“Which only raises the question of who did frame him—and, if you know, why?”
The question was a softball. It seemed as if the judge was on my side rather than seeking to silence or intimidate me as I’d expected. I forced myself to breathe. The room had suddenly become airless. “I believe that Jacob Mauldin had Jordan Walker murdered and framed Randall Rodriguez for it because she was planning on exposing the conspiracy evidently described in Benton’s letter. What does it say about her?”
“I can’t tell you that,” the judge said. “This matter has become the subject of an inquiry by the US Attorney’s Office. Such criminal matters are beyond the scope of my jurisdiction. What I need to determine is whether to reverse the judgment for Kairos, order a new trial, or do nothing at all. The problem is tricky because in the government’s view, revealing the contents of Benton’s letter would compromise an ongoing investigation. But that doesn’t stop me from compelling testimony from private citizens with pertinent knowledge. Do you have any knowledge that would suggest the judgment was obtained as a result of fraud?”
“I do,” I told him, because I sensed he wanted the answer to be yes. However, I knew that nothing I might tell him could possibly be other than hearsay and speculation. Following the judge’s prompting, acutely aware that every word I spoke was being taken down by the court reporter, I proceeded to tell what I knew and suspected. Relying on what Cho had told me the night of his death, I described how Mauldin and Kairos had manufactured the case against him, forging an incriminating video and contriving false evidence to suggest that Cho’s allegations of fraud were baseless. I told of Cho faking his death, then of the chain of events that had ended with Jordan’s murder. Finally I told of the long day that had begun with me finding a man apparently drowning Lydia Cho in her Jacuzzi, his shooting, our trip to her husband’s hiding place up in Trinity County, and Cho’s murder there. I also described my fruitless meetings with Tom Benton.
When I’d finished, the judge asked if there were any questions from the lawyers. Lydia leaned forward and whispered to her attorney, who shook his head, refusing to ask me what she’d suggested. No one else spoke up.
The judge then thanked me for my testimony and told me I was free to leave.
“I’d like to ask a question,” I said before I went. “I heard Benton is missing at sea, presumed dead. How’d he come to send this letter?”
“I’ll read you his opening paragraph. ‘Hon. Judge Parker,’ it begins. ‘It’s with sadness I write this. I am a lawyer and duty-bound to keep my clients’ secrets. But I also have an obligation to the court when I know a fraud has been committed. Because my desire for self-preservation is stronger than my ethical conscience, according to the instructions I’ve left my attorney, this letter will only be delivered if and when I’m dead.”
The judge broke off and raised his eyes to the lawyer representing Kairos. He stared straight ahead. The judge regarded him for a moment before addressing me. “Curiosity satisfied? Because that’s all I can read, according to our friend from the government.”
“Not even close,” I said. “But I guess it’ll have to do.”
Chapter 24
Rodriguez remained behind bars. The Chronicle sued to have Benton’s letter made public, but the judge dismissed the suit in a one-line order stating that the document in question had been turned over to the US Attorney’s Office, and the paper would have to seek it there. The Chronicle’s request to that office was denied.
Rachel Stone’s story summarizing these strange events contained another tidbit gleaned from an interview with Rodriguez’s lawyer. It appeared that prison had worked a change in her client, because he now was ready to protest his innocence. The trouble was that, after the judgment, it was too late to withdraw his plea. The only way to wind back the clock and regain his right to a jury trial was through a petition for habeas corpus, and the standard for a successful habeas petition required him to present proof of innocence.
A judge had unwound the Kairos case with the stroke of a pen, but all Rodriguez and his lawyer had was speculation and conspiracy theories with no apparent basis in fact.
A few weeks after these articles appeared, Stone got in touch with me. “You calling to apologize?” I asked her.
“For being right?”
“Now you’re giving yourself too much credit.”
