Panther's Prey

by Lachlan Smith

  Also by Lachlan Smith

  Bear Is Broken

  Lion Plays Rough

  Fox Is Framed

  Panther’s Prey

  A Leo Maxwell Mystery

  LACHLAN SMITH

  Copyright © 2016 by Lachlan Smith

  Cover design and illustration by Carlos Beltrán

  Author photograph by Sarah Moody

  Panther’s Prey cover credits

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or permissions@groveatlantic.com.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  FIRST EDITION

  ISBN 978-0-8021-2503-3

  eISBN 978-0-8021-8992-9

  The Mysterious Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  16 17 18 19 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Also by Lachlan Smith

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Acknowledgments

  Back Cover

  Chapter 1

  “Not everyone who confesses is guilty. This is the case of a man who confessed to a crime he didn’t commit.”

  I turned and indicated my client, Randall Rodriguez, behind me at the defense table in a borrowed suit. Next to him sat my cocounsel, Jordan Walker.

  I went on, addressing the jury. “After a childhood filled with unspeakable abuse, Mr. Rodriguez has spent his adult life on the street, in mental hospitals, or in jail. Three times in the past five years he’s appeared at one of the police stations here in San Francisco and asked to be arrested, just as he did in this case. Each confession involved a well-publicized crime: two murders and a rape. Each time, the police proved he couldn’t have committed it.

  “But that was before he crossed paths with police detective Harold Cole.”

  I drew the fourteen jurors’ attention to Cole, a balding, middle-aged man sitting at the DA’s table beside the assistant district attorney.

  Medicated now, Randall was passive before his fate. The judge had determined his confession was voluntary, and she’d also found him competent to stand trial and assist in his defense. Jordan had worked wonders with him, but our client’s “assistance” was more theoretical possibility than practical fact. One of his diagnoses was autism, another schizophrenia. His raw intelligence was remarkable, however. For instance, he’d begged me to clip the chess problems from the Chronicle and bring them to our meetings. Before we could discuss the case, he’d sit down with a chess set he’d constructed from scraps of paper. He began from the opening position and played a realistic game, complete with formal openings and sophisticated tactics, his fat, scarred fingers moving at lightning speed, delicately sliding certain slips of paper and plucking others up, until after five or six minutes the pieces arrived in the formation of the problem. Then, rather than solve the puzzle, he’d move to the next clipping and start again. Wanting the jury to see a homeless man incapable of planning or foresight, I’d instructed Randall to avoid chessboards in jail.

  Jordan and I’d been prepping the case for weeks, day and night. It was August. Janelle Fitzpatrick had been raped in January, one of the first cases I was assigned when I came to work at the PD’s office. When Jordan had arrived for her six-month stint as a volunteer attorney, I’d enlisted her help, asking her to interview the cops who’d investigated Rodriguez’s confessions in the past. Two years younger than I was, she was a slight five four, with red-blond hair, a distance runner. She could get in someone’s face when needed, but was accustomed to relying on her more than considerable charm. Most importantly, she was a worker, willing to put in the hours. I hadn’t expected her to succeed, but she’d persuaded those ordinarily closemouthed detectives to cross the so-called blue line. Based on this accomplishment, I’d asked her to help me try the case.

  After I’d laid out our defense in my opening statement, the grizzled DA, Mark Saenz, called his first witness. This was the alleged victim, Janelle Fitzpatrick. She was young, blond, single, and dressed more expensively than any of the three lawyers in the courtroom. She came from a wealthy family and worked at a downtown investment bank.

  At the prelim Saenz had presented only the testimony of the investigating detective, who’d nearly fumbled the case when I confronted him with the shocking fact that the victim had failed to pick out Rodriguez from a lineup on her first try.

  She wouldn’t make the same mistake today. After they’d spent over an hour walking through every detail of the attack, most of which admittedly had occurred in near darkness, Janelle dramatically pointed out Rodriguez in the courtroom as her attacker.

  Next, Saenz asked her what had happened when she returned to the police department’s Southern Station three days after the attack.

  “They called me to let me know they had a suspect who’d confessed, saying all I had to do was identify him. I thought I was strong enough, that I’d be able to handle that. But I was wrong.

  “Being in the same room with him again, even separated by glass, sent me into a panic attack.” She stiffened slightly as she spoke these words, and avoided looking at Rodriguez, showing the jury that the fear was still there, though under containment now. “I couldn’t breathe. I had tunnel vision. When the light came on, I was so focused on not breaking down I couldn’t look at the men. I didn’t want to see him. I blurted out a number, but it was just the number that was in my head, and the minute I said it I knew I was wrong.

