Unleashed

by David Rosenfelt

  Laurie and I head back to the jail at 9:00 A.M. On the way, she calls the friend in Wisconsin who was going to pick her up at the airport, to tell her that she’s not coming. She asks the friend to tell all her other friends the news.

  I feel guilty about it, but I’ll get over it. Laurie exercised free will in deciding to stay home; I didn’t and couldn’t coerce her, much as I would have wanted to. She loves investigative work and has missed it, so this gives her a chance to be happy. And, naturally, her not going makes me happy.

  Of course, not everyone is happy. Not Barry Price, whose murder basically enabled all this happiness. And not Denise Price, who is stuck in jail for a murder she may or may not have committed.

  Happiness is a zero-sum game.

  We’ve run into quite a bit of traffic, thanks to a broken light up ahead that is just flashing red. It’s bumper-to-bumper, and a car trying to enter from a strip mall on our right side has pretty much no chance to get in.

  The male driver of that car looks at me, and I wave for him to enter in front of us. He does so, without waving back.

  “Uh-oh,” says Laurie, knowing what’s coming.

  “Did you see that?” I ask. “The guy didn’t even wave.” To me, not waving thanks in a situation like that is deserving of imprisonment.

  “Shocking,” Laurie says.

  “Now we have to sit behind that guy in this traffic? He’s going to get where he’s going before we do?”

  “How do you know where he’s going?”

  “You’re missing the point,” I say.

  “So you don’t let them in to help them out. You do it to look like a really nice guy and get thanked?”

  “Of course. Why would I care if that guy was stuck in that strip mall? I wish I had a BB gun with me. I’d shoot out one of his tires.”

  Laurie shakes her head sadly. “Mentally speaking, you need a lot of help.”

  “Maybe so, but I’ll tell you this: if I got that help, I’d wave to the people who helped me.”

  I call Hike Lynch, who functions as my cocounsel on the rare occasions that we have a case. The fact that I work with Hike is reason enough never to take on another client. He’s a complete pessimist, with an uncanny ability to always see the negative side of any situation.

  Hike now has a girlfriend, which in itself defies all logic. She noticed he was depressed, which doesn’t exactly make her Freud, and convinced him to get a battery of tests to determine whether he should be on medication. He was ultimately judged not to be clinically depressed, an outcome that further depressed him.

  When starting a conversation with most people, I would automatically ask, “How are you?” or “How’s it going?” I have learned not to do that with Hike, because I’m guaranteed to be bombarded with a litany of awful things that have happened to him in the last twenty-four hours, often including defective and disgusting bodily functions.

  So instead I say, “Hey, I never got your e-mail.” I had asked him to find out the name of the prosecutor in Morris County who is handling Denise Price’s case and set up a meeting for me.

  “I can’t type,” he says. “I tore a cuticle.”

  “Oh.”

  “Then I pulled on it and it kept coming. I ripped it off almost to my elbow.”

  “I didn’t know cuticles go as far as the elbow,” I say as Laurie stares at me in amazement.

  “Mine does,” he says. “Or at least it used to, before I ripped it off.”

  “Hold on, Hike. Let me put Laurie on; you can read the information to her.”

  I hand the phone to Laurie, one of the meaner things I’ve done in the past decade, and she frowns but gets the information from Hike. It takes a while, and to get off the phone she finally has to lie and tell Hike we’ve arrived at the prison. To get off the phone with Hike, I would check into prison.

  There are two types of photographs that one should never rely on to judge how good-looking a person is. One is the pictures of themselves that people put on dating Web sites. The other, even less reliable, is a mug shot.

  The dating photos are designed to make the person look better and therefore date-able. Of course, unless the hope is to have a relationship that never gets beyond phone sex, eventually the truth will be revealed.

  The mug shots always, and I mean always, make people look worse than they normally do. That’s why you will never find people using their mug shot on a dating site. Of course, if they did, there might be other reasons not to date them besides their being bald or chubby or just weird looking.

  I haven’t seen the mug shot they took of Denise last night, but I’m sure it captured the way she looks when she’s brought in to see us this morning: depressed, frightened, worried, miserable. It is the way every person looks when he or she is first imprisoned, because it is the way every person feels.

  The other thing that the first exposure to prison life does is activate the denial mechanism in the brain. For example, Denise has no recollection that I told her bail in this case would be virtually impossible, and she is stunned when I repeat it.

  “The reason you are in here is that the prosecutor believes he has convincing evidence that you are responsible for your husband’s death. The only way you’re going to get out of here is to convince a judge, or maybe a jury, that the prosecutor is wrong.”

  “How do we do that?” she asks.

  “One of two ways. Demonstrate either that you didn’t do it or that someone else did.”

  The pained expression doesn’t leave her face, which probably means she realizes neither of my described routes out of here is going to be quick or easy.

  “Let’s start with some questions,” I say. “You said that you heard Barry ask Sam about me.”

  She nods. “Yes, but I overheard him. He didn’t know I was listening.”

  “Why was Barry interested in a criminal defense attorney?”

  “I didn’t know that he was. I assumed you were a divorce lawyer.”

