by Paul Levine
"Kreeger had no criminal record," Steve continued. "He was wealthy, well known, respected. He was the court-appointed expert in a nasty child custody fight. At the same time, he was having an affair with the mother."
"Not nice."
"A woman named Nancy Lamm. Not only does Kreeger seduce her, he gives her bushel baskets of pills, overprescribing antidepressants and sedatives. They have a falling-out, and she threatens to file a complaint with DPR, go after his license."
"Sounds like the state had its motive. Kill her. Shut her up."
"That's what Pincher argued to the jury, but think about it, Vic. If Kreeger planned to kill her, would he do it at his house, in his hot tub, with his drugs in her system?"
"If criminals were smart, we'd be out of business."
"Kreeger has a genius IQ. If he wanted to kill Nancy Lamm, it would have been a lot cleaner."
"Unless he snapped."
"He's not given to rages. He's a smart, calculating man who just happens to have a woman drown in his hot tub after mixing booze and barbiturates."
"Any signs of trauma?"
"Excellent question, Counselor. Laceration on the skull. Pincher's theory was that Kreeger bashed her with something, then tossed her into the hot tub. Kreeger told me he was in the house mixing a pitcher of daiquiris. When he came out, he found her in the tub. My theory was that she was zonked out of her mind, slipped on the wet pool deck, hit her head on the rounded edge of the tub, and tumbled in."
"Sounds pretty far-fetched to me."
"I had a human-factors expert who backed me up. Said it was within the realm of reasonable probability. We also put together a video animation that looked pretty convincing."
"So you made the slip-and-fall argument without blushing?"
"I never blush."
"Right. Not even when you claimed your client shouldn't have to return the engagement ring she accepted when she was . . . what was the term you used?"
" 'Temporarily unavailable for matrimony.' "
"Right. Solomon-speak for 'already married.' "
They walked past the Sheraton Hotel and neared the bridge to Brickell Key, once an undeveloped island, now a concrete jungle of high-rises, with barely a tree or shrub that wasn't potted on a condo balcony. A heavyset shirtless jogger plugged into an iPod lumbered past them.
"What did the coroner say about the laceration?" Victoria asked.
"Inconclusive. Could have come from impact with the tub or something else with a rounded edge."
"Such as?"
"The skimmer pole used to clean the pool."
"Did they test it, match up the marks?"
"Couldn't. The pole was missing. Never found."
"Oh, isn't that convenient?"
"Yeah, Pincher ranted and railed about that. Suggested to the jury that Kreeger smacked the woman with the pole, then got rid of it before he called nine-one-one."
They approached the small park at the point where the Miami River pours into Biscayne Bay. Off to one side was Miami Circle, the archeological site that dates back two thousand years. Long before Brickell Avenue was populated with lawyers and investment bankers and CPAs, a hardwood hammock stretched along the bay, a prairie ran inland, and Native Americans camped on the banks of the river, cooking their wild game over open flames and making carvings in the limestone.
"You already know what the jury did," Steve said. "Acquitted on murder and convicted on manslaughter."
"The curse of the lesser included offense."
"Exactly. A no-guts compromise verdict. They should have either convicted Kreeger of murder or acquitted him. But forget that for a second, Vic. You be a jury of one. What's your verdict?"
"I hope you don't think I'm being critical," she began. Her feminine way of softening whatever might follow, couching her criticism in terms as comfy as bedroom slippers. "I'm surprised the jury didn't acquit. Without a murder weapon, with a reasonable alternative scenario for the head wound, your guy should have walked."
"I thought you'd say that. But it wasn't a fair question. I left something out."
"Something incriminating?"
"You tell me. Let's go back almost twenty years. Kreeger's just finishing med school at Shands. To celebrate, he takes a weekend trip down to Islamorada with a couple classmates. One's his best friend, a guy named Jim Beshears. The other is Beshear's girlfriend."
