by Lee Child
“No, that’s not true,” said Mirza.
“Isn’t it a fact, Mr. Mirza, that you received a letter, typed correspondence, hand-delivered to your home, instructing you to incriminate my client, telling you what to say, giving you details including the defendant’s taxi number, the license number of the vehicle, the location of the alley, and other specifics like the time of your supposed observations, and telling you that unless you did as the letter instructed your family members in Egypt would be killed? Is that not a fact?”
“No. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The discomfort level of the witness was obvious.
Madriani lifted a sheaf of papers from the table in front of him. Beneath the papers were several large glossy photographs as well as photocopies of a letter and its envelope. Madriani handed one set to the bailiff who delivered it to the judge and another to the prosecutor.
“May I approach the witness, Your Honor?” The judge nodded as he read from his copy of the letter.
“Mr. Mirza, this is not the original but a copy of the letter in question. The original has already been examined by a laboratory employed by the defense. It was turned over to the police for their examination less than an hour ago. I should tell you that our experts have already identified your fingerprints on the original letter and its envelope. You should be advised that perjury is a serious crime. I remind you that you are under oath.”
Mirza looked at the document.
“Your Honor, we’ve never seen this before.” The prosecutor was on his feet waving his copy of the letter at the judge.
“Neither had I, Your Honor, until late yesterday morning,” said Madriani, “when, subject to a subpoena, the letter was found in a safe-deposit box belonging to Mr. Mirza at Fontana Bank in the city. It was tucked inside a large manila envelope containing some insurance documents.”
“I’ve never seen this before,” said Mirza, his hands shaking.
“We would ask for a continuance,” said the prosecutor.
Madriani ignored him. “Then perhaps you can explain to the jury and the judge how it came to find its way into your safe-deposit box with your fingerprints on it?”
“The witness will answer the question.” One thing judges don’t like is perjury.
Mirza looked up at the judge, then toward the prosecutor, and finally at Madriani. A bewildered expression spread across his face. “I don’t know! I really don’t know!”
· · ·
Six days later, after the police crime lab verified Mirza’s fingerprints on the letter and its envelope, both sides made their closing arguments to the jury.
In the courtroom, crowded to overflowing, Alex Cooper sat just beyond the railing behind Madriani at the counsel table. In closing, it took little more than an hour for Madriani to shred the State’s case given that the testimony and evidence of the prosecution’s chief witness had turned to dust. Other than the bleak GPS data putting Mustaffa’s taxi in the vicinity of the body dump, Mirza’s testimony was the only real evidence tying him to the crime. Worse, it now appeared as if there was an active conspiracy afoot to frame Mustaffa.
Paul explained to the jury that while he could not defend Mirza’s conduct on the stand, he understood the unwillingness on the part of the witness to own up to his perjury. After all, his family was in jeopardy and he had reason to be afraid for them.
Mirza, to the last breath, denied ever having seen the letter in question. He claimed that, to his knowledge, no one had ever threatened his family and no one had told him what to say on the stand. He was adamant. No doubt the DA’s office would take him to its own version of the woodshed for a thrashing on the issue of perjury if the jury failed to believe him. Still, there was no way to explain the fingerprints and the letter in the safe-deposit box, all belonging to Mirza.
After retiring to the jury room for deliberations, it seemed that the headiest item on the jury’s agenda was the election of a foreman. Before the noon break they were back with a verdict. “On the count of violation of Penal Code Section 187, first-degree murder, we, the jury, find the defendant, Ibid Mustaffa, not guilty.”
There was a veritable uproar in the courtroom as Mustaffa was discharged by the judge. Madriani made plans to meet with him the following Monday at his office in San Diego. Mustaffa left to get his personal belongings that had been taken from him the night of his arrest.
Paul, Alex, and Jenny Corcoran retreated through the phalanx of reporters to a restaurant for lunch and a glass of wine. It was Friday afternoon. Alex had to fly back to New York, but Jenny was able to stay on. She made plans to get together with Paul and his girlfriend, Joselyn Cole, as well as his law partner, Harry Hinds, in San Diego for a quick visit.
