Justice Delayed: Southern California Legal Thriller #2

by Rachel Sinclair

Regina went and took a seat, and flipped through some magazines while she waited for Beth to appear. In the magazine she read all about the royal baby, an event about which she could not care less, and all about who was getting divorced, who was making up, who was having an affair with who. It was fascinating for her in a way, the trials and travails of the Hollywood stars, even though she knew that most of the stories in this particular tabloid were not accurate. To say the very least.

  After she sat and waited for about 45 minutes, Beth finally appeared. “Regina Baldwin?” She said as she came into the lobby. Beth was a tall slim blonde, with curly hair, a long fine nose, and a very angular face. She had a genuine smile, which encouraged Regina. “I’m sorry to keep you waiting. I had to work on a motion for court today. But please, follow me to my office. I understand that you have some new evidence for me to look over in the Becky Whitfield case. It’s been a closed case for a while, but we’re always willing to take a look at these closed cases when something new comes up.”

  She followed Beth into her office, and she sat down in a chair across from her desk. “Now,” Beth began. “What is the new evidence that you need to give to me?”

  “I know who raped Becky before she died. There’s some DNA on file for a guy by the name of Jurgen Williams. He’s the son of Carl Williams. At the time of the trial and the retrial, there was no DNA on file for him. He recently got arrested for a DWI, and DNA was taken from him at that time. Lo and behold, his DNA is a perfect match for the DNA that was found inside of Becky at the time she died.”

  Beth nodded her head. “I’ll have to look into that.”

  Regina was unconvinced that Beth was going to actually going to look into it. “There’s also a lot of proof that Carl Williams was behind the railroading of Avery Collins in the first place. The prosecutor who was on Avery’s case was also a regular guest at the Carl Williams compound. Follow the line from A to B to C, and you can see what happened. Carl Williams bribed Paul Sharpton, the prosecutor in the first Avery Collins trial, by promising him a lifetime membership to his sick child ranch. You have to know that Paul went out to San Diego right after the trial is over. If Carl was bribing Paul to throw Avery under the bus, it stands to reason that he was protecting somebody. Carl had an airtight alibi for the crime. So it wasn’t him who did it. Anyhow, I just think that the hard evidence of the DNA, combined with the circumstantial evidence about Paul ending up in San Diego, and being a part of Carl’s client list almost immediately after the trial, tells you everything you need to know.”

  Beth still looked unconvinced. “I know what you’re saying. But this case is a closed case, and I have an entire roster of active cases that I need to work on.”

  Regina could not believe what she was hearing. “So what are you saying? Jurgen Williams is out there, and he could be hurting girls and women even as we speak. And he’s got his daddy to protect him, still. I mean I know that his daddy is over in Europe right now, because he’s too chicken to face the people over here who hate his guts and want to tear him limb from limb, but you know he still is protecting that guy. That means he is still going to get away with doing what he’s doing.”

  Beth took a deep breath, and stood up and closed the door. “I’m not going to lie to you,” she said as she sat back down. “I know what you’re saying. Believe me, I get it. But I take my orders from the higher-ups, and the higher ups have explicitly told us assistant district attorneys that we are not to file any cases that involve Carl Williams. Now, I don’t really know why that is. I’ve heard rumors about some blackmail schemes that are going on with some of the senior attorneys in this office. I don’t really know. All that I know is that if I did decide to file a case against this guy, I would be out of a job. I mean, why do you think that Avery Collins got railroaded in the first place? I’ll tell you why. It wasn’t that Paul was being bribed by Carl. The fact that Paul went out to San Diego and was accepted into the Carl Williams’ world was a bonus for him, but that was not the reason why he did what he did with your friend. No. What happened with your friend was an order from people much higher than Paul.”

  Regina closed her eyes. “I don’t understand. You do know that Carl is not being protected by the Ivanov family anymore, don’t you? That’s the reason why he’s on the lam, even as we speak. Not only that, but the cat’s out of the bag with that guy. Everybody knows what he did with those kids. There’s no secret to keep anymore. Come on, you cannot let this guy still be out on the streets, doing what he’s doing with these girls.”

