Accomplice Liability

by Stephen Penner

He stepped off the elevator onto the 23rd floor and set out for the burglary unit. The attorneys’ offices circled the outside of the floor, each with its own door and views of the city. The legal assistants, on the other hand, sat in a communal cubicle maze in the middle. The legal assistants rotated between units more frequently, so after a while, Brunelle had gotten to work with most of them. The attorneys tended to stay longer in their units, and the burglary unit was one of the felony teams where the newest lawyers started, once they’d finished their initial rotation in misdemeanors. So Brunelle said his hellos to the familiar faces in the legal assistant farm as he passed, but didn’t even recognize most of the names on the attorney doors until he got to the nameplate that read ‘Gwen Carlisle.’ And even then, he didn’t recognize the woman inside.

  Carlisle was facing away from the door, typing on her computer. On her desk were an open file folder filled with police reports, several printouts of case law, and an oversized coffee cup boasting the words ‘World’s Greatest Lawyer.’ She was intent on her work and didn’t notice Brunelle. He scanned her office further and found it to be neat and tastefully decorated, with framed nature photographs joining the obligatory diplomas on the wall. No photos of significant others.

  Gwen Carlisle herself matched the décor. Simple and stylish. A black suit coat was hung on a set of hooks near the door, and Brunelle could see her toned arms under her white blouse as she typed. She had thick, blonde hair cut just above her shoulders and only a gold necklace for jewelry. No rings.

  Brunelle knocked on the doorframe. “Hi, Gwen. I’m Dave Brunelle.” He gestured vaguely upstairs. “I work in homicides. Do you have a minute?”

  Carlisle stopped typing and spun to face her visitor. “Hi, Dave. I know who you are. We’ve nodded to each other in the elevator a few times.”

  Brunelle smiled to cover up the awkwardness of someone remembering prior contacts that he didn’t. “Right. I thought you looked familiar,” he lied. “So, uh, you got a minute?”

  Carlisle pushed her keyboard away and gave her full attention to Brunelle. “Of course. What can I do for you?”

  Brunelle already liked her professionalism. It would play well in front of the jury. Jurors wanted their prosecutors to be professionals. Defense attorneys could be colorful, but prosecutors were supposed to be the adults in the room. Gwen Carlisle was clearly an adult. “I’m looking for a second chair on a new murder case and I was wondering if you might be interested.”

  Carlisle sat up a bit straighter and began nodding. But Brunelle interrupted her acceptance. “Actually, Duncan suggested you,” he told her. She should know that. Not that Brunelle didn’t want her on the case; but the big boss did want it. It was true, and real adults told the truth. He’d recently been reminded of that.

  “Oh,” Carlisle replied. “Well, that’s very flattering. And yes, I’d very much like to work on the case. Thank you.”

  “Done,” Brunelle announced. He finally sat down in one of the two guest chairs crammed into the small office. “So, do you want to hear a little about the case?”

  “Of course,” Carlisle replied. “And then I’ll read the discovery tonight.”

  Brunelle grinned. “Uh, I think there’s already like five hundred pages of reports. We’ll get another two thousand or so before we’re done.”

  “All the more reason to get started,” Carlisle smiled back. “I’m not afraid of paper.”

  Spoken like a true civil attorney. Brunelle hated paper, unless it was photographs of the crime scene or ballistics reports matching the defendant’s gun to the bullets extracted at autopsy.

  “Yeah, Matt mentioned you were in civil for a while,” Brunelle said. “In fact, that’s why he recommended you. The lawyer for the shooter is Ron Jacobsen.”

  Carlisle let out a light laugh. “Ron? Oh, God. Yeah, I know Ron. He’s not afraid of paper either. Shit, I think he must own stock in a paper company, the way he cranks out the motions.”

  Although surprised by it, Brunelle kind of liked the s-bomb Carlisle dropped. It was real. Adult and authentic. Perfect partner.

  “Yeah, well, there are six different attorneys we’re going to have to deal with,” Brunelle went on. “I want Jacobsen to be the last one standing, then you and I can take him down together.”

  Carlisle’s eyebrows raised. “Six attorneys? So, six defendants? What happened? Did a gang beat somebody to death?”

