Panther's Prey

by Lachlan Smith

  I wondered if the police had even gotten a warrant for Jordan’s phone records. With the goal of finding out, my first stop the next morning was Gabriela’s office. She was writing longhand on a yellow legal pad. I stood there, waiting.

  “Leo. Just the man I wanted to see. Come in and close the door.”

  I did as she asked. “What’d you want to see me for?”

  “Why do you think?” She paused. Then she looked at me. “You’re new here. Unlike most of our lawyers, you came in with experience trying felony cases. We took a chance that you’d be able to mesh with our system.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “On the plus side, you’re not afraid to bring a hopeless case to trial. You’ve proved you can win against the odds. Don’t get a big head about that. Any lawyer who can’t work miracles won’t last long.”

  “Okay.” I didn’t say that I wasn’t planning to last any longer than I had to. It was moments such as this that made me determined to be my own boss.

  “So you’re over the first hurdle. You’ve got talent. But do you have judgment?”

  I tried to play off the question, but my response fell flat. “No one’s ever accused me of that.”

  “With your backstory, I imagine you’ve learned a lesson or two.”

  I remembered Jordan examining my scars, the light touch of her fingers on my belly. “I never learn. If I’d learned anything, I’d be sitting in some cubicle downtown, reviewing documents for fifty bucks an hour. I’m here because I try criminal cases and you’ve got a steady supply.”

  “You’re all messed up by Jordan’s death. I can see it in your eyes. You’re here, but you’re not here.”

  “I’m all right.”

  “No, you’re not. I heard about what happened in Department Eighteen yesterday. You think that’s competent representation, a lawyer who drifts off midsentence?”

  I’d thought I’d gotten away with the mess I’d made of the prelim. I’d convinced myself it didn’t matter. “I wasn’t as prepared as I should have been.”

  “You weren’t a lot of things you should have been.”

  “Jordan and I won the case together. If our relationship is the problem …”

  “I’m trying to figure out what the problem is. A lawyer on my staff is dead and her client will soon be going to prison for it. Obviously, something went very wrong.”

  “Very wrong or very right. Either we were wrong about Rodriguez or we were right about him—that the police arrested and charged the wrong man. And now it’s happening again, except this time the real killer planned that Rodriguez would confess.”

  Gabriela studied me for a moment. “I want you to take leave. You’ll need to see a doctor, bring me a medical certification. You’re not thinking clearly and I don’t want you representing clients in this state.”

  I thought I’d argue but I was ready to go. “Fine.”

  “You’re not Rodriguez’s lawyer anymore. Now we’re on the other side. I’m sure you can think of half a dozen theories why he might not be guilty, or why he shouldn’t be held criminally responsible, but that’s not your job.” A different concern passed through her eyes. “Have you been in contact with Rodriguez’s new lawyer about this?”

  “All she has to do is read the file. All my theories are there.”

  “She’d have to get it first.”

  “She hasn’t requested it?”

  “Everything but the evidence is our work product. We don’t give up work product without a court order. So far, no court has ordered me to turn it over.”

  “She’ll get it from the DA, won’t she?”

  “No warrant has been served. The minute one is, we’ll file a motion to quash it. We have the papers ready to file. I doubt it’ll come to that.”

  “I’m sure Chen and Cole would love to sift back through our file and figure out what we were hiding from him. But you’re telling me they’re too lazy to serve the warrant?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “I’ve earned a lot of credit at the DA’s office. Not just for winning cases, going toe-to-toe and getting up every time they knock me down, but for straight shooting. I’ve reviewed every piece of paper in that file, and I’ve scanned every document the two of you saved on the shared drive. There’s nothing there that could possibly assist the prosecution. I called the DA and told her that myself.”

  “And she’s taking your word for it.”

  “Keep in mind that Rodriguez’s acquittal and Jordan’s murder were every cop’s worst nightmare. The first tendency is to blame the defense lawyers, and we’ll have our share of that. But among those whose opinions matter, it’s understood you and Jordan couldn’t have won the trial if Cole and Saenz hadn’t lost it first.”

  This was basically what I’d told Chen as I was leaving our interview after I’d discovered Jordan’s body. Hearing it from Gabriela was powerful reassurance. But I couldn’t ignore the fact that she was trying to play me in the hope of keeping me from becoming an obstacle to Rodriguez’s speedy conviction.

  “She was one of us,” Gabriela now said. “I’m going to do everything I can to bury the son of a bitch who killed her, and right now the odds are on Rodriguez.”

  Whatever my doubts, I had no desire to assist in Rodriguez’s defense. I wanted him right where he was, behind bars until further notice, and I told Gabriela as much. “I just want the same thing her father wants, which is to make sure the police are right about Rodriguez this time.” I then corrected myself: “Or to make sure Jordan was wrong.”

  Gabriela shook her head. “You need to worry about yourself, about getting your head on straight. We’re bystanders. We watch and wait. And we trust in the workings of our justice system. As of now, you’re on leave. If I see you in the office before Rodriguez pleads guilty, you won’t have to worry about bringing me a doctor’s note. You’ll be fired.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, but her attitude made it clear she didn’t want any more questions or opposition from me. She began writing at the top of a fresh page. I rose to leave.

