“Each of them had become a full-fledged member of the Brotherhood.”
“And Edwards, presumably, continued to provide the FBI with information about the Brotherhood once he was out of prison?”
“Yes, although it wasn’t the quality of information we might have hoped for. Sims, because of his willingness to inflict suffering, had risen quickly in the organization, while Edwards lagged behind. A penitentiary is a ruthless place.”
“Edwards didn’t have the stomach for it,” I suggested.
“He was fulfilling his obligation to the Bureau,” Braxton said. “We don’t condone participation in criminal activities, especially if it involves harm to others. Obviously, given the AB’s activities, and its expectations of its members, Edwards, while inside, couldn’t avoid wrongdoing entirely. But the purpose of having him in place was to bring down the AB, not to further its hateful purposes.”
“Was he your only informant at this time?”
Again Braxton hesitated, trying to intuit where I was going. “No.”
“What concerns did you have for Edwards’s safety after he and then Sims were released from prison?” I asked.
“In a word? Sims. There’s always the concern that an informant may have been compromised. Sims definitely suspected Edwards after they got out of prison. At first I thought his suspicions went back to the way they’d been set up for prison, that something about how those arrests and prosecutions had been handled was suspicious to him. It also could have been the simple fact that Sims knew Edwards could hang the Plum Tree job around his neck anytime he wanted. But it turned out that wasn’t it. It all went back to a woman named Leann Ward.”
“The mother of my client, Alice Ward, the defendant in this case.”
“Correct. Leann was found dead of a drug overdose a week after the Plum Tree job, and the medical examiner classified it as a homicide. Once we connected Edwards and Sims to the Plum Tree, it was natural to suspect that Ward was the person who’d helped them gain access, and that after the job went bad they’d killed her to prevent her from making a deal. As it turned out, there was something about Leann Ward that I didn’t know at the beginning, something that made Jack Sims extremely wary of Edwards after she turned up dead.”
“And what was that?” I said when it became clear the FBI agent was waiting for another question from me before he’d go on.
“Edwards believed he was the father of her child.”
As he spoke these words, Braxton looked directly at my client. His eyes were eager and observant, but emotionless.
My next question had evaporated from my mind. I was aware that Braxton had possibly just pronounced Sims’s death sentence at the hands of the Aryan Brotherhood. Whatever else you might say about Bo Wilder, it was clear to me he wouldn’t tolerate one of his men using another man’s daughter as her father’s executioner.
Turning to my client, I saw she didn’t seem to notice that the FBI agent, the jurors, and everyone else in the courtroom were staring at her.
Without warning, Alice Ward jumped up, knocking over her chair.
The first deputy to reach her pinned her arms and slammed her onto the carpet facedown. In the jury box, there was obvious consternation. For his part, Braxton hadn’t moved a muscle, except that his eyes had followed Alice’s blind flight toward the door of the detention cell where she’d attempted suicide weeks before.
CHAPTER 21
At Judge Ransom’s order, Alice was returned to her holding cell. After a few minutes, I was permitted to join her. I found her shackled, her teeth chattering, her arms squeezed between her legs by her restraints.
“I’ll take the deal,” she said. It was hard for me to hear her, she was speaking so softly.
“We don’t know if he’s telling the truth or not.” I went down on my heels in front of her, my eyes seeking hers. “He’s trying to mess with your head, the way Sims did. They’re both bastards, two sides of the same coin.”
“Doesn’t change what I did.”
I had no answer to that. Nothing would change it, as long as Braxton was telling the truth. And I had no reason to believe he wasn’t.
“We can get a paternity test,” I told her. “The results might take a few days, but—”
“It’s not the first time I heard that,” she admitted. “Another girl passed me the message, right after. ‘Jack said for me to tell you that you killed your daddy yesterday,’ she said to me. ‘The only thing left for you to do now is kill yourself.’ That’s what Jack wanted, and what I was trying to do. But I fucked up suicide the way I fucked up everything else. Two with one stone, he thought.”
