To Kill a Man - Maggie Costello Series 05 (2020)

by Bourne, Sam

  In one case, prosecutors believed they had sufficient evidence. Four years ago, Todd was tried in Tulsa for the sexual assault and battery of Juanita Bock. The DNA evidence was conclusive, and Todd’s lawyers conceded that he and Bock had had sexual intercourse. In testimony, Todd did not deny that he had pinned Bock down during sex or that he had gripped her by the throat, leaving dark bruising around her neck, or that he had penetrated her using a series of objects.

  But, they argued, this had all been done with Bock’s consent. Critical for his case was that Bock had waited nearly a week before reporting the attack and that she had sent him text messages a few days after the incident which made no mention of it.

  Maggie skimmed through the next few paragraphs, which gave more details of Todd’s chequered employment history, including how he had been fired repeatedly for aggressive or unacceptable behaviour. There was a reference to the death of his parents a few years earlier, but that was not what she was looking for. It came a sentence later.

  A turning point occurred nearly a year ago, when a twenty-nine-year-old legal secretary was found dead in Bowling Green, Kentucky. The post-mortem examination confirmed that she had been the victim of a violent sexual assault, with asphyxiation given as the cause of death. The DNA evidence left no doubt: it matched perfectly DNA samples associated with a man who had been held in police custody many times before, repeatedly accused of sexual violence. Detectives were certain: the killer was Jeffrey Todd.

  An immediate warrant for his arrest was issued, his details circulated among police departments in five states and eventually nationwide. “We thought it would be easy, that we’d pick him up in a day or two,” said Detective Mike Crump, who worked the case. But Todd had gone to ground. The last known sighting was on the very day the dead woman was reported missing. “Seems Todd understood that this time we had him, that he wouldn’t get away with this one,” said Crump. “His only option was to go on the run.”

  He evaded local police, he evaded the FBI. Jeffrey Todd seemed to have vanished into thin air until last Sunday, when he was found dead on the floor in the home of Natasha Winthrop.

  Without thinking, Maggie moved her cursor over that last line and highlighted it. She then put the pen she’d been holding – she’d never mastered the art of reading without a pen in her hand – back between her lips. She was desperate for a smoke, but didn’t want to break the moment of concentration. Wisps of thought were forming and she feared they might slip away.

  No one else had been able to find Todd, not even the FBI. Yet somehow Natasha had drawn him out, into the daylight. How had she done it?

  Or had she not done it at all? Natasha thought she had entrapped Todd, but what if that was only how it was meant to look? What if Todd had been placed right in front of her, allowing her to believe she was reeling him in when, in reality, it was she who had been trapped – duped into making contact with a killer who would not be caught, but would kill again? Or was the trick even more devious, a plot hatched by someone who either wanted Natasha to be killed or to kill in an act of self-defence they knew could be made to look like murder? Who was the cat here, and who was the mouse?

  Chapter 24

  Washington, DC

  Natasha had warned her. As she had handed Maggie her keys, along with a set of entry codes and computer passwords, she had warned that there was no time when the office of a top law firm was guaranteed to be empty.

  ‘It’s a bit of a macho thing,’ she had said. ‘Lawyers like to show off their stamina. You head home at one am and someone will ask why you’re having an early night.’

  Which meant that as Maggie punched in the numbers, using the same underground entrance she had used three nights ago, she had no idea if she would be able to work discreetly and alone, or whether she’d have someone over her shoulder. Maggie had asked Natasha if she trusted her colleagues. The answer had not been wholly reassuring: ‘I think so.’

  The elevator had arrived at the third floor. As the doors opened, the reception area was in darkness. Maggie stepped forward, a motion that was sufficient to activate the lights. It illuminated the open-plan office, which revealed itself as unoccupied: just the odd peeping light of computers on standby and laptops on charge.

  Maggie headed to Natasha’s office; the door was unlocked. She pushed it open and waited for the automatic lights to come on. A second later, she remembered that Natasha had mentioned that too. ‘I’m afraid I disabled the automatic lights thing: just couldn’t bear that awful fluorescent glare.’

