Prehistoric Beasts And Where To Fight Them

by Hugo Navikov

  Slipjack was called—strangely, by the prosecution, with the defense to perform cross-examination—and answered everything in a way that matched Sean’s statements well. It was only the final run of questions, this seemingly irrelevant and insulting line of inquiry, that was all set up for this bombshell to be dropped. Kat was having an affair with Slipjack? Sean’s attorney had been correct to imply that the winch chief had a face only a mother could love, and only if paid to do so. But it was more than that: Slipjack had an oily quality about him, something Kat had once commented to Sean about over wine among other inappropriate observations about their crew, and even if she just wanted something physical … she turned to Slipjack?

  It was true that Sean pulled long, long hours working on all aspects of the expedition, but the same was true (although less frequently) of his wife. They were academics with the funding to make the research voyage of a lifetime. They would be able to gather evidence to support the logically connected, but thus far physically unsupported, conjectures that some other scientists called a “theory,” using that word in the sense of a “systematic explanation ready to be tested.” He appreciated their enthusiasm, but he knew they knew that he needed hard data, and a lot of it, to move the “prehistoric beasts surviving near hydrothermal vents” idea from an interesting thought experiment to a theory that could be supported or not supported by reality.

  Ichthyopaleontology, and evolutionary biology in general, were different from mathematics or physics, in that nothing could really be disproven—the Higgs boson was theorized to exist only within certain energy parameters. If it wasn’t to be found there, then either that part of the theory was incorrect and the Higgs boson might exist somewhere else; or that part of the theory was correct but the Higgs boson didn’t exist.

  But paleontology of every stripe was a matter of finding evidence, usually in the form of fossils but also with chemical and statistical analysis, that could be pieced together to form a larger picture of what had happened, what life-forms were involved, how they lived and when they died. Alternate explanations could also be reasonably introduced—unlike with math or the hard sciences—and duked it out with the prevailing theories used to suss out the secrets of things that lived one hundred million years ago or more.

  Sean was glad to have a marine biologist and oceanographer as his wife (apart from being glad to have the excellent person Katherine was as his wife in the first place). This combination of specializations and meeting of the minds allowed Sean to add credence to his ideas and was used by Katherine in paper after paper as her star rose in academic circles. It wasn’t a one-way street: each Muir did anything possible to lift the other up, and it had worked beautifully until the day that Sean wished Kat had never shown any interest in his crackpot ideas.

  He remained seated at the defense table as the gallery was cleared out and his main lawyers were called away to meet with the judge. He found himself staring at the empty witness stand. His Katherine had been having an affair? Why would she do such a thing? She was no wilting flower—she could have shared her issues and desires with him. They were academics; they could have worked something out from the catalogue of sex-partner scenarios. And she had shared a bed with his trusted crew member, the winch man Slipjack? He just couldn’t get his mind around it. Until the bailiff and officers returned to the courtroom to safely escort Sean and the assistant defense lawyer out of the building, he just stayed where he was, stunned into silence, asking himself the same questions over and over again, and coming up with nothing.

  ***

  The judge’s robes and demeanor made him resemble nothing so much as a pitch-black tornado, and anyone in the halls who happened to be in his way got the hell out of his way with the same speed and urgency that they would have shown had an actual tornado been coming at them.

  The two lead attorneys followed him, trying not to look like they were being called to the principal’s office, but the speed at which they had to follow His Honor left little doubt in anyone’s mind that they were being taken to the woodshed.

  The judge swept behind his desk but didn’t sit down. When the prosecutor and defense counsel arrived, he barked, “Shut the goddamn door, and sit your asses in those chairs.”

  They did as they were told, trying to maintain their dignity but failing.

  The judge didn’t even notice their expressions through the flames of his anger. He stabbed a finger at the defense attorney and said, “Mister Kreide, what in the name of God was that just now? I had half a mind to let the witness put his hands around your grandstanding neck!”

  “Your … Your Honor, I know it was dramatic, but—”

  “Dramatic? For Chrissake, you accused the witness of screwing around behind the back of your own client! The defendant may be guilty of murder—may be, and it’s the jury’s job to decide—but you just pulled this thing out of your rectum and humiliated the poor son of a bitch!”

  “Your H—”

  “Don’t you talk, counsel. Don’t you say a goddamn word until I tell you to talk. I should’ve held you in contempt six times in the past half hour, and if you don’t make the next thing you say containing a Mother Teresalevel of convincing credibility, it’s unlucky seven for you, and you are going straight from this room to jail. You understand me, Mister Kreide?”

  The defense attorney nodded.

  “All right. Now, you didn’t imply an affair, you didn’t goddamn allude to it, you said, How can an ugly-ass bastard like you get my client’s classy wife to spread her legs on a regular schedule? I want to stick you in a hole for a year and let you count up all the ways you just violated not only the decorum of my courtroom but also your own Bar Association’s guidelines and rules! I guarantee a year won’t be enough, but I’m going to give you one chance to defend what you just did during a trial. Not a magistrate’s hearing, not in opening or closing arguments—where it would have been entirely inappropriate, anyway—but in a trial that you might have just forced into a goddamn mistrial, wasting the taxpayers’ hard-earned money, wasting weeks of time that fifty public servants could have used to improve the county, not to mention your own client’s goddamn money!”

