The Last Plea Bargain

by Randy Singer

  “Sounds like it,” Rivera repeated.

  “Does that refresh your memory about threatening me?” Tate asked.

  Maybe Rivera would be smart enough to talk his way around this. Maybe he would make up something that would sound innocuous. But the guy was obviously dumb enough to threaten his lawyer in a phone call, so I tried to keep my hopes in check.

  “That had nothing to do with Judge Snowden,” Rivera said. “I was talking about something else you were supposed to do. Filing some kind of pleading or something. I was just messin’ with ya.”

  “So let me get this straight,” Tate said, his voice mocking. “You were saying I had twenty-four hours to file some kind of pleading or you were going to go to the prosecutors to cut a deal based on some information that somebody told you about my case?”

  “Somethin’ like that.”

  Tate motioned to the jurors. “And you expect these people to believe that?”

  Masterson was on his feet. “Objection.”

  “Sustained.”

  “In that tape, you said that you knew things you weren’t supposed to know. That ‘people talk.’ Were you referring to knowledge about the trace amounts of morphine found in the fingernail testing?”

  “All I know is that I had given you morphine just like you asked. That’s who talked. You talked.”

  Tate smiled broadly, and I could tell it was making Rivera mad. “Let me make sure I understand. You’re saying that in this telephone call with me, when you said that ‘people talk,’ you really meant that I talk?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “I see. Well, let me ask you this—when you decided to talk to the DA, whom did you approach first?”

  “The lead detective on the case.”

  “Would that have been Detective Tyler Finnegan?” Tate asked.

  Rivera shrugged. “If you say so.”

  “And after you met with Detective Finnegan, then the two of you together met with Ms. Brock—isn’t that right?”

  “Yeah. I already said that when Mr. Masterson was asking me questions.”

  “Are you saying under oath, at the risk of your sterling reputation, that Detective Finnegan didn’t feed you a little information about the case before that meeting with Ms. Brock?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m talking about giving you information about the morphine and about a six-month time frame for supplying the drugs.”

  “That didn’t happen.”

  “So when you said on that phone call that ‘people talk,’ you were not referring to Detective Finnegan?”

  “No. I wasn’t talking about him.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “One hundred percent.”

  79

  Rafael Rivera’s testimony had been an unmitigated disaster, but Bill Masterson insisted on eating lunch at the same place we had all week. “You don’t change your routine,” he whispered to me. “They’ll think we panicked.”

  “They would be right,” I whispered back.

  I followed Masterson out of the courtroom, and the usual reporters were waiting on the courthouse steps. They flung questions at Masterson, but he shrugged them aside, the way he had every other day.

  “What are you going to do now?” one of them asked.

  “Eat lunch.”

  “No. I mean about the testimony of Rafael Rivera.”

  Masterson stopped for a moment and looked at the cameras. “This office will conduct an investigation of Rivera and see if his testimony should lead to any charges. However, the case against Caleb Tate does not hinge on Rivera’s testimony. Where Tate got the drugs is not the issue. As Dr. O’Leary said, the drugs in Rikki Tate’s blood and stomach were so great that it was clear she died from an intentional poisoning, not an accidental overdose.”

  “Then why did you put Rivera on the stand?”

  “Don’t you guys ever eat lunch?” Masterson asked. He started walking away, and I fell in behind. “As you can tell, I don’t miss many lunches myself.”

  When we got to our secluded table in the back of a local Alpharetta diner, his mood darkened. He talked about whether we should nol-pros the case. He couldn’t believe Caleb Tate had a tape.

  “Maybe LA can pull our fat out of the fire,” Masterson said. “He’s pretty slick.”

  I didn’t see how LA could undo Rivera’s damage, but I kept my thoughts to myself. At least we would have the weekend to regroup.

  “He didn’t mention your dad,” Masterson said between bites. “Didn’t have to. He probably just wants to keep that hanging over our heads. Figures he’ll give us one last chance to nol-pros before he drags your dad into it.”

