Prime Witness

by Steve Martini

  “I checked with the Boise police,” says Dusalt. “It’s a research outfit, and a sanctuary for birds. Cops don’t know much about ’em. They pulled a few records for me, looked the place up on a map.”

  “What do they do exactly?” I ask.

  “According to the cops, they raise raptors.”

  “You make it sound kinky.” Lenore winks at him.

  “Birds of prey,” he says.

  “I know.” She smiles.

  “Hawks, falcons, birds of prey,” he says, “they hatch ’em, raise ’em, and let ’em go in the wild. A labor of love,” says Claude. “I’m told that the center is one of a kind. They take in birds from all over the world, breed them, and then do their thing to reorder the balance of nature.”

  “Did you call the place, talk to anybody?”

  “Yeah.” Claude looks at his notes again. “I tried for this guy William Rattigan.” If Nikki is right, this is the “Bill” from Karen Scofield’s computer files.

  “He was away on business. I guess he runs the place. The director. That’s his title. The woman on the phone was cooperative, but she didn’t know a lot. Abbott Scofield was a regional representative for the center in this area, sat on its board of directors with Rattigan. They were involved in a number of projects together.”

  “Did she say where Rattigan had gone?”

  “East coast for a seminar. I got the number of the hotel he’s staying at. He was out so I left a message at the desk for him to call me back.”

  “Anything else?” I ask.

  He shakes his head and turns a blank page on his notebook.

  I turn to Lenore. “What did you find?”

  She’s been at the university library most of the afternoon.

  “Guess how many listings?” she asks.

  I shake my head, like I have no idea.

  “Five,” she says.

  Goya’s been playing with the computerized version of the Guide to Periodical Literature. Checking to see what she could find out about the center in any magazines or other publications.

  She reaches into her purse and pulls out a long narrow sheaf of paper folded down the center. She opens it up. It’s several pages of letter-sized paper stapled together at the top left corner.

  “This was the best of the lot,” she says, “out of Audubon.”

  I open the photocopied article and read.

  She takes it from my hands and turns a few more pages, then flips it around and drops it on the desk in front of me again, tapping one of the photos with her finger.

  I look at the picture, a wooden tower built at the edge of some rocky precipice, a silhouetted figure climbing a makeshift ladder to the top. I read the cutline underneath.

  On Idaho’s Grouse Peak, university ornithologist Abbott Scofield climbs to a hack box to place extra food for young peregrines.

  “If you want my guess,” she says, “that’s the project he was working on when they were killed.”

  Lenore has wandered into my office. “What are you doing for lunch?” she says.

  I reach for my coat.

  “My turn,” she says. She means to pay for lunch. The last two have been on me.

  “I won’t argue.”

  “You know,” she says, “the thing we talked about the other day. The Scofield evidence. There may be a way to get it in.” She means before the grand jury.

  “Let’s walk and talk,” I say. We head out the door.

  “It’s a little duplicitous,” she says.

  I wrinkle an eyebrow.

  “We’d be setting up the other side, just a bit.” She explains that there would be no deception on the court.

  “All’s fair in that war,” I say. “Within limits. What’s your idea?”

  “I’ve been doing a little research,” she says.

  Neither of us is well versed in the aspects of a grand jury. To find the people best honed in this, you would have to go back through a generation of lawyers, most of whom are now retired.

  “People v. Johnson,” she says. “What’s called a ‘Johnson letter,”’ she tells me.

  I’ve seen the case before, somewhere, but can’t recall its rule.

  She explains. It seems the courts have held that while the defendant has no right of representation before a grand jury, he has the right to insist that all exculpatory evidence, anything that could point to his innocence, be disclosed to the jury, which then can choose to look at it in detail, or not, as the jury chooses.

  “What’s the ‘Johnson letter’?” I ask.

  “It’s the mechanism the courts came up with to trigger the requirements of the case. If the defendant sends the prosecutor a letter,” she says, “demanding that certain evidence, deemed to be exculpatory, be given to the grand jury, the prosecutor has no choice. He has to disclose that evidence. If he doesn’t, it’s automatic reversal. The indictment will be quashed.”

  I whistle, a high pitch. “A real silver bullet,” I say.

  She nods.

  We’re out the front door, down the steps.

  “Where do you want to go?” I ask.

  “How about Quiche Alley,” she says. This is the salad and soup spot a block away, light fare. We head in that direction.

  “What I don’t understand,” she says, “is why you want to do it. The Scofield stuff could be dynamite. Confuse a jury with it and Chambers will turn it into the best defense going.”

  “Very likely,” I say.

  “We don’t charge his client with the Scofield murders, but instead admit that there’s probably another killer out there someplace, still on the loose. If I were defending, I’d love it,” she says.

  “Exactly. You don’t think Chambers has already seen the possibilities in Scofield? He’d have to be a fool,” I say. “But it’s still an open question, how damaging the stuff would be.”

  We walk a little further in silence. Then I speak.

