Dachshund Through the Snow

by David Rosenfelt

  She no sooner says that than the phone rings again. She answers and says little, just a couple of Rights and Okays, topping it off with “I agree.”

  “Marcus?” I ask when she hangs up.

  She nods.

  “What was it you agreed to?”

  “That Marcus is not going to grab the guy now; he’s going to watch him and not do anything until we can figure out who he is and what he’s trying to do.”

  As much as I don’t like the idea of being followed like this, it seems like a logical plan. “Please mention to Marcus that if the guy is about to shoot me, he should intervene.”

  She smiles. “If I think of it, I’ll tell him.”

  The discovery documents have arrived, and they don’t offer much.

  I already know most of the facts of the murder, such as they are, from reading the media coverage that Noah had culled. The discovery provides some extra details, but not many.

  The main connection tying Noah to the crime is DNA, proving he was with the victim close to the time of death. The skin under the fingernails also demonstrates that they had a physical altercation, so that is particularly damning evidence. The DNA evidence is all a jury would need, especially in light of Noah’s actions, or inactions, after learning of the crime.

  The value of these documents to us is that to some degree they give us an investigatory road map. The police conducted many, many interviews, as they are wont to do. They talked to all of Kristen’s friends, her boyfriend, and even a few people they considered potential suspects.

  But everybody had an alibi, and no one besides Noah left DNA and skin at the scene. That trumped everything.

  The documents describe Kyle Wainwright as Kristen’s boyfriend at the time of her death. Kyle’s relationship with her, and that it had seemed to be ending, initially placed him dead center on the police radar. However, he was quickly eliminated as a suspect as he was on a college visitation trip at Tufts when she was killed.

  Another interesting note is that Kristen had been acting a bit strangely in the days before her death, which is consistent with what Noah told us. Friends reported that she seemed nervous and worried and even talked about going somewhere else to live, which is again what Noah described. That could all have been tied into having a secret, “forbidden” relationship, but for now we have no way to know if something more ominous was going on.

  Significantly, at no point in the past fourteen years did Noah’s name even come up. None of Kristen’s friends mentioned him, nor did anyone else that was interviewed. She had clearly kept him a secret. If Noah is telling the truth, and Kristen wanted him to take her away with him, then not revealing his identity to anyone would help conceal where she ran off to.

  Starting right away, we will begin interviewing anybody and everybody who might have information helpful to our defense. We’ll be coming at those talks from a different point of view than the police did; their focus was that whoever was with Kristen, having not come forward, was the killer. We will be assuming the opposite about Noah.

  Of course, they might have been right.

  I interrupt my reading to have an early dinner; Laurie has made her special-recipe fried chicken. It is fantastic; if I am ever able to successfully give up lawyering, I’ve got an idea to buy a million buckets and sell the stuff.

  The doorbell rings while we’re having coffee and I immediately tense up. I can’t imagine Marcus would let some bad guy just walk up to the house, ring the bell, and shoot me, but you never know.

  While I’m trying to figure out what to do, pretending to contemplate as I wipe the nonexistent fried-chicken crumbs from the side of my mouth, Laurie goes to the door. She seems not to possess my coward gene, an obvious accident of birth.

  I can’t see who it is, but I hear her say, “Corey, come on in.” This immediately tells me two things: Corey is here, and he’s coming in.

  Both Corey and Simon are here, which delights Tara. She runs over to renew acquaintances with Simon, and the two furiously and simultaneously sniff and wag their tails. Sebastian deigns to lift his head up from his position on a dog bed, but decides to stay there and let Tara play the gracious hostess.

  “I bring news,” Corey says.

  “About the case?” I’m surprised if that’s true; the proper thing would be for the lawyer, in this case me, to be informed of any developments.

  He grins. “I heard from administration. I have a feeling they didn’t want to tell you and give you the satisfaction.”

  “So it’s good news?” Laurie asks.

  “Simon and I now have the same retirement date, and that date is today.”

  “That’s great!” Laurie says, raising her coffee cup in a toast.

  It is, in fact, great. “Biscuits are on me.” I head for the biscuit jar.

  When I get back, I dole them out. Even Sebastian decides they’re good enough to be worth the effort it takes to chew them.

  Corey turns to me. “You did a great job; Simon and I are very grateful. I never thought you could pull it off.”

  “In any public fight between the bureaucracy and a dog, bet on the dog.”

  “Maybe so, but you played it brilliantly. How much do I owe you?”

  “We’ve been through that already. Remember Laurie’s goodness-of-my-heart speech? Besides, this one was fun.”

  He shakes his head. “No, I need to make this right.”

  “Corey…,” Laurie starts, but I interrupt.

  “You need to make this right? It’s already right. Use the money to buy Simon some designer chewies, and save a few for Tara and Sebastian. Besides, Simon was my client, not you. I’ll send him a bill and he and I can work it out.”

  “I’m serious about this. I’m going to start doing private work, and hopefully I’ll be making good money.”

  “I’ve got an idea,” Laurie says. “We’re starting a case.”

  “The Traynor thing?”

  “Right. You can work on it, and your fee will cover Andy’s work.”