  So Maggie pawed her way across the desk, reaching for the light, a beautiful, vintage Anglepoise lamp whose switch required physical effort, which it rewarded with a satisfying clunk. Once it came on, Maggie recalled the surprise, and slight pleasure, she had felt when she walked in for that first meeting with Natasha. She had been expecting a neat, even paper-free wooden surface, cleared and sorted, confirming that Natasha Winthrop had reached the summit of the legal profession before the age of forty because she had an orderly, rational and disciplined mind.

  Instead, Maggie had seen – and saw again now – piles and piles of paper. Letters, envelopes, newspapers, leaflets, pamphlets, transcripts, bills, bank statements, handwritten memos, notebooks, photographs, instruction manuals, brochures and several high-end fashion magazines. The piles themselves were quite neat, squared-off and of even height, in a semblance of order as if – and here Maggie might have been projecting from the state of her own desk – in readiness for the big clear-out to come. Natasha’s office was a garden that had overgrown, but one in which each clump of tall grass, thick nettles and strangling weeds was neatly fenced in: overgrown, but not out of control.

  Natasha’s instructions had been clear on one key point. Maggie was not to remove, alter or delete anything that she found, no matter how incriminating. ‘Especially if it’s incriminating,’ Natasha had said. The last thing she needed was any suggestion that she had removed or destroyed evidence.

  Instead, Maggie’s brief was to rummage through Natasha’s past looking for enemies. She was to see if there was anyone with sufficient animus – a bitter ex-client, say, or an adversary she had successfully sued or put behind bars – who might plausibly have set out to make a bad situation for Natasha Winthrop infinitely worse, by finding and leaking those internet browsing histories, for example. Or even, and this was in Maggie’s mind rather than Natasha’s, to look for a foe so hostile they might have set up the entire thing – enticing Winthrop to kill, or be killed, by dangling the mouse of Jeffrey Todd in front of her.

  The police would work their way through this material eventually. Indeed, they had wanted to do it right away. But Natasha had ensured Maggie had a clear run at it first. For the second time, Winthrop had fended off the DC Police by invoking attorney-client privilege: she couldn’t possibly allow detectives to look at confidential or commercially sensitive documents, at least not before she or one of her colleagues had had a chance to go carefully through each one. Maggie was to consider this initial examination the first stage of that process.

  Natasha had given her few pointers, save that the computer contained almost everything that mattered. Despite that guidance, or perhaps because of it, Maggie decided to look at the papers first. She wanted to rifle through them, just to see what was there.

  The first pile yielded an invitation to address a women’s organization in Pittsburgh. A letter from a client questioning a bill. A clipped article from the New York Review of Books. A memo from an assistant who had worked on the Congressional hearings just completed. I’ve gone through the proceedings of the Church committee and can see no applicable precedent. There might be a discussion in the Iran–Contra bundle. I’ll keep you posted.

  There was a handwritten note from a colleague, asking her further advice on that ‘personnel matter we discussed’. A cable TV bill. The programme for a literary festival at Hilton Head, North Carolina: Maggie flicked th
rough it to see that Natasha Winthrop was a listed speaker, down to interview a Nigerian novelist who had become a sensation.

  Now she would go for spot checks, cutting into the pile at random points, telling herself that if she did that three times and each time landed upon an item of no consequence then she would declare the papers clean and move on to the digital files.

  First came a birthday card. Maggie’s eye went to the signature and saw that it was not from a friend or relative but ‘Simon B and the Hyde Brothers team’. Maggie pulled out her phone, consulting Google to establish that Hyde Brothers was a private bank based in Boston. Confirmation of what Maggie already knew: Natasha was properly loaded.

