Animal Instinct

by Rosenfelt, David

  “She’s dead?”

  “Yes, murdered in a drive-by shooting.”

  “Wow. I don’t spend much time with the mainstream media. The kind of things I read, unless there was a wild conspiracy theory about her, or she was killed by aliens, I wouldn’t have seen it.”

  “How long did you work at Ardmore?”

  “Way too long.”

  “Can you quantify that?”

  He smiles. “Man, I can quantify everything; I’m a living, breathing quantifier. I was there for four and a half years.”

  “Why did you leave?”

  “They padlocked my office and had security lead me out. It made me feel unwanted.”

  “Mind if I ask why they fired you?”

  “Let’s just say I was not management friendly. I would call them assholes when they were making stupid decisions, and they made a lot of those. So who killed Lisa?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out. Can you think of anyone at Ardmore that would have had a reason to hurt her?”

  “Nah, she was a nice lady. Smiled at me every morning; I can’t say that for everybody there.”

  “Was she good at her job?”

  “Hey, it wasn’t brain surgery, you know? Brain surgery isn’t even brain surgery, you know?”

  I don’t know that, but I think it’s best to ignore the weird utterances coming from his mouth and try to get him to focus.

  “She worked on a computer, inputting stuff, that kind of thing. Management thought the people who did that were all Steve Jobses. Hell, Steve Jobs wasn’t Steve Jobs, you know?”

  “Your work was in computers?”

  “Yeah, if you call setting up their whole damn system being in computers. And if you call handling all their IT stuff for four and a half years being in computers. Then, yeah, my work was in computers.”

  “Who replaced you?”

  “Nobody. At least nobody who knows anything. They brought in a guy named Miller, or Marler, or Marley, or some asshole.”

  I’m floundering here, trying to get past his bitterness and into something meaningful to me.

  “Did you know Gerald Kline?”

  “Gerald Kline … Gerald Kline … oh, right … he’s the guy they used to pick some of the geniuses they hired. Never met him, never wanted to. What about him?”

  “He was killed as well.”

  “No shit? Who killed him? Same person that killed Lisa? Man, all the weird stuff started happening after I left.”

  “What are you doing now?”

  “Living off the money they paid me to leave. Where do you think I got the cash to buy the Tang?”

  He starts laughing at his own joke, which I have to admit seems funny in the moment.

  “If I ask you to think about Lisa Yates and Gerald Kline and call me if anything comes to mind, will you do that?”

  “No chance.” He laughs again. “I’ll be too busy looking for work; my Tang money is starting to run out. Maybe one of your old friends in the police department wants to hire a computer guy? I interview really well; I’ll even buy new pajamas.”

  “That should do the trick.”

  WHAT is the world record for most consecutive unproductive indoor meetings?

  Whatever it is, we must be approaching it. We keep getting together at Laurie and Andy’s house to discuss positive developments and strategy. What we come away with is that there are no positive developments, and we obviously need to come up with a new strategy.

  Only Sam Willis seems to be getting anywhere, and he’s the one who called this meeting. Sam promises that this time he’s hit the mother lode, which is probably one of the better “lodes” to hit.

  I just hope he’s right; my trial is bearing down on us.

  “So, Corey, you made the suggestion that I should check Lisa’s emails. I did and found something very interesting. It’s an email from Lisa to Doris Landry … do you remember that name?”

  “Of course. She’s the woman from Somers Point. Her obituary was one of the printed articles in Lisa’s suitcase.”

  “Right. I think you’ll find the content very interesting, and I’ll show it to you in a second. But just as interesting is what is not there. It seems to be the last email in a fairly long chain.… There were eight previous emails. All are shown in this one email … one on top of the other … nothing unusual about that. But all the previous emails are gone; Lisa erased them and then emptied the trash. I can only assume she screwed up and forgot to erase this last one. Or maybe that’s just the way she kept her emails organized.”

