JD05 - Conflict of Interest

by Scott Pratt

  I was sitting at my computer in the small office I’d rented near the new courthouse in Jonesborough when I read the note. I’d gone back to practicing criminal defense law and had been cherry-picking cases, taking only the ones I wanted, and I worked alone. I didn’t even have a secretary. I had a grand total of three cases pending. One was a second-degree murder in Carter County that I thought was justifiable homicide and was scheduled for trial the following February, one was an aggravated robbery that involved a client whom I thought had been mistakenly identified, and the third was a misdemeanor assault that involved a sixty-five-year-old high school teacher who had punched a student in the face and knocked him out. The kid who got punched in the face had pulled a girl’s panties down in the lunchroom. I thought the kid deserved what he got, so I took the case.

  My cell phone rang a little after nine that morning, just after I read the online ransom note. It was Caroline. She sounded excited.

  “I just talked to Mary Monroe,” she said.

  “You’re kidding. How is she?”

  “Desperate, confused, angry, frustrated. About what you’d expect from a mother whose child is missing and who is being accused of having something to do with it.”

  “The police think she took her own child?”

  “They’re accusing both of them. They want to come and talk to you.”

  “When?”

  “Now. They should be there any minute.”

  It took them a half an hour. I watched them pull into a parking space out front. Richard was driving a red, CL600 Mercedes-Benz, a car that costs more than most people’s homes. I opened the door for them when they approached.

  Mary Monroe was, by any standard, a beautiful woman. Her hair was the color of polished ebony and fell in gentle waves around high cheekbones and a smooth, angular face. Her eyes were sky blue, her nose small and perfect. She was tall and slim and carried herself elegantly. She was wearing a beige jacket over a pale yellow, button-up blouse and a knee-length skirt that matched the jacket. The shoes looked expensive, although I wasn’t any kind of expert in women’s footwear.

  Richard was a boy next door type. He was the same height as his wife – a little under six feet tall – with wavy, sandy brown hair and dark eyes, an average build and deep dimples in his cheeks. His smile was what drew my attention first, easy and attractive, the kind of smile that puts people at ease. He was wearing black jeans and casual shoes and a navy blue pullover shirt with a cardigan sweater tied around his neck.

  “Sorry it took us so long,” Richard said as he walked through the door. “I had to lose a convoy of reporters.”

  “They followed you?”

  “They’re disgusting,” Mary said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  I looked out over the parking lot of the quaint little complex that housed my office, one that included a hair salon, a used book store, a real estate office, an insurance office and, just around the corner, a diner that my sister had opened in January. It was less than a mile from the Monroe’s house. I didn’t see any cars pulling in behind the Monroes, but I locked the door anyway and led Richard and Mary through the small reception area back to my office. I smiled and shook their hands.

  “Joe Dillard,” I said. “I’m pleased to meet you, but I wish it were under different circumstances.”

  They both looked exhausted. I noticed that Mary had taken the time to put on makeup, but the whites of her eyes were tinted pink and she looked pale and drawn.

  “Please, sit down,” I said.

  They sat in the two chairs in front of my desk. I wanted to sit next to them and express sympathy, to reassure them, but I resisted the impulse. They obviously needed legal advice, and legal advice is best served dispassionately.

  I walked around my desk and sat across from them, not really sure how to start the conversation. I sat there awkwardly for a few seconds before I finally said, “I can’t imagine what you’re going through. Caroline loves Lindsay. I’ve seen her dance at the recitals and I’ve seen her at the studio a couple of times, but I’ve never talked to her. She’s a beautiful child.”

  “Thank you,” Mary said. She opened the small purse she was carrying and took out some tissue that had been folded into a square. She held it up for a second and said, “Just in case. I told myself I wouldn’t cry. I’ve cried so much over the past few days that I don’t know how I could have any tears left in me.”

  “How can I help you?”

  She looked down and shook her head slowly.

  “It’s all so… so surreal.”

  “Caroline said the police might be accusing you of something.”

  Her head came up quickly and anger flashed in her eyes.

  “They’re insinuating that we either killed Lindsay or had something to do with her kidnapping. It’s the most ludicrous thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “Have they interrogated you?” I asked. “By that I mean have they taken you to the police station and talked to you separately?”

  “Yesterday,” Richard said. “At the FBI office in Johnson City. They split us up and took turns badgering us. One of them, Special Agent Dedrick, the one who seems to be in charge, is the most aggressive.”

  “The news said Sheriff Bates is in charge,” I said.

  “In name only,” Mary said. “The FBI is running the investigation.”

  “Dedrick?” I said. “Never heard of him. What’s his first name?”

  “Ross,” Mary said. “Ross Dedrick. I can’t stand him. He’s smug and rude and thinks he knows everything. We’ve given him fingerprints, hair samples and blood samples. They’ve searched the house, the cars, our beach house in Charleston, our chalet in Vail. We let them take our computers so their geeks can analyze them. When they started making accusations and asked us to take polygraphs, we knew it was time to hire an attorney.”

