Collared

by David Rosenfelt

  “I’d bet anything on it,” I say. “Keith said he thought Jill was having an affair while they were still together, and she was. She was sleeping with Renny Kaiser, at the same time she was trying to get him to invest enough money to save her company.”

  “But why go through the charade of adopting the baby and then having it abducted? Why couldn’t Kaiser have just adopted the child in the first place?”

  “I don’t have the slightest idea,” I say.

  “You’re off the roll.”

  I smile. “It was fun while it lasted.”

  “So what now?”

  “Now we need to get that child away from Kaiser, for two reasons. One, he doesn’t belong there. He belongs with his natural father, assuming I can keep him out of prison. And that brings me to number two. If we can show that Kaiser has Dylan Hickman, then Keith is by definition innocent and Kaiser is the guilty one.”

  “So we have to prove that Kaiser’s younger son is Dylan Hickman.”

  “What do you suggest?” I ask. “Have Marcus break into Kaiser’s house and swab the kid’s mouth to get a DNA sample?”

  “Can you get a search warrant to do it?”

  “On what basis?”

  “Probable cause,” she says. “You have reason to believe that Renny Kaiser has the abducted child. Why would a search warrant to get DNA be different than one to get anything else?”

  “It probably wouldn’t.” Laurie is right about this, in that an executed search warrant could search for any kind of forensic evidence, including fingerprints or blood or DNA or anything else. “I don’t know if we could in effect enter the kid’s body like that; I’d have to research it.”

  “I’m sure there are other traces of his DNA in the house. A hairbrush, a toothbrush,” Laurie says. “They wouldn’t literally have to go inside Dylan’s mouth.”

  “It’s a great idea,” I say, “but I have no idea how to make it happen. All we have is guesswork. It’s damn good guesswork, but no judge would buy it. There is nothing factual to tie Kaiser into this.”

  “So come up with something,” she says. “You’re a lawyer; you even sent in your renewal form.”

  “Thanks, pal.”

  “Think about it, Andy. We will not be able to live with ourselves if we don’t get that baby back.”

  or the life of me, I can’t figure a way to get a search warrant. We just don’t have the evidence. I know instinctively that Jill had an affair with Renny Kaiser and told him that the child was his as a way to manipulate him to put up money. And I know that Dylan Hickman is the child that he has taken as his son.

  The problem is that “Judge, go with my instincts and sign the warrant; trust me on this” is just not a recipe for success.

  The other thing that’s bugging me is Kaiser’s reaction to everything that happened, from day one. First of all, if he really believed Dylan to be his son, and he wanted him that badly, there were other ways he could have gone about it.

  Obviously, Jill wasn’t exactly a devoted mother. Couldn’t he have pulled this off without putting up hundreds of millions of dollars? He thought he was the father, so in any event, he would have parental rights, for at least joint custody.

  The investment was ultimately a success, but he couldn’t have known that going in. It wasn’t a sure bet—far from it—which is why no one else was willing to put up the money.

  And to track Teresa Mullins for years and kill her? And then to send Kyle Gillis after me? Finally, to top it off, to murder Jill for lying to him?

  All of this to conceal the fact that he had his own son? At any point, he could have engineered another scam to rival the original abduction. The child could have been “found,” and he could have subsequently gotten Jill to come forward and admit that he was the father.

  At the risk of a very bad pun, his reactions have been at the least overkill.

  What is Kaiser so afraid of, and what is he trying so hard to protect?

  The one positive about spending my time trying to figure all of this out is that it takes my mind off the jury’s deliberations. Usually at this point, I’m a basket case, unbearable to be around and religiously following my verdict superstitions.

  The truth is that I’m very worried about the verdict. I think that I gave enough evidence to discredit Teresa Mullins, but the fact that she was a disembodied presence made it less dramatic and powerful.

  And I didn’t effectively go near the other evidence. No one, including the jury and me, believed that transference was the reason for the dog hairs and blanket fibers. I made an error in taking that position; I should have stuck to my guns and said they were planted. To hide behind transference sent a message to the jury that I didn’t believe they were planted, because the two explanations are mutually exclusive.

  Laurie interrupts my pondering to come in and ask if I’ve come up with any idea for getting the search warrant.

  “No, they could agree with everything we think and still not go along with it. A judge has to show that he signed off on it based on real evidence. Just my saying it has no credibility.”

  “I wonder if after all this, Jill would have told us the whole truth. It felt like she was about to.”

  The idea comes to me all of a sudden, and it’s a strange feeling, because I simultaneously think it’s a good idea and a bad idea. I like it and I hate it, so I might as well voice it.

  “What if she did tell us? What if in that phone conversation before she died she told us where Dylan really is?”

  “She didn’t.”

  “What if she did?”

  “Andy, she didn’t. I was on the call. I don’t understand.”

  “Okay … let me ask the question another way. What if I lie?”

  “You mean tell the police and a judge that Jill said something to you that she didn’t say?”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  “Andy, you can’t do that.”