  He takes a small folder out of his briefcase and hands four pieces of paper to each of us. They have been collated and stapled; Sam is efficient.

  We all start reading. It is, as Sam described it, an email chain between Lisa Yates and Doris Landry. They are clearly comfortable and familiar with each other; there are occasional references to family and things that each of them has been experiencing. Doris, for example, says that her son, Steven, is coming that day to take her out to dinner.

  Then, on page three, comes the bombshell. Landry asks a question, phrased with deliberate vagueness, as if concerned someone else might wind up reading it: “I’m afraid to ask. But is there anything new with your situation?”

  After Lisa says that she hadn’t wanted to bring it up for fear of “unloading” her problems on Landry, Lisa does just that: “It’s getting worse. Gerald doesn’t think that Rico will do anything. I think he’s crazy.… Rico doesn’t just dispense this stuff for nothing. He’s a dangerous guy; he’s connected to people. I’m afraid to leave my house.”

  “Are you still going to quit your job?” Landry asks.

  “I think so. I can’t live here anymore. If I go somewhere else and get clean, I can start all over. Without Gerald.”

  Landry responded, “You can do it, Lisa. You have strength you don’t even realize.”

  Lisa’s answer, and the last words on the chain, were “I’m going to need it.”

  Andy is the first one to speak after we’ve all read it. “Well, this qualifies as a surprising development.” He is obviously and deliberately understating the case.

  “Lisa and Kline were buying drugs,” Laurie says. “Do we know if the autopsy report said there were drugs in Lisa’s system? Or Kline’s?”

  “We have Kline’s autopsy report in the discovery,” Andy says. “I don’t recall any mention of drugs, but I’ll look at it again. We don’t have Lisa’s report because Corey isn’t charged with her murder.”

  “I can access a copy,” Sam says, and I don’t think anyone doubts that he can.

  “This still leaves a lot of unanswered questions,” I say. “For one, who the hell is Rico? For another, while it demonstrates a connection between Doris Landry and Lisa, why was Lisa carrying around her obituary?”

  “I’ve got a third,” Laurie says. “Why would Rico bother to frame you for the Kline killing? He didn’t find it necessary to frame anyone for Lisa’s death. Framing someone doesn’t seem like a drug dealer’s style. And how would he know about you?”

  “I can’t answer those questions, but it does explain Kline’s cashing those checks. He was buying drugs. Apparently it was not enough money to get him off the hook. And for more than twenty grand, it was a very large hook.”

  “Marcus, can you try and figure out who Rico is?” Laurie asks. “I’m assuming he is local.”

  “Yunhhh.”

  “I’ll also ask some people in the department. I doubt Rico operates completely under the radar.”

  Andy takes out his copies of the obituaries and looks at the one for Doris Landry. “It says she’s survived by a son, Steven. We need to talk to him.”

  “I’m feeling like there are pieces to the puzzle that are still missing,” I say. “For instance, Jake Gardener was a high-priced hit man. Is that the kind of guy drug dealers hire? Doesn’t feel right.”

  I can see Laurie react with a slight frown that she quickly covers up. Gardener’s death is still both
ering her; she believes that she and Marcus should have called the police that night and reported what happened. I have tried to convince her otherwise, but she comes from the same cop culture as I do, so I understand her feelings.

  “Maybe Gardener was also a customer of Rico’s,” Laurie says. “He could have been paying his tab by killing Lisa and Kline.”

  “Maybe,” I say. “But it’s also possible, and I agree this would be a coincidence, but just because Lisa was afraid of this Rico guy doesn’t mean he was the one that had her killed. If she and Kline were operating in this kind of world, they could have made other enemies.”

  “Speaking legally, this is an enormous plus whether Rico is the killer or not,” Andy says. “If we can show that Lisa and Kline were taking drugs and in fear for her life from a dealer, it would be pretty hard for the jury not to find reasonable doubt about your guilt.”

  “I want more than reasonable doubt,” I say. “I want complete exoneration.”

