“I told Pete that he was going to shoot me,” I say, which may or may not be an accurate statement. “Does he have a cell phone?”
Marcus just shrugs and nods toward the body.
“I’m not a big fan of touching dead bodies. Would you…?”
It’s hard to tell in the dark, but I think he frowns. He leans over and checks the guy’s pockets and then extracts a cell phone and hands it to me.
“Do you know how to find out what phone number it is?”
This time, he definitely frowns, but he takes back the phone and presses some buttons. He hands it to me, and I see that the phone number is now showing on the face. I make a mental note of the number.
I hand the phone back to Marcus. “Would you mind returning it to its rightful owner? But wipe the prints off first.”
He does so, just before three police cars pull up, lights flashing. The officers get out, take in the scene, and tell Marcus and me to put our hands against the car so they can frisk us. We do, and they find and take a small handgun from Marcus.
One of the officers points to the perp’s body and asks, “Where’s the club he was hit with?”
I point to Marcus and say, “It’s attached to his shoulder.”
Another car pulls up, and Pete gets out. He speaks to the officers, and they set off to secure the scene. Then Pete looks at the body before coming over to us.
“He’s going to be hard to interrogate,” Pete says. “Any idea who he is, or was?”
“None at all,” I say, and Marcus doesn’t say anything.
“We’ll do the questioning and take your statements down at the station. Too cold out here, and too much barking. One of the officers will take you down there.”
We wait for two hours for Pete to get back to the station. I call Laurie to update her on what is going on, and then I spend some time thinking about the implications of what happened tonight.
I think it’s a good assumption that the dead guy was following me because of something having to do with the Keith Wachtel case. It’s my only case, and I doubt it had anything to do with “meet the teacher night.”
He was either going to threaten me, hurt me, or kill me. The fact that he drew his gun seems to indicate he wasn’t planning only to call me names or engage in vigorous debate. And the likelihood that he or one of his colleagues probably killed Teresa Mullins would serve to support that theory.
His actions indicate that whoever employed him must think I present a danger, which comes as news to me. I think I’m floundering, but someone else must believe otherwise. That in itself is interesting.
The Teresa Mullins killing has been bugging me, though not as much as it must have bugged Teresa Mullins. The only reason to kill her, as in my case, is if she were a real danger. And the only way she would be a real danger is if she knew who the bad guys were. I don’t mean the muscle, I mean the person or people at the top.
But if she did, she showed no inclination to reveal what she knew. By returning Cody, all she did was essentially give us our marching orders, to provide incentive for us to find out whatever we could. If she had more information, she could have told us.
Same thing was true with Stanley Butler. If she had told him damning information about the real abductor, Stanley would likely have gone to the police with it. Certainly, he would have done something that left some trace of what he might have learned. It seems that she simply enticed him with some information, as she did with us.
My view is that by giving us Cody, Teresa was doing all she was going to do, so why kill her? She must have known more, or at least the killers must have believed she knew more.
When I find out what that is, I’ll have found out everything.
Pete finally comes back and interrogates me himself, assigning one of his colleagues the unenviable task of questioning Marcus. Pete is no dummy.
I tell him all that happened from the time Laurie called me until the time he arrived on the scene. I advance the theory that the events were connected to the Keith Wachtel case, but I can’t supply evidence to that effect, because I don’t have any.
When he’s finished, I say, “Do you have the guy’s name yet?”
He nods. “Kyle Gillis. That mean anything to you?”
“No. Is he local?”
“He’d be local if we were in Vegas.”
I’m surprised to hear that; there are enough tough guys around here without having to import any.
“What else can you tell me about him?” I ask.
“Is that my role here? To keep you informed?”
“Until I can find somebody better suited to the job,” I say.
He shakes his head. “I don’t know anything yet. But you’ll be the first person I tell.”
It’s almost one o’clock in the morning when I finally get home. Laurie is waiting up for me, and she meets me at the door with an outstanding hug. She was obviously more concerned about me than she let on.
“You okay?” she asks.
“Are you kidding? I laugh in the face of danger, babe. That’s what I’m about.”
he guy’s name is Kyle Gillis. Here’s his cell phone number,” I say.
Sam looks at the number and says, “That’s a Vegas area code.”
“That’s where he’s from.”
“Where is he now?”
“On a slab in the coroner’s office. He messed with me and Marcus.”
“Man, how come I’m never around when stuff like that happens?”
“Sorry, Sam, I get all the luck.”
“You want the full treatment on this guy’s phone? Location, calls made and received, the works?”
“Absolutely. Anything yet on Renny Kaiser?”
“He’s a tough one; the guy is layered up.”
“What does that mean?”
“He hides behind companies that are layered, one over the other. Very hard to penetrate, but I’m working on it.”
“What do you know so far?”
“He’s got three dollars more than God, and he has business interests all over the world. Some of them are in countries that cruise ships don’t visit … dangerous places.”
“He’s a drug dealer.”
“Based on the financial dealings I can see, I’m not surprised.”
