Pearl thought about it for a few seconds. “Maybe she has damning information about him. Maybe he really did it, and she knows it.”
“That’s what I’m wondering. That’s what I’m hoping.”
Pearl narrowed her eyes. “Wait, what? You’re hoping that she has damning information about your client? Come again?”
“Yes.” That was all that I said. Not that I didn’t trust Pearl. I did, implicitly. But I could never be too careful. I regretted even opening my mouth at all.
She pursed her lips and looked at me skeptically. “All right. You don’t have to tell me why you want your own client to go down. I guess you have your reasons.”
“I never said that,” I said calmly. “ I never said that want him to go down.”
“I guess.” She still looked suspicious. “You’re going to be able to find out what’s going on with Kayla Stone soon, though. She’s coming in tomorrow.”
Just then, the phone rang. I knew who it was, even before I picked up the phone.
“Harper Ross,” I said.
“Harper, you bitch,” Michael said, his voice full of rage. “I told you that you were not to bring Kayla into this mess. You disobeyed me.”
“Okay, then. Fire me. Go ahead.”
He was quiet, and I knew that I had him. He couldn’t fire me. Not when Christina was paying my fee. “Why don’t I just file a Bar Complaint against you instead?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “You’re going to file a Bar Complaint against me for scheduling your girlfriend in for a deposition? Knock yourself out.” I rolled my eyes. I hated clients who filed Bar Complaints against me just because they didn’t like the way I did my job.
Then he started to yell. Loudly. I held the phone away from my ear and then set it down on my desk. While he screamed into the phone, I calmly looked on my computer, looking for information that I was going to need to know to answer the questions that I had. I was excited about Anna coming over and letting me know what she had found out. There was something there. I knew it. I could feel it.
Pearl was still sitting there across the desk from me, and she looked at the phone and shook her head. He was yelling and screaming, although I had no idea exactly what he was yelling and screaming about. It was unintelligible. I had no interest, either, in what exactly he was screaming about. Let him scream. There was nothing that he had to say that I was interested in, and he was stuck with me. I knew that. Christina told me as much.
It was me or nobody.
“Do you hear me? Are you listening, you little cunt?”
I picked up the phone. “I have to go. Goodbye.” At that, I hung up.
“Girl,” Pearl said. “What’s up with that dude?”
“He hates me, obviously.”
“That’s Michael? No wonder you want to send him up the river.”
“Now, Pearl, no I don’t. He’s just another client. I don’t want you to ever think that I won’t meet my ethical obligations to him or to any other client, just because I personally don’t like them. I’ve had many clients over the years that I’ve not been entirely fond of. He’s no different.”
“Um hm,” she said. “I guess.” She rolled her eyes. “You need anything else from me?”
“No. Thanks for brain-storming with me, though.”
Anna soon appeared in my office. “Hey,” she said.
“What do you have for me?”
“Here,” she said. “Here are the records I have for him. I have birth records, medical records and school records. It seems like he’s had problems his whole life. He’s gone from one school to the next, and ended up getting kicked out for the last time when he was only in the 10th grade. That last school was a special school – an alternative school for behaviorally challenged kids.”
I nodded my head. That sounded about right. “What else did you find?”
“Well,” she said. “It seems like the reason why his mother could afford to send him to that last school, which was a full-time residential treatment school, was that she won $5 million as part of a class-action suit against a chemical company that buried toxic waste that seeped into the ground water. It caused problems in her community. The kids were born with severe birth defects, including brain damage, and the adults got really sick. The adults just had a range of problems, including memory loss, confusion, nausea and loss of appetite. The real problem was the effect on the unborn babies, including Elmer, apparently.”
“$5 million. What did you find out with regard to his medical issues?”
“The doctors established that his pre-frontal cortex was severely damaged at birth, and they traced it to this toxic seepage of this chemical called Toluene. This is a nasty chemical, associated with paint thinners and cement and glue. It causes neurological harm, but it generally just makes people feel really sick. It has been established to cause brain damage in fetuses, however, and Elmer’s mother, Jolene, was able to get enough experts to show that Elmer’s issues was caused by this chemical. She was awarded the $5 million for Elmer’s brain damage.”
Toluene. I bit my lower lip. I made a mental note to do more research on this chemical, but, perhaps more importantly, I was going to have to find out if there were any companies in the area who had recently been accused of dumping this chemical. I suddenly realized that the reason why Elmer was so important to me, the reason why I needed to speak with him so badly, was because his problems were going to lead me to the right company. There was something that was lodged in my sub-conscious, something that I wasn’t able to acknowledge until recently. With my sudden ultra-clarity and burst of insight, I knew that there was something that I was missing and Elmer provided just what that was.
Why was this important? This chemical?
“Thanks, Anna,” I said. “You did great, as usual.”
She nodded. “You need anything else?”
“No. You brought me what I need, so I appreciate that.”