  “Mister Käse,” the judge said to the lead prosecutor, “I need to ask you a couple of things before I let your opposite number make one more peep.” He came around the desk and half-sat on it in front of him in a way to express casual interest, nothing big.

  “Yes, Your Honor,” the prosecutor said as seriously as the defense attorney had nodded a moment earlier. (Contrary to what fans of courtroom-based dramas may have been led to believe, lawyers on both sides of the aisle were colleagues and often friends. Trial attorneys Käse and Kreide—“one K short of an ACLU lawsuit,” this judge had said to them in a much lighter moment during a much less complex trial—were friends, and neither took pleasure at the other being chewed out or embarrassed. At least outside of court.)

  The judge took a deep breath and began: “Did this alleged ‘affair’ ever come up in discovery? Did it arise in any depositions from anyone involved, from any witnesses, including this ‘Slipjack’ fellow? Do you feel that any evidence of this out-of-the-blue accusation was withheld from the prosecution? Or did you know that this subject was in the air surrounding the case but thought it wasn’t relevant to pursue? Go ahead, just tell me. You’re not the one I’m extra pissed at.” He took a moment to glare at the defense attorney, who just didn’t feel like meeting His Honor’s eyes at that exact moment.

  “Your Honor,” the prosecutor said carefully, not wanting to attract any of the wrath he had so far avoided, “this was the very first anyone at my table has heard anything at all about any affair. And we spent a lot of time looking for motive. We also couldn’t find anything out of the ordinary regarding the office and shop keys.”

  “All right. Why, then, do you think Mister Kreide—a very well-compensated, high-profile attorney who, to my knowledge, has never been accused of flagrant contempt of court—would pull this kind of a s
tunt? There was no reason for the defense to discredit an expert witness called to describe the manufacturing process of this cable. I can see the need of a prosecutor to have the court hear how and when the cable could have been tampered with or otherwise compromised, the whole thing with the keys, and so on, of such an expert witness. You follow me?”

  “So far, Your Honor.”

  “All right. Why, then, do you think, the lead defense attorney could possibly have done this—based either on evidence that he illegally withheld from the prosecution, or possibly based on no evidence at all?”

  “I don’t know, Your Honor. If I put myself in his shoes, I believe that I’d see that my client was guilty as … heck … and would start grasping at straws, do anything to tear down a prosecution witness.”

  “Hmm. Was it, maybe, a trick question? Like a ‘When did you stop touching strangers on the bus’ kind of thing?”

  “It could be, Your Honor. I don’t want to speculate too much in front of defense counsel, sir.”

  “No, of course,” the judge said. “You’d never ask any trick questions of anyone, not of a fellow attorney, certainly not of an unsophisticated witness doing his duty to the court by testifying, would you?”

  The prosecutor let out a breath of laughter, which dissipated when he saw that although the judge was giving him a smile, he was asking him a question that he expected to be answered, and answered right now. “I—I wouldn’t—well, Your Honor, I don’t believe I would, not on purpose. It wouldn’t be ethical.”

  “No. No, it wouldn’t,” the judge said. “Very unethical, in point of fact.”

  The judge kept his gaze on Mister Käse, and he couldn’t lower his eyes the way his defense compatriot had without being rude. But something was coming, he could feel it. So he nodded. “Very unethical, Your Honor.”

  “Glad you agree. You know another dirty trick? One played against the witness, the jury, the judge—hell, anyone within listening distance? There are so many a clever lawyer can pull, aren’t there?”

  He gulped like a cartoon turtle. “Yes?”

  “Oh, indeed there are. Here’s one: You implied, strongly—almost stated, actually—that the reproduction of keys marked ‘DO NOT DUPLICATE’ was illegal. Then you asked the witness if he had any knowledge of that not being true.”

  “Your Honor, I believe I asked him if he had any knowl … edge …” The judge’s expression was not one approving of interruption. “But yes, Your Honor, I did.”

  “You know damned well it isn’t illegal. Not even unlawful. Hell, it isn’t even unethical if you don’t use the duplicate key for nefarious purposes. But you got your witness to agree that it couldn’t be done, or wouldn’t be done, anyway; and so cut off any answers to your ‘key’ questions that depended on a spare key having been made.” The judge seemed to be done and waiting for him to respond.

  He cleared his throat quietly and said, “Yes, I did, Your Honor. I was trying to show that the defendant must have kept the key to the manufacturing building. I’m trying to show he kept it to eliminate—” He stopped dead and looked at the defense counsel. “I would rather not share my prosecution strategy with the defense, Your Honor.”

  “No, of course not. I’m done with you, anyway, but please do stay with us, Mister Käse. Maybe you’ll enjoy learning a new dirty trick.”

  He couldn’t laugh, because it wasn’t a joke. And he couldn’t show any resistance to the judge’s words, because the judge was not inviting him to enter into a conversation about “dirty tricks.” So the prosecutor made no expression at all and very subtly nodded to acknowledge the judge’s words.

