by Ed Gaffney
It was worth looking back through the messages left at the nine old crime scenes to see if there was anything Vera could pick up. “Probably right.” She idly turned the evidence bag over and noticed that there was something on the envelope that had contained the note. “What do you make of the fact that the words ‘Welcome to my world’ were on a sticker that was on the back side of the envelope that held the note?”
Willy didn’t answer right away. When he did, his voice sounded tight. “Wait a minute. Did you say ‘Welcome to my world’?”
Vera looked again at the envelope. “Yeah. It’s pretty clear that it came from the same computer printer, I mean—”
But Willy interrupted. “You’re telling me that on the back side of the envelope at your crime scene, the words ‘Welcome to my world’ were printed?”
Vera had no idea what was so important about the message being on the back of the envelope, but just to be sure, she read it again. “‘Welcome to my world.’ That’s what it says.”
“Holy hell,” muttered Willy. “That’s not good.”
“What?” Vera was completely confused. “Was that something that Lombardo used to put on his envelopes?”
Willy exhaled loudly. “Yeah, but that’s not the problem. You ever work on a serial killer case before?”
“No. Why?”
“I only had two. This one, and another I helped with when I was in the FBI, a million years ago. Anyway, this agent taught me once that in high-profile cases, it’s a good idea to try to keep a few specifics of the crime scenes out of the press. He called them hole cards. He’d hang on to them for interrogations, especially when there was a possibility you’d get crackpots turning themselves in. If the guy confessing didn’t know about your hole cards, then you’d know he wasn’t your guy.”
“And—‘Welcome to my world’—”
“That’s right. Lombardo always wrote that on the envelopes which contained his notes. They were easy to keep out of the press. Those envelopes were my hole cards.”
That took a minute to sink in. What it meant was that the person who committed this crime either had—just by chance—happened to commit a murder in the same neighborhood and in the same manner as a serial killer two decades ago, while leaving a clue common to the original crimes that no one knew about, or else…
“You know what that leaves you with,” Willy said, as if he were reading her mind. “Either the person who did this crime is someone who has access to the original, confidential police files of the Alan Lombardo case—”
Vera finished the thought. “Or the Springfield Shooter is still out there.”
TWO
July 3, 1982. It was a hot day, so Bobby was wearing shorts and a T-shirt when I came in. He wasn’t expecting me, of course, and surely didn’t think I’d come to do anything to him. The shock in his eyes when I pulled out the gun was awesome.
By the time he was all tied up he was crying. Gasping. Sobbing. I couldn’t believe it! Snot was pouring out of his nose. He had no idea what I was going to do next. I pointed the gun at his face to see what would happen, and he looked like he was going to piss his pants.
And then, sure enough, he did piss his pants.
It was incredible.
But that wasn’t the only thing I was going for, so I waited for a while, until he calmed down a little.
And then I shot him.
But I almost blew it. I wanted to watch his eyes as he realized that he was actually going to die, and I wanted to see what his face looked like as he bled to death, but when I pulled the trigger it looked like I hit him square in the heart and that he was going to die instantly. That would have been awful!
Luckily, the bullet hit him lower, probably in the stomach or the liver, and the blood just started to pour out of him. Was he ever surprised! And scared shitless. He was actually shaking as he looked down at the blood oozing out of his belly.
Then I shot him again, lower this time. Intestines, I think.
I wish I hadn’t done that, because I bet the first shot would have killed him soon enough, and the second one just messed up the expression on his face. He looked like he was in pain, but then he started to look confused. He didn’t look scared enough. And worst of all, he wasn’t looking at me anymore. That wasn’t right.
So I shot him again to get his attention. By now, he had fallen to the floor, and there was a pretty big puddle of blood on the rug. The third bullet must have hit an artery somewhere, because the puddle really started to grow, and then Bobby began to shudder a lot, and his face got very pale. He wasn’t watching me at all now, and it didn’t even look like his eyes were focused.
