Not …
The judge was now speaking to the jurors, thanking them for their service. But I couldn’t track the words, hearing instead the rush of blood in my ears. Beside me, Alice Ward had taken my wrist and was holding on as if to keep herself from floating away.
Sims must have gotten to one of them, I thought. But, in that event, the jury would only have hung, prevented by the lone holdout from reaching a guilty verdict. It simply wasn’t possible for even the most powerful gang leader to engineer an outright acquittal. There’s no way he could have managed to threaten all twelve. Yet each juror had just confirmed the unanimous vote.
The outcome of the trial was unreal, inexplicable.
The jurors began filing out of the courtroom. I turned to Alice and numbly shook her hand, thinking of something Teddy’d once told me, a quote probably stolen from some other lawyer: that to win a murder case a lawyer needed only to prove that the victim deserved it and the defendant had been the one for the job. The jurors must have concluded that in taking out a member of the Aryan Brotherhood, Alice Ward had performed a public service. If so, it was the first and only instance of jury nullification that I’d ever seen.
Sloane was staring with open shock at the jurors as they walked out. None would meet her eyes. They knew they’d flouted the law,
but one of their number must have been smart enough to explain to the others that they’d get away with it, that no judge could undo a “not guilty” verdict.
As soon as the courtroom doors had closed, Judge Ransom was on his feet, walking out of the courtroom to his chambers, unbuttoning his robe as he went, as if he couldn’t wait to leave this fiasco behind. Sloane stepped graciously across the aisle and shook my hand, but her eyes were cold, filled with suspicion, disappointment, and self-doubt.
“You hoodwinked me,” she said. “You and that FBI agent.”
My phone buzzed in my pocket. “Excuse me,” I said, my heart beginning to race all over again.
Jeanie had come forward from the gallery to stand with Alice Ward, nodding at me. I stepped past her toward the rear of the courtroom. Then, as the doors swung open, I caught a glimpse of the throng waiting in the hallway outside.
Reversing, I stepped through the well of the courtroom, answering the call as I went into the recently vacated jury room, waving a hand at the bailiff. It was Braxton. “I talked to Sims. He contacted me directly. I’m back in San Francisco, and I’m on my way to the courtroom. I’ll be in there in fifteen minutes. In the meantime, you’ve got to keep Alice from leaving. I have an order pending from a federal judge authorizing her detention as a material witness in Edwards’s murder.”
Shit. This meant Alice Ward’s legal troubles weren’t over. She could be prosecuted again in federal court under the RICO statute if Braxton decided he wanted her. “When did you talk to Sims?”
“Just a minute ago. He called me on my cell.”
That Sims would have known Braxton’s cell phone numbers set off alarms. “He already knew about the verdict?”
I stepped to the door of the jury room and looked out, scanning the faces remaining in the gallery. If Sims had a man here, he was indistinguishable from the usual courtroom hangers-on. Or he’d left as soon as the verdict was announced. I could see Alice and Jeanie talking at the counsel table, Jeanie’s arm now around the girl’s shoulders.
“Sims wants to talk,” Braxton said. “He’s playing games, trying to work the situation to his advantage. That’s a promising sign. Means we’re dealing with a calculating man—not a desperate one.”
I ducked back inside the jury room. “Surely he doesn’t think he can walk away from this.”
“Come on, Leo. Where’s the seat of power for the AB?”
The answer was obvious once I thought of it. “You’re telling me that Sims actually wants to return to prison.”
“The man who would be king has to live in the castle. From the moment someone stuck that shank in Wilder’s back, Sims knew that he was going inside. The question is, how does he give himself up without losing face with his ‘brothers’?”
Again I had the answer. “By going on a rampage and taking my family hostage.”
“I already said, I’m confident he won’t hurt them while he still thinks he has a shot at being top dog,” Braxton said. “He’ll never be accepted as a bona fide leader if he breaks that cardinal rule. That’s not to say they aren’t in danger. Because, as things stand now, he’s apparently used a woman—a Brotherhood member’s daughter, no less—to kill a fellow member. Under the code of the AB, such a man doesn’t deserve to live, let alone run the show. We’ve got to find a way to fix that.”
