Despite my innate dislike of Atwater--and criminal defense attorneys in general--I'd never stopped to think how Wheeler's acquittal might've affected her. To me, a win is a win. If a bad guy happens to step off a curb and get hit by a truck instead of going to jail, well…it's harsh, maybe, but to me, justice is served. That's a cosmic balance I can live with. But if your life and livelihood is predicated on intentional hard work that others need to see and respond to and your first display of that calls into question, it could ruin you.
I cast about for a silver lining. "It was still a win. And it was twelve years ago. New clients come along. People forget."
She smiled sarcastically. "Yeah, except I didn't. When you get five years of shit clients, you start thinking it's you. That maybe you don't have what it takes and never did. I've gotten past that, but it took most of a decade for me to start believing in myself again."
I gave her a second, then said, "When I first called you and mentioned Wheeler, you didn't sound angry or disgusted. You sounded scared. Why was that?"
Her face twisted. "Don't you get it yet, Singer? I wasn't scared, I was pissed off. That case represents everything that's gone wrong with my career from day one. And you're the guy who started it all. Then you call and want to chat about it. What the hell is it to you, anyway?"
I watched her face. "He's back."
Atwater became very still. Her face, previously flushed with her anger, turned waxy. "What? What did you say?"
"Wheeler's here, counselor. He looked up Brenda Lane's daughter and left her a not-so-subtle reminder of her mother's death. You remember Brenda, don't you? The woman he murdered, no matter what the court said?" I leaned forward and stared at her. "He's after Brenda's daughter and I have to find him. I need to know where he is. I need to know anything you do."
She swallowed. Her hands squeezed each other so hard that, just like they say in the books, the knuckles turned white.
"Get out, Singer," she said. "Your thirty minutes are up."
. . .
I left Julie Atwater sitting on her couch, tight of lip and rigid of body. No amount of cajoling or implied threats would get her to talk and she kept repeating that I should leave until, after the sixth time and with her voice starting to crack, I figured she meant it. I jotted my number down on a scrap of paper I found near the penny bowl by the door. It would probably end up in the trash by the end of the day, but I'd had less likely leads pan out before.
It sure would be nice if she called, since our encounter had raised a hell of a lot more questions than it had answered. That she didn't know where Wheeler might be was natural. It had been the longest of shots to begin with, the kind of jackpot question you have to ask in case you get lucky. It was her behavior that had me stymied. Like on the phone, her reaction first to Wheeler's name, then to the news that he was in DC, wasn't sarcasm, or irritation, or dismissal, or any number of other reactions I would've expected from a woman who, at the heart of it, hated my guts. It was fear. And that didn't make sense for a twelve year old case where the defendant had walked out free as a bird because of her.
So the long shot was one reason to leave my number. The other was, if Wheeler was around and had already threatened her or she thought he would, she might wise-up and give me a call when she realized she couldn't handle it herself. It wouldn't hurt to be thought of as her temporary guardian angel…as long as it led to Wheeler.
But I went over the conversation again in my head as I tucked my hands in my jacket pockets and headed back to my car. Something wasn't sitting right. Atwater might've turned white when I told her Wheeler was back in town, but the first chink in her armor had appeared when I mentioned Don Landis, the prosecutor on Wheeler's case. Not that I had a fond recollection of the man, either. I had worked with Don on the investigation and would've preferred to forget all about him. But the ghosts of the case weren't that easily laid to rest. So when I got to my car, instead of putting it in gear and driving off, I turned on the heat and sat, thinking about a case I shouldn't have lost.
Chapter Eleven
The case against Wheeler took almost a year to put together and get to trial. This is considered light speed in the world of criminal trial law, but his defense seemed so paper thin, the man himself so smug with guilt, that I had trouble believing we hadn't already tried, sentenced, and buried him in the first month. I remember waking up some of those days, thinking about the work ahead of me, planning it out, and being astonished--toothbrush or razor frozen in hand--when I realized Wheeler's case was still at the top of my list.