After Anna left, I brought my pen out and tapped it on the desk. I was going to have to do more research on the issue of Toluene. I booted up my computer and immediately started to Google the issue. I read about it, and Anna was right – the chemical was a nasty one. It caused a lot of sickness and it caused brain damage in fetuses. The main way that it caused birth defects was when the mother huffed it, as they huff glue. But, in the case of Jolene and Elmer Harris, the exposure was caused when the chemical seeped into the ground water and made everybody sick.
Then I went and Googled whether or not there was a company that was being accused in the Kansas City area of dumping this chemical.
It didn’t take me long before I found just what I was looking for. The name of the company was Dowling Chemicals, and the news articles that I found indicated that the company had been accused of allowing Toluene into the groundwater in Raytown, Missouri, which was a suburb of Kansas City. The Raytown community had been suffering for years with a disproportionate incidence of birth defects, cancer and low-level sickness. Toluene had not yet been certified as a carcinogen, yet the articles in the Kansas City Star about this community indicated that the lawyers involved in the case were planning on demonstrating that the high levels of cancers were caused by the Toluene dumping.
The Toluene dumping was caused when the Dowling Chemical Company put the waste products into large barrels that they buried into the ground. The barrels disintegrated, which caused the chemicals to go through the porous containers and contaminate the ground water. This, in turn, made the community sick.
I nodded my head and immediately went through the list of cases that were pending in front of Judge Sanders, looking for whether the class action suit had yet been filed in the District Court. I found nothing that indicated that Dowling Chemicals was on Judge Sanders docket. Not that that meant anything, because I knew that class action suits weren’t always filed right away. It took some time to get these lawsuits together, although I knew that this suit was coming.
But how would the Dowling Chemical Company know th
at Judge Sanders would be overseeing the case? They would have the motive to kill the judge in this case, because Judge Sanders was probably going to slap them down hard. This was the kind of class-action suit that would cost a company millions, especially if there was punitive damages involved. The punitive damages would come if the lawyers could show that there was some kind of criminal act involved or if the conduct was willful, wanton or malicious. If Dowling was found merely negligent, then they wouldn’t have to pay punitive damages.
After carefully reading the article in the Kansas City Star, I knew that punitive damages would most likely be awarded in this case – especially by a judge like Judge Sanders, who habitually ordered severe punitive damages, much more than any other judge in the Western District of Missouri. The company wasn’t just careless in how they disposed of these chemicals – they flat-out broke the law. Although most of the chemicals were buried in the ground in barrels, the barrels were not rated for the kinds of chemicals the Dowling was burying, and, in some cases, the chemicals weren’t in barrels at all. The newspaper article, quoting whistle-blowers’ testimonies, indicated that thousands of pounds of paint thinner was simply thrown out and spread on the ground. They didn’t even bother to put the stuff into barrels in these cases.
Punitive damages in this case could very well soar into the hundreds of millions before everything was said and done – but only if the “wrong” judge heard the case. Judge Sanders would definitely be considered, by the defendant, to be the “wrong” judge.
Again, though, how would Dowling know for sure that Judge Sanders would be assigned to the case? It hadn’t yet been filed.
A quick search gave me the answer. Cases may be assigned to judges according to areas of expertise. That wasn’t a guarantee, since cases were typically randomly assigned, but when a judge has a certain expertise area, the judge typically would get cases of this kind. After reading about Judge Sanders’ background – he was an EPA attorney for twenty years before he came to the bench – it stood to reason that he was likely to get this Dowling Chemical case.
I then went through the list of cases that had been brought before the Judge over the years, and found that he had tried hundreds of cases involving environmental concerns.
No doubt about it, Judge Sanders was probably going to get that Dowling Chemical case, and he was probably going to hammer them.
I nodded my head. This was promising, although I almost hated to go down this lane. I still wanted to make Michael pay for the murder of his father-in-law and I hated to find some alternative explanation for the murder of the judge.
Yet there was still a nagging voice inside of me that was telling me that finding the Dowling Chemical case information was getting me closer to proving that Michael had done it, not further away. Why that was, I didn’t know – I only knew that there was still some missing pieces of the puzzle, pieces that I was determined to find.
Twenty-Two
The next day was the day that I was going to have Kayla Stone in for her deposition. I didn’t quite know what to expect, but I knew what questions I needed to ask. I was going to get to the bottom of her relationship with my client, find out if she was really with him at the time that the judge was killed, and ask her about whether or not her husband was really going to cut her off if he found out about her relationship with Michael.
She came in right at 1 PM, just after lunch. She was just how I pictured her in my head. She was about 5’7”, with long brown hair and big green eyes and a fake rack. At least, I assumed that her rack was fake, as it was extremely large and way too perfect and way too big for the rest of her frame. She looked like money, just like Christina Sanders did, but I had the feeling that she was going to be much more demure than Christina was. I didn’t know why I thought that, but I did.
She was dressed head to toe in winter white – her tightly-fitting dress was that color and so was her coat. Her shoes were colorful, though, as was her purse. Everything on her was designer, including her enormous sunglasses that had the trademark Chanel logo right on the arms of these glasses.