  “Now that he’s proven Rivera’s threat by the tape, how is my dad’s success rate in front of Snowden even relevant?”

  “Probably isn’t. But that doesn’t mean he won’t throw it out there anyway. Drop it like a nuclear bomb and let Judge Brown sustain our objection. Then let the press take the story from there.”

  I picked at my food as we discussed how to salvage the remnants of our case. I had seen witnesses tank before but never quite so spectacularly. Masterson didn’t seem to be as distraught as me. “Eat something,” he said as he wolfed down a sandwich. “You won’t make it through this afternoon if you don’t.”

  Just before paying, Masterson swung the conversation back around to my dad. “It’s one thing to jeopardize your dad’s reputation if we’ve got a chance to win the case,” he said. “It’s another thing to do so if our case is basically toast anyway.”

  “I don’t think my dad’s reputation should be the deciding factor,” I protested.

  “That’s very noble of you,” Masterson said. “But I liked your dad. And I’m the one who gets to decide whether we sacrifice his reputation for what’s left of our case. Fortunately, now that Rivera is off the stand, Tate won’t be able to raise the issue of Judge Snowden’s susceptibility to bribes until he starts putting on his own witnesses. Let’s get through the rest of the afternoon, and then we’ll talk.”

  “Okay,” I said, grateful that the case was hanging on, if only by a thread.

  80

  LA took the stand looking dapper and decidedly Hollywood. He smiled widely for the ladies on the jury, and just the sight of him lifted my spirits. Witnesses aren’t allowed to hear the other testimony in the case, and so as far as LA knew, everything was still on track.

  I walked him through the investigation, and he testified with confidence and precision. I found myself ashamed that I had been doubting his loyalties throughout the case.

  LA did a beautiful job putting the pieces of the puzzle together—the links to the Van Wyck case, the dramatically increased levels of drugs in Rikki’s bloodstream starting shortly after Tate’s research of that case, Tate’s financial distress, the life insurance policy, the marital difficulties, Rikki’s conversion to Christianity, and her determination to become something other than Caleb Tate’s trophy wife.

  I then asked him if he was aware that Caleb Tate had called Dr. Aaron Gillespie about four months prior to Rikki’s death, informing Gillespie that his wife was addicted to painkillers and asking for Gillespie’s help.

  “Yes. We learned that during our investigation.”

  “Doesn’t that show that Caleb Tate wasn’t poisoning his wife?” I asked.

  LA nodded as if to say, Excellent question. “On the contrary, it sets up the perfect alibi. Think it through,” LA suggested. “If Caleb Tate was secretly slipping a few pills now and then into his wife’s food, she would deny she had an addiction problem if Dr. Gillespie asked her. Or maybe Tate discovered a few painkillers and saw it as his opportunity to call Dr. Gillespie and establish an alibi. That way, when he gave her a massive overdose, he would be able to point to this phone call as proof of his innocence, proof that he tried to stop her from taking the pills.”

  I noticed that some of the younger female jurors were nodding along. I couldn’
t blame them. LA could be very persuasive.

  “What about the absence of fingerprints on the pill bottles?”

  “Well, Ms. Brock, the defendant is smart enough to know that there’s going to be an autopsy. That means the authorities are going to find OxyContin and codeine in his wife’s blood. He has to account for that somehow. So he slips the pills in her food, watches her die, then puts her hands on the pill bottles. He’s probably wearing gloves the whole time. As soon as he does that, he calls 911, and the show is on.”

  Next, I walked LA through the timing of the fingernail testing. I established the fact that when Rivera first came to us and told us about the morphine, nobody other than LA, the DA’s office, the medical examiner, and the toxicologists knew about the morphine. “What did that tell you about Rafael Rivera?” I asked.

  I thought this would draw an objection, but Tate let it pass. That worried me.

  “He was telling the truth about supplying the drugs to the defendant.”

  I took a deep breath to calm myself. I had been working on the phrasing of this next question since Rivera left the stand earlier that day. I was hoping that LA would pick up on my vibes.

