by Mike Lawson
“Yeah, okay,” DeMarco said, and opened the binder.
In Seattle, in 2004, a former Microsoft executive, not worth as much as Bill Gates or Paul Allen but still loaded, was accused of rape. There was a single witness who could corroborate the victim’s story, but the witness changed her testimony during the trial. Case dismissed.
In Phoenix, in 2006, it was a road-rage case, the one that Porter had heard about at the conference in Miami. A multi-multi-multimillionaire developer killed a Mexican driving the pickup he used for his lawn-mowing business. In spite of three witnesses, the developer walked.
In Minneapolis, in 2008, the wife of a billionaire supposedly committed suicide by hermetically sealing the garage with masking tape, then taking a seat in her Jaguar and running the engine until the gas tank was empty. The case was mostly circumstantial—the absence of the wife’s fingerprints on the tape, the husband’s shaky alibi, and the discovery of the husband’s hot young mistress—but there was enough there that the Minneapolis cops decided that maybe it wasn’t suicide. The one witness who could place the husband near the scene of the crime was killed in a hit-and-run a month before the trial. Case dismissed.
In Houston, in 2009, a former Miss Texas was arrested for hiring a man to kill her extraordinarily rich but abusive husband. The reason she was arrested was that the killer was arrested for another killing, and he gave up the not-so-grieving widow to avoid the death penalty in a state where they execute more people than anywhere else in the country. There was also a witness who could testify that he saw Miss Texas meeting with the killer. Then, lo and behold, the witness who saw the killer and Miss Texas together says he made a horrible mistake, and a man facing lethal injection changed his mind about testifying against the widow. Not guilty, twelve Texans said.
In San Diego, in 2011, a fifty-something heiress was accused of shooting her thirty-something playboy husband. The woman claimed she wasn’t home when a robber tried to break into her house and that it was the robber who shot her young hubby. The cops, however, found a teenage boy who could testify that the woman was home, as well as two witnesses who heard the woman threaten to kill her husband for cheating on her with a cocktail waitress. Then, voilà, the teenage witness takes off before the trial, another witness disappears, and the third witness changes her testimony.
In 2013, in Las Vegas, a man’s wife disappeared and her body was never found. The guy figured: no body, no evidence of murder, no conviction—just like that guy Powell in Utah. Unfortunately for him, a neighbor with insomnia saw him putting a shovel in his car around the time his wife disappeared—and the suspect couldn’t explain what happened to the shovel. Then a park ranger saw the guy’s Range Rover in the Lake Mead National Recreation Area. The ranger even got a partial license plate number. The man should have gone to jail for life. He didn’t.
As Porter had said, in all six cases the defendants were richer than God. The other thing the cases had in common was that the defense lawyers involved were all top-of-the-line and all had well-deserved reputations for being sneaky and underhanded. But this didn’t mean anything, DeMarco knew, as most high-priced defense attorneys were sneaky and underhanded. DeMarco also noted that in each case there was a lengthy period between the arrest and the trial. This also wasn’t unusual—the wheels of justice in the United States grind slowly—but the thought occurred to him that a lengthy period between arrest and trial worked to the advantage of someone whose job it was to get rid of witnesses.
DeMarco also noticed that there was generally a gap of about two years between the cases—but he didn’t know what that meant. If the same person had tampered with the witnesses in all six cases, maybe he—or she; or they—didn’t need to work more than every other year. The other possibility was that cases involving superrich criminals just didn’t come along very often.
He saw nothing in the summary, however, that showed that the cases were linked in any way. The defense lawyers were different. The cases occurred in different cities, although four of them had occurred in the Southwest. There was nothing that gave any indication of a wizard behind the curtain. Porter had said that she’d learned about the wizard after speaking to the prosecutors, but whatever came out of those discussions wasn’t documented in the intern’s file. Porter apparently wanted him to come to his own conclusions.
DeMarco closed the notebook, thought about the whole mess for a few minutes, then called Sarah. He gave the kid his credit card and driver’s license information and told her to book him a flight to Las Vegas.
