VC04 - Jury Double

by Edward Stewart

  “Indeed she did, Mickey.” Elihu waved a piece of paper. “I hold in my hand Rilda-Mae Turnbull’s fax retaining me.”

  Williams shrugged. “Then I guess he’s my lawyer.”

  “My client,” Elihu said, “pleads not guilty on all counts.”

  Tess diAngeli strode angrily to the bench. “Your Honor, in view of Mickey Williams’s appalling record of past offenses and the savagery of the Briar murders, we request that he be held without bail pending trial.”

  “Ms. diAngeli … as we are both well aware, criminal court has an overflowing calendar.” The judge sat tapping his fingers on the open file. “How much time are we realistically talking—two, three years?”

  “I hope not. The state will do all it can to reasonably expedite trial.”

  Dotson Elihu ambled toward the bench. “Your Honor, since my client has no previous record in New York State, and since the police coerced his so-called confession in the absence of counsel—”

  “Mr. Elihu,” the judge cut in, “none of that’s relevant here today.”

  “Then I ask Your Honor to release Mr. Williams on nominal bail on his own recognizance.”

  “Your Honor,” Tess diAngeli cried, “Mickey Williams’s continued freedom constitutes a clear danger to the community.”

  For a long, deliberating moment, the judge was silent. “The court understands your concern, Ms. diAngeli, but it must balance that concern against the prisoner’s rights. We therefore set bail at five hundred thousand dollars.”

  Mickey’s people are dirt farmers. I don’t believe for one minute his sister could afford to hire a big-ticket defender like Elihu.” Cardozo thumped his mug on the desktop. Coffee sloshed across a stack of unsolved crime reports awaiting their semiannual update. “So who’s paying? Where did Elihu get the money to put up bail?”

  “Give the coffee a rest, Vince.” Ellie reached down with a Kleenex and daubed the papers dry. “That’s your third cup in ten minutes. You should switch to ginseng tea.”

  Cardozo relied on coffee to stoke his brain. Like all addicts, he didn’t want to discuss or defend his habit; and like all addictions, it had begun to deliver diminishing returns. Today his synapses weren’t getting the jump start they needed; the chemical switch in his head refused to click. “How the hell does a showboater like Elihu get in on the act?”

  The linoleum floor deadened the slow, careful tap-tap of Ellie’s heels. “You want an educated guess? Elihu represented Corey Lyle in the White Plains hearings. So the cult hired him to help Mickey.”

  Cardozo ran it through his mind. “Where do they get their money?”

  She shrugged. “Rich supporters.”

  “I wonder. They’ve got enough troubles with law enforcement. Why would they go out of their way to identify themselves with a wacko like Mickey? He’s a known rapist and child molester, and now he’s a killer.”

  “It could be the cult’s loyal to their members.”

  “There’s got to be more to it than that.” Outside the shut door of Cardozo’s cubicle, the squad room kept up its steady bubbling—footsteps hurrying, voices chattering, cop radios giving off bursts of static. “And I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit on my duff and wait for Mickey to rape another little girl.”

  “What makes you so sure he will?”

  “Look at his rap sheet. He’s a compulsive sociopath. He can’t control his actions and I doubt he even wants to.” Cardozo’s gaze came up, angry and grim. “If the court’s not going to deal with him, then it’s up to us.”

  “Hold on a minute.” Misgiving was written in capital letters on Ellie’s face. “What are you planning to do?”

  “Whatever it takes.” Cardozo searched the cluttered desktop and found the transcript of Mickey’s confession. He reread it. He reread Dan Hippolito’s preliminary autopsy and his own report on yesterday’s crime scene. He couldn’t get past a nagging sense that the picture was incomplete—some vital element was still missing.

  On his computer, he called up Sergeant Britta Bailey’s crime-scene report. According to Bailey, a man named Jack Briar came to the precinct at 1:10 P.M. yesterday and reported trouble in his parents’ apartment. Bailey then checked with the telephone operator. Learning there was a receiver off the hook, she broke into the Briars’ apartment and found John and Amalia’s bodies.