  Brunelle shook his head. “Not exactly. One guy shot another guy for being a snitch, and the rest helped him out, each in a different way.”

  Carlisle nodded thoughtfully. Then she turned back to her computer and grabbed the mouse. “What’s the shooter’s name?”

  “Hernandez. Elmer Hernandez.”

  Carlisle raised an eyebrow at Brunelle. “Elmer?”

  “He goes by ‘Burner,’“ he explained. “He’s a drug lord in North Seattle. Lake City.”

  “So yeah, Elmer doesn’t fit that,” Carlisle agreed. “Although there’s probably a glue joke in there somewhere. We should keep an eye open for that.”

  Adult, authentic, and a sense of humor, Brunelle thought. Jackpot.

  “Okay, here we go,” Carlisle said, her eyes again fixed on her computer screen. “Elmer Hernandez, Nathan Wilkins, Samantha Keller, James Rittenberger, and Lindsey Fuller.” She’d already pulled up the case. “That’s only five codefendants. You said there were six.”

  “Uh, right,” Brunelle answered. “The sixth is uncharged. She came forward right away, before we even knew who she was. She gave us the info we needed to be able to charge Hernandez, so we already cut her a deal.”

  That eyebrow of Carlisle’s raised again. “Before the investigation was complete?”

  “The investigation wouldn’t have been complete if we hadn’t agreed to talk to her. We had no evidence at that point. Well, we had a dead body and a mostly incoherent statement by Josh Rittenberger while he was still high as a kite. Not enough to charge at that point. The problem is that the only witnesses were also participants. We have to cut deals with some of them in order to get the others.”

  “But how do you know which ones to give deals to?” Carlisle questioned.

  Brunelle frowned. “You try to cut the deals to the ones who are least culpable so you can get the ones who are most culpable.”

  “But if the only witnesses are the defendants themselves,” Carlisle asked, “and they all want a deal and have every reason to blame the others, how do you know who to believe? “

  Brunelle nodded. “Welcome to my world.” He raised an eyebrow of his own. “You still want in on this case?”

  Carlisle only had to think for a moment before returning the smile. “Fuck, yes.”

  Chapter 13

  The next morning, Brunelle decided to swing by Carlisle’s office, just to check in. He doubted she’d actually read all the discovery, but she’d probably started. Maybe they could begin discussing strategy over a cup of coffee. But when he arrived, he realized they’d be spending the morning in her office.

  Carlisle had removed all the frames and diplomas from one of her walls and replaced them with a large sheet of butcher paper. Taped to the sheet were the five booking photos of the charged defendants, along with a copy of Amanda Ashford’s driver’s license photo, and an old booking photo of Derrick Shanborn. Below each photo was the person’s name, known aliases, date of birth, and any prior violent felony convictions. Above each photo was a one-word description of each defendant’s role in the murder. Hernandez got ‘Shooter.’ Keller got ‘Girlfriend.’ And Brunelle’s immediate favorite: Ashford got ‘Siren’—although Fuller’s ‘Harpy’ was a close second. Each defendant’s name was written in a different color ink, but the labels were in black, in quotation marks, and followed by different numbers of colored circles, some filled in, some not.

  “So you read the discovery?” Brunelle deadpanned.

  Carlisle had been standing in the center of the room, chin in hand, examining her chart. She turned to Brunelle a
nd laughed lightly. “Yeah. I was here pretty late last night.” She gestured to her handiwork. “I’m kind of a visual person. I need to see the relationships.”

  Brunelle nodded approvingly. Cleaned up a little and mounted on a foam board, the diagram would make a hell of an exhibit for closing argument. “So what do the colors mean?”

  “Yeah, isn’t that cool?” Carlisle enthused. “Each defendant has his or her own color. Hernandez is the killer, so he’s red.”

  “Of course,” Brunelle agreed.

  “Wilkins is like his business manager,” Carlisle went on, “so he’s green. Keller is like Hernandez’s queen, so she gets purple. Rittenberger is weak so he gets orange. I hate orange. I made Fuller brown because she’s a piece of shit. And that leaves blue for Ashford.”

  “Because she’s a siren rising out of the ocean?” Brunelle ventured.

