Murder One

by Robert Dugoni

  “No . . .”

  “Barclay—”

  “No. I want you, David.”

  “And I’ll be here.”

  “No. I want you to represent me.”

  Sloane straightened and released her hand. The thought had never occurred to him. “Barclay, I’m not a criminal lawyer; this is way out of my expertise. We can find someone . . . the best. I already called Carolyn to get ahold of—”

  She shook her head, emphatic. “No, I want you.” She retook his hand. “You have to represent me, David. I don’t want anyone else.”

  He pulled back. “You have to understand . . . you need a criminal defense lawyer; you need the very best lawyer out there.”

  “You’re the very best lawyer out there.”

  “I’m a civil lawyer.”

  “I’ve watched you in court. I know what you can do. I saw it. I’ve talked to people who’ve gone up against you, who said they never had a chance. You can’t be beat. You never lose.” She drew out the final words. “They say what you do to a jury is something that can’t be explained, cases that you should have lost, cases—”

  “Civil cases.” He pushed back his chair and stood. “All civil cases. Your life is on the line here.”

  “Don’t you think I know that!”

  For a moment neither spoke.

  “At some point it is going to come down to what a jury, twelve people, believe and don’t believe,” she said. “That’s why I have to know that you believe me, so that when you stand up in front of them—”

  Sloane wheeled, turning his back, finding only a wall. He rubbed his forehead, thoughts coming from all different directions. He felt the press of her hand at the small of his back.

  “When you get up and tell them that I did not do this, they’ll believe you. I know it. But I need you to believe me. I want you to represent me without any doubt.”

  The voice of reason shouted at him to tell her this was not a good idea. It was a crazy, irrational, horrible idea. It was the product of her feeling vulnerable and alone and scared. He needed to tell her she shouldn’t rush to any decisions, that she could decide on her representation later, after the initial shock of her arrest and her surroundings faded.

  Her hand gently turned him. She stood, head cocked, as she had the night they played pool at the Arctic Club, her jade-green eyes sparkling, a thin smile. “I don’t trust anyone but you. These past weeks, I’ve never let anyone so close . . .” A tear leaked, running down her cheek. “You know me, David. You know my heart, my soul . . . better than anyone ever has. I love you.”

  The three words stunned him, not because she’d said them but because he had been certain, or at least had convinced himself, that they would never again mean anything to him. But hearing them sent an electric pulse through his body, touching a part of him he had believed dead, incapable of ever feeling again, a part that Barclay had brought back to life.

  FOURTEEN

  FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2011

  KING COUNTY COURTHOUSE

  SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

  Déjà vu all over again,” Rick Cerrabone said, as he walked into the conference room on the fifth floor of the King County courthouse, which housed the offices of Cerrabone’s boss, King County prosecutor, Amanda Pinkett.

  Rowe knew enough baseball to suspect Cerrabone’s malaprop had been intentional, one likely uttered by the Yankees’ legendary catcher and even more legendary butcher of the English language, Yogi Berra. Rowe would have smiled had he not been so tired. Cross-white’s dull expression indicated she felt the same. After the high of arresting Barclay Reid and escorting her to jail, Rowe had crashed. He could feel the fatigue tingling in his joints. His eyelids drooped, begging to close.

  Cerrabone asked Rowe and Crosswhite to meet with him to discuss the evidence before his meeting with Pinkett. With the media already generating local and national stories, Pinkett had scheduled a news conference to issue a statement on Barclay Reid’s arrest. She wanted all of them, including the chief of police, Sandy Clarridge, present. The invitation wasn’t to applaud Rowe’s and Crosswhite’s efforts. That would come after the trial, and only if they obtained a conviction. This invitation, they knew, was to hold them accountable, and there was no better way to do that than to have them stand before the cameras and let the world know who was responsible for Reid’s arrest.

  “You feel comfortable about it,” Cerrabone said, taking a seat across the table and flipping through his file. “You feel comfortable with this kid Joshua Blume?”