  He thinks about this. “Sounds fair. What do you want me to do?”

  “Too soon to know,” Laurie says. “But you can be on retainer.”

  I nod. “Right. We pay for your availability. If we need you, it’s covered. If not, the retainer money still goes to pay off my fee. At the end of the case, we’re square.”

  He thinks about it some, trying to decide if we’re putting something over on him. Even though we might be doing just that, he buys it. “Okay, Simon and I are on call.”

  We’re going through the motions, but it’s not really possible to visit the murder scene.

  Kristen McNeil’s body was discovered about a hundred yards from Hinchliffe Stadium in Paterson, right near the Great Falls, a truly impressive waterfall. Hinchliffe has a storied history and is one of only two stadiums still standing in which the old Negro League baseball games were played.

  But “still standing” is probably the kindest way that Hinchliffe can currently be described. It has been out of use for more than two decades and was allowed to degrade badly. Then, at the behest of the Paterson government and some influential citizens, it was declared a federal Historic Landmark, and plans were made for its restoration. There was even talk of opening a restaurant and museum on the site, as a way of generating revenue.

  So far, it hasn’t worked out as hoped. Some money has been thrown at the project, most recently another $200,000 to work on the façade. But a real restoration would take more money than anyone has the stomach for, probably in the neighborhood of $25 million.

  It’s a worthwhile project, but Paterson has a whole bunch of more important things to do if $25 million dollars shows up. It’s not like they’re going to get it into the kind of shape that the Yankees would start playing their home games there. So the stadium so far has seen just cosmetic fixes, and relatively ineffective ones.

  But the area has changed enough, mostly due to decay and repairs, that the scene has been substantially altered. Laurie and I alway
s go to the murder scene first; it helps us to get a firsthand feeling for what happened. We get some information from it, but we also get an understanding that has served us well.

  Unfortunately, this scene is simply not what it was when the murder happened. Too much time has passed.

  It’s fairly easy to tell from the police sketches where the murder took place—on the far side of the stadium, with a clear view of the Falls. To Kristen and Noah, it might have seemed like a romantic setting. But it was also desolate, and no one would have been there to help Kristen or hear her scream.

  The area has not been overrun by vegetation, but there is certainly far more than the fourteen-year-old police photographs show. Back then it was basically a clearing, a logical place that the two teenagers might have chosen.

  The parking lot is around at the front side of the stadium. “So they pulled up in separate cars,” Laurie says. “Maybe they arrived at the same time, or maybe this was just the designated meeting place. After they argued, Noah said he left first, and he assumed she would follow.”

  “If she was still alive when he left, then someone else must have been here the entire time. Unless she was waiting for someone.”

  “I think it’s most likely someone came after Noah left. They could have seen his car drive off.”

  “I would tend to think the other way, that someone was here already,” I say. “There are plenty of places they could have been hiding where they wouldn’t be seen. They could even have been within the stadium walls. If they waited for Noah’s car to pull away before coming in, Kristen could have already been in her own car and leaving by then.”

  “But if they were here, they would have needed to leave their car somewhere. If it was in the parking lot, Noah would have seen it.”

  “They could have left it on the other side of the building, or in that area over there. They could have been in place before Noah and Kristen arrived, if they had advance knowledge of where they were going. Or they could have pulled up and left their car down the road; with the noise from the Falls they wouldn’t have been heard.”

  I’m not sure that last theory is correct, because even as I’m saying it, we hear a car pulling up. Laurie reacts instantly, taking her handgun out of her purse. I just stand there, having neither of those items. I need to start carrying a purse.

  But self-defense isn’t needed; it’s Marcus’s car. He pulls up right near us and gets out, then walks around and opens the back door on the left side. He reaches in and pulls out a human being, dragging him out by the collar and resting him on the ground.

  Laurie walks over to them and has a brief conversation with Marcus. I just stand there like a jerk, waiting to hear what happened and hoping that the guy on the ground is still breathing.

  Laurie comes back to me. “He’s the guy that’s been following you; his name is Freddie Siroka. Marcus got the name by having the license plate run and has now confirmed it by checking Siroka’s wallet. Marcus was concerned that we’d be out in the open here and the guy might have taken a shot at us, so he decided to terminate the surveillance.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “No. When Marcus grabbed him, Siroka took a swing at him. Not the smartest move to make; you can see how well it worked out for him.”

  I nod. “Siroka might not have been class valedictorian.” Then, “Are we going to wait for him to wake up so we can question him?”

  She shakes her head. “You need to go home and be there when Ricky gets home from school. Marcus and I will question him. Marcus is pretty good at it. I’ll fill you in when I get home.”

  “Works for me.” This is my favorite kind of plan.

  When Ricky gets home, he joins me in taking Tara and Sebastian for a walk.

  Laurie comes home just as we’re about to leave, and she decides to come along as well. She says she wants to stretch her legs, but she’s just spent hours at the stadium, and this morning she did an hour on the exercise bike, so I’ve got a hunch her legs are already pre-stretched. They certainly reach the ground okay. I conclude that she wants to be around in case Siroka was not the only guy after me.

