Shortly after the last reporter called him about the shoot-out, a reporter from the Portland Clarion, Portland’s alternative newspaper, phoned to ask Brad to comment on Paul Baylor’s report, which had concluded that Peggy Farmer’s pinkie was in with the rest of the fingers, but Laurie Erickson’s was nowhere to be found. Brad knew about the report because Ginny had used her feminine wiles to get information out of the associate Tuchman had assigned to take over Little’s appeal, but he had no idea how the reporter had learned about the pinkies. When the reporter said that a confidential source had given him the information Brad suspected immediately that the leak originated with Ginny. His suspicions grew stronger when the reporter told him that the anonymous caller had suggested that Brad had been fired for pursuing the Little case too vigorously because of Susan Tuchman’s ties to the president.
A few days later, a scathing editorial in the Clarion condemned Tuchman for firing an associate who’d gone above and beyond the call of duty to try to prove that a client had been unjustly convicted of murder. The editorial pointed out that Brad had put principle above public opinion by risking his life to see justice done even though his client was detestable.
Brad showered when he finished his run. Then he called Ginny to discuss their plans for the evening.
“Reed, Briggs, Stephens, Stottlemeyer and Compton.”
“Ginny Striker, please.”
“Whom shall I say is calling?’
“Jeremy Reid of Penzler Electronics.”
“One moment, please.”
Brad waited for Ginny to answer.
“Hey,” he said.
“Thank goodness you were smart enough to use an alias. You have no idea how persona non grata you are around here since the Clarion published that editorial.”
“Tuchman deserves everything she gets.”
“I couldn’t agree more, but it would mean my job if anyone found out we were dating.”
“Is that what we’re doing? I thought I was bartering food for sex.”
“Pig. So, how was the interview?”
“Good. I’ll tell you about it tonight. Will you want to go to the movie straight from work or will you have enough time to go home, change, and come back downtown.”
“I’m not certain I’ll have time for a movie and dinner. I’ll call you when I’ve got a handle on my workload. Are you going to be at home?”
“That’s where I am now. I’ll be here for the rest of the afternoon.”
“Okay. Let me try to clear my desk. I’ll see you soon.”
Brad felt a little guilty that Ginny had to work while he spent his days as he pleased. Besides running, he’d hiked in the mountains and at the coast and had gone to an occasional movie. Then there were the pleasant afternoons sitting on his deck reading a book and sipping a cool drink. The life of leisure sure beat toiling away in the bowels of Reed, Briggs, but Brad knew those days were numbered. He’d have to get a job soon if he wanted to feed himself and keep a roof over his head.
Ginny joined him on the weekends when work permitted and he’d been spending his nights at her place when she wasn’t too tired. Brad was a fair chef. On two occasions he’d spent an afternoon working up an elaborate menu for their evening meal. Ginny had paid him back with some of the best sex ever and all the office gossip she could dig up.
Another way Brad spent his time when he wasn’t hiking, cooking, or looking for work was by keeping up with the independent counsel’s investigation. He’d absorbed every piece of information about it in Exposed, the New York Times, and other media outlets. He knew more about the case than most. While they were driving to Marsha Erickson’s house Dana Cutler had told him what had happened after Dale Perry hired her to tail Charlotte Walsh. Most of that information had been in Exposed, but Brad had learned about the shoot-out at the motel, which had happened after she’d given Patrick Gorman the story.
Keith Evans checked in on Brad from time to time because Brad was a witness. When they talked, Brad pumped the FBI agent for news, but Evans was tight-lipped and Brad rarely got any information that the media didn’t have.
To kill time until Ginny called, Brad read about new evidence against Charles Hawkins that the New York Times had unearthed. A photographer had snapped a shot in the meeting room at the Theodore Roosevelt Hotel. The photograph showed Hawkins off to one side answering his cell phone as the first lady finished posing with the last contributor in front of President Roosevelt’s clock. The clock read 9:37, which was around the time Dana Cutler said she’d phoned her mystery client with the news that Charlotte Walsh was returning to the Dulles Towne Center lot from the farm.