Despite my bias, I was still a professional. I went about my business and conducted as thorough an investigation as I could. Interviews, diagrams, background checks, ballistics results, spatter reports, more interviews. Phone calls, long hours, late nights. We paid special attention to the case, did what we could, though we were stretched thin. Those were the heydays when DC led the nation in homicides.
Assigned to the case from the legal side was Don Landis, a silver-haired attorney in his mid-fifties with a decent reputation. Unlike the rest of the country, the District is a federal jurisdiction, so the United States Attorney's office does the prosecuting instead of a district attorney. It sounds like a big deal, but the situation is identical to that of the rest of the law-abiding world, including the sometimes complicated relationship between cops and prosecutors. Some of them are crazy about getting involved early on, showing up at the scene to make sure everything is done right, micro-managing the site until the cops on the ground go crazy. Others don't move until the investigator's report starts to yellow and curl up at the corners.
There were worse cards you could pull from the deck. Landis fell solidly in the middle. I'd worked with him on other investigations and found him to be thorough, if uninspired. He did the minimum amount of work to see a case through, but at least he did it. The apathy meant he wasn't climbing any political ladders or looking for headlines despite a ton of trial experience under his belt. He was a clock-puncher, a nine-to-fiver. I expected a competent job from him and not much else. Consequently, I was astonished when I got a call at the break of dawn from him the day after Brenda Lane was killed.
"Singer," I answered from the bed. Even shut, my eyes were burning. I'd trawled the scene most of the night and hadn't gotten back until after three.
"Marty," came the phlegmy, pack-a-day voice on the other end. "Tell me about Mike Wheeler."
"Don?" I said, surprised, eyes opening.
"The one and only."
"You drew the short straw, huh?"
"You could say that," he said without humor. "At least it'll be more entertaining than the gangbangers and drug hits we usually get."
"Press been after you?"
"I got a couple calls in the middle of the night from friends at the Post. They only needed a couple lines for the morning blotter, but if I don't have a statement by this afternoon they'll be out for blood."
"Mighty nice of them."
"So what do you got?"
I described the scene and Wheeler's statements. I did my best to stick with the facts but, as far as I was concerned, Wheeler was guilty as hell. I was so convinced that I found myself speaking of him in the past tense. And I expected Landis to feel the same way. I was talking to the prosecutor, for crying out loud. He should've taken my cue that this was about as open and shut as you could get. We were beyond the what and the why; we should've been talking about the how and how long.
Instead, Landis asked, "Wheeler had some prior contact with this woman?"
"Yeah, scuttlebutt has it that she'd called the station a half-dozen times to complain about him hanging around. Borderline harassment. And the switchboard told me we've got a recording of her calling last night a minute before he shot her."
"Can you get me that tape?"
"Once I listen to it myself, yeah. We'll get it to you."
"This lady--"
"Brenda," I said. "Her name was Brenda Lane."
"Sure," he sa
id. "Did she ever file charges on Wheeler? About the harassment?"
"Not that I heard asking around last night," I said. "We'll know more today."
"You don't know?" he asked, his voice peeved.
"I've been on the case for six hours, Don," I said. "And I've been asleep for three of them."
"If she didn't file charges, that's going to weaken the case."
"It's important, but that's not going to make or break this case. You talk to this guy once and you'll smell the stink coming off him."
"As in a confession?"
"No, not as in a confession," I said. "As in a string of goddamn lies. A two year old could see through the crime scene."
"Why don't you walk this two year old through it, then?" he said, his voice sarcastic.
I pinched my eyes with a finger and thumb until I saw stars. "There's no way the shooting could've happened the way he said it did. He calls it self-defense, but I walked through it and, physically, it doesn't work. The lab can give you the floor plan. You can see for yourself. As for the gun she was supposed to be pointing at him, unless she's got connections to a black-market arms dealer, it's a plant. And, for Christ's sake, the guy thanked me, like I was his sponsor at communion or something. He damn near came out and asked me to cover for him. I'm telling you, Don, he stinks."