  “All I could think was now they’d have to let him go. And he’d be waiting for me someday again. I told Detective Cole I wanted to go back in. And so we did and I picked out Mr. Rodriguez.” Now she looked directly at him across the courtroom, ignoring Jordan and me. I could almost feel her counting to herself—one, two, three—as if daring him to glance up and meet her eyes. Rodriguez went on staring at his hands, hunching lower in a posture the jurors no doubt would construe as shame but that was simply the reaction of a severely autistic, schizophrenic man—or so I wanted the jurors to believe. “It was him. I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.”

  When Janelle looked away, Rodriguez glanced at me and winked.

  This crafty look was gone in an instant. I couldn’t even be c
ompletely sure I’d seen it. The jurors were watching Janelle as Saenz wrapped up his questioning. Jordan hadn’t noticed anything, either.

  Now Jordan took Saenz’s place at the podium. It made sense for a female to handle this cross-examination, and Jordan was more than up to the job. Also, the physical resemblance between her and Janelle couldn’t have been lost on the jurors. Janelle’s smile at her indicated recognition of a peer, someone who couldn’t possibly harm her. The jury saw that, too.

  “When you picked out the wrong man from the lineup, how much time had passed since the rape?” Jordan asked.

  “Three and a half days.”

  “Did you watch TV news or look at newspapers, websites during those days?”

  “Some. I was staying at a friend’s. I needed to know if my name was out there. Because it would dictate how much I’d have to tell people when I went back to work.”

  “Was there much publicity?”

  “More than I expected.”

  “A media frenzy?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far, but my father is active in state politics. If something happens to his daughter, that’s news.”

  Jordan led Janelle through a summary of what she’d read in the news, quickly establishing that the rape had been a lead story on the Chronicle website and had also featured on TV. A number of details had been leaked, including that she’d been raped, forced by her attacker to shower, then duct-taped and locked in the bathroom. “The press didn’t learn any of these facts from you?”

  “Of course not. I was screening my calls.”

  Jordan skipped to the contact from the detective informing Janelle a suspect had confessed. “Was that also reported?”

  Janelle didn’t recall. But, in fact, Rodriguez’s picture, an old mug shot, had been published online by the Chronicle a few hours before she showed up at the station to make the ID.

  “Do you recognize the story?” Jordan asked, showing her the website printout.

  The witness claimed not to remember if she’d looked at that particular article.

  “Isn’t it true that you viewed online a picture of Mr. Rodriguez immediately before you drove to the police station to identify the suspect in custody?”

  It was possible, Janelle conceded.

  “You ran a Google search with the keywords ‘rape’ and ‘San Francisco’ and ‘confession,’ correct?”

  Janelle again pleaded a faulty memory but didn’t deny it.

  Jordan moved away from the podium, coming back around to a position beside Rodriguez behind the defense table. She put her hand on his shoulder, the jurors swiveling their heads between her and Janelle, most of them looking back to Jordan. Rodriguez was stone-faced. Again I tried to tell myself I must have been mistaken about the wink. “The reason you couldn’t identify Mr. Rodriguez in that first lineup—even right after looking online at a mug shot of him as the guy who’d confessed—was because you were having a panic attack?”

  Janelle must have recognized what Jordan was doing with Rodriguez, playing off her physical similarity to the victim, showing the jurors she wasn’t afraid. “I might be having one now.” Her tone was cool but her voice had begun to shake a little.

  Jordan remained at Rodriguez’s side, her hand on his shoulder. “Thank you, Ms. Fitzpatrick.”

  Chapter 2

  The next afternoon, it was finally my turn again. While Jordan cross-examined Janelle, and during the DA’s direct examination of Detective Cole, I’d found myself obsessing over Randall’s slightest movements in the chair beside me, with equal parts dread and fascination, both dreading and anticipating another revelatory moment like that wink.

  Relieved to be on my feet, I cross-examined Detective Cole, working from the script I’d established based on his testimony at the preliminary hearing. As I moved around the courtroom, approaching the witness and retreating, I was conscious of the jurors, the only audience that mattered. Yet, at every moment, I was also aware of Jordan watching me.

  The conundrum for the police was the complete lack of physical evidence implicating Rodriguez or anyone else. This was because in addition to forcing Janelle to shower after the attack, the rapist had taken away the bedding, an act obviously requiring more cunning than I wanted the jury to believe he possessed. (Good thing they hadn’t seen him moving his homemade chess pieces … ) Having confessed to the crime, Rodriguez nonetheless had been unable or unwilling to tell the police what had become of the bag and its contents. Cole kept trying to minimize the importance of this, while I did everything in my power to highlight his evasions. My goal: to show the jury that this cop was incompetent or indifferent or both.

  The state rested on Wednesday, after calling the obligatory police, medical, and forensic witnesses. Then Jordan and I took over and put on a demonstration showcasing the beauties of a publically funded defense. Our case lasted the rest of that week and half the next, with closing arguments on Tuesday morning and the jury retiring to deliberate that afternoon.