After lunch, some local sightseeing, and a heavy dinner, the lawyers parted as Paul dropped Alex at the airport. She was still conflicted, she told him, about how it felt to hear that Mustaffa was acquitted when her first assumptions about his guilt in this heinous crime were so strong.
Paul headed back to his own room. He would spend one more night in the City of Angels before collecting his luggage, picking Jenny up the following morning, and heading south to San Diego and home.
As for Jenny, she was exhausted. As soon as she got to her room and showered, her head hit the pillow and she tried to sleep. But still the subconscious was at work. Something troubled her. It was the testimony of Terry Mirza.
In the true-to-form trials of the real world, Perry Mason endings with witnesses crumbling on the stand and admitting their guilt do not occur, except in one narrow band of cases. People who commit perjury and who are confronted on the stand with irrefutable evidence of their lies often do recant their testimony, particularly when admonished by counsel and the judge in stern language that perjury is a serious crime for which they could pay a stiff penalty, including time behind bars, if convicted. Mirza had been told this several times and still he stuck to his testimony. He insisted that he had never seen the letter threatening his family or directing him how to testify.
The letter had still another quality to it, like a rabbit pulled from a hat. Samir Rashid somehow had acquired information about Mirza and his family in Egypt. According to Rashid, they were under a severe threat of death from the people who had raided the Cairo Museum and stolen the golden figurine, Surfing the Panther. These people had already killed Carla Spinova to get their hands on the memorandum left behind in the charred U.S. consulate building in Benghazi, the memo that identified the mastermind behind the museum theft, as well as the deal for the sale to the North Korean dictator. Rashid’s same sources had told him about the letter delivered to Mirza and the threat to his family. The Cairo thieves were desperate to convict Mustaffa for Spinova’s murder—to make her death appear to be a brutal sexual assault, staged to seem so—because it would put an end to the controversy and leave them free to do their deals with their stolen booty. Case solved. Story over. It all made sense. Sort of.
Slowly her subconscious released her and Jenny drifted off to sleep. She couldn’t tell how long the slumber lasted, minutes or hours, disoriented as she was in the dark room. But she was awakened with a start by the noise next to her head. She opened her eyes in the dark, little blinking lights in unfamiliar places and the sound of the electronic ringtone blaring next to the bed. She grabbed for the receiver and found it on the second stab.
“Hello.”
“Hello, Jenny. Paul Madriani here. I’m sorry to wake you.”
“What is it?” She looked at the clock on the nightstand. It was four thirty in the morning.
“We need to talk. The police called me ten minutes ago. Ibid Mustaffa is dead.”
“What?”
“He was killed by a hit-and-run driver at an intersection in West Los Angeles two hours ago. The police found my business card with the hotel phone number in Mustaffa’s pocket. They said he was drunk, stumbled into the street, and got nailed. According to witnesses, the driver sped off.”
Jenny’s mind, still hal
f asleep, raced trying to absorb it all.
“Corcoran, are you there?”
“Yes. I’m here.”
“Mustaffa was Islamic, devout. He prayed five times a day. More to the point, he didn’t drink.”
· · ·
An hour later, the two lawyers sat bleary-eyed hunched over the table in Paul’s hotel room gulping coffee from Styrofoam cups, something from an all-night café on the corner.
“I don’t believe in coincidence,” said Jenny. “You want to know what I think?”
“What?” said Paul.
“I think Mirza was telling the truth. I don’t think he’d ever seen that letter before. I mean, you had him in a vise right there on the stand, squeezing him with hard evidence. Why not own up? After all, if your family is in jeopardy, it’s no longer a secret.”
“Then how did his prints get on the letter and the envelope?”
“Blank paper,” said Jenny. “Maybe somebody got into his house. We all stack paper in our printers. Somebody could have taken the bottom page from the feeder. Or better, somebody hands Mirza a blank piece of paper in an envelope. He opens it, looks at it. Whoever gives it to him says, “Oops, wrong envelope,” takes it back, and gives him something else. Mirza never thinks twice about it. The contents of the letter are then typed or printed on the blank page and suddenly the witness is confronted with it in court.”
