“‘I know what you’re thinking. You’re telling yourself this is your chance. Do it. Well, I’m telling you the same thing. If you think I killed her, now’s your chance. I know you’re strong enough, and you’re right about one thing—your mama’s murderer doesn’t deserve to live.’”
Here he’d waited for a few beats, just long enough to prove that he, not she, was in control.
“‘Put it away,’ he said. ‘I didn’t kill her. But I’ll take you to the man who did.’”
In San Francisco, Sims had found a parking spot on Van Ness. Before getting out he’d told her to give him the gun, which he pocketed. She’d had to hurry to keep up with him as they approached Myrtle Street. “‘They ought to be about finished now,’” he’d said, not telling her what he was referring to. “‘You remember what he looks like, don’t you?’
“‘Who?’” Part of her still hadn’t wanted to get it, why she was here with him.
“‘Edwards. The guy who killed your mother. That’s right, sweetheart. Randolph lied to me, said he had nothing to do with it. But I learned the truth. He killed her. He didn’t trust her like I did. I knew she wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t rat us out, but then he lost his head. And the feds knew this. So they used it to get him to start working for them, which meant protecting him from the consequences. He ain’t never gonna face justice. You gotta go now, if you want to catch him.’”
She’d stood frozen in place.
“‘Come on. He held her down and he covered her mouth and he stuck that needle in her arm, all while you were sleeping in the next room. And then he left her there for you to find. Go ahead, just run on down there and do what’s got to be done. Squeeze the trigger—once is enough. Now, go—run!’”
In that moment, something about the alley focused her rage. One minute she was standing beside Sims, and the next it was as if she were being swept along on a wave of anger, her feet pounding the pavement. The world had gone silent. The cars seemed to stand still as she ran between them, and there he was—Randolph Edwards, stepping out the front door of the cheap hotel, looking like a man in a hurry to be somewhere else.
She couldn’t even remember how the gun had come to be in her hand. But there it was. She didn’t know what she was going to do with it, had formed no intention. And then, like an echo, Sims’s words reached her brain: Once is enough. Suddenly, she was across the street, and Edwards was standing in front of her, turning to look at her.
She raised the gun and shot him in the face.
CHAPTER 14
Back at the office, I reviewed the case file and sent an email to Sloane asking for several pieces of evidence that I’d requested to be produced, but which hadn’t yet crossed my desk. The documents I hadn’t received included dash cam videos from the responding patrol cars that day. It was possible these might reveal witnesses the police hadn’t corralled.
Half an hour after the renewal of my request, my in-box pinged with a testy message from Sloane informing me that the videos and several other documents had been burned to a disc and put in an envelope with my name on it weeks ago, and that the envelope was still there, waiting to be picked up from the front desk of the DA’s office. Certain that no one had told me that it was there, I swallowed my annoyance, grabbed my coat, and walked briskly through the fog and wind to the Hall of Justice, arriving just minutes before the office closed.
Back at my desk half an hour later, I dropped the CD into my computer and waited for the contents to load. Along with several pdf files, it contained three clips that were the dash cam recordings I’d asked for.
Each showed a variation of the same scene, but with different timing and angle, determined by the position of the police cars the cameras were in. I was quickly able to identify the footage from the first car on the scene. The clip showed the view out the windshield as the patrol car negotiated busy streets at reckless speed, headlights and taillights flashing by until the vehicle braked to an abrupt stop. Twenty feet ahead, Alice Ward sat on the curb in front of the Motel 6 with her hands behind her back.
Nearby, Edwards’s corpse lay in a pool of blood, the gun beside it. At the edges of the frame, bystanders appeared, some running, others frozen. Car doors slammed, the picture shaking as two uniformed officers ran out, weapons drawn, threw my client unresisting to the ground, and spoke to a man who’d been near her moments before. As the police ran up, it looked to me as though this person took something from his pocket and showed it to them. A badge, I figured. But the image was too indistinct for me to be sure.