His voice became brittle. "Marty, you might be able to play a hunch, but I need something more than how the guy smells. The union is coming out with a statement of support later today and the mayor's office is expected to comment after that. Half the city is going to want Wheeler swinging from the 14th Street bridge, the other half is planted directly behind him. If I'm going to prosecute this guy the right way, I can't afford to blow it on guesswork. It's my ass on the line when we go to court and I'm not going to let someone else fuck this up on my behalf."
It was obvious who he thought the someone else was. And I didn't appreciate it. "If this case goes down in flames, prosecutor, it's not going to be my team's fault."
Those were still the days of landlines and phones with bells in them and the base made a nice ringing sound when I slammed the receiver down hard enough to crack the plastic casing. It's not like today where you have to punch a button to hang up and all you get is a "beep," no matter how angry you are. You have to throw the phone across the room to get any satisfaction.
Then again, if I'd known where the case was going, I would've slammed the phone down and thrown it across the room.
. . .
Twelve years later, I found myself gritting my teeth as I remembered the memos Landis had sent to my office. The words "insufficient" and "inadequate" peppered most of the messages. The language was negative and harsh, criticizing my team and its work, while constantly urging us to double and triple our efforts. This on top of the three dozen or so other cases we'd been assigned. Only in books, TV, and the movies do cops get to work on a case at a time. And it seemed even more inequitable than usual for us. While other teams were going home at five, we were canceling vacations and sleeping in the office to handle the work load.
It didn't amount to squat. In court, Landis was unable to project the image of Wheeler as an obsessed stalker, refusing to make more than a passing mention of Brenda Lane's calls to the station complaining about his attentions. Atwater, despite her inexperience, used the same episodes to paint Wheeler as a devoted community peacekeeper, an example of his dedication to protect Brenda Lane and the neighborhood. She cited a rise in local crime to back up the need for vigilance--never mind that the "rise" consisted of statistics taken from the rest of DC and not the patty-cake problems the Palisades suffered from. Lawrence Ferrin, Wheeler's partner and friend, gave an impassioned description of Wheeler's service to the community and his fitness as a brother police officer. With sly looks in my direction, he described how brusque I'd been at the crime scene and my dismissive attitude.
The case progressed and Atwater ripped the lab team apart, describing their examination of the crime scene as a comedy of errors. She intimated that the body had been moved and created a colorful misinterpretation of the timing of things, deftly making Wheeler's alibi--impossible from what I'd seen two hours after the event--perfectly acceptable. The head of the forensics team defended his department's actions on the stand, but when Atwater pointed out several black-eyes suffered by his unit in three previous cases, all having to do with crime scene taint, his credibility went down in flames.
The coup de grace was a chain-of-evidence fuckup of monumental proportions. The tape of Brenda Lane's call the night she was murdered--her panicky, gasping reaction to Mike Wheeler breaking into her house minutes before she was shot to death--up and lost itself.
Lost. Vanished. As in, we couldn't find it.
I'd listened to it dozens of times. But when the original was sent by courier to Landis's office, it never got there. It grew legs and walked off. No one had made copies, even though that was standard procedure, so the only evidence of Brenda Lane's damning call was the fuzzy memory of the harried switchboard operator on duty that night.
The dirty little secret that no cop or prosecutor wants to admit is that...it happens. Things go missing that shouldn't. But you don't lose something of this magnitude. The tape wasn't just a piece of physical evidence, one block among many in the wall we were building around Wheeler. It was that all-important emotional denunciation that juries lap up, the stand-up-andpoint moment that knocks the defense's house of cards down like a hurricane hit it. Would anyone have truly believed Wheeler was there to check on a burglary after hearing Brenda's voice, the recognition in that one word, "You?"? Does a woman aiming a pistol at a potential attacker stay on the phone and scream "Don't, don't, don't!" instead of firing? Those twelve angry men would've been in and out with a guilty verdict so fast the door wouldn't have had time to swing shut.
