Apex Predator

by J. A. Faura

  Steven stopped and turned around, “No, don’t get me wrong, that’s not what I mean at all. I’m going to defend myself with everything at my disposal. I’m nobody’s hero, sir, and I’m definitely nobody’s martyr.”

  The General smiled and held Steven’s arm as he shook his hand, “Good man. Now, call Zeidler. I’ll give him a call to give him the heads up. The bastard charges us enough.”

  Steven returned the gesture, “Thank you, sir. I appreciate it.”

  He left his boss’s office and went to make a call he knew he had to make before he got on his way.

  Grady was going over case files that he’d been unable to get to with everything else going on when his cell phone rang. His first inclination was to just let it go to voicemail, but he decided instead to look and see who was calling him.

  When he saw who it was, he picked up immediately, “Hello, Mr. Loomis. I’m not going to ask how you got my cell phone number.”

  On his end, Loomis smiled, “I suspect you probably know why I am calling.”

  Not knowing who was listening and knowing that Loomis could have the phone line tapped, Grady was careful in how he replied, “Well, I think I may have an idea, but I don’t want to assume anything. You know what happens to people who assume.”

  Loomis smiled on the other end, “Well, I wanted to call you to let you know that your idea is correct. I will be talking to my people shortly and we will all be coming in to have a cup of coffee with you and Detective Mullins.”

  Grady could see that Loomis was also being very cautious with what he said over the phone.

  Loomis went on, “We should be there in about an hour and we can talk about how things have gone.”

  Grady was still trying to absorb the statement. Steven Loomis was calling him to tell him that he was going to turn himself in. He was going to contact an attorney and then head into the station, and if Grady was reading him right, he was planning on giving a full statement.

  Of course Grady couldn’t be sure of what Loomis was going to say, so he kept his optimism in check. “Great. We will have a fresh pot of coffee ready and waiting. I will let Captain Freeman know…”

  Loomis interrupted him, “Detective Grady, if you wouldn’t mind, I would like to chat with you and Detective Mullins. If you need to tell your captain, so be it, but I would like to speak with you and Detective Mullins only, please.”

  Grady winced. He knew he had to tell Freeman and he knew he would want to be in on the interrogation, no matter what. “Mr. Loomis, I don’t know if that will be possible. Captain Freeman is going to want to be part of the conversation.”

  Loomis replied calmly, “I understand that, but if you want to have a full conversation, you will explain to the captain that it will only happen with you and Detective Mullins in the room. He can watch the tape later, but my only request is that it be you and Mullins in the room.

  “I really think you will probably want this conversation to be as complete and specific as it can be, and I would hate for my people to have to keep interrupting because there is someone in the room that shouldn’t be there.”

  Loomis could not have made it plainer: ‘You want a full confession? You will make sure Freeman is not in the room.’ Grady was sure Freeman was going to scream bloody murder, but he also knew there was no better way to save resources and manpower than to get a full confession from the person that had committed the crime. He would go to the chief if he had to in order to make it happen.

  “I think we can arrange for that to happen.”

  Loomis answered, “I knew you could, detective, I wouldn’t have asked otherwise. I will see you in an hour.”

  Grady hung up his cell phone and immediately dialed his office phone to call Mark Mullins, “Mark, can you please come in here? Yeah, I mean right now…just got off the phone with our guy.”

  Mullins held the receiver with a puzzled look for two seconds and then it dawned on him, “Shit! I’ll be right there!”

  Mullins practically flew to Grady’s office and came in, shut the door and sat down on the chair in front of the desk.

  “So, what did he say?”

  Grady was leaning back on his chair, still trying to settle fully into the situation. “He was very careful about what he said, I was too. He basically said he needed to talk to his people and that once he did that he wanted to come here and have a chat with you and me only. He was very clear that he wouldn’t talk if there was somebody else in the room.”

  Mullins was smiling. He was already anticipating Grady telling Freeman he couldn’t be in on the biggest investigation going. He knew he would make a stink about it, but he also knew Freeman would concede in the face of losing a full confession. “Man, Freeman is going to blow a gasket.”

  Grady was also smiling sideways, “I know and I don’t care. This is the best and most efficient way to resolve the case of the Riche shooting, and I know the chief will back us up to get that confession.”

  Mullins answered, “Not to mention it lets us off the hook, officially I mean.”

  Grady was nodding, “I agree, unless Loomis decides to come clean all the way himself. He doesn’t strike me as someone who would do that, based on the conversation I had with him before this call. He knows it’s our ass if he spills everything he knows.”

  Mullins replied, “Yeah, he doesn’t strike me as that kind of guy, either. If he just comes in and owns up to the shooting, it means we don’t ever have to say anything about what happened.”

  Grady put his hands behind his head and leaned back, “That it does, that it does.”

  Chapter 17

  After hanging up, Loomis picked up his coat and briefcase and headed down to the street to hail a cab to the offices of the lawyer he’d been referred to and to begin his journey in earnest.

