Deck the Hounds--An Andy Carpenter Mystery

by David Rosenfelt

  To make matters even more difficult, the security around Judge Yount was intense. Just because Simmons had missed him the first time, there was no reason to believe he’d give up. Simmons was apparently deranged enough to blame Eric Yount for how he believed his father wronged him. So the son, Eric, was now essentially a prisoner; he spent all of his time either in his home or in the courthouse.

  He was advised not even to walk near windows; it was a terrible way to live, and the restrictions would relax only when Simmons was caught. The strain on his wife, Nancy, was immense and taking its toll on her.

  Of course, the situation would have been devastating even without all these complicating factors. A judge had been shot and killed; that just does not happen in this country and cannot be tolerated. The system is not built to handle it. More important, the people affected are not built to handle it.

  So Judge Abernathy called Judge Yount into her office; she was intent on treating the court calendar as business as usual, even though they both knew that was impossible. “We need to talk about Lawrence’s caseload,” she said, referring to the late Judge Alexander by his first name.

  Yount nodded his agreement. “By all means.”

  “I’m attempting to get another judge transferred in here, and there is one awaiting confirmation, but we have to deal with what we have now. I will also say, and I mean this sincerely, Eric, if you feel you need to take a leave of absence, I will support you unconditionally.”

  “I appreciate that more than you could know,” Yount said, “but … and I don’t want to sound corny, but if I do that, if we change the way we do things, then he wins.”

  “Okay.”

  Yount said, “And if I back off now, Lawrence will be up there laughing at me.”

  Abernathy smiled. “He probably would at that.” Then, “You’re familiar with the patent case that was next up for him? The Baxter Optics case? It’s scheduled for this Monday, but I can move it back.”

  He shrugged. “I’ve started looking at it already, so I’ll be prepared. It’s not that complicated; Baxter is being sued by a small optical supply manufacturer in a patent dispute over a new type of contact lens. The issues are fairly straightforward.”

  “There’s potentially a lot at stake,” she said.

  He smiled. “What else is new? It will take my mind off life.”

  “So you want it?”

  Another smile. “Not particularly, but just try and take it away from me.”

  I’m back at the Welcome Home shelter to do what I should have done the first time.

  I’ve spent most of my time trying to figure out who actually murdered Steven McMaster, and not enough trying to prove that Don Carrigan didn’t.

  Part of the problem is Carrigan’s lifestyle. He was homeless and living on the street; I can’t show that he was at a charity dinner the night of the murder, or that he was playing poker with his buddies.

  But maybe I can show that he was at Welcome Home, if not at the exact hour of the murder, then maybe close enough to reduce the window of time available for him to have gotten to Short Hills and done the deed.

  Once again Sean Aimonetti, the director, is there to greet me with a smile. “Haven’t we done this already?” he asks.

  I return the smile. “I’m retracing my steps. I left my wallet somewhere.”

  “I emptied it. I thought it was a donation.”

  The banter out of the way, I ask him if people who show up for food or shelter sign in each time when they arrive.

  “They’re supposed to,” he says. “We encourage it, but it’s not a rule or a requirement. We try not to do anything which will discourage attendance; the important thing is to get these people fed and protected.”

  “Do you save the log-in books?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I see one in particular?”

  “I really think we have done this before, because once again I’m going to take you over to the shelter and turn you over to James Lasky. He’s in charge of all of that stuff.”

  We head over there, but one of the workers says that Lasky won’t be back for a half hour; he’s at one of the other shelters. I hadn’t realized that Welcome Home had more than one location, but Aimonetti tells me there are four.

  While I’m waiting, he shows me around the place and describes how it works. It’s all very remarkable and staffed with very extraordinary people. By the time he’s finished, I’ve written a check for a fairly substantial donation; that way maybe I can feel extraordinary too.

  It doesn’t work … I don’t.

  Lasky finally comes back and seems less than thrilled to see me. He again broadcasts the fact that he has a lot on his plate, and my presence interferes with his cleaning it. But Aimonetti asks him to help me, and I say it won’t take long, so he nods grudgingly and asks what I want.

  “I want to see your log-in books for a specific week,” I say, specifying the week of the murder.

  “Why?”

  “So I can see who logged in.” I’m not going to tell him why because I don’t want word of this getting back to the prosecution, in case it doesn’t show what I want it to. The other unspoken reason for my refusal is that it’s none of his business.

  I tell him the week I’m looking for, and he heads into what appears to be a storage room, though I can only see it when he opens the door. It’s a good five minutes before he comes back, carrying a very large book. “Here it is,” he says.

  I walk over to a table about fifteen feet away and set it down. I want the message to be clear that I don’t want anyone looking over my shoulder, and it seems to have worked because no one walks over with me.

  The book covers a month, which includes the week in question. It’s fairly straightforward, so much so that even I can understand it. Each day has four pages, one for each meal, and one for overnight shelter.

  That’s the good news. The bad news is that Carrigan signed in for dinner five days that week, but the night of the murder wasn’t one of them.