  That much Cardozo already knew. Now came the part he hadn’t known. “Well, how about that?”

  Ellie leaned to read over his shoulder. “What have you found?”

  “It turns out Jack Briar wasn’t the first person to report trouble in the Briar apartment. According to Bailey, a woman named Yolanda Lopez made an identical report three days ago.”

  The door to the female officers’ changing room was partway ajar. Cardozo rapped loudly. “Is Britta in there?”

  “Who’s asking?”

  “Cardozo.”

  She came to the door tucking her plaid work shirt into faded jeans. “What’s this I hear about Mickey Williams making bail?”

  “You heard right.”

  Her eyes brimmed with open disgust. “It makes me sick.”

  The Muzak was playing “Goody-Goody.” Cardozo hated Muzak. He didn’t see why a police force that was still 20 percent undermanned was wasting any part of its budget on canned music. “Let’s go somewhere we can talk. I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”

  “Make that a beer and you’ve got a date.”

  The waitress leaned into the booth and set down a Heineken and a ginger ale.

  “Could I ask you something?” Britta lifted her mug.

  Cardozo lifted his and clinked.

  “Are you on a diet or in AA or something?”

  He smiled. It wasn’t the first time a cop had asked him that question. Nowadays, diets and alcohol were two subjects that made a lot of cops insecure. “No, I’m not on a diet and so far I’m not in AA, knock wood.”

  “So why the ginger ale?”

  “With ginger ale there’s no collateral damage. Gotta keep the old brain clear.”

  Britta sighed. “I wish you’d talk to my husband sometime. He’s a cop in the twelfth precinct, and lately he could use a little less booze and a little more clarity.”

  This could have been Britta’s roundabout way of saying she trusted Cardozo. His ego enjoyed the stroke, but he knew better than to play marriage therapist or alcohol counselor. “Tell me about Yolanda Lopez,” he said.

  Britta shrugged. “Came into the precinct Sunday. Dark-haired, petite Latina—barely five feet tall. She was hysterical. She said John Briar and his wife were very sick and needed help.”

  “What kind of help?”

  “I couldn’t tell you. Her mouth was going ten miles a minute and half of it was in Spanish. Frankly, she was acting like a crazy.”

  “Did you check on it?”

  “I phoned the Briar apartment and a guy answered and said the Briars were just fine. He also said he didn’t know any Yolanda Lopez.”

  Cardozo ran it through his mind. “Did you get her phone number and address?”

  “I always go by the book, Lieutenant.”

  Cardozo dropped a quarter into the pay phone, dialed the number, and put a finger to his ear to shut out the fifties retro-rock thudding from the jukebox. There were four rings, a click, and then a female voice weirdly stitched together from sound bites: “I’m sorry, but the number you dialed is no longer in service.”

  The coin clanked into the change-return slot. Cardozo dialed zero and identified himself to the operator. “I need some information.” He gave her the number. “When was that line disconnected?”

  There was a long, silent wait with ghosts of other phone calls crowding the circuit. And then another click. A district manager asked if she could help.

  Cardozo explained who he was and what he needed to know.

  “That number was disconnected two hours ago.”

  “Why?”

  “The subscriber requested it.”

  As Cardozo hu
ng up, reality seemed to shift. The light in the bar seemed yellower than a moment ago, as though it had to fight its way through darker impurities. Shadows of customers hunched over their drinks seemed to run at a steeper angle and stretch further.

  He returned to the booth and counted out five singles from his wallet. Britta looked up at him curiously.

  “I have to run,” he said. “Catch you later.”

  FOUR

  1:30 P.M.

  YOLANDA LOPEZ’S ADDRESS, 828 West End Avenue, turned out to be a melancholy old apartment house with cornices and pilasters and oculus windows peering from the sloping, green-copper mansard roof. Cardozo parked beside a busted hydrant, propped his NYPD placard in the windshield, and crossed to the front entrance.

  The door had been tied open with a length of wire, and moving men were carrying furniture out into the street. Cardozo peered at the rank of buzzers and pressed the button for Lopez, Y. There was no answering buzz. He pressed the super’s button.

