“Please answer yes to this question,” I say. “Do you have the other pacifier?” We had taken two pacifiers from Dylan’s room but only given one of them to Emmonds to test.
“Yes,” Laurie says.
“We need to get it tested, fast.”
“You want to bring it to Pete and have him get it done at the county lab?”
“No. Finding Home does a lot of their work, so the respective staffs must know each other well. If Pete goes in there and asks for it to be done, but not by Finding Home, the word might get back to them.”
“You want me to call Cindy?”
Cindy Spodek is a close friend of Laurie’s and mine who heads up the Boston office of the FBI. She’s done a lot of favors for us in the past, and we’ve reciprocated a few times. Her career has prospered because of our reciprocations; she’s been able to make some big arrests.
“Definitely,” I say.
Laurie waits until we get home to call her, and I stay in the room to listen in. After twenty minutes of chitchat about things that are of absolutely no interest to me, I can’t take it anymore. How can two people talk for that long without sports ever coming up?
“This is torture,” I say. “Let me talk to her.”
“Andy is unhappy with our conversation,” Laurie says. “He wants to talk to you.”
I take the phone and say, “Cindy, how are you? Okay, are we done with the small talk? We need a favor.”
“Andy, what a treat to chat with you.”
“Right. Just one question and then you can talk to Laurie some more about recipes and shoes and what the bridesmaid dresses for your niece’s wedding look like. Can you run a DNA test for us?”
“Sure. The FBI exists to serve you.”
“This is important. We’re trying to save an innocent man and find a missing child.”
“This the Dylan Hickman case?”
“Yes, we have a pacifier with his DNA on it, and we’re trying to learn who the parents are.”
“Doesn’t the mother’s company do DNA for a living?”
“Yes, but we want an independent test run, just to be sure.”
“Okay, I’ll do it for Laurie,” she says.
“Why do you hurt me?”
She ignores that and says, “Have someone drop the sample off at the Newark bureau office tomorrow, and I’ll set it up. It’ll take about five days.”
“I need it faster.”
“Oh, do you now? That’s too bad,” she says.
“Let me rephrase. Laurie needs it faster.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
I hand Laurie the phone, and she ends the call with Cindy very quickly.
“She’ll do it for me,” I say when she gets off. “She considers me a special friend. It might take five days, which is a problem. Finding Home was able to do it in three days. On the other hand, it probably goes faster when you’re faking the results.”
“What do you think we’re going to find out?” she asks.
“Sorry, I’m out of hunches.”
r. Patricia Brenner was good enough to take the day off to appear in court. She flew in from Portland late last night, so neither Hike nor I have had a chance to prep her. That shouldn’t be a problem; I just want her to tell the jury what she told me in Bridgton.
I take her through her career, which basically consisted of going to veterinary school at Cornell and then heading back to her hometown and opening a practice. I can immediately tell she’ll be an excellent witness; she has that “kindly country doctor” look about her, the kind of person you instinctively trust.
I show her and the jury three photographs of Teresa Mullins and ask if Brenner recognizes her. “Yes, I do,” she says. “She brought in her dog to be treated.” She’s fudging the truth a bit, since when we originally showed her the photo in Maine, she said she didn’t recognize her. I don’t think she’s lying; rather I think her knowledge of the case is changing her recollection.
“What kind of dog?”
“A border collie.”
“How many times did they come in?”
“Once.”
“How can you be sure of your identification?”
“The dog had anahlichtia; it’s a tick-borne disease.” She then goes on to describe it, much as Dan Dowling had. “It was one of the first cases I’d ever treated; I’ve only had a handful since. It’s difficult to diagnose, so I was pleased I was able to. That’s why it was memorable.”
“Did she use the name Teresa Mullins?”
“No. She gave her name as Linda Sanford.”
“You’re sure of that?”
She nods. “Positive. I brought the records with me.”
Kelly aims his cross not on whether a border collie came in with that ailment but rather how Brenner can be sure that the person matched the photographs of Teresa Mullins.
She holds up quite well, and finally an exasperated Kelly says, “Don’t you focus most of your attention on the patient? The dog?”
“Yes, but we’re a friendly practice in a small town. I like to get to know my clients, so I schedule enough time to do so.”
Kelly is very happy to get her off the stand. As for me, I liked her, and if she inspired as much respect and confidence in the jury as she did with me, we did very well.
I would let her treat Tara. I can think of no higher praise.
Next up, briefly, is Janet Gallo, who works for Verizon. Hike had subpoenaed Linda Sanford’s phone records, among many others, and Gallo is here to verify them.
I get her to explain the process by which a cell phone GPS works and how the phone company can trace where a phone has been, even after the fact. The jury actually perks up when they hear this; I don’t think most of them knew that Big Brother is always watching.
We introduce the records for a phone originally purchased in Brunswick, Maine, by Linda Sanford. Using maps, I get Gallo to say that the Linda Sanford phone was at the location of the Tara Foundation twenty minutes before Willie and Sondra found Cody.
