Twisted Justice

by Diane Capri

  But I’d learned something.

  Hathaway and Drake didn’t agree on George’s arrest. Otherwise, Drake wouldn’t have accused Ben in front of me and other witnesses. Now, I knew that Ben had been leaning toward my point of view even before I arrived in his office. He could be persuaded to help us. It was a valuable piece of information. But was it enough?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Tampa, Florida

  Thursday 6:25 p.m.

  January 27, 2000

  WHEN THE DOORBELL RANG, I looked through the peephole to see Ben Hathaway standing there. With a briefcase.

  I wasn’t totally surprised. After Drake’s open disrespect, and attempts to embarrass Ben in front of his subordinates, I’d expected Ben to rebel and stop supporting Drake, who wasn’t grateful for it. That’s what I’d have done. Ben and I had been allies before, even friends. Neither of us had any great love for Drake. Never underestimate the male ego.

  Ben couldn’t openly support us against Drake, but he didn’t have to. All I needed was a little head start by getting a look at the file a few days early. Anyone who assumed George had killed Andrews, which was just what Drake claimed to believe, would realize that sharing the investigative file with us now instead of three weeks from now would not change the truth and should have been no big deal. Ben wasn’t taking any real risk here. Either Drake believed in his evidence or he didn’t. I knew Ben would come to the same conclusion. Eventually.

  If I could show the public what a total jerk Michael Drake actually was, so much the better. I let Ben in.

  “Okay,” he said, holding up his thumb and forefinger on his right hand. “But I have two conditions of my own. One, you keep me up to date as you go along.” He folded the fore-finger down.

  “No problem.” I lied; he knew it.

  “Two,” he held up his thumb. “You tell me who you think killed Andrews and I’ll arrest him. None of your elaborate confession schemes.”

  I must not have looked properly agreeable.

  He said, “I mean it, Willa. I don’t want you or George getting killed over this.”

  I reached for the briefcase, and he pulled it away from my grasp.

  He tried once more to persuade me. “This guy murdered a decorated army general, for God’s sake. General Andrews was more than able to defend himself. Have you thought about that? If you cross him, the killer won’t let you live just because you’re a judge.”

  I nodded; he wasn’t impressed. “I’m serious here, Willa. If you think arresting the wrong guy will get me run out of town on a rail, think what Drake will do to me if I let you and George get killed by the same perp.”

  I waited until he offered the briefcase to me, asking nicely, “Do it for me. Please.”

  Only because I was beginning to worry that he’d change his mind again, I agreed. Realistically, it was the sleeves out of my vest anyway. What was I going to do with a cold-blooded killer who would shoot Andrews in the head and then just walk away? I had no interest in being a hero.

  All I wanted was my husband’s life back.

  Ben came fully into the room then, making his way to the only chair that would hold his bulk. I settled across from him, the briefcase close to my side, my hand gripped around the handle in case he changed his mind and tried to take it back from me.

  “Let me tell you a couple of things first,” he said. “The full autopsy report isn’t done yet.”

  “Okay.”

  That wasn’t unusual. Even an expedited full autopsy report still takes several days.

  “The science crew in this case was two of my best technicians. These guys know what they’re doing,” Ben told me.

  The crew’s job was to locate, identify, preserve and remove for analysis, all substances that might be clues to solving any crime that occurred.

  Ben said, “These two criminalists work together all the time. They’re good guys. They have a routine they’ve developed that’s very thorough.”

  That didn’t mean they’d found everything, just that they’d likely be good witnesses, able to describe in meticulous detail everything they found and how they found it. If they’d found anything to incriminate George, they’d be able to get it into evidence easily. Half the cases a criminal defendant wins are won because evidence against him is excluded.

  Ben’s point was that evidence wouldn’t be excluded in George’s case, and he waited a few moments for his message to sink in.

  “Another thing I might as well tell you,” he said. “We knew, almost immediately after we found the body, that Andrews was murdered.”

  I thought back to the Saturday afternoon of the Blue Coat, when I’d listened to Hathaway’s report on the radio.

  “Why did you say it was a suicide, then?” I asked, a couple of beats before I could answer my own question. “Drake’s idea, right?”

  Ben nodded. “Drake thought it would give us some time to find the killer, if he felt secure enough to hang around.”

  My ire bubbled up. “So Drake thinks George is stupid, too? If George killed Andrews, why would he go around telling everyone he was sure Andrews had been murdered, and play right into Drake’s hands?”

  It was one thing to think George was a killer, but quite another to think George was a stupid killer. Drake was a jerk.

  Ben chose not to respond to that. He rose and made his way toward the door. “I’m going downstairs for a late dinner. I’ll be back in two hours.” He gestured toward the briefcase. “I’ll pick it up after.”

  George always said people would do the right thing if you gave them a chance.

  “I’ll keep it right here until you’re finished,” I said, but I couldn’t find it in my heart to smile at him.

  Before Ben left, he gave me two more rules: No copies; and never tell a living soul he’d done this.

  I thanked him and he left me to my work. He wasn’t really doing anything wrong by helping me. I couldn’t force him to give me the file, but he could release it voluntarily. Still, Drake wouldn’t like it, which made it a big risk.