I paused and replayed in slow motion the clip of them throwing her to the ground. I wasn’t positive, but it appeared she was already cuffed before they touched her. My heart was beating faster now.
I had the case file open. It contained the police reports with the names of witnesses who’d been interviewed, and their statements. I’d been hoping to match statements to faces, but soon realized this would be impossible. There was no mention of anyone having cuffed the suspect before the police arrived.
I watched the videos again and again. In the first clip, perhaps six people were shown at a distance, in addition to the guy I’d noted. In the second, offering a more oblique angle along the sidewalk, a crowd had begun to form at the corner half a block away. The third clip showed a similar throng gathering in the other direction, Alice no longer visible among a cluster of officers. I slowed each one down, zooming in on the individual witnesses’ faces.
The shadowy figure from the first clip wore dark jeans and what looked like the waterproof shell from a ski jacket, this garb offering a stark contrast to the suit he’d been wearing during our conversation. He appeared again in the second clip, shouldering through the crowd at the end of the block, a phone held to the side of his head. For just a second, he glanced back, and I was able to zoom in on his face. The picture was grainy, but I knew I was seeing FBI Agent Braxton.
Until I heard Alice’s story and saw the dash cam video, I’d lacked a satisfactory explanation for what Edwards was doing in the Tenderloin the night she’d shot him. An FBI agent at the scene suggested that her story of what Sims had told her was true—that Edwards was a snitch. This was also, of course, a plausible motive for murder, though it raised the question of why my client was needed to pull the trigger. But that was the state’s problem, not mine. The police’s concealment of Braxton’s presence, particularly if I was correct that he’d been the first law enforcement officer on the scene and the one who’d handcuffed my client, was exactly the fault line I needed to begin chiseling into the DA’s case.
“I want the three of you out of town during the trial,” I told Teddy and Tamara when I went to their house for dinner at the end of that week.
It was Friday evening, and we were sitting at the kitchen table, Teddy and I having finished the dishes while Tamara put Carly to bed.
“I can’t just run away,” Teddy said. “How’s that going to look?”
“It’ll look worse if you stay and become a target for reprisals based on the defense I plan to present.” I hesitated before going on. “The thing is, depending on how the testimony goes, none of us may be able to come back.”
“But what does your trial have to do with us?” Tamara asked.
She deserved to know the whole story. “It’s starting to look as if the man my client murdered may have been an FBI informant—just like Dad. Today I sent notice to the FBI that I intend to call Braxton as a witness. The feds will fight my subpoena, but it appears he may have been the closest eyewitness to the shooting. I don’t see how the case can go forward without him. I don’t know what he’ll say, but my instinct tells me to push the button and keep pushing it.”
“But what if he pushes back?” Teddy asked. “You’re worried he’s going to retaliate, and expose Dad’s role as an informant?”
“It’s always possible. But I think he’s got too much invested in Dad’s years undercover for that. The alternative is pretending I don’t know what I know. I’ve been warned that
it’s my job to keep my client from telling what she knows. They’ve threatened Carly. My fear is that if I give in now, then we’re always going to be at the mercy of these guys.”
Tamara wasn’t buying it. “Why can’t you just withdraw?”
“Because that would be an admission that I’ve outlived my usefulness. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve given serious thought to the idea, not least because the state bar would probably view my decision to remain on the case as a serious ethical breach. There’s a decent chance that when this case is over, I won’t be a lawyer anymore. That might even be the best-case scenario. But I also think I’m the only lawyer who can fully exploit the weaknesses in the DA’s case.”
“What weaknesses?” Teddy’s skepticism came with the full force of the anger behind it. “You’re sitting here telling us we may have to move away, start over, presumably sell our home, and you’re doing this because you think you’re the best lawyer for this girl who’s guilty as hell?”
