Prime Witness

by Steve Martini

  Beyond this I am still eating the full fury of the county’s politicians, none of whom will now talk to me. Claude tells me that this includes Emil, though Dusalt still does his duty for me like a yeoman.

  This morning we are gathered in the small law library in Davenport, with the door closed, a sign hanging from the doorknob on the outside, “DO NOT DISTURB,” something no doubt copped by one of the office staff from a motel on a county-paid trip.

  The table is piled high with bound transcripts of grand jury testimony, declarations of witnesses, a few treatises and some code books.

  Kay Sellig has dragged two sizable cardboard boxes to this meeting. Sporting Marlboro logos on the side, these cartons contain an assortment of paper bags sticking up out of the open tops. The bags are crammed with items of physical evidence, microscopic blowups, the cut ends of plastic cord magnified seventy times, the tent stakes, some of these still showing traces of dried blood on bright steel. There is the bloodied rag in hues of congealed brown stored in a clear plastic bag, looking as it did the day it was discovered in Iganovich’s van.

  Sellig is now the custodian of these items, and a score of others. She is responsible for the chain of custody regarding all physical evidence in our case. Along with her other duties as chief forensic expert, she will testify at trial as to how each of these was found and tagged, the procedure for storage to ensure production at trial.

  Claude and Lenore Goya round out our group. It is the first of what will be many strategy sessions in the months ahead, leading up to trial.

  “What do we hear?” I ask Goya.

  “Unusually quiet on the defense front,” she says. “But my sources tell me Chambers is busy at it.”

  Lenore has had her ear to the ground over in Capital City. I have asked Harry Hinds to give her a little help. Though it is against his religion to assist any prosecutor, he made an exception after seeing Lenore. I think Harry is in love.

  “What can we expect from Mr. Chambers?” I ask her.

  Before his suspension from the practice of law, Adrian Chambers had earned the title among the local bar as the dean of delay. According to Goya he has not lost his touch.

  “It’s shaping up as a battle on two fronts,” she says. “The first looks like a full-blown psych-eval. He probably figures that’s good for at least a year,” she tells us.

  Psychological evaluation is a standard procedure in high-profile violent criminal cases.

  According to Lenore, Chambers has been holding forth with anyone of the mental therapy persuasion who will talk to him, mostly psychiatrists and psychologists, people with sufficient credentials to qualify as persuasive experts with a judge.

  “He’s shopping opinions,” she says. “Last week he even tried Forrest Hunter.”

  Claude laughs. “He must be desperate.”

  “That’s how we found out what he was doing,” she says.

  Forrest Hunter is the psychiatrist of choice among district attorneys north of the Tehachapies. I have never known him to testify for a criminal defendant. He is a prosecution witness of the first order, capable under oath of telling a jury of firemen that Nero was sane.

  “What do you think,” says Claude, “an insanity plea?”

  She shakes her head. “Word is, he’s hoping for a long stretch of evaluation, maybe some treatment on the theory that Iganovich is incompetent to stand trial, unable to assist in his own defense. If he can make out a case to the judge, the competency hearing alone could last longer than most trials.”

  Goya is right. It is not much of a reach to imagine Chambers selling this theory to the trial judge, who to date has not yet been named.

  Under the due process clause, it is a cardinal rule that one who is not mentally competent at the time of trial cannot be convicted or punished for his crime. This does not go to the issue of the defendant’s sanity at the time of the crimes, but rather whether he is mentally present for the trial.

  “You think he could make out a case?” says Claude.

  “Expert opinions on the state of the human mind are for rent,” I tell him.

  “We might be able to blunt the argument,” says Lenore.

  I look at her.

  “We could stipulate to a short-term period of evaluation in an institution, a state hospital,” she says.

  This would avoid a protracted hearing on competence. Chambers wouldn’t like it, but a judge faced with the alternatives is likely to accept this lesser of two evils.

  “We cut him off at the knees,” she says. “Ninety days for evaluation instead of a year for hearing and, if he wins, treatment.”

  I agree that this could work to avoid considerable delay. We make notes to start assembling our own psychiatric experts. Chambers has knocked Hunter out of the box by talking to him, made him unavailable to us for reasons of conflict, the upside of tipping his hand. This was probably part of his plan.

  Sellig says that the DA’s Association has a long list of expert psychiatric witnesses, people whose opinions are generally safe and available to the state.

  “You say he’s dragging his feet with two arguments. What’s the other?” I ask.

  “Change of venue,” says Goya.

  This we have anticipated from the start. Based on the adverse pretrial publicity, it is a safe bet that Chambers will try to have the trial moved from Davenport to some other county in the state where his client conceivably can receive a more fair trial.

  Ordinarily this would be a dead-bang winner. Except that in this case publicity has been so pervasive that there is not a county in the state that has not been deluged in the news of these crimes, bathed daily by a sobering immersion in the graphic details of these murders.

  We have sampled public opinion in the seven counties of comparable demographics and size to Davenport, the most likely candidates for a change of venue.