  We’d begun by attacking Janelle’s identification of Rodriguez as the rapist. Wednesday afternoon, the jury heard from the computer expert who’d analyzed her hard drive. Then an employee of the newspaper’s website host confirmed that on the afternoon in question, a URL listed in her search history had linked to the article with the picture of Rodriguez. This allowed us to argue that her picking him out of a lineup an hour later was a foregone conclusion, tainted by her viewing the photograph online. This was in addition to the fact she’d not been able to identify him as the perpetrator the first time she’d tried.

  Our main problem, of course, was the confession. The conventional wisdom held that the jury would need to hear Rodriguez deny the guilt he’d previously admitted. Jordan had worked with our client for hours in the weeks leading up to the trial, and I’d considered letting her put him on the stand, but we decided there was no question of Randall testifying. This was owing to his numerous low-level convictions for theft and drug offenses as well as his habit of responding to even the most basic questions with non sequiturs. Not to mention my fear that if he took the stand, he’d revert to his free-confessing ways.

  Without the ability to use him as a witness to disown his confession, we had our backs to the wall. Our way out was the testimony of a pair of expert witnesses.

  The first we called to the stand was a Michigan law professor who’d published prolifically on the subject of false confessions. Jordan had met Eric Lewis at the airport Wednesday evening and driven him straight to our office, where the three of us sat up late into the night.

  Based on his review of Detective Cole’s testimony, Lewis testified that in his opinion Rodriguez’s confession had been obtained as the result of improperly coercive and suggestive questioning, without the safeguards necessary to ensure key details came from Rodriguez and not from the police. At the same time, Lewis had no choice but to acknowledge that Cole’s interrogation of Rodriguez was itself the result of the accused’s own prior uncoerced and voluntary admissions.

  The research on voluntary false confessions was less developed, Lewis explained to the jury. Yet it was well established there were personality types prone to confessing falsely without prompting from the police. “The reasons for voluntary false confessions are as varied as the confessors themselves. These include a conscious or unconscious desire to be punished because of some real or imagined guilt, or a compulsion arising out of childhood trauma that leaves the individual with a deep-seated conviction of his worthlessness. There can also be simple confusion between fantasy and reality, to the point where a person fantasizes about a crime, then comes to believe he actually committed it. These conditions are often reinforced by a desire to impress or gain approval.

  “It is a real phenomenon, recognized by psychological and sociological authorities, to the extent that police interrogation has evolved techniques to minimize voluntary false confessions. One method is to check the suspect’s knowledge regarding key details of the crime scene that have been withheld from t
he public. The most important safeguard is to record the entire interview. Obviously, those precautions weren’t followed in this case.”

  The DA’s cross-examination of our first expert focused on making his testimony seem abstract, emphasizing that he’d flown here from Michigan the night before, had a ticket home to Detroit that evening, and had never set eyes on Rodriguez prior to seeing him in the courtroom today and thus had no idea whether he was mentally ill or not, guilty or not. Lewis’s own statistics revealed the rarity of voluntary false confessions. Outwardly bored with a witness that his body language communicated was an irrelevant waste of the jury’s time, Saenz excused Lewis after twenty minutes. “To catch your plane,” he said.

  However, his testimony provided merely the foundation of our false-confession defense. More significant was the testimony of Angela O’Dowd, a psychiatrist from Berkeley who’d examined Rodriguez on two separate occasions and worked up a profile that the judge, over the DA’s strenuous (and well-argued) objections, had deemed admissible. This was a major victory, owing in large part to Jordan’s well-researched brief. Dr. O’Dowd’s testimony allowed us to present much of Rodriguez’s life story in the guise of the factual basis for her psychiatric conclusions. She’d ultimately determined that Rodriguez was competent to stand trial under California law. However, this did not mean that in the conventional sense he was sane.

  On the contrary, she identified him as someone highly susceptible to confessing to crimes he hadn’t committed. In her interviews with Rodriguez and in her review of the records generated by the state’s involvement in his life, dating back to his early childhood, she’d uncovered a history of physical abuse at the hands of his mother. This mistreatment had ended only when Rodriguez, at the age of nine, was taken by the state and placed in a series of foster homes, where the abuse continued in other forms. By sixteen, he’d been sent to juvenile camp, where suicide attempts and an attempted sexual assault by Randall against a teacher had resulted in his transfer to a series of mental institutions. (We’d been unsuccessful in persuading the judge to exclude evidence of this long-ago crime, even though it bore little similarity to the facts of Janelle Fitzpatrick’s case, and so we were forced to integrate it into our narrative as best we could.) In all, he’d spent the next ten years in the custody of the state before funding cuts forced the closure of the inpatient hospital where Randall at the time was being treated with heavy doses of lithium and shock therapy.