Dachshund Through the Snow

by David Rosenfelt

  “What’s that?”

  “A key to Arrant’s hotel room.”

  “You took it off his body?”

  I nod. “I did. I want to get a look in there.”

  “I would think that the police are all over it already.”

  “I don’t think so. I’m sure he used one of two fake IDs, but by the time the cops make the connection and trace it to a hotel, we’ll have been in and out of there.”

  “We?”

  “I thought you might like to come along. Think of it as a morning adventure.”

  I call Sam and he answers on the first ring, in typical Sam fashion. “Talk to me.” His voice sounds less raspy.

  “You feeling better?”

  “Getting there. What do you need?”

  “Can you get into the computer at the Saddle Brook Marriott?”

  “Why do you insult me? Of course.”

  “I need to know what room a particular guest is in.”

  “What’s the name?”

  I give him both names since I don’t know which fake one Arrant used. I hope there’s not a third name that I’m not aware of.

  We get off the phone and Laurie and I head to bed. I’m exhausted; almost getting shot and killed can take a lot out of a person. I’m just falling asleep when the phone rings. Caller ID tells me that it’s Sam.

  “Hello?”

  “Room 316, in the name of Edward Pruett. He was due to stay there another week.”

  We drop Ricky off at school and head for the hotel.

  We want to get there early, when it will be busy, and there will be even less chance of our being noticed. Many people use the hotel for access to Manhattan, as well as Newark Airport, so the turnover of guests is rapid. Many of those people, I would assume, check out after breakfast.

  Sam Willis meets us in the lobby; he’s feeling better and wanted in on the action. I asked him to come in case we find any electronic devices that we need help on. He’s going to wait downstairs and come up if I call him; we don’t want to look like an invading army heading for Arrant’s room.

  We walk directly to the elevator and take it to the third floor. We smile and chat on the way, trying to appear normal, even though appearing normal is not necessarily my specialty. Once we get off the elevator, we follow the signs to room 316, which is at the end of the hall.

  I insert the key and the light flashes green, always a good sign. Laurie goes in first; I opt not to carry her across the threshold.

  “He had a suite,” she says. “Crime pays.”

  She hands me a pair of skintight rubber gloves and puts a pair on herself. She seems a bit uncomfortable; this kind of subterfuge is not consistent with her cop’s training. I doubt she’s ever searched a room without getting a warrant.

  We go through the entire room, which is not difficult or time-consuming because he traveled lightly. Just some clothes, and not much else, certainly not anything interesting. He also has two books on the night table, including a thriller by David Rosenfelt, who I hear is terrific. I’m tempted to grab it, but I don’t.

  A cell phone is in the night table drawer, so I call Sam and tell him to come up. He does, and Laurie hands him a pair of gloves. “This is so cool,” he says.

  He picks up the phone and examines it, pressing some buttons and looking like he knows what he’s doing, which he does. He does so for two or three minutes.

  “Got to be a burner phone,” he says.

  “Why?”

  “There’s no protection on it, no security.”

  “What does that mean?” I ask.

  “Personal phones require a fingerprint, or facial ID, or at least a password. This has none of that; it’s all there to be examined by anyone who wants to. I’d bet anything he was about to throw this one away. He must buy them by the truckload.”

  “What does he have on it?” Laurie asks.

  “Not much; no emails, no downloads, no apps … none of that.”

  “What about phone calls?”

  He nods. “He made three of them; doesn’t seem to have received any.”

  “So you can tell who he called?” Laurie asks.

  “For now all I know are what numbers he called, but I can definitely attach names to it. Won’t take long. Are we taking the phone with us?”

  “No,” I say.

  “Then give me a second to write down the numbers.” Sam does just that. Then, “We leaving together?”

  “No, you head out, and then Laurie and I will follow once we make sure everything is the way we found it.”

  Sam leaves and Laurie and I restore the few things we moved. As we leave, we wipe the outside doorknob clean. “I feel like a thief,” she says.