“Nothing I’ve printed is provably incorrect. A great deal is still unknown, of course. And we both know there was no way I could take seriously your freakish story about hot tubs and hit men. We’re not the National Enquirer.”
“Don’t you think you need to admit Jacob Mauldin’s the guy you should be talking to now? A judge just ruled he committed fraud in court. Instead of harassing me why don’t you get him to talk?”
“He has, after a fashion. That’s actually the reason I’m calling. He, Lydia Cho, and the government have announced a settlement of her husband’s lawsuit against Kairos.”
I had a sense of foreboding. “Well, I hope she took him for all he’s worth, just like he did to her husband. Right down to the scorched earth.”
“Many of the terms are confidential, but I’m told she’ll be assuming a fifty-one percent stake in Kairos. Mauldin will retain a forty-nine percent stake and will have no involvement in its day-to-day operations. The company will be required to open its books to auditors but will retain its contracts. Care to comment?”
My mind reeled. “You mean they’ll be working together?”
“She won’t comment one way or another on the fraud allegations. Still, it’s the kind of ‘no comment’ that suggests the allegations are true. Evidently, though, she believes her husband really was a scumbag. Otherwise, how could you explain her going to work with Mauldin?”
“Maybe she believes in forgiveness. Or maybe the settlement included enough cash to convince her to keep her mouth shut, to let bygones be bygones.” I didn’t think that I could go for forgiveness, were I in Lydia’s place. Even if it really were her husband on that video. I also remembered Benton’s comment: I don’t know what anyone deserves.
“There’s more,” Stone informed me. “She insists the events of October twenty-seventh never happened as you claim. There was no man in her hot tub. She never took you to her husband. He was never killed by hit men. Rather, he committed suicide by jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge months ago. She turns out to be not much of a fan of your imagination, either.”
“Yeah, I was just out on a hike one morning and I dreamed it all up. Have you considered the idea maybe she was in on the fraud from the beginning?”
After a pause, she said, “You want me to print that?”
“Print whatever you want,” I told her. “As long as it’s not too critical of Jacob Mauldin.”
After this conversation, I seethed for half a day; then I calmed down as I realized I wasn’t completely at an impasse. I’d actually seen the face of the man who’d been brutally questioning Lydia in her hot tub, a man I now believed had been working for Jacob Mauldin, one of the “security” men he’d brought in to shoot up drug dealers in Double Rock.
I wondered if Lydia had intentionally led the killers to her husband’s hiding place that night. Perhaps neither of us had been meant to walk out of those woods alive.
I called Cho’s former lawyer, Ma, on the pretext of congratulating him on a settlement that ought to eliminate his malpractice liability. But while I had him on the phone, I asked if he might still have in his files an employee directory or similar document from the Kairos litigation. Preferably one with pictures.
He replied that me he might be able to put his hands on material like that. But, naturally, he was curious. “What are you looking for, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“I’m just trying to determine whether any of Kairos’s employees recently turned up dead.”
“I’m not on the case anymore. Which means I’m not supposed to have any case documents. But you know how electronic storage is. Nothing really eve
r disappears.”
“I’d like to match a face. Or, more likely, rule out the possibility that the guy I’m interested in was one of theirs. No one will find out about it.”
He told me to come to his office Saturday morning at eight thirty. “Wear jogging clothes,” he suggested.
To make our meeting on the weekend look legit, he insisted we jog a few desultory miles in the rain and wind after I’d met him in the lobby of his Embarcadero Center building. When we returned, we rode the elevator up to his small suite, which was deserted. Unlocking his office door, he turned on his computer, logged in, and opened a folder.
“Now I’m going to use the john,” he said. “Try not to get my chair sweaty.”
The window he’d opened was a folder tree of Kairos documents. A subfolder contained files labeled with the name of an employee and a numeric identifier. These turned out to be resumes, each with an attached color headshot. These the company presumably would submit to the government when bidding on contracts. Each dossier was stamped: HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL.