  “What do you think makes him suspicious of you?”

  “I’m sure they’re getting a lot of outside pressure,” Richard said. “Pressure from the media, pressure from superiors, that kind of thing. They don’t seem to have any viable suspects so they think we must have had something to do with it.”

  “I read the so-called ransom note on the internet a little while ago,” I said. “Is it legitimate?”

  Both of them nodded and Mary’s eyes became wet.

  “I found it on her pillow when I went into her room Saturday morning,” Mary said. “At first I didn’t understand… I didn’t know what to think. But then I noticed the window. The screen was cut.”

  “Was the window locked the night before?”

  She shook her head and bit her lip. “I’ve always liked fresh air. I open the windows sometimes. I never thought about someone climbing up there. It’s at least fifteen feet up a brick wall…” Her shoulders heaved involuntarily and she burst into tears. She cried for maybe a minute – it seemed like an hour – and then, with obvious effort, composed herself.

  “I went over to the window and looked out and saw the screen lying on the patio,” she said. “I started running around the house looking for Lindsay. I was so upset I don’t remember everything clearly. I just remember feeling sick and terrified. I went outside and looked all around the house. I kept calling her name and calling her name, but she didn’t answer, and then I went back in and got my cell phone and I called Richard and then I called nine-one-one. A uniformed policeman came first, and then another, and then a supervisor. The house filled with police officers – TBI agents, FBI agents, Jonesborough police, the sheriff. Everything just seemed to spin out of control.”

  “So you weren’t there, Richard?”

  “I left for the office at six,” Richard said. “I usually go in and kiss Lindsay, but Mary was going to get her up at seven and I was going to pick them up at eight so I didn’t want to disturb her. We were going to drive to a friend’s house who lives near the Holston Hills Country Club outside Knoxville. He has a boat and a girl Lindsay’s age, and we were going to meet a group of people there an
d ride to Neyland Stadium on the river and go to the Tennessee game.”

  “What kind of business are you in?”

  “I own a company that develops apps for cell phones. We’re going through a little rough spot right now, but overall it’s been good.”

  “Good enough to pay three million in ransom money?”

  Richard and Mary exchanged glances and Richard took a deep breath.

  “Six months ago it would have been no problem,” he said, “but I’m involved in some litigation right now that has everything tied up. One of my former friends, a college roommate, sued me. He thinks he’s entitled to half of my company. He isn’t, but his lawyers filed for a temporary injunction that’s making it tough for me to even do business right now, let alone come up with a huge amount of cash. We already have the ransom money, though. Mary’s father put it together. He and some of his employees are staying at the Carnegie Hotel in Johnson City. He has the money with him.”

  “Do the police know about the money?”

  “That’s another reason we came today,” Richard said. “The ransom note says no police. You and I both know what the police will do if the kidnapper contacts us. They’ll make all the decisions. They’ll be more interested in catching the guy than in getting Lindsay back safely. We don’t think we want them involved.”

  I thought the assessment was a bit harsh, but it had at least a smattering of truth to it. The law enforcement officers who were involved would care very much about getting Lindsay back safely, but Richard was right. They would also care very much about catching the kidnapper.

  “What exactly do you want me to do for you?” I said.

  “Three things,” Richard said. “We need you to protect us from the police, protect us from the media, and help us get our daughter back.”

  I sat back and folded my arms across my chest. I was an experienced trial attorney and had done a fair amount of investigative work, but I had never been involved in a search for a missing child. I thought about the cases of girls like Jaycee Dungard and Elizabeth Smart and JonBenet Ramsey and asked myself whether I wanted to put myself through the gut-wrenching emotions that I knew would go along with representing the parents of a missing six-year-old girl. The case could go on for years.

  Then there was the inherent conflict of interest involved in representing two people suspected of committing a crime. I almost decided to pass, to diplomatically explain that I just didn’t want to subject myself to this particular brand of turmoil, but then I thought about Caroline and what she said when we were about to leave Jonesborough the day Lindsay was taken: “She’s out there somewhere, terrified and alone.” I thought about my daughter, Lilly, and knew that I would have done anything to get her back if someone had taken her.

  Mary must have sensed my reluctance, because she stood suddenly and put the tissue back into her purse.

  “We had nothing to do with Lindsay’s disappearance, Mr. Dillard,” she said. “We came to you because of your reputation and because we think so highly of your wife. If you’re not interested, perhaps you could recommend someone.”

  I swallowed hard and made my decision.

  “Please, Mrs. Monroe, sit back down,” I said. “Are you familiar with the term concurrent conflict of interest?”

  She sat back down slowly, shaking her head.

  “It basically means that if the police suspect either or both of you of being involved in Lindsay’s kidnapping, then there is a possibility that at some point you might be put in the position of having to testify against each other. Or the district attorney might offer one of you a deal to testify against the other. As a lawyer, my loyalty has to be to my client, and in a situation like I’ve just described, it could become impossible for me to be loyal to both of you.”

