Panther's Prey

by Lachlan Smith

  “And now you’ve changed plans.”

  “What Jordan believed is no longer the story. The story is what happened to her because of that belief. Your client confessed. He’s the Panther, if there ever was one.”

  “It’s a good thing you didn’t run the piece before her murder. Then you’d have had no choice but to double down. ‘The Panther strikes again.’ In retrospect, it would have looked like a dare. You might even have felt responsible.”

  “So because you were fucking her you get to be self-righteous?”

  I ignored this. “You believed her before she was killed. Why not afterward?”

  She poured more tea for herself and gave a shrug. “Rodriguez confessed.”

  “Exactly. And then almost immediately, he confessed again.”

  I watched her eat. We both were thinking. Finally she said, “When Jordan was still alive, I was willing to accept that a jury might arrive at ‘not guilty.’ That could mean he’s innocent. It could also mean he did it—but that for whatever reason the state didn’t bring enough proof to convict.

  “I was willing to explore both scenarios. My piece immediately after the verdict suggested the DA had fucked up and lost a case it should have won. Out of fairness, and because Jordan was a convincing advocate for what she believed, I was willing to give that possibility serious treatment. What if Rodriguez was innocent? Britney was going to be the centerpiece of my Panther story. Not out of choice, but because there was no way Janelle Fitzpatrick was going to talk to me about her case.

  “But then Jordan was murdered and Rodriguez confessed. You and I both want Jordan to be right, but look at it from my point of view. My reputation’s at stake with every story, and so is my newspaper’s. When Rodriguez confessed to Jordan’s murder, do you think the odds he was guilty of raping Fitzpatrick got better or worse?”

  She was trying to spin me and I didn’t like it. “You don’t want her to be right. You just want the most sensational story you can possibly write. You wanted to use the Rodriguez case to make a moral example out of someone. At first, you could make your little lesson out of the DA’s failure to present a compelling case and the cops’ failure to investigate thoroughly. Then, after Jordan was killed, you had a more sensational story to tell, with a much simpler takeaway. ‘Naïve liberal defense lawyer gets what she deserves.’ What we all deserve. Isn’t that the effect you’re going for in your latest piece?”

  Her voice was icy. “I make a point of writing the facts and letting readers draw their own conclusions.”

  “How’d you know her?” I asked.

  “Tommy introduced us.”

  “Benton?”

  “He and I go way back.” There was an opening there but her tone indicated she intended to guard it.

  Not accustomed to prying into other people’s lives—at least when I didn’t have the people in question on the witness stand under oath—I left it alone. Just for the moment. “Did you talk to her the night of her death?”

  “Know something? You’re the first person to ask me that question.”

  It didn’t surprise me. “Did you send her a text message or an e-mail that night?”

  “No. I didn’t talk to her, didn’t text her. No e-mails. You can cross me off the suspect list.”

  “I’d like to see her phone records, and, better yet, I’d like to know if the police have gotten them. Otherwise, it seems to me you may have a chance to revisit that story you wrote after the verdict. There’s more at stake now than simple laziness. If Chen doesn’t nail Rodriguez this time around, Cole’s ass is on the street because of what happened with the Fitzpatrick trial. This is their one shot at redemption.”

  “I’d agree with you there,” she said.

  “What you said before, about exploring the alternative possibilities—why can’t you still run with that? You’ve been down the first road. Idealistic public defender gets a fatal reality check. That’s the official version. But what about the possibility Jordan was right and Rodriguez gave another false confession, just like he did in the Fitzpatrick case?”

  Stone shook her head. “No one tells me what to write.”

  “You were talking to Jordan about writing a column on Britney. The what-if piece: ‘Panther stalks the city’ and all that. Obviously, you can’t do it the same way after what happened, but the premise you were working from hasn’t fundamentally changed.”

  “If I’d realized you were coming here to lobby me for a story I’d have told you not to waste your time. Jordan and I had a lot in common. You’re just another man trying to tell me how I should do my job. I don’t tell you how to try your cases—though since I’ve probably spent more time in courtrooms than you have, I could give you a few pointers.”

  “Let’s stay on topic. You liked Jordan. So did I. So did Tom Benton. So did her father, who, by the way, is convinced she was right. I’m not so sure.” I needed to keep her attention and achieve something approaching trust. That’s what I was here for. “Part of me thinks you and the police are right about Rodriguez killing her. But I’m sure the police, the DA, even Gabriela at the PD’s office are railroading Rodriguez straight to a guilty plea and the rest of his life in prison. It’s too fast, and no one is asking the questions that need to be asked. I’ve even been told I’ll lose my job if I stir the pot. What do you think of that?”

  “I’m still sitting here and my tea is gone. That should tell you something.”

  “Rushing to judgment was wrong before and even more wrong now. You wrote what you wrote then, so I know you agree with me now. No one’s asking you to be inconsistent.”

  She studied me for a moment, then said, “While we’re conducting these little thought experiments, let’s say there’s a third option. Someone on the inside, someone who knew Rodriguez and how he’d react. Someone with access to Jordan, someone she trusted to let in the door of her apartment. Someone with a personal motive to want her dead. She wasn’t ‘into’ you the way you were into her, is what I hear.”

  Stone meant Rebecca and Cole, I guessed. Contact between them was not unthinkable. Cole’s survival depended on his acquittal in the court of public opinion, a court over which Stone and the Chronicle presided. “Write whatever you have to write.”