  Beth just shook her head. “Believe me, I’ve had more fights about this very topic than you care to know. To tell the truth, I was absolutely relieved that Avery got a new trial. And I was relieved that I was one who was prosecuting it. I did not try very hard to win that case, believe me. A hundred-year-old attorney who is deaf, dumb, and blind could have won that case for Avery. That was because I knew that she was innocent. And that did not go well with the higher ups at all. They wanted me to be aggressive in trying to win that case, because they needed her to stay in prison for Becky’s murder. They knew that if Avery was found not guilty, they were going to be pressured to find Becky’s real killer. Well, Avery was found not guilty, and they have been pressured. But nothing has happened on that case, and nothing ever will. I’m sorry. I wish I could tell you something different, but I do like my job. I like my job, and I’m very good at it. And if I filed charges against Jurgen Williams, I’ll be out on the street in no time.”

  “This is a hill to die on,” Regina said. “If there is any hill to die on, it’s this one. Come on, have a little backbone. Just think how you’ll feel when this guy does it again. You know he’s going to. He might’ve already. Who knows? He might be Ted Bundy in disguise. He might’ve left a whole trail of bodies. You have a chance to put this guy behind bars. Any jury is going to convict on these facts. All you got to do is just file the charges.”

  “I’m sorry, but the answer is no.”

  Regina just shook her head. She could not believe what she was hearing. She was serving this guy up on a silver platter, and they weren’t going to do a thing about it.

  For once in her life, she felt speechless. Helpless. Was there really nothing that could be done to bring this guy to justice? She knew that Avery was working on the civil case, but she was in jail at the moment, and it seemed that this Jonathan Augusto person wasn’t just going to play hardball, he was gonna play down and dirty.

  And now this.

  “Well, I guess that there is just nothing more to say,” I said. “Of course, the next time this guy does it again, I’m going to let you know about it. And you know that there’s going to be a next time. There always is. A guy like that doesn’t just start out violent, and then just change his ways. Especially when he’s being protected by everybody. Have a nice life.”

  She turned to walk out the door, but Beth stood up. “Regina. Wait. Please.”

  Regina turned around. Her arms were folded in front of her, in a defensive posture. “Yes. What do you want?”

  Beth looked around the room as if she was thinking that somebody was going to hear her. “Listen, you’re an investigator. You don’t happen to have access to anybody who is a reporter or anyone like that, do you? Do you know anybody who is media savvy and who might want a story?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do know somebody like that. His name is Ari Romo, and he’s a reporter with the New York Times. He’s the one who broke the story about Carl Williams and his ring. Why?”

  She leaned forward and talked to Regina in a quiet voice. It was such a quiet voice, that Regina could hardly hear her. “There’s a story that your friend might be interested in. Tell him that he needs to look into the death of a girl by the name of Allegra Chianti. Five years old, hit-and-run. Nobody ever found the culprit. There’s a story there. That’s all I’m going to say.”

  Regina suddenly understood. She understood very well. Something told her that somebody high up in the prosecutor’s office wa
s responsible for the death of that little girl, or, more likely, had a kid who was responsible for the death of that little girl. “On it. Thanks.”

  Regina left the office, and knew what she had to do. If she ever wanted there to be a kibosh on the apparent office- wide ban on prosecuting anybody associated with Carl Williams, she was going to have to figure out that story. She was going to have to figure it out, and threaten to go public with it. Maybe then, and only then, would she be able to have the leverage to finally get this bastard the justice that he so sorely needed.

  Chapter 25

  Avery

  Christian finally got me out of jail sometime after midnight. By that time, I was freezing, starving, and I had a headache that had been beating down for the past five hours. To say that I was not in a good mood was understating the matter.

  “I assume I’m taking you home, right?” Christian asked.