I take this time to introduce records of the death of the real Linda Sanford and how a new driver’s license had been issued to signal her resurrection. I let Gallo read it into the record; anyone could have done so.
Kelly’s cross-examination correctly avoids challenging the science. “Ms. Gallo, is it your testimony that a person known as Linda Sanford was in that location at that time?”
“No, I am saying that her phone was there.”
“So anyone could have been carrying it?”
“That’s correct,” she says.
“Do you have any independent knowledge that Linda Sanford and Teresa Mullins might be the same person?”
“I do not.”
“So your testimony is simply that you believe a cell phone belonging to someone named Linda Sanford, regardless of who she is or who was carrying the phone, was there that day? Am I accurately describing it?” Kelly asks.
“Almost.”
“Where was I wrong?”
“You said that I believe it to be the case. It’s more than my belief. It’s a fact.”
Lunch today is a three-person affair … me, Hike, and Billy, the South Carolina police chief that became Hike’s big buddy in the course of about twenty minutes.
Billy, whose full name is William Eason III, is not what I expect. In my biased Northern mind, I expected an overweight, loud sheriff who would be at his most comfortable chasing Burt Reynolds down country roads or arresting Vinny’s cousin.
Instead, Billy stands six two and wouldn’t push the scales past 170. He’s got movie star looks, a gentle, friendly way about him, and an understated manner.
I take him through his testimony, but it proves to be unnecessary. Hike has already spoken to him about it, and he’s completely on the same page as we are.
Pod Hike is at the lunch with us. Apparently, just the mere presence of a South Carolinian turns Hike into an affable, friendly, optimistic guy. He’s cracking jokes, all of which sends Bil
ly into gales of laughter.
When Billy says Hike, it comes out as Haahyyk, and at one point he says, “Haahyyk must keep you boys just rolling on the floor all day.”
I nod. “He’s a laugh a minute.”
On the stand, Billy is a pro. He tells the jury that he had seen Linda Sanford in town a number of times, on occasion with the border collie. He says that there is no doubt that the woman he is talking about matches the photographs of Teresa Mullins. I also introduce the photograph taken at the Rotary event.
“Where is she today?” I ask.
“She’s deceased; she died in a fire in her cabin soon after she got back to town.”
“What was the cause of the fire?”
“Our fire investigators determined it was arson. We’ve got ourselves a murder investigation going on.”
Later, after court when we are saying our good-byes, Billy points to Hike and says, “You need to send this boy down our way more often.”
“I think that can be arranged,” I say.
“Wish we could take him off your hands, permanent-like,” he says.
I nod. “Make me an offer.”
aurie has some good news for me when I return from walking Tara and Sebastian this afternoon. “Cindy called,” she says. “Apparently, they got a good, quality sample from the pacifier, so they may be able to shave a day or two off the estimate.”
“She’ll do anything to please me,” I say.
She ignores that and repeats what she and I have been thinking since we learned that the James Ware ID from Finding Home was faked, that we can’t understand what they’d have to gain by faking it.
“Maybe learning who the parents are will give us the answer,” I say. “If they weren’t hiding something, they wouldn’t have given us wrong information.”
“Wouldn’t it be nice if the father was Renny Kaiser?” she asks. “That would help to tie things together rather neatly.”
I’m not sure why I hadn’t had that thought before. I know Kaiser has kids; what if some crazy set of circumstances led him to find out that it was a child who he’d fathered that Jill Hickman had adopted?
“That’s worth checking out,” I say, and I head to my checking-out place of choice: Google.
I type in Renny Kaiser, and I get sixty-one thousand results. I glance through a few pages of them, and none of the articles talk about him as a drug dealer or scumbag of a human being. Rather, they’re about his business successes, and especially his philanthropy.
I click on Images, and there are hundreds of photographs of good old Renny. A half dozen or so include his family, usually when they are attending some charity event together. There are two male children in the photographs; one looks to be about twelve years old, and the other perhaps two years old.
I check the date on the photographs, and they are a year old. Which would make the younger child about three now.
Dylan Hickman’s age.
Laurie is looking over my shoulder, and she says, “We can’t be that lucky, can we?”
“I’m not even sure what it would mean,” I say.
“The most important thing it would mean is Dylan has been found and is healthy,” she says, always looking at the big picture.
She gets the photo of Teresa and baby Dylan to see if we can determine whether he and Kaiser’s son look the same, but we can’t tell anything. Dylan is just too young in the baby picture; his features are not really formed yet.
“I’m looking forward to seeing that DNA report,” she says, “although Kaiser may well not be in the database.”
I nod. “If it shows that the father is not in the database, I will get Kaiser’s DNA if I have to take the swab myself.”
It doesn’t pay for me to think of the implications of Renny Kaiser being the father, especially since it doesn’t seem to make sense on any level.