  “What if, during the course of your investigation, you had learned that Rafael Rivera had threatened the defendant? What if you found out that Rivera asked the defendant to bribe a judge and that, when the defendant refused, Rivera came to us with this evidence about supplying the defendant with drugs? What would that have done to your investigation?”

  LA twisted his face into a who cares frown. “It wouldn’t have done anything. We already knew Rivera was a convicted felon. Would he try to get his lawyer to bribe a judge before coming to us? Probably. Everybody knows that you’re tough on plea bargains. There was no guarantee he could get a good deal from you. So if he could get out of jail by bribing a judge, he’d try that first.

  “But that doesn’t mean he lied to us. What Rivera told us was confirmed by the scientific evidence. The fact that he knew about the morphine before it was physically possible for him to know proves that he was telling the truth about supplying the drugs.”

  I wanted to kiss the man. Honestly, I had been wanting to kiss him for a long time. But the answer was so smooth, and so believable, that it almost felt like he had been listening to every word Rivera had said earlier that day. Had he been? I really didn’t want to know.

  But I knew that I would never forget that moment in the case. The tape, which had seemed so devastating before lunch, now seemed like an afterthought. In a few short sentences, LA had brought things back into perspective. Some couples find out that they have chemistry on the dance floor. For me, it was this exchange in the courtroom.

  “No further questions for this witness. At least not right now,” I said. Maybe later. Maybe at my place.

  My heels clicked across the floor, and I sat down at counsel table. “Nice work,” Masterson said under his breath.

  Unlike with prior witnesses, Caleb Tate did not spring up to confront the witness. I assumed for a minute that he had been stunned by the turn of events. In the euphoria, I had forgotten a cardinal rule that I had been taught by my trial advocacy professor.

  Never assume anything at trial.

  And another rule, this one harped on by my brother, the preacher.

  Pride cometh before a fall.

  81

  Mace James watched the readout from the machine that measured the brain activity of Rashad Reed. This was the third time he had seen this machine in operation, but he still couldn’t figure out what the graphs meant. So he also kept an eye on Dr. Rukmani Chandar’s expressions to see if he could pick up any clues about the test. But Chandar never flinched, his poker face giving nothing away.

  The BEOS test lasted for nearly ninety minutes in the cramped cell as Chandar took Reed through every step of all three carjackings. When he was finished, he politely thanked Reed and removed the electrodes from the prisoner’s scalp. Mace still couldn’t figure out if the news was good or bad.

  “Let’s talk outside,” Chandar suggested.

  Mace said good-bye to Rashad and waited for the doctor to pack up. They left the secured area, saying nothing as they passed through one fireproof door after another. Only after they had reached the parking lot and found a place in the shade did Chandar give his preliminary opinions.

  “He was there for every one of the carjackings. I don’t know how he beat the polygraph; the young man does not strike me as very savvy. But that is why I prefer the BEOS—you cannot bluff your way through it.”

  “Is there any doubt about this?” Mace asked. He towered over Chandar, who was a full seven or eight inches shorter.

  “As always, my preliminary opinions are subject to confirmation after I study the graphs,” Chandar said. “But this one seems pretty clear.”

  Mace thanked the doctor and told him he would need an affidavit. After discussing some logistics, Mace returned to the jail to meet with Rashad. He considered the irony of justice in Milton County. Because a new type of brain scan had just proved his client guilty, Rashad Reed might be able to get out of jail in a couple of years. But if the brain scan had suggested Rashad was innocent, the judge probably wouldn’t allow it into evidence, and Reed would have to go to trial. Odds were, he would spend at least twenty years in prison.

  The roulette wheel of criminal justice in Milton County was spinning, and Rashad Reed might have just landed on a lucky red seven.

  Caleb Tate shuffled some papers at his table and lined up the edges as if he had all the time in the world.

  “Does defense counsel have any questions?” Judge Brown prompted.

  “A few.”

  “Well, now would be a good time to ask them.”

