Prime Witness

by Steve Martini

  He bounces a little more venom off his erstwhile client, which from all appearances is sailing well over the spikes on the kid’s head. “I think our friend here has a real problem. A case he can’t fathom,” he says. “But then I’m sure that’s nothing new for him.” He moves toward the stall.

  “I wouldn’t push too hard if I were you, Adrian.”

  He turns and fixes me with a stare, all the intensity he can muster in his mean eyes.

  “Why not?”

  “Because if you’re not careful you’ll flush the best part of yourself down that hole in there.”

  The kid laughs, out loud, from the belly, the first thing he’s understood.

  I grab my briefcase from the top of the towel holder and walk out, leaving the pimply wonder standing there alone, chortling to himself, fighting with the zipper, and looking at the closed door of the stall which has now been slammed in his face.

  But Chambers is right about one thing, though as yet he doesn’t know the half of it. I do have a problem. With the looming discrepancies in the Scofield murders, even with hard evidence on the Russian, his defense will be able to play upon the thesis that somebody else committed these murders, that they did them all, and that the police are still looking for the real killer. Given time and his nimble mind, he will, I am sure, have handy explanations for the rope and stakes found in the Russian’s van. With this as a growing backdrop, the Scofield murders are now poised, like a wrench waiting to be wedged into the cogs of my case.

  They say that time cures all. My relationship with Nikki is not healed, a long way from it, but it seems that maybe we have passed over the rockiest part of my latest lapse in judgment, picking up the pieces of Mario Feretti’s life. It has taken nearly two months to reach this point, but tonight she has even deigned to help me with one aspect of the Putah Creek cases. “A family outing,” she calls this. More than a little sarcasm to her words.

  I have offered to entertain Sarah in my office while Nikki works on the computer. Sarah skipped through the door like she was entering Disneyland North.

  “There it is,” I say.

  Sitting forlorn in the center of one of the empty desks in the clerical pool is a small desktop computer from Karen Scofield’s apartment.

  Denny Henderson and Claude spent the better part of an afternoon searching her place for leads as to what she and Abbott were working on at the time of the murders. They came up empty, except for a few papers which Claude is studying, and the computer, which he delivered here.

  Rather than screw with this little desktop machine and risk the loss of vital information, I have called on Nikki. In her various jobs she has touched every computer known to mankind. She had been making plans to go for her master’s degree in computer science, but this is on hold now, until I can find the time to take some of the load at home.

  “Do you know what software she was using?” she asks. Nikki’s talking about Karen Scofield and her little computer.

  I shrug my shoulders and point to a pile of little cardboard boxes and books that Claude seized from the apartment when he took the machine.

  She starts flipping pages, looking at the indexes to these books. I stand there for several minutes, feeling like a potted plant.

  She looks over her shoulder at me. “Go play with your daughter,” she says.

  Sarah is at my desk, stapler and hole punch in hand, an assortment of pads and pencils at the ready. Every few minutes I am called in and handed important slips of paper covered in gibberish she claims she can read, numbers and a few letters, some of these are still written backwards. Tonight we are playing bank. She is the teller. This goes on for the better part of an hour until she bores with this game. Nikki is still fighting with the machine in the other room. Finally a few yawns from my daughter and she is pulling her shoes off, the sign that sleep is not far off. I put her on the couch in the reception area and cover her with my coat. In five minutes she is asleep.

  I head for my office and settle into the chair behind the desk, pick up the phone and dial. On the second ring Claude answers.

  “It’s me,” I say. “Did you find anything?”

  “Not much,” he says. Claude is home poring through a stack of papers taken from Karen Scofield’s apartment.

  “Mostly personal correspondence. A few letters,” he says. “There was something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Two letters to a laboratory supply company down south ordering some live mice.”

  “Mice?” I say.

  “Yeah. The lady was into mice in a big way.”

  “Probably experiments. Scofield was a scientist.” My deep, impenetrable knowledge of things scientific.

  “Could be,” says Claude, “but three thousand of ’em. In a four-month period?”

  “Three thousand? What could anybody do with three thousand mice?”

  He makes a noise on the other end of the line, like search me. “Maybe they were eating the things,” he says. “Could be the latest hors d’oeuvre among the college crowd.”

  “Did you find any sign of them at the university, in Scofield’s office or his lab?”

  “No. But it explains the pellets.”

  “What pellets?”

  “Grain, feed pellets for livestock. We found two hundred-pound sacks still stitched up, and a lot of grain dust, like there may have been more bags at one time, in the corner of the lab.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Mice love the stuff,” he says. “My dad used to use it to feed hogs. Had it by the ton. The mice always burrowed their way into the bags when he stored it in the barn. They feasted on it.”

  “You think Scofield was feeding the grain to the mice?”

  “I don’t know. There’s a couple of kids, undergraduates I’m told, who worked with him on projects from time to time. I’m gonna send Henderson over tomorrow to see if he can track ’em down. Maybe they can enlighten us.”