Feeling suddenly too upset to remain seated, I went to the back door and peered out the window. Then I turned, determined to make them see the truth. “What’s the alternative? There’s no time for her to start over with another lawyer. As for our family, we can’t expect to win a fight with a prison gang, which is what we’d have if I backed out. The AB is far more ruthless than we could ever be. That’s its strength—but also its weakness. If I can get Braxton on the stand, it’s possible I can use him to make the Brotherhood implode.”
“If we aren’t safe here, how are we going to be safe anywhere?” Tamara asked. “I mean, in this day and age, if they want to find us, they can. Right?”
I had no good answer. “All I can tell you is that the Brotherhood’s power stretches only so far. Bo Wilder’s the only guy with the power to order a hit in a different part of the country. But even if he’s gone, and one of the local foot soldiers was to meet us on the street, it’s possible he’d be obliged to kill us.”
“So you’re saying we’re never going to be safe in California.” Tamara’s voice now was hardening with blame.
“I’m sorry,” I told her. “But I think recent events have made that clear.”
She only nodded, too overcome to respond. She took Teddy’s hand, and he put his other hand on top of hers on the table. Then he shot me a look that transferred all her anger and resentment onto me, filtered through his consciousness of his own powerlessness to protect her.
“We’ve lived here all our lives,” he said. “Now you’re telling me that we have to leave? I suppose you’ve got someplace picked out for us to go, some new life.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t. I’m sorry. I’m just starting to come to terms with this myself.”
“You don’t know what’s best for us,” Teddy went on in the carping tone I’d become familiar with after he was shot, when I was managing his life because he wasn’t yet capable of managing it himself. “You’re not a father, you’re not a husband. I don’t think you should be telling me how to keep my family safe.”
“Leo’s right,” Tamara said. I had to strain to hear her soft voice. “He is. We can’t stay here. They burned Leo’s office. Then that man grabbed Carly, and now they’ve murdered your father and Dot. Whether you cooperate with them now or not, it’s only a matter of time before they’ll come for us.”
For a moment Teddy seemed to hold his breath, both hands gripped in his wife’s. Then, finally, with a shuddering exhalation, he let the held breath out.
Tamara wrapped her arms around her husband and held him tightly.
“What about Braxton, the FBI?” Teddy asked without hope, returning his wife’s embrace. “The Witness Protection Program?”
“I’ve thought about that, but the only conclusion I can come to is that we’d be trading one ruthless master for another. The FBI seems to regard its informants as resources to be used up, to be squeezed until their last drop of usefulness is extracted—not so different from the way Bo Wilder views us. Remember, Braxton kept Dad as an asset in place for over fifteen years.”
“And the Witness Protection Program?”
“Braxton holds the key to that kind of thing. For the reasons I just told you, I wouldn’t trust myself—or anyone I cared about—to him. He’s been chasing his goal too long not to be willing to sacrifice us in service of the cause. And my guess is that no information we could give him would ever be good enough for him to pull us out. He might dangle the idea of relocation in front of us like a carrot when he needed to, with the only result being that we’d be signing on to spend years in the same situation we’re in now—with the added danger of knowing that if anyone in Wilder’s crew finds out, it’s our death sentence.”
“I’m not living that way,” Tamara said vehemently. “I won’t.”
Teddy, his head still leaning against her, closed his eyes briefly and nodded. “They couldn’t protect Dad,” he said. His tone now was resigned. “There’s no reason to believe they’d be able to guarantee our safety.”
“But what about us?” Tamara said. “What’s to stop them from prosecuting Teddy, from prosecuting you?”
“Nothing,” I told her. “I’d say because we’re innocent, only that’s never stopped the feds before. All we can do is make their job a lot more difficult by not giving them the evidence they’d need to hold over us.”
For a few minutes, the silence in the kitchen was profound.
“Where would we go?” Teddy finally asked.
