JD05 - Conflict of Interest

by Scott Pratt

He nodded. “I’m afraid so. We have to do some more tests to be absolutely certain, but based on my experience with this sort of thing, the probability is almost one hundred percent. I’m sorry.”

  Caroline let out a muffled sob, and then another, and another. It was one of the eeriest, most terrifying moments of my life. A little over five years earlier, we’d sat in a very similar room and received the news that the biopsy that had been performed on a lump in Caroline’s breast revealed a malignant tumor called invasive ductal carcinoma. She’d been through months of chemotherapy, hours of radiation therapy, and more than twenty surgeries. She’d lost her hair twice. The area around her surgically removed breast had been radiated so thoroughly that it had turned black. She’d dealt with large open wounds that took months to heal after surgeons attempted unsuccessfully to transplant healthy tissue from her abdomen and her back to her chest in order to give her the appearance of still having a breast. She’d endured more pain and anguish than any human deserves to endure, and now this man was telling us the insidious disease was back and it was now in her bones. For a moment, I thought I would vomit right there on the floor.

  “Do you need a minute?” I heard the doctor say.

  I nodded, and I’m sure Caroline did the same, although I couldn’t see her through the tears that had gathered in my eyes. We stood and embraced each other while Caroline cried openly and I tried desperately to keep from falling apart.

  “I’m so sorry, baby,” I whispered into her ear. “I’m so sorry.”

  She cried for a couple minutes more and I held her in my arms, rocking gently back and forth. When she stopped, she looked at me and said, “I don’t want to die.”

  “You’re not going to die. Just put that thought out of your mind right now.”

  The doctor knocked and came back in a short time later. He talked about things I didn’t understand, things I didn’t want to understand. He mentioned life expectancy and pain management strategies and treatment plans. He said the tumors were now inoperable and incurable. Treatment for breast cancer had come a long way, he said. He’d seen patients live five, ten, even fifteen years. The last thing he told us was that he would be sending Caroline to another oncologist, a woman at Vanderbilt University.

  “They have more bells and whistles than we do,” he said.

  Bells and whistles. My wife had just been handed a death sentence, and he was talking about bells and whistles. I wanted to choke him.

  Caroline and I left shortly thereafter, she with a fistful of prescriptions for pain medications and sheets of paper with doctor’s appointments listed on them and I with a heart so heavy I didn’t know how far I could walk. When we got to the parking lot I asked her to leave her car there and ride home with me.

  I didn’t want her to be alone.

  I didn’t want to be alone.

  I lived the next couple of days in a dense fog of emotions so powerful I haven’t the words to describe them. My love was dying, and I was helpless to stop it. I was reminded of Prometheus, the mythical Titan who stole fire from the Gods. Zeus punished him by chaining him to a rock on a mountain side. During the first night, an eagle came and ripped out Prometheus’s liver. It grew back the next day, but the following night, and every night thereafter for eternity, the eagle would return and Prometheus would have to endure the terrible pain of having his liver torn from his body. The only difference between Prometheus and me was that my heart was being torn out instead of my liver.

  Those first two days, as the family rallied around Caroline, I managed to remain calm and stoic in their presence, but late at night, after Caroline and Jack were asleep and everyone else had gone home, I would shut the dogs inside, walk out the back door and down the deck steps, stand on the bluff overlooking the lake, and cry. I cried alone because I was ashamed – ashamed of being weak, ashamed of being helpless, ashamed of feeling sorry for myself.