Instead, Landis called us in a rage a few days before trial, wanting to know where the tape had gone. A massive, unsuccessful hunt for the thing followed, succeeded quickly by a lot of finger-pointing. No one seems to know who picked up the tape or signed for it, or whether it even got to the goddamn prosecutor's office. My team ripped into each other until I told them to knock it off and concentrate on the case. Communication with Landis's office reached an all-time low in both volume and civility.
I was furious--not to mention dejected--at the setback, but still thought we had enough to pin Wheeler to the wall. As for getting the jury emotionally involved, we'd lost our ace when the tape went missing, but I thought we might have a chance when Wheeler took the stand. The man was so naturally arrogant that he was his own worst enemy.
But Atwater had coached Wheeler well. He was the model defendant: humble, courteous, contrite, nearly breaking into tears when he fielded a soft-pitch from Atwater about how the shooting might mark the end of his law enforcement career. Landis did his best to rattle him and a few times I thought I saw the true Michael Wheeler rise to the surface. But each time that happened, either Wheeler recovered himself, Atwater objected, or Landis failed to follow through. Atwater took the point in that game and the defendant's testimony--so often the straw that breaks the jury's back--did nothing but pave the way for the eventual verdict.
Not guilty.
I'd been involved in enough trials to see it coming, but refused to believe it until I heard the actual words come from the jury rep's mouth. The crowded gallery broke into a raucous mix of cheers and groans; like the police, the city, and the public, the audience was split in their support. Landis stared straight ahead, his gaze caught somewhere between the floor and the judge's dais. He didn't even blink when the verdict was read. Atwater had almost the same look, with just the merest blush at her success. I remember thinking at the time that she seemed under-whelmed by the victory.
Then I caught sight of Wheeler. He was standing, surrounded by supporters. Lawrence Ferrin and Tim Delaney from the night of the shooting were there along with a bunch of other cops that I hoped I never had to work with. There were backslaps and
jokes all around.
I stared at Wheeler, not quite believing what had happened. He was shaking someone's hand, when Ferrin--grinning so wide the skin of skull seemed ready to split--nudged him in the ribs and he turned my way. His face was so self-satisfied, so full of triumph, I almost vaulted the railing to get at him. Wheeler was guilty as hell and we'd let him slip away. It was, perhaps, the worst moment of my professional life. I kept my cool, but while he was still turned towards me I cocked an imaginary gun, aimed, and shot.
He just smiled, a jackal's grin, and shook his head.
. . .
The rest of the year petered out, sluggish and uninspired. To a man, my department knew we'd blown it. Half the fault might be the DA's, but you don't look at it that way. As a matter of survival, I forced everyone to focus on the current cases and let Wheeler go. There was no shortage of people out there killing other people and they deserved our attention. Over time, the team let the case slide from the front of their mind to the back and eventually out altogether.
Of course, I didn't follow my own advice. Months after I watched Wheeler swagger out of the courtroom and Kransky had left Homicide cursing my name, I would go home and look at my personal file of the case, wondering where we'd missed the golden nugget that would've put him away. I never found it. Or we'd had it and lost it. I blamed myself, my fellow cops, the legal system, the government. I blamed Atwater and the whole sub-human race of criminal defense lawyers, then I blamed Landis and every federal prosecutor who'd ever lived. More than once I sat in my living room with a fifth of whiskey on the floor to the right and the phone to the left, got stinking drunk, then called Landis to heap abuse on him. To my surprise, he stayed on the line and took it, at least the first three or four times. Even after that, he would simply listen for a minute, then hang up quietly. Dods--newly assigned to me--got wind of what I was doing and threatened to cut my phone lines, then my fingers, if I didn't stop.
A Reason to Live (Marty Singer1) Page 8