When he stopped shuddering I figured he was probably done, so I shot him in the head to be sure, and left.
It was my first one. It wasn’t perfect, but I’d get better.
There would be others.
(Commonwealth v. Alan Lombardo, Trial Exhibit Number 5A)
Attorney Terry Tallach sat across from his partner, Zack Wilson, in the office they shared in downtown Northampton, Massachusetts. Terry was reading one of several trial exhibits in a case called Commonwealth v. Lombardo. Zack said that they were looking into it to see if there was legal support to claim that the defendant—a guy twenty years ago the newspapers had dubbed “The Springfield Shooter”—should be given a new trial. Mr. Shooter was claiming that he was innocent.
Zack had described the case as “somewhat of a challenge.”
Which meant that it was going to drive Terry crazier than his father’s fascination with twisted Uncle Campbell’s set of bagpipes. Every time Terry heard one of those shrieking, plaid noisemakers, he couldn’t believe that humankind hadn’t already wiped Scotland off the face of the earth just for inventing them.
He focused on the last few lines of the exhibit. “It was my first one. It wasn’t perfect, but I’d get better.
“There would be others.”
Swell. It was always good to have something to look forward to.
Terry closed the folder. He looked over at Zack, who was typing up a hopeless memo in preparation for a hopeless trial they would be handling next week.
Zack didn’t look like one of the best criminal lawyers in the state. Although he had decided to forgo his usual jeans in favor of khakis today, the faded red linen shirt still managed to make him look way too informal to be taken seriously. And, like always, his blond hair was just a little too long, a little too unkempt.
But somehow, all of that melted away in the courtroom, when the gavel hit the bench. Because that’s when judges, lawyers, witnesses, and juries—especially juries—saw the energy and intelligence in Zack’s eyes, and the confidence and, well, the peacefulness in his smile. All he had to do was stand up and say, “Good morning, Your Honor and ladies and gentlemen of the jury, my name is Zack Wilson, and I represent the defendant,” and the prosecutor was in serious trouble.
Good thing Terry and Zack were best friends. Otherwise, that kind of thing might be really annoying.
Now Terry got up and walked to the window, looking out at the paralyzingly slow stream of cars passing through the Traffic Cone Capital of the World—the undying roadwork project taking place directly in front of their building. Thirty thousand people in this suburb of Springfield—Northampton was officially called a city, but that was a joke—and Terry would bet that two-thirds of them drove through this goddamned construction site every single day.
And good news for the rest of Northampton—this was a traveling show. The entire city was getting new road surfaces this summer. As soon as the geniuses responsible for this nightmare finished messing up downtown, they were scheduled to start wrecking the residential areas.
Zack stopped typing long enough to ask, “How’s it looking out there?”
An immense piece of equipment which was being used to rip the top layer of pavement off of a perfectly good road had recently lost its mind, and had spewed football-sized chunks of stone and tar all over the sidewalk in front of sev
eral stores across the street. The monstrosity had apparently chosen to end this morning’s effort by coming to a palsied stop in the middle of the busiest and most important intersection in Northampton, half of which was already torn to shreds. The machine stood there shuddering, occasionally croaking out an ominous plume of foul-smelling black smoke, while two part-time cops wearing idiotic-looking orange plastic vests hopelessly flailed their arms, blew whistles, and shouted as traffic worked itself into an impossible knot.
Meanwhile, angry shopkeepers and a crowd of by-passers watched as a group of hardhats scurried around like circus clowns trying to shut the insane contraption down while cleaning up the debris on the sidewalk so nobody got killed on their way to getting an ice cream cone.
And was that blonde down there with the cutoffs the girl who worked at the pizza place around the corner? What was her name again? And why wouldn’t that construction guy move so Terry could get a better look at what she was wearing?
What was it that Zack had just asked him?
