Prime Witness

by Steve Martini

“We got your spotting scope.” Claude is leaning across the table now into Cleo’s face. “The one you left behind up in the blind, remember? We’ve been running traces on it,” he says. “Not very many made like that. Pretty expensive,” he says, “for a cheap fuck like you.”

  If this is getting to him, it doesn’t show.

  Claude raises his voice a notch, a few more expletives. Then he comes back down to a more normal tone.

  “Tight jeans you got there,” he says. “A good tush.”

  Coltrane looks at him, not certain whether he should be offended.

  “Ever see what people in prison for a few years can do to loosen up a pair of tight buns like that?” says Claude. “They’re real adept at it. And they seem to enjoy their work.”

  Coltrane chews on the lump in his cheek, unmoved, like they’d have to catch him first.

  “Six people are dead and you’re busy covering for their killer. You can jack these good people around,” says Claude, looking at me, “but I’ll see to it that your ass is put in the federal slammer so fast you won’t believe it,” he says. “Now I wanna know what you saw, and I wanna know it now.”

  Coltrane looks down at the newspaper, something to divert his eyes from Claude, a silent variation on the word “no.”

  Dusalt sweeps the paper off the table with the back of his hand, sending it sailing halfway across the room.

  Coltrane stiffens, pushes back in his chair, away from Claude as far as he can get, rigid like a head case subjected to shock therapy. He can’t be sure how far Claude will go. His eyes come to me again, a sign that we have bonded. He would much rather talk to me than Claude. With me he gets coffee with sugar.

  “The scope,” says Claude, “we got a fingerprint off the scope.” This is a lie of misdirection. We did get a print, smudged and unusable.

  “We’re waiting for yours to be sent up by wire now,” he says. In fact this can be done instantaneously by computer link now, a fact that Coltrane probably doesn’t know, and intended to sweat him.

  Claude tells him if he cuts a deal now before we match the prints it will go easier, we will help him with the federal violations, put in a good word, that he cooperated.

  This does not seem to move the man much. He shows the kind of confidence that grows when you know you wore gloves. I have suspected from the beginning that with only a single smudged thumb print on the scope that maybe this belongs to the evidence tech, the one sent up to flop around on the perch the day I first met Claude.

  Dusalt tries a few more pitches, variations on the common theme. Each of them fails to move Coltrane. Dusalt’s powers of persuasion exhausted, Coltrane has taken Claude’s worst punch and is still psychically on his feet.

  Claude gives me a little glance, like maybe he should get a rubber hose. We take a break. Coltrane wants to hit the head. We send him with a guard.

  Outside in the hall we cluster near an open window at the fire escape for some fresh air, Denny, Dusalt and I.

  I’ve tried to reach Nikki up in Coloma three times in the last two hours. She has still not returned. I am beginning to get worried.

  “Any ideas?” I ask Claude.

  He is wrung out.

  The sun is down much earlier these days. I can see dusk closing on the horizon, through the wire mesh. One would wonder what good the fire escape would be, sealed off like this.

  I look at my watch, a quarter to seven. Lenore should be deep into it with Ingel and Chambers by now, trench warfare over terms of the jury charge in Ingel’s chambers at the courthouse. With the details to cover, this could go till well after nine.

  “What do you want to do?” says Claude. He wants to know how late I want to go.

  “A while longer,” I say. “Then we’ll give it a rest. Put him up in a hotel and go at it tomorrow, after court,” I say.

  “Sooner or later,” says Claude, “he’s gonna want it to stop. Ask to go free or to see a lawyer.”

  “I’ll show him a lawyer,” I say. “Somebody at the U.S. Justice Department.” The message is clear. Cleo Coltrane is not leaving this town unless he tells us what he knows.

  In the distance I hear the click of heels on terrazzo, coming this way. A second later Betty, one of the senior secretaries from the office, comes wheeling around the corner.

