The Last Trial

by Scott Turow

  And so it goes. The justice done in courtrooms is, in Stern’s view, only rough and approximate. Sitting through the evidence, even as Marta and he have dismantled it piece by piece, Stern’s visceral reluctance to accept Kiril’s guilt has been greatly reduced. Yes, his old friend in all likelihood did something seriously wrong. But not so bad as to warrant a lonely death in a federal cell.

  Inspired by a similar perception, Marta does a spirited job of attacking the indictment, particularly the murder charges. Sonny listens to her with a look of deep attention. Once Feld has answered somewhat bloodlessly with a perfunctory recitation of the law, Sonny says, “I want to reflect on my ruling overnight. I’m going to have the clerk make some changes to my Friday motion call. Come back at noon tomorrow, and then we can decide how we’ll go forward.”

  The last remark all but says she will not be dismissing the whole case, but even Stern knows that would not be called for.

  After court recesses, Kiril asks for a moment across the hall in the attorney-witness room, and Stern realizes how bereft Kiril must feel at the moment. His son has accused him. Donatella is absent. And Sandy, his friend and advocate, called him out badly after court yesterday. Stern feels as he did this morning. Whatever Pafko is—liar, philanderer, fake, a long unflattering list—Stern must remain on his side, first as his lawyer, but also as the grateful beneficiary of Kiril’s talents. As soon as the door closes, Stern grabs Pafko by both arms, his hands on his biceps.

  “I apologize for my tone when we met at the office yesterday, Kiril. Weariness is taking a toll.” He means that. When he gets home each night, it seems that he is even more exhausted than the evening before, so tired that it sometimes feels like his bones may give way. In those moments, he has adopted a mantra: Just get to the end. Those unhelpful little spurts he feels from his heart now and then are increasingly frequent, although he knows they will calm down when he gets time to rest.

  Kiril, much taller, nods several times. His face seems to have been loosened by uncertainty.

  “What you said about Olga and the car—it was bewildering.” Kiril, too, now appears very old; the thought required to find words is protracted and his speech somewhat labored. His eyes, with their yellowish whites, are unmoving while he finds his way. “But you were correct.”

  “About what?” asks Stern.

  “There is something peculiar. With the Malibus. I stopped at PT this morning, on my way to court. I asked Janelle to find the records you have been talking about—the sign-outs from the fleet for the last week in March this year. I thought I would bring them to you, since they seemed to matter so much.”

  “Thank you.”

  Kiril nods several times, as if acknowledging Stern’s gratitude, but there is still a lapse before he speaks.

  “They are gone,” Kiril says.

  “Gone?”

  “I had Janelle bring me the books. They’re three-ring binders, Sandy. I don’t know how it operates precisely, because before they suspended me, Janelle would get a car for me when I wanted one, if the Maserati was going to the shop or we needed another car for some reason at home. Apparently, Oscar, the security manager in the parking lot, keeps the binder out there. But the forms are gone for that period. Janelle and I looked at it together.”

  “Removed?”

  “I assume. I thought I’d best tell you before doing anything further.”

  “Yes. Let us take it from here.”

  Stern now recognizes what is new in Kiril’s aspect. It is a look Stern has seen often from many other clients at this point: He is finally and appropriately frightened. All the emotions Kiril has been denying have flooded into his eyes. He is near tears, beaten and uncertain and overwhelmed by the utter misery of being prosecuted.

  “I cannot lose you at this stage, Sandy,” Pafko says, sounding frankly plaintive. Stern understands. Kiril is afraid that the information he just shared will drive Stern even further from him. And it has already occurred to Stern that he must question Janelle closely, to see if Kiril was alone with those books before the discovery that the sign-out forms have gone missing. Even now, Stern is unwilling to dismiss the possibility that Kiril is covering for Olga, which might also be a reason for him to appear so distraught.

  Yet it does not matter. Like a knight or a soldier, he swore allegiance to an ideal: the client, no matter what.

  “You shall not lose me, Kiril. That I can promise.” He grips Kiril’s arm again. “I promise,” he repeats.