Victoria seemed puzzled. "What's a trip to the Keys have to do with the dead lady in the hot tub twenty years later?"
"Like I always say to the jury, please wait until my entire case is presented before reaching any conclusions."
Victoria shrugged and he continued. "The three of them—Kreeger, Beshears, and the girlfriend—charter a boat to go after marlin. Now, they've been drinking all weekend, and everything they know about fish they learned at Red Lobster, but somehow Beshears' girlfriend manages to hook a marlin and fight the thing till it's alongside the boat. Not a huge one as marlins go, but still a couple hundred pounds or so. The captain's on the fly bridge, and Kreeger and Beshears are like Abbott and Costello trying to land the fish. Kreeger's waving a gaff and Beshears is leaning over the gunwale, and somehow the fish lands in the cockpit and Beshears lands in the drink."
"Okay, so he went overboard. They haul him aboard, right?"
"The girlfriend throws him a life ring but he can't reach it. Beshears is swallowing water and panicking. Kreeger leans over the side, holding the gaff for Beshears to grab on to. But the boat's rocking and Beshears is riding up and down on the waves, and somehow in the confusion, Kreeger brains him with the gaff. The captain's trying to maneuver the boat and they lose sight of Beshears until he's dragged into the props and chopped into sushi."
"Oh, God. You're not saying Kreeger intended to kill him? I mean, there's no proof of that, right?"
"No more than with Nancy Lamm in the hot tub."
"Meaning what?"
"All weekend long, Beshears had been busting Kreeger's balls about some paper he wrote, claiming Kreeger'd phonied up research to justify his conclusions about evolutionary psychology. Kreeger believed that murder is a natural consequence of our being human, that evolution favored those who kill their rivals."
"Survival of the homicidal."
"Exactly. Kreeger wrote that killing is programmed into our DNA, rather than being aberrational conduct. He did some studies with undergrads, measuring their propensity for violence. Beshears needled him the way guys do, calling him a fraud. Kreeger warned him to shut up, and it just kept getting uglier."
The sun had angled lower in the sky and was shooting daggers into their eyes. Victoria slipped her sunglasses down from the top of her head. "Pattern conduct," she said softly, as if thinking aloud. "Beshears and Lamm. Two people who pose threats to Kreeger. Each one gets clobbered on the head and knocked into the water. Both end up dead. Each time it looks like an accident. Similar facts under the Williams Rule."
"Which is how Pincher got the Beshears story into evidence, crippling my defense."
"Pincher's usually so lazy, I'm surprised he discovered the earlier case."
"He didn't."
"So how'd he find out about the fishing trip and the guy dying?"
"I told him," Steve said.
"No. You didn't."
"I did, Vic. I gave Pincher all the evidence he needed to convict my client."
Victoria's lower lip seemed to tremble. Then she shook her head, as if trying to cast out the memory of what she just heard. "You violated your oath?"
"I had a good reason."
"There's never a good reason," Victoria said, turning away.
Six
THE LOVE CHILD OF
AYN RAND AND TED BUNDY
Victoria tried to process what she had just heard. Just yards away, students at the dig site worked on hands and knees with trowels and whisk brooms, searching for archeological treasures.
She could hardly believe what he'd told her. Steve never rolled over and played dead for anyone. In co
urt, he always fought hard and sometimes dirty. More than once, he had spent the night behind bars for contempt.
"A lawyer who's afraid of jail is like a surgeon who's afraid of blood."
He'd told her that the day they met. At that moment, they were ensconced in adjacent holding cells. He had provoked her in the courtroom. She'd lost her cool and they'd been held in mutual contempt. Which is the way they felt about each other. In the lockup, he had ridiculed her propriety; she'd railed about his ethics, or lack thereof.
"You make a mockery of the law."
"I make up my own. Solomon's Laws."
She knew that Steve cut corners to win. But breaking the law to lose? That was a new one. And perhaps even more frightening because it cut to the heart of the lawyer's oath. A lawyer was supposed to zealously defend—not double-cross—his or her client.