“We have to go back out there,” I said, and then I made a reckless promise. “It can’t get any worse than this.”
But who was I to say whether things couldn’t get worse? For instance, she might be convicted of first-degree murder. That, on top of believing she’d likely killed her father, would probably send her over the edge.
Still, I had unfinished business with Braxton. Even if the judge was willing to postpone the trial, I doubted the FBI agent would return tomorrow. This was my one and only shot.
“You have to,” I told her, lifting her by the arm. “Let’s go back out there together and show the jurors what you’re made of.”
I knocked on the door and we were readmitted to the courtroom. The jurors weren’t present. I pleaded briefly with the judge to allow her restraints to be removed. After consulting with the deputies, Judge Ransom acquiesced. Next, I asked him for permission to treat Braxton as an adverse witness. The ADA objected, but the judge, after a moment’s thought, granted permission. I helped Alice into her chair. She didn’t attempt to rise when the jurors were readmitted.
Standing beside her, my hand protectively on her shoulder, I carefully studied the jurors’ faces as they filed in, trying to read their reaction to what had happened and thus determine my next move. In their eyes I saw concern and pity, overlaid with shock. All of them had been deeply affected by what they’d witnessed a few moments before in the courtroom. They sat shaken but alert, without a trace of boredom or disengagement. Not one of them looked at Braxton, still sitting there on the witness stand. Only a few glanced at the ADA.
At the defense table, Alice’s chin was clamped against her chest, her body was hunched like a question mark, her eyes were fixed on her hands in her lap. A shudder passed through her. She seemed to gather herself tightly, the better to contain it.
“The FBI doesn’t care about the random murder of a diner in a restaurant, does it, Agent Braxton?” I asked once the jurors had all been seated.
He blinked at the shift in tone. “It’s not that we don’t care. It’s that sometimes true justice can only be achieved through roundabout ends. We’re a federal agency, and our jurisdiction only extends to the violation of federal law.”
“You’re saying you couldn’t find a federal law to charge Jack Sims with for the Plum Tree robbery? How about the Hobbs Act?”
Braxton was silent. At any point, Sloane might have objected to this line of questioning, but she made no attempt to do so.
“You could even have sought the death penalty for use of a firearm resulting in a murder, couldn’t you?”
Again, Braxton chose not to answer. I glanced at the jurors and saw that they’d interpreted his silence correctly as an admission. They were gazing at him now, several sitting with folded arms, all evidently dismayed by what they’d heard.
“In fact, as far as you’re concerned, any crime not committed in furtherance of the Aryan Brotherhood isn’t worthy of your attention, correct?”
“That’s not true. Our operational priority is to bring down one of the most vicious criminal organizations in the state of California over the last fifty years. No one murder is justifiable, but we’re talking about an organization that drops dozens of bodies each year. You’ve got to look at the big picture.”
“And the way you achieved your operational priorities in this instance is by helpi
ng prospective members of the Aryan Brotherhood remain free to commit more crimes, free to victimize innocent Californians when they might have been safely locked away in prison the rest of their lives, or on death row, isn’t that true?”
“I don’t answer to you, and I don’t need to sit here and listen to this.”
“Answer the question,” the judge instructed him.
Braxton made as if to rise.
“Deputies,” Ransom said sharply.
The deputies who a moment ago had flanked Alice Ward now advanced toward the witness stand, glancing at one another uncertainly.
“That’s good,” Ransom told them. “Just keep him company up there. Mr. Maxwell, proceed.”
I asked for the question to be read back. When the court reporter had done so, Braxton answered. “When you’re fighting an enemy that prides itself on ruthlessness, you’ve got to be more ruthless. When his only value is loyalty, you’ve got to make him disloyal. When the only thing he respects is blood, you’ve got to show him blood. And when your enemy thinks he has nothing to lose, you have to give him something, if only so that, later, it can be taken away.”