  “All for a good cause.”

  Once we’re in the car, I call Pete. “What now?” he asks.

  “I just got the weirdest anonymous tip. It said that Arrant was staying at the Saddle Brook Marriott in room 316 using the name Edward Pruett.”

  “An anonymous tip,” he repeats, obviously skeptical.

  “Yes. It was an anonymous tip left anonymously by a tipster who prefers to remain anonymous in order to retain his or her anonymity.”

  “The Feds were all over this early this morning. I’ll relay this information.”

  “Do me a favor? Tell them you got it anonymously.”

  I hate jury selection.

  Picking jurors, deciding which ones are most likely to buy the bullshit that we will be selling, is obviously crucial. For example, you would be hard-pressed to find a legal observer who doesn’t believe that the O. J. Simpson case was lost in that pretrial phase.

  What makes it so frustrating and detestable for me is that the reveal, the discovery of whether I made the right decisions, doesn’t come until the end of the trial.

  Then it’s too late.

  So I’m here for the second and hopefully last day of jury selection, trying my best and, more important, trying not to second-guess every decision I make.

  Hike is not exactly helpful in these situations; he is sure that every potential juror would love nothing more than to send Noah to the electric chair, if New Jersey had one.

  The only consolation is that the prosecutor, Jenna Silverman, has no clue either. She has a team of assistants and a jury specialist to consult with, which may or may not give her a sense of security, but it would be false. Like me, she’ll have to wait until the end to find out if she made the right calls.

  We should be done by lunchtime, and Judge Calvin Stiller has said we would start with opening statements tomorrow.

  This shouldn’t be a long trial, but it will take quite a while to play out. That’s because we are starting on Monday, but then we’ll stop for Christmas on Friday, then stop again for New Year’s Day. I only wish that instead of viewing Christmas as a short-duration event, the court would adopt Laurie’s three-month Christmas window. By then we might be ready to mount a decent defense.

  Both Jenna and I urged Judge Stiller to wait until after New Year’s to start. He didn’t listen to us for two reasons. First, he considers any day that isn’t utilized to be a crime against nature. Second, anything a lawyer recommends is something he instinctively resists. Maybe I should recommend Noah’s conviction.

  Judge Stiller does not like me. That is not breaking news; if I was going to practice in a courtroom where the judge didn’t dislike me, it would have to be on the moon. The only factor in my favor is that he dislikes all lawyers, which sort of evens the playing field.

  Sam calls me during lunch with some news that seems bizarre. He’s traced the three phone calls on Arrant’s burner phone. One was to Taillon, which makes perfect sense. He might even have been calling him to arrange the Pennington Park meeting that resulted in Taillon’s and Siroka’s deaths.

  The second call was to Gameday, a video-game company in Oklahoma. I have no idea why that call was made, and since it went through the company switchboard, there’s no way to know who received it. The call could have been benign, though
Arrant’s profile doesn’t seem to be that of video-game nerd.

  The third call is even weirder. He called an assistant football coach at LSU named Ben Walther, who is the defensive coordinator. Walther has developed a national reputation and is said to be a leading candidate for some head-coaching jobs after the season.

  The call lasted ten minutes. LSU is playing Clemson in a national semifinal game in a couple of weeks, so Walther must be pretty damn busy. But he found time to take Arrant’s call.

  If I had to guess, based on Arrant’s criminal history and ability to profit off of it, I would say that some illegal betting or fixing is going on. But that’s a stretch; this is big-time college football with great scrutiny on it. Also, I am not aware of anything in Arrant’s past that involved sports betting.

  It could also be some kind of recruiting scandal, but for it to be lucrative enough to attract someone like Arrant, it would have to be widespread. With only the one call to the one coach, at least on this phone, it seems even more unlikely.

