The Last Plea Bargain

by Randy Singer

  Late Friday afternoon, I finally got sick of feeling sorry for myself and called Bill Masterson. He asked how I was doing, and I told him I had been better. His solution didn’t surprise me.

  “I think it’s time that you get back in the saddle. That’s what both your mom and your dad would have wanted.”

  I agreed with him because I didn’t have the energy to tell him the truth—that I was wondering whether I even wanted to be a prosecutor anymore.

  “We need to get the Caleb Tate case nol-prossed next week,” Masterson said. “And we need to get ready for the press onslaught when we do.”

  I knew what that meant. I would be the one to face the reporters and tell them we didn’t have enough evidence to go to trial. Everybody knew how much I wanted to nail Caleb Tate. The fact that we were backing off, at least for the time being, would go down easier coming from me.

  When I went to bed Friday night, the last image in my mind was the same one I had seen every other night before the medication kicked in—the face of Antoine Marshall, a man who was haunting me in death as much as he did in life.

  65

  The phone woke me out of a sound sleep early Saturday morning. Too early. I checked the caller ID—LA—and rolled over to go back to sleep. Next he sent a text message saying we needed to talk and followed this with another phone call. He left a voice mail, but I was too tired to check it and before long had dozed back to sleep, the medication doing its job.

  But LA knew how to be persistent. The next time I woke up, it was because Justice was barking like mad at somebody knocking on the front door. I decided to ignore this too, but whoever it was couldn’t take a hint. I squinted at the clock. It registered 7:05. I tried to shake off the effects of the medication, and it finally dawned on me that nobody would come to the house this early unless it was an emergency.

  I looked at my bed hair in the mirror and matted it down a little before I padded to the front door. I squinted at the sunlight and saw LA standing there, hands in his pockets, patiently waiting. I opened the door, and Justice jumped on LA, licking as usual. I tried to think of something clever to say, but my mind wasn’t really functioning yet.

  “Can I come in?” he asked. “We’ve got to talk.”

  I could tell by the grave look on his face that something was desperately wrong. Perhaps Caleb Tate had gone public with the information about my father and Judge Snowden. Maybe the press was getting ready to do an exposé about something someone had dug up on Masterson. It was still hard for me to concentrate and formulate my thoughts, like my mind was wading through a swamp.

  “Sure. I’ll make some coffee.”

  LA came in and sat down at my kitchen table. He absentmindedly rubbed Justice’s head while I got the coffeemaker started.

  “Remember the kid who pleaded guilty on Monday?” LA asked. He wasn’t going to wait for the coffee. He just needed to unburden himself.

  “Yeah. But I don’t remember his name.”

  “Latrell Hampton,” LA said.

  I was standing next to the coffeemaker with my arms crossed. This whole conversation wasn’t making sense. “Okay,” I said.

  “We put him in solitary,” LA said, his face ashen. “We did everything we could to protect him. We knew the gangs would try to take him out.”

  As I waited for the coffee to brew, the cobwebs started clearing. Something had happened to Hampton.

  “That was my case. I put 24-7 surveillance on both his mother and his former girlfriend for two days. But resources are scarce, so we reduced it to drive-bys. Late last night, they attacked his girlfriend and her three-year-old son. Slit the girlfriend’s throat. Stabbed her thirty-two times. Killed the kid, too. Stabbed him multiple times.”

  The thought of it made me sick. And I knew the newspapers would be all over this. The cops would get crucified.

  “I spent the night over there working the crime scene. Jamie, we just didn’t have enough officers available to stand watch at that house and at his mom’s house 24-7. And now . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I’ve worked a lot of crime scenes,” LA continued, looking at me with those sad, steel-blue eyes, “but I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much blood.”

  The coffee finished brewing, and I poured our cups. I sat at the opposite end of the kitchen table from LA and spent thirty minutes trying to tell him it wasn’t his fault.

  He asked if he could hang out at the house for a while, and I went upstairs to take a shower and change clothes. When I came back down, he was sleeping on the couch.

  We spent the day together and avoided talking about Latrell Hampton except for a few phone calls LA had to field about the investigation. We went out to dinner that night at a local Macaroni Grill. It was the first time I had felt like a human being in a week.

  When he dropped me off at the house, I stayed in his car and talked for another thirty minutes. Just before I got out, he steered the conversation back around to the case that brought him there in the first place.

  “We both know who’s behind this, Jamie. You can’t let him off the hook on that murder case. Until we take him out, we’ll never break the back of this conspiracy.”

  “It’s out of my control,” I said. “Masterson made the call.”

  LA turned in his seat and looked at me. “You know what I love about you? You have no idea how popular you are. If you threatened to quit over this, there’s no way Masterson would let you.”

  “You don’t know Masterson.”

  “I know he’s a politician. And I know the surest way to lose votes right now is to tell the public that he forced Jamie Brock to nol-pros the Tate case and she quit. Think about how that would play out.”