  What I am holding in my hand is evidence for the prosecution to use; hopefully they won’t be smart enough to do so. But his failure to sign in that night means he had ample time to get to Short Hills and commit the murder. It isn’t proof of anything, but at the very least it looks suspicious.

  Even to me.

  There’s a court session this morning that will accomplish absolutely nothing.

  It’s to go over some of the pretrial motions submitted by both sides. The only ones that have any chance of being granted are the ones that are of no consequence.

  Our key motion consists of trying to get the judge to rule that the hat containing the DNA samples not be admitted as evidence because of chain of custody issues. I have as much chance of winning that one as I have of making the NFL Pro Bowl as an offensive tackle.

  The absolute worst part of the day is when it is revealed that the judge assigned to the case is going to be unavailable, and Judge Henry “Hatchet” Henderson will be taking his place. He is not called “Hatchet” because of his calm and affable demeanor.

  Hatchet hates lawyers in general, and me in particular. He thinks I’m a wiseass and bring disrespect upon any courtroom I enter, showing that Hatchet may be tough, but he’s not stupid. But I’m not alone in incurring Hatchet’s wrath. His attitude toward lawyers is similar to Michael Corleone’s attitude toward Barzinis and Tattaglias: he will tolerate them and let them live, until he won’t.

  The prosecution’s main motion, which will also fail, is to get the judge to forbid us to challenge the DNA evidence. They do this because we declined to conduct a Kelly-Frye hearing, which specifically challenges the science.

  I didn’t ask for it because Kelly-Frye hearings always lose, and they lose because the science of DNA works. I hate it because it almost always cuts against the defense, but it works. But it doesn’t mean we won’t challenge it on other grounds, including chain of custody. Just because Hatchet didn’t rule out the hat on those grounds does not mean
we can’t challenge it.

  Carrigan is with Hike and me the entire time, and it gives me a chance to ask him about the sign-in process at Welcome Home. “Did you always sign in?” I ask.

  He nods. “Pretty much. If there was a long line to sign in I might not have, but basically I always did. I figured if they were feeding me for free it was the least I could do to sign in like they wanted.”

  I don’t ask him about the night in question because if he didn’t commit the murder, there is no reason he would remember it. It would have just been another day in a life in which specific days didn’t have a hell of a lot of meaning.

  At the end of the hearing, the prosecutor, Raymond Tasker, walks over and shakes my hand. “Waste of time, huh?”

  “At least you got to meet Hatchet.”

  He nods. “I’ve heard stories. Hey, you got a second to chat about something?”

  I find that whenever people ask to chat, it means it’s about an issue of some importance. They use “chat” because it conveys that the conversation will be casual and insignificant, which means they want to make you think that and throw you off. Consider that another life lesson presented free of charge by Andy Carpenter.

  I say goodbye to Carrigan and Hike and I go with Tasker to an anteroom. Once we sit down, he asks, “I assume you still don’t want to plead it out?”

  “That’s your version of a chat? No, we do not want to plead it out.”

  “What about if I made the offer too good to turn down?”

  “I make it a habit never to turn down offers that are too good to turn down, but goodness is in the eye of the beholder. In any event why would you want to do that?”

  “I want his accomplice,” Tasker says.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You want my operating theory of the case? It might be slightly different from the one the jury hears.”

  “I’m honored,” I say.

  “We have more than enough to nail your client. He was on the scene, the DNA proves that, the ring further implicates him, and he’s proficient in hand-to-hand combat. He’s a neck breaker, and the victim died from having his neck broken.”

  “That’s your theory?”

  “Part of it. The rest is that Carrigan didn’t do it by himself; he wasn’t even the driving force, literally and figuratively. He got recruited by someone and driven to the scene. The recruiter came away with all the money and none of the police focus. We don’t see any signs that your boy went on any kind of a spending spree. Maybe he stuck the ring in his pocket.”

  “So you are willing to make the deal so good it can’t be refused if Carrigan gives up the recruiter?”

  “Correct,” he says.

  “There’s just one flaw in your theory,” I say. “It’s ninety percent horseshit. Carrigan wasn’t recruited, he wasn’t on the scene, and he didn’t commit the murder. The ten percent you got right is the fact that he never went on a spending spree; there never was anything to spend.”

  “If you think you can sell that to a jury,” Tasker says, “you’d better be even better than people say.”

  I smile. “Once I turn on the charm, I’m dazzling.”

  “Kimble didn’t call Karen McMaster after you left his office,” Sam says.

  We’re meeting in my office. I’m here because I asked Edna to come in to copy a bunch of documents, and this is where our copy machine is.

  When I showed her the documents, she asked, “All of these?”

  “Yes, Edna,” I said.

  She looked at them and said, “Some of them have writing on both sides.”

  “Yes, we call them two-sided documents. It’s a legal term.” She has gone off to get started, and based on her traditional document copying speed, I’m hoping to get the copies before the judge sentences Carrigan.

  I had asked Sam to keep track of Kimble’s phone, just to see if he was still close enough to McMaster to warn her that I had suspicions about her.