  “What are twelve innocent and objective souls going to say when they see the Scofield evidence at trial, when it’s mixed and stirred in a courtroom with the other testimony, the physical evidence? Is it going to explode in our faces, or go inert?”

  She shrugs like she has no idea.

  “Precisely,” I say. I look at her, a sideways glance as we walk down the street. “That’s why I want to take it in front of the grand jury,” I say, “to test-drive the case.”

  She stops in mid stride and looks over at me, tracking on the strategy. She laughs a little. “Interesting,” she says, nodding her head. I can tell the wheels are turning upstairs. “He’s not there. Chambers isn’t there to see you do it.”

  I smile. “Just like a shadow jury,” I say.

  We start to move again, down the street.

  It is the latest fad among the civil sharks who try the mega-buck tort cases. Hired, private focus groups, average citizens paid to be locked in a room for days with lawyers. There the attorneys sample their wares in advance of trial, their theories and evidence to see what will sell and what won’t, the best defenses. Mine is only a modest takeoff on this latest tool of litigation.

  “But we won’t have to pay for it,” I say. “All we have to do is figure a way to get Chambers to ask that the Scofield evidence be played out in the grand jury.”

  “That won’t be too hard,” she says.

  I stop. I look at her.

  “Simple,” she says. “We send him a letter telling him that it is not our intention to put the Scofield evidence before the grand jury, on grounds that it is irrelevant and could confuse jurors. We give him a citation to Johnson in the letter and let him read the law.”

  I smile. Lenore Goya is becoming a quick study on the temperament and tactics of Adrian Chambers. Like blood to a shark, her correspondence will, no d
oubt, draw the quickest Johnson letter ever crafted by human hands in this state.

  I smile at her. “My treat,” I say. Lenore has earned her lunch.

  Chapter Nineteen

  It has come like a hot rocket, Chambers’s rendition of the so-called “Johnson letter,” produced so promptly that it is difficult to believe it was crafted by human hands.

  Lenore is ecstatic. It is all she could have hoped for, and as I read it, perhaps a little bit more.

  “He’s probably waiting for us to file a motion by way of objection,” she says. Goya is certain that Chambers is girding himself for our pitch to the court, our anticipated argument to keep the Scofield stuff away from the grand jury.

  “He’ll grow a long white beard on that watch,” I tell her. His letter is unequivocal. He’s thrown the door open wide for us. He won’t be able to complain later that the Scofield evidence is irrelevant or prejudicial to his client.

  “If we can get the jury to bite,” I say, “we can run it up the pole and see how it flies.” I’m talking about the details, the discrepancies in the Scofield case. We are both wondering whether we will be able to convince a jury of the existence of another killer, a copycat. If we are lucky, we will have a dry run to find out.

  Lenore has also given me some bad news in this meeting. It seems Kay Sellig with her ear to the ground at the Department of Justice has gotten wind that Acosta’s formal letter of complaint has arrived there, questioning my handling of the Russian’s extradition from Canada. She has no idea what the Attorney General will do with this thing, but for now it is ticking like a bomb in his in-basket. All I need right now is the bad press of some government inquiry looking over my shoulder.

  For the moment I’m holding Chambers’s letter, studying its terms.

  As if it were fired from a sawed-off barrel, Chambers’s Johnson letter has been loaded with a lot of scatter shot. He has reached into the hot ashes of defeat on his failed attempt for a quick preliminary hearing, and seeks to try his case before the grand jury by correspondence. This is, in my view, a mistake.

  In addition to the physical evidence found in the Russian’s van, Iganovich had made those damaging utterances at the point of his arrest in Canada, statements overheard by the two security guards who took him into custody. While it is debatable whether any of these statements could be viewed as wholesale admissions, a jury might see them as concessions of guilty knowledge. It would not be a far leap of faith for a jury to conclude that it was not the vehicle which concerned the defendant so much as its contents.

  Chambers now uses his Johnson letter to put a favorable spin on these statements before the grand jury. He claims that his client was concerned by the thought of delinquent parking fees on the abandoned vehicle. According to the unlikely story, Iganovich thought this was the reason for his detention in Canada. He plays upon the fact that the man spoke only broken English, that he was in a foreign country and confused. He claims others had parked the car for Iganovich and failed to provide him with the parking stub, that the Russian thought this was a big item, that it played upon his fears, and bred anxieties. Hence his blurted statements about the van. It is a fanciful story. I can only credit Chambers with an inventive if somewhat implausible imagination.

  True to form, he does not identify this convenient third party, the person who allegedly parked the van.

  “It begs a question,” says Lenore.

  I look at her.

  “How does he intend to get this story before a jury,” she says, “at trial?”

  Goya is right. Without Iganovich as a witness on the stand to play out this unlikely scenario before a jury it may be a song with a single chorus, one that will be sung only here, before the grand jury.

  “Maybe he has another witness,” I say. “A friend who will testify that he parked the vehicle.”

  She makes a face. “And incriminate himself?” she says.

