The Liar

by Steve Cavanagh

  What the hell had I just done?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  “He was angry on the phone,” said Susan.

  I nodded, and sat down a couple of questions too late. Inside, I was screaming at myself – but I didn’t let any of that show. If I did, the jury would pick up on it in a heartbeat. And King would do her level best to show it. She was walking toward the witness before I had time to pull my seat below the table.

  “Mrs Howell, it has been put to you that your husband’s demeanor was not as you described it. Are you sure your recollection is correct?”

  “Positive,” she said, again looking at me and with triumph in her eyes.

  “Your Honor, I have a motion for the court,” said King. The judge sent the jury out and called us both for a sidebar.

  “What’s the motion?” said Judge Schutlz.

  “The motion is to introduce cell phone data, from the defendant and the witness,” said King.

  A cold sensation spread over my skin.

  “This is an ambush, Judge. Any relevant information should’ve been handed over in discovery. And how did the police obtain this information? Was there a warrant issued, because I haven’t seen one,” I said.

  “Your Honor, the defense opened this line of questioning with the witness. Mr Flynn put it to her that she was being dishonest in relation to her impression of her husband from those phone calls. We didn’t know that was disputed and it so happens we have relevant evidence for the jury to consider in relation to that point. In fairness to the jury, they should have the full picture. We have the voicemail itself and the relevant cell data for the calls,” said King.

  I didn’t argue back – the point was lost. Judge Schultz would allow the cell phone evidence.

  “I’m granting the motion, let’s get the jury back in.”

  If I’d pressed my objection any further I’d have risked alienating the judge – and it wouldn’t have gotten me anywhere. So I nodded, turned and walked back to my seat like nothing had happened. It was the first time that I had an opportunity to get a full view of the crowd. Behind the prosecution table I saw their witnesses, spread out amongst the crowd. Funny, the prosecution witnesses normally sit behind the prosecutor, the defense witnesses behind the defense table; in many ways a criminal trial was like a church wedding that nobody wanted to attend. I saw the fire investigators, the experts, SAC Lynch, and George. Howell’s driver sat with his head bowed, rubbing his knee. Poor guy – sitting on a cramped bench wouldn’t do his leg any good.

  Further back, close to the doors of the courtroom, I saw Harper staring at me. Disappointment writ large on her face. I should’ve listened to her. First chance I got, she and I would talk.

  A face appeared behind Harper, straining to take a look. Bald, white beard, the face that I’d seen first thing this morning; Max Copeland. He probably wanted to check out his competition, size me up, and see how I handled myself in the courtroom.

  If I was him, I wouldn’t be too impressed so far.

  “Your re-direct, Miss King,” said the Judge. King removed two USB memory sticks from a wallet in the prosecution file. Handed one to me. The other she slotted into the port on the right side of the large plasma TV closest to the witness stand and swiped her hand across the lower half of the TV to switch it on. An ADA handed her the remote, and she held it behind her back.

  “Mrs Howell, Mr Flynn has suggested that you are lying when you said your husband was angry in the phone calls he made to you. Can you confirm that you saved the voicemail he left you on the day of Caroline’s disappearance?” said King.

  “I did.”

  “Is this the voicemail?”

  She whipped around and hit play. The screen turned a vivid blue, and I heard the beginning of a voicemail introduction.

  “Saved messages. You have one saved message. It’s me. I’m in the office, call me back.”

  “That’s the message,” said Susan.

  For a second, I thought I was in the clear. The message was innocuous, and fair enough, he did sound a little pissed off.

  But King wasn’t finished. She returned to a file of pages that sat in a lilac folder on the desk. She flicked through it and came out with some copies of a report. I’d seen those kinds of reports before; the FBI Forensics logo sat brightly in the right-hand corner of the title page. She handed a copy to me, one to the judge, and one to the witness.

  “Mrs Howell, this is a forensic analysis carried out by the FBI on the defendant’s cell phone. The report catalogs points of origin for cell phone calls made in the United States by the cell phone number at the top left of the page. First of all, can you confirm that is your husband’s cell phone number?”

  “That’s his number,” said Susan.

  King directed the witness to a particular page.

  I was way ahead of her. I’d read the date on the relevant call, flicked forward to the map which they append at the end of these reports, and pushed the whole report in front of Howell. I expected my client to pick up the report and at least flick through it. He left it on the table, without picking it up or even looking at it. That wasn’t good. It meant Howell knew what was coming, and he didn’t care. My shoulders sagged and I felt as though a lead weight in my chest had suddenly sunk into my gut. The judge nodded, and the ADAs started passing out the reports amongst the jurors.

  I looked at King. She didn’t even bother pointing out the anger that came across in the voicemail. The jury had ears and they could pick that up on their own. No, King was winding up the bat, ready to hit one out of the park.

  “Mrs Howell, please turn to the last page of this report. You will see the FBI have matched the geographic origin of this call to a cell-phone tower in Virginia. Do you agree?”

  Mrs Howell studied the report.

  “Yes, that looks like where the call was made from. The times match.”