  Back at the office, Marta and Sandy resume the discussion they’ve had too many times before: What kind of evidence can they offer in defense?

  “You know that’s why Sonny wants us in court tomorrow. She wants to know what to expect from the defense, so she can adjust her schedule.”

  Father and daughter again go through their options. They have hired two experts, both revered professors, one to address the FDA regulations, the other the insider trading laws. It’s hard to imagine any expert being more effective than Marta has been in making hash of the clinical-trial regulations. On insider trading, they are better off offering their best defense in closing argument, rather than giving Feld a chance to reduce it to a threadbare fabric as he would by picking it apart during his cross-examination of an expert.

  “Does Kiril still want to testify?” Marta asks.

  Stern makes one of his expressions of futility—hands, brows, shoulders. Marta, like her father, knows that the defendants in fraud cases, generally speaking, are the hardest clients to convince to stay off the stand. A little like compulsive gamblers who can’t resist another bet, no matter what the odds, fraud defendants always want to try to sell their story to someone else.

  Stern, unlike most defense lawyers, prefers to see his clients testify, even if they will get bruised on cross. If the person seems likable and has an explanation for the crime that approaches the realm of reason, it’s often worth doing. About 70 percent of acquittals come when the defendant testifies. On the other hand, when the accused ‘gets up,’ the saying is that there is no other witness in the case. It all comes down to whether he can be believed. Juries see the issue as binary. If they deem the defendant credible enough to raise a doubt, he will go free. If they don’t, they will convict him, no matter what they thought about the prosecution case before he got on the stand.

  Marta repeats what they both already know. “Under the guidelines, any chance he has of getting a kiss at sentencing—revered Nobel Prize winner, all that crap—Sonny will have to disregard. If he gets convicted after testifying, he’ll have very little chance of leaving prison alive.”

  “If they convict him of murder, Marta, the result will be the same.”

  If there were some reason to think that Kiril wouldn’t look like a hopeless liar on the stand, it might be worth the chance, with the goal of neutralizing the murder charges. But Stern is skeptical that Kiril’s old-world schmaltz will play well with the group in the box. It will be lie after lie exposed on cross-examination—not knowing about the database on his computer, never calling Wendy Hoh, not remembering the conversations Lep testified to. And as a topper, the prosecution might well be allowed to bring out decades of falsehoods to Donatella about his affairs, which Sonny might deem fair game now that Kiril has put his credibility directly in issue. For that reason, Kateb, or other witnesses with similar things to say, could also be called by the prosecutors.

  Like a man with a toothache who regards the extraction as the only thing worse than his current pain, Stern vows they will decide all this tomorrow after the judge’s ruling. He goes down with Ardent to the Cadillac. As soon as they are out of the garage, he reaches into his pocket for his cell phone. Donatella recognizes his voice.

  “Sandy, to what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “I am calling, Donatella, to be sure, first of all, that you and I remain friends.”

  “Yes, of course, Sandy.” She lowers her voice, even in the privacy of her own house. “What Kiril has done to this family is no fault
of yours.”

  “So you are not staying away from court because you are put out with me?” His question is an effort at diplomacy. With Kiril marching around in public with Olga again, Stern has a clearer understanding why Donatella has stopped attending the trial. Whatever arrangements govern the Pafkos’ marriage, Kiril has stepped over the boundaries and she feels no further need to support him.

  “Certainly not.”

  “Then, Donatella, I must beseech you, please, to return.” He explains to her, just as he has to Kiril, that the jurors might infer from her absence that she was taken aback by something she heard in the evidence. Donatella says nothing, although he can hear her husky breath in the phone.

  “Truly, Donatella, I ask if not for Kiril’s sake, then mine. This is my last case. I know you have seen the effort I have made. Please do not undermine that. We need you in court.”

