Collared

by David Rosenfelt

  Cody comes out looking none the worse for wear, and Jill leaves with him. I have no idea where this is going to go, if anywhere, but I do know what I have to do next:

  Mail in the renewal for my law license.

  Just in case.

  ara starts barking at six thirty the next morning, and Sebastian joins in. This is highly unusual; Tara almost never barks in the morning. She’s always happy to sleep in, but if nature calls and she needs me to take her out, she accomplishes that by coming to my side of the bed and rubbing her nose against my arm. Sebastian is very different in that regard. If I were to put a diaper on him, he’d be content to sleep the entire day.

  I get up to determine the cause of the outburst. Tara makes that rather easy, since she is standing at the window looking out. When I do the same, I see three local news media trucks and a group of maybe eight reporter types and cameramen. I can tell they’re cameramen because I am a born investigator, and because they are carrying cameras.

  Just then, the phone rings, and that serves to do what the barking did not, which is wake Laurie up. She answers, listens for a few seconds, and then says to me, “There are media people outside Jill’s house.”

  “I think I detect a pattern,” I say.

  “What’s going on?” Laurie asks.

  “I suspect if we turn on the news we’ll find out all we need to know, but in the meantime, I’m going to take my media fans on a walk through the park.”

  Laurie turns on the television as I get dressed, and sure enough, Cody’s reappearance is the lead story on the local news. I’m sure it will get at least some national play as well, because Dylan’s abduction was a pretty big story back then. Many kids are unfortunately victimized each year, but the national media only latches onto a few. Think JonBenét Ramsey, Elizabeth Smart, and Caylee Anthony. Dylan Hickman made it to that list.

  Once I’m dressed, I grab two leashes and say to Tara and Sebastian, “Come on, gang. It’s showtime.”

  We go outside and head for the park. The assembled reporters and cameramen follow me, both on foot and in their vans. We’re quite a procession as we trudge along; Tara seems to be enjoying it, and Sebastian is basically oblivious to them.

  The reporters bombard me with questions and pay no attention to the dogs, except for one close call when Sebastian almost pisses on one of their legs.

  They are asking where Cody is, how we know it’s the same dog, and what it means to the case. They already know the details anyway, including the fact that Cody was dropped off at our foundation. It’s why they came to me in the first place.

  My responses are basically that I am not positive it’s the same dog, that we have no idea what, if anything, it means to the case, and that it’s none of their business where he is.

  “But I can tell you one thing,” I say. “He’s damn cute.”

  It’s a fairly quick walk at a brisk pace, except for once on the way back when Sebastian stops to squat. “Any of you guys good with a plastic bag?” I ask, and this seems to disperse them quite a bit. They head back, no doubt to breathlessly report all the information that I haven’t provided.

  I don’t know how the information about Cody got out. I’m sure it wasn’t Willie or Sondra; they know better. It’s possible that it was a police department leak, but more likely, Jill told one of her friends, who blabbed about it.

  There’s no great harm in it happening, and probably some benefit. Now the public can help in trying to figure out where Cody’s been; somebody out there has to know.

  The other result, whether beneficial or not, is that now Keith Wachtel will be aware of the development. I’ve been thinking about going to the prison and meeting with him, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to pull the trigger and inform him. Now that doesn’t matter; if he doesn’t know already, he will by the end of the morning.

  Of course, Keith either will have no information to add to this puzzle, or if he does, he won’t reveal it. If he did, and it was helpful to his situation, he would have come forward long ago. If he kept it secret because it represented a negative to him, that would likely still be the case. In either event, I don’t see him being helpful in that regard.

  Having said that, there is one area in which he could be very helpful. Since I was not a participant in the original case, my knowledge of it barely extends past media reports. Much as I would dread it, if I’m going to jump fully into this investigation, that has to change.

  That brings me back to the trial transcript and the discovery information. Even though I don’t want to immerse myself in it right now, I should put myself into position to do so if I change my mind, or if Laurie changes it for me.

  I can get the transcript on my own; it’s part of the public record. But the discovery I can only get by either being Keith’s attorney of record or having him authorize his prior attorney to provide it.

  Each of those possibilities presents a problem. First of all, I don’t want to be Keith’s attorney, which precludes avenue one. Avenue two, getting it from Keith’s attorney, presents one major difficulty.

  He’s dead.

  Stanley Butler was a credit to the legal profession, which is still my profession now that I’ve sent in my license renewal. He graduated from Columbia Law near the top of his class, which means he could have punched his ticket to pretty much any top law firm in the country.

  Instead, he went to work for Passaic County as an assistant prosecutor. One could say he became spoiled by success, as he won case after case. He came to the conclusion that most of the defendants that he put away did not have the resources to mount an effective defense against the government. Unlike most of his colleagues, that bothered him.

  It was not that he thought they were innocent; on the contrary, he knew in his heart that most were guilty. It’s just that he believed for our system to work in a fair and just way, the playing field had to be more level.

  So he went to the other side and joined the public defender’s office. Eventually, he left and opened his own practice, but he continued to defend those that in many cases were too poor to pay him. His win-loss record turned around permanently toward the negative, but he felt he was doing the right thing.