  “God yes. All I want to do is go home and get into my king-size bed, with my two girls, and just sleep for like 100 hours. But we’re also going to have to figure out how it is that we’re going to try this case. We’re going up against somebody who is going to be up to using anything and everything to try to prevent us from making headway. I think it’s time for you to do a little hacking, and see if we can come up with something to fight fire with fire with this guy. And, if it comes right down to it, I think it’s time for us to do dirty tricks of our own. We gotta show this guy that we are not to be intimidated.”

  “That’s true, but in the meantime, you got a cocaine possession case to worry about. You could lose your bar license if you get convicted for that. If you do that, you’re not going to be good for anybody.”

  “Leave that to me.”

  * * *

  That week, I got the surprise of my life. I got a letter in the mail from the prosecutor’s office explaining that they were not going to prosecute me for the cocaine possession charge.

  Huh. I filed the letter away, but I had to admit that I was curious as to what happened.

  I soon found out.

  “So, what did you think of my opening shot?” Jonathan Augusto’s booming voice was on the other line. “Believe me, that’s just a taste.”

  “I suppose that you also got the prosecutors to drop the charges against me, didn’t you?”

  “Damn right. I wanted to show you exactly how much power I have over them. I say jump, they say how high. It’s all just a show, kabuki. And, trust me, next time it’s not going to be so minor. Don’t forget, I’ve been responsible for planting dead hookers in people’s beds. This isn’t my first rodeo.”

  “Well, just like you sent your opening shot, you just wait for mine. I’m not some shrinking violet. I’ve been to prison, I’m not scared of anything. And that includes you and your dirty tricks,” I said.

  He just started to laugh. “Okay, I’ll be looking for your shot. Let’s see if you can give as good as you get. My assumption is that you’re going to be dismissing that case with prejudice, I repeat with prejudice, by the end of the week.”

  I hung up the phone, and I knew that this was a fight that I could not back down from. There was something about being threatened by people who apparently did not play the game in any kind of an ethical way, to say the very least, that got my back up. I was so tired of everybody in this case throwing their muscle around. I knew why they were. The only way to protect pedophiles such as Carl would be to play dirty. If people were not willing to play dirty, this guy would’ve been in prison a long time ago. He certainly would not be making millions upon millions of dollars off of wealthy child rapists if he did not have a whole slew of people who were willing to do anything and everything to make sure that he continued on with his dirty ways.

  I was just going to have to plan my own salvo to him.

  I went down the hall to Christian’s office. “You finding anything on Jonathan yet?” I asked him.

  He shook his head. “No. I haven’t. I’ve been hacking his system, and so far I haven’t been able to find anything that is incriminating against him. Even his bank accounts seem to be pretty kosh. I’ve seen no evidence of any kind of criminal activity so far.”

  “Well that doesn’t really matter, does it?” I asked rhetorically. “I mean, this guy apparently has prosecutors in his pocket just like Carl did. Even if there was something criminal that he’s up to, chances are no one’s gonna do anything about it. We just have to figure something out to humiliate him publicly. Or threaten to humiliate him publicly, so that he will back the hell off and let me try this case. All I want to do is try to win this case fair and square. I don’t want to humiliate him into throwing it. I just want him to stop with his dirty tricks.”

  “So, what are you thinking about?”

  “We need Ari Romo on this. At least, we need to do something to him, and then get Ari to threaten to file a story about it. This guy’s a celebrity attorney. He’s also a celebrity fixer. We need to figure out his soft spot, his Achilles’ heel, and poke it. We need to do the equivalent of a dead hooker in his bed, and then threaten him with publicity about it. As you know, he wouldn’t be afraid of the legal system. But he might be afraid of a front page story in the New York Times about it.”

  Christian smiled. “What about an actual dead hooker in the bed? It worked in Godfather Part Two.”

  “Where are we going to get a dead hooker? Besides, there’s not much we can do even with a dead hooker. Nobody’s going to prosecute him for anything, especially not a dead hooker, because who really cares about them, right? I mean, I’m being facetious, of course. I care about dead hookers, so do you, so does everybody with a heart. But I’m just saying that the prosecutor’s office would not prosecute him for something like that. And even if we tried to use a dead hooker as bad publicity, that wouldn’t work, either. He would just revel in it. He’s the kind of guy that believes that any publicity is good publicity, unless it’s something that gets at his Achilles heel. Which we don’t really know what that is yet.”