  I assume that the Feds have already been to the Marriott and retrieved Arrant’s phone. By now they should know who he called and will no doubt follow up on it. But I can’t count on them to do anything on my time schedule, nor will they share with me what they learn.

  If Arrant had any information on who is going to win the LSU-Clemson game, I wish he had shared it with me before he died. I bet on bowl games all the time, and I think the last one I won involved players wearing leather helmets.

  Unfortunately, I believe that Arrant died with the answer to all my questions. The key one is how an international criminal like Arrant became involved in the murder of eighteen-year-old Kristen McNeil.

  Is it so simple that he had a client who was, for whatever reason, willing to pay to have her killed? Was he just a hired killer who farmed the job out to Taillon to literally execute? Or was there more to it? Did Kristen somehow represent a threat to Arrant or the people that paid him? I haven’t found anything that would indicate this and I’m running out of time.

  But there’s no opportunity to think about it now; I have a fun afternoon of guessing what a bunch of people who have no desire to serve on a jury will do once they get stuck on one.

  Juror candidate number 37 is staring at Noah; does that mean she hates him or is sympathetic to him? Or is she staring at Hike, who is sitting next to Noah? I’m going to accept her to sit on this trial, and if she votes to convict, I’m going to somehow set her up on a blind date with Hike.

  Revenge will be mine.

  The jury has finally been chosen and it’s terrific, or awful.

  We’ll know when we know. One thing is certain. It is what it is, they are who they are, and there’s no upside in my focusing on it or worrying about it. Time to move on.

  So with the afternoon free before opening statements tomorrow, I go home and do what I do almost every day, starting well before the trial and continuing until the jury starts deliberating. I read through the discovery documents.

  I do this even though I almost know them by heart already. It’s partially because I need to be ultraprepared for anything that comes up during the trial; I need to be able to react quickly and by instinct, rather than strain to remember something I read.

  The other reason is that on many occasions reading something, even dry evidentiary reports, somehow causes me to look at an issue with fresh eyes, and I see something I hadn’t seen before.

  After about an hour, fresh eyes and new discoveries are nowhere to be found, so my mind starts to wander. These pages are all about the evidence against Noah. They obviously have nothing to do with the case I am trying to develop, albeit unsuccessfully.

  The prosecution will never admit that four dead bodies now connect to this case, those of Taillon, Siroka, Holzer, and Arrant. I would have replaced Arrant as one of the four in the group if not for the intervention of Corey Douglas and the amazing Simon.

  I certainly believe that Arrant killed Taillon, Siroka, and Holzer and was set on killing me. But I have to say that it seems like literal “overkill”; Arrant reacted violently and lethally to situations that just did not seem that threatening to him. But he obviously thought otherwise.

  Taillon and Siroka worked for Arrant and might therefore have been privy to information that could have endangered him. Therefore, killing them could have made some sense.

  But why Holzer and me? All Holzer had was Arrant’s name and a suspicion. He didn’t know where Arrant was and certainly could not prove that he was involved in anything. I still don’t know how Arrant even knew that Holzer had his name, unless Arrant has connections to the Paterson streets. It’s hard to see why he would.

  Arrant killed Holzer and went after me soon after Holzer and I talked. What made him move so swiftly? And why go after me? How would Arrant even know that Holzer told me Arrant’s name?

  I can’t imagine we have a leak in our organization; we barely have an organization. And it’s highly unlikely we have electronic surveillance on us. Holzer was killed the day after talking to me; there’s no way taps and microphones could have been placed, and the information derived acted upon, so quickly.

  I keep bouncing around back and forth between things I don’t understand, so in keeping with that, I once again focus on Kristen McNeil. Why was she killed?

  The only people that come close to being suspects in my mind are the Wainwrights, father Arthur and son Kyle. Each brings his own issues to the suspect party. Kyle was Kristen’s boyfriend, and she was dumping and cheating on him. Anger at rejection therefore becomes a possible motive.