  At the far end of the poorly lit lobby, a door opened. A woman with a red wig stuck her head out.

  Cardozo approached, ID extended in his right hand. “I’m looking for Yolanda Lopez.”

  Wariness rippled off the woman like heat. “You just missed her. She moved out an hour ago.”

  “Where’d she move to?”

  The woman shrugged. Cardozo was getting an odd vibration from her—an edgy kind of secretiveness.

  “Come on,” he said. “She must have left a forwarding address.”

  “Not with me she didn’t.” The woman’s eyes followed a quilted sofa leaving on the shoulders of two sweating men. “But those are her movers. They should know.”

  Cardozo went out to the moving van. The license plates were from Virginia and the company’s name was XYZ. The driver had rolled up the arms of his red Coke Classic muscle T-shirt to display his biceps, and he was using the steering wheel as a serving tray for his baloney sandwich.

  “Excuse me.” Cardozo showed his shield.

  The driver’s eyes came around with a bored look. They were gunmetal blue—eyes of an android.

  “Where are you taking Yolanda Lopez’s furniture?”

  The driver shook his head. The movement was slow and boulderlike. “We can’t give out client information.”

  “In that case, could I see your manifest?”

  “Can I see your search warrant?”

  Okay—it was going to be that kind of conversation. “I don’t need a warrant. You’re suspected of transporting narcotics.”

  “I don’t care if you suspect plutonium.” The driver dredged a wallet out of his hip pocket and flipped open to a Treasury Department ID. “We’re Secret Service, Lieutenant. Outside of your jurisdiction.”

  DiAngeli answered on the second ring. “Tess diAngeli.”

  “Tess, it’s Vince. Something weird’s going on. I tried to contact a witness by the name of Yolanda Lopez.

  She’s disconnected her phone. She’s given up her apartment, no forwarding address. The Secret Service is moving her furniture and they won’t say where.”

  “That’s understandable. She’s in the federal witness relocation program.”

  “Why? Are the Briar murders suddenly a federal offense?”

  “The argument could be made. John Briar was Secretary of the Treasury.”

  The moment felt weirdly off-center. “Tess, who’s prosecuting this case? You or the feds?”

  “We’re prosecuting and the feds are helping.”

  “Helping how?”

  “We can’t give a frightened witness the kind of protection they can.”

  “Protection from who? Mickey Williams?”

  “It’s only a courtesy. She requested it.”

  “Fine, and meantime, who’s protecting the children of New York City? Because according to the record, Mickey’s a compulsive sociopath with multiple convictions for preying on little kids.”

  “Where’d you get that information?”

  “The FBI’s national crime stats. I don’t suppose you ever bother to look at them?”

  “Vince, I’m not saying I like the direction this case is taking any more than you do. But with the Corey Lyle connection, federal interest in the killings is a given. We’ve got to accept it. And if you don’t believe me, take another look at those stats. You may be surprised.”

  The line went dead in his hand, and at first Cardozo thought his phone had died: it was a rickety, early Touch-Tone model that had been discontinued a quarter century ago. And then there was a dial tone and he realized diAngeli had hung up on him. He laid the receiver back in the cradle and called up the national crime stats on his computer.

  He cursored quickly to the Ws. There were hundreds of Williamses, but today the only violation listed for Mickey Armitage Williams, Jr., was a two-year-old drunk-driving charge.

  Cardozo’s mouth tasted like a tablespoonful of copper pennies. He cleared the screen and opened the door to the squad room. Detective Greg Monteleone was taking a statement from a woman who’d witnessed a shooting in a shop on Madison.

  Cardozo waited till he’d finished.

  “Hey, Greg, how would you feel if a murderer and child molester was remanded to the custody of Dotson Elihu?”

  “Scared.” Greg was wearing snakeskin boots with clicking metal toes that jittered on the linoleum. “For my money, Elihu’s an incompetent, foaming-at-the-mouth sixties liberal. He sees government conspiracies as the root of all crime.”

  “Don’t you believe the government ever conspires?”

  “This government? They couldn’t conspire to deliver a first-class letter.”