  Laurie says that Marcus had something to do, but he’s going to come by later to see if we have an assignment for him. Our walk takes an hour; as always, Sebastian is the reason it goes so slowly. He walks on flat terrain like he is climbing Mount Everest; if he gets any slower and lazier, I am going to have to look into getting him a canine Sherpa.

  When we get home, Marcus is waiting for us on the front porch. Ricky runs ahead to give him a hug, yelling for his “Uncle Marcus.” Uncle Marcus smiles and twirls him in the air before putting him down. Then Tara and even Sebastian go to Marcus to receive their petting.

  I am the only living creature in the family who’s petrified of Uncle Marcus.

  Once we get in the house, Ricky goes to his room to pretend to do his homework while secretly watching television. Marcus, Laurie, and I go into the den so that they can update me on what they’ve learned. She’ll be doing the updating, since she knows if Marcus does it, then I’d need subtitles or have to wait for her to tell it to me in English later on.

  Laurie reveals that she and Marcus succeeded in getting Siroka to talk. He said that he was hired by a sometime associate named George Taillon to keep an eye on Andy Carpenter and to report back on where he went. No more, no less.

  At first he said he had no idea of the purpose of the surveillance and that under no circumstances was he instructed to have any encounter with me. He was to meet with Taillon every other night at Taillon’s apartment to give a report. His strong sense was that Taillon would then forward that report to someone else.

  Under prodding, Siroka admitted that it had to do with the McNeil case, though he wouldn’t go so far as to say he had knowledge of who killed her. That doesn’t mean he has no such knowledge; the willingness to finger an associate is inversely proportional to the seriousness of the crime for which he is being fingered. It’s one thing to say that Taillon hired Siroka to follow me; it’s quite another to say he murdered an eighteen-year-old woman.

  Siroka’s claim that he was not to harm me in any way is consistent with his actions and also with his being unarmed when Marcus dealt with him at the stadium.

  He’s lucky he didn’t try anything; if you’re going to mess with me, you’d better be packing heat.

  He might not be telling the truth and might be holding back other information, but Laurie doesn’t think so. Marcus had apparently mentioned to him that if it turned out that Siroka was doing either of those things, Marcus would pay him a visit. The prospect of that would not be appealing to Siroka; I don’t relish Marcus’s visits and he’s working for me.

  Marcus had also told Siroka not to give Taillon a heads-up that he’d spilled the beans to us, and Siroka promised not to. There is no way of telling if he will follow through on that promise. While he might not want Taillon to know that he had been busted, he’d have to tell him why he was discontinuing the surveillance.

  So Siroka is faced with a decision, and based on his taking a swing at Marcus, decision-making doesn’t seem to be a specialty of his.

  We will commence finding out what we can about Taillon before we take our next step, but there is a good bet that he will at some point be paid a visit by me and Uncle Marcus.

  “By the way,” Laurie says, “I’ve got the whole thing on audiotape. Siroka didn’t realize I was doing it; he was somewhat focused on Marcus, but if I tried to videotape it, he would have noticed and clammed up. Will it be admissible?”

  “You’re worried if it’s admissible?” I ask, amused.

  She smiles. “You’ve got me thinking like a lawyer.”

  “That’s a terrible thing to say. But we’ll figure out a way to get it admitted, if we can’t get Siroka to testify.” It was brilliant of Laurie to tape it, and it was even legal for her to do so. New Jersey is a one-party consent state.

  Our representation of Noah Traynor has obviously become a threat to some
one. Until now I viewed our opposition in the case as the prosecution team and the justice system, but no way are Siroka and Taillon working for them.

  Even though I am never thrilled to have enemies, in this case our discovery is potentially positive. It means another entity is out there that wants us to fail and wants Noah to be convicted.

  Maybe, just maybe, that entity is the real guilty party.

  That would make Noah Traynor innocent, which would in turn make Andy Carpenter happy.

  Publicity definitely can cut both ways.

  Whereas Simon is experiencing the glories of retirement living at least in part because of the public outcry we created, Noah is on the wrong end of the media stick.

  His arrest has sparked a deluge of stories about the Kristen McNeil murder, recapturing what the feeling was like in the area back then. The justifiable fear had been that the killer would strike again, and it was a hot topic of conversation and worry.

  Now everyone is being reminded of what it was like, of the horror that Kristen and her family endured, and bearing the brunt of that public reeducation will be Noah. It’s fair to say that not too many of the articles and televised pieces dwell on Noah’s not having been convicted of anything. They use the word alleged as a throwaway, as if they are checking a box.

  Today I’m meeting with Jenna Silverman, the prosecutor assigned to put Noah away for the rest of his life. I’ve never gone up against her before, but I’m told she is young, competent, and reasonably fair, as prosecutors go. This will be her first murder trial.

  The prevailing view, and I’m sure this is held at the highest levels of the New Jersey justice system, is that Jenna’s competence is unlikely to be severely tested by the upcoming trial. The prosecution’s case is not complicated; Noah’s DNA proves that he was there, and his not coming forward in the past fourteen years is evidence of his consciousness of guilt.