  I took the briefcase into the den and opened it. The official police file, labeled People v. George Carson, was nothing more than a five-inch Redweld jammed full of papers. A note on the top that said the file was scheduled to go the prosecutor’s office shortly, which meant Drake hadn’t seen it all yet. Timing is everything.

  I reached into Aunt Minnie’s desk drawer and pulled out my headset. It would be faster if I dictated what I found as I went along.

  My legal training had not deserted me. I’d already set up my own shadow file. Organization is the key to a lawyer’s life. Legal documents multiply like rabbits in the dark. They’re worse than rats and telephone pink slips.

  As I’d done hundreds of times as a lawyer, I reviewed the file. Like most legal work, it was slow, tedious, and solitary.

  First, I went through and dictated a list of the file’s contents. Things have a way of disappearing from police files once they’re turned over to the prosecutor. I’d had a number of experiences like that as a lawyer. Since I’d been on the bench, lost evidence happened in my cases more often than I’d like to admit.

  I’m not big on conspiracy theories. I don’t believe that AIDS was deliberately transmitted to the gay population by the CIA as a test of biological warfare; the Government introduced drugs to the black community; or the defense department is concealing aliens in Roswell, New Mexico. I don’t even believe that President Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy of his political enemies.

  But I know that things legitimately get lost and over-zealous lawyers sometimes fail to look hard to find them when they pull out all the stops to win a case.

  Which was what Drake would be doing here.

  Competitiveness, the desire to win at all costs, is alive and well in America, and it pervades our entire culture, not just professional sports.

  When I went through the file the first time, I saw a normal homicide investigation file. If anything, the file was maybe a little more
complete than usual.

  I flipped quickly through the initial report of the first officers on the scene: crime scene photographs, autopsy photographs, toxicology report. A few interview notes with members of the victim’s family, George, friends, colleagues. Inventory of Andrews’s pockets where they’d found the suicide note, the boat. Pictures of the gun, ballistics report.

  When I’d finished the list, I returned to the beginning and went through more slowly, wishing technology had developed to the point where I could scan everything. Someday.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Tampa, Florida

  Thursday 6:55 p.m.

  January 27, 2000

  THE HOMICIDE SQUAD AND the medical examiner’s office had been called at the same time. Regardless of the cause, where a death is unattended or a death certificate cannot be issued by a competent physician, someone from the medical examiner’s office has to examine the body to estimate the time and probable cause of death. Nothing unusual about that.

  The photographs of the scene weren’t too gruesome. Mostly they were pictures of Andrews slumped over in the boat. The photos were taken from every angle, though, and revealed that he’d slumped due to the hole in the side of his head.

  The fingerprint reports listed fingerprints appearing on almost every flat surface. Most of them belonged to members of the Andrews family and Andrews himself. A few were unaccounted for, so far. George had been finger printed when he was arrested, but none of these prints were his. That was a break.

  They’d bagged the gun and taken samples of the bloodstains.

  Physical evidence was limited, but what existed had been gathered, photographed and sent to the various laboratories for analysis.

  Except for the body, of course, which had been sent for autopsy by the medical examiner.

  There would be no DNA to match at this crime scene. The killer left no bodily fluids. If skin cells or hairs were left behind, they’d been blown away by the wind.

  Around the Andrews’s back yard, investigators found nothing remarkable. No footprints or car tracks that the killer might have left. But it’s pretty dry here in January and the ground would have been hard, resisting imprints of any kind.

  Butterflies, which felt more like disgusting squirming maggots, returned to my stomach when I read the next page into my microphone.

  The gun found on the bottom of the boat was a snub nosed .38 caliber Colt revolver, serial number Y327141, which had five shells in the cylinder, one having been fired. I had to stop a second and swallow hard before I could continue: “Registered to George Carson.”

  The police officer at the scene picked up the gun by sliding a pen through the trigger guard. This meant that no one obliterated valuable data by sticking something down the barrel.

  Ben’s earlier warning about the admissibility of evidence against George reverberated in my mind and the maggots in my stomach thrashed about. I forced my attention back to the file.

  The officer’s report claimed he had smelled the fresh odor of burned gunpowder when he smelled the gun barrel, suggesting that the gun was recently fired. Fingerprints on the barrel, the cylinder and several of the shells belong to George Carson, I read.

  At this point, the maggots caused my stomach to revolt. I yanked off the headset and stood up; paced quickly, taking deep breaths. Snagged a bottle of water from the fridge and swallowed about half of it to tamp down the bile.

  Glancing at my watch, I saw that Ben’s two-hour dinner was half over. No time to fool around. Reluctantly, I took my seat and replaced the headset.

  “Gunshot residue tests revealed no indication that Andy had recently fired a gun with either hand,” I dictated. “In a true suicide, a negative result might mean the victim had on rubber gloves, or held the gun in a plastic baggie, or maybe even that no residue escaped. But since Andrews appears to have died instantly, those possibilities are unlikely.”

  The only legitimate conclusion was that the gun was fired by someone else.