“Hello,” she said, her voice light and breathy, like Jackie Kennedy. She lifted her hand, and I shook it. “I’m Kayla Stone. This is my lawyer, Arnold Vogel.”
Arnold also shook my hand. He was a tall man, about 6’3”, with a completely bald head and glasses. He looked to be around 65 years old, and I could tell that, as a younger and thinner man, he was quite a looker. He had large dimples and large brown eyes and it looked like he laughed easily. He had that certain twinkle in his eyes that I usually saw in good-natured people.
“Hello, Ms. Ross,” Arnold said. “Where are we doing this deposition?”
“Right this way.” I led them into the conference room and offered them both some iced tea or bottle water. Kayla opted for a bottled water while Arnold joked.
“I’ll take some scotch neat, please,” he said with a smile. “Or a glass of iced tea if I can’t have the scotch.”
I smiled. “I would love to offer you some scotch, believe me. I know why you want it, too.” Just being an attorney is enough to drive sane men to drink.
I got the water and tea and all of us sat down while the court reporter got her machine ready to go. I was fascinated by court reporters – I had no clue how they were able to take those chicken scratches and somehow, someway, make heads or tails from it. I also admired the way that they transcribed everything that was said. If it were me, I would have problems focusing for such a long period of time, and my mind would wander and that would cause me to miss a ton of words.
One thing was for sure – court reporters earned every penny that they were paid.
We went through the preliminary questions – her name and her address – before I started in with the substantive questions.
“Ms. Stone, are you aware on the reasons why I am deposing you today?”
“Yes.”
“What is your understanding on why I’m deposing you?”
She shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “Because Michael Reynolds is my, uh, boyfriend.” She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know what else to call him.”
“Mr. Reynolds is your boyfriend. How long has he been your boyfriend?”
“For the past six months.”
“And you are married, is that correct?”
She looked uncomfortable. “Yes.” Her face flushed red. “I know what you must be thinking.”
“No you don’t,” I said. “No judgments.”
She nodded, looking relieved.
“Where were you on the evening of October 19?”
“I was with Michael.”
“Were you with him the entire evening?”
“Yes.”
“What did you and Michael do that evening?”
“We went out to dinner and a movie and then got a hotel room downtown. The downtown Marriott. We planned on spending the night, and Michael was going to return home the next day.”
“What was Michael supposed to be doing?”
She sighed. “He was supposed to be looking after his father-in-law, who had been very sick. Very bad health problems. Nobody could figure out why.” She hung her head and then started to bite her nails. That was the one thing that I noticed about her – she was very well-groomed, with her hair perfect and her makeup just as perfect – but her nails were short and plain. It turned out that she didn’t have a decent manicure because she had an issue with biting her nails. I made a mental note that she was most likely nervous, because nail-biting was generally a nervous habit.
“So, he was with you the entire night?”
She nodded.
“Please verbally answer the question,” I said.
“Yes.” Her voice was weak when she said that word. I raised an eyebrow, knowing that she was lying.
“Were you present when Michael got a phone call from his wife, Christina Sanders?”
“Yes.”
“What happened after he got that phone call?”
> “He rushed to the judge’s home.”
“Why did he rush to the judge’s home?”
“Because Christina told him over the phone that she couldn’t get in touch with her father.”
“What time was it when Michael got that phone call from Christina?”
“Around 11 or so.”
“And then he rushed out the door?”
“Yes.”
“Did he try to tell Christina that maybe she couldn’t get in touch with the judge because he was sleeping? Why did he think that it was such an emergency?”
She cleared her throat. “I don’t know. He just told me that it sounded bad.”
“Was there chicken involved that night?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Did he pick up fried chicken that night?”
“No.” She shook her head. “Why?”
“He told the police on the scene that he was out getting fried chicken at the time that his father was killed. He obviously didn’t tell them that he was with you.”
“Oh, okay. No, he didn’t pick up any fried chicken that night.”
“Are you aware that he showed the police on the scene that he had fried chicken?”
“No.”
“Let me pivot some. Tell me about your marriage to Gerald Stone.”
At that, her face got red. “I was told that I should plead the Fifth on this one.”
“Who told you that?”
“Michael told me that.”
“Why would testifying to the facts about your marriage cause you to self-incriminate?” All at once, I was suspicious. What about her marriage would cause her to plead the Fifth?
She shrugged. “I plead the Fifth. I don’t have to answer these questions, do I Mr. Vogel?”
“No,” he said. “Not if you think that answering that question would incriminate yourself.”
“Thank you. I plead the Fifth.”
I bit my lower lip. That was so weird, and it made me more and more suspicious. Was there something about her marriage that was significant in this case? Pleading the Fifth meant that she was going to say something that would implicate her. Was she involved with the murder? What motive did she have to murder this judge? I suddenly had about a million unanswered questions, questions that I needed to have answered.
Justice Denied - A Harper Ross Legal Thriller Page 17