  According to Lenore, in four of these, if we send the defendant for trial, we can ship the cyanide at the same time. These are places where voters eyed Ronald Reagan suspiciously for his permissive views, and where gun control is defined as a steady hand.

  It is the paradox of the Putah Creek crimes that Iganovich chose to kill in an otherwise rural county which ordinarily would harbor similar provincial attitudes of hang-tree justice, except that in Davenport there is the leavening effect of a major university.

  “In the other three counties,” says Goya, “it’s a pull.” She means that there is no real difference in the views of the electorate in those counties. From the raw data, Chambers could not expect to get an appreciably better result if the case were tried in any of these, rather than Davenport.

  “He may still try,” I say, “if for no other reason than to stall. We should firm up our data, put it in a form ready to present to the court when he makes his move.”

  Goya agrees. She makes a quick note.

  We turn our attention to Sellig and her cardboard boxes.

  I’m looking at one of the enlarged photos of the cut cross-sections of cord as they make their rounds through our group. They are a little fuzzy, black-and-whites without much contrast. I tell Kay this.

  “We could go for some higher resolution, color,” says Sellig, “but I would have to send the evidence to a commercial lab for processing.”

  Goya and I discuss it. She says she thinks it will be critical that the jurors see for themselves the extrusion pattern on the inside of the cord. For this, clear enlargements that we can prop on an easel will be vital. It is the consensus that we shoot for higher quality, processed photos from a commercial lab.

  Kay takes us on a quick tour of the evidence. A strong case she believes, but still one built on circumstance.

  “The key is the van,” she says. “All of the incriminating evidence that we have was found in a vehicle registered to the defendant. That is the so
ft underbelly of our case,” she says. “Remove these items from possession by the defendant, and our case evaporates.”

  “Then that’s where Chambers will go,” I say.

  “He will come up with some artful explanations,” says Claude.

  The most obvious of these is the broken window. Chambers will no doubt argue that the incriminating evidence was tossed into the vehicle by whoever broke the glass, after the van was abandoned by Iganovich. I point this out.

  “Do we know the window was broken in the garage?” says Goya. “Maybe it was broken someplace else, earlier.”

  Sellig shakes her head. “We found minute traces of glass fragments on the concrete beneath the side door of the van. Reconstruction indicates it was broken in the garage. Most of the glass was on the inside of the vehicle. So it was broken from outside.”

  “Were there traces of glass under the cord and stakes?” says Claude.

  The point here is whether the spray of safety glass from the broken window was all on top of the coiled cord and stakes, or underneath them. If glass was found only on top of the objects it would mean that they were in the vehicle already, when the glass was broken. Iganovich could not wiggle out.

  “We looked,” she says. “It’s inconclusive. The items were too far from the window to get a sufficient spraying of glass particles to know.”

  Claude makes a face, like it was a good thought anyway.

  “There’s another possibility,” says Goya. “Maybe Iganovich broke the window himself to provide a later explanation for the cord and stakes inside.”

  This doesn’t wash with Sellig. “Easier just to get rid of the stuff,” she says. “If he was thinking about it, he would have dumped it.” She shakes her head. “No. I think he just didn’t see the stuff as incriminating.”

  “Even the bloody rag?” says Lenore.

  “Probably an oversight,” says Sellig. “He may have been in a hurry when he dumped the van.”

  Claude tells us that the broken window offers more complications.

  “Our investigators,” he says, “have identified two other vehicles in the same garage during the same period with insurance claims filed by the owners for broken windows.”

  “Vandals?” I say.

  He nods, like this is a likely explanation. “Probably kids,” he says.

  “Anything missing from the other vehicles?” I ask him.

  He shrugs his shoulders. “I don’t know.”

  “Check it out,” I tell him.

  “Why?”

  “If there’s personal property missing from the other cars, it means it wasn’t pure vandalism. Whoever broke the windows was looking for valuables inside. When they got to the van, if they did the van, they would have looked inside.”

  He looks at me and suddenly it registers. “Maybe they saw the cord and the stakes.”

  I give him a smile. It’s the longest of shots, finding juveniles who smash the windows of cars for whatever they can find inside. Still cases have turned on more perilous leads.

  It is my turn to report. At noon today I had lunch with Ravi Sahdalgi, the Pakistani graduate student from our grand jury. Over salads at a restaurant not far from the university I picked his brain on the quality of our evidence, and in particular whether Chambers, if given the chance, could confuse a good jury with the evidence in the Scofield murders.

  “His testimony was good.” This is how Sahdalgi characterized the evidence presented by Harold Thornton, our psychologist and expert on the theory of criminal profiles. But Sahdalgi said the jury did not totally buy into his theories.

  I wondered what he would say if I’d dumped the medical evidence from the autopsy on them. I am confident that had they received the information that the Scofields were killed elsewhere, with a knife rather than the stakes, that they would see distinctions galore between these cases.