  One bullet had been removed from Andrews’s skull, a .38 caliber. Again, modern technology was working against George, because the ballistics tests confirmed the gun found at the scene was the murder weapon.

  Using an interesting technique I hadn’t seen before, the criminalists had used a length of string to trace the angle at which the bullet had entered Andrews’s skull. While it wasn’t exact, they did place the approximate spot the gun was held when it was fired: outside the boat, on the dock.

  The faint powder burns on Andrews’s head indicated that the shooter must have been about three feet away from him. Burns would have been stronger if he’d shot himself.

  As Ben had told me, no reasonable doubt existed: Andrews was murdered. And Drake had known it from the outset.

  “Liar,” I said under my breath, felt better.

  Drake lied about the suicide. Maybe he’d lied about other evidence, too.

  Now that I had everything dictated, I had less than half an hour left to go through the file a third time, more carefully, my figurative magnifying glass over each piece of paper.

  I started with the interview notes. The interview with George was either the shortest suspect interview in history or there was another set of notes somewhere. These notes contained only George’s assertion that he had no idea how his gun ended up at Andrews’s house and that he’d been at a breakfast meeting the morning of the murder.

  Thanks to me, everyone knew that George had not been home. But he’d refused to say where he was in response to police questioning, too.

  “What was George doing that was so important he’d keep the secret rather than exonerate him by providing an alibi?” I heard myself dictate into the section of the document I’d labeled Open questions.

  If I knew that one thing, I could end the whole mess. George couldn’t have been in two places at once. Damn George’s honor. Whoever he was with that night certainly didn’t feel honor bound to help George. It was like him to keep his word, even when others didn’t. But this was the time for self-preservation.

  As for George not knowing how his gun ended up in Andrews’s boat, I took that to be true. And I had made a note earlier in my journal to follow that issue up with him. Beginning where he’d last seen the gun might help me find out who used it to kill Andrews.

  The interview notes didn’t say anything about George’s answer to those questions, if they’d been asked. These notes were incomplete. Another issue for the Open questions list.

  The interview with General Andrews’s daughter, Robbie, was a little longer. Her alibi for the time of the murder was that she was working. Too bad, I thought, uncharitably. I didn’t like Robbie and she clearly despised both George and me. It would have been such a tidy package if Robbie had killed her father and framed George for the murder. Too tidy, unfortunately.

  Still, Robbie worked at home. Her alibi had been verified when Robbie had shown the investigator the online therapy column she’d been working on at the time. I made a note of that, and to follow up with a few questions of my own. That is, if Robbie Andrews would talk to me.

  She had also told the police that George had been plotting with Senator Warwick and President Benson to defeat her father’s nomination. She said George would stop at nothing to keep Andrews off the bench.

  This was obviously where Drake got the idea that George would have a motive for murder, but it seemed pretty weak to me. That motive would fit every protester at the Capital last week, including the shooter who had tried to kill Andrews while I watched the episode on live television in my chambers.

  The other interviews had been even longer than Robbie’s. The police had interviewed John Williamson, Robbie’s husband, Deborah Andrews and both of the general’s sons. They’d also interviewed Senator Warwick and my brother, Jason.

  And that was all the interview notes in the file, although I was sure there would have been further interviews done.

  The only consistent thing about them was that they all provided confirmed alib
is and George had not. The detectives had tried to meticulously rule out all of the other potential suspects with a personal motive located here in Tampa.

  In a high profile murder like this one, other law enforcement agencies were no doubt assisting with the investigation. The protestors would be located and ruled out, one at a time. Craig Hamilton’s shooter would be thoroughly questioned. Even if he’d acted alone, he might have like-minded colleagues.

  The investigation could be secretly continuing, even if Ben Hathaway didn’t know about it. At least, I hoped so.

  As I dictated into my headset, I noticed a few other things, but I was just trying to get it all down. There would be time for analysis later.

  I listed the coroner’s conclusion on manner of death: “homicide, inconsistent with suicide.” Next, I simply dictated his evidentiary support for this conclusion: The angle of entry of the bullet into the temple was inconsistent with a self-inflicted gunshot; no powder burns on the general’s temple, suggesting the gunshot was fired from some distance rather than with the gun placed on the side of his head as a suicide would do.

  Exactly two hours later, hoarse from dictating and emotionally exhausted, I finished. I put the file back into Ben’s briefcase and returned to the living room just as he knocked on the door again.

  “No wonder people don’t trust the government, Ben,” I told him as I handed the briefcase over to him. “They lie.”

  He stood immediately inside the door, away from the line of sight of any inquisitive diners down below. “Only when we need to. Remember, Drake isn’t out too far on a limb here.”

  Ben ticked off the evidence Drake had used to support George’s arrest. “George has no alibi; his gun complete with his fingerprints was the murder weapon; George made it plain to one and all that he would make sure Andrews never sat on the Supreme Court. Add to that his fight with Andrews downstairs the night of the murder. It’s a set of facts that will definitely support an indictment, Willa. George is in trouble. You’ll need a miracle to get him out of this. You might want to suggest he consider a plea.”