  Even the entreaty in his own behalf is received again in silence. Yet that is not the principal business of this call. Stern pauses to ponder before going on to his next subject. He still has not really had time to fully process Kiril’s news that the sign-out records have gone missing for the Malibus. Tonight, when Pinky comes home from the office, he will discuss next steps with her. But his granddaughter is clearly on quite a run and deserves, yet again, to be congratulated. It remains possible, of course, that the documents are simply misfiled somewhere, but even Kiril did not appear to believe that. After eight months of caution and denial, Stern’s internal scales have shifted decidedly toward the unsettling conclusion that he was purposely run off the road. In six decades, he has learned a great deal about crime, the whys of it and the means of detection. But in every case, his calculations have been cold-blooded and detached. He is not surprised to discover that the anger—and fear—that go along with being the victim make rational deliberation a much more labored enterprise. Nonetheless, there is an alternative hypothesis for what happened he feels obliged to pursue.

  “Donatella, this is too complicated to explain briefly, but may I ask: In the last year was it ever the case that you had to come out to PT to drive the Cadillac home after Kiril recovered the Maserati from the shop?”

  On the other end, there is a different silence, more complete, as Donatella absorbs a question that must seem entirely random.

  “That’s happened, Sandy.”

  “Any way to recall when?”

  “I doubt it. I can look at my personal calendar. I may have made a note.”

  “Check March 24, if you would, please.”

  She promises to look later and to get back in touch.

  After Stern hangs up, he watches the dark city passing by the car window as they approach US 843. It is the way Olga strode into the courtroom yesterday that fortifies his suspicions. Olga understood, probably before anyone else, what the implications were of Innis’s phone records. And she delivered them personally, and preened in advance, because she wanted Innis to see not only that Olga had a role in her downfall but the pure pleasure Olga took in seeing her rival completely vanquished. The sheer merciless power of Olga’s ambition is part of what had seized the attention of the hundreds of people.

  Stern will not say he fully believes even a little bit of what he is turning over. So far, they don’t even know for certain that Olga had checked out one of the Malibus the day he was struck. Nor will they ever—that was the purpose of destroying the records. But if in fact Olga went tearing out of the PT lot late on the afternoon of March 24, Stern maintains a visceral unwillingness to believe she was actually after him, since he still cannot make out any obvious motive for that. On the other hand, the Cadillac Kiril and Donatella drive occasionally is close enough in appearance to Stern’s old car to allow for a mistake, especially from someone in a state of high anxiety as they embarked on mayhem. Driving at ninety, there would not be much time to check details. But the Olga who powered into the courtroom would have had a more logical target than Sandy. She was finally going to remove the last obstacle between Kiril and her.

  28. Oscar

  At a little after eight a.m. on Friday, Ardent drives Pinky and Stern into the parking lot at PT. Oscar is at the little flat-topped steel hut between the incoming and outgoing lanes, which is his principal workspace, and lifts the striped bar to admit them.

  Oscar is a beefy guy, somewhere in his fifties with a full head of jet hair. He is wearing a puffy blue winter jacket that has a fake fur collar and the PT logo over the heart. As soon as Stern sees Oscar, he recollects him. Before the accident in March, when Stern was still driving himself out here, Oscar picked up Stern in his golf cart on a couple of occasions, as Stern was limping toward the front door from the handicapped spots. He is a vet, a good-natured guy who joked with Stern about also being a ‘gimp.’ From Oscar’s gait, Stern’s guess is that Oscar has a prosthetic leg.

  It is a gray brisk day in the Tri-Cities area, too cold to keep the door to the hut open, but it is a tight fit for three people. Despite that, Oscar is an accommodating host and serves coffee from a pot breathing fog on the rear window. Oscar’s desk is actually a shelf on the front wall. He offers Stern his seat, a bar stool with a back, which Sandy declines at first until Pinky insists her grandfather sit down. A little space heater with a fan chugs on and off intermittently behind them.

  “So this about the logbooks?” asks Oscar.

  “More or less,” Stern answers.

  Oscar nods. The main need for security at PT is not because of street crime but rather fear of industrial espionage. Oscar and his junior colleague are under orders to be wary of strangers and regularly drive through the lot in their golf carts, which now, as winter approaches, are fully enclosed with a plastic window and a canvas top.