  Rowe sipped coffee. “Hey, I’d prefer the kid was a Harvard graduate with twenty/fifteen vision, but you get what you get.”

  “What kind of impression does he make?”

  “He’s a sixteen-year-old kid, Rick. He mumbles, doesn’t make great eye contact, has a limp handshake. But he’s certain about what he saw, and he signed a statement.”

  “He picked her out without hesitation,” Crosswhite added. “First chance. Boom, ‘That’s her.’”

  “When can I talk to him?” Cerrabone asked.

  “I’d give him a day. The defense won’t have the report for a while, and the father is squirrelly, one of those guys who keeps talking about his attorney. He was worried about liability.”

  Worry lines creased Cerrabone’s forehead. “Liability for what?”

  “Not coming forward sooner.”

  “Why? Was the kid impaired?”

  “He admitted to drinking a couple of beers,” Crosswhite said. “And I believe he was telling the truth about that. The father is just one of those control-freak, paranoid types.”

  “We’ve got the names of his friends with him that night,” Rowe said. “We’ll follow up.”

  Cerrabone sat back. “But we still can’t explain the other footprints.”

  That was the turd Rowe and Crosswhite were now dumping in Cerrabone’s pocket, and they all knew Pinkett would smell it immediately. It would be the piece of evidence the defense targeted to create reasonable doubt unless Cerrabone could explain it. At the moment they had no good explanation.

  “Maybe we no longer have to,” Rowe said. “It could have been two people sleeping on a boat who heard the gunshot, went to check it out, but didn’t want to get involved. We don’t know. What we do know is that the shooter’s footprints are size seven, the same size and same brand of running shoe Reid wears.” Kaylee Wright had confirmed that the brand of shoe was a Nike AS300 cross-trainer. “The bullet was a thirty-eight. Reid is the registered owner of a thirty-eight and her gun is conveniently missing. We found ball-round ammunition in her home. The shooter, according to ballistics, was between five feet and five feet four inches tall. Reid is five-two. Blume puts her at the public easement where she would have entered and exited the water. He’ll testify Reid looked to have gotten out of the water after a swim and got onto a bike. Reid is a triathlete. She has no alibi for the night of the murder, and she certainly had a motive. She told her ex-husband she would kill Vasiliev in exactly the manner he was killed.”

  “Yeah, about that—why would she do that?” Cerrabone asked. “It isn’t the smartest thing to do if she was actually considering it.”

  “It might be exactly why she did it,” Rowe said. “Just like she went to an attorney and inquired about filing a wrongful-death lawsuit the afternoon before she intended to shoot Vasiliev.”

  “A reverse alibi,” Cerrabone said, following Rowe’s reasoning but not sounding convinced. “That’s a hell of a risk.” He pressed wisps of hair flat on his head. “Does she have a lawyer yet?”

  “Sloane.”

  Cerrabone cocked his head. “I meant her criminal lawyer.”

  “Sloane was at the jail all last night,” Rowe said.

  “Really?” Cerrabone asked.

  “Why? What’s wrong?” Crosswhite asked.

  “Nothing. It’s just that I did some checking. Sloane has a bit of a reputation,” Cerrabone said. “A law-school classmate says Sloane wins cases he has no business winning.
”

  Crosswhite sat forward. “Implying what? He cheats somehow?”

  “No.” Cerrabone seemed to be searching for words. “Apparently, he’s just that good.” He rocked back in his chair, seeming to further consider it. “Still . . . a civil lawyer . . .”

  A hell of a risk, Rowe thought but did not say.

  LAW OFFICES OF DAVID SLOANE

  ONE UNION SQUARE

  SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

  Sloane fought through the cobwebs, his mind slow and his thinking blurred. A copy of the Seattle Times lay on the conference room table, the banner headline screaming at him.

  Prominent Seattle Attorney Arrested in Drug Dealer’s Murder

  Positioned beneath it was a four-by-six-inch photograph of Sloane trying to shield his face from the cameras as he left the jail, looking foolish doing so. He used to wonder why people bothered; it only made them look all the more guilty. Now Sloane knew. He had reacted instinctively to the bright light and to the intrusion on his personal space, the camera like a punk kid challenging him to a fight. He looked ridiculous, definitely not the first impression he wanted to convey about the guilt or innocence of his client.