  “So your husband left you an angry voicemail saying he was in the office and you should call him back, and this evidence indicates that your husband made the call from Virginia. Mrs Howell, where is your husband’s office?”

  “Manhattan. He was lying to me in the voicemail. He wasn’t where he said he was.”

  “Mrs Howell, just one final question to wrap this up. You will see the map on the last page of the report has a blue dot and a red dot marked ‘1’ close beside it. For the benefit of the jury, the blue dot is the location where Caroline’s car was found, and the red dot is the rough location where the defendant made the call and left you the voicemail message. Mrs Howell, your husband seems to have called you on the day of your stepdaughter’s disappearance, and left you that message, from a location half a mile from where your stepdaughter’s car was eventually found – do you know why your husband would be in that area instead of in his office?”

  “No, I’ve no idea.”

  “Any idea about why he would want to conceal his real location from you that day?” said King.

  “To give himself a false alibi,” said Susan.

  I objected, the judge sustained it, and the jury were told to disregard the last statement of the witness. There was about as much hope of them disregarding the statement as there was of me winning the case. King had played it perfectly. I had no doubt that if I hadn’t asked about the phonecall, King would’ve recalled Susan Howell in order to introduce this evidence. Her best play was to get me to open the door to this line of questioning – so the jury and the judge could see her slamming that door back in my face. I hadn’t seen it coming, and the jury knew it. It made them doubt me, made them doubt my client. Great evidence is even better if you can make your opponent appear as though they’d brought it up. Trials are mind games. The prosecution would seek to undermine me and my confidence at every opportunity. They wanted me to question my tactics, make me afraid to ask questions.

  No way was I gonna let that happen.

  I ran my fingers over my tie, smoothing it down. It was a nervous reflex, and one that I told myself to stop. Every tim
e my fingers touched that tie pin I thought about Howell. I would never hand over the pin. Not while we were both still breathing.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Howell slumped over the desk in the dull gray consultation booth, below the courtroom. Elbows on the table, fingers in his hair, as if he was about to ram his head into the pine desk.

  My back was to the door of the eight-by-six room. A chair sat empty in front of me. I put my heel to the door, hands in my pockets and stared at the frayed, navy carpet tiles. Neither of us spoke. I couldn’t win a case for a man who was bent on self-destruction, a man who lied to me, who kept things from me. When I set foot in a courtroom, knowledge is power. I had to know more about the case than anyone else. That was my thing. I just had my ass kicked because the prosecution knew more than me. This wasn’t going to work. I checked my watch. We had five minutes before we were due back, and I needed to be able to rescue something from Susan Howell. I had one more bite of the cherry.

  “Lenny, unless you tell me everything I’m going to walk. I can’t represent you if you won’t work with me. You want to die in jail? Fine. Don’t bring me down with you. Don’t hold things back. Remember, you called me six months ago. You wanted me in on this. So use me. If the jury had to make a decision right now, you’d get convicted for her murder and the real killer gets away. Do you want that?”

  No movement. Blank eyes boring into the names of old felons that had been scraped into the flesh of the desk.

  “Sixty seconds. That’s all you’ve got. You talk, or I walk.”

  His left hand slipped from behind his head, and landed lazily on the table. His eyes closed slowly, gently, almost like the slightest movement caused him pain.

  Fifty seconds.

  I heard the soft tap, tap, tap of his foot beneath the desk. My breath, his breath, and the tap of cheap shoes on a thin, loose, carpet tile were the only sounds in the room.

  Thirty-five seconds.

  The soft whisper of the guard’s key chain, distant and muted as he walked away from the consultation booth, and back to the security desk.

  Twenty Seconds.

  I kicked off the door, stood up straight. My hands dug into my pockets and I stared at Howell one last time.

  “Good luck. I’m deeply sorry about your daughter,” I said, turning to leave.

  The door handle had turned a quarter inch when he said, “I was in a cemetery.”

  I froze. Thinking that it would be wise to crank the handle and leave Howell to his fate. I’d been so mad at getting nailed in the courtroom by King, I’d forgotten that I’d just given Howell an open question. God knows what he was about to tell me. If he told me that he’d taken Caroline – I wouldn’t represent him. Shit. I wasn’t thinking straight. I’d been treating Lenny with kid gloves when I should’ve been pounding him, getting him ready for the trial of his life.

  “Which cemetery?” I asked, still holding the door handle.

  “Green Pastures, in Virginia.”

  “What were you doing there?”

  “Visiting a grave,” he said.

  I pulled the door handle down the whole way, cracked the seal on the door.

  “Wait, please wait, Eddie. I’m sorry. I was visiting my first wife.”

  I let go of the handle and listened as the door sucked itself shut. His head was up, and his eyes were focused on me. Pulling out a chair, I sat down opposite Howell.

  He nodded, leaned back, and took a photo from his pants pocket. It was a small picture – laminated to keep it from fraying in his pocket. He handed it to me. Howell’s first wife had long brown hair that spilled over her shoulders. She wore a floral dress and sat on a clump of rocks looking out to sea. From her neck hung a silver chain with a butterfly pendant.

  She was beautiful.

  “I bought her that pendant on our first date. She wore it almost every day,” he said.