  I’d never been a religious man, largely because my mother was an embittered atheist who constantly reminded me that anything that happened in this life was a product of circumstance, that self-sufficiency was important above all else, that there was no God or no grand plan and that if something terrible happened, there was nowhere to turn but inward. She railed against those who worshipped God or blamed God or attributed anything to God, calling them weak fools who were unable or unwilling to accept that life is sometimes cruel and unfair. Prayer was nothing more than wishful thinking, she said, religion nothing more than a dogmatic form of social control. I came to regard her as an extremist in her bleak view of the world, but at the same time, I’d never been able to reconcile the notion that a kind, loving and benevolent God would allow evil, cruelty and disease to flourish so prevalently in a world He had created. I’d chosen the path of the agnostic, a man who made no claim of knowing what is on the other side of life but who, at the same time, chose not to examine the issue too closely, and as I stood there gazing over the bluff through watery eyes as my sweet Caroline lay suffering, I couldn’t help but wonder whether my lack of faith had somehow contributed to her fate.

  On that second night, after I’d been outside for ten minutes or so, I heard movement behind me and turned to see Jack walking in my direction. Like me, Jack’s initial reaction to stress or frustration was often anger. The evening before, not long after Caroline and I had delivered the terrible news to him, I’d heard a steady banging in the basement and had gone down to check on him. He’d dragged an old, heavy punching bag that hadn’t been used in years out of a storage closet, hung it up in the same place where I used to hang it, and was beating it viciously. I stopped in the doorway and watched for a short time. He was sweating profusely, breathing heavily, and cursing. I turned and walked away without saying anything to him, but I remember thinking that had the bag been a man, his ribs would have been reduced to sawdust.

  Our tiff the night he returned from California had been forgotten as soon as it ended, and he and I had had several civil discussions about his future. He wanted to go to law school. He wanted to practice criminal law, most likely defense, and he wanted me to guide him. He was so much like me that it was frightening sometimes. He was kind and gentle and funny and had many excellent qualities, but he was sometimes competitive to the point of fanaticism, he wasn’t above meeting violence with violence, his ego sometimes got in the way of reason, and nuance was a concept that usually escaped him. He was also often a walking contradiction – he would express a thought or an attitude far beyond his years, yet he wouldn’t make a bed or clean a room or put a dirty plate in the dishwasher. He was a serious and excellent student and devoted to physical training, yet if you put him in a room full of his jock buddies, he could – and would – drink them all under the table. I’d decided his contradictory proclivities were typical of young men and had resolved to be patient with him.

  He lumbered up next to me and wrapped an arm around my shoulders.

  “Do you remember when she first got sick?” he said. “You took Lilly and me to breakfast out in Gray and gave us a speech.”

  “I did?”

  “Yeah, you did. You told us that we weren’t the ones who were sick and that you didn’t want to see any self-pity. You told us to stay strong and to live well because that’s what Mom would want us to do.”

  I nodded, vaguely remembering the conversation.

  “This isn’t your fault, dad. I know you and I know what you’re standing out here in the dark thinking. It isn’t anybody’s fault. I’ve been doing some research and you wouldn’t believe the number of women getting breast cancer these days. What’s even more shocking is that it doesn’t exist in some parts of the world, especially the Far East, which tells me it has to be diet based.”

  “You’ve been researching it? What are the numbers on survival? How long is she going to be around?”

  “The numbers aren’t good.” He dropped both his chin and his voice. “Ninety-five percent of the women who are diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer die within five years.”
r />   “She’ll be in the five percent,” I said immediately.

  “I hope you’re right. You know I hope you’re right. But there’s one thing I want you to keep in mind, dad, because it’s the only thing keeping me sane right now. Even if she isn’t here in five years, she’ll still be here for five years. That’s almost two thousand days and nights. If we walked in there and asked her right now, she’d tell us that she wants us to make the best of every one of those days. She’d tell us not to sit around and cry, she wouldn’t want us to stop living our lives and sit by her side, she wouldn’t want us to treat her like an invalid. She’d want us to love and she’d want us to work and play and laugh and cry and just live. Like we always have.”

  I stood quietly for a minute and then turned to face him full on. I placed my hands on his shoulders, my heart so full of love I felt like it would burst.

  “You’re quite a young man,” I said.