  Stanley represented Keith Wachtel in his murder trial. By all accounts, at least as I remember it, impartial observers thought he did a creditable job. He lost because there was a mountain of evidence stacked against his client, not because he provided inadequate representation.

  I knew Stanley Butler pretty well; I shared a few meals with him, and he and his wife, Phyllis, came over to the house a couple of times. He was a major dog lover, so we obviously had that in common. In fact, they rescued a Lab mix from the Tara Foundation.

  Life was not always easy for Stanley. He battled drugs and alcohol and founded an AA group in Paterson. He was proud of his sobriety, and we were going to have dinner one night to celebrate his hitting the five-year mark.

  Two nights before that dinner, he was killed in a car crash when he drove his car off a road, down into a ditch, hitting a tree. He was killed instantly, and subsequent blood tests showed there were drugs in his system.

  It was a double blow to those who cared about him. He had kept it from all of us, and we weren’t aware enough to have realized it and offered help.

  I had heard that Stanley’s practice was turned over to the public defender’s office after his death; I assume his clients were divvied up by the lawyers there. But his not being around certainly complicates my getting up to speed on the case, should that be what I decide to do.

  Here’s the problem: I know myself. If I go see Wachtel, it effectively means I’m diving in all the way. I’d much prefer to just dip my toes in a bit and find out if the water’s cold.

  When I get home, Laurie greets me with, “You just got a call from the prison. Keith Wachtel wants to meet with you.”

  So much for toe-dipping. Andy Carpenter is about to do a full gainer with a high degree of difficulty.

  ast Jersey State Prison w
as originally called Rahway State Prison. This was a cause of some dismay among the citizens of Rahway, since the prison wasn’t actually located there. They were understandably not thrilled being known for having hardened criminals in their midst, especially since the criminals were really housed in somebody else’s midst.

  In this case, the somebody else was Woodbridge Township, which is where the prison happens to stand. The Woodbridge citizens had been fine with the Rahway name but were less fine with having their own town attached to it. They must have known more people in high, prison-naming places than the poor Rahway-ians, because suddenly East Jersey State Prison came to be.

  Of course, calling it East Jersey State Prison comes with its own silliness. New Jersey is only seventy miles wide. You could start a drive across the state at the opening kickoff of an NFL game and get to the other side before halftime, even with no endless replay reviews.

  In New Jersey, east and west are pretty much one and the same. It’s one of the few states where “the twain shall meet.”

  One can see the prison from miles away because of its most distinctive feature, a large dome roof. The shape is reminiscent of a woman’s breast, and the lore is that it was built that way to further taunt the all-male inmates. That, of course, makes no sense, since the only people on earth who have absolutely no chance of seeing the outside roof of the building are the people imprisoned inside.

  Keith Wachtel is one of the fifteen hundred men who can’t see the dome. I’ve met him once or twice in the past, through Jill and Laurie, but we never really got to know each other. That’s unlikely to change today.

  Getting to see someone in a maximum-security prison is not quick or easy. There’s a lot of waiting, scanning, waiting, metal detecting, and waiting involved. I’ve been here quite a few times, which is common among criminal attorneys when they don’t go undefeated.

  The good news is that I know some of the people who arrange for the visitations. They’re aware that I’m a lawyer, so they make the natural assumption that my meeting with Keith is to be a private lawyer/client conference. Therefore, we wind up in a separate room, rather than one of those crowded rooms where you talk on phones through glass.

  “How’s it going?” I ask when I first see Keith, which is near the top of the list of stupid questions to ask inmates in a maximum-security prison. It ranks just below “Get out much?” and one rung above “Do you believe this weather?”

  “Every day is the same,” Keith says, which is not really on point but moves the conversation to the next stage.

  “You wanted to see me,” is my next salvo.

  “Yeah. Thanks for coming. It’s about Cody being found.”

  I know I take dog-loving to a somewhat absurd degree, but what he just said pleases me. Someone who doesn’t care about dogs, or this one in particular, would have said, “It’s about the dog being found.” But he said Cody instead of the dog, which to me is a sign of respect and caring.

  I may need to get out more.

  “What about it?” I ask.

  “Is it really him?”

  “They’re doing a DNA test, but in my mind, there’s no doubt that it is.”

  “Jill would know for sure—better than any DNA test.”

  I nod. “We can stipulate that it’s him.”

  “What about Dylan?”

  Saying Dylan and not the kid chalks up another point for Keith on the Carpenter grading scale. “No news on that front at all.”

  “So bottom line, what does it mean?” he asks.

  “To you?”

  “Of course to me. I do have something of an interest in this.”

  “To tell you the truth, Keith, I don’t have the slightest idea. But the fact that Cody is alive doesn’t exactly give you a ‘get out of jail free’ card. There’s just too many credible explanations.”

  “But there has to be more to it. Cody didn’t just turn up; he turned up with you.”

  He’s just hit on something that’s been bugging me, but which I’ve not been paying attention to, or at least not verbalizing.