  LA had a point, but I knew it wasn’t that easy. “If we go to trial, all this stuff about my dad comes out. Tate will annihilate Rivera on cross, and the press will crucify Masterson and me. It’s too late now.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” LA said, his voice animated. “First, I don’t think you had any obligation to divulge that information to Mace James. Nobody can prove anything except that your father did well in front of Judge Snowden. And even if you did have a duty to divulge it—you told Masterson, and he told the AG. What more could you do?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It sounds logical sitting here tonight, but Caleb Tate would play it—”

  “Jamie,” he interrupted, “they made the little boy watch while they slashed his mother’s throat. The CSI guys could tell because of the blood-spatter evidence. What kind of animals do that? What kind of warped man incites them?”

  It seemed to me that LA was piling assumption on top of assumption. But I shared his burning desire to take down Caleb Tate. Maybe I was doomed to live life as a fighter, my self-image defined by my enemies more than by the people I loved.

  “I’ll think about it,” I said.

  “That’s all I can ask.” And then, as if to seal the deal, LA reached over and gently placed his hand behind my head. He leaned in and gave me a kiss, and I didn’t fight him. It had been a long day, and my emotions were raw, but this felt right.

  We pulled back and lingered there for a moment, a few inches apart.

  “I need to get going,” I said.

  I got out of the car because I didn’t trust myself to stay there. I closed the car door but leaned back down. He rolled down the passenger window. “Thanks for the kiss,” I said.

  “There’s more where that came from.”

  I smiled. Probably for the first time in more than a week. “I never doubted that,” I said.

  66

  I set my alarm for 6 a.m. on Sunday, and Justice forced me out of bed. He wagged his tail and jumped around while I fixed him breakfast, as if to celebrate the fact that his master was coming back to life. I worked all day on a memo arguing that we should proceed with the Tate trial, now scheduled to start in just eight days. I knew we could get a brief continuance and push the case into September
if we needed to. But we had subpoenaed the witnesses more than a month earlier, and I had developed outlines for each person’s testimony. I wanted to start on schedule.

  Sunday evening, LA came to the house and fixed dinner while we discussed everything we needed to get done in the next few days if Masterson allowed the case to go forward. We avoided talking about the alternative—what would happen if Masterson called my bluff and I had to resign.

  I got to work at eight o’clock Monday morning and left a copy of my memo on Bill Masterson’s desk in an envelope marked Personal and Confidential. At nine, I checked with his assistant to make sure Masterson would see the memo that morning. He had gone straight to court, she said, but she would make sure he got it.

  I checked back with Masterson’s assistant twice and would have checked a third time, but she was clearly getting perturbed. At four thirty, just before I picked up the phone to call his cell, Bill Masterson walked into my office, shut the door behind him, and sat down across from my desk.

  “I got your memo,” he said. “You put a lot of work into it.”

  “We’ve got to take a shot at this guy. It’s the right thing to do. As you can tell, I feel pretty strongly about it.”

  There was no need to say anything else; I’d put it all in the memo. I believed Caleb Tate was the man who had initiated the no-plea-bargaining chaos. I was sure he had killed his wife. I was willing to risk the reputations of my father and Judge Snowden just to get a chance to argue Tate’s case to the jury. My last paragraph contained my ultimatum. I would resign rather than drop the case.

  Masterson and I talked for a while about how we might handle Rivera’s testimony. Masterson confirmed that he had provided the information about Snowden to the AG’s office. They had decided last Monday not to pass it along to Mace James.

  “You’re willing to put your dad’s reputation on the line?”

  “Yes, sir. I am.”

  He rubbed his face and thought, staring at the floor. Then his eyes lit up as if he’d had an epiphany.

  “Rivera’s going to deny saying anything about bribing Snowden, right?” Masterson asked.

  His excitement got my heart pumping faster. “Yeah. He denies that conversation ever took place.”

  “Right. So Tate will ask Rivera about it on cross-examination. Rivera will deny the conversation ever occurred. Your dad’s record in front of Snowden isn’t direct evidence—at best it’s corroborating evidence. But before corroborating evidence like that can be considered, somebody’s got to testify about the underlying threat by Rivera. And who’s the only person who can do that?”

  “Tate,” I said. It suddenly seemed so obvious. How could I have missed it? “You’re right,” I continued, thinking out loud. “Even if we believe Tate’s version of events, Rafael Rivera never mentioned my father. He only mentioned Judge Snowden. The only witness who can drag my father into it is Tate. And if Tate waives the Fifth Amendment and takes the stand, we’ll nail him.”

  Masterson was standing now, watching it all play out in his mind. “So Tate can still gut Rafael Rivera’s testimony, but the price he pays is that he’s got to take the stand himself.”

  “I think that’s right,” I said. I was disappointed I hadn’t realized this earlier. But at the same time, Masterson’s excitement was contagious.

  “And if he does that, this whole case will come down to our cross-examination of Tate,” Masterson said. I could tell by the look in his eyes that he relished the thought.

  “Here’s what we’re going to do,” he said. “We go to trial next week. You take the opening and every witness except Rivera and Tate. I’ll take those two and the closing.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  We discussed the details of the case for another hour. Masterson wasn’t worried that he hadn’t fully prepared for the case; he’d get up to speed watching the first part of the trial. I wished that I had half the man’s confidence.