  Carlisle scrunched up her face at him, then laughed. “No, because that was the last color left over. But very poetic.”

  Brunelle sighed. “Yeah, I’m routinely accused of being poetic.”

  He was joking but Carlisle met his gaze and smiled. “There are worse things to be.”

  Brunelle felt a rush from the eye contact. He hadn’t noticed before, but she had bright green eyes. Not hazel, but truly green. They were striking; he was surprised they hadn’t caught his eye the day before.

  “Uh, yeah, I suppose,” he stammered. “I’ll try not to give my closing argument in sonnet form.”

  “That’d be a pretty short closing,” Carlisle responded. “I mean, longer than a limerick, but still, just fourteen lines.”

  Brunelle put his hands in his pockets and nodded. “Yeah, I have no idea how long a sonnet is.”

  “Fourteen lines,” Carlisle replied. “I just told you. And yeah, that’s not surprising.”

  “You think I’m not cultured?”

  “I think you’re a dude and a lawyer,” Carlisle answered. “You majored in beer and the only thing you read is closed captions.”

  Brunelle was taken aback. And a little hurt. “There’s more to me than that.”

  Carlisle put her hand on her hips and smiled. “Oh yeah? Well, we’ll see. In the meantime, I need to talk with that dude and lawyer.” She pointed to Amanda Ashford’s photo. “Would you do her?”

  “Um,” Brunelle managed to respond after a moment. “What?”

  “Ashford,” Carlisle gestured again at her photo. “Would you do her?”

  When Brunelle still didn’t answer the question, Carlisle rephrased. “Fuck her. Would you fuck her?”

  “I know what you meant,” Brunelle replied. “I just— I mean... Why would you ask me that?”

  Carlisle crossed her arms and cocked her head to look across the room at the photo of Amanda Ashford. “She claims Hernandez used her as a fuck toy. But I don’t know. She looks pretty skeezy. I don’t know if I’d put my dick in that. I mean, if I had a dick.”

  Brunelle was speechless.

  “You have a dick, right?” Carlisle prodded.

  “Uh, right.”

  “So would you stick it in that?”

  Brunelle hesitated, but only for a moment. Then he gave up. He looked at Ashford’s picture. She was attractive enough, although no one looked good in a booking photo. Well, almost no one. And he’d seen her in person too. “Well, I am a dude, as you say, but I’m an upstanding, honorable, sensitive kind of dude. But absent that… Yeah, I’d probably have sex with her.”

  “Have sex?” Carlisle asked with a grin. “Not ‘stick your dick in’? Aw, that’s nice. You’re adorable, even for a guy.”

  Brunelle straightened himself up a bit and tried to move past his adorableness. “Okay. Great. Glad I could help somehow. It seemed credible to me from the start, but probably because I’m a dude. And because I wanted to believe her since her story is what we based the charges on.”

  “I know,” Carlisle answered. “Which is why I was testing that. But even if she’s telling the truth, she doesn’t give us enough. See those colored circles?”

  “Yeah. I was going to ask about those.”

  Carlisle explained. “Every defendant has a color, right? Well, the circle after the defendant’s label tells us which witnesses said what. Look at the circles after the word ‘Shooter’ above Hernandez. The orange circle is filled in because Rittenberger—he’s orange, right?—Rittenberger said he saw Hernandez pull the trigger. But the blue circle has an X through it because Ashford said she wasn’t there so she can’t say who actually pulled the trigger.”

  Brunelle nodded approvingly. “Good system. What about the other circles? Green, purple, and brown? Those are empty. What do those mean?”

  “Those mean we don’t know yet what those people will say,” Carlisle answered. “But we need to find out. Every circle we fill in is another witness against Hernandez.”

  “And another deal with the devil,” Brunelle sighed.

  “No,” Carlisle said. “Hernandez is the devil. We’d be cutting deals with his henchmen.”

  Brunelle chuckled at that. “The devil’s henchmen are still demons.”

  Carlisle laughed too. “I suppose so.”

  Brunelle shrugged. “Well, who would know better what happens in hell than the demons?”

  “The victims,” Carlisle answered after a moment. “The damned.”

  Heavy, Brunelle thought.

  “But our victim is dead,” he said. “So that just leaves the demons. So let’s try to use as few of them as possible, and the ones with the least blood on their hands.”