  “All right, then we all agree that you two have both acted like jackasses.” The judge turned once again to the defense attorney. “Now, Mister Kreide, what evidence do you have, whether you have shared it with the opposition or not, that there was a sexual relationship between Mister McCracken and the late Katherine Muir?”

  “Evidence? I have no hard evidence, Your Honor.”

  “Then what … the … hell were you doing in there? You accused the witness of sleeping with the defendant’s wife. You can’t slander the dead, but you sure as hell can slander a living witness.”

  “It was reckless, Your Honor, but I asked because everything suddenly made sense to me: the whole business with the keys, why Sean Muir and his wife both were in possession of keys to the building even though there was no need for either of them to have even one. The prosecution has as good as said that the defendant kept his to remove any trace of evidence that he had tampered with anything. But what I believe—and now that I’ve thought of it, if I’m not going up the river for thirty days, I can find evidence for it—is that Slipjack McCracken and Katherine Muir used the building for their trysts. There are long couches in there, and we know they were used by the defendant and others to catch some sleep when pulling an all-nighter working on the expedition. McCracken was in love with Kat, and he saw her husband as an obstacle to their getting together. That’s why, I believe, McCracken tampered with the cable. He could do it without anyone knowing if he had Kat’s key copied, a key she had pilfered from her husband in the first place.”

  The judge leaned back and crossed his arms. “You don’t even know which keys were which, let alone who ‘illegally’ made copies. There isn’t one iota of this horseshit that will stand up in court—you have to know that, Mister Kreide.”

  “Maybe it won’t, Your Honor—”

  “Definitely it won’t, Counselor.”

  “Yes, okay, I apologize for following an idea that I hadn’t even fully worked out, much less had any evidence for. I started doing my closing argument during the questioning of a witness. I am very sorry, Your Honor, and I apologize to Mister Käse as well,” he said, looking at the prosecutor, who gave him a noncommittal nod. “But it wasn’t out of contempt, sir—I had a sudden revelation about what actually happened, and why.”

  “A sudden revelation that just happens to exonerate your client.”

  “Your Honor, if I may just give you the last piece of the puzzle, the thing that made me improvise and go down the road of making McCracken admit he was ugly and others saw him as ugly.”

  The judge looked at the prosecutor and widened his eyes. He said, “This should be good.” He motioned for the defense attorney to go right ahead and collect however much rope was necessary for him to hang himself.

  “What seemed really hard to reconcile in my mind was not why McCracken was in love with Katherine Muir, who was practically model material. That was self-evident. But why in the heck would she be sharing a bed with him? I know people can have affairs without necessarily being unhappy in their marriage, and I know sometimes the paramour isn’t as attractive, smart, interesting, or well-heeled as his or her other number. Look at Hugh Grant and that nasty hooker—he was in a long-term relationship with Elizabeth Hurley, one of the most attractive women in an industry with a lot of attractive women.”

  “You’re talking in circles now, counselor. Sum it up; let’s go.”

  “Yes, Your Honor. But even if Kat Muir was slumming, which does happen, why did the liaison take place at a building that both of them knew Sean Muir had a key for? It seems unnecessarily risky, especially for a spouse who is sleeping around for the thrill of being with someone beneath her.”

  “So to speak.”

  “Ha! Yes, Your Honor, very good. McCracken insisted on bedding her at the manufacturing building because he was in love with her—as often happens with the ‘slumee,’ someone who is not even close to being in the slumming party’s league. He was delusional, having convinced himself that if he was in love with her, then she must be in love with him, and was only afraid to break from her husband for a deck swab because it might put her reputation and career at risk.”

  “I see where you’re going with this,” the judge said. “Get there, already.”

  “So, since he was largely in charge of overseeing the manufacture of the cable, the lifeline that kept D-Plus from
sinking irretrievably into the depths, he would place the flaw, one that would weaken the cable enough to break entirely, at a spot that wouldn’t come into play during Katherine’s first test depth but that would be unrolled during Sean’s deeper second test. Sean hurt his fingers, though, and Kat took his place in the submersible, and there was nothing Slipjack—Mister McCracken—could do to stop it that wouldn’t expose him as a saboteur and a murderer.”

  “Holy cow,” the judge said. “That is one heck of a convincing argument, isn’t it, Mister Käse?”

  “Sure, and when I was a kid, I could explain exactly how Santa filled billions of stockings and left presents all over the world in one night. It was a very convincing argument.”

  “All right. Now, Mister Kreide, you … wait a second,” he said, and looked at the prosecutor with eyes narrowed in amusement. “What was this super-convincing argument about Santa? I want to believe!”

  The prosecutor smiled and spread out his hands like he was stating the most obvious thing in the world. “Magic, Your Honor. Magic doesn’t worry about physical laws—that’s what makes it magic. And Santa is well known to be a magical personage.”

  “Wow, you missed your calling, Mister Käse.”

  “Did I, Your Honor?”

  “Yeah, you should have been sent to the asylum back when you were a kid,” he said, and laughed heartily. “All right. Back to you now, Mister Kreide. Your argument is very convincing in an Agatha Christie / Sherlock Holmes kind of way, but surely you know not one iota of that is admissible in court.”