“And you gave Jack Sims his freedom, didn’t you?”
“Not permanently,” Braxton answered.
Having exhausted this line of questioning, I decided to move on. “Earlier, you’d begun telling me that Sims had become wary of Edwards because of a woman named Leann Ward.”
“That’s right.”
“Edwards had a relationship with Ms. Ward and believed himself to be the father of her child.”
“Correct. We covered that.”
“Jack Sims killed Leann Ward?”
Sloane now objected, basing her opposition on the agent’s lack of personal knowledge.
“But the state introduced this topic,” I responded. “When Detective Dunham was on the stand, Ms. Sloane asked her numerous questions regarding Edwards’s possible involvement in Leann Ward’s murder, because the state evidently believes this murder supplied my client with a motive to kill. Now that we’re trying to make our case for provocation, however, the DA doesn’t want the jury to hear that Sims may also have been involved. That’s fundamentally unfair.”
“The objection is more straightforward than that, Mr. Maxwell. It’s a matter of the agent’s personal knowledge.” He now turned to Braxton and, to Sloane’s evident frustration, rephrased the question. “What knowledge, if any, do you have regarding the identity of Leann Ward’s killer or killers?”
Ransom’s use of the plural “killers” didn’t go unnoticed by the jurors, I observed. Though he surely hadn’t meant it to, the question tipped the playing field in favor of the theory I was developing, which was that Sims and Edwards had both been involved and that Sims had then lied to my client, pleading innocence and putting it all on Edwards as a way of provoking her into killing his onetime partner.
“Edwards never spoke about her murder, and I never broached the subject. But my opinion, for what it’s worth, based on all the facts and circumstances and my experience, is that Sims and Edwards must have acted together, to prevent her from going to the police about the Plum Tree killing. I don’t believe either of them could have pulled off her murder alone. Not without making more noise than was made.”
I now stepped in. “And you helped the two of them cover it up?”
“‘Cover up’ implies an active role. So, no, I didn’t help them cover up anything.”
“You simply declined to share pertinent evidence with the state and local authorities?”
“That’s correct.”
“Evidence that could have led to the conviction of Sims as well as Edwards for one or both of these crimes?”
“Fair enough.”
“In exchange for all this consideration, what did the FBI get?”
“I can’t answer that,” Braxton said. “Or, rather, I won’t. As I said, this is an active investigation. I won’t compromise legitimate law enforcement objectives, and I don’t see how the answer could possibly be relevant here.”
Sloane stood to supply an objection to my question, which the judge sustained, requiring me to move on.
“In addition to shielding informants from state or local law enforcement, the FBI also provides financial incentives in exchange for information, correct?”
“When appropriate.”
“Monthly envelopes of cash?”
“Information is a cash business. The whole point is keeping the relationship secret from prying eyes.”
“And am I correct that Edwards had been meeting with you to receive his cash payment and deliver his latest information the day he was shot?”
“Yes.”
“So what happened to the cash you’d given him?”
“I removed the envelope from his pocket after he was shot.”
“And you didn’t inform the police or anyone else that you’d done this?”
Braxton was unrepentant. “Correct. At that point, I was still concerned with maintaining the integrity of my source.”
“Isn’t it true, Agent Braxton, that the FBI has another informant placed at the highest levels of the Aryan Brotherhood? A man who’s spent years behind bars, who’d be compromised if you revealed what Randolph Edwards had given the FBI in exchange for the consideration we’ve been discussing here today?”
Again, Braxton refused to answer. Again, the judge ordered him to respond.
“No,” Braxton said. “No, it isn’t true. There are no remaining active sources within the organization.”
I had no choice but to move on. “I want to talk for a moment about the oath you’ve taken here today. An oath to tell the truth. In fact, you’d violate that oath to protect a confidential informant, wouldn’t you?”
