Collared

by David Rosenfelt

  “We proved that she was murdered, just days after giving up the dog. Is that a coincidence?

  “And even though we don’t have to prove or even show motive, we gave that to you as well. She received a fortune for her participation in this conspiracy, to help her ailing mother and to allow her to disappear forever.

  “The rest is all smoke and mirrors; without Teresa Mullins’s perjured testimony, Keith Wachtel would never even have been charged. For what—for having dog hair and a few strands of fiber in his house and car? For resenting the employer that fired him? You’ve heard testimony that Finding Home fired their entire chemistry staff. Don’t you think they felt resentful? Why not charge all of them with murder?

  “We don’t know what happened to Dylan Hickman, and his disappearance is an unimaginable tragedy for his mother and for us as a society. Whoever took him should be punished; Mr. Kelly wants that, I want that, Mr. Wachtel wants that, and I’m sure you want that.

  “But it does not help to punish the wrong person; it only increases the tragedy. It ruins a life that doesn’t deserve to be ruined; that is obvious. But it does something else, something insidious. It tells the authorities that they have solved the crime, that the bad guy is locked up.

  “But Keith Wachtel is not a bad guy, and he is certainly not the bad guy. Locking him up will only leave the real perpetrator out on the street, unworried, and free to strike again.

  “Nobody gains from that. Everybody loses.

  “Do the right thing, please. Thank you.”

  Judge Moran gives the jury their charge and sends them off. Once the jury and judge have left, Keith tells me what a great job I did.

  “We need to talk,” I say, making the decision in the moment.

  “Okay. When?”

  “Now. Right now.”

  tell the bailiff that I’ll need a few minutes with Keith in the anteroom. It’s common practice; he’ll wait outside until we’re done.

  As soon as we get in there, Keith asks, “What’s wrong? Did something happen in there that I didn’t pick up on?”

  “Not in there. What happened is that we ran another test on Dylan’s DNA.”

  “What did it show?”

  “That you’re the father.”

  He looks stunned. As an accomplished reader of facial expressions and reactions, I can quickly narrow it down to two possibilities: he’s either stunned or faking being stunned.

  “That’s ridiculous. It’s not possible.”

  I don’t say anything, so he adds, “Did you do it through Finding Home again? Because they—”

  “The FBI did it for us. They have a tendency to be accurate in matters like this.”

  “Let me think about this for a minute,” he says. “There has to be an explanation.”

  I nod. “I’ll wait.”

  “You think I knew about this?”

  “I don’t know; it’s certainly a possibility.”

  “What would I have to gain from concealing that?” he asks. “And why would I kidnap my own son?”

  Again, I don’t say anything; I find that in situations like this I can accomplish a hell of a lot more by listening.

  “Andy, I had no idea of this, and I don’t know how it could be real. I’m at a loss.”

  I’d better be careful here, because I may be starting to believe him. “So let’s put aside the question of whether you knew or not,” I say. “Let’s focus on who the mother might be. Could it be Jill?”

  He shakes his head. “No. First of all, she wasn’t pregnant, at least not to my knowledge. But why would she abandon her child and then adopt him?”

  “I agree,” I say. “So who else? You said you had affairs. How many?”

  “Three women. But I was always careful.”

  “Not careful enough, apparently.”

  “Andy, I father a child, the woman abandons him without telling me he even exists, and then Jill winds up adopting him? Come on.”

  “Give me the names of the three women,” I say.

  “I’ll try, but I’m not even sure I remember them; these were not exactly long, idyllic romances. What will you do with them?”

  He’s asking a good question; the truth is I have no plan for what to do. “I’m not sure.”

  “Are you just going to look them up and say, ‘Hey, did you have a baby and give him up?’ Why would they tell you, and what would you accomplish?”

  “Here’s what I might accomplish,” I say. “It might get me one step closer to figuring out what the hell happened and where that kid is. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t, but at least I’ll have tried.”

  He nods. “Okay.”

  “The truth is it doesn’t matter for you,” I say. “The trial is over; the jury is going to do what they are going to do, and you’ll either walk or you won’t. If you walk, then nothing I turn up can hurt you; they can’t charge you again for the same crime.”

  “It matters plenty to me,” he says, his voice a little softer.

  “What does that mean?” I ask.

  “When a child is lost, any child, that’s terrible. But when it’s your own, that’s worse. I don’t know that Dylan is my son, but if he is, that’s worse, and it’s different. It just is.”

  Keith just moved up a notch in my mind. He could still be lying through his teeth, but it doesn’t feel like it.

  I send him off with the bailiff, but I stay in the room to think. The fact is that my work as a lawyer is over, at least for the time being, but I don’t think I can leave it like this.

  If Keith gets convicted, I’ll think there is a good chance that an innocent man is in prison and that I’ve failed. If he gets acquitted, I’ll think that there is a good chance I allowed a guilty man to walk, which would represent a different kind of failure.

  Regardless of the outcome, it will be uniquely unsatisfying and upsetting.

  I leave the room sure of one thing: I need to find out the truth.

  ndy, what the hell is going on?”