  Arthur Wainwright, as the father of Kyle, could also be involved. But what makes him intriguing is his wealth. Arrant did not come cheap, and he then turned around and hired Taillon, who hired Siroka. Taillon had $20,000 in his possession, very possibly his payment for having me followed, and who knows what else.

  But money seems to be all over their actions and this case, and Arthur Wainwright has plenty of it.

  One thing I have not focused on is NetLink Systems itself. It is a successful company and Kristen worked there. She could have met someone else there who has some direct or indirect involvement in this case. That’s at least a better bet than the answer being among her high school friends. NetLink could be described as Kristen’s connection to the real world, and a high-stakes world at that.

  Even more significant, we know that Taillon called NetLink twice just before Kristen was killed. I still don’t know who he called—it could even have been Kristen herself—but the connection between Taillon and someone at NetLink is crucial.

  I take out Sam’s reports on Taillon’s phone calls, but nothing more is to be learned there. I need to be aggressive and try to shake things up, so I decide to call Jeremy Kennon, the tech guy that Kyle works for. At least he didn’t throw me out of his office, which is more than I can say for Arthur Wainwright.

  The phone number for NetLink is right here in Sam’s report of Taillon’s phone calls. Assuming it’s still the number, I dial it. It rings twice, and a woman answers, “Mr. Wainwright’s office. How may I help you?”

  I’m surprised by this; I thought I’d be reaching the switchboard. It sounds like I’m talking to the woman who brought me to Arthur Wainwright’s office when I was there. “Hello, this is Andy Carpenter. We met last week, and—”

  “Hello, Mr. Carpenter. How can I help you?”

  “I was trying to reach Jeremy Kennon.”

  “Oh, let me switch you to the operator. This is Mr. Wainwright’s private line.”

  “No thank you. I’ve got another call coming in, so I’ll call back,” I lie.

  When we get off the call, I let the impact of what I’ve just learned sink in. Taillon didn’t just call NetLink Systems twice the week of Kristen McNeil’s murder.

  He called Arthur Wainwright.

  “I have been through too many trials to minimize the importance of your job.”

  That’s how Jenna Silverman begins her opening statement
. With the first sentence, I can tell she is going to be a problem for the good guys, in this case us.

  First of all, she looks the part. She’s attractive but buttoned-down and professional, seeming to be serious and in control. She speaks in a pleasant but authoritative voice. She is someone you want to root for, whose side you want to be on.

  She continues, “There really are very few tasks that you will do in your life, that anyone will do in their life, that are more significant. You will go in a room, no lawyers or judges will be around, and you will decide the fate of another human being. Your decision will either send him to prison for most of the rest of his life, or free him, never to be bothered by these charges again.

  “But I have also been part of enough trials to know that there is a difference between important and difficult. I’m going to be blunt here: your job is not difficult.

  “Very often there are complicated issues involved in a trial, sometimes requiring a special expertise. This is not one of those cases. We will demonstrate through forensic evidence that cannot be challenged that Noah Traynor was with Kristen McNeil at the time and place of her death. That same evidence will prove that they had a violent confrontation.

  “When I say that these facts cannot be challenged, I will predict that Mr. Carpenter will not even make the attempt. That’s how irrefutable that evidence is.

  “But Mr. Carpenter is an excellent attorney, and he is nothing if not resourceful. So he will parade a group of criminals before you, some dead and some alive. The one thing they will all have in common is that they are not relevant to this case, so you should not let them distract you from the facts.

  “We will also show a consciousness of guilt that caused Mr. Traynor to avoid acknowledging these facts for fourteen years. If there was an innocent explanation, why not come forward with it? Why not do what you can to help the police find this awful killer, who could conceivably strike again? Why hide in the shadows for all this time?

  “The answer will be crystal clear and not difficult for you to uncover. That answer is that Noah Traynor willfully and cold-bloodedly strangled eighteen-year-old Kristen McNeil and left her body lying in the dirt.