  Chapter 10

  I had no intention of giving Rodriguez’s lawyer our case file, and was dismayed Gabriela might suspect me of wanting to do so. The actual physical file was no longer in my possession, but all the documents, exhibits, and notes were still on my hard drive. In about ten minutes I could have put together a complete packet for Alex Ripley, including a number of points that hadn’t seen the light of the courtroom. After my meeting with Gabriela, I went to my office and burned all the documents from the Rodriguez case onto a CD. She could force me to take leave but she couldn’t stop me from looking into Jordan’s murder.

  In every trial, there are pieces that don’t get used, leftover trial exhibits that never emerge from our box behind the defense table. Then there’s the other stuff that doesn’t even make it into that box, ideas that never advance past the stage of brainstorming and perfunctory Google-search fact-checking. In the Rodriguez case, one of these was our theory that a serial rapist was at work in San Francisco.

  We’d played on this possibility at trial, though we hadn’t presented any evidence to back it up. Rather, we simply argued that if Rodriguez was innocent, the guilty man must still be out there, waiting to strike again. Originally, I’d toyed with the more ambitious plan of taking the jurors on a tour of unsolved sexual assaults. My idea had been to identify crimes similar to the Janelle Fitzpatrick rape, then call the investigating detectives as witnesses.

  I still had the notes I’d made during my first weeks on the case, before Jordan had brought a second set of eyes to bear on the problem of Rodriguez’s confession. Initially I’d seized on indications the rapist wasn’t new to sexual violence. Making the victim shower to eliminate physical evidence struck me as the act of someone with foresight and experience. Rather than reacting impulsively, he’d followed a plan. Same with the way he’d stripped Janelle’s bed and taken away the sheets, blankets, pillows, and clothing on which he might have left any fluid or
hair. The only mistake he’d made was turning the light on when he forced her to shower, allowing her to believe she’d gotten a good look at his face.

  Feeling certain the person who’d raped her had done it before, I’d started looking for crimes that seemed similar to her case, where the description of the suspects was consistent with the description Janelle had initially given of Rodriguez—before the botched lineup—as a large man who could have been either white or Hispanic. None was an exact match. Those that had been closed by arrest were no use to me, because those rapists were in prison when this latest assault had occurred. Also, I needed a crime for which my client had an airtight alibi, preferably one that had taken place while he was locked up.

  The best match had been a police report from two years ago. The incident it described was another home-invasion rape that had never been solved. I’d seized on this crime not only because of certain similarities to the Fitzpatrick case, but also because on the night of this earlier event, Rodriguez unquestionably had been in jail.

  Just as in the Fitzpatrick case, the assailant had followed the victim to her door, waited until she unlocked it, then charged forward and grabbed her. The rape had happened not in the bedroom, but in the front hallway, from where the rapist had dragged her into the bathroom, forced her to strip, and made her wash. Then he’d stuffed her clothes and the washcloth into a kitchen garbage bag and fled. This evidence had never been found.

  There were differences, of course. The victim in the previous rape was a waitress and part-time student who lived with roommates near Balboa Park. The roommates hadn’t been home at the time of the assault, but one had arrived barely twenty minutes after the rapist fled and found her roommate locked in the bathroom naked. However, the timing here suggested the crime had been impulsive and opportunistic rather than planned. In my imagined narrative, this was one of the first completed stranger rapes by a perpetrator who’d become more methodical with experience. By the time Janelle Fitzpatrick entered his sights, he’d honed his plan, and followed it to the letter.

  Jordan had convinced me to drop this theory. “The crimes aren’t similar enough,” she’d pointed out. “Also, there aren’t enough data points. Between any two events you can draw a trend, but unless there’s a third point to test your theory on, it’s just coincidence. You need at least three similar crimes to form a convincing pattern.”

  I’d spent several days sifting through police reports, but every similar rape I’d found had been committed by a man who was convicted and sent to prison and who was still behind bars at the time of the Fitzpatrick rape and thus could be eliminated as a suspect.

  Now, with Jordan’s rape and murder, we had the third data point we’d lacked. But I also remembered another caution from Jordan: the imagination can create a pattern out of anything.

  I’d never developed the theory beyond my notes and the documents. If I had, my next step would have been to track down the victim of that first crime and talk to her, see if she’d have had any value as a witness. I’d gone so far as to print search results from the usual databases, yet I’d held back from making the initial contact—both because around then Jordan had hit the jackpot with the investigators of Rodriguez’s previous confessions, and because my gut told me the jury was unlikely to buy the idea of a serial rapist on the prowl. Would anyone be any more likely to buy it now, when Rodriguez was so much more obviously guilty?

  Her name was Britney Yarmouth. A list of possible cell phone numbers from the LexisNexis database was in the file. The first two numbers I tried were no longer in service. The third connected and, just when the call seemed about ready to go to voice mail, a woman said hello, with an urgent challenge in her voice. I told her I was a lawyer and what office I worked for and that I wanted to talk to her about a crime she’d been involved in as a victim a few years before. Then I waited, expecting the silence that signaled she’d ended the call.