  “A noble goal. But as your lawyer, I’ll settle for you not spending the rest of your life in prison.”

  I’m uncomfortable with a lot of this, but I probably shouldn’t be. Lisa clearly expressed a fear of a drug dealer in this email, which opens up a promising area of investigation.

  Andy’s right; from the standpoint of our defense, we’ve struck gold. Maybe we’ll find Rico and he’ll break down and confess, and the judge will take off my GPS bracelet, apologize profusely, and all will be right with the world.

  Maybe.

  JASON Musgrove, the man who was called “boss,” was as much amused as worried.

  On one hand, they were up against an apparently competent adversary. And that adversary was certainly tenacious; Carlos had stupidly ensured that by framing this Corey Douglas guy for Kline’s murder.

  That was a monumental error; by placing Douglas’s future freedom in jeopardy, it ensured that he and his colleagues would be relentless in discovering the truth. That Carlos had made such a dumb mistake caused Musgrove to question his choice of Carlos for the position he held.

  One more mistake like that and the position would be temporary. Musgrove’s team would see to that. That team was incredibly talented; each one was extraordinary in his own right.

  But Musgrove had created it all, had the access and the ideas. But he was a worrier because the operation had gotten so big, and so violent, that he did not feel fully in control of the nuts and bolts of the operation. He was aware that he did not fully know how foolproof and impenetrable the construction of the system was.

  Musgrove’s amusement with the current situation came from his team’s ability to manipulate his enemies and the entire situation. His people knew everything the other side knew, and more important, what they thought they knew.

  He knew that they had discovered the obituaries and was certain that they had no idea of the significance of them. They would go down one dead-end road after another, until Douglas was in jail, and Musgrove’s team would be left with more money than they could ever spend.

  But just in case, he would continue to watch them.

  He and his team were always watching.

  WE just caught another break.

  Somers Point, New Jersey, where Doris Landry lived and died, is well outside the radius that I am allowed to travel from my GPS prison. So I was not going to be able to go down there to interview her surviving son, Steven. Andy and Laurie were planning to drive down to do that.

  Sam got a phone number for Steven, and Andy called him to ask if they could visit. It turns out that he does not live down there at all, but in Freehold, which is much closer.

  He was quite willing to talk to us about his mother, even though Andy was vague about the reason for the request. To make matters even more convenient, Steven said he was planning on traveling to Manhattan the next day, to handle some personal business and to deal with a few issues in his mother’s estate.

  Steven said that he would be willing to talk to us there, if we’d make the trip in for an early-morning meeting. So that is what Andy and I are now doing. We’re meeting at Sarabeth’s, a terrific breakfast place on Amsterdam Avenue on the Upper West Side, near where Steven said his meetings are.

  We get there twenty minutes early, which is lucky, because Andy considers it a badge of honor to find a parking spot on the street. He says it’s because the parking lots are so absurdly expensive, but I don’t think that’s what it’s about. I think he relishes the challenge.

  We finally find one, and when we arrive at the restaurant, a man in his forties is sitting at a table set up for three. He brightens when he sees us and waves us over. “Andy Carpenter, right? I recognize you from television. I’m a big fan; I admire what you do.”

  Andy has made a number of TV appearances in connection with high-profile cases he’s worked on, but he’s not exactly mobbed by paparazzi when he walks down the street. That Steven Landry recognizes him does qualify him as a fan.

  Andy smiles with as much modesty as he can, but doesn’t bother to introduce me. Steven doesn’t seem to mind or notice; his total focus is on Andy. If an ex-cop comes to breakfast and no one acknowledges him, does he make a sound?

  We order breakfast, followed by some meaningless chitchat between them about New York traffic and Freehold Raceway. Steven says he lives just a few blocks away from the track, and Andy claims to have misspent his youth there. Less than fascinating stuff, but the pancakes are terrific.

  “Small world,” Steven says, and Andy and I both nod in agreement.