  He smiled, winked at me and said, “I had a good teacher. C’mon, let’s go try to get some sleep.”

  CHAPTER 33

  After hours of research on polygraph examiners and a dozen phone calls, I decided to hire a retired FBI agent named David Trumble to administer Richard’s lie detector test. Trumble had impeccable credentials. He had a law degree, he’d spent twenty-five years in the FBI, and he’d administered more than three thousand polygraphs. His Atlanta-based firm, Trumble and Associates, was one of the most respected private investigative agencies in the United States. He was expensive – ten thousand plus travel expenses – but I thought it would be worth it if Richard somehow managed to pass. Trumble’s advertising was filled with endorsements from former FBI agents and U.S. Attorneys, so I figured it would be difficult for the agents and lawyers handling Richard’s case to simply ignore the results if they were favorable.

  I’d thought a great deal about Richard’s theory that his father-in-law was framing him for kidnap and murder. It didn’t make any sense to me, but Richard was right about one thing: I didn’t know Charles Russell. I didn’t know the dynamics of the relationships between Charles and Richard and Mary.

  The nagging question remained, however. Where was Lindsay? Sheriff Bates had told me Lindsay’s blood was on the clothing they found. Blood and semen on the clothing of a missing child usually meant the child was dead, but the body had yet to be found despite one of the most intense searches I’d ever seen. And although Caroline had received devastating news regarding her cancer, she remained intensely interested in the case and continued to insist that Lindsay was still alive. I trusted Caroline’s instincts and wanted to believe her, but the fact remained that I was confronted with evidence, and the evidence seemed to show that Richard wrote a ransom note, killed his daughter, staged a kidnapping scene, and topped it all off by stealing three million dollars in ransom money from his father-in-law.

  David Trumble walked into my office at ten in the morning. He’d flown up from Atlanta the night before and had been at the jail with Richard Monroe since 7:00 a.m. I wasn’t allowed to attend the session. Trumble was a short, slight, studious-looking man with salt and pepper hair and green eyes behind circular glasses. He wore a brown suit with a heavily starched, white shirt and a brown tie. I’d had dinner with him the previous evening and he’d explained his particular methodology of conducting the polygraph exam. I already had a pretty clear understanding of how the test worked, but Trumble talked about it as though it were a form of art. He struck me as a mix between fastidious scientist and passionate artist. I’d never before heard anyone gush about respiratory rates and heart rates and blood pressure and electro dermal activity. If he hadn’t been so genuinely serious, he would have been hilarious.

  He sat down across from me and folded his hands in his lap.

  “That was interesting,” he said.

  “For ten grand you better have something more than that,” I said.

  “Your client was cooperative,” Trumble said. “I took my time in the pre-test phase and was able to establish a solid rapport with him. By the time we got into the meat of the test, I think he was as comfortable as one can be under these circumstances.”

  “So you think the results of the exam are reliable?”

  He nodded. “In my professional opinion and based on my experience, the results of the test are indisputable. I went into every aspect of the case with him. I approached his involvement from every conceivable angle. I will, of course, provide you with a written report of the results and my conclusions based on those results.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “What’s the verdict? Did he kill her?”

  “Not only did he not kill her, he has absolutely no idea what happened to her. He didn’t write the ransom note. He didn’t stage the kidnapping scene, and he didn’t take the money. And he’s never abused his child, sexually or otherwise.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “I’d stake my reputation on it. I’d stake my entire career on it.”

  I stood, shoved my hands deep into my pockets, and started rocking back and forth on my heels.

  “Damn, David, this gets worse by the day. If what you’re saying is true, then Richard is innocent. But the feds have already played their hand. You were an FBI agent for how long, twenty-five years? In all that time, how often did you see a federal prosecutor admit he’d made a mistake by jumping the gun on an arrest or an indictment? How often did you see a U.S. Attorney stick his tail between his legs and dismiss a case, especially a case as high profile as this one?”