  Next Maggie went to a new stack, so far undisturbed, taking hold of almost all of it to see what lay close to the bottom. An invitation, amateurishly produced, for what appeared to be a reunion, nearly a year earlier. Not for high school or college, but for the New York District Attorney’s office where Natasha had started out. The image on the front showed a blindfolded Lady Justice with scales in one hand and a martini in the other. On the back was scrawled the message, Where it all began! See you there, I hope. F x. The DA’s office had been Natasha’s first real job, after Harvard Law School and that spell clerking for the most distinguished liberal justice on the Supreme Court.

  Maggie put the pile back and, as arbitrarily as she could, scythed into one last pile, the one to the right of the keyboard of Natasha’s computer. She made a pact with herself. If whatever documents she came to were innocuous, she would consider this part of the exercise complete. What she found was a playbill for a production of Turandot at the Kennedy Center.

  All right, time to turn on the machine. She typed in the password Natasha had given her – ‘Pilgrim’ plus a year with a couple of added symbols – and watched as the screen filled up with various folders. With a sigh, Maggie realized that here too she would not be able to read everything, but would have to dip and skim, hoping that if there was a clue to be found, she would find it.

  She looked closely at the electronic folders, scanning the names. Some were labelled by case, some by client, a couple for charities on whose boards Natasha had served. She clicked first on the one that related to those House hearings that had made Winthrop’s name and electrified the nation. It was a Russian doll, giving birth instantly to a dozen other folders, which themselves contained dozens more. These documents were mostly labelled by witness, including several names that had become fleetingly famous following their day in the Capitol Hill klieg lights, their hours of cross-examination forming the subject of intense cable chatter and even late-night satirical comedy. Maggie saw letters and memoranda that had been projected on screen in the hearing room, as well as briefing notes passed between Natasha and her team, charting in granular detail how best to elicit the facts from this or that witness. Maggie was fascinated by one graphic so complicated, it looked like a diagram setting out a theorem of higher mathematics. Only when she zoomed in could she see that it was, in fact, a flow chart, or rather a decision tree, setting out all the possible responses the witness might offer, and how Natasha should respond to each eventuality. The TV audience had marvelled at Winthrop’s suppleness and agility as an interrogator, her calm unflappability. Now Maggie understood that that was the fruit, yes, of a keen intellect but also the most meticulous preparation. For all her aristocratic demeanour, Winthrop was no breezy dilettante. She worked.

  Maggie packed the Russian dolls back together and went elsewhere, reasoning that the congressional story had played out so publicly, pored over in forensic detail by journalists, rival politicians and indeed lawyers, that there was little Maggie was going to discover in a few hours of skim-reading that wasn’t already known.

  Besides, there was a more fundamental matter of logic. Maggie was searching for those who might have set out to frame or entrap Natasha Winthrop. It struck her now that such people would surely have sought to act before Natasha could damage their cause, rather than afterwards. The only possible motive of anyone involved in the recent clashes on Capitol Hill would be revenge, punishing Winthrop for what she had already done. In Maggie’s experience, that was not how such people operated. They preferred to remove a threat before that threat materialized, not once it had. If those people, whoever they were, wanted vengeance, they would surely have waited longer than a couple of weeks, and their methods, when they struck, would have been more direct.

  So Maggie followed her intuition and looked around. There was a folder that related to pro-bono work, including for a group that promoted free expression. Natasha had petitioned several foreign governments over journalists jailed for doing their jobs. Maggie scribbled a few names, making a note to herself that she should check if the governments in question had ever been linked to the deaths of dissidents exiled abroad. If they didn’t take out troublemakers, it was unlikely they’d take out troublemakers’ lawyers.

  Another folder was labelled ‘Gerry’. Maggie half-formed an image of this Gerry, picturing a South Boston mafioso presiding over a family of Irish mobsters. Could that be it? Had Natasha been a lawyer to the mob? Then she clicked the file open to see dozens of electoral rolls, voting tables and large-scale maps, detailing congressional districts down to the tiniest ward. Maggie had to smile: Winthrop had been a lead member of the legal team that had sued several states over the biased drawing of electoral boundaries, also known as gerrymandering. ‘Gerry’ was Natasha’s little joke.