  “So, what could my mother have to do with Andy Carpenter?” Steven finally asks, continuing to pretend as if I am not here. I’m starting to wish I wasn’t here.

  “We’re interested in learning about a friendship your mother had with a woman named Lisa Yates.”

  Steven doesn’t hesitate. “Oh, sure, Lisa. Mom mentioned her a lot. She really liked her.”

  “Do you know how they met?” Andy asks.

  “Hmmm … I think it was on a cruise. Mom took a bunch of them after Dad died; she wanted me to go, but come on, a cruise with your mother?”

  “You’re sure it was a cruise?” I ask, just to show I’m awake and present. Steven answers me, but continues to look at Andy. Maybe if I punch Steven in the face, he’ll notice me; at least it’s something to consider.

  “Actually, I’m not. But I do know Mom liked Lisa a lot. I think she felt sorry for her as well; she described her as ‘troubled’ a few times.”

  “Troubled how?” Andy asks.

  “I don’t know; if she said, I don’t remember. But Mom saw herself as a healer; not a faith healer or anything weird like that, but she thought she could help people by talking to them, and by just being understanding. Mom was really good like that; she liked people and people liked her.” Steven shakes his head sadly. “I miss her every day. My dad too.”

  “But no mention of anything specific?”

  Steven thinks for a little while. “I think she might have said that Lisa fell in with the wrong guy. But honestly, I could be wrong about that too. Mom had a lot of friends, and she seemed to attract needy people. She believed everyone had good in them; it was just hard to let it come to the surface and stay there.”

  “Your mother sounds like a good person,” I say.

  He nods. “She really was. I thought she’d be lonely once Dad died, but she kept up these friendships. I kept in touch as much as I could, but we all have lives, you know? And then one day it’s too late.”

  “Were a lot of her friendships through email?” Andy asks.

  Steven laughs. “Oh, yes. Mom really latched on to emailing. She was old-fashioned about a lot of things, but when it came to emailing, she was one of those early adopters.”

  “Were you able to notify all of those people when she died?”

  He nods. “Every one of them. Took a while, and a lot of them wanted to talk, share memories, that kind of thing.”

  “Was Lisa Yates one of the people you notified?” I ask.
>
  He hesitates for a second. “I’m sure she must have been. There were so many I can’t remember. And some of them I just knew their email addresses, not even their full names.”

  “That must have been some job,” Andy says. “I guess you just searched through her emails and replied to the most recent one from each person?”

  Steven nods. “Yup. Took most of a day.”

  We’ve run out of questions at the same time we’ve run out of pancakes, which is a happy coincidence. We thank Steven for his time and head for the car. Luckily it hasn’t been stolen off the street and sent to a chop shop while we were at breakfast.

  Once we’re on the West Side Highway heading home, Andy asks my impression of Steven and the interview.

  “Seemed like a friendly, nice guy. And I think he was lying through his teeth.”

  “You’re not as dumb as you look.”

  “So you thought he was lying also?”

  Andy nods. “Except for the part about how much he admires me.”

  I’M shocked that Andy also thought Steven Landry was lying.

  First of all, Steven was pretty good at it. He came across as friendly, helpful, and sincere, at least on the surface. And Andy gave no indication that he disbelieved him. I hope that I didn’t either.

  “What made you distrust him?”

  Andy shakes his head. “You first.”

  “Okay. The guy’s mother just died, and this famous criminal attorney—”

  “That would be me, in case you’re scoring at home.”

  “—this famous criminal attorney, Andy Carpenter, who he has on this pedestal for some bizarre reason, starts asking him questions about a relationship his mother had. Not once does he so much as hint at any curiosity as to why said famous criminal attorney is asking the questions.”

  “He could have been awed by me.”

  “As are we all. But the part that got me was his story about how he notified all his mother’s friends that she died by returning their most recent emails.”

  Andy nods his agreement, so I continue, “First of all, how did he even get into her computer or phone, and then if he did, how did he get her password?”