Sloane objected that the question was argumentative, and the judge sustained her objection. “Mr. Maxwell, please move on.”
Frustrated, I said, “You witnessed the shooting?”
“I did. Want me to tell about it?”
This question was a clear challenge.
“I want you to tell the jury about it,” I said.
Braxton smiled without humor, turned pointedly away from me, and addressed the jurors. A look of surprise crossed his face as he registered their hostility, but he quickly recovered his pose of indifference.
“We’d finished our business. Edwards insisted on leaving first, as usual.
“A car braking hard drew my attention. I looked out and saw the girl sprinting through traffic across Geary Street. She was nearly run down. The skidding car missed her by about six inches, which she didn’t seem to notice. She looked like just a kid, but the gun in her hand was no toy.
“I ran out, and as I reached the sidewalk she pulled the trigger. There was no hesitation. She didn’t say a word, barely even stopped running. The gun came up and went off. It was a head shot, killing him instantly. I shouted at her, told her to drop the weapon, but she didn’t move. I had my sidearm out of the holster and was prepared to fire. Then, as I came closer, her legs seemed to give way, and the gun slipped from her hand. I caught her and cuffed her.
“It was obvious Edwards was dead. Killed instantly. I removed the envelope of cash from his pocket and finished securing the scene. I knew SFPD would soon be there, and in the meantime I attempted to question the shooter. She’d just taken out one of my informants, and it seemed possible she might have been coerced into doing that. I wanted to know by whom.”
Sloane stood and objected. The judge instructed the jurors to disregard Braxton’s last statement about Alice being coerced, informing them that coercion was no defense against a murder charge. When Ransom’s admonition was finished, Braxton waited as if daring me to ask what my client had said.
I had no choice but to take the dare.
Sloane objected. In response, the judge instructed the jurors not to use any statement my client might have made to establish the truth of its contents—that rather, its only relevance should be to her state of mind.
/> I had no argument with that.
“She didn’t answer,” Braxton said, addressing the jurors directly. “She appeared, for all practical purposes, to be catatonic. She kept swaying, as if she was going to pass out. I couldn’t get her gaze to focus on my hand when I held it in front of her face. Her eyes were open, but it was as if there was no one home.”
Too late, Sloane was on her feet, objecting to an answer that had to register as a hand grenade lobbed into the camp of the prosecution. The damage, though, was done. Evidence of my client’s altered mental state at the time of the shooting was now before the jurors. Not only did this testimony bear the stamp of the FBI’s authority, but because Braxton’s hostility toward my client was so painfully obvious, any testimony from him that was helpful to Alice Ward carried even greater weight than it otherwise would have.
On the cross-examination, Sloane came alive, attempting to undo the damage. But her efforts were too little, too late. Under her questioning, Braxton simply filled in the details he’d omitted during the quick summary he’d provided in his direct examination. Each detail reinforced that Alice Ward been acting out of blind rage up to the moment she pulled the trigger, after which she seemed to lose all animation, “like a puppet with cut strings,” as Braxton said.
Sloane had little to gain by attacking Braxton for deliberately sabotaging her murder case. Instead, she worked indirectly, focusing her questions on the voluntary nature of his testimony, trying to make clear to the jurors that he must have a hidden motive for being here. She also took this opportunity to establish that Braxton, at least, had no knowledge of Jack Sims being anywhere in the area the day Edwards was shot.
“If you’d known he was there, what would you have done?” she asked.
“Randolph would never have gone out that door,” Braxton said. “We’d have whisked him out of there in an unmarked car. He certainly wouldn’t have been exposed the way he was.”
Finally, with this much accomplished, Sloane sat down.
As the FBI agent walked from the courtroom, I glanced at Alice. The evidence of provocation was tenuous, lacking that vital piece revealing exactly what Sims had said to provoke her. Nevertheless, it seemed to me this could be inferred.
Wolf's Revenge Page 18