“Is he a big investor in the Parsons Group?” I ask.
“He is the Parsons Group, or at least 80 percent of it.”
“You have local addresses for him?”
He shakes his head. “Not yet, but I’ll get there.”
I smile; this is a moment of rare triumph. “You want me to give them to you?” I ask.
“You have them? How did you get them?”
“You ever hear of Google, Sam? You type stuff in, and it gives you information.” Of course, I neglect to mention the fact that Robbie Divine sent me Kaiser’s addresses on Park Avenue and in Greenwich.
Sam is not amused. “Yeah, give me the damn addresses.”
“I’ll e-mail them to you,” I say. “You do know how to use e-mail, don’t you?”
Sam hangs up on me, which I take as a yes, so I send him the addresses.
Laurie’s at Jill’s house, and since it’s Sunday morning, Ricky doesn’t have school. Laurie assigned me the job of making breakfast for the “men in her life,” but it’s unlikely to end well, at least by Laurie’s standards.
“Here are your choices, Ricky: cold cereal with milk, or cold cereal dry.”
“Frosted Flakes?” he asks hopefully.
“No, some kind of granola stuff that your mother bought. It’s good for you.”
“What does it taste like?”
“I don’t know; I wouldn’t eat it if you strapped me into the chair. Probably sawdust.”
“What about the frozen pizza you got the other day?” he asks.
“I was sort of saving that for a special occasion.”
“Like now?”
“Ricky, Mom would not want me to give you frozen pizza for breakfast.”
/> “Aw, come on, Dad.”
“It doesn’t have any vegetables on it.”
“Good,” he says, “I hate vegetables.”
“That’s my boy,” I say. “All right, pizza it is. But this has to be our secret.”
“I promise.”
I put the pizza in the oven, leaving it in a long time so that it’s crisp, the way we both like it. Then I cut it into eight pieces, of which Ricky has two and I have the other six. I’m pretty full after the fifth one, but he doesn’t want any more, and I don’t want to leave any trace evidence.
Laurie comes home an hour later, after I take the empty pizza box outside to the garbage where it can’t be discovered. There is now nothing to be gained by her in searching the crime scene.
The first thing she asks Ricky is, “How was breakfast?”
He looks at me. “Can I tell her that?”
“Of course,” I say, already not liking where this is going. “We’ve certainly got nothing to hide.” I add a little fake chuckle at the end, to show how unworried I am about the breakfast question.
“It was good,” Ricky says.
“What did you have?”
“Nothing,” is Ricky’s answer, which just might be insufficient to satisfy Laurie.
“You had nothing, but it was good?” Laurie asks.
“We had something, but I forget what it was,” Ricky says. This is not a kid who would hold up well in cross-examination.
Laurie walks over to the refrigerator and opens the freezer door. “You had frozen pizza for breakfast?”
I need to jump in here. “First of all, it wasn’t frozen when we ate it; it was warm and nourishing on a cold winter’s day. Second of all,” I say, pointing to Ricky, “it was all his fault.”
Once we put the frozen pizza caper behind us, Laurie tells me about her conversation with Jill regarding Renny Kaiser.
“She’s never met him,” Laurie says, “but she’s heard the rumors that it’s his money behind the Parsons Group.”
“She never tried to confirm it?”
Laurie shakes her head. “I don’t think so. She hadn’t heard of him until the transaction was long over. She said she’s only dealt with Ted Parsons and that due diligence didn’t show any red flags. I think she was just relieved to be able to make the deal.”
“Okay,” I say. I’m not terribly surprised, nor do I think badly of Jill for it. The Parsons Group is considered a reputable firm, and to have attempted to unwind a deal that saved the company over some unsubstantiated rumors would have been too much to expect of anyone.
“The fact that a big-time drug dealer might have invested money in the company doesn’t exactly implicate him in a child abduction,” Laurie points out.
The problem is, she’s right.
I don’t have a hell of a lot of time to dwell on it, because Rita Gordon calls. She’s the court clerk, so this is a very important call.
“Nine o’clock tomorrow, Andy. In Judge Moran’s chambers.”
This means that the judge is likely to rule on our motion for a new trial. If that’s the case, he’s doing so faster than I thought, which I don’t consider a good sign. Of course, it’s just possible he wants to entertain oral arguments.
“Do you know which way this is going to go?” I ask.
Rita and I once had a forty-five-minute affair, so I like to think I have earned some friendship points with her.
“I believe I do,” she says.
“Do you care to share it with me?”
“I believe I don’t.”
Maybe the forty-five minutes didn’t go as well as I thought.
’ve studied your written briefs,” Judge Moran says. “Do either of you have anything to add to them?”
The question is posed to Mitch Kelly and me as soon as we’re seated in chambers.
“Yes, Your Honor,” I say. “Since ours was submitted, the coroner in South Carolina has ruled that Teresa Mullins’s death was in fact a homicide.” I don’t mention that I had that news minutes after it was determined, thanks to Hike getting a call from his police chief buddy, Billy.