  At Max Zeidler’s office, a sense of controlled chaos was the norm, but today that controlled chaos was multiplied tenfold. Every intern, assistant, paralegal and young associate was busy looking up citations, case law, appellate decisions, and anything else that had to do with insanity and temporary insanity defenses. The criteria for a temporary insanity defense in New York were very tight. Bottom line was that for it to be used successfully, the defendant must have been in such a state of mind that he or she did not believe that what they were doing was wrong or criminal and nothing about their behavior could point to them being aware of any wrongdoing. It was very clear that for such a defense to work the defense attorney had to unequivocally prove that his client was factually and completely insane during the commission of the crime. What made it more difficult than a defense of not guilty by reason of insanity was the temporary element. Basically, the jury would need to be convinced that the insanity was temporary and only present during the time of the commission of the crime and that once that passed, the defendant returned to a normal state of mind.

  Nobody in the office knew how many cases had actually used the defense successfully, which is why everyone was knee deep in reference materials and Lexus/Nexus citations and anything that could be found online. Still, nobody had any doubt that if anyone could pull it off it would be Max Zeidler. The man had become a legend winning cases like this, and if he was taking a case in which he was thinking about using the defense, he probably already had his opening argument for the trial ready.

  In fact, Zeidler was in his office reading up on the last two cases in New York to have successfully used a temporary insanity defense. The last one had been in 1982 and it had involved a man who had a stroke and had temporary psychosis as a result of it. He killed his wife with a butcher knife because he believed her to be a masked intruder coming into his home to kill him. He had called the police, had walked them to the body, and had very lucidly explained how he had taken the knife and defended himself from the monster that had invaded his home. It was not until an hour later, when he began to understand what he had done, that the man had absolutely fallen apart and had to be restrained and put on suici
de watch.

  That case had everything going for it, a psychological or physiological trauma that had affected the defendant’s cognitive abilities profoundly and a man that had been married to his wife for 38 years, had never even gotten a traffic ticket and had never shown even a hint of violence toward anyone, let alone his wife. It had everything going for it and it took the jury just under two hours to come back with a not-guilty verdict, and it took that long because they needed to take a break to eat something. Zeidler believed that he had just such a case in this one. If he was right about what was about to walk into his office, it had everything he would need for just such a defense.

  Drew was in his office trying to get a handle on some cases he had brought with him and a few others he had gotten since coming on board with Zeidler.

  Zeidler walked in and sat across the desk from him with that cat-that-ate-the-canary smile on his face, “Are you ready to put everything aside and get into the case that will make your career?”

  Drew put down the file he was holding and smiled, “I can’t wait to hear this. If this is going to be the case that will make my career, I am assuming you’re going to be in on it too.”

  Zeidler chuckled, “You bet your ass I am. Are you kidding? A case like this comes along once in a lifetime, well, in my case a few times, but still, it’s going to put your name in the headlines.”

  Drew leaned back in his chair, “Alright, already, I give, what is it?”

  Zeidler got up from his chair and walked over to the window, “Global Intelligence Consultants is one of our largest corporate clients. We bill them well over ten million a year, handle everything from patent law to international jurisdictional issues, congressional hearings, and every once in a while we also handle some high-level criminal stuff for them. Nothing spectacular, forged passports, illegal entry into various countries, that kind of thing.

  “It’s usually federal cases and most of the time there are people involved at very high levels of government, so the cases usually don’t see the light of day.

  “Anyway, their CEO, Art Goodman, known by everyone and God as the General, just called me. He told me that he was sending someone my way who had something to do with the shooting at the courthouse. At first I thought that maybe it had been one of his operatives that had killed Riche, that maybe someone had given an order and it had gotten done. It’s happened before, but not this time.”

  Drew also stood up and walked around his desk, “Wait a minute, are you telling me that people get killed by operatives from this company under the orders of some unknown government entity?”

  Max turned around, “Oh, come on, Drew, are you serious? Do you really think it’s that unlikely that when a known drug lord or a particularly unsavory Middle Eastern moneyman becomes too much of a problem, the General gets a call and the problem disappears? Think about it, people disappear without a trace every day in this country.

  “Anyway, that’s not what this is. I remembered that GIC had come up with the whole Riche thing when it first broke, and then I remembered why. One of the victims was the daughter of a senior executive at GIC, a Steven Loomis.”

  Drew, now standing next to Zeidler also looking out the window, said, “I remember the name. He’s the ex-SEAL the police looked at after the shooting at the courthouse. He was the only family member of one of the victims that had the background to do something like that.”

  Zeidler nodded, “That’s right, but they eliminated him as a suspect pretty quickly. CNN reported that he’d been in a meeting at the time of the shooting when they were reporting about who could have shot Riche. The General didn’t say whether it would be him coming in, but he said that we are to provide the person coming with every available resource, whatever the cost. That’s someone with a personal stake in this talking. He’s never called me directly and he’s never said anything like that before.

  “My bet is that Loomis is coming in to figure out a way to turn himself in. I have every one of my interns and clerks looking up every possible angle on a temporary insanity defense. If it is Loomis, we’re looking at an almost ideal setup for making the argument that he was temporarily insane.