  “Barry was looking for a divorce?”

  “It would not have surprised me. We weren’t getting along for a while.”

  “What was the problem?”

  “He didn’t love me anymore,” she says, starting to tear up. “He hadn’t loved me for a while.”

  Laurie asks her first question. “Was there a third party involved?”

  Denise nods. She seems on the edge of losing it but takes a moment to pull herself together. “There was no shortage of parties involved. But I doubt very much that Barry loved any of them either.”

  My keen ear notices that when Denise mentions Barry, she doesn’t throw in the obligatory “May he rest in peace.” This was a woman scorned, not necessarily a good thing to be if you’re going on trial for the murder of the scorner.

  I sneak a glance at Laurie, who is probably focusing on the positive in all this. If there are other women, women whom Barry had obviously not left his wife for, then they are all potential suspects.

  “So you have no idea why Barry might have needed a criminal attorney?”

  She shakes her head. “No. Probably something involving his business. He seemed especially preoccupied the last few weeks. It’s one of the reasons I thought he was getting ready to leave me.”

  “Do you know much about Barry’s business?” Laurie asks.

  “No, he kept me as far away from it as possible.”

  “Who would be the best person for us to talk to about it?”

  “Mark Clemens,” she says without hesitation. “He’s the number-two person in the firm. Sort of Barry’s protégé.”

  “Have you spoken to him since Barry died?”

  “Yes. He told me we’ll need to talk about the business when I’m ready. I guess I own most of it now.”

  We question Denise some more for anything she might know about Barry that would make him a target for murder, but there’s nothing there, or nothing she’s prepared to reveal.

  “Do you know anything about the mechanical workings of airplanes?” I
ask.

  “Nothing at all; I can barely operate a light switch. Anyone who knows me realizes that.”

  I explain to Denise that she is going to be brought to an arraignment, which is the next time I will see her. I repeat that she is not to talk to anyone about anything without me being present, and she seems to understand that.

  “I haven’t said a word,” she says, “not even to the person…” She stops in midsentence.

  “What’s the matter?” Laurie asks.

  Denise smiles slightly. “I just realized I have a cell mate. I guess I expected to go through my entire life without a cell mate.”

  It’s the first evidence I’ve seen that Denise has a sense of humor.

  She’s going to need it.

  I know nothing about the prosecutors in Morris County. I generally try cases against the Passaic County prosecutors, and my unfamiliarity with their Morris counterparts leaves me at a disadvantage. I’ve learned the idiosyncrasies and habits of the Passaic group, and I’m able to effectively use that knowledge. I won’t be able to do that here.

  On the other hand, the Morris lawyers and judges don’t yet despise me, don’t dream of the day when they conduct a murder trial in which the role of victim is played by Andy Carpenter. So this is sort of refreshing.

  Hike has set up an appointment with Thomas Bader, the prosecutor handling the Denise Price case. The fact that Bader was willing to meet so quickly, without hassle, probably indicates that he’s happy with his case and has little to hide. Or maybe he’s just a friendly guy.

  Bader is in his late thirties, maybe six two and a hundred and seventy pounds, with a face more than vaguely like Matt Damon’s. I’m glad Laurie waited out in the lobby.

  We exchange fake pleasantries and then I say, “My cocounsel said you were very cooperative in agreeing to see me on short notice. I appreciate that.”

  “That was your cocounsel?” he asks with obvious surprise. “The guy with the foot-long cuticle?”

  “The very one,” I say. “Goes clear up to the elbow, and then loops around. When can I expect discovery?”

  “Starting right about now,” he says agreeably. “We’ve only got a couple of boxes of it copied so far. I can send it to your office, or you can take it with you.” This level of pleasant cooperation is another bad sign. He knows that I know this, so he grins and says, “We’ve got a strong case.”

  “You don’t mind if I don’t take your word for that, do you?” I ask.

  “I expect the great Andy Carpenter to fight every step of the way.”

  I’ve never been called “the great Andy Carpenter” before. It has a nice ring to it. It would be really nice if Laurie could incorporate it into her everyday conversation. Like “Wow, I just slept with the great Andy Carpenter” or “The great Andy Carpenter just took out the garbage.”

  I’d like to come up with questions that would get Bader to use the phrase again, but I can’t think of any. So instead I go with, “Any surprises in there?”

  “Well, the victim died of botulism.”

  I try my best to conceal a very significant level of surprise. “So your theory is he was dead before the plane hit the ground?”

  “Not my theory,” he says. “It’s the coroner’s conclusion, though he doesn’t say exactly that. Price could have been paralyzed; botulism does that before it kills you. Anyway, it’s preliminary, but he tells me that’s where it’s going to end up.”

  “And how do you tie this to Denise Price?”

  He smiles tolerantly but stands up, indicating that the meeting has come to the end. “It’s all in the discovery documents,” he says. “You may not find it enjoyable reading.”

  “Let’s let the ‘great Andy Carpenter’ be the judge of that,” I say.

  He laughs and extends his hand. “Happy to.” Then, “You seem like a nice enough guy.”

  “That surprises you?”