  “Anything else?”

  “That’s it,” he says.

  “Is that everything from her office?”

  “Read it all, three times,” he says.

  “Put the documents in the evidence locker for now,” I tell him. “I’ll see you in the morning. By then I should know whether we’ve got anything in the computer.”

  We sign off. I hang up.

  I can hear the clicking of keys outside as Nikki works away. I head out to see what she has. The little screen is all lit up with menus. I move in over her shoulder and get a quick glance, long lists of backlit words as she flashes through screens.

  “I assume you want data files, things she loaded in for storage or to be printed out?”

  “Right.”

  Halfway down the screen something sticks out, more than the standard three- or four-letter symbols—the word “PEREGRINE.”

  “There,” I say. “What’s that?”

  She punches some more keys and comes up with a clean screen. Up at the top is the name of the directory—“PEREGRINE” with the hard disk drive designation, the little prompt letter “c:”.

  “Can we get into the directory?” I say.

  “This is the menu,” she says. “We can go in, but it won’t do us any good.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s empty,” she says.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “If there were any files they’d be listed here, on the menu, by file name.”

  She flashes back to the parent directory one more time. “There it is, big as life, but no files,” she says. “What about this?” She points to another entry. “PEREGRINE.42”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s not a directory listing. No DIR designation. It looks like a data file that got misplaced,” she says. “Maybe somebody hit the wr
ong key and dumped it into the root directory by mistake.”

  “Can we call it up?”

  Again she punches buttons and this time a letter appears on the screen. There’s no salutation other than the name “Bill” and no address as to whom it was sent.

  I read it. The letter is like walking into a room in the middle of a conversation. It refers to subjects in past correspondence without any clue as to the substance of those items. I try to read between the lines as best I can.

  Dear Bill:

  In reference to your letter of 9 Feb., three pair are now in place. We are watching them closely for progress. An additional seven have been put out individually. If things continue to go well, we will be at full strength by early summer, and in a position to observe progress on an ongoing basis.

  If you can ship four more pair, before spring, we believe we can place them before the snows fall. Will await your reply.

  Karen

  “What do you make of it?” She’s looking at me.

  “I’m not sure,” I say. “It would help if we had some way of determining what might have come before this letter. Other pieces in the chain of correspondence.”

  “It’s only a guess,” she says. “But I think maybe the writer numbered everything under each topic sequentially, each file with a separate number.”

  “Is there any way to find out what else was in the Peregrine directory? To retrieve the lost files?”

  She makes a face like this is a long shot.

  “Could you do it? Here in the office?” I say. “I can’t allow the computer to leave the office.”

  She looks at me like I don’t even trust my wife.

  “When am I supposed to come into the office to do this?” she says.

  “You can do it at night,” I say. “I’ll watch Sarah.” I can tell I am pressing the outer limits of Nikki’s tolerance. She looks at me almost dazed that I would have the gall to ask this again. The audacity of the lawyer.

  She gives me a major shrug. “One more time,” she says, “and then that’s it. And you make an end of this case. Next quarter I go back to school, come hell or high water. Do you hear me?” she says.

  I nod my agreement.

  “I mean it,” she says. “I don’t care what your problem is. You get back to a single law office or we are history,” she says.

  Five days later I am in Feretti’s old office, cloistered with Lenore Goya, preparing for the eventual trial of Andre Iganovich. In Vancouver, they are now three days into an extradition hearing that was originally expected to take only two. We are getting hourly reports, color, and play-by-play from Denny Henderson whom Claude has sent north for this purpose.

  Lenore and I are busy preparing for the preliminary hearing where we will test the evidence to date in front of an impartial magistrate, our quest for a holding order on the Russian to bind him over for trial on four counts of first degree murder in the superior court.

  In all probability that is at least four or five months off.

  The phone rings on my desk, the hot line, direct from the outside.

  “Hello.”

  It’s Henderson, breathless and excited.

  “You’re not gonna believe this.” He’s sucking air like he’s run the four-minute mile. “He’s on the street,” he says.

  “Who’s on the street? What are you talking about?”

  “Iganovich. The court released him five minutes ago.”

  “What?”

  “A problem with the documents,” he says.

  The blood in my veins runs cold. All documents sent to Canada originated in this office.

  “Slow down,” I say. “Tell me what happened.”

  “Defense made a motion at the end of the hearing, what they called a ‘no evidence motion’ based on a defect in the documents. It came out of the blue,” he says. “Could have knocked Jacoby over with a feather. Iganovich’s lawyers discovered that the certified copy of the charging statute was the wrong one.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The section of the penal code, the murder statute, that we used to charge the Russian, it was an old statute that’s been repealed and reenacted in another form. We sent the wrong one under certification up to Jacoby.”