Next he called Porter, got her voice mail, and left a message saying: “I need you to call the prosecutors involved in these cases and let them know I’m working for you; I don’t want them to blow me off when I try to meet with them. I also want a letter or credentials saying I’m an authorized investigator for the Manhattan DA. Something that makes me sound like a cop. I need that today. I’m flying to Las Vegas tomorrow.”
23
DeMarco had decided he was going to work on the cases in order, starting with the most recent. He figured there was a chance of somebody remembering something that happened in 2013 than of someone recalling an event from 2004. He hoped. So he planned to visit the cities in the following order: Las Vegas, San Diego, Houston, Minneapolis, Phoenix, and Seattle.
The prosecutor who’d handled the Las Vegas case—the case of the guy whose wife disappeared—was named Albright, but he was no longer working in the DA’s office, having retired the year before. His home was on the eighth fairway of the Painted Desert Golf Club and the fairway was as green as Ireland in spite of the region being in the fifth or sixth year of a drought. Albright was living DeMarco’s dream.
Albright, a tanned, silver-haired guy in his sixties, was dressed in shorts and a polo shirt and appeared to be in excellent shape. He said, “It seems unlikely to me that one guy would be involved in all six cases, but I know for a fact that somebody got to the witnesses in the Otterman case. I mean, I know that son of a bitch killed his wife and buried her near Lake Mead. And I know the park ranger saw Otterman’s car near Lake Mead when Otterman was supposedly in California visiting his sister.”
“So what happened?” DeMarco asked, even though he knew the answer from the file Sarah had put together.
“First,” Albright said, “we had a neighbor who saw Otterman putting a shovel in his Range Rover. This was at one in the morning and the neighbor, who has insomnia, couldn’t sleep and she saw the light go on over Otterman’s garage. You know, he had one of those motion detector lights, and when he backed his car out, the light went on. Then the neighbor sees Otterman stop his car in the driveway, and he goes back into the garage and gets a shovel. Most likely the wife’s body was in the car when this happened, but all the neighbor saw was him getting the shovel, like the dumb shit had forgotten he’d need it to bury his wife.
“That same day, about five a.m., a park ranger sees a Range Rover in the Lake Mead Recreational Area, which covers about a million square miles. The ranger was … Never mind what he was doing; it doesn’t matter. The point is, he saw a car, noticed it was a Range Rover, which is a pretty distinctive vehicle, and happened to get three letters of the license plate. The only reason he got the three letters was they spelled TUB. Otterman’s license number was 216-TUB—I can still remember it—and the ranger noticed the TUB part. It just stuck in his mind.
“About a week later, Otterman reports his wife missing. He said he waited so long because he was visiting his sister in California and didn’t realize his wife was gone until he got back. We start to investigate and learn from the wife’s relatives that she was planning to divorce Otterman and take half his money and a house the size of the Bellagio. We also thought it kind of odd that the wife didn’t take her car when she left and her closet was full of clothes and her makeup was still in her bathroom. Then we talked to the neighbor and learned about the shovel.
“We asked Otterman how come he put a shovel in his car. He says he was afraid it might snow o
n his way to visit his sister in California—and it was winter, so that sort of made sense—but he claimed someone stole the shovel from his car.
“The next month, I got a PR nightmare on my hands. The wife’s relatives know Otterman killed her, and they and all their rich friends are hounding me. So I hold a press conference basically asking if anyone can remember seeing Otterman and his white Range Rover the day his wife disappeared and I give out the license plate number—and I can’t believe it when I get a call from fuckin’ Ranger Dave. He tells me he remembered seeing a white Range Rover near Lake Mead and the reason he remembers it is TUB, the letters on the license plate.”