  He nods. “I spoke to some friends in the Passaic County office. You’re in no danger of them electing you Miss Congeniality at the Defense Attorney Ball.”

  “Damn … I just bought a dress.”

  I load the two boxes of discovery documents into the car, and Laurie and I head for home.

  “He was poisoned,” I say. “Botulism.”

  “Uh-oh.” There’s no hard-and-fast rule, but poison is more often the weapon of choice for women than for men.

  “Could have been ingested accidentally,” I say.

  “Right. He was out on a nature walk, and he picked a piece of fruit off a botulism tree.” As a former cop, Laurie is considerably more likely than I am to come down on the prosecution side. That can actually be helpful to me, in terms of my understanding how the other side is thinking.

  “There’re a lot of ways it could have happened, and a lot of people who could have caused it to happen.”

  “Or maybe Sam’s high school sweetheart isn’t quite so sweet.”

  “Poor Sam,” I say.

  “He’ll get over it.”

  “But it will hurt. If this went down as the prosecution says, then she was going to kill Sam as well. She expected him to be on the plane.”

  “Until that dog intervened.”

  I nod. “Good old Crash.”

  The garage was the tip-off. Detective Burke realized it even before Special Agent Ricardo Muñoz, the FBI agent he was guiding through the investigation. Not that Muñoz didn’t notice the obvious; it just took him a split second longer.

  So far the relationship between the two men was going uncharacteristically smoothly. Burke was investigating the death of a fellow cop, a friend, and he made it clear to Muñoz that he was not backing off. It was his case.

  Muñoz was fine with that. Rather than adopt the more traditional FBI scornful attitude toward the locals, he recognized that since he was on assignment out of the New York City office and unfamiliar with Concord, Burke could be a help in showing him the lay of the land.

  Their first stop was at the home of Alex and Rodney Larsen, the brothers whose bodies were found in the service station with Drew Keller’s. It was a small house in a very run-down area, no surprise since records showed that both men, while listing their occupation as auto mechanics, were receiving unemployment insurance.

  The front door was locked, so Burke tried the garage, which opened. And there it was, pristine clean and in mint condition, a new, fully loaded pickup truck.

  “Unemployment must pay more than it used to,” Burke said.

  The rest of the house revealed similar nuggets. There was a new TV, an apparently new computer, and a DVD player that was still in the box.

  Burke called in the license number on the truck and learned that it was not stolen but in fact purchased by Alex Larsen six days prior. Muñoz, in the meantime, was phoning in a request to get the financial and banking records of the two brothers as soon as possible.

  Burke had arranged for a forensics team to meet them at the house, and the team showed up a few minutes after they had entered. They were to retrieve as many prints as they could. Someone had killed the brothers, and it could well have been a coconspirator. If so, at some point he might have been in this house.

  Burke and Muñoz carefully searched the house but did not turn up any obvious evidence that they could use. They impounded an old computer that was on the desk, as well as the new one, which would be examined by experts.

  As they were getting ready to leave, Muñoz got a phone call from his office. When he got off, he said to Burke, “Alex Larsen had one hundred thousand dollars wired into his account two weeks ago.”

  “From who?”

  “They’re running that down now. There is eight thousand in the account now; I’ve got a hunch he didn’t put the rest into T-bills.”

  “So not only were they going to kill a big shot, they were being paid real money to do so,” Burke said. “You think it was their employer who decided they were expendable?”

  “Maybe your friend showing up scared him off,” Muñoz said.

/>   “Or maybe the employer looked at the way they were spending the money and the way they talked to Drew and decided they were too stupid to rely on or allow to live.”

  “You got a lot of big shots around here?” he asked, though he knew the answer.

  Burke nodded. “It’s the state capital; we’ve got a few.”

  “I think the plan was to reduce the number.”

  Reading the discovery material presents a bad news/bad news situation. As Thomas Bader had said, these are only the beginning in what will be a series of discovery documents. But what is here is damaging enough to Denise Price.

  Barry Price probably died of botulism poisoning; the injuries he suffered when thrown from the plane were all, according to the coroner, likely postmortem. It’s hard to tell exactly, since the effects of the poison had certainly set in long before the crash. It’s entirely possible that the impact mercifully finished the job.

  I take a few minutes to Google botulism, and the facts can be molded to fit the prosecution’s theory and time line, as I expected they would.

  There were traces of the poison found in a basement sink drain in the Prices’ house, which certainly tends to implicate Denise. She and Barry are the two obvious candidates to have had access to that sink, and he could safely be characterized as being in the clear.

  Another troublesome little tidbit is that Denise worked as a pharmacist’s assistant for two years before meeting and marrying Barry. It just contributes to the notion that she would have been capable of preparing the poison.

  There is no possibility of successfully arguing suicide in this case. It makes no sense that Barry would deliberately ingest a poison and then get on that plane. If he wanted to kill himself, he could have just taken the poison, or more likely just gotten on the plane and flown it into the ground. There is no logical reason to do both.

  The obvious conclusion, though not mentioned in the documents, is that the killer gave Barry the poison before he was going to fly, in the hope that the crash and subsequent explosion would incinerate the body and remove the chemical residue.