  Gesturing with his hands as if to assure me that it was nothing that I had done in the presentation of the case, Sahdalgi told me that the similar circumstances of the murders were too much for most of the jurors to overlook. “It is too easy to purchase rope, the clothesline cord. And the stakes. The fact that different ones were used was not particularly persuasive,” he told me.

  “And the other things, the missing eye of the Scofield woman, the supposition that the killer knew her.” He made a face like this did not wash with the jury, too much of a psychic reach. In all, Sahdalgi let me down easy, but the message was clear. Had I brought charges against Iganovich for the Scofield murders, the discrepancies in those cases would not have troubled the grand jury greatly. They would have returned indictments in those cases as well.

  It causes me to wonder if maybe I’ve made a mistake in failing to charge the Russian with the Scofield killings. It is, after all, possible that, even in light of the medical evidence, the Russian is responsible for the Scofields. These victims were older, perhaps more wary than the others. Maybe it was necessary for Iganovich to use a knife first, and to follow the ritual of the stakes after they were dead?

  Goya gives me a perplexed look. “I thought Thornton’s testimony was solid,” she says.

  It’s the problem with trying to predict the whims of a jury; nine guesses in ten will be wrong.

  “Maybe we should charge him,” says Claude, “with the Scofields.” Emil would love it. Claude doesn’t say this, but the message is clear.

  I look at Sellig. She would like to wade in, to argue the opposite view. But lately I sense that on this call she is prepared to defer to the local authorities. She is the penultimate professional; having given us her best rendition of the evidence, the decision now rests with me.

  I weigh it only for a moment, Claude looking at me all the while. He is politic enough to enjoy the thought of carrying a pleasant message to a superior.

  “We still have a problem,” I say. “We can’t be sure that Iganovich was available for the Scofield murders.”

  Lenore nods. “We don’t know if he was still here—or up in Canada when they were killed. If we charge him and Chambers produces hard evidence of an alibi, it could taint the charges on the other four. Play to his theory of defense,” she says.

  We all sit, mulling this in silence for a moment.

  “It makes the witness up in the trees that much bigger.” Claude finally breaks the reverie.

  “Any leads?” I’m asking Claude about this shadowy figure in the trees.

  He makes a face. Shakes his head. “We’re still looking. Ran a trace on the spotting scope,” he says. “Six thousand of that model sold nationwide last year. We checked the serial number with the manufacturer. Nothing. Whoever bought it never registered for warranty protection.”

  Another dead end.

  I’m back to Goya. “How long do you think we have before trial?”

  “At a minimum,” she says, “six months.”

  I relax a little.

  “Chambers can delay any trial at least that long, nine if he really tries,” she says. Enough time for us to chase down the open ends of our investigation, perhaps to find the man in the trees, the figure who is now shaping up as a prime witness.

  Stress tortures the human mind in a thousand untold ways. For me during periods of anxiety, sleep becomes difficult. In recent years, in the throes of a trial or some other exacting event, I have turned increasingly to over-the-counter medications as a refuge from insomnia. While I’m under the arresting spell of these elixirs, nothing, not the pounding hoofbeats of the horsemen and their apocalypse, can rouse me.

  Tonight, the incessant ringing in my ears brings me to a state of semiconscious stupor. Then I realize that this sound is the phone. I feel weight on my body. Nikki has reached across me and taken the receiver from the phone on my bedside stand. In my dreamlike state I hear silence as she listens, then her voice.

&nb
sp; “Who is this? Who are you?”

  Then a return to quiet, the peace of silence. I slip back again, into the abyss, the sleep of the innocent.

  I feel the sharp point of bone in my back. The light is on. I fight the grip of the medication. Focus my eyes with some effort at the clock in the radio next to me on the stand. It is three-forty in the morning.

  “Who the hell is calling at this hour?” I find speech difficult, a little slurred.

  I roll over, try to shake the cobwebs. Nikki is still holding the receiver, but it is away from her ear. She is kneeling up on the mattress, the blankets and sheets pushed to the foot of the bed. I can hear the hum of an unbroken dial tone from the receiver in her hand. Whoever it was has hung up.

  “Who was it?” I say.

  “They didn’t leave a name. It was for you,” she says, “but they wouldn’t wait.”

  “Yeah.” I’m rolling over, yawning, covering my mouth with the back of one hand, like let’s talk about it in the morning.

  Nikki’s bolt upright staring at me, like I should be more curious.

  “What did they want?”

  “They left a message.”

  “Yes?” I’m fighting to keep my eyes open.

  “The man on the phone says that if you know what’s good for your family, your wife and your daughter,” she says, “you’ll charge the Russian with the Scofield murders.”

  “Damn it.” I say this under my breath. It has started. The crank phone calls, the crackpots who seem always to follow the high-profile cases. From time to time, in my practice, we have had to change our home number, unlisted as it is, twice in the same month. So relentless are some in this army of the unhinged.

  “Oh come over here.” I smile, reach out to put my arm around Nikki’s shoulder, to give her a hug, an attempt to comfort, to lull her back to sleep.