Something about the photo bothered Brad, but he couldn’t figure out what it was. He wandered into the kitchen, poured a cup of coffee, and carried it out on the deck. While he watched the traffic on the river he sipped from his cup and worried the problem, but nothing came to him. He was still stumped when Ginny called.
Brad was lost in a swamp, fighting his way through mud that sucked at his shoes and vines so thick that he could barely see where he was going. The heat was unbearable-a heavy blanket that wrapped around him, making it hard to move or breathe. From somewhere in the swamp two women begged him for help and he despaired that there wasn’t time to rescue both of them. He wanted to give up but he couldn’t.
In the dream, Ginny stood next to him. Instead of offering encouragement, she calmly informed him, “It just can’t be done. There isn’t enough time to go one place then get to the other.”
Brad shot up in bed, his heart pounding. He knew what had bothered him the day before. When he spoke to Ginny after returning from his run Brad had asked if she had enough time to go home and change before coming downtown or if she was just going to go to the movie straight from work. Ginny had told him that she might not have time to go to a movie and eat dinner.
Brad groped for the light on his nightstand and turned it on. He was bathed in sweat, and his breathing was labored. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and tried to calm down. The important thing was to hold on to the dream. In it Brad was panicky because there wasn’t enough time to be in two places at one time. His subconscious was trying to point out that on the evening of Charlotte Walsh’s murder Charles Hawkins had been faced with the same predicament. Had everyone been going at this case the wrong way?
The clock on Brad’s nightstand said it was 5:58. He knew there was no way he could get back to sleep, so he went into the bathroom and prepared to face the day. While he brushed his teeth, Brad made a plan of action. He would eat breakfast then reread everything that bore on the time element. Just as he ducked under the medium hot spray in the shower a sudden thought distracted him. He paused, the bar of soap in his hand and water cascading down his face and chest. There had been something in Laurie Erickson’s autopsy report that had made no impression on him when he read it. Now the memory triggered a really scary idea.
After finishing in the bathroom, Brad put up coffee and toasted a bagel. As soon as he was done with breakfast, he started reviewing the file in Clarence Little’s case and the articles about the Erickson and Walsh murders he had collected. It was almost eight when he finished reading the item he’d intentionally saved for last, Laurie Erickson’s autopsy report. Brad sat back and stared at the wall across from the couch. A colorful print he’d purchased from a street artist in Greenwich Village hung over the fireplace, but he didn’t see it. His thoughts were elsewhere.
When he’d worked the problem through, Brad went into his bedroom and got his appointment book. A few weeks ago, one of the partners had ordered him to call a doctor at home in the evening after court had recessed in a medical malpractice trial. He’d written the number in his book. The witness was the only doctor he knew in Portland. When the doctor picked up the phone, Brad asked him a question. When the doctor answered it, Brad felt sick. He hung up and sat quietly for a few moments. Then he found Keith Evans’s card and dialed his cell phone. The agent answered after a few rings.
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“This is Brad Miller. I’m calling from Portland.”
“What’s up, Brad?”
“I had an idea.”
“Yes,” Evans prodded when Brad hesitated.
“It’s kind of crazy.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“Can you answer a question about the autopsy report in Charlotte Walsh’s case first?”
“I will if I can.”
“Is there any evidence that Walsh received a stab wound to her brainstem?”
Evans was silent for a moment while he tried to recall the details of the report.
“Yes, I think there was something about that in the report,” he answered. “Why?”
“You’re not going to like what I have to say but I think you have a problem.”
Chapter Forty-three
The events that followed Brad’s call to Keith Evans would have been very exciting if Brad wasn’t scared to death. First there was the black car filled with very serious FBI agents that spirited him away from his apartment less than an hour after Evans ended their call. Then there was the nonstop flight on the FBI jet to a military airfield somewhere near Washington, D.C., followed by the drive from the airfield to the safe house where Dana Cutler was living and the warning to stay inside and away from the windows so snipers would not have a good shot. And then there was the most terrifying part of the whole affair for someone who was a good but not great attorney-explaining his theory to retired United States Supreme Court Justice Roy Kineer, one of the greatest minds in jurisprudential history.
