“Milgram? In what way?”
“I’m afraid I can’t say,” I lie. “It’s covered by attorney-client privilege.”
I need to start asking questions rather than answering them, and Laurie picks up on this. “Have you at any time considered that Steven’s disappearance could in some way have been connected to his work?”
“As you can imagine, I’ve analyzed it from every angle, including that one, but I haven’t come up with anything. Steven seemed mostly happy with what he was doing. In fact, in the days before he left…”
She pauses for a moment. She used the word “left,” but it seems as if she has never really come up with a word that she is comfortable with, or that seems to fit. She continues. “He was particularly upbeat. That’s one of the things that has always seemed so strange…”
“So nothing about his work was bothering him in any way?” I ask. “You said ‘mostly happy.’”
She shrugs. “He wasn’t making as much money as he thought he should, but he felt that was going to change. We were about to have the baby, and earning money had become very important to him.”
“What exactly did he do for Milgram?”
“He was what they call an assayer. He had a master’s in quarrying and extraction, and he went to land that Milgram owned and estimated how much oil and gas, or other resources, were there. You know, so they’d know whether to drill or not, I guess.” She smiles. “Truth is, I never really understood it myself.”
“Is that why he traveled so much?” Laurie asks.
She nods. “It wasn’t so much, just more than I would have liked. I wanted him home as much as possible.” She shakes her head and smiles sadly, “Look how that worked out.”
“Would you have any way of knowing where he traveled in, say, the two months before he disappeared?”
She nods. “Absolutely. I gave the police all of that information, his records, his calendar … and they gave them back about a year later. When they gave up looking.”
“You still have them?” I ask, knowing there is not a chance in hell she threw them out.
“Yes, in case the police ever found a lead. But I want to keep them. I could copy them for you.”
“We would appreciate that,” I say, and Laurie arranges to pick them up tomorrow.
On the way home, Laurie says, “It’s pretty hard to imagine anything worse than someone you love like that just disappearing. And to never find out what happened…”
“I think we’re going to be able to tell her what happened.”
“You think he was in the fire?” she asks.
“Probably. But even more than that, I think he might have been the reason for the fire.”
Judge De Luca calls Dylan and me into chambers prior to the start of court.
He has the court reporter in there to record everything, something he doesn’t always do.
“I’ve decided to grant the defense’s request and admit the evidence as proffered,” he says. Once he does, Dylan formally objects again, for the record, but he knows it’s a lost cause, and De Luca confirms that for him.
De Luca then launches into a speech which, if listened to out of context, would lead one to believe he had ruled against us. He goes on and on about how the ruling is a limited one, capable of being changed or curtailed at any time. He warns me not to take this too far afield, and not to allow witnesses to speculate.
I believe he is covering himself for the record, though the prosecution is unlikely to stop the trial in order to appeal it to a higher court. They also cannot appeal it after the fact, should Noah be acquitted. But if the transcript is later scrutinized for any reason, De Luca wants to look as unbiased and evenhanded as possible.
I’ve given a lot of thought as to how I can introduce the evidence that De Luca has now ruled admissible. Part of it, Camby’s shooting, involves Marcus, but there is no way I’m going to call him to testify.
The jury, not knowing better, would look at Marcus and definitely not consider him one of the “good guys,” and since he is on our side that would not cut to our benefit. It also would not be fair to the court reporter; Marcus is tough enough to listen to; to have to accurately transcribe what he says is covered under the Constitution as “cruel and unusual” punishment.
Instead I call Laurie. She was enough of a participant to get by, or at least I hope so. And it’s something of an understatement to say that the jury will find her more appealing than Marcus.
Laurie describes for the jury how she and I had just come from interviewing a witness, and she noticed that we were being followed. “So we pulled into a 7-Eleven parking lot, and while you went inside, I called one of our investigators, Marcus Clark.”
“Why did you do that?”
“So that he could come and follow the man following us. We were confident it had to do with the Galloway case, since that was the only one we were working on. It was important to learn why someone thought they needed to monitor our movements.”
She describes how she signaled me to stay in the store until Marcus was in place, and that when she was certain that he was, it was okay for me to come out. She throws in the information that I brought out a “bread and some bleach,” which brings a few snickers from the jury, and more from the gallery.
“What happened next?” I ask.
“We went to your house and waited for Marcus to call, which he did. He had attempted to question the man, but before he could do so, a sniper fired through the window, killing him.”
Laurie goes on to say that Marcus took the man’s cell phone and that we found out later that it was Camby, and that we were able to trace the phone records, which eventually led us to Loney.
Dylan focuses his cross-examination on the shaky connection between Camby and Galloway, claiming that there is no basis for us to assume that link.
“Mr. Carpenter has been a criminal attorney for a number of years, has he not?” he asks.
“He has.”
“And you were a police officer here in Paterson? And then a police chief in Wisconsin?”
“Correct.”