  After he left my office, I called LA.

  “We’re in,” I said.

  67

  Mace James spent the days after Antoine Marshall’s execution trying to make good on his oath to vindicate his dead client’s name. Mace was no psychiatrist, and he didn’t know the DSM-IV criteria for an obsessive disorder, but he was pretty sure his focus on Antoine Marshall qualified. He had other clients, but he spent nearly every waking hour working on Antoine’s case. Something wasn’t right about this case, but after all these years, Mace still couldn’t put his finger on it. Now Antoine was dead. Yet how could he just close out the file? What if he had allowed an innocent man to die?

  He started by rereading the entire case file, looking at the matter from a different perspective. In the past few years, he had focused on errors in the trial court’s rulings in order to get his client a new trial. But now he searched the file for clues about who the real killer might be, the way he had when he first got involved in the case. Once the police had zeroed in on Antoine, they had never really pursued the kinds of questions Mace was re-asking now.

  What if this wasn’t a random breaking and entering? Who might want Laura Brock dead? What if the real target was Robert Brock? Who were his enemies?

  Mace started running down all the cases where Laura Brock had testified. Next, he looked at the high-profile cases that Robert Brock handled. And because he had always been suspicious of Snowden, he started studying her other decisions as well. Why had she bent over backward to protect Robert Brock? What did she have against Caleb Tate? What other cases had Caleb handled in front of Snowden?

  He did some additional digging into the scientific research in order to understand how Marshall could have passed a lie detector test but failed the BEOS. He called some scientists in India who were on the forefront of the BEOS procedure and who swore to its reliability. Lie detector tests, on the other hand, had well-known credibility problems.

  Mace had downplayed the reliability of the BEOS test to Antoine during his client’s final days because it seemed like the right thing to do. But now, the more he researched, the more Mace became convinced that the BEOS test was reliable. Maybe Antoine had it right. Maybe he had been so drugged that he had no conscious memory of that night and could pass a polygraph. But Mace couldn’t talk himself into closing the file just based on the BEOS test. Not yet. Maybe not ever. Mace had watched a client die. He couldn’t just move on to the next case while he still had doubts.

  One thing that intrigued Mace was the number of times Caleb Tate’s clients had passed a polygraph. That fact, coupled with Tate’s own on-air performance on the lie detector, caused Mace to investigate Dr. Stanley Feldman, the polygraph expert who had tested Tate.

  Mace left no stone unturned. He spent hours combing through files in the Milton County clerk’s office. He went to the jail and interviewed defendants who had been involved in the cases. He talked to lawyers and expert witnesses and made charts and spreadsheets about what he found. He went to bed thinking about his research and woke up with new ideas to pursue.

  He felt close to a breakthrough, like he was onto something, something that eluded him, something just beyond his reach. But he couldn’t quite figure it out. And sadly, even if he did, it would all come too late to save his client’s life.

  68

  I felt myself spinning out of control the week before the biggest trial of my life. Like any young lawyer, I always got nervous before an important case. But this was different. I was so jittery I could hardly concentrate or get anything done.

  Part of it was my certainty that Tate would figure out a way to inject the information about Judge Snowden and my father into the case. Even if he didn’t take the stand and testify, he would leak it to the press. He would also let them know that he had shared the information with me nearly three months ago and I had been sitting on it even when Antoine Marshall was executed. Tate would figure out a way to turn the tables so he wouldn’t be the only one on trial. I would join him. And so would my dad.

  There were times durin
g the week when I thought about the trial, imagined all the terrible things that could happen, and felt my heart start racing, my breathing becoming short and shallow. I checked my pulse and a few times found my heart beating over 150 times per minute. When it happened at work, I closed my office door and sat at my desk, eyes closed, forcing myself to calm down. At home, I would pace back and forth or lie down on the bed until I relaxed enough to think straight.

  I took Lunexor at night and muscle relaxers during the day. I told myself that these anxieties were no different from the nervousness an athlete experiences before a big game. Once the trial started, I would be all right.

  But I had been an athlete, and I had never experienced anything like this. At times I honestly thought I was losing my mind.

  It got worse when LA and I prepared Rivera for his testimony via Skype. Not surprisingly, the man came across as surly and defensive. “He’s lying,” LA said as soon as we hung up.

  I had my own suspicions, but I was hoping we were both wrong. “How could you tell?”

  LA looked at me for a moment as if trying to weigh whether he should further destroy my confidence.

  “Tell me,” I insisted.

  He shrugged. “You asked.”

  We had been using his computer for Skype, and I didn’t realize he’d had a software program recording the video. For the next thirty minutes, he played back portions of Rivera’s testimony. He pointed out microexpressions that had flashed across Rivera’s face. He showed me a graph of pacing and voice pitch that his software program had computed. Rivera’s word flow slowed and his pitch changed when he answered questions about providing drugs to Caleb Tate.

  “The most reliable signals of deception come from the cognitive efforts and emotions that surround a lie. It takes more mental horsepower to construct a lie than to remember the truth,” LA explained. “As a result, our pace and pitch change in ways that are usually imperceptible to the naked ear. But a computer program can pick it up.”