  It’s Jill on the phone; the stress level in her voice is off the charts. The clock on the night table says it’s seven fifteen, and she’s woken us up.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s all over the news. They’re saying that Keith is Dylan’s father?”

  What I’m thinking is, How the hell did this get out? What I say is, “I just found out myself.”

  “How could you do this? How could you tell the media this?”

  “I didn’t, Jill. I don’t know who did.”

  “Get a retraction out there, Andy. And it’s not possible that Keith could be the father. This is terrible.”

  “Let me get into this, Jill. Try to relax. But a retraction won’t fly, because Keith really is the father.”

  “That’s crazy … it can’t be; that makes no sense. And I can’t relax, Andy. How can I relax? You need to fix this.”

  Laurie is up and listening to my end of the conversation, so when I finally get Jill off the phone, I update her on what happened.

  “I think she’s more upset about the public relations side of this than the possibility that Keith is the father,” I say. “And she says it couldn’t be true.”

  We turn the news on, and sure enough, there it is. I have no idea how this could have gotten out, and there are limited possibilities. Only Laurie and I knew on our end, so our team didn’t leak it. That leaves Keith, but I can’t imagine why he would do it. If the jury were to find out, it would most likely hurt, not help, his cause.

  The other possibility is an FBI leak, and I call Cindy. She has seen the report and doesn’t know the source either, but I can tell she is afraid it’s from her end. “A lot of our chemists know a lot of the chemists at Finding Home,” she says. “So it’s possible.”

  She says that she’ll check into it but allows that “we may never know.” She apologizes just in case, but I don’t blame her. I should have been more specific with her about the secrecy of this.

  The media starts calling, and
we screen all of them. When the message tape fills up, we erase it and it starts filling up again. Today is Saturday, so I have no court responsibility, which means I can spend all day trying to figure this thing out. I’ve got the same plan for tomorrow, with a three-hour break to watch the Giants game. Even in these troubled times, I do have my priorities.

  I sit in the den with all the materials relating to the case. I find that the best way to proceed when I’m looking for answers is to just go over everything, as often as necessary. Sometimes I can read the same document five times without seeing something that jumps out at me on the sixth reading.

  But not this time. I spend three hours getting nowhere. Nothing strikes me; I have no new insights. After I read all the documents, I look at the crime scene photographs, and still nothing.

  Then I get to the selfie that was in among Stanley Butler’s photographs, the one of Teresa Mullins and little Dylan in his stroller. I look at it to see if I can see any of Keith in Dylan’s face. Laurie and I had done the same thing when we entertained the thought that the father might be Renny Kaiser, so I bring the photo in to Laurie to ask her if she sees Keith in it.

  She looks but says, “He’s just too small, Andy. He’s an infant.”

  She’s right about that, but just how right is she? “How old do you think Dylan is in this picture?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe a few weeks? A month?”

  “Does Brian have office hours today?” I ask. Brian Rubenstein is Ricky’s pediatrician and also the father of Will Rubenstein, Ricky’s best friend.

  “I don’t know. He alternates every other Saturday with Dr. Zander.”

  Laurie calls and learns that Brian is actually off today and at home, but going out. When I tell him I have something urgent to show him, he responds that he’s heading in our direction, so he’ll stop by.

  Fifteen minutes later, Brian is in our house, and I show him the selfie. “How old is the child in that photograph?”

  He studies it for at least a minute and says, “Maybe two weeks. Three at the most.”

  “Are you sure?” I ask.

  “Am I sure? I’m a pediatrician, Andy,” he says, smiling. “Would I ask you if you were sure something was a tort or a deposition? Actually, I wouldn’t bet my life on it, but I doubt very much that I’m wrong.”

  I thank Brian, who leaves probably thinking that I’m nuts, and I call Pete Stanton. “Do you have Stanley Butler’s computer?” I ask, assuming that they impounded it as part of their investigation.

  “We do. But there was nothing on it we could use.”

  “I need to borrow it,” I say.

  “For what?”

  “So I can find the bad guys and turn them over to you on a silver platter.”

  He resists but finally agrees, so I call Sam and ask him to pick it up from the precinct and bring it over. Two hours later, Sam and the computer are in the house.

  “Look at this photograph,” I say, showing him the selfie.

  “What about it?”

  “That’s on printer paper, right? This would have been printed out?”

  “Unless it was color copied.”

  I hadn’t thought of that; if that is the case, this whole thing has been a waste of time.

  “Sam, I think … I hope … that this photograph was e-mailed to Stanley Butler. If it was, then it’s on that computer. Can you find it?”

  “If it’s in iPhoto, it’ll take two minutes. If not, then longer. But if he downloaded it, I’ll find it. If it’s in e-mail, but he didn’t download it, then we’re out of luck without his e-mail password.”

  Laurie and I leave him alone to look, and thirty minutes later, he calls out, “I got it.” We go in there, and he adds, “It wasn’t in iPhoto, but it was downloaded.” He points to the computer. “There it is.”

  Sure enough, the photograph is there, on the screen. Now I ask the question I should have asked earlier. “Is there a time stamp on it? Is there any way to tell when it was taken?”