Kelly shakes his head. “That’s not technically accurate, since they actually haven’t even determined that she is Teresa Mullins. Her identification is that of Linda Sanford.”
“I have documentation of Linda Sanford’s death years ago,” the judge says. “Is it the prosecution’s contention that she came back to life, only to be murdered?”
“Of course not, Your Honor,” he says. “But we are not ready to concede that the newly deceased is Teresa Mullins.”
“We would be happy to let a jury decide that question,” I say.
Judge Moran ignores that and turns to Kelly. “Your original case would have been a lot more difficult without Ms. Mullins’s testimony.”
“Only marginally,” Kelly says. “We believe we would have prevailed anyway. But she did testify, and nothing in their brief proves that she perjured herself.”
I smile. “Another question for which we would welcome a jury’s decision.”
“A jury made their decision three years ago,” Kelly says.
“After being lied to,” I point out.
“How long would it take you to prepare for trial?” Moran asks, which is as good a question as I could have hoped for under the circumstances.
“Very quickly, Your Honor. As an innocent man, Mr. Wachtel, has spent far too much time in jail already.”
“I would like to restate that the county strongly believes that a retrial is not called for,” Kelly says.
“Noted,” Judge Moran says. “Now if you will answer my question.”
“We could be ready very soon, since the evidence is unchanged and compelling. But because it is unchanged and compelling, it should be unnecessary to re-present it.”
Judge Moran nods. “I will be issuing an official notice that a new trial of Mr. Wachtel has been granted. I will set a date, based on the earliest available opening on my schedule.”
“Thank you, Your Honor,” I say. “My next motion will be for bail to be granted.”
“Then your motion-winning streak will end at one. No bail will be granted.”
I head down to the prison to tell Keith the news in person. It’s rare that I bring positive news to inmates, so I’m looking forward to this one.
“You’re amazing,” Keith says, even though that goes without saying.
“It’s only step one,” I say. Slightly mixing metaphors, I add that the huge hurdle is still to come, and later on I throw in that it will be an “uphill struggle.” Listening to me is like going to the gym.
“Can I testify?” he asks.
It’s the earliest in the process that a client has ever asked that.
“Way too soon to think about that,” I say. “And that will always be your decision, but it’s rarely a good idea.”
“Stanley said the same thing, and I’ve always regretted not telling my side of the story.”
“You don’t have a side of the story, Keith. The story is the abduction, and you weren’t there. You don’t know any more than the jury does. All you can say is that you didn’t do it, and your denial is assumed based on the fact that you didn’t plead guilty. I can get your point of view across in other ways without you being cross-examined.”
“Think about it, okay?”
I nod. “We both will.”
I leave the prison to discover a message on my voice mail from Steve Emmonds at Finding Home.
The message is, “Give me a call or stop in. I’ve matched the father.”
ost people don’t have their DNA on file,” Emmonds says when I get to his office. “But more do than you would think. Almost all military people do, which is where we found the father.”
“He’s in the service?”
“I have no idea what he’s doing now,” Emmonds says. “But he was when his DNA was put on file.”
“How long ago was that?”
He looks at some kind of notebook that’s i
n front of him. “It’ll be two years this July.”
“And the mother? No match on her?”
“None. Came up empty.”
“What’s the father’s name?” I ask.
He looks at his folder again and says, “James Ware. He’s thirty-two years old and is from Pomona, New York. It’s in Rockland County.”
Rockland is about forty-five minutes to the north of here, in New York State but on the Jersey side of the Hudson River. To get to the New York side from there, you would take the Tappan Zee Bridge or drive down the Palisades Parkway and take the George Washington Bridge.
Emmonds gives me the only other piece of information he got from the registry, which is the address in Pomona. It’s a year and a half old, so it may not still be where he is. But it’s a good start.
“Are you going to share this with Jill?” he asks.
“No. She asked me not to. So you shouldn’t either.”
“Okay. Glad I asked.”
I call Sam Willis and give him Ware’s name and address and ask him to find out whatever he can about him. “Please let me know the basics as soon as you can,” I say. I’ve been leaning on Sam a lot, but he doesn’t seem to mind.
Once that’s accomplished, I head home to discuss the situation with Laurie. This has to be handled tactfully, and Laurie possesses 80 percent of the tact in our family. Tara controls the other twenty. Sebastian and I are basically tact-free.
“How are you going to approach him?” Laurie asks when I tell her the DNA results.
“Here’s my plan, and I think it’s a good one,” I say. “I’m going to ask you what I should do, and then I’m going to do it.”
She nods. “Very good plan.”
“So what should I do?”
“Hard to say at this point, until we learn more about him from Sam. For instance, if he’s married, I might recommend a different approach than if he’s single.”
“Why?”
“Because we don’t want to ruin his life. We don’t know whether he was a party to the decision to abandon the baby. It’s even conceivable that he doesn’t know about the child at all. This is not going to be a casual conversation.”
“But it’s one I have to have. Otherwise I’m not doing all I can to defend my client.”
Collared Page 11