Albright laughed. “Ranger Dave was a beautiful witness. Deacon in his church, a veteran who helps out at the VA hospital, doesn’t drink, has better than twenty-twenty vision. God couldn’t have created a better witness. So we spend the next three months scouring the Lake Mead area with volunteers and cadaver dogs but can’t find a grave. Finally I say, Fuck it, and arrest Otterman. I got a witness who can prove his sister was lying about him staying with her in California—plus the sister’s an alcoholic skank who’s totally unbelievable—and then I got Otterman’s outrageous story that someone stole his shovel.
“We go to trial, and from out of nowhere comes this homeless guy who lives in California where Otterman’s sister lives. He said he heard about the case on the news—like fucking bums actually watch the news—and that Otterman was in trouble because nobody believed someone stole his shovel. Well, the bum said he couldn’t bear to see a man go to jail for something he didn’t do, and admitted he stole the shovel out of Otterman’s car when it was parked in front of the sister’s house. And, don’t you know, he still had the shovel attached to a shopping cart he stole from Safeway, and it was identical to the one Otterman bought from Home Depot.
“But I don’t care,” Albright said. “I figured no way is a jury going to buy the bum’s story. They’re going to have enough common sense to know that someone paid him to lie. And I’ve still got Ranger Dave. I put Dave on the stand and he says he made a mistake. He says he lied about seeing the TUB license plate. He doesn’t know why he lied, maybe for the publicity, but he did. After I pick myself up off the floor, I start grilling him about why he changed his testimony and he starts crying, and anyone with half a brain can see that somebody got to him and did something to make him change his story. But I can’t budge him, and Otterman walks, and that was that.”
DeMarco asked, “Did you try to find whoever got to the ranger?”
“Of course I did,” Albright said. “I was pissed. We looked into Dave’s finances to see if he’d come into money. He hadn’t. We looked at his phone records to see if anyone connected to Otterman had been calling him. No one had. We talked to his neighbors to see if they’d seen any strange guys hanging out around his house, maybe threatening him; nobody saw anything. We got one thing from this other ranger who worked with Dave, and it wasn’t much.”
“What was that?” DeMarco asked.
“One day, a handsome, dark-haired guy came to the Ranger Station—”
“Handsome?”
“That’s what she said. Anyway, the guy was talking to Dave out in the parking lot as Dave was going home for the day. This lady ranger was looking through the window and said they talked for about fifteen minutes and then the guy drove away. She didn’t think anything of it, but then she leaves the station half an hour later, and Dave’s just sitting in his car. She goes up to ask him if something’s wrong, and she could tell he’d been crying.”
“Huh,” DeMarco said.
“Yeah,” Albright said. “I’ll tell you what I think happened, even though I don’t have one shred of evidence to prove it. Dave’s wife used to work on the strip here in Vegas. Cocktail waitress, hostess, that sort of thing, and I wouldn’t be surprised if maybe she hooked a little, even though she was never arrested. Then one day she gets religion, moves to Dave’s hometown, marries Dave, and has two kids. I think—and like I said, this is coming totally from my gut—that the guy talking to Dave in the parking lot found something out about Dave’s wife, something she did when she worked here. I think that’s why Dave changed his testimony: to protect his wife and kids.”
“But the only thing you got on the guy who talked to him,” DeMarco said, “is that he had dark hair and was good-looking.”
“That’s it. One of these days we’re going to find Arlene Otterman’s bones near Lake Mead, and somewhere close by will be a shovel with a yellow handle. But it won’t matter, thanks to double fucking jeopardy.”
DeMarco wasted a day on Ranger Dave. He drove to the ranger station near Lake Mead, only to discover that Dave was out and about, doing whatever rangers do. So for three hours, instead of taking in the scenery, DeMarco sat on a bench until he could no longer stand the hundred-degree-plus temperature, and then sat in his car with the air conditioner blasting away as he waited for Dave to return to his home base.
What DeMarco planned to say was: Hey, I can understand what happened at the trial. Somebody threatened your wife or your kids and you didn’t have a choice. So no one’s blaming you, Dave, and certainly not me. And if you’ll tell me what happened, no one—not the Las Vegas DA or anyone else—will hear it from me. I’m just trying to get a lead on the devious, heartless bastard who forced you to change your testimony.