Terry glanced over his shoulder at his partner, who was still writing. Guess it wasn’t that important. “You want to take a break for lunch and get a couple slices of pizza?”
Zack stopped typing, peered at his computer screen, then said, “Um, it’s ten-fifteen, Elvis.” He took a bite of the corn muffin that he had brought in from the deli earlier this morning and washed it down with some coffee. “Maybe after I finish breakfast.” Then he stole a look out the window and turned back to Terry. “Is Heather distracting you again?”
Heather. That was her name. Terry returned to the scene on the street. He still didn’t have a full view of Heather, but what he did see was really, really nice. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, but if she’s wearing a halter top with those shorts, I’m probably going to need to take the rest of the week off.” Heather turned the corner, passing out of sight. “And stop calling me Elvis.” Lunch today was going to be one of the greatest meals of his life.
Terry spun back to face his partner, who had returned to his keyboard. “So what’s up with this case you gave me to read? ‘I shot him so he’d look at me?’ I’m no shrink, Zack, but I’m betting Mr. Lombardo might have some control issues.”
Zack finished typing something, and looked up again from his computer. “You read the whole file already?”
“No. I had to take a break to make sure that Heather made it to work okay. And I never like to rush through my psychopath diary reading.” Zack was still looking at him. “I finished the first entry, though. Is there a lot more?”
“He killed a total of nine people.”
“Okay. That’s more.”
Zack picked up his muffin and coffee, and joined his partner at the window. “Yeah. A lot more. And guess who his lawyer was.”
By now, a pair of Northampton police cars, lights flashing, were snaking their way up the street, because everyone knows that the presence of multiple police cars with bright blue strobe lights flashing always relieves congestion on the roads. But in an attempt to get out of the cops’ way, some dumbshit in an SUV had managed to rear-end a Mini Cooper and blow out one of the little car’s back tires. The Mini Cooper driver, who was about six inches and fifty pounds too big for a tiny ride like that, had unfolded himself from his crippled vehicle, and was addressing the situation by repeatedly banging on the roof of his car, screaming at the SUV driver, and pointing at his flat tire. His fellow commuters were fascinated, and many stopped to watch.
In about fifteen minutes, traffic would be backed up to Maine.
“Uh, I don’t have any idea who represented the guy,” Terry replied. “When did you say he was convicted?”
“1985.”
Terry had met Zack in the fall of 1986, in high school, when Zack and his family had moved to Rhode Island. “I don’t know,” Terry responded. “Your dad?” Zack’s father, now Federal District Court Judge Nehemiah Wilson, had been a high-profile criminal defense attorney back in the day.
Zack took another bite of muffin and swallowed. “Bingo,” he said.
“Wait a minute,” Terry said. “I thought the biggest thing he did was that white-collar case—the George Heinrich gambling thing.” On the few occasions that Terry had spent with Zack’s father, the old man never failed to bring up his biggest legal victory—the acquittal of “Gentleman George,” who went on to become one of New England’s quietest but most successful organized crime bosses. For someone who had a great son like Zack, Judge Wilson was a real load.
Zack nodded. “Heinrich was the biggest case Dad ever won. Lombardo came later, and it was even bigger. But he lost that one.”
“So how come your father wants you to look into it?”
Zack walked back to his desk and sat down. “I doubt he knows I’ve got anything to do with it.” He started to type again. “Harry Baumgartner called me early this morning and asked me to take it as a special favor. You know that shooting in Indian Oaks last night? The facts are just like the ones in the Lombardo case. Judge Baumgartner thinks there might be an argument that Lombardo deserves a new trial, so he wanted us to poke around, see what we could find.”
Jesus Elizabeth Christ. Judge Harold Baumgartner was a good guy, and a volunteer on the bar association committee who was in charge of assigning lawyers to court-appointed cases. But the last special favor Terry and Zack had done for the judge had almost ended with some crackpot blowing up the entire Boston Esplanade. And this assignment seemed to have just about the same amount of crazy on it as the last one. “Just because some copycat nut-job shot somebody?”