“You’re forgetting something. How did the letter get into Mirza’s safe-deposit box?” said Madriani.
“Where there’s a will, there’s a way. You said it was found inside an envelope with some insurance documents.”
“Right.”
“Where did the insurance papers come from?”
“I don’t know. I assume an insurance agency.”
“Yes and we, as well as the court, all assumed that Mirza either hid the letter or misfiled it with his insurance papers. Now let me ask you, who reads insurance documents?” said Jenny.
Paul looked at her. “Nobody.”
“Exactly. You receive them and you file them away somewhere safe. Anybody could have gotten to that manila envelope with the insurance documents and slipped whatever they wanted in it before it was delivered to Mirza. Look again and you might find pictures of Mirza shooting from the grassy knoll in Dealey Plaza.”
Paul thought for a moment. “And who knew exactly where to look for the letter?”
“Rashid,” said Jenny. She looked at her watch, picked up the receiver on the nightstand, and started dialing, first an outside line.
“Who are you calling?”
“Alex. I need to pick her brain, but it’s going right to voice mail.”
“She may still be airborne,” Paul said.
Jenny tried again and asked for information this time.
“I would like the phone number for New York, the United Nations, UNESCO, if there is a separate listing.”
“What about his business card?” said Paul.
Jenny shook her head. “If I’m right, that’s probably an answering service. They’ll answer with any name a client gives them.”
Ten minutes later they had the news. The good part was that UNESCO had its own main number; the bad news was that no one by the name of Samir Rashid worked there. There was no listing under that name for any employee.
Jenny slammed the receiver into the cradle. “He played you and Alex like a piano. How the hell did he get into the building? His office?”
“After hours. On a Saturday night,” said Paul. “And the janitor who just happened to be going in through the side door. The man is just full of coincidences. He used the service elevator instead of the bank of elevators near the main entrance. I should have known it was way too smooth.”
“No going through security,” said Jenny.
“Exactly. He probably paid the janitor at the door to let Alex and me in. You hang a few pictures and certificates on the wall, put a holder with business cards on the desk, slip a plastic plaque with your name on the office door and you’re in business. What we saw is what he wanted us to see. It’s all about confidence,” said Paul. “Put yourself in the right setting, surround yourself with a cloak of authority, and you can peddle anything.”
“To two gullible lawyers, searching for the truth,” said Jenny. “And all you got was smoke and mirrors. Alex will go ballistic.”
“Don’t be so hard on us. We were the perfect marks. I’ve got a loser of a case. He’s got the answer, the solution to all my problems. He plays on the interests of justice. We both wanted the fair result, especially when we figured out that Mustaffa was being set up.”
“Why does he want to get Mustaffa off?” said Jenny.
“Mustaffa killed Spinova,” said Paul. “He had something Rashid wanted and he was holding it over Rashid’s head unless Rashid helped him beat the charges.”
“What?”
“The CIA memorandum,” said Paul.
“What? You think that was real?” said Jenny.
“The best con is one that includes a kernel of truth. Mustaffa killed Spinova to get the memo—and he got it. But in the process he got nailed. Mirza saw him dump the body. Cops caught up with him and Mustaffa used the memo which, unless I’m wrong, identifies Rashid as the mastermind behind the Cairo Museum theft. Mustaffa used the memo to extort Rashid. ‘Help me or else.’ If Mustaffa goes down for the count, he uses the memo and the evidence in it to cut a deal for himself come sentencing.”
“Enter two overanxious lawyers,” said Jenny. “And Alex, trying to do the right thing by the dead woman. Make sure the wrong guy isn’t convicted unfairly. Those autopsy pictures haunted her.”
“Now Mustaffa’s dead. The memo’s gone,” said Paul, “and God knows where Rashid is, assuming that’s even his name, which you and I both know it is not. He may be a lot of things, but stupid is not one of them.”
“I hate being used like this,” said Jenny.