  Trumble shook his head, but he didn’t reply.

  “That’s what I thought,” I said. “Never. The track has already been laid and the train has left the station. Richard Monroe is going to get railroaded.”

  CHAPTER 34

  Two days later, I was back at the federal courthouse in Greeneville, this time in a conference room surrounded by the law enforcers who bore the primary responsibility of bringing Lindsay Monroe’s kidnapper and murderer to justice. Seated at the head of the table was Assistant U.S. Attorney Rudy Zeller, the man in charge of the prosecution. He was flanked by Ross Dedrick, Leon Bates, Mike Norcross, Mitchell Royston, and two older men in suits who were introduced as senior FBI agents who were part of the Child Abduction Rapid Deployment (CARD) team that had been assigned to Lindsay’s case. In my briefcase were ten copies of the report David Trumble had expedited for me along with a motion asking the trial judge to allow Trumble to offer expert testimony regarding the results of Richard Monroe’s polygraph test. I hadn’t yet filed the motion because I was hoping against hope that Zeller would do what the feds always refer to as “the right thing.” I was hoping he would give credence to Trumble’s test results and allow an FBI polygrapher of his choosing to examine Richard. Beyond that, provided Richard performed as well on the FBI’s test, I entertained the hope that Zeller would rethink his case and his evidence and get back to work finding the real kidnapper.

  “I appreciate you agreeing to meet,” I said as I took my seat at the far end of the table, opposite Zeller.

  “I assume you’re here to talk about some kind of deal,” he said. “Has your client decided to tell us where her body is?”

  “Not exactly,” I said as I started sliding copies of Trumble’s report around the table. “Have any of you guys ever heard of David Trumble? My understanding is that he’s pretty famous in law enforcement circles. An expert in the field of polygraphy, consultant to law enforcement agencies all over the country, subject of a television series that didn’t get past the pilot phase, a real credit to the FBI.”

  “Never heard of him,” Zeller said, picking up the report and starting to read.

  “I’ll bet if David Trumble had you hooked up to his machine right now, the machine would show deception,” I said. “How about you, Agent Dedrick? Heard of Trumble?”

  “What difference does it make? Tell me you didn’t ask to meet with us to talk about a retired glory hound.”

  “Glory hound? Do I detect a hint of jealousy?”

>   Dedrick snorted and started reading. I waited a few minutes while the men around me began to digest the contents of Trumble’s report. Zeller was the first to toss it on the table.

  “This is garbage,” he said. “Voodoo science.”

  “Trumble is willing to stake his professional reputation on the accuracy of the test,” I said. “He wants to testify, to break some new ground.”

  “There isn’t a chance in hell Judge Wilson will let this in,” Zeller said.

  “He might if you stipulate,” I said.

  “And why would I do that?”

  “Because it’s the right thing to do. Listen, the reason Richard and Mary Monroe came to me in the first place was because you guys were pressuring them to take polygraphs. Well, Richard has now taken one, administered by one of the foremost experts in the field. The results say he didn’t have anything to do with his child’s disappearance.”

  “His DNA says otherwise,” Dedrick said.

  “Somebody could have planted that,” I said. “Richard is an intelligent man. If he’d killed his daughter during a rape or after a rape, do you really think he’d be stupid enough to put her soiled panties and pajama bottoms in a dumpster outside his own office? And would he be stupid enough to write a ransom note on his own computer? He makes his living writing computer code. Do you think he didn’t know someone could retrieve the note from his computer?”

  “Every person in this room would agree that criminals do stupid things,” Zeller said. “They panic and they do stupid things. Then when they get caught, one of their first arguments is, ‘Do you think I’d be that stupid?’”

  “We’re getting off track here,” I said. “I want to talk about this polygraph. I’d like you to give him another one. You can use somebody of your own choosing, an FBI examiner. If he passes again, maybe you should reconsider trying him for this murder.”