Well, maybe on one level. Steve Emmonds and Finding Home faked the DNA tests in an effort that must have been to prevent us from learning the true parents. Renny Kaiser calls the shots at Finding Home.
If there’s something that Kaiser doesn’t want me to know, then I really want to know it.
Hurry up, Cindy.
avid Browning is a vice president at the Passaic Bank and Trust. He’s here to testify about Teresa Mullins’s financial situation. We subpoenaed the information legally, and lo and behold, it matched the information that Sam had gotten illegally.
“Mr. Browning, how long did Teresa Mullins have an account with your bank?”
“Just two months.”
“She opened it when she moved here?”
“Apparently. I have no independent knowledge as to when she actually moved.”
“How much money did she deposit to open the account?”
“Two hundred and seventy dollars. In cash.”
“Tell us about her deposit and withdrawal history, please,” I say after I introduce the relevant documents into evidence.
“It was relatively uneventful for six weeks. Her balance never dipped below two hundred dollars and never went above six hundred and seventy. Then, six weeks after she opened the account, she received a wire transfer.”
“For how much?”
“Seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”
I can see some members of the jury react in surprise, which is very much what I wanted. “Where did it come from?” I ask.
“A bank in the Cayman Islands. The account information on the sender was sealed; we cannot access it.”
“Did she withdraw any of that money?”
He nods. “She wrote a check to Lincoln Medical; it’s a company in Maine. The check was for seventy thousand dollars, and the notation on it said, ‘For Hospice Care.’”
I introduce documents that we got from Lincoln Medical showing that Martha Mullins, Teresa’s mother, was a patient there, and that this payment was for her care. Ms. Mullins has since passed away.
“What did she do with the rest of the money?” I ask.
“She wired the remainder to another bank and then closed the account with us.”
“Whom did she wire it to?” I ask.
“Linda Sanford.”
I have no more questions for Browning, and Kelly doesn’t even try to make a dent in him. The facts are the facts, and even if the jury is half-asleep, they have to accept the fact that Teresa Mullins and Linda Sanford are one and the same person and that both of them are dead.
My next—and most important—witness is Pete Stanton. It’s probably the first time he has ever been key to a defense case, and I’m sure it’s weird for him. It’s probably like playing for the same sports team for fifteen years and then getting traded and having to go to the visitors’ locker room when you come back to play the original team.
I don’t have to establish Pete’s position and background, because he already did so when he testified as part of the prosecution’s case. So I can get right to it.
“Welcome back, Captain Stanton. You testified earlier that you were in charge of the investigation into the abduction of Dylan Hickman. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“And would you say that Teresa Mullins was a very important witness in that investigation?”
“Yes.”
I have him read portions of her testimony aloud. I don’t need it to conduct my direct examination, but I want it in the record.
“So she voluntarily implicated Mr. Wachtel and identified him as the assailant, correct?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t prompt her by mentioning his name first?”
“I did not.”
“And it was her testimony that led you to obtain the warrant?” I want the jury to hear the answer, but more importantly, I want to get it into the record.
If we lose the case, I want to reserve the ability to appeal based on the idea that the warrant was based on a lie and the fruits of it should be inadmissible. It won’t work, because as long as the police in good faith believed her at the time, then the sear
ch warrant will stand up. But I’d try it anyway.
“It was.”
“Her testimony as you just read it was that the abductor took the dog as well. Is that also what she said to you at the crime scene?”
“Yes.”
“She was positive it did not just run off as a stray?”
“She said she was certain of it.”
I’m doing most of the talking, but at least Pete’s short answers have been the right ones.
“Did I come to you last month and tell you that I believed Teresa Mullins was missing?”
“You did, and you presented some evidence that it might be under suspicious circumstances.”
“Did you commence an investigation?”
“An informal one. At that point, I would say I began looking into it. It seemed curious.”
“Did you find Ms. Mullins?”
“We did not.”
“Did you do any testing to determine whether the dog left at the foundation building was Cody, the dog that was taken during this crime?”
“Yes. It is the same dog.”
“Are you familiar with the prior testimony in the defense portion of this trial?”
“I believe I am.”
“I am talking about all the evidence submitted showing that Teresa Mullins abandoned Cody at the rescue foundation, that she has been in possession of him all along, that she received a huge amount of money at the time of her testimony, that she changed her identity, and that she has subsequently become a murder victim.”
He nods. “I am aware of it. Much of it I confirmed independently.”
“What is your professional assessment?”
“I believe Ms. Mullins lied to me and to the court, that she engineered her own disappearance, and that she was subsequently murdered.”
“Thank you, Detective,” I say. I should end it on the drama of that statement, but I realize that I forgot to bring something up. I mentally kick myself for it, but I need to fix it.
“One more thing, Captain Stanton. Did I tell you that I believed Teresa Mullins contacted Mr. Wachtel’s former attorney, Stanley Butler, about a year ago?”
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