  Maggie kept going like that for hours, speed-reading her way through the Winthrop caseload for the last decade, seeing how Natasha had moved up through the gears, how city cases had become state and eventually national cases, how by her early thirties she had graduated to fighting fossil-fuel companies over pollution and confronting federal agencies for failing to enforce environmental standards. The Guantanamo folder was bleak, as Maggie waded through the correspondence that had underpinned the case Natasha had made before the Supreme Court, arguing that men accused of admittedly heinous terrorist crimes had faced treatment so inhuman it amounted to ‘cruel and unusual punishment’.

  Could a former guard at the Guantanamo base have wanted to silence Natasha for her role in bringing those abuses to light? Again, Maggie didn’t think so. Not least because Natasha’s target had always been the US government, rather than any one individual.

  More harrowing was the folder packed with testimonies of migrant children and their parents, separated at the southern border and held in detention centres. Natasha had bombarded the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, or ICE, with scores of letters, complaining about the family separation policy in general and the mistreatment of named children in particular. Natasha was one of the few lawyers who had been inside those godforsaken places, seeing children sleeping on concrete floors, toddlers denied basic washing facilities, babies sitting in soiled diapers, separated from their mothers and fathers with only other children to care for them. One letter described children in such a state of shock, ‘they no longer know how to cry.’

  Maggie read through a blizzard of emails between Natasha, her assistants and civil rights organizations, the Red Cross, the TV networks, the newspapers – anyone who might help those children or at least publicize their plight. Most heart-breaking were the letters back and forth between Natasha’s office and the various, disconnected parts of the federal bureaucracy as she tried to reunite children, many of whom didn’t speak at all, let alone speak English, with parents who had no idea where their children had been taken.

  Underneath the civil language of these letters was Natasha’s cold fury that officials of the US government had broken up families without keeping clear records of who was being sent where and who belonged to who. Maggie found herself reading the story of one woman who’d gone to pick up her little girl, only to be told a man had already collected the child, claiming to be her father. ‘Physical and sexual abuse of these children is not merely possible,’ Natasha had
written in a submission to a Texas judge, ‘it is probable.’

  The picture of Natasha Winthrop’s professional life was becoming clearer, and there was just a little corner of Maggie’s mind – the part that had fought alongside, and been tutored by, Stuart Goldstein in a presidential campaign – that couldn’t help but marvel at what she saw. If they could somehow get through this current . . . stuff, Natasha Winthrop would make a truly phenomenal candidate. Maggie could almost hear Goldstein’s voice: You’re telling me this woman has defended little kids, fought for small towns whose drinking water was polluted, freed brave dissidents thrown into jail by evil dictators and graduated top of her class from Harvard and looks like a movie star? You gotta be kidding me. She’s like a sexy Mother Theresa. Come on, Maggie, where’s the catch?

  The catch, Stuart, is that she also went on kinky bondage sites, deliberately lured a man to her home and clubbed him to death. So you’re telling me she might have some baggage.

  Maggie smiled at the sound of his voice, even if it was only in her own head. Christ, she missed Stuart.

  She continued in this same vein as she clicked on the rest of the on-screen files, still looking for a past act or stance or client that might serve as the explanatory motive in a plot to bring down Natasha Winthrop, but now with one barely admitted eye on the lookout for material that could work as backstory in a campaign to put Winthrop in the White House.

  Maggie did not spell it out even in her own head, so it remained a thought bubbling below the surface. But as the hours went by, as she tapped and clicked at that computer, surrounded by documents – some on her lap, some arranged on the floor, some on screen – she understood that she didn’t merely want to fulfil her promise to help Natasha Winthrop out of a hole. She wanted to give her a shot. Natasha might blow it; she might turn out to be a dud. God knew, that happened often enough. But if she were to have so much as a chance, she would have to clear her name – and with the deadline for presidential nominations just five days away, she would have to do it now.