a trial about my, what I call self-furlough, because it’s bullshit that I couldn’t get a real one, and they extended my sentence by five years. So, that’s the reason why I’m in here for another five years.”

  “You mean, even after you broke out of prison, they put you back here in minimum-security?” That did not make any sense to me. Usually when people break out of minimum security prisons – and it’s relatively easy to do, because there’s no fence around the perimeter – they don’t come back to the minimum-security prison. They go a higher security prison. But this guy was able to come back to this place?