Yep, that was DeMarco’s plan: to convince Dave that DeMarco held him blameless and that everything they talked about would remain confidential. On top of that, Dave would have the opportunity to make things right.
DeMarco barely got two sentences out of his mouth.
Dave was sitting behind his desk, sipping a Coke, wearing his uniform: gray shirt, dark green shorts, and hiking boots. He was a good-looking man with sandy brown hair and a wide, open, honest face; if DeMarco had been in charge of the National Park Service he would have used Dave for a model on recruiting posters. When DeMarco said he wanted to talk to him, Dave gave him a big smile. Dave was a friendly guy, and DeMarco could tell he genuinely liked people. He was the kind who, if he saw your car had broken down alongside the road, would stop to help.
DeMarco introduced himself and said he worked for the Manhattan DA, and showed his credentials. Justine had given him a letter on the DA’s letterhead saying he worked for her and he had a badge case containing a card with his name on it and the DA’s seal. DeMarco suspected that Sarah had made the card on her computer, but it looked official.
Dave looked puzzled when DeMarco said he wanted to talk to him, but was still friendly. When he said he wanted to talk about the Otterman case, before he could even launch into his spiel, it was as if a sheet-metal gate slammed down over Dave’s face.
Dave said he had nothing to say about Otterman and that, by the way, he had things to do. He picked up his Smokey Bear hat and walked out of the station with DeMarco trailing along behind him, trying to say that he wasn’t going to cause Dave a problem, honest to God, and that he understood why …
Dave got into his Jeep and drove away.
Shit. DeMarco could tell that what Dave had done—lying on the witness stand—would eat at the man for the rest of his life; it was probably the only crime he had ever committed. DeMarco didn’t know what religion Dave practiced, but DeMarco was a Catholic—a severely lapsed Catholic—and he’d been taught that if you went to confession, told the priest your sins, and truly repented those sins, God would forgive you. Well, DeMarco knew from his own experience that God might forgive you, but there were some sins where the one who wouldn’t ever forgive you was yourself. And that’s the way it appeared to be with Dave: He was never going to forgive himself for his part in helping acquit a man who’d murdered his wife, but neither was he going to talk to anyone about what he’d done.
DeMarco called Sarah and told her to make him reservations for San Diego.
DeMarco struck out in San Diego. San Diego was the 2011 case where the heiress was accused of shooting her gigolo husband. Like Albright in Las Ve
gas, the San Diego prosecutor was a bitter man who knew somebody had tampered with his witnesses but after a year of trying to find the culprit, he found nothing. All he knew was that the defense attorney, a sleazebag named Scott Barclay, made a fortune on the case, but he couldn’t prove that Barclay had hired people to suborn perjury and make witnesses disappear.
DeMarco called Sarah. “Goddamnit, get me a flight to Houston.”
24
Ella thought that watching Jack Morris play blackjack was like watching a boxer taking a beating in a prizefight. After a while you just wanted the fighter’s corner man to throw in the towel and stop the slaughter.
When Bill gambled, win or lose, he always had fun. He joked with the dealers and the players next to him. If he won, he’d buy the other players a drink, and win or lose, he always tipped the dealers. But then Bill wasn’t a gambling addict, didn’t have thirty grand in debt hanging over his head, wondering how he was going to pay next month’s rent—which is what Ella had learned from the Dallas data miners about Jack Morris, the McGill’s bartender.
Jack declared an income of approximately twenty-five thousand a year, although Ella was certain he declared only a portion of the tips he made. He also received social security and a $430-a-month disability check from the VA. He was sixty-seven years old and had served in the army from 1970 to 1972, so he might have been in Vietnam. Ella didn’t know—and it didn’t really matter—if the disability check was for a combat injury or something else, but Jack didn’t move like a man with a disability. Ella wouldn’t have been surprised if tip-stealing Jack Morris had one of those impossible-to-diagnose back problems that might not be real.