  Carlisle and Brunelle both stared at Carlisle’s diagram for several moments. Finally, Brunelle stepped forward and tapped on one of the photographs.

  “Lindsey Fuller,” he said. “We start with her.”

  Chapter 14

  Lindsey Fuller may not have been the least culpable of the five defendants. Then again, she might have been. They were still low on details. Hernandez pulled the trigger—that much seemed certain—which left everyone but Hernandez in the running for the least culpable award. What tipped the scales in favor of Fuller wasn’t anything she’d said or done. To the contrary, screaming at Rittenberger to not cooperate was definitely a check in the negative column. But she had one thing the others didn’t have: Nick Lannigan as her attorney.

  Rittenberger had Barbara Rainaldi. A fine attorney. She’d do him well. Too well. Before she let her client talk, she’d want every possible assurance, benefit, and favor, all in writing and witnessed by two priests and a rabbi. All Lannigan would need was a promise he wouldn’t actually have to go to trial.

  “I noticed all five of the defendants are set for pretrial this morning.” Carlisle asked as they reached The Pit, the large meeting room where all the criminal attorneys, prosecutors and defenders, meet every day to make the sausage of plea bargains and deals that kept ninety-five percent of criminal cases out of trial courtrooms, lest the system be completely overwhelmed. “Are we going to keep them together for all of the court dates? I heard what happened at the arraignment.”

  “After this, we’ll start scheduling them on different dates,” Brunelle answered. “But I want them to see each other today, going from the jail to court, then get split up while they talk to their individual attorneys. I want them wondering if someone else is talking. Nothing encourages you to snitch like thinking somebody else might snitch you out first.”

  He opened the door to The Pit and they both stepped inside. There were at least twenty attorneys inside. Most were sitting at tables, holding two-, three-, or even four-way conversations. Defender A talking with Prosecutors B and C about two different clients, while Prosecutor B was also talking with Defender D about a third defendant and Prosecutor C was showing pictures of his kids to Defender E and Prosecutor F. It was all very congenial. Crimes were committed, deals were made, pleas were entered, next. At least, that’s how Brunelle hoped the morning would go with Lannigan. If it did, then Jacobsen, Edwards, and Rainaldi would just have to wait. And Robyn
Dunn too. But Robyn wasn’t very good at waiting.

  “Hello, Dave.” Robyn emerged from the crowd to greet him before he was even two steps inside. She cast an appraising glance at Carlisle. “Is this your sidekick?”

  The sidekick smiled and extended her hand. “Gwen Carlisle. Pleased to meet you.”

  Robyn shook her hand without hesitation. “Nice to meet you too.” She tipped her head toward Brunelle. “Be careful of this one. He’s slippery. You never know what he’s really going to do.”

  Brunelle straightened up a bit at the statement, but before he could protest, Robyn added, “It’s not his fault. He has trouble deciding what he wants. You should double-check his decisions to make sure they’re really the best thing for the case.”

  Carlisle smiled. “Okay. Thanks for the advice.”

  Brunelle didn’t like being talked about as if he weren’t there. He glanced past Robyn into the throng of attorneys behind her. “Is Nick here? I want to talk to him first.”

  “Of course you do,” Robyn replied with a laugh. “Why do you think Jessica assigned him to Lindsey Fuller?”

  Brunelle paused for a moment to consider Edwards anticipating his decisions and stacking the deck against him before they even got started. Before he could consider it too much though, Robyn handed him a stack of papers. “I know there’s no point in talking deal with you today, so here’s our motion to sever Ms. Keller’s trial from her codefendants, and a scheduling order setting the argument for two weeks from today. I imagine the other attorneys will all piggyback my motion. Well, all except Nick.” She turned and looked to a back corner of The Pit. “He was the first one here this morning. I know because I was second. He’s waiting for you.”

  Brunelle took the pleadings from Robyn. “Thanks. So, I guess that’s all we need to do on your case for today?”

  Robyn smiled, making that one dimple pop again. “For today, Davey. But you know there’s lots more coming. If you decide you’d like to talk to my client, let me know, but I’m not going to come to you hat in hand. You know I don’t beg.”