  “I’m not saying I’ve decided to do it, or even that I want to, but let’s think this through,” I say. “If I lie about this, and we’re right about Dylan Hickman, then we take a child away from the person that abducted him, and we put away a big-time drug dealer. If I don’t lie, we probably never get the child back, and the drug dealer doesn’t get caught.”

  “You’re an officer of the court.”

  “So you would think less of me if I told a lie about something I believed to be true than if I didn’t do everything I could to get the child back and put a drug dealer away?”

  Just as Laurie is about to answer, the phone rings, and I pick it up. “Andy, you need to get down here.”

  It’s Rita Gordon, the court clerk. “Is there a verdict?” I ask.

  “I don’t know, but the jury is coming in.”

  here is not going to be a verdict. Not now, and maybe never. As soon as we get to the courthouse, Rita tells me that it is her understanding that the jury wants to talk to the judge but that it is not an evidentiary question.

  In my experience that means only one thing: they are hung.

  I go to the defense table, where Hike is waiting for me.

  “This is not going to be good,” he says. I haven’t heard from Pod Hike in a while.

  Keith is brought in, and I can see the anxiety etched into his face. “Is there a verdict?”

  I shake my head. “No, they want to talk to the judge. My guess is they are going to tell him they are hung.”

  “What will happen next?”

  “Depends on the judge,” I say. “He can send them back or declare a mistrial.”

  As I say that, the judge that it depends on comes into the courtroom, and we all rise as instructed to greet him. He briefly informs us that the jury has a message they want to convey, after which he calls them in.

  Once they’re settled, he calls on the foreman, who says, “Your Honor, at this point, we are unable to reach a verdict.”

  If he thought that Judge Moran was going to say, “Fine, you’re free to go,” he is sadly m
istaken. Instead, the judge lectures them on the effort they must continue to put in to find common ground.

  He says that he knows it’s not easy, but that they are here to do a job, and they should do everything in their power to make sure they get it done.

  He says it not in a critical, but rather almost inspirational way, as if exhorting them to “convict one for the Gipper.” I half expect them to start pounding each other on the shoulder pads as they head back to the jury room to restart their deliberations.

  Once Keith leaves and the courtroom starts to empty out, I find Laurie near the back of the room. “We never got a chance to finish our conversation,” I say.

  “Andy, I understand your frustration. But even if you’re right, Dylan has been with them for three years and I’m sure is being treated well. And Kaiser has been eluding the law for a lot longer than that.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “That I think we should exhaust every avenue before you think about crossing that line, and maybe revisit the idea later.”

  I think about that for a few moments; it seems a reasonable approach. “I can live with that,” I say, although I think Laurie is putting more emphasis on the “not crossing the line,” while I’m focused more on the “revisiting the idea later.”

  But for now, the key is coming up with some avenues to exhaust.

  have to apply some pressure; the question is where it would be most effective. What I need is for someone who knows the truth about Dylan Hickman to come forward. That would be all that I’d require to have the police generate a search warrant, and then there would be no stopping the steamroller.

  I’m sure Finding Home is full of such people, and the one I decide to pressure is Steven Emmonds. I choose him for a couple of reasons.

  One is that he’s a scientist, not a top-level business or money guy, and I imagine he’s had less experience dealing with these kinds of stressful situations. Two is that I know he’s in on it, because he’s the one who lied to me about the test results, no doubt because Jill told him to.

  It’s a little after seven in the evening when I decide that either Emmonds is the weakest link or at least the link I want to test. I’m not sure if he’d still be in the office, but I call the Finding Home number.

  I get a message saying that I’ve reached them after business hours and that I should call after nine o’clock in the morning.

  I walk into the kitchen, where Laurie and Ricky are going over some of his homework. “What happened?” she asks.

  “There’s no switchboard operator; they’re closed.”

  She looks at her watch. “It’s after seven.”

  “They have a full staff on at night,” I say. “Everybody says that they’re a twenty-four-hour operation.”

  “So?”

  “So why can you only call the day shift? Actually, you don’t need to answer that, because I think I know why. I have to go down there.”

  “To Finding Home?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are going to talk to Emmonds?”

  “No, I have no idea if he’s there.”

  “I can’t go with you,” she says, since we obviously can’t leave Ricky alone. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to try to get a look at what is happening there, basically to confirm what I already know, so I can report it in.”

  “I’ll call Marcus.”

  Marcus arrives five minutes later; I don’t know how he always appears so fast; maybe he’s living in our basement. I tell him that we’ll go over the plan on the way to Finding Home; this way, I’ll have something to fill the awkward silence in the car.

  We park two blocks from the Finding Home campus. Fortunately, the streets around it are very dark; I don’t know why, but in many suburban upscale neighborhoods, residents feel more comfortable in the dark. They’re not as concerned about safety as they are about ambiance.

  By contrast, in urban centers like Paterson, most people would approve the placement of klieg lights on every corner. I am among those people.

  Marcus and I walk carefully and quietly onto the Finding Home campus. As I expected, the main building has only a few lights on, while two of the satellite buildings are completely lit up.