  Richard held up his hand.

  “You can stop right there,” he said. “I understand what you’re saying, but in order for that to happen, one of us would have to be guilty of something. We’re not.”

  “But you could be charged even if you’re not guilty,” I said. “It happens.”

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, if we come to it,” Richard said.

  “If either or both of you are charged, I’ll have to withdraw or one of you will have to hire another lawyer.”

  “Agreed,” Richard said.

  “I’ll need you to sign a form that acknowledges that I’ve explained the potential conflict to you and that you consent to me representing both of you.”

  “Fine,” Richard said. “Mary?”

  “That’s fine,” she said.

  “Okay,” I said. “Something tells me this isn’t a good idea, but if both of you understand the potential conflict and you sign a consent form, then I guess I’m in. You’ve just hired yourself a lawyer.”

  PART II

  CHAPTER 9

  As I sat there looking at and listening to Richard and Mary Monroe, I wished – for the millionth time in my career – that I could tell whether the people sitting in front of me were telling the truth. I used to think I was good at detecting deception, but the simple fact is that it’s almost impossible. There have been many studies done on whether one person can tell if another is being untruthful by looking for physical signs like blinking or looking away or looking up and to the left or looking up and to the right or looking down or waving the hands or crossing the arms or fidgeting, and the scientific consensus is that nearly all of those things are as unreliable as the person telling the lie. Human beings have been lying since they learned to talk and they’re excellent at it, especially when the truth becomes a danger to their well-being or freedom. Even the results of polygraphs are open to interpretation and notoriously arbitrary, which is why they’re inadmissible in court. I’d been deceived many, many times in my career, and as a result, I’d learned to make strategic and tactical legal decisions based solely on admissible evidence. But the most difficult time for a lawyer is early in a case when all he has to go on is what the client is saying. If the client is lying, and the lawyer accepts the lie as truth, the lawyer unwittingly becomes an advocate for deception.

  We talked for the next two hours, primarily about Richard and Mary’s backgrounds and, of course, about Lindsay. Mary was by far the more emotional of the two when Lindsay was mentioned. She cried repeatedly, and I could almost see her weakening with each passing moment. Richard was more stoic, even brooding at times, especially when Lindsay became the main topic of the conversation. I could only imagine the anger and frustration that must have been churning deep within him, knowing that his only daughter had been stolen from under his nose and there didn’t seem to be a thing he could do about it.

  I learned that Mary was thirty-two, had been born Mary Catherine Russell and raised in Brentwood, Tennessee. She was the valedictorian of her senior class at Brentwood Academy. Her father, who she said she worshipped, was a former Marine aviator and was now the CEO and majority owner of a highly successful risk-management company based in Nashville. He’d been in town since the evening after Lindsay disappeared. She said her mother was a former beauty queen who became an alcoholic and committed suicide when Mary was sixteen. When she was ten, she said, her parents took in a child named Earl Botts who had become like a brother to her. Botts now worked for her father and was also in town, staying at the Carnegie Hotel.

  Mary graduated with a degree in psychology from the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. From there, she’d gone to Europe for a year to travel, then to New York where she lived in Manhattan and tried her hand at musical theater for two years with no success. She came back to Tennessee when she was twenty-five and was visiting a friend in Johnson City when she met Richard at a pig roast. Richard was five years her senior. They fell in love and were married in Hawaii in what she called a storybook wedding a year later. Mary became pregnant with Lindsay six months after that. A complication during delivery had left her unable to have more children, so Lindsay was the focus of her life.

  Richard’
s parents were both high school teachers. His father taught math and his mother taught physics. He described himself as geeky and awkward as a child, a skinny, clumsy lover of video games and fantasy novels. He was a computer science major at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City and had started the company he named Pegasus at the age of nineteen. He and his roommate had programmed a cell phone application that read bar codes for a class project during his junior year. His roommate’s main contribution to the project, Richard said, had been to bring beer to the study sessions. Richard thought the app was good enough to sell, and by the time he was halfway through his senior year, he’d sold it to a software development company for two million dollars. After that, he said, confidence was no longer an issue. He took what he’d learned developing the first app and started on another, and then another, and another.

  He talked fondly of meeting and marrying Mary and described Lindsay’s birth as a “profound experience.”

  “Tell me about your enemies,” I said to Richard.

  He frowned and shook his head slightly.

  “I don’t have any,” he said. “At least not in the sense of someone who would take my child for ransom. I have competitors and I have the roommate who sued me – his name is Preston Sparks, by the way – and I’m sure I have some employees who might not be as happy as they’d like to be, but I can’t think of a single person who would do something so extreme.”

  “I know this is a difficult question,” I said, “and I’m sure the police have already asked you, but what do you think about who took her? Any ideas?”

  “Someone sick and evil,” Mary blurted. “I don’t think he really wants money. I think he wanted Lindsay and now he has her, and I don’t think he has any intention of giving her back.”

  “Do the police have any theories that don’t involve the two of you?”