  “I don’t have to tell you how difficult it is to win a case with that defense, but this is an ideal set of circumstances – a monster as the victim, an all-American ex-military hero for a defendant, the whole world outraged about what Riche did, I mean, it doesn’t get any better than that.”

  Drew shook his head slightly. It was amusing and also a bit disturbing to listen to Zeidler refer to a horrible murder case and a devastating loss as an ideal set of circumstances, but Drew had to admit that he was right. It was the best setup for a temporary insanity defense that he could think of.

  Still, it was human beings that they were talking about, a man’s daughter and now his life, and Drew hadn’t been in the game long enough to develop the thick, cynical skin that Zeidler had.

  Drew stood up and followed Zeidler into the hallway where he gave instructions to two of the associates doing research, “I want you guys to find out who the best expert is for temporary insanity cases. Call Dr. Newberry and ask him, he’ll know.”

  Drew followed Max into his office and as both men were about to sit, his phone rang.

  Zeidler put it on speaker. “Mr. Zeidler, there is a gentleman here to see you.”

  Zeidler couldn’t imagine who it could be right now, “Does he have an appointment? Could Louis receive him?”

  The receptionist came back on, “He says he doesn’t have an appointment, but that you would be expecting him. He says someone named ‘The General’ sent him to talk to you.”

  Zeidler almost jumped out of his chair to pick up the phone. He hadn’t expected Loomis so soon.

  “Bring him back to my office right away! And Missy, I do not want anyone, and I mean anyone, bothering us, no calls, no buzz-ins, nothing, is that understood?”

  Missy responded in her most even tone, “It is, sir.”

  Missy brought the man to the door and then turned and left. The man knocked lightly on the door where Zeidler met him, hand outstretched, “Welcome, welcome, please come in, Mr. …?”

  Steven shook the man’s hand and went into the office, “Loomis, Steven Loomis. It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Zeidler. Your reputation precedes you. The General has nothing but the utmost confidence in you and your firm.”

  Max smiled as he led Steven to the other chair in front of his desk, “Well, we’ve handled some pretty serious cases for him and for your firm. The respect is mutual, by the way, the old man has more juice than any 10 players in this city, and he knows exactly how and when to use it.”

  Max spread his hands to encompass the scene before them, “Case in point.”

  Loomis was looking around the office when he turned to Drew, who was standing next to the other chair by Zeidler’s desk, “And this is…?”

  Zeidler was caught off guard for a moment, “I am so sorry! This is Drew Willis, he just joined our firm and will be co-counsel in our matter.”

  The two men shook hands. Drew felt the sheer power in the guy’s arm through the handshake. He looked at the well-built and impeccably dressed man and at the cold and focused eyes. Drew guessed the guy to be about 6’1” and about 195 pounds. For his part, Loomis took a liking to the kid almost immediately. Although clearly younger than both other men in the room, he carried himself with a lot of confidence, not cocky or obnoxious, just a quiet inner peace and strength. Drew projected that confidence through bright and curious eyes and through the ability to make the people around him feel at ease without sounding like a used car salesman.

  Once the three men were seated, Max spoke up first, “Can I get you anything before we start, water, Scotch?”

  Loomis folded his hands on his lap and replied, “No thank you, I would just like to get going with this if you don’t mind.”

  Max nodded, “Not at all. Please let us know, how can we help you?”

 
Steven looked down at his folded hands and paused for two seconds, he took a deep breath in and proceeded to explain his situation, “By now I think you have probably heard about the shooting at the courthouse and about the case that the shooting was associated with, the case involving Donald Riche.”

  Max and Drew both nodded, but kept quiet.

  “Well, one of his victims was my daughter Tracy.” Steven paused at this point. He closed his eyes and Drew could tell he was still hurting.

  He opened his eyes and continued, “He took her from Central Park when she was with her mother and her brother and sister.”

  Loomis stopped again and looked at Max, “I think I will take you up on that water now.”

  Max stood up and went to a small refrigerator in the corner of the room where he retrieved a bottle of water.

  He handed it to Loomis, “Take your time, I know it must be incredibly difficult. If you need to stop at any time, let us know.”

  Steven took two long pulls from the bottle and put the cap back on it. “I’m good. It’s just that this is the first time I have actually articulated any of this and I’m a bit surprised, I didn’t expect it to affect me like this.”

  Drew gently put his hand on his shoulder. It was a simple gesture, unrehearsed and done completely without thought, “Hey, Mr. Loomis, I can’t imagine having gone through what you’ve been through, so don’t feel bad for being human, just take your time.”

  Normally Steven would have been put off by the contact, but he could see that it was nothing more than what the kid thought would be a humane gesture toward someone who was obviously hurting.

  He turned to look at Drew and gave him a small nod, “Thank you, I’m okay.”

  He took two more long pulls from his water bottle and went on, “Anyway, I found out that she hadn’t been the only one, and early on I knew she probably wasn’t coming back. After a week, I was sure of it.

  “As you know, I am in the intelligence and security business and have some resources, which I utilized to find out what was going on with the investigation. I could see that the police and other law enforcement organizations were doing everything they could but still were having no luck. Eventually, as you know, Riche was found out and arrested.”