  “I want to get close up. We don’t need to get in, but I want to see what’s happening in there,” I say, and Marcus just nods.

  As we walk closer, the large door on the side of the building, near the loading dock, opens. Three large vans come out and start toward us. We get out of the way before their headlights reach us, and we hide in the shrubbery along the side of the path.

  As far as I can see, there is no identification on the vans at all. The name Finding Home is not emblazoned on what I assume are Finding Home trucks.

  Even though I believe the existence of the trucks is enough to make me sure I’m right, we move closer to the building. I look in the windows, but although I can see a lot of people milling about and working in what seem to be labs, I can’t tell what they’re doing.

  “Inside?” Marcus asks.

  It’s a tempting prospect. Unless there’s a chemist in there with a bazooka, Marcus could get us in with little problem. But it would alert Renny Kaiser to what I’m doing, and he might disband the operation.

  More importantly, we’d be entering illegally, and nothing I could say about it would be admissible either in court or on a search warrant. So the upside to going in is not enough to offset the downside.

  It’s disappointing that I can’t see more from out here, but ultimately, it doesn’t matter. I know what they’re doing, and if I have to, I’ll swear to it.

  We walk back the way we came, and just as we reach the public street, my cell phone rings. It sounds deafening and scares the hell out of me, and the scariest part of it is that I was too dumb to have shut it off before. It could have rung while we were snooping around near the building.

  The caller is Sam, and I’m whispering, even though now I don’t have to. “What’s is it, Sam?”

  “I’ve been monitoring Renny Kaiser’s phone like you asked, and he made a call you might be interested in.”

  “What is it?”

  “He called an aviation company that he’s used before.”

  “So?”

  “So I hacked into their computers. Renny Kaiser and his family are flying from Westchester County Airport to Dubai tomorrow night. Their only stop to refuel is in Croatia.”

  Dubai. It’s very hot, it’s very wealthy, and it does not have an extradition treaty with the United States. Neither does Croatia.

  I cannot let them get on that plane.

  now know what Renny Kaiser got out of his investment in Finding Home. I assume he wanted Dylan, whom he probably believed to be his son. But at its core, the investment was a brilliant business maneuver, and not because Finding Home became a profitable company. That was just gravy.

  By all accounts, Renny Kaiser deals in prescription drugs and exotic drug cocktails. Prescription drugs are not that easy to come by. They are generally gotten through thefts of drugstores, private homes, or warehouses, corrupt doctors writing bogus prescriptions, or prescriptions written on stolen or fake forms.

  But Kaiser found a way to eliminate all of that tedious stuff. He is manufacturing the drugs himself, and he’s set up the perfect operation in which to do it.

  In Finding Home, he has a large facility and has been able to staff it full of chemists and other workers to create the drugs without arousing suspicion. Because of the very nature of Finding Home’s business, they are assumed to belong there. The company is even doing government work, so by definition, it is a trusted entity.

  Kaiser has been mass-producing these drugs right under the noses of everyone; those large vans were not carrying DNA results. And they didn’t fire all those chemists because they might be loyal to Keith Wachtel; they fired them because they didn’t want them around to see what was really happening.

  I call Laurie at home, brief her on what
I’ve learned and what I suspect, and ask her for Steve Emmonds’s cell phone number. She gets it off the company directory that she had gotten from Jill and gives it to me.

  Emmonds answers on the third ring, and I tell him it’s Andy Carpenter calling. “It’s past ten o’clock,” is his first response.

  “Take advantage of it while you can,” I say. “In the cell block, it’s lights out at eight.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I know all about the illegal drug manufacturing going on at Finding Home, I know that you lied about the DNA test, I know who Dylan Hickman’s real parents are, I know where he is, and I know you’re going to jail.”

  He’s either thinking in silence, or he’s hung up.

  “You need to be on the right side of this, Emmonds. It’s going down fast.”

  Finally, he says, “What do you want?”

  “I want to hear it from you, and then I want you to make a deal for yourself. You are in an excellent position to do that. If you say no, I move on to the next person, and you become one of the big losers.”

  “I’m in Chicago,” he says. “Visiting family.”

  “Pretty soon they’ll be visiting you. You can talk through the bulletproof glass.”

  “Okay. I’ll meet you at noon tomorrow. But just you, no police.”

  “I can’t wait that long,” I say, neglecting to add that I literally have a flight to catch.

  “I can’t get there before then,” he says. “I told you, I’m in Chicago. But I’ll give you what you need.”

  The timing is close, but it can work. I’ll make it work. “Where?” I ask.

  “There’s a park about six blocks from Finding Home. At the north end is a building that they used to use as storage for park equipment. I’ll meet you there.”

  “Stevie-boy, if you’re not there, or not there on time, or not alone, the next meeting you have will be with a judge.”

  y self-preservation instinct compels me to bring Marcus with me to meet Emmonds. I might need him if something goes wrong, and worst comes to worst, maybe I can convince Marcus to torture Emmonds into confessing. I’m only half kidding, because above all I need to keep Kaiser and his family, including Dylan Hickman, off that plane tonight.