“You think I like it? I had an obligation to defend Mustaffa to the best of my ability. But suborning perjury was not included among my services.”
“So what do we do?” said Jenny.
“You got me,” said Paul. “We could go to the trial judge and the DA and explain what happened. Of course, what good is that? Even if Mustaffa were alive he would be beyond the reach of the court, double jeopardy being what it is, which is redundant in this case since he’s dead.”
“Rashid is a coconspirator,” said Jenny. “He’s still liable.”
“Try and find him,” said Paul. “He’s busy peddling his wares, little golden statues, remember?”
“Yes, I heard about them,” said Jenny. She thought for a moment. There was a twinkle in her eye. “That’s it!”
“What?”
“The answer.”
“The answer to what?” said Paul.
“A woman scorned. Alex will want a hand in this. Maybe the DA will listen to her now.”
EIGHT DAYS LATER A SLEEK Gulfstream G650 touched down on the runway at the heavily guarded airport just outside Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea. It taxied to a stop in front of a large hangar as the stairway was wheeled up next to the door. It swung open and a man stepped out onto the platform. He was carrying a small wooden box under one arm.
The man who called himself Samir Rashid looked down at the official entourage waiting for him at the foot of the steps, behind them the line of shiny black limousines and security cars waiting to escort him to the government house, what is called the Grand People’s Study House.
Rashid walked briskly down the steps until he reached the tarmac, where he extended his right hand in greeting toward the general who was first in line. Before the officer could take it, a guard stepped around him and quickly slapped the cold, hard metal of handcuffs around Rashid’s right wrist. Another guard took possession of the wooden box while they manacled Rashid’s other hand.
“What is this? What are you doing?”
“Silence,” said the general. “You will come with me. Is this t
he statue?” He gestured toward the box.
“It is, and your leader will be very angry with you for the manner in which I am being treated. There is no excuse for this. I had an arrangement with his father and have an understanding with your Dear Leader. I assure you he will be very upset when I speak to him about this.”
“Yes,” said the general. “Perhaps you can explain the meaning of this to him.” The officer reached for something handed to him by one of his subordinates standing next to him. It was a newspaper, two of them actually, copies of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, each of them one day old. Blaring headlines just below the fold from New York:
AUDACIOUS THEFT FROM CAIRO MUSEUM
ATTEMPT TO SELL BOGUS TUT STATUES
From Los Angeles the revelation:
PROSECUTOR UNVEILS ELABORATE FRAUD IN SPINOVA MURDER TRIAL, COCONSPIRATOR ON THE LAM
Rashid’s eyes raced over the newsprint trying to absorb the full impact of the words. Adrenaline flooded his heart as glimpses of his fate revealed themselves here and there in the words on the page—“golden knockoffs”—“North Korean dictator”—“unsuspecting buyers”—“fraud”—“murder,” the last of which seemed to be the least of Rashid’s worries. In that instant, the man who had called himself Samir Rashid knew that he would never leave North Korea alive.
It is true what they say: justice is a funny thing. It comes in many different forms.
JEFFERY DEAVER
VS. JOHN SANDFORD
Combining Lincoln Rhyme and Lucas Davenport in a single adventure seemed an insurmountable problem. Rhyme, the hero of Jeffery Deaver’s series that began with The Bone Collector (1997), is a quadriplegic and, of necessity, sticks close to home in New York City. Davenport, the star of John Sandford’s Prey series, is an ace investigator living in Minnesota—working presently for that state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.
How could the two ever meet?
Fortunately, Davenport’s talents as a no-nonsense, take-no-prisoners cop have transported him to the Big Apple before. In Silent Prey (1992), NYPD Detective Lily Rothenburg enlisted Davenport’s aid in nailing the psychotic killer Dr. Michael Bekker, who was prowling the streets of Manhattan. Rhyme, too, has a partner, Detective Amelia Sachs, so Jeff and John decided it was a natural fit for this foursome to join forces to tackle the case of a murderous sculptor for whom art and death are inextricably—and gruesomely—intertwined.