I’d had no idea that Kairos had so many employees. My fascination made me almost forget my purpose. I clicked through dozens of resumes and headshots. Then after opening the file of a man named Carl Hastings with the job title of “seismic engineer,” I saw a face I’d never forget. I’d been afraid I wouldn’t recognize him even if he was there, but the minute the headshot appeared on the screen a pulse of fear moved down my spine.
It was the man I’d last seen floating dead in a hot tub at Lydia Cho’s. I hit Print and the copier in the other room spat out what I wanted.
Ma returned a few minutes later. “Find what you need?”
I told him I had, thanked him, and got out of there, promising again to keep my mouth shut about the favor.
I thought of calling Rachel Stone but knew I still had nothing definite to tell her. In spite of my discovery, I seemed to be at a dead end, so I decided to take a chance. I put a copy of the printout of Carl Hastings’s dossier in an envelope with one of my business cards and sent it to Lydia Cho.
Two days later, I was drinking a beer after work, studying the chess problem in the Chronicle and thinking of Rodriguez while delaying the inevitable return to my room. Suddenly, a man moved through my peripheral vision and sat on the bar stool beside me. I swiveled and locked eyes with Jacob Mauldin.
He was about five five and round bellied, with a shock of white hair above a face like the moon. Not the bland familiar features but the dark side peppered with craters. He would have been ugly even without the acne scars. He had on pressed slacks and buffed shoes. When the bartender turned to him Mauldin ordered a Plymouth Gin and tonic.
“I know who you are,” I said, trying to hide my impulse to put as much distance between the two of us as possible. From all my online digging, I obviously recognized him. His easy comfort on my turf struck me as a sign of danger.
“That saves me having to think up a suitable pickup line. How are you, Leo?”
“Not so good,” I said after a suitable pause. “I miss my friend.”
“We all miss someone.” He accepted his drink from the bartender. “An insightful woman once told me men are disposed to looking backward, fixating on the one who got away. The perfect girl who, if we could just get her back, would make everything all right. Women, on the other hand, look forward. They believe the best is yet to come.”
“Is that what Lydia Cho believes?”
“Lydia knows how to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”
“And you’re the sow. I guess you had to pay her seriously big bucks. It’s too bad killing her didn’t work.”
“I’d appreciate if you’d refrain from making reckless accusations. You’ll find yourself saddled with a defamation suit, if you’re not careful.”
“I’d welcome it.”
“Would you?”
I’d had a few pints by then and didn’t give a shit. I had the accusations ready and they rolled out of me with easy momentum. “What’d it take to bring her over to the side of the formerly bitter adversary who had her husband killed? After framing him? Five million? Ten? Come on, it’s just you and me talking, Mauldin. Don’t forget, I was there that night. I saw Gary Cho take a bullet in the throat.”
“So you say. Lydia, on the other hand, denies it ever happened.”
“Yes. But it isn’t too hard to figure out why.”
“You think so?” He inclined his head. “Maybe you’re the one looking for a payoff, to keep you from talking about what you claim happened that night. But you’ve already gone on and on about it. And no one believed you. If I offered you money, it would only give credence to a story the world has already dismissed.”
I held up my glass, signaling for another. “I’m not looking for money. Gary Cho’s murder isn’t the one that keeps me awake at night. I want to know who killed Jordan, and why. I figure if anyone knows, you must.”
He sighed patiently.
“Your former client has already been convicted of that crime, based on his own confession. I came here tonight because Lydia said you’d contacted her, and when she provided me with what you sent her, it was evident you’d somehow come into possession of confidential personnel information relating to one of my employees. That concerns me. My sole purpose in coming here is to get to the bottom of the leak, if there is one. Let’s be clear: I’m not here to lend credibility to your theories.”