  “Oh, so I guess a horse’s head is out as well, huh?” he said, referring to the scene in the first Godfather where the movie producer woke up with the head of his dead race horse in his bed.

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. No, there has to be something else. Something that we can really get this guy on. Listen, we need all hands on deck for this. Let’s meet at my condo this evening. Aidan’s going to be home tonight, I’ll invite Regina, we’ll order in, and we can brainstorm this. Two heads are better than one, and four heads are better than two.”

  “Where is Regina, anyhow?”

  “She’s working the Kansas City angle. Last I heard, she was talking to the prosecutor about reopening the Becky Whitfield murder case. She was going to talk to the medical examiner and see if the DNA found inside Becky matched the DNA for that Jurgen guy. If it did, hopefully that would give the prosecutor enough information to pursue charges.”

  Christian got up, went back to his office. He had a motion that he was working on for a court appearance at 1:30. I looked at the clock, and wondered myself how Regina was doing. I hadn’t heard from her since I got out of the jail.

  I had a sinking feeling that there was something wrong. I just didn’t know exactly what.

  Chapter 26

  Regina

  Regina spent the next three days turning over every single rock she could investigating the Allegra Chianti hit-and-run case. Little Allegra was only five years old when she was struck by a motorcycle going 70 mph in a 25 mph school zone. She started with the police report, and spoke with every witness she could possibly speak with. She was beginning to think that this was another dead end, when she decided that she was going to look a little deeper.

  She called Christian and asked him to hack into the files of the Kansas City Police Department. She wanted to see if there was anything buried in the archives about this case.

  Ten minutes later, she got her answer. “There was an arrest made. A Jerry Astin was brought in for questioning. He w
as also arrested. Turns out that his bike had damage that was consistent with having hit a child, he was wearing the same clothing that witnesses said the guy on the bike was wearing, and he was three sheets to the wind. He blew .25. The blood test came back that he was also high on cocaine. And, the kicker is, he confessed.”

  “Jerry Astin, who is he?” Regina was going to have to look into this Jerry Astin guy. She was also going to have to look into exactly why this case was buried, and what it had to do with the Becky Whitfield case.

  “I don’t know, that’s up to you. Try to figure out who that guy is, who might’ve been able to bury it, and who might’ve been able to use it. Good luck.”

  Regina got on the computer, and looked for some records on this Jerry Astin kid. She found out that he was the son of a guy by the name of Ronald Astin. At the time that the Becky Whitfield case was working its way through the court system, this Jerry Astin kid apparently was racking up the DWIs like they were going out of style. Every single one of them, however, got dismissed.

  When Regina started looking into his background, Ron Astin’s, she figured out why every one of Jerry’s charges got dismissed. Ron Astin was a state senator, and he was in charge of the committee that funded the Jackson County prosecutor’s office. That told Regina everything that she needed to know. She put two and two together and figured that every time his shady kid got arrested for yet another DWI, this Ron Astin guy probably threatened the prosecutor’s office with a choke of funding unless they declined to prosecute him.

  What Regina did not know was how it was that Ron Astin was associated with Becky Whitfield’s case. He evidently was. But how?

  Some additional digging led Regina to the answer. Apparently, in 1998, Carl Williams himself was one of the people who was in line to buy the Kansas City Star. The Star is the paper of record in Kansas City. When she went to the archives of the articles that did not make it to print, with the help of Christian, who hacked the Kansas City Star archives the same way that he hacked the KCPD arrest archives, she saw that there was a major article that was killed. This was an article that threatened to expose Jerry Astin for the kid that he was. It also threatened to expose all the coverups that Ron was responsible for, with regards to his kid. A major story was going to be published after Jerry Astin had confessed to having killed Allegra Chianti, but the story was killed right after Carl Williams apparently endowed the newspaper with a $1 million donation.