“Did you arrest a lot of people?” he asks.
“My share.”
“So it’s certainly possible that someone was following you, unrelated to this case?”
“It would have been possible, had not subsequent investigation confirmed our suspicions.”
It was a great answer, nailing Dylan in his tracks, but he quickly recovers. He smiles condescendingly, and says, “We certainly look forward to hearing about that.”
The decision was posted at noon on the Delaware Chancery Court Web site.
It was twenty-one pages, and filled with legalese and rationalizations. But the summary page was all that one needed to read to understand that it represented a sweeping victory for Entech Industries.
The poison pill that Milgram had attempted to adopt was considered by Judge Holland to be a “fraudulent attempt by the board of Milgram to thwart the purchase,” and not in the best interests of the Milgram shareholders.
Savvy legal minds, were they inclined to read and analyze the full opinion, would note that Holland’s ruling relied mostly on fact, rather than law, which would make it even less likely for an appeals court to overturn. Since it was widely known that Milgram did not have the resources nor appetite to mount an appeal, Holland’s approach made such an attempt even less likely.
Sure enough, within an hour of the announcement of the ruling, Milgram’s board indicated reluctant acceptance. Though they disagreed in principle with Judge Holland’s decision, they pledged to work with Entech to insure that the purchase would move immediately to completion.
Alex Bauer on behalf of Entech followed in kind, releasing a statement praising the work of the court, and Milgram’s acceptance of the decision. The statement indicated that the purchase of the outstanding shares would begin within twenty-four hours, and promised that the future of the combined company and its employees would be an outstanding one.
>
For Judge Holland, the issuing of the opinion brought a mixture of shame and relief. It was the first time in his career that he had ever been coerced into giving a particular ruling; it violated every principle he had ever lived by.
But he had known he was going to do it for a while; no other option presented itself as feasible. It was over now, it was well behind him, and he knew that he had done it masterfully, and that it would withstand whatever scrutiny might be applied to it.
He would go home, and spend some precious hours and days with his family.
And then he would say good-bye.
Sam is proving to be a surprisingly good witness.
I’m pleased and relieved about that, because even though we’ve rehearsed his testimony a few times, I was afraid that he would love the drama of it all and turn into a loose cannon on the stand.
I take him through the phone records, and the process by which we zeroed in on Loney, as well as the other various players. I avoid naming the important people on the list, including Bauer and Judge Holland. We may wind up going there, but I’m reluctant to do so. Once they are named, then the threat of doing so becomes an empty one.
Sam refers during his testimony to the subpoenaed phone records, which helps to avoid having to explain how we got the previous, hacked versions.
Finally, he describes finding Loney’s body in the Delaware warehouse. “I called his cell phone, and it led me to the bloodstains, which led me to the body.”
“What did you do then?”
He grins. “I climbed back through the window and ran across the street.”
“How about after that?”
“I called Laurie … Ms. Collins, and she said to stay there, that she was going to call the FBI, and that I was to just tell the truth about what happened.”
“And did you do that?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“And did you tell the truth today?”
“Yes.”
I turn him over to Dylan, who continues to take the same approach to what he considers tangential testimony. He doesn’t want to get too far into the nitty-gritty of it, fearing that would give it credibility, and worse, relevance.
“Mr. Willis, that was quite an adventure you went on.”
“I guess…”
“Discovering the body of a known mobster like that, it must have been frightening,” Dylan says.
“It was, but I handled it.”
“Obviously. Now that it’s over, and you can look back on it, what does it have to do with the Paterson fire that was set six years ago?”
I had told Sam that Dylan would lead him down this path, trying to get Sam to give a tortured explanation of how Loney’s death could possibly relate to Noah’s guilt or innocence. But the quick flash of panic in Sam’s eyes makes me fear that in the pressure of the moment he’s going to forget the plan.
He doesn’t.
“I’m afraid I haven’t given that any thought,” he says. “My job was to analyze the phone records, and try to track down Mr. Loney. I wasn’t told to work on any theories. That’s above my pay grade.”
It stops Dylan in his tracks; he wants to attack the relevance but can’t, since Sam didn’t testify to it. He tries to come at it from a few other angles, but Sam is ready for him, and deflects it.
All in all, it’s a tour de force performance, and I don’t even have to ask any additional questions on redirect.
I am not at all happy with the quality of our defense, or where we stand in the trial as we reach the end. We’ve thrown a bunch of stuff on the jury wall, but at this point there is little chance that it stuck. I’m going to have to explain what it all means during my closing statement, and hope that we can get to that elusive reasonable doubt, at least in some jurors’ minds.
Where I think we have been successful is in casting doubt on the Butler statement recounting Noah’s “confession.” It should be clear by now that Noah barely knew him, and would have been very unlikely to have confided such a monstrous secret.
Working against us, of course, is the fact that Butler’s statement is corroborated by other evidence, most notably the DNA on the paint can. That is simply not something that we have been able to effectively rebut.