  He continues, “You remember when we all had dinner at the Bonfire? You and Laurie, me and Jill?”

  “I think so,” I say, even though I don’t.

  “Well, I remember it. We were discussing some murder trial in the news, not one you were involved in. And you were talking about it, and you said, ‘In murder cases, there’s no such thing as a coincidence.’”

  I don’t remember saying that at a dinner with Keith, but I have no doubt I did, since it’s what I believe. To be completely clear, it’s not that coincidences can’t happen, it’s just that as a lawyer it is always best to discount the possibility.

  I offer a grudging nod. “You’re talking about the fact that the dog came to me. A criminal attorney, and one who knows the players.”

  “Right. Somebody wanted to draw you in.”

  Another nod from me, less grudging this time. “It’s certainly possible.”

  “That’s why I wanted to talk to you. I need you in.”

  “I’m not your lawyer, Keith. If I do this, it’s for Jill and for Dylan. Maybe even for Cody. I’m sorry, but my goal would not be to get you out. It would be to find out what has happened and why.”

  He nods. “Good enough for me.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I’ve got nothing here, Andy. When Stanley died, they gave me a public defender. Kid must have been out of law school for about an hour. We met, and you know what he told me? That I should stay on good behavior; it would serve me well with the parole board. You know when my first parole hearing is? In seventeen years.”

  What Keith is telling me is that any action, any movement, on his case can’t be bad. It could either have no effect on his situation or be a positive. That in itself is something for him to grab on to.

  I nod. “I understand. And even though I just said I’m not your lawyer, I’m going to need you to hire me, on a temporary basis.”

  “Okay. Why?”

  “Because I’m going to have to request discovery from the prosecutor’s office, and I can only do that if I’m representing you.”

  “Fine. Great. But you know I can’t pay you, right?”

  “Fee is one dollar.”

  He smiles. “That I can manage.”

  y next stop is the Passaic County prosecutor’s office. I could have accomplished this by phone, but it’s on the way home, and it gives me a chance to see Richard Wallace.

  There’s one thing you can say about Richard that you can’t say about any other prosecutor on the entire planet: he likes me. The main reason for that is his connection to my father, who ran the prosecutor’s office when Richard first arrived. Richard loved and respected my father, and he and I got to know each other back then as friends, not adversaries.

  We’ve tangled on a couple of big cases over the years, and I’ve been lucky enough to come out on top in each trial. It hasn’t affected our friendship, which is a good thing for me, since Richard now runs the office. It’s good not to be hated at the top.

  I called to confirm that Richard could see me, and he said he’d make time. After we exchange pleasantries and a few stories of the old days, he says, “So is this about the Hickman abduction?”

  “What makes you ask that?”

  “Come on, Andy, you’re all over the news.”

  “Were you involved in the case?” I ask.

  “Only as a supervisor. Mitch Kelly tried it.”

  Mitch Kelly is an excellent prosecutor, if not exactly my favorite human. He’s a sore winner, and if there’s anything I hate more than winning prosecutors, it’s smart, sore-winning ones. “So he’s still on it?”

  “At this point, no one’s on it. The case has already been tried.”

  “So you don’t think finding the dog means anything?”

  “It’s a human-interest story, Andy. Not a legal one. You don’t agree?”

  “You’re probably right, but I promised Jill Hickman I’d look i
nto it. So I’m going to need a copy of the discovery, as well as a trial transcript if you have one lying around.”

  “You have an official role?”

  “I’m Keith Wachtel’s attorney. He just hired me on a temporary basis, basically for this purpose. I can get you paperwork.”

  “No need; I believe you. Maybe later for the file.”

  “Great. Thanks.”

  “Last time we had dinner, you said you were going to retire,” he says. “I think your plan was to become a placekicker for the Giants.”

  I nod. “I gave up on that idea. Stadium is too windy, and I found out you have to wear a jacket and tie on road trips.”

  He smiles. “Damn, and you were so close.”

  Richard promises to send the discovery over as soon as possible, so I head home. On the way, I contemplate just how far to go with this. If it’s going to be a full-fledged effort, it would mean involving the whole team.

  I call Laurie and ask her opinion, and unfortunately, she gives it to me. “Bring them in,” she says. “I really want to do this for Jill.”

  “Let’s set the meeting for tomorrow afternoon at the house,” I say. “We should have copies of the discovery tonight, which will give me a little while to skim through it.”

  “Okay if I include Marcus?”

  She’s talking about Marcus Clark. “Maybe wait on him,” I say.

  “Maybe not; he brings a lot to the party.”

  “He scares me. I’m always afraid he’s going to do something I don’t care for.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like kill me.”

  “Come on, Andy, you’re a big boy. And I’ll protect you.”

  “If I say no, are you going to call him anyway?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then you have my permission.”

  spend the morning reading the trial transcript. It’s all Richard could get on such short notice; he called and said I should have the rest of the stuff later today. He’s still not assigning a prosecutor to it; he’ll follow it for the time being himself and will bring someone in if it appears that there is reason for us to go into court.