  “Mr. Madriani. We’ve been looking all over for you.”

  “What is it?”

  “Judge Ingel’s called from the courthouse. He was quite insistent, wanted to know why you weren’t at the meeting. He was very angry,” she says. This is how Betty describes the Prussian.

  I can imagine. “How did you find me?” I say. I have specifically avoided telling anyone where I was. I had a feeling this would happen.

  “It wasn’t easy,” she says. A little exasperation. “He wanted to talk to a lawyer. The judge.”

  “Let me guess?” I say. “Roland.”

  She nods. “He took the call, and a lot of abuse from the judge.” She says this like I should be grateful to Roland.

  “What did Overroy tell him?”

  “He looked in your office, saw the note and told the judge you were over here meeting with someone named Coltrane.”

  Mental expletives fill my brain. Ingel will no doubt repeat this to Chambers while venting his spleen in his office. Adrian is not stupid. I have missed a command performance at the courthouse to talk to somebody at the county jail. My missing witness. Adrian will be ranting about Fisher’s discovery order, my failure to disclose that we now have our prime witness. I can feel another hiding coming from the judge, and Adrian helping me off with my shirt. Having shafted his settlement offer, he will no doubt take glee in this one.

  I’m shaking my head, wishing I were up with Nikki at this moment, breathing mountain air, anywhere but here.

  “They did seem angry,” says Betty.

  “They.”

  “Mr. Chambers called five minutes ago, a few minutes after the judge. He said the bailiff and clerk had left to go home, but that the courtroom door would be left open for you.”

  I raise an eyebrow. Adrian’s taking charge. He is probably walking all over Lenore by now, jamming instructions down her throat. If I don’t get there soon, he’ll be wearing Ingel’s black robes.

  “They expect you to be there,” she says.

  “Wonderful.” I roll my eyes, thank Betty and tell her to go home. Why kill the messenger?

  “Get him back in here,” I tell Claude. I’m talking about Coltrane. “Pull him off the john if you have to.”

  One more shot, then I’m going to have to go over to the court. Maybe I can bring them a present, a little hard evidence identifying the Scofield killer. It may be my only chance to mollify the Prussian.

  Inside, Coltrane looks at me, like it must be my turn again.

  “Cleo. Can I call you Cleo?” I ask.

  He nods.

  I’m holding a large manilla folder in my hand as I approach him. From this I pull an eight-by-ten color glossy photo and slide it on the table in front of Coltrane.

  “Do you know this woman?” I say.

  He looks hard, at the dead head of Karen Scofield, then swallows. The brown hues of congealed blood and the empty eye socket stare back at him from the table.

  He shakes his head.

  “You didn’t know her, but you’ve seen her before, haven’t you, Cleo? On the creek that night?”

  “No,” he says. “I’ve never seen her.”

  “These marks.” I point with a finger to her brow and cheek. “You know how they were made, don’t you, Cleo?”

  He shakes his head.

  It is something that has burdened this case from the beginning, the profile experts and their theories of facial disfigurement, the violence to Karen Scofield’s face, the missing eye. It ha
d troubled me for weeks, until yesterday when it finally struck me in the quiet of my office, in the dead of evening, working alone, the pincher marks, the deep wounds on the brow and cheek of Karen Scofield.

  “Let me tell you how they happened,” I say. “They were made by the talons of a large bird,” I tell him. “A bird of prey. They were made by your bird, Cleo. They were made by Harvey.”

  He’s shaking his head, his eyes closed, all the motions of denial, but not a word is passing from his lips.

  This morning I had Claude wire a copy of this photo to William Rattigan at the World Center for Birds of Prey. He has told me what none of the shrinks or pathologists could, that Karen Scofield’s eye was not removed by the killer at all, but was gouged from her head by the razor-sharp talons of a giant bird of prey.

  I give him a moment, the photo lying on the table before him.