Closing statements will be tomorrow, and I head home to do some preparatory work. Laurie is not there; hopefully she’s out either solving the case or, if not that, maybe getting some sexy lingerie to please her man.
I take Tara and Bailey for a walk and then settle in to read through the files for what seems like the five-millionth time. Laurie comes home at around nine o’clock. I don’t see any Victoria’s Secret bags, so hopefully she solved the case.
The look on her face says that she just might have.
“I’ve been at the hospital,” she says. “Seeing Jesse Briggs.”
“How is he?”
“Not good. He’s not going to leave there, and he knows it. The doctors have stopped treatment.”
“That’s too bad,” I say. “But why were you there?”
“I’ve been finding out as much as I can about his daughter and her baby, but I needed to know something else, and I knew he could tell me. She moved back to Paterson a few months before the baby was born.”
I nod. “I know. Tony told us that when we were at Taco Bell.”
“Good memory,” she says. “But do you know where she moved from?”
“No.”
She smiles. “Delaware. Dover, Delaware.”
“Well, you’ve now heard all of the evidence,” Dylan says.
“I know that it wasn’t easy. Sometimes lawyers like me have a tendency to speak more than we should. My wife often says that I take five sentences to say something I shouldn’t say in the first place.”
He pauses to smile, so the jurors will know he’s joking, and a few of them return the smile.
“And it wasn’t just long and sometimes dull; some of it was difficult to watch and hear. I know that, but there was no way around it. You are the triers of fact, and you needed to know the facts.
“Now you do.
“Every fact in the case points to Noah Galloway as the arsonist, as the mass murderer. He bought drugs from the dealers in that building. They cut him off, and he became furious. He knew how to mix the chemicals. His DNA was on the murder weapon. He confessed the crime, in detail.
“It couldn’t be clearer.
“And how does the defense respond? Not with evidence, because they have none. So they talk about other murders, which have nothing to do with this case. One of the murdered people called Danny Butler. That’s it, yet they try to create an entire defense around it.
“You’ll notice at no point did Mr. Carpenter offer a theory as to why these evil-doers framed Mr. Galloway, or why they planted all this evidence, but then waited six years to reveal. Or even who has been doing these killings, or what they have to do with this trial.
“So when I say that you’ve heard all the evidence, I mean that you’ve heard all that relates to this case, and a heck of a lot that doesn’t.
“I thank you for your patience, and I especially thank you for your service. All I ask is that you continue to exercise your best judgment, and keep your eyes on the true facts. And then follow those facts to justice.”
I stand even before Dylan sits down; I don’t want to let his words sink in too deeply. “There is much that I don’t know,” I say. “I wish I knew more, so that I could tell it to you, and everything would be clear.
“Unfortunately, life doesn’t usually work that way, and trials almost never do. So all we can do is go by what we know at the time, and what we think that could mean.
“The prosecution would have you believe that Noah Galloway, a man who never committed a violent act in his life, decided one day to ruthlessly burn twenty-six people to death. And why? Because he had a grudge against three people.
“They would have you believe that instead of killing those people, perhaps with a gun, Mr. Galloway somehow carried in a
mixture of napalm, in so many cans that it would have been impossible for one person to hold. Then he went through the building, spreading out this mixture, risking detection at any point. And then he set fire to the building, in the process burning up all the drugs they say he was so desperate to have.
“And then what did he do with the cans? Leave them to be incinerated and destroyed in the fire? Not according to the prosecution’s case. No, they think he carried at least one out and left it a few blocks away, with his burned skin on it.
“But if that wasn’t a crazy enough thing for him to do, their theory is that he then confessed the crime in minute detail to a relative stranger, for no apparent reason. And that stranger, drug-addicted himself and not very bright in the first place, remembered every single detail, so as to be able to repeat it six years later.
“And now, six years later, people are continuing to die. Noah Galloway sits in a prison cell, as airtight an alibi as one could imagine, while people involved in this case continue to die.
“Ladies and gentlemen, it makes no sense. What does make sense is that Noah Galloway has been made a fall guy. I can’t tell you why right now; I expect that someday I’ll be able to. But your job, and even my job, is not to find all the answers. It’s to judge the guilt or innocence of one man.
“Noah Galloway is an exemplary citizen, who overcame a terrible problem and has helped countless others overcome theirs. His is a comeback and a story to be celebrated. He deserves our thanks, not our condemnation. And justice, true justice, demands that he be set free.
“Thank you.”
When I finish, Noah shakes my hand, and even Hike nods his approval. I hear Judge De Luca say that court is concluded early for the day, and that he will issue jury instructions tomorrow.
But I’m only half listening, and I’m out the door as soon as he finishes talking.
I’ve got a long drive ahead of me.
Laurie got the call about an hour after Andy left.
It was from Alex Bauer, and the fear in his voice was evident. He was standing in his den, pacing as he talked.
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