  Without rising, Caleb Tate asked his first one. “Are you aware that I represented Antoine Marshall, the man accused of killing Jamie Brock’s mother?”

  The muscles in LA’s neck tightened. “Of course.”

  “And because of that, she really wanted to nail me in this case,” Caleb Tate said in a matter-of-fact style, as if everybody knew it.

  I stood and looked at the judge. “Objection. Relevance.”

  “Goes to the witness’s bias,” Tate said.

  “I’ll sustain the objection,” Judge Brown said.

  “Are you aware that Ms. Brock promised to lynch me in this case?” Tate asked.

  “Mr. Tate,” Brown snapped, “leave Ms. Brock out of it.”

  Tate looked at me and then back at the witness. “Do you have a relationship with Ms. Brock?”

  “What did I just say?” Brown asked.

  Tate finally stood. “If Your Honor will just allow me a few questions. This goes directly to Detective Finnegan’s bias.”

  Brown waited. Thought about it. Probably worried about how it might look on appeal. “Proceed,” he said.

  “Do you remember the question?” Tate asked.

  “Yes. And the answer is that I have a professional relationship with Ms. Brock. It involves putting people like you in jail for life.”

  “Do you want to see me lynched as well?” Tate asked.

  “Not really,” LA said. “It would be a waste of perfectly good rope.”

  “You think this is a joke?” Tate shot back. “A man is on trial for his life, and you think it’s time for humor?”

  “I think it’s extremely sad—the way you manipulate and abuse the system.”

  I knew that LA was baiting Tate, waiting for an opening to mention his assumption that Tate was behind the prisoners’ no-plea-bargaining strategy.

  But Tate proved once again that he had good courtroom instincts and changed the line of questioning. “In fact, you have more than a professional relationship with Ms. Brock, do you not?”

  I stood but Judge Brown waved me off. “I’ll allow it,” he said. “Goes to bias.”

  “No. We work together on cases. That’s all. I would like for it to be more.”

  Surprisingly, even in the heat of the courtroom bat
tle, the comment gave me a surge of adrenaline. But I couldn’t dwell on it.

  “Did you go to her house last night?”

  It hit me at the same time that it hit LA. We had been followed.

  He shifted in his seat. “I went to her house to work on the case.”

  “Did you stay until after 1:30 a.m.?”

  LA hesitated, and I knew it wasn’t lost on the jury. “I don’t know exactly what time I left.”

  I thought about the big picture window that ran across the back of my house, the length of the family room. The backyard was fenced in, so I seldom pulled the blinds. I wondered if Tate’s investigators had pictures.

  “You weren’t working the whole time. Were you?”

  “I don’t see what this has to do with the case.”

  “I take it that means no.” Tate said it with a snide tone that made me furious. “I take it that means you weren’t working the whole time?”

  “We worked until she fell asleep. I continued to work until I left.”

  Alarms went off as soon as LA finished the answer. My best witness had just lied on the stand, and I was a sworn officer of the court. Not only that, but I was afraid that Tate would expose him the same way he had Rafael Rivera.

  “Would it surprise you to know that your car left Ms. Brock’s residence at approximately 1:45 a.m.?”

  LA shrugged, but all of this was having an impact on the jury. “Not really.”

  “Isn’t it true, Detective Finnegan, that you would do anything you could to help this woman nail me to the wall?” Before LA could answer, Tate amended his question. “Or perhaps I should say, lynch me from the nearest tree?”

  “There was no bloody glove for me to plant at your house, Mr. Tate. The drugs were undeniably in your wife’s bloodstream and stomach. There are lots of witnesses who can talk about the difficulties in your marriage. I didn’t make up your financial problems. Nor did I download the Van Wyck case to your computer. All of that evidence has nothing to do with me.”

  “Ahh,” Tate said, drawing it out with smug satisfaction, “but you didn’t mention the morphine. Isn’t it true that you told Rafael Rivera about the morphine and the fingernail tests even before he met with Ms. Brock?”