Brad guessed that Justice Kineer had a lot of practice greeting awe-struck neophyte attorneys because Kineer did everything he could to put Brad at ease when Keith Evans ushered him and Dana Cutler into the conference room at the offices of the independent counsel.
“Mr. Miller, thank you so much for coming,” the judge said as he extended his hand and flashed a big smile. “Agent Evans was effusive in his praise for your deductive abilities, and I’m very anxious to hear your theory.”
Brad couldn’t think of anything to say so he flashed a nervous smile.
“Can I get you something to drink?” Kineer asked. “We have coffee, tea, and soft drinks, and we might even be able to rustle up a latte, or whatever is popular in your neck of the woods? I hear there’s a Starbucks not far from here.”
“Actually, New York is my neck of the woods. I just moved to Portland. So black coffee would be great, if it’s no trouble?”
Kineer’s smile shifted to Dana. “I’m also very pleased to finally meet you, Miss Cutler. Can I get you something?”
“I’m fine.”
“No thanks to Charles Hawkins from what I hear. It seems that you’ve had several close calls.”
The judge sent a young assistant to get Brad’s coffee. Then he turned to the nervous attorney.
“Let’s get down to business, Brad. Can you sit by me? I’m a little hard of hearing.”
Kineer went to the head of a small conference table. Evans sat at the other end with Cutler beside him. A middle-aged man and a woman in her early thirties sat across from Brad. The man had a notepad in front of him. The woman looked intense. Kineer introduced them as staff attorneys.
“So, what do you have for us?” he asked Brad, who suddenly doubted every clever deduction he’d made. It had been one thing to speculate about the case in his apartment and another to explain it to Roy Kineer.
“I could be way off base on this,” Brad hedged.
“Mr. Miller, I respect people who think outside the box. You can get A’s on law school exams by having a good memory, but you can’t ace a real case without exercising a little creativity. So let’s have it. The worst thing that will happen is that you’ll be wrong.” Kineer smiled. “If you are I promise it will not go on your permanent record. And if you’re right-and Agent Evans thinks you may be-then you’ll have saved us all from looking like fools.”
“Okay. We know that President Farrington couldn’t have personally killed Charlotte Walsh.”
“Agreed,” Kineer said.
“Well, Mr. Hawkins couldn’t have done it either. It takes about forty-five minutes to go from the Theodore Roosevelt Hotel to the Dulles Towne Center mall, about an hour to go from the mall to the safe house, and roughly an hour to go from the hotel to the CIA safe house. The picture in the New York Times proves that Hawkins was still at the hotel at nine-thirty-seven.
“We know that Charlotte Walsh was dropped off at the mall around eleven and the Secret Service logged Hawkins in at the farm at eleven-fifteen. If Hawkins got to the mall around ten-thirty and waited to kill Walsh at eleven, there’s no way he could have gotten to the safe house at eleven-fifteen. If he went from the hotel to the farm and arrived at eleven-fifteen, there’s no way he could have killed Walsh after she returned to her car.”
“We’ve already worked that out,” the judge said, “but it’s encouraging to see that you know enough about the case to come to the same conclusion.”
“Okay, well, Hawkins has men who are willing to commit murder for him. He sent them to Dana’s apartment, Marsha Erickson’s house, the hospital, and the motel in West Virginia. So Hawkins could still be guilty of Walsh’s murder as an aider and abettor. But there’s a problem with this theory. The earliest Hawkins could have learned about the location of Walsh’s car in the mall was eight, when Cutler phoned in her report, but there’s no record of anyone phoning to retrieve voice messages from any spot in the Theodore Roosevelt Hotel that’s connected to Hawkins until the call that was made from the suite adjoining the first lady’s suite around nine-forty-five. If Hawkins didn’t learn the location of Walsh’s car until then, he would have had to find Tierney and organize the hit fast enough to get Tierney to the mall before eleven. I guess that’s possible, but it would be hard.