  “It’s been a long day.” I soften my voice. “And I’m getting a little tired. So I’m going to tell you what’s going to happen to you. And you can believe that this is gospel.”

  There is no sense in drawing this out any longer.

  “Have you ever heard,” I say, “of DNA?”

  “I’ve heard of it,” he says.

  “It has to do with genetics,” I tell him. “Chromosomes, the basic building blocks of life that make each of us different. You have different chromosomes than I do, different from Lieutenant Dusalt here.”

  Coltrane looks at Claude and I think is pleased by this thought.

  “Your chromosomes are specific to you,” I say, “and they can be traced from hair and blood—even your saliva,” I tell him.

  He stops chewing for the moment. Dense thoughts. Did he spit up in the perch? From the look in his eye, he cannot be sure.

  “With a little of your saliva, and a drop of your blood we would be able to determine whether these each came from you, to the exclusion of nearly everyone else on earth,” I say.

  As I say this I am reaching into my pant pocket.

  He looks at me wondering, I think, whether I’m about to produce something sharp, a needle for blood.

  Instead, when my hand comes out it’s holding a single small feather, delicate and gossamer under the florid lights, which I pinch from its point between finger and thumb, and twirl in a slow revolution.

  “Cleo, we can get the blood later,” I say, “because Harvey has chromosomes too.”

  From the look in his eye one can tell that my words, the soft drama of the quill, something from a pigeon in the plaza on the way over here, has struck a deep responsive chord with Cleo, like the impact of a laser-guided bomb—he and Harvey are trapped, birds of a feather.

  He is swallowing a lot of air now. Looks to me, then to Claude.

  “You can do that?” he says. He’s talking about DNA.

  “We can do that,” I say. “And if we have to, you are going down for the hard fall.” There’s an edge to my voice now. I’m tired of screwing around.

  His Adam’s apple is going up and down, dunking like a doughnut, his eyes making the rounds in this room, to Claude, then back to me.

  “The minimum, they tell me, for what you’ve done is three years,” I say. “The parole board will not look kindly on the fact that you refused to help us catch a killer.

  “Cleo—” I lean down into his face—“you can believe me when I tell you that if you don’t help us, you will do more than three years.” My tone carries the authority of Yahweh carving the Commandments on tablets of stone.

  He looks at me, big round eyes. A time for silent thought. Seconds go by as Coltrane weighs this. He is teetering on the verge. His jaw slacks a little.

  Just then the door behind me opens. I turn.

  It’s Denny Henderson.

  If looks could kill, Henderson would need the services of an undertaker at this moment.

  Coltrane’s trance is broken, the momentum stopped.

  I look back to Henderson. “What the hell is it?”

  “I thought you’d want to see this,” he says. He hands me a slip of paper. I look at it. A name or other written on what looks like the torn corner of a yellow page from a phone book.

  “What’s this?”

  “The name of the property owner. Along the Putah Creek,” he says. “Where the doer did the Scofields.”

  I look down at the ragged-edged little corner in my hand, the note handed to me by Denny.

  The cold acid of alarm spreads through me an instant before full comprehension. It was there before me all the time. I can feel the blood drain from my face, settle like lead in the pit of my stomach, more fear here than anger. I look up at Claude.

  “What is it?” he says.

  I crumple the note in my hand, reach over and grab Coltrane by the collar of his shirt. It is pure adrenaline that hoists him out of the chair, throws him with his back against the table. A pained expression as the corner catches a kidney, the small of his back.

  “Tell me about the man on the creek,” I say. “Now.” I make this single word sound as if it has a dozen W’s.

  Coltrane is bug-eyed. This is a whole new side of me he has never seen.

  Claude and Denny are on me from behind grabbing my arms, trying to keep them from Cleo’s throat. It is the thing about an adrenaline rush. It would take an army at this moment.

  Cleo is gasping, struggling with his hands. Nodding like if I’ll let him, he’ll talk.