“The case is done. The verdict’s rendered. It’s over, Braxton.”
“But your client hasn’t told her story.” He paused. “Five minutes.”
The call went dead. I lowered the phone. I was shaking all over. I couldn’t do this, couldn’t offer up my client—a child herself—as a sacrifice to save my family, to save Carly. The very idea of it was beyond the pale.
And yet.
I came back out and found Jeanie disputing with Sloane. Alice was still sitting at the counsel table, a deputy looming beside her. “She can be released. She was tried as an adult and she was acquitted,” Jeanie was saying.
“But she’s still a juvenile,” Sloane explained with an edge in her voice. “She walked away from her foster placement, and she killed a man.”
“She’s been acquitted,” Jeanie said. “It would amount to double jeopardy to bring that up again in juvenile court.”
“But she’s been declared a dependent of the juvenile court. That means she remains in custody. She’ll have a hearing there to determine whether she’ll be returned to foster care or placed in a more secure institution.”
Jeanie glanced at me, seeming to expect me to take over. But I remained silent.
Even if Braxton hadn’t been on his way here, what was Alice Ward going to do, I asked myself—try to survive on her own on the streets of San Francisco, an AB target on her back? The failure was mine, I realized. I should’ve had a plan in place, a shelter bed ready to accept her. But I myself had made the mistake of assuming she’d be found guilty of something.
“I want out of here,” Alice said. “They can’t keep me. I was acquitted.” Her voice sounded uncertain, however, as if she knew better.
“You have an order to show me?” I asked.
“We’re getting it,” Sloane said. “The dependency court judge is at lunch. We’re trying to find her. It shouldn’t be long.”
She’d been caught off guard, so expectant of a guilty verdict that, like me, she hadn’t made a plan for what would happen if the jury went the other way. Her insistence on detaining Alice made my conflicted role somewhat easier, freeing me from the disloyal act of keeping Alice in the courtroom until Braxton showed up.
He arrived before the family court judge’s order did. His encounter with the sheriff’s deputies was brief and to the point. “She’s being taken into federal custody under the federal material witness statute,” he said, showing identification. “We’ve got an order on the way from the federal district court.”
The order from the federal judge came through on the fax machine. Judge Ransom, whose jurisdiction over the matter had ended with the verdict, still hadn’t reappeared in the courtroom. His clerk handed the fax to the deputies, and Braxton showed it to me and then to my client. He explained to her that she had a right to challenge her detention before a federal judge. Now, however, he was hoping to speak with her in the presence of her lawyer.
She glanced at me, then nodded, and we went into the jury room.
When the five of us were sitting around the table, Braxton began by explaining the situation to Alice, who listened without expression. Then he turned to me with an assertion that, to me, sounded delusional, given all that had happened: “My view is that Sims is only pretending to be motivated by revenge in kidnapping your family. In reality, I think his reas
ons are more calculating. He needs a pretext for arrest. Then, once he’s behind bars, he intends to consolidate his power and assume control over the AB. Murdering your private investigator and terrorizing your family can give him the credibility he’ll need to do that—as long as he doesn’t go too far.”
My hostility surprised even me. “There’s no standing down from what he’s done. There’s no ‘too far’ for him. A bullet’s the only deal the government should be thinking of making.”
“Put your desire for revenge aside. Would you rather we have a months-long struggle between factions—with innocent bodies falling between them, daily riots in most of California’s prisons—until this power struggle sorts itself out?”
“But you’re talking about giving him what he wants.”
“As far as cementing his control, he’s on his own. Wilder’s dead. That leaves a power vacuum. And prison’s always been the primary seat of power for the Aryan Brotherhood. A cell, for these guys, is the equivalent of a throne. If the death penalty and solitary confinement are off the table, Sims’ll come around. Trust me. I know these men. I’ve been after them all my career. At the end of the day, I can convince him to make the only play that allows him to seize the crown—and keep it.”