"Come on, Steve. You didn't give incriminating evidence to the state."
"Yes, I did."
"Why?"
"Kreeger lied to me, and I caught him at it."
"Then you should have withdrawn from the case."
"Then he would have lied to his next lawyer, and he would have gotten off. Like you said, without evidence of the earlier death, the state had a weak case."
"That's the system. The net has holes in it. Sometimes the guilty fall through so the innocent won't be snared. You, of all people, must know that."
Here she was, a former prosecutor, telling Steve-the-Shyster that it's okay for murderers to walk. She couldn't believe the role reversal at play.
"Somebody had to stop him," Steve said. "Kreeger killed Jim Beshears and Nancy Lamm."
"Dammit, Steve! You don't know that."
"I felt it in my bones. I was dead-solid certain."
"Even if you're right, a defense lawyer can't be a secret agent for the state."
She glared at the man she loved, the man she planned to live with, might even someday marry. But this was just astonishing. Something her mother once said came back to her.
"Men's deceptions are always the tip of the ice cube."
"You mean iceberg, Mother?"
"Not if they're drinking Scotch on the rocks. My point, Princess, if you catch them in one lie, others will surely follow."
In her chosen career as a glamorous widow, Irene Lord, The Queen, had developed a healthy cynicism about men. Victoria had picked up some of that. But it never seemed to apply to Steve. Most men put on a front and hide their aggravating traits. Like the archeology students at the dig site, you have to scrape with shovel and trowel to find their true nature. Not so with Steve. He hid his softer, caring side—his love for Bobby, his pro bono work, his passionate commitment to justice—under an exterior that could be both overbearing and unbearable.
She forced herself to speak to him in even, measured tones. "I understand your motive, but you stepped so far over the line, I have to question whether you're fit to be a lawyer."
"Jeez, why are you taking this so personally?" Sounding hurt.
"How am I supposed to take it? I'm your partner. And your lover."
"You weren't either one when this went down."
She clenched her teeth so hard, she felt her jaw muscles ache. "Would you like to restore the status quo ante?"
"Aw, c'mon, Vic. I didn't mean it that way. More like, you weren't around to influence me, so I did some things I wouldn't do now."
"Nice recovery, Slick. But what you did was still unethical and illegal."
"Okay, already. I've gotten over it. You should, too."
"Just like that! Could you give me a few minutes first?"
One of the students at the dig site, a young woman in khaki shorts, stood and yelled. She held something in her hand and waved to the others. From this distance it was impossible to make out the item. A shard of pottery, an arrowhead, some artifact of the Tequesta Indians? Scratching away to learn secrets of the past.
Victoria went into her lawyer mode. Speaking softly, as if thinking out loud, she said: "Kreeger probably can't sue you because the statute of limitations has run. But there's no limitations period on ethical violations. He could have you disbarred."
"Or hit me with a marlin gaff."
He told her then about the gaff delivered to the office. "The marlin on the door. The gaff. Kreeger's way of saying he knows I torpedoed his case."
"But why tell you?"
"To let me know he can do the same thing to me he did to Beshears and Lamm."
"So selling out your client wasn't just blatantly illegal," she said, shaking her head in disbelief. "It was also unbelievably stupid."
* * *
Her anger surprised him. What happened to that warm and comfy nurturing he'd expected?
What happened to clinging to her warm bosom?
Steve thought back to the day he'd discovered Kreeger's secret. He'd been looking for helpful witnesses, not damning ones. Kreeger had become a bit of a celebrity. The psychiatrist had done work with the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit and gained some credibility as an expert on serial killers. Turn on CNN or Court TV, and he'd pop up every time some freak was loose. Then he moved into personal relationships, which Steve figured wasn't all that different than homicide. Relaxed in front of the camera, Kreeger got his daytime TV show, dispensing wisdom to women fed up with their men, an inexhaustible and ever-growing audience.