  Sloane hadn’t slept, going directly from the jail to the Washington Athletic Club, where he showered and changed clothes before getting to the office. Based on Jenkins’s greeting when he had entered the conference room—“You look like shit”—the fatigue showed on Sloane’s face. Now seated at the far end of the table, Jenkins stretched his arms and yawned. Pendergrass sat across from Sloane with a notepad and a cup of coffee, his hair still damp, the red a darker shade.

  Jenkins had been Sloane’s first call upon retrieving his cell phone from the gun vault converted to safe deposit boxes at the jail. Sloane hadn’t bothered to call the prior night, there being nothing Jenkins could do. His second call had been to Carolyn. She hadn’t even said hello: “At this hour of the morning, somebody better have died, or somebody is going to.”

  God love her, she was in the office within the hour, coffee made and answering the phones, which were ringing off the hook. In addition to the local news stations, she fielded calls from national shows: CN, MS-NBC, The O’Reilly Factor, Anderson Cooper 360, 48 Hours, Dateline, even a representative of Larry King. They all wanted to find out if Sloane would be representing Barclay Reid. In between fielding the inquiries and telling them nothing, Carolyn continued her efforts to contact John Kannin. Without Kannin, the task of giving Sloane a crash course on criminal law continued to fall to Pendergrass.

  “The first appearance will be a probable-cause hearing in district court, which is inside the jail,” Pendergrass said. “They’re held every day between two and two-thirty. I’ve made some calls to find out who the prosecutor will be, but no one is saying much. Reading between the lines, we can anticipate this won’t be a typical hearing, where the prosecutor of the day handles whatever cases came in the prior night. On the more serious crimes, the senior prosecutors work directly with the detectives from the initial call. So you can expect a heavyweight, and whoever that is, he or she will have been intimately involved from the get-go and prepared right out of the chute.”

  “Any chance the judge will set bail?”

  “Not likely. It’s strictly to determine if the police have sufficient probable cause to charge. If not, they have to release her within seventy-two hours. Bail usually comes up at the arraignment. I’m told a million dollars per murder is the going rate.”

  “I’ll need to know everything the judge will consider. See if you can find other cases with similar charges and whether the judge did or did not grant bail.”

  Pendergrass nodded but looked pained. “I’ll look, but . . . we might be up against it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A case of this notoriety . . . Judges are elected officials. The King County prosecutor and chief of police will be fully engaged. No judge wants to take a chance of looking bad if something goes wrong, a suspect flees.”

  “She’s not going to flee; she runs a two-hundred-person law firm.”

  “All I’m saying is the notoriety may work against her. And she has money and . . . her only child—her only family—is dead. The prosecution will argue she’s a flight risk. With a murder-one charge—and we have to anticipate that will be the charge—I can see the judge going either way.”

  “Get me what I need to know,” Sloane said. He slid Jenkins a packet. “The U.S. attorney’s office filed these after the raid on Vasiliev’s used-car lot. I had Carolyn pull them off the Internet this morning. We can use these as support that Vasiliev was recently the subject of an investigation, a significant heroin dealer suspected to have ties to the Russian mafia. You understand what I’m saying?”

  Jenkins nodded.

  “Dangerous profession. Any number of people out there who might have wanted to kill him.”

  “Can we get it into evidence?” Pendergrass asked.

  Sloane had already considered the question. “The prosecutor has to argue Barclay’s motivation for killing Vasiliev was revenge—that she blamed him for supplying the drugs that overdosed her daughter. When he does, it’s fair game.” Turning back to Jenkins, he said, “See what you can find out about the organization Vasiliev worked for, his associates, rivals.”

  Jenkins nodded. “I’ll make some calls, but if you want someone with some contacts and knows their way around a computer, I’d suggest Alex.”