“Then I may as well send that printout to Rachel Stone at the Chronicle and tell her Carl Hastings happens to be the guy who’d been drowning Lydia in her own hot tub, the one she shot. He was trying to get her to tell him where her husband was, and when she went up there, Cho was killed. A real company man; he was right there on your payroll, I have no doubt. Listed as an ‘engineer’ but his real job was something far more sinister.”
“I’m sure you don’t have any doubts.”
“While Rachel may not trust every word out of my mouth, I’m sure she’s interested in knowing why Kairos was settling a case it’d already won. She must be wondering what leverage Lydia could possibly have that placed her in a position to obtain such a significant stake in your company.”
“A lot of our dirty laundry has been aired. Not to mention Benton’s letter, which contained only lies. Naturally, I’d have preferred a great deal of what’s come out never to have seen the light of day, but it’s behind us now. Happily.” He paused. “I don’t dispute that we had a problem on our hands. We needed a fresh presence at the helm, a public face able to convince the world we’re ready to do business as usual. Who better than the widow of the person who brought the fraud to light?”
“You knew nothing about it, of course.”
“Sometimes the man at the top is the last to know. You don’t want to believe it, but when you learn the undeniable truth, you do what you have to do to make amends.”
“You’re the one who sent Hastings to her house. Obviously, one of the terms of this arrangement would be her continued silence.”
“Kairos doesn’t yield to extortion. If anyone had made such an attempt, we’d have immediately reported that person to the authorities.” He sipped his drink.
“The beauty of a settlement agreement is that it transforms extortion into a mutual agreement to compromise a disputed claim.”
Mauldin shook his head again. “The individual on the printout you sent Lydia, a file stolen from my company, is no longer employed. If your account were true, he would be dead. They’d have found him in that Jacuzzi. But I can assure you he’s alive and well.”
“If he’s alive, I’d like to talk to him. Can you tell me where to find him?”
“I’m not at liberty to give out such information. I wouldn’t concern myself with his well-being, if I were you.”
“If anybody should be concerned, it’s the police.”
He ignored this. “Do you care to tell me how you obtained the document you sent to Lydia?” he inquired politely.
I didn’t.
&n
bsp; “Well, one way or another I’ll find out. Now about your proposed conversation with Ms. Stone. Naturally, you’re free to do whatever you wish. Still, I’d advise against it.”
“Because …?”
“I merely wish to suggest you consider the risk to yourself in proceeding down the road of further publicity. You have your phone on you?”
“Why?”
His smile this time held a bit more menace. “I’d just like you to refresh your memory for a moment about what sorts of incriminating evidence might be stored on these phones. Go ahead, take a look. Try the videos.”
I stared at him. A rushing sound filled my ears. I was distantly aware of a need not to panic, but the sparkle in his eye told me what I was about to find was something very bad indeed.
Still, I wasn’t prepared. Nothing could have prepared me for the horror of what I saw.
In the videos on my phone were six files I was sure had never been there before. Not that I’d opened the videos folder very often in the previous months. They could have been there for weeks and I wouldn’t have known, except I was pretty sure that if these videos had been on the phone either of the two times I’d been arrested since Jordan’s death, the police would have found them. They were titled “Jordan1” through “Jordan6.”
“I suppose the Panther, if he exists, must enjoy the suffering of the women he rapes.” Mauldin was relaxed now. “In fact, their suffering may be more important to him than the physical release of the act itself.” He took another sip of his drink, set it down, and rubbed drops of condensation from the glass between his thumb and forefinger, then tossed me a package of cheap drugstore earbuds from his pocket. “Let’s move to a booth.”
I slid down from the stool, still feeling like I’d been punched in the groin. My life was open to these people, I realized. They’d stop at nothing.
In the booth I inserted the earbuds and played the first video, which was agonizing to watch, a pornography of death. It was a clip showing Jordan, still alive, tied to the bed in which I remembered having made love to her for the last time that night, no doubt only hours before this video was taken. Her face was wan, her eyes vacant and terrified, wasted by the ordeal she must already have endured.
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