  “OK,” he says. “Get offa me. I’ll tell you. Tell . . .” he says. Cleo’s face is flushed. His body shaking as I finally loosen my grip.

  Self-conscious, I straighten his collar a little, pat the front of his shirt, help him back down into his seat. Claude and Denny slowly ease their grip on me, but stay close, in case I should suffer a relapse.

  I move around them, pick up the newspaper, which Claude scattered to the floor earlier in our session. I lay this on the table before Coltrane, front page up, and slap my palm hard on the picture.

  “Now identify the man you saw on the Putah Creek that night,” I say, “the one with the two bodies on the ground.”

  He flinches once, then stops. He looks up at me one last time, the futile thought written in his eyes that maybe in this last moment I will lift this cup from his lips. He sees the answer carved in my unremitting gaze as I fix my eyes on the picture before him.

  Then in the most deliberate of moves, quick and sure, Cleo Coltrane points with a gnarled outstretched index finger, to a single image, a face burned into the newsprint on the table before him.

  In this instant of revelation wild thoughts flood my mind, images of flashing metal stakes driven through soft flesh, the hellish visage that was the end of Abbott and Karen Scofield—the night they were murdered by Adrian Chambers.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  As the three of us cross the city plaza there is but a single thought running through our minds. It is repeated on our tongues in all the myriad forms that make up nervous banter: whether Adrian Chambers has any idea that we know.

  “Maybe Ingel didn’t say anything.” This is Claude’s happy thought for the day. He is hoping that maybe the judge has kept his mouth shut, not carped and complained after calling my office that I was meeting with someone named Coltrane at the jail. Claude knows as do I that Coltrane’s name could be the password to violence.

  We are jogging across the square, around the fountain. Denny is falling behind.

  If Ingel kept quiet, the three of them may still be sitting there, idly arguing about the sophistry of jury instructions.

  “How would Chambers recognize Coltrane’s name?” says Denny.

  Henderson’s still running a half-step behind, literally and figuratively.

  “Who do you think hired Cleo?” My words come out in little half breaths.

  “Cha
mbers?” says Denny.

  “Right.”

  It was Henderson’s little scrap of paper, the note scribbled on the corner torn from the yellow pages that gave me the answer. The owner of the property along the Putah Creek, where the Scofields were found, was “A.C. Associates,” Adrian’s firm, his little empire of limited partnerships. It was in the phone book, that little fact I looked up after running into Chambers with Harry by the jail in Capital City.

  Coltrane has already told us that he was hired over the phone, paid in cash through the mails, that he never met his employer on the Putah Creek job, did not know his name. Like star-crossed lovers, their paths met not by design, but chance, the happenstance that is a single gravel access road on isolated land near a river, a road which each man used for his own purposes.

  As we race up the courthouse steps my mind is on Lenore. I try to calm myself with assurances that Adrian is, after all, a lawyer. There would be no purpose to more violence. But then I am dealing with Adrian Chambers. And he has already killed twice.

  Claude placed two phone calls before we left the jail; the first to Ingel’s courtroom, an attempt to warn the judge. There was no answer. This is not unusual after hours. The second call went to the county SWAT unit. It will be a while before they can assemble, maybe a half hour. The guys who make it up come from all ends of the county.

  When I reach the front door to the courthouse I find it is locked. I shade the glass with one hand. A dim light is on back near the county clerk’s office but no guard, no marshal on duty. Or maybe he’s busy making his rounds.

  “Come on.” I’m down the steps heading for the garage in the back. The door in the basement, the one leading to the library, will be open, the lawyer’s entrance for after-hours research.

  By this time Henderson is falling out badly, a half block behind us by the time we reach the rear of the building and the underground. I don’t break stride, but am through the door inside and heading down the hall for the freight elevator, Claude right on my heels.

  We get inside. I look. No sign of Henderson. We can’t wait. I push the button for the fourth floor and the heavy grated door comes down.