  “What about CJ?”

  “My mother’s overdue for a visit. Alex wants to help.”

  Sloane was not about to turn down an offer of help from someone who had worked years for the Defense Department. “Which brings us back to probable cause,” he said. “We know Rowe didn’t have the gun, because he came looking for mine.”

  “Maybe they found it,” Jenkins said.

  “Maybe, and the gun would go a long way to establishing probable cause, but not far enough.”

  Pendergrass agreed. “Barclay is a very big fish. They aren’t going to go after her with just the gun.”

  “So Rowe has to have something more,” Jenkins said. He stood and poured a glass of water.

  “Who could have taken the gun?” Pendergrass asked.

  “She doesn’t know, but she said a couple of weeks ago she got home from work and had a feeling someone had been in the house.”

  “You said there was an alarm,” Jenkins said.

  “There is, and she’s religious about setting it.”

  “Religious before or after this incident?” Jenkins asked.

  Sloane made a note to ask Barclay and to find out more about the security system, whether they could determine if and when it had gone off.

  “Was anything stolen?” Jenkins asked.

  “She didn’t think so, but she never checked to see if the gun was still there. She was thinking jewelry or money, valuables.”

  “Any ideas?” Jenkins probed.

  Sloane shrugged. “Maybe someone in Vasiliev’s organization.”

  Jenkins shook his head. “I don’t see it. These guys are cowboys. They would have just killed her and been done with it.”

  “Not with the U.S. attorney going after Vasiliev,” Sloane said. “The feds would have been all over Vasiliev and anyone associated with him. When I spoke to Vasiliev, he was more worried that I might sue him. He said he wanted Barclay to let the matter go. Maybe someone in the organization was worried she wouldn’t and what it might lead to.”

  “Maybe I’m dense, or maybe I’m tired, but I’m still not following,” Jenkins said.

  “I’m saying that maybe they decide to kill two birds with one stone. They get rid of Vasiliev to end the inquiries and they get Barclay off their back.”

  “Then why not leave the gun for the police to find?”

  “Too obvious.”

  Jenkins frowned, unconvinced. “It sounds like Vasiliev was moving a lot of product, which means a lot of money for the organization. If he was also laundering the proceeds, he was a valuable as
set.”

  “Was,” Sloane said. “Rebecca Han said that all stopped with his arrest, that the organization wasn’t going to take a chance with the feds watching. And the civil suit would have made his suppliers really uncomfortable. In a civil suit I can go after all of Vasiliev’s financial records, including his business records.”

  Carolyn pushed open the door and stepped in, her eyes finding Sloane. “The King County prosecutor’s office is on the phone.”

  SEVENTH FLOOR NORTH

  KING COUNTY JAIL

  SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

  Sloane stood in the broom closet he had left just hours before. Barclay entered, this time wearing a white jumpsuit with ultra-high security stenciled in black on the back. Her hands remained handcuffed to the belly belt. She looked even more tired.

  “The King County prosecutor wants to cut a deal,” he said.

  Reid shook her head. “No—”

  “Not to the charges.”

  “Then what?”

  Sloane had been on a conference call with Rick Cerrabone and Amanda Pinkett, the King County prosecutor. “Given the media circus, Pinkett saw no reason to put you through both a probable-cause hearing and an arraignment. She wants us to stipulate to probable cause.” Sloane held out the police certification Pinkett had faxed to his office. “They have a witness who puts you at the scene the morning of Vasiliev’s murder.”

  “What?” She took the certification, reading it.

  “They also say that you told your ex-husband you intended to shoot Vasiliev in the head.”

  “Are you kidding me? My ex-husband hates me, David. He’d say just about anything to hurt me.”

  “Did you say that to him?”

  Her voice rose. “Of course not.”

  “You said something similar to me.”

  “I did?” She sat back. “I don’t know. Maybe a figure of speech. Why would I say something like that if I intended to do it?” Her voice lowered, an exhausted whisper. “That’s ridiculous.” She considered the report again. “Who is the witness?”