  Oh shit. I think this to myself, silently, in that place reserved for all private panic. What Henderson is telling me is that someone has botched the uncomplicated job of copying the statute, and certifying it for use in the Canadian hearing.

  “Hold on,” I say. I cup my hand over the mouthpiece of the phone.

  “Who copied the statutes for the extradition package?” I’m talking to Lenore.

  She shakes her head, like she has no idea. “It was done before you brought me on board, into the case,” she says. “What’s goin’ on?”

  “The Russian’s been released.”

  Round eyes from Goya.

  “Find out who assembled the documents. Get ’em in here,” I say.

  She’s out the door, to the steno pool.

  I’m back on the line. “Where is he now?” I’m talking about Iganovich.

  “He left the court with his lawyers. I followed ’em downstairs. They didn’t waste any time. Got in a taxi and left. Jacoby had two RCMP officers follow them. To try and keep tabs,” he says.

  “I can’t believe this,” I tell him. “They couldn’t hold him?”

  “Jacoby says no. Says everything turned on the documents. Kept telling me the devil was in the detail, whatever the hell that means.” His voice fades a bit, like he’s turned away from the mouthpiece. “Here, you wanna talk to him?”

  The next voice I hear on the phone is Herb Jacoby. “Listen, my friend,” he says, “I’m sorry, but there was nothing I could do. With the sixty-day statute running, the court had no choice but to release him. You should be happy you’re not up here,” he tells me. “His Lordship was rather pissed off.” Jacoby’s talking about the Canadian judge. “Three days of his time down the johnny flusher, and forced to release the man on a technicality,” he says. “Not a good show, not good at all.”

  I apologize for the screwup. Tell him I’m getting to the bottom of it.

  As I’m talking to Jacoby, my mind is wandering back in time, to Chambers’s smug attitude in the washroom that day. Suddenly it hits me, he had been lying in the weeds aware of this deficiency in our filing for weeks, biding his time, waiting to spring this trap.

  Jacoby wants to know how long before I can get another warrant up, to rearrest Iganovich. “I trust you can understand, given the man’s propensities we would rather not have him walking free up here—too long,” he says.

  “I’ll have one in an hour,” I tell him. “I’ll fax it up there. It may take a little longer for the diplomatic note from the State Department.” This is a requirement to effect a provisional arrest in a foreign country pending an extradition hearing.

  Lenore’s back in the office, followed by Irene Perez, one of the stenos.

  I can tell by the look on her face that she is scared, primal senses tell her that she is on the carpet, but she doesn’t know why.

  I tell them to hold on a minute.

  I hit the intercom button on my phone. I get Jane Rhodes.

  “Get me the number for the State Department in Washington, the lawyers who did Iganovich. I’ll wait.”

  Irene Perez is beginning to shake all over my carpet. I think she may soil it if I don’t relieve the tension. “Sit down,” I tell her. “Relax. I’ll be with you in a minute.”

  Rhodes is back to me. “Do you want me to dial them?”

  Thank God for a little efficiency. “Yes. Ring me the moment you have them. Tell ’em it’s an emergency. If they’re in a meeting, tell them we have to break in.”

  Irene Perez is twenty-five
years old, a single mother, with a little baby I have seen in the office on family occasions. She is pleasant and anxious to please. At this moment she is terrified, sitting in a chair across from my desk.

  “I don’t hold you responsible,” I say. “It’s my fault for not checking the documents,” I tell her. “But I have to know how this happened.” I explain the mess up in Vancouver, the document in question.

  “You shouldn’t blame yourself,” she says.

  I look at her, like thank you for this absolution, now tell me what happened?

  “It wasn’t among the papers you reviewed,” she says.

  “Why not?”

  “Because the code books were being updated. The annual pocket parts,” she says. She’s talking about the little inserts that come out yearly, with the new laws, and are inserted into pockets in the back of each volume.

  “We were replacing them. All the books were apart in the library.” She talks like she was on top of this project.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “A lawyer from Washington called, I think it was the State Department. He said he needed the code section to complete the extradition package before he could send it on to Canada. He said he needed it by the next day. We Fed-Ex’ed it to him.”

  I look at her cross-eyed. “Those kinds of calls are supposed to be referred to a lawyer, Irene.”

  “But it was,” she says, “referred to a lawyer. You weren’t in.” She looks at me with big, olive-eyed innocence. “The only one here was Roland, Mr. Overroy. He took care of it.”

  I sit there, staring at her in stone-deaf silence, uttering a mantra in my mind’s ear, cursing the cruel fates that lifted this thing from the able hands of Irene Perez.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “The World Center for Birds of Prey.” It is an unlikely name for an organization, but Nikki passes me a slip of paper with this moniker on it, a phone number, and a man’s name. This is the information she’s gleaned from the “Peregrine Directory,” the files missing from Karen Scofield’s computer.

  “I think she was writing to this group,” she says.