  “So, was it an anniversary of some kind? Is that why you went to the grave?”

  “In a way, yeah.”

  It wasn’t great. In fact, it was pretty thin, but it was a better excuse for being in the area than kidnapping your daughter and dumping her car. It didn’t tell me why he lied to his current wife about it.

  “And do you visit her on every anniversary?”

  “I used to go there every week. But I stopped soon after I met Susan. She didn’t like me spending time there. Somehow, Susan was jealous. Maybe because we had never broken up, and now that she was dead, we never would. One night, Susan told me that it was like I was cheating on her with my dead wife. God, why didn’t I end it with Susan sooner?”

  “So that’s why you lied to her about where you were?” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “So why were you there that day in particular?”

  “It’s the day she passed. July second.”

  Nodding, I said, “Okay, but there’s one thing I don’t get. When you left that voicemail message you were pissed as all hell. Why?”

  He didn’t answer at first. His head fell, his breathing became fast.

  “It’s her family plot. For years it was just my first wife and her parents. But when I got to the grave that day, the soil had been turned over. Somebody else must have been put in the plot … on … on top of her.”

  He stood and began pacing up and down the floor, drawing in great gulps of air and letting it stream out of his nostrils. He looked ready to kill somebody.

  “Lenny, take a moment. I need to know. This is important.”

  I sat in silence, giving him time. He had to wind down on his own. I’d read Howell’s military service record. He was decorated, highly trained, and he’d left the marines and went straight to the police force with glowing recommendations. Those references helped when he left the force and set up Howell Security – the kidnap and ransom game was ripe for someone like him. He’d been on the inside, with the marines, the police, and the FBI. But for all his medals and specialist training, there were rumors from his days in the force. Rumors that suspects died from beatings, that fatal shootings weren’t all as clean as IAB had made out. For the first time, I saw the old Howell. This was not a guy to cross. If you did, chances were that you’d end up dead rather than in jail.

  “My first wife’s sister died a few years ago. She was buried someplace else. At least that’s what I heard. But the cemetery she’d been buried in had to be moved. A development commission were regenerating the land. I found out about it last year. I’d received a letter about it because I hold the papers to the family plot. I wrote back and told them to dump her body in the river. I didn’t want it. They must’ve moved her anyway, put it in the last space in the plot with the rest of the family.”

  “You’re not making much sense, Lenny. You’re telling me your dead wife’s sister got buried there recently – and that’s what made you mad?”

  I heard a dull crack from his neck as his head snapped in my direction. Eyes gleaming wet.

  “She died because of her sister. I didn’t want her stinking corpse anywhere near my wife.”

  I didn’t know anything about this. Didn’t know his late wife even had a sister, much less that she was responsible for her death. For the want of anything better to ask, I said, “I’m sorry. What was her name, your wife’s sister?”

  “Julie Rosen,” he said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  I was careful not to let the name register in my facial expression. My mind felt as if it was rolling down a long hill, somersaulting and crashing into boulders and occasionally when it hit a tree, the spinning would stop, just for the briefest of moments and in that second an image almost formed in my mind, and then the world turned as the tumbling began again.

  I was embarrassed to ask, I felt like I should’ve already known, but I managed to ask him to remind me of his first wife’s name. Rebecca. Howell would say no more than that. I’d pushed him too far. He had retreated into himself, again. I thought about threatening to walk away, but this time I knew he would just let go –
he had given me everything that he could at that point. Forcing any more out of him could damage that mind even more and there wasn’t much left in him.

  I got up and left the consultation booth.

  Harry picked up my call on his cell. I was surprised he managed to take the call as I expected him to be in court.

  “It’s me. I need you to grab the Julie Rosen files and get up here to White Plains. Can you do that?” I said.

  “What do you mean, can I do that?” said Harry.

  “Well, don’t you have a court list full of cases?”

  Silence.

  “Oh, oh that. Yeah, well I’m sure I can get another judge to fill in for a day. Where are you staying?”

  “There’s a hotel not far, just beyond the overpass closest to the courthouse. When do you think you can make it?”

  “I can be there in an hour. Why? What’s happened?” said Harry.

  “I’ll tell you when you get here. I’m just glad you can make it. How come? Did you have a case collapse on you today? I thought you were pretty busy.”

  I heard some mirthless laughter on the other end of the line.

  “Thanks to you, Eddie, I’ve got a lot of free time. I’m on a leave of absence. It was that or get suspended. I got the call from the Judicial Complaints Commissioner about a half hour ago,” he said.

  “You were threatened with suspension? For what?”

  “Tampering with an inquiry. Apparently you paid a visit to Max Copeland’s office this morning.”

  My fist took a chunk out of the old plaster that peeled away from the corridor wall.

  “I’m sorry, Harry. I just talked to him, I didn’t threaten him. Well, maybe a little. And his security guy put his hands on me first.”

  “I know you thought you were doing the right thing. Doesn’t matter, they were probably going to suspend me anyway. Copeland filed his final appeal brief this morning. He claims Julie Rosen had defective counsel, and that she was mentally unfit to plead.”