Steve traveled to the med school in Gainesville, trying to find character witnesses. He spoke to a professor who remembered Kreeger and told a murky story about a fishing trip gone bad. A few more calls turned up the former girlfriend of the late Jim Beshears. The girlfriend told Steve that Kreeger had been enraged by Beshears' charges of academic fraud. The two men had argued, and from her vantage point in the cockpit of the boat, she thought Kreeger might have pushed Beshears overboard, then intentionally hit him with the gaff. But everything had happened so fast and she'd been so shaken, she couldn't be sure. Officially, the death was declared an accident without a full criminal investigation.
Then Steve read Kreeger's bestselling book: Looking Out for Numero Uno. The man's views of human nature were downright macabre. In chapter one, "Screw Thy Neighbor," Kreeger posited that greed, hedonism, and selfishness are good. Altruism, charity, and sacrifice are stupid. Self-interest is the only interest. Be the screwer, not the screwee. The more he read, the more concerned Steve became.
He went back to Gainesville and puttered around in the Shands Hospital library. He found Kreeger's monograph, Murder Through the Eons: Homicide as an Essential Element of Evolutionary Biology. While a hospital resident on the psychiatry staff, Kreeger had argued that human beings were bred to be murderers. Homicidal instincts, he wrote, are survival tactics dating from prehistoric times. By historical practice, it is rational and sane to kill anyone who threatens your cave, your mate, or your dinner. Our DNA carries those instincts today.
"Murder should not be considered a perversion of human values. Murder is the essential human value."
Then Kreeger went even further. To kill rationally, he declared, does not require one to be engaged in self-defense. Setting aside man-made notions of right and wrong, it would be logical to kill a rival for a promotion at work or for the love of a woman or even for the last seat on a bus.
Suddenly, preparing for the man's trial, it had all become clear to Steve.
William Kreeger, MD, was the love child of Ayn Rand and Ted Bundy.
A man so possessed of narcissism and self-interest and so devoid of feelings for others that he would eliminate anyone he believed was a threat.
His classmate. His lady friend. Or his lawyer.
Sure, Victoria was right. Not only was it illegal to turn over incriminating evidence to the state, with Kreeger as a client, it was also dangerous. So what now? Kreeger wouldn't be satisfied with pranks involving dead fish, marlin gaffs, and trash talk on the radio. Those were just preludes.
Kreeger could be planning his attack right now.
Which meant Steve needed a counterattack. Or
better yet, an offensive. A way to bring down Kreeger before he took his shot. But how?
Storm into the radio station, jack Kreeger up against the wall, and rattle his fillings.
Nah.
Steve was a lawyer. A schmoozer. He could bob and weave in front of a jury and play rope-a-dope with opposing counsel. But violence? Not his style. Sure, he'd taken one swing with a stick that cracked a man's skull, but that had been necessary to rescue Bobby. What else?
Punching that probation officer in dubious defense of Cece's virtue? Not very impressive. Starting a brawl years ago by spiking the Florida State shortstop while breaking up a double play? Nah, nobody even got bruised.
But Kreeger? The man had a track record of deadly violence. So Steve needed a plan. But a problem there, too. How do you outsmart a man who is both brilliant and a killer, when you are neither?
SOLOMON'S LAWS
3. When you don't know what to do, seek advice from your father . . . even if he's two candles short of a menorah.
Seven
KING SOLOMON AND THE
QUEEN OF SHEBA
Steve needed advice. He needed to talk to the man who had once peered down at assorted miscreants, pronouncing them guilty, dispatching them to places where the only harm they could inflict was on one another. The Honorable Herbert T. Solomon had a feel for this sort of thing.
What do I do, Dad, when some nutcase is after me?
Steve walked out the kitchen door into his backyard. His father and nephew sat cross-legged on the ground, in the shade of a bottlebrush tree. Pieces of plywood and two-by-fours were strewn on the grass, along with a hammer, a saw, and an open toolbox.