I didn’t want to hand Sims what he wanted, a perch from which to rule the AB from behind bars. I wanted him dead. Or at least that’s what I’d have wanted last week, before he’d grabbed my family. Don’t you ever think about revenge? Alice had asked me. Right now, however, I’d take just having Teddy, Tamara, and Carly home safe.
However, I didn’t believe Sims would give up his freedom as easily as Braxton, with all the arrogance of his power, seemed to suppose.
“What’s the FBI getting in return?”
Again Braxton’s silence seemed to confirm that he was on the verge of making a deal with the devil. Assuming, that is, that Sims hadn’t already been in the Bureau’s pocket for years.
Still, we had to hear him out. I was aware that this negotiation was, at present, the only concrete possibility on the table for bringing my family home. “What exactly are you requesting of Alice?” I asked Braxton.
“Sims needs to save face. The only person who can help him do that is your client. My proposal is that she fires you, and that her new lawyer issues a statement making clear that in her view, Sims had nothing to do with Edwards’s killing.”
“And if she does this, he’ll let my family go? Come on, Braxton. He’d be able to run the AB much more effectively from the outside. That was Wilder’s problem. What could you possibly offer Sims that he doesn’t already have?”
“You’d be surprised.” His tone was level. “Maybe you shouldn’t be, though. Didn’t you just accuse me in court of protecting the target I was sworn to destroy? It’s always possible you were more right than you know.”
I held his gaze, seeing now that he hadn’t forgiven me for those attacks, even though we’d been working together to serve his purposes. “You’re saying that the only way to save my family is for the government to allow Sims to consolidate his power over the AB. With your agreement to do that, he’ll consent to being sent to prison. Once he’s there, the FBI may even help cement his control. Do I have that right?”
“We’ve covered up murders before; you pointed that out quite ably during the trial. So, from Sims’s perspective, since he’s gotten away with murder at least twice before, it’s not unimaginable that there might be a way out for him from this mess now.”
Again I wondered if this was the result intended all along, if Braxton had secretly been backing Sims from the beginning. If so, then it appeared his ambition was not to destroy the AB, but rather to contain it by placing his informant, someone whom he believed he could control, at the top of its hierarchy.
The idea, to me, was abhorrent.
He continued: “Remember, Sims craves the same power Wilder held. Looking at it from his perspective, who better than the FBI to give him the support he needs to control a huge criminal organization?”
I knew better than to ask again how the FBI hoped to benefit from such a deal. It wasn’t lost on me that Braxton’s short-lived tactic of sowing chaos had given way with surprising ease to a lesser-of-evils philosophy. By backing Sims, he might purchase order behind bars and peace in the outside world.
I decided that I didn’t care anymore about the game Braxton might be playing, where his loyalties lay, or whether he was honest or corrupt. I just wanted him to save my family and protect Alice, and this was the point I pressed now. “If Alice fires me, who’s the lawyer that takes over?”
“Unclear. Presumably Sims has someone in mind. Because your defense raised the possibility of RICO liability, we’ll have a plausible basis to keep her in custody as a material witness. The new lawyer’s assurances that Sims had nothing to do with Edwards’s killing will not only be consistent with a defense against federal charges, but also appease those within the AB who may be tempted to believe Sims was involved. Meanwhile, Alice will remain in protective detention. Eventually, we’ll announce that we’re declining to prosecute, and we’ll assist her in transitioning to an independent life.”
Alice was skeptical. I didn’t blame her. I didn’t trust Braxton, either, and I sure as hell didn’t trust Sims. But, like me, she seemed to recognize that we had no choice but to accept the plan Braxton had offered. “I don’t want him to get a deal, to go on running the AB behind bars. I want him locked up in solitary, or on death row. Or dead. But what I want even more is for that little girl not to get hurt. So, okay. I’m in.”
This wasn’t how this meeting was supposed to go. I was supposed to be Alice’s lawyer, which should have meant preventing her from being used by the government for purposes that could be of no benefit to her, now that she’d been acquitted and there was no credible threat of further prosecution.