  Sam looks at me with a half frown on his face. “You really don’t know anything about this stuff, do you?”

  “Obviously not,” I say. “Does that question mean you can’t do it? Or you can?”

  “Of course I can.” Then he starts talking about “right-clicking” and “get info” and all kinds of other stuff, none of which I care about or understand. His final sentence is, “Do you also want to know where the photo was taken?”

  “How can you tell that?”

  Another frown, some more gibberish, at the end of which I understand that in addition to finding when it was taken, he can learn the latitude and longitude of the location at which it was taken. It is as accurate as a GPS.

  What a world.

  Within two minutes, we have the date, and five minutes after that, the street address.

  There can no longer be any doubt; the selfie that Teresa Mullins took with Dylan Hickman was taken two weeks before he was abandoned and adopted by Jill Hickman.

  believe that Jill Hickman is both Dylan’s natural and adoptive mother. That has to be a first. But it’s the only solution I can come up with, so I’m sticking with it.

  It is inconceivable to me that Teresa Mullins had or was caring for an infant, and then after giving it up and having it adopted by Jill, was coincidentally hired by Jill to care for it. And then throw in the fact that Keith is the father of that child and that Teresa was the witness against him, and it becomes too ridiculous to contemplate.

  The only possible explanation that makes any sense at all is that Jill had the baby but for some reason didn’t want that fact to be known by anyone. So she must have hired Teresa to care for it, all along planning to engineer an abandonment and adoption of her own child.

  Just because I don’t know why she would do that doesn’t mean that she didn’t.

  “Nobody knew that Jill was pregnant,” Laurie points out.

  I nod. “I’ve been thinking about that. Maybe she didn’t show until fairly late, and then she was able to cover it with the right kind of clothing. Then, when she couldn’t do that anymore, she went off to Europe, apparently to raise money. Remember? She was gone for more than two months, and maybe the baby was born early.”

  “It’s possible,” Laurie allows, which I interpret as full-fledged agreement with my point of view. “But why hide the fact that she had the child if she was ultimately going to adopt him anyway?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe she didn’t want Keith to be part of her life as the father. Or more likely an entirely different reason that we can’t figure out.”

  “This would tend to explain why Finding Home lied about the DNA test; they must have known and were covering up for Jill.”

  I nod. “Right. And Jill had called Steve Emmonds to clear the way for his running the test. She could have told them to fake it then. This makes it much more likely that Keith was telling the truth, that he didn’t know he was the father.”

  “But it doesn’t explain other things,” Laurie says. “Like why Renny Kaiser sent that guy after you. He doesn’t seem to have a role in this at all.”

  Just then the phone rings. It’s Rita Gordon, the court clerk, informing me that Judge Moran wants to meet with counsel before the start of the court day on Monday. The meeting is to be in his chambers.

  “Did he say why?” I ask.

  “I think if you turn on the news you might get a clue.”

  I tell Laurie what the call was about, and she asks the legal implications of the news of Keith’s paternity getting out.

  “Hard to say,” is my weak response. “It should have no evidentiary impact, because that part of the trial is over. Kelly or I could petition the judge to reopen it, but I know I won’t, and I doubt that he would. It’s just not clear how this cuts, and it presents too many land mines.”

  “So what would the judge want to talk about?”

  “I would think the jury, and whether or not they have seen anything about this. They’re suppose
d to be avoiding it, but you know how that goes. A mistrial is a possibility if either Kelly or I push for it.”

  “Would you?”

  I think about it for a moment. “I might; I’d have to talk to Keith first. I don’t think Kelly would want one, but you never know.”

  “So what’s the next step, team leader?”

  “Let’s check out the address Sam gave us for where this photo was taken.”

  Laurie calls Nancy, who again comes over to watch Ricky, dollar signs dancing in her head. As we’re about to leave, an upset Jill calls again, and Laurie unsuccessfully tries to talk her down off the ledge. She doesn’t tell her about our suspicions, though we are going to have to do that sooner or later.

  The address where the photo was taken turns out to be a large two-story apartment building down the street from an industrial complex in Englewood. The sign outside describes them as corporate apartments, available for long-term rentals. Obviously, companies put their out-of-town employees up here when they are going to be staying for a while, perhaps when they’re relocating to the area but haven’t found a place to live yet.

  We seek out the manager, a guy by the name of Peter Wallman. We show him the photo of Teresa and Dylan and ask him if they’d ever stayed here.

  He shrugs. “Doesn’t ring a bell, but a lot of people stay here.”

  “Can you look up her name?” I ask. “It’s either Teresa Mullins or Linda Sanford.”

  “She has two names?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “Okay, when did you say she was here?”

  I give him the dates, and he looks it up on his computer but comes up empty. “But that doesn’t mean anything,” he says. “Many of the people that stay here aren’t in the computer; in fact, most of them aren’t. We go by the company that booked them; that’s who pays the bills.”

  I ask him to look up Finding Home and Jill Hickman, but that draws blanks also, so we thank him for his time and leave. I still think that Teresa stayed here with Dylan; she or Jill just concealed it well.

  “I think it’s time we talked to Jill,” I say.