  “But they could screw up the Briar murders,” Cardozo said. “Which is why I need your help.”

  A Chelsea church ran a grade school three blocks from Dotson Elihu’s home, and Cardozo had a hunch it was only a matter of days before Elihu’s client and houseguest would begin checking out morning recess in the school playground. So weekday mornings at eleven, Detectives Greg Monteleone and Rob MacPherson took turns—scrunched down in the front seat of a blue Toyota—watching Elihu’s filigreed granite town house.

  It was Tuesday in the second week of the vigil and the crisp air was ringing with children’s yells, when Greg Monteleone saw Elihu’s oak door swing inward.

  Mickey Williams stepped onto the sidewalk and spread his arms like a man embracing the bright blue of a perfect morning. He turned in the direction of the shrieking voices.

  Monteleone got out of the car and followed on the opposite sidewalk.

  Mickey ambled ten steps past the playground, slowed, and looked furtively backward along the sidewalk.

  Monteleone pretended to be unlocking the door of a maroon Camaro with a Jersey license plate.

  Mickey strolled back to the playground and stopped at the chain-link fence. He watched the children, his attention taut and stretched and scanning.

  After a moment his hand slid to his pocket and sneaked something out. Metal glinted in sunlight.

  For one disbelieving instant Greg Monteleone felt he had been dropped headfirst into a vat of ice water. And then Mickey raised the object to his eye, and Monteleone saw it was not a gun, but a camera.

  In her eighth-floor office in the state court building on Thomas Street, Tess diAngeli’s melancholy dark gaze fixed on each of the photos in turn. They showed Mickey Williams watching children, photographing children, talking to children through the playground fence. She made no physical show of emotion except for the way her mouth tightened.

  “Jesus, Vince—these are in broad daylight. Mickey knows your face. If he recognized you, it could blow the whole case.”

  “I didn’t take them,” Cardozo said.

  Her eyes registered puzzlement. “Who did?”

  “One of my best detectives—Greg Monteleone. I’ll introduce you sometime.”

  “Did he have a court order?”

  “Why? He was acting as a private citizen. Same as Mickey.”

  Tess fix
ed him with a waxen stare. “The last thing we need now is for Mickey to file a charge of police harassment.”

  “Harassment? How do you figure that? The stats may have been erased, but Mickey Williams has been convicted of three aggravated assaults against children. And these photos show he’s building up to another. He can’t be left running loose.”

  DiAngeli glanced uneasily toward the closed door. Sounds of indistinct voices and footsteps and ringing phones pressed in from the corridor.

  “Do you have any idea how long the government’s been trying to link Corey Lyle to some kind of indictable felony? He’s sent mail bombs, he’s trafficked in drugs and porn, he’s blown up buildings, he’s been responsible for upwards of eighty deaths, and so far no one’s even been able to indict him for littering.”

  “And what does any of that have to do with Mickey Williams?”

  “Everything—because we’re indicting Mickey Williams and Corey Lyle as coconspirators.”

  Cardozo’s eyebrows shot up. “I hope you’re basing that indictment on something more than the name Corey and the initial L in an address book. Especially when Mickey’s already confessed to doing it alone.”

  DiAngeli gave him a long, silent look. “How much do you know about Corey Lyle?”

  “I know what the media tells me.”

  “It’s much more than that, Vince. And much worse. Corey Lyle is a charismatic fanatic with enormous control over his followers. He recruits them from among ex-cons, the mentally ill, the terminally ill, and the filthy rich—and they think he’s God’s spokesman. They’re willing to die for him. Unfortunately, over the years, he’s had tax problems and he’s come to the notion that the government must be destroyed. By any means possible.”

  She yanked a drawer open and slammed a manila folder down onto the desktop. It was stamped COREY LYLE—CONFIDENTIAL.

  “Remember the post office bombing in White Plains two years ago? Go ahead, look.”

  Cardozo opened the folder. The photos showed twisted girders and toppled concrete and exploded bodies. His eyes flinched. He wondered, what these human beings had done to deserve such deaths. Why had they become punching bags for all the malevolent karma in the universe?