  I shake my head like I have no other explanation.

  “We’ll have to wait for the disclosure of their witness list at trial,” she says.

  “Maybe not,” I tell her. “For evidence to come before the grand jury it must be admissible at the time of trial. We have a right to know the source of this testimony before we place it in front of the grand jury.”

  “What are you saying? We force him to identify the alleged driver of the van now?” she says.

  “That’s one way.”

  “He has another option,” she says. “He could strip the item from his letter, take it off the table for the time being.” Lenore guesses that when pressed, this will be what Chambers does.

  She is probably right. It is a notorious practice, and one that emanates from the darker side of the defense bar, the last-minute production of a convenient alibi witness. It is an invitation to perjury as old as the law.

  The legislature of this state has sought to deal with it over the years, crafting laws which require the early posting of witness lists, to give the prosecution time to check out the credibility of witnesses before they take the stand. But even these are sometimes bent by judges in an effort at fairness, to give the defendant a final word.

  “Let’s make a demand on Chambers,” I say, “invite an offer of proof as to which witnesses if any will verify his story on the parked van.”

  “Flush him out?” she says.

  I nod.

  I can tell by the look on Lenore’s face that she likes this approach.

  For the moment, however, there is something about Adrian’s letter that is to me more troubling. I have looked at it from every angle, so much so that its corners are now dog-eared. As I read it again, I get an uncomfortable, queasy feeling, that something is wrong.

  “His letter is like a road map. And I’m troubled,” I say, “by the specifics.”

  “How he knew the details,” she says. “I was wondering that myself.” Lenore has seen it, too, though she mentions it only now.

  “How could he know what was in the Scofield file?” I say. “It’s been sealed. We didn’t charge his client with these murders.” I make a face. “So Chambers has no access to the particulars involved in these crimes.”

  “A good guess on his part,” she says. “He knows for example that we’ve matched up ends of the cord used to tie the first four victims to the ground. It was in the police reports in those cases. The same with the metal stakes, that the ones used to kill the college kids were ground to a point.”

  “Possible,” I say. “Could be simple deduction. The fact that we didn’t charge Iganovich with the Scofield killings tells him that we failed to get a match on the rope and the stakes in those cases.”

  This is what she is thinking. It is plausible. Chambers would not be likely to miss such a thing.

  “It’s a smart move,” she says. “You make a blind allegation in your letter that the rope and the stakes don’t match and then wait to see what we do. In order to dispute it before the grand jury, we have to produce evidence in the record, a match. He reads the grand jury transcript and knows precisely what we have. Either way he can’t lose. If we sit mute and don’t counter any of this with hard evidence, he can safely assume we can’t produce a match at trial.”

  I am looking at her, tracking her line of thought. “So when we get to court, he uses these unexplained crimes, the discrepancies in the evidence, as a lever to lift doubt in his defense.”

  She nods. “I think so. That’s where he’s going. He’ll try to sell the jury on the theory that somebody else did ’em all. Chambers will argue that unless we can tell the jury who did the Scofields, there is a reasonable doubt that his client is not guilty of any of them.”

  She is right. This is clearly his line of attack. It might not be enough to acquit, but it could certainly hang the average jury, leave them hopelessly deadlocked. The county would be faced with the pro
spect of another costly trial. Chambers would take his revenge, laughing each inch of the way. Confronted with the prospect of still another trial, Derek Ingel and Armando Acosta would make it their special mission in life to crush my career.

  I look again at Chambers’s letter, lying open on my desk. There is something else that troubles me, something I do not mention to Lenore. It is the tenor of this writing. Chambers is far too sure of himself. His words are not the image of someone dealing in the dark, juggling details grounded on conjecture.

  In one area he has slipped over the edge, revealed a bit too much. It is the tire tracks, the ones at the Scofield scene.

  Imbedded in the letter, three paragraphs down is Chambers’s assertion that vehicle tire tracks found at the scene of the Scofield killings do not match the tires on his client’s van. He is of course correct. The police have indeed found tracks, and moreover, come up with no match.

  The problem is, there is no mention of any tire tracks in any of the reports on the earlier killings. It is something that is isolated, confined, mentioned only in the Scofield file. This information on the tire tracks Chambers could not get from any serendipitous conjecture.

  There is no way that Chambers could have known about this, I think, unless he has eyes and ears inside my case, unless he has been talking to someone close to the investigation.

  Chapter Twenty

  “We’re going out,” says Nikki.

  “Emm?” Saturday afternoon and I’m lost in the sporting green, at the kitchen table, the first time I’ve read anything unrelated to work in a week.

  “Even when you’re here, you’re not here,” she says.

  I drop the paper, a pained expression, and apologize.

  When I look up, Nikki has her purse over her arm. It seems that this is the extent of my life of late with Nikki and Sarah, an endless train of amends for lost weekends, and late nights in the office.

  “Where are you going?” I say.

  “I’ve been talking to you for the last five minutes,” she tells me. “You haven’t heard a word I was saying.”