I had to laugh. Teddy’d been wrong to think I’d had it all planned out, because the truth was, I hadn’t given the future a thought. My mind ran up against a brick wall when I thought of living anywhere other than the Bay Area. Rationally, I knew that people lived in other places, but it was hard to think of those people as real, or those places as anything other than pictures on TV. I was a thirty-four-year-old man who’d never so much as taken a vacation outside my home state, a fact that probably said volumes about the ways in which my life was broken, about how I’d never managed to move past the grim events of my childhood.
“I don’t know,” I told them. “Somewhere we can stretch a dollar. You two come up with ideas. In the meantime, when’s the last time you had a vacation? My trial starts in three weeks. You should take Carly to Disneyland.”
I knew how flippant this sounded, but I needed them out of harm’s way.
Teddy gave me an abject look conveying his sense of betrayal.
“That’s not a bad idea,” Tamara said.
CHAPTER 15
I couldn’t expect that my client would remain anonymous, and on the following Monday a call from Jillian Sloane put an end to my ethically questionable dreams of trial by ambush. “She shuffled through a number of foster parents after her mother’s death, and was eventually placed with a distant relative of her mother’s,” Sloane said. “She took off from there six months ago. This wonderful person went on cashing the checks from the state and never bothered to report her missing. A social worker checked up on the household last week and found Alice gone.”
“She’s just a kid. Why not charge her with voluntary manslaughter and let the case go to juvenile court?”
“I’d need to have a good reason to do that,” Sloane replied. “And you haven’t given me one. Instead, I received a call from the U.S. Attorney’s Office about a subpoena you sent to the FBI. Care to fill me in?”
“The witness’s name is Special Agent Mark Braxton.”
“Justice isn’t going to let him testify,” she said. “Not a chance. And a state court judge won’t have the authority to make an FBI agent appear.”
“Yet you could make these problems all go away just by reducing the charges and transferring the case to juvenile court.”
She was too smart to tell me it was my witness, and therefore my problem. If she’d done her homework, and I had to assume she had, then she knew the mess the police had made for her. None of the reports mentioned anything about Braxton’s presence at the scene, even if the dash cam video seemed
to show him displaying his credentials to the officer who’d written one of the incident reports in my file. And, having watched the clip repeatedly, I was certain Alice had been handcuffed when the SFPD first rolled up.
“I’m sorry, Leo,” she said, breaking in on my thoughts. “That’s not going to happen. Your client gunned down a man in cold blood. We’re going to trial.”
In response to my subpoena, I received, ten days before trial, a letter bearing an impressive United States Department of Justice seal. It gave me formal notice that Braxton wouldn’t be permitted to testify, stating that as an employee of the Justice Department, he was protected by sovereign immunity. Therefore, federal regulations authorized the agency, in its sole determination, to decide whether or not he would be granted permission to testify in a state court criminal proceeding.
This permission, the letter informed me, was denied because I’d failed to provide a detailed summary of the testimony I expected him to give. If I provided a sufficiently detailed summary, the letter stated, my request would be forwarded to the appropriate authorities for further consideration. Unsurprisingly, the boilerplate letter took no position on the question of whether Braxton had been anywhere near the scene of the shooting that night.
Knowing the law, I’d expected this. Attaching the letter, I immediately filed a motion with the court to compel Braxton’s testimony,
and, along with it, a motion for a dismissal of the charges, citing Brady v. Maryland, the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment, and the Sixth Amendment’s Compulsory Process Clause. These all, in theory, guaranteed my client the right to subpoena any witness, even one who happened to be an FBI agent.
One week before trial, Judge Ransom, to whom the case had been assigned following my client’s arraignment, held a hearing on these and other pretrial motions. One of these was the state’s motion to amend the information to include my client’s real name. Armed with a binder of cases I’d researched, including one from federal court in California and another from state court in Georgia—neither fully supporting my position—I met my client in court expecting a quick rebuff to my Hail Mary pass. I knew from my research that a state judge had no power to force Braxton, a federal government agent, to appear and testify, no matter how vital his knowledge might be to my defense. The only remedy he could give me would be to dismiss the charges. But I was certain no elected judge would do that.
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