  Stern asks for a rundown of what happened with the book yesterday, which is not a long story. Janelle came out at 8:00 a.m. yesterday and asked for the binder for March. She opened it in front of Oscar and found that the sign-outs for the last week of the month weren’t there, so they looked at April, thinking the papers were misfiled. Ultimately, they paged through every month of the year looking for the missing forms.

  “Do you believe the forms were deliberately removed?” asks Stern.

  “Gotta be,” says Oscar. “I mean, you don’t need to be Bernie Madoff to figure out how to grab them. The binders are just sitting out here and Bill and I, we’re driving around the parking lot half the time. Wouldn’t take thirty seconds to find what you’re looking for and throw them in your pocket. I’m not asking why somebody would do that neither. Around here,” says Oscar, rotating his head emphatically, “there’s always stuff I’d rather not know.”

  With Stern’s prompting, Oscar reminds them how the fleet program started, which was basically as a recruiting tool. Young scientists in particular are very sensitive about climate change, and at Lep’s suggestion, Kiril and Innis wanted to create jobs for which a car wouldn’t be needed. The PT facility is right across the street from a light rail stop, and the company buys a monthly pass for every employee who wants one. The fleet was meant to meet the occasional need to drive somewhere. But all of this started before ride sharing. Lep has already told Oscar that when the Malibus age out, the company will just pay for Uber or Lyft.

  The system for checking out cars is straightforward. Oscar has a list of authorized users, who must first provide him with copies of their driver’s licenses and insurance cards. Anyone who anticipates needing a car calls down twenty-four hours in advance and Oscar assigns a car by filling out a form. Last-minute requests are met, if there are still fleet cars available. Either way, the user signs for the vehicle right here. It’s a simple form, a two-ply document that creates a yellow duplicate on the underleaf. The yellow copy is retained in a manila file on Oscar’s desk until the car is returned. After that, the forms for the month are kept in a white three-ring binder on the desk, in case of any issues.

  “And after the month?” asks Stern. “Do you file them?”

  “Right,” says Oscar. “In my very f
ancy file cabinet.” He kicks a cardboard box on the floor. “End of the year, Innis said trash the lot of them. If you’d showed up to ask in January, there wouldn’t have been nothing.”

  “Could it be that no one signed out a car in the last week of March? That would explain why there are no forms.”

  “First of all, it doesn’t happen that a week goes by and nobody takes a car. Second, that week? That week was spring vacation.” For the sake of athletic schedules, the Tri-Cities and suburban schools are on the same calendar. “Certain times—Christmas vacation, spring vacation, Easter, the summer, weekends—every vehicle is gone. Folks here, some of them, they think we got this fleet, so they don’t need to rent a second car. Relatives in town, kid home from college, teenagers with no school—they sign out a car and forget to return it for a week or two.”

  “Who did that?” asked Stern.

  Oscar rolls his eyes and shakes his head minutely. Rather not say.

  “All of them at one point or another,” he says. “Everybody in the C-suite, everybody who’s a senior VP.”

  “Did Olga Fernandez ever do that?”

  Oscar shoots an index finger at Stern. “You asked, okay? I didn’t bring up her name. But Olga—you know, Olga?”

  “I do,” says Stern.

  “Well, okay, so you know Olga, then you know she’s kind of an operator. I mean, she’s got sales calls, big meetings, running back and forth to the airport. I’m not saying she don’t need a car. But you know, Jesus, once she’s got it, good luck getting it back. Especially after her middle daughter got her license. Finally, I told her, I said, ‘Listen, miss, don’t let’s have your kid taking driver’s ed in my vehicle. She needs to scrape up a fender cause she’s learning, let it be your Beemer.’”

  “How did she respond to that?”

  “Olga? She laughed. She thinks it’s funny when you’re onto her bullshit. But I mean, what am I gonna do? I’m not gonna go complain to Kiril about her.” Oscar’s eyes slant up for a second, to see if Stern gets his meaning. “Or Lep for that matter. His head’s in the clouds.”