“Not really,” Zack replied cheerfully. “Lombardo had been asking for new counsel for years. The Indian Oaks shooting just pushed it to the top of Harry’s pile.”
“And were we supposed to ignore the entire Canon of Ethics when we took the case, or just the part about conflicts of interest?”
According to one of the most fundamental ethical guidelines governing—well, supposedly governing—lawyers’ conduct, whenever an attorney was involved in a legal matter, he was obligated to put his clients’ interests ahead of anyone else’s. Including his own. One of Terry’s law school professors had explained it like this: “Clients hire lawyers to go to war for them. If a lawyer has to worry about who the bullets might hit when he starts shooting, he’s got a conflict of interest.”
So, for example, if a lawyer was defending someone accused of a crime, he couldn’t take on as a client one of the witnesses against the defendant, even if it was involving a different legal matter—say, a real-estate closing. Because when it came time to cross-examine the real-estate client at the criminal trial, the lawyer would be in a dilemma. It might be in his criminal client’s best interests to make all of the witnesses at his trial look like liars, but it would be in the lawyer’s best interests to soft-pedal his cross-examination of the real-estate client, because he wouldn’t want that witness to get pissed off and take his business to another law firm.
The conflict of interest facing Zack in the Lombardo matter was just as obvious. It made no sense for Zack to be responsible for checking into a case that his own father handled to see if there were grounds for a new trial. Because if Zack discovered that dear old Dad had somehow screwed up, he would be faced with the dilemma of either keeping the mistake to himself and protecting his obnoxious father’s reputation, or doing the right thing for his client, which might end up plastering his father’s face on the front page of every newspaper in New England.
Zack finished typing and started printing out the memo. “Yeah, I talked to Harry about that. Turns out that the first two lawyers he assigned to look into Lombardo’s case met with the client and then asked to get reassigned. I guess Lombardo’s got some personality thing that makes him a little tough to deal with.”
“You mean besides the killing-nine-people-in-cold-blood personality thing?”
“Yeah.” Zack reached over and took the finished memo out of the printer. “He’s obsessive-compulsive, or has obsessiv
e-compulsive tendencies, or something like that. Anyway, Harry said he would have dumped the whole thing a long time ago, but he thinks there’s actually a possibility that this guy is innocent. Who knows? Maybe this latest killing really is by the same creep who murdered all those people twenty years ago. Maybe they got the wrong guy back then. That’s what Lombardo claims, anyway.”
“Wow,” Terry said. “A convicted felon who says he didn’t do it. Imagine that.”
Zack straightened the pages of the memo. “Anyway, Harry told Lombardo that because he didn’t cooperate with the first two lawyers who had been assigned to the case, Lombardo was going to have to represent himself. I guess that really scared Lombardo, because he begged Harry for just one more chance—he’d read about us, and specifically asked Harry for us. Harry agreed, but he told Lombardo that if it doesn’t work out with us, he’s going to have to go pro se.”
Technically, any inmate could file a motion for a new trial without the help of a lawyer. The Latin term for this—which lawyers use because everything is so much clearer when it’s in Latin—was pro se. But realistically, there were so many procedural and other hurdles facing somebody trying to overturn a criminal conviction that the typical defendant stood little or no chance on his own. And somebody like Lombardo, who had been in jail for twenty years, was sure to know that.
“But just because we’re Lombardo’s last hope doesn’t get rid of the conflict problem, Zack. Your dad’s not my favorite person in the world, and I know he’s done some things that you aren’t thrilled with, but he’s still your father. There’s no way you can pretend that he’s just another lawyer when you look at this case.”
Zack nodded as he got up to make copies of the memorandum. “That’s one of the things I’d like to talk about with Mr. Lombardo when I meet him.” He fed the original of the document into the copier, and pressed the start button. “You up for a trip to prison?”