Instead, I was sitting by, more or less silently, while she offered, perhaps, to sacrifice herself. “Let’s just consider for a moment that he’s manipulating us all,” I said. “That he has no intention of letting my family go. That, instead, he’ll find a way to blame their deaths on the FBI.”
I’d expected this to provoke further overconfidence from Braxton, but his tone, instead, turned somber. “You’re right. That’s why we’ll need to take extraordinary precautions. He’s supposed to contact me in the morning with the meeting place for the handover, somewhere here in the Bay Area. My agents will be in position, but out of sight, ready to close in if anything goes wrong.”
“Alice isn’t doing this unless I’m allowed to be present at the exchange.”
Braxton held up his hands. “Fine. As far as I’m concerned, Maxwell, it can’t hurt to have Sims’s attention focused on you. Remember, I’m only doing what I’m doing because the lives of your family members are at stake. I promise you I’ll do my best to get them home.”
CHAPTER 25
I hereby discharge Leo Maxwell from representing me….
The termination letter, written by me on a sheet of legal paper, was folded in the breast pocket of my suit. With the stroke of my client’s signature at the bottom, I’d been kicked off the case I’d won barely half an hour before.
As Jeanie and I walked out of the jury room, leaving Alice in Braxton’s custody, I had no doubt that she’d obey my parting advice not to speak to the FBI agent without a lawyer present, but all bets were off as soon as her new lawyer appeared. Jack Sims now had his first wish granted: He’d succeeded in replacing me with a lawyer who, presumably, could be counted on to do his bidding. Clearly, this development served Braxton’s purposes as well.
As we emerged, a balding, barrel-shaped man in a shiny suit and thick-framed glasses was just walking into the courtroom. Art Jewel introduced himself as Alice’s new lawyer. I’d seen him around, a night-school JD scraping out a tenuous living handling indigent appointments in cases where the public defender had a conflict of interest and whatever personal injury work fell into his lap. His congratulations on my tri
al win were tempered with condescension. No doubt he believed his fortunes had taken a promising turn.
I didn’t disillusion him. Instead, Jeanie and I grabbed my file boxes and got out of there to await Braxton’s call.
“Golden Gate Fields,” Braxton told me when he phoned at 10 A.M. the next day, after I’d had another sleepless night. “Not the facility itself, but the turnaround at the end of Buchanan Street, past the entrance to the general parking lot. Smart choice for a high-risk meet.”
I understood what he meant. Just to the north, Interstates 580 and 80 split, heading to Marin and Sacramento, respectively. To the south were the sprawl of Oakland, the tunnel to Orinda, and the Bay Bridge. Within ten minutes, a driver could easily vanish into this spaghetti tangle of freeways. And with a steady stream of vehicles arriving along the access road for the afternoon racing at the track, Sims could be certain no law enforcement officer would dare risk a long-range shot.
He filled me in on the rest of the details. It didn’t take long.
“So how’s this going to happen?” Jeanie, who’d driven over before dawn after spending the night at her place, asked when I got off the phone. “We just show up, he hands over your family, and they arrest him?”
“According to Braxton, Sims wouldn’t confirm anything, except to promise that he’ll be there, and that he intends to give himself up.”
“I don’t believe it,” she said. “I’m coming with you.”
I hadn’t expected otherwise. Still, I made a vain attempt to talk her out of it.
We met in the IKEA parking lot and rode from there to the meeting place in the back of Braxton’s unmarked Tahoe SUV. The complex was tucked next to the freeway on landfill. Along the water were narrow public beaches and a former landfill, the Albany Bulb.
He’d bragged of having a chopper standing by, ready to maintain constant visual contact with Sims’s vehicle after the meet. He also promised that he had agents stationed in the parking lot and on the beach. We had no easy way of spotting Sims among the cars exiting the freeway, gradually filling the huge lot that lay between the track and us. We, on the other hand, were sitting ducks in one of about a dozen parked cars at the turnaround.
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