  Instead her words came in a rush, tumbling out so fast I could hardly keep up. “I’ve been going around for days wondering what the hell is going on: should I call the police, should I call you, or should I just forget about it. Like, for my own safety. But I can’t just forget. I’m too scared. Even in the middle of the day, I can’t walk down the street without looking over my shoulder. The cat was making noise last night and I nearly put a bullet through my bedroom door. Jordan told me we were safe but obviously she was wrong.”

  My heart rate spiked. “You knew Jordan?”

  “She first called wanting me to be a witness in that trial. I told her I didn’t think I could. In the end, she said I didn’t have to. I asked her to keep me posted on how it was going, and she said she would. I didn’t expect her to follow through, but during the trial she called me every single night. Even if it was just a few words, she always called.”

  I hadn’t realized Jordan had actually spoken with Britney before our focus shifted to discrediting Rodriguez’s confession by reference to his history of interactions with the police. I was even more surprised to learn they’d kept in close contact months after Britney ceased to be a potentially useful witness in Rodriguez’s trial.

  “What did she want you to testify about?”

  “What happened, of course. The rape. She said it couldn’t have been your client. After I saw a picture of him, I knew she was right. She was sure that the guy who’d attacked me must also have attacked other women.” The urgency came back into her voice. “We discussed it again the night she died.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Discussed what?”

  “About how the police had long since given up investigating the rape. She had this idea, after Rodriguez was acquitted, that now they’d have no choice but to start looking into the possibility that the guy who’d attacked me was still out there, that I hadn’t been his first or his last, that he’d been attacking other women and getting away with it. She wasn’t going to just walk away after the case was over. In her mind, the jury’s verdict was only the beginning. She wanted to get the real guy. I believed in her. I wanted to get him, too.”

  “And then she turned up murdered.”

  “He killed her. Because he knew she was gunning for him.” Her voice rose, becoming almost manic. “I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life. And now they’ve got Rodriguez behind bars for the crime, so that means the real killer can do whatever he wants. As far as the police are concerned, he doesn’t exist. And that means he never did.”

  “What did you mean before about Jordan saying the two of you were safe?” I wondered if there’d been threats, or some other indication that they might not be safe, that the rapist had one or both of them in his sights nearly two years after Britney had been attacked.

  “She said he wouldn’t dare come after me again. His whole MO is watching, waiting in the shadows. Like a panther in a tree. That’s what we started calling him during the trial. The Panther. I’d ask her: ‘Do you think the Panther’s following this?’ Meaning the trial. And she’d say ‘I’m sure he is.’ She wanted to send him a message. ‘We’re coming for you’ is what she wanted him to think. ‘You can’t hide much longer.’ “

  I steered the conversation back to the part that kept ringing in my ears. “You talked to Jordan the night she died?”

  She confirmed that she had. Then, suddenly, she needed to cut the conversation short. “I have to go to class,” she said, and asked what time would be good for her to call back.

  I told her I wanted to meet in person, that what we had to talk about was too important for the phone. She reluctantly agreed. I was about to suggest my office, but the memory of my conversation with Gabriela made me backtrack. I was on leave, which meant I shouldn’t show my face during business hours.

  “The flower conservatory,” I suggested, figuring she’d prefer somewhere public.

  “Fine,” she said, and we made plans to meet at four o’clock that day.

  She’d seen my ten seconds of fame on the evening news and knew what I looked like.
The idea was for me to wait outside the front entrance of the Conservatory of Flowers, near the east end of Golden Gate Park, and she’d find me.

  At ten past four I was standing at the top of the steps, chilled by a frigid Pacific wind, the first fluttering of panic beginning to stir in me as the fog turned August into December. I worried she’d decided not to come.

  Then a voice spoke behind me. “Mr. Maxwell?” I turned and saw a slight young woman in jeans and an oversized sweatshirt.

  Inside the conservatory, the air was humid, thick with the scent of greenery and soil. The light was the same as outside yet seemingly illuminated a different planet.

  “You’re still in school?” I asked as we moved along an aisle between overhanging palms.

  “I stopped taking classes for a while after the attack. I quit my job. But I have another one now, waitressing again. In a few years I’ll be a nurse. You do what you need to do, and you learn to shut out the rest.”

  I could sense she was trying to convince herself. “You’ve had to shut out a lot.”

  “You go on living,” she said. “You can’t spend your life behind a locked door.” She paused, gazing at a bird of paradise. She reached out as if to touch the exotic bloom, then seemed to remember it wasn’t permitted and yanked her hand back.

  “Jordan never said anything about being in contact with you.”

  “Why should she? Jordan talking to me had nothing to do with the case you two were working, not after we decided I wasn’t going to testify. We were just … friends.”

  Each time we paused she turned away from me and moved on. As the minutes passed, I became increasingly aware of an almost unbearable turbulence in her. “Jordan and I shared a lot of things outside of work, near the end.”