  Sam continues, “Actually, I should qualify that. He didn’t call her from his private cell phone, the number you called him on. It’s always possible that he made it from a company phone. I could check her phone records, but if I had to guess, I’d say he didn’t call.”

  “Did he call anyone?”

  “Not for at least two hours, and then he only called his home and one of his companies on the West Coast. Nothing suspicious.”

  I’m not terribly surprised; I had no reason to doubt that Kimble and Karen McMaster had gone their separate ways. I’m actually a little disappointed; if he called, she might start feeling pressure and might make a mistake. But there are other ways to apply pressure.

  “There’s one other thing you might want to know; I’m not sure if it means anything.”

  “What is it?”

  “Well, I looked closer at Karen McMaster’s phone records. One of the things I wanted to check was if Kimble had called her at all recently. He hadn’t.”

  “Okay.”

  “But I got deep into the records, and I saw some other calls she had made and received the day her husband was murdered. One of them could be interesting.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, that night she got a call from a number registered to someone named Carl Betters. I got his address and other personal information off the phone company records.”

  “Who is he?”

  “He’s nobody; he doesn’t exist. Not at that address or probably anywhere else. I’ve seen fake records before, and this one is fake.”

  “What time did she get the call?” I ask.

  “Ten oh eight.”

  “What time did she call the neighbor to go check on her husband?”

  Sam takes some papers out of his briefcase, and quickly moves through them to find what he’s looking for.

  “Ten seventeen.”

  “How long was the call with Carl Betters?”

  “Thirty-eight seconds.”

  There could be a number of benign explanations for this, but I don’t buy any of them. Maybe the person who called her wants to keep his or her privacy by using a phone registered in a fake name. Maybe the person isn’t fake and does exist, but Sam just can’t locate him or her. Maybe the person who called dialed a wrong number.

  I’m not in the business of believing in benign explanations or coincidences. I think this call was to tell Karen McMaster that the deed was done, and that she should put in motion the process of her husband’s body being discovered.

  “We need to find out whose phone that is,” I say.

  Sam shakes his head. “Can’t be done. I’ll find out how the bills are paid, but you can be sure the owner doesn’t blow it by writing a personal check from his real account. This is an elaborate fake.”

  Edna comes into the room carrying a fairly large stack of paper. “Here they are,” she says, and then coughs a few times.

  “Are you okay?” I ask.

  “I think I breathed in too much ink toner fumes. It can be very dangerous.”

  “You should take tomorrow off and suck up as much oxygen as you can.”

  She nods. “Good idea. You know where to find me if you absolutely have to.”

  Edna leaves, but her last comment gives me an idea. “Sam, you can’t find out whose phone it is, but can you find out where it is?” Every smartphone has a GPS in it, which is why the phone company computers can see where it is at all times. Anything the phone company can see, Sam can see.

  He thinks for a minute. “I don’t know why not. It’s not a burner phone; some of them don’t have a GPS in them. This is a real phone, just registered to a fake name.”

  “So let’s see what you can find out. If you can pull this off, there are a half dozen waffles in it for you, soaked in maple syrup.”

  “Vermont?” he asks.

  “Is there any other kind?”

  The good news is that Sam thinks he knows where the cell phone owner lives.

  The bad news is that it is a high-rise apartment building on Broadway and Eighty
-Eighth Street called the Montana. “It’s a rental building with a hundred and fifty-six apartments on twenty-six floors,” Sam says.

  “Any of them rented to someone named Carl Betters?” I ask, since that’s the pseudonym the cell phone guy used.

  “No. So he could be going by his real name, or more likely a different fake. By the way, rentals are seven thousand and up a month, so this guy has some money to spend.”

  The more we talk it out the more we realize how difficult it is going to be to locate our man, assuming it is a man. First of all, the names on the apartment rental list are not going to be particularly revealing, since our boy would likely be using a fake name. Even worse, for all we know he’s in town from Topeka, and is staying with an old college buddy.

  Second, there is absolutely no guarantee that he is involved in our case. Simply because there was a call from that phone to Karen McMaster the night of the murder does not exactly a slam dunk case make.

  Just the fact that we’re basing our hopes on this shows how weak our case currently is. Even if the guy is the leader of the Taliban, it’s a long way from proving Karen McMaster guilty, or Don Carrigan innocent.

  Compounding the problem is that there is a short delay involved in Sam getting into the phone company computers and then locating where the phone is at any particular moment. It’s not like a radar screen where he’s following a blip; if it were we’d have a better chance.

  We come up with a plan of attack. Sam is going to spend the next four or five days tracking the locations of the phone, seeing if we can detect a pattern. If the phone shows up in a particular place at a particular time with some frequency, then we can take advantage of that pattern.

  It will still be hit or miss, but we might have more of a chance of hitting.

  In the meantime, I need to focus on trial preparation. I have Hike resubmit the request we had put in for the bloody sleeve to be DNA tested. Once we had our own results, we had withdrawn the request, since we didn’t want the prosecution to know about Ernie Vinson.