“Also, Tierney denies that he or any of his team killed Walsh. He could be lying, but seeing that he’s already admitted to several murders it wouldn’t make much sense to deny killing Walsh.”
“We’re with you so far, Brad,” Kineer said.
“Once I realized that President Farrington and Hawkins couldn’t have murdered Walsh personally and it was improbable that men working for Hawkins or the president had committed the murder I started to wonder if everyone wasn’t approaching the case from the wrong direction. We’ve been assuming that Rhonda Pulaski, Laurie Erickson, and Charlotte Walsh were murdered because they were a threat to Christopher Farrington’s political career, but they all have something else in common. Farrington was cheating on his wife with each of them, and that gave Claire Farrington one of the oldest motives in the book to kill them. When that thought occurred to me I remembered something I’d read in Laurie Erickson’s autopsy report.
“According to the medical examiner, Erickson was almost decapitated when Clarence Little hacked away at every inch of her neck with a sharp object, tearing the skin to ribbons. The report also said that Little had sliced off several body parts after Erickson was dead. The only point about which the medical examiner had any question was the discovery of a subdural hemorrhage over the brainstem for which he could find no source.
“I asked a doctor in Portland about the subdural hemorrhage. He said that sticking a sharp object into the base of the back of the neck between the skull and the first cervical vertebra would sever the spinal cord and cause instant death without much bleeding. If the medical examiner didn’t remove the brain, the only evidence of the cause of death would be a subdural hemorrhage.
“The ME in Oregon was sloppy and had his pathology assistant remove the brain. That’s why he didn’t look at the injury in situ. He couldn’t see the entry wound for the sharp object because the neck had been hacked to pieces, and he didn’t find a source for the subdural hemorrhage because he was so certain that Little murdered Erickson that he didn’t pay attention to the spinal cord injury.
“I asked Agent Evans about the Walsh autopsy report. He told me that there were a large number of slashing wounds
all around the neck, which is similar to what was done to Laurie Erickson’s neck. He also told me about a difference between the way Walsh was assaulted and the assaults on the other Ripper victims. The other victims were mutilated before they died, but most of Walsh’s wounds were postmortem.
“Now, here’s the crucial piece of information from Walsh’s autopsy: she died because a sharp instrument was thrust into the base of the back of her neck between the skull and the first cervical vertebra, just as in the Erickson case. This severed Walsh’s spinal cord and caused instant death but hardly any bleeding. The doctor who conducted the Walsh autopsy found the wound when he took out the brain.
“I asked the doctor in Portland if a scalpel could have been used to kill Laurie Erickson. He said it would do the trick. Claire Farrington is a medical doctor. She’d have a scalpel and would know how to use it to kill someone in the manner in which Erickson and Walsh died. Dr. Claire Farrington had the means and motive to kill both women.”
“Didn’t Mr. Hawkins see Erickson alive when Dr. Farrington was at the library fund-raiser?” Kineer asked.
“We only have Hawkins’s word that Erickson was alive when he saw her. What if Dr. Farrington dosed her son so he would sleep all night then killed Laurie just before she left for the library, wrapped her in bedsheets, and dropped her down the laundry chute? At the fund-raiser, she tells Hawkins what she’s done. Hawkins rushes back to the governor’s mansion on the pretext of retrieving his notes, gets rid of the body, and makes the murder look like the work of Clarence Little.”
“Why would Hawkins do that?” Kineer asked.
“Three reasons. One, he’s been in love with Dr. Farrington since college; two, he’s fanatically loyal to the Farringtons; and three”-Brad paused-“he’d done it before.
“Judge, I have no evidence to prove this-not one iota of proof-but the police never figured out who killed Rhonda Pulaski. What if Claire Farrington ran her down and told Charles Hawkins? What if Hawkins sanitized the hit-and-run car to protect Claire then got rid of the chauffeur?”
Executive Privilege Page 28