  “If I dive back into this I intend to look at all the angles. But I need a source, and until a better one comes along, you’re my man. I want your promise, Leo, that no matter where this leads, you’ll talk to me. On the record, too. That’s my precondition.”

  “You want a blank check.”

  She smiled grimly. “If you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve nothing to fear.”

  Chapter 12

  The piece ran three days later, appearing online in the middle of the night. It was long, running to six full pages in the digital version, and it presented a powerful and comprehensive indictment of the police investigation into Jordan’s death. It summarized and built on all the evidence of incompetence we’d presented, as detailed in previous articles focusing on the Fitzpatrick rape. Yet I clearly hadn’t been Stone’s only source. Inside the police department there’d been somebody able to confirm that no additional warrants had been issued since Rodriguez’s latest confession, that the police hadn’t yet obtained Jordan’s phone records, and that her e-mails had been searched not by the police but by the IT people at the PD’s office.

  As before, no physical evidence linked Rodriguez to the crime scene, Stone’s article noted. Once again, the only apparent indication of his guilt was his own confession. The first section of the story included a quote from the police department spokesperson, to the effect the police had closed the case with Rodriguez’s arrest and weren’t presently pursuing additional suspects. But Stone wasn’t done yet.

  Next, despite her seeming resistance to my ideas, she went on to basically follow the script I’d suggested. Reporting Jordan’s belief that Janelle Fitzpatrick had been the victim of a sexual predator who was still at large, Stone dwelled on the coverage of the Rodriguez trial, i
nviting the readers to imagine the reaction of the “Panther’s” to seeing another man confess and be tried for that rape.

  Furthermore, Fitzpatrick’s wasn’t the first unsolved rape. Other assaults had appeared on the blotter sheets over the years, with characteristics that might be viewed as forming a pattern. The victims left alive but bound and confined. The sheets, clothing, and other possible repositories of physical evidence meticulously removed—carried away by the perpetrator and never recovered. Across the city, Stone wrote, women were waiting for justice. Waiting, and wondering where the Panther was now.

  Reading the piece, I felt a mixture of satisfaction and dread. I’d used Stone as my proxy to stick my thumb in Cole’s eye. But there was no telling how the police might react. The only certainty was the authorities couldn’t now go on ignoring the possibility a serial rapist was stalking women in San Francisco.

  Not surprisingly, the story kicked off a minor media frenzy. Each story confirmed that as far as anyone knew, I’d been the last person other than the killer to see Jordan alive.

  At six thirty Saturday morning, a pair of cops knocked on my door. They had no warrant, they informed me, only a strongly worded request that I voluntarily accompany them to Southern Station to resume my interview with Detective Chen. Evidently I’d succeeded in stirring up the hornet’s nest. I made them wait in the hallway while I showered, shaved, and dressed. Soon enough, I once again found myself sitting in a cramped interview room facing Chen across a table.

  “We’d like you to provide a biological sample,” he said. “A cheek swab. It’s not invasive. We know you had intercourse with Jordan the night of her death. We need a sample from you to identify whether a third party’s genetic material may also be present.” His tone was carefully neutral, but I knew he hadn’t dragged me out of bed on a Saturday morning merely for such a routine request.

  On the surface, this was a reasonable appeal. Jordan had been on the pill, and we hadn’t used a condom. My semen was undoubtedly present in her body at the time of her death, and providing a sample of genetic material from my cheek lining would enable the police to confirm what they already knew by virtue of my own statements. On the other hand, if no one else’s genetic material was present, the inevitable DNA match would help the DA seal a case against me. Still, I couldn’t really believe they’d make me their target—especially not with Rodriguez’s confession in hand.

  After quickly weighing these calculations, I did as he asked, leaning forward to let him swab the inside of my cheek. “You haven’t checked the sample against Rodriguez yet? Or didn’t you get a match?” I asked as he screwed the sample into its sterile case.

  “I’m not expecting a match with Rodriguez. We didn’t have one in the Fitzpatrick case. This is to eliminate the possibility of a third party at the scene.”

  He sealed the sample case in a manila envelope.

  “What about Jordan’s cell phone records? Come on,” I said, seeing his reluctance. “Haven’t you gotten them yet?”

  “They just came in. The only message that night came from a prepaid.”

  “What did the text say?”

  “I can’t discuss that.”

  “That’s all right,” I told him. “I’ll just wait and read it in tomorrow’s paper. It must be frustrating to have a leak in your investigation and not know who it is.”

  Chen refused to take the bait. “Last time we were discussing your reasons for possessing an unregistered handgun. You said Jordan had recommended you get rid of it. Remember that discussion?”

  I met his stare. “I do criminal defense for a living. You’d have me on a misdemeanor. I’d get pretrial diversion and the charge would go away.”

  “Normally ballistics takes about a month, but I was able to put a rush on this job. That gun killed a man named Russell Bell.”

  I blinked.

  “You know the name, I take it. The chief witness in the prosecution of Lawrence Maxwell. Who, of course, happens to be your father. Russell Bell turning up shot to death was the only reason your father ended up being acquitted.”

  I blinked again.

  “Now do you want to give me your story about how you came by that weapon? Or do you need some more time to think about it?”

  If he was bluffing, it was a pretty cheap bluff, certain to kill his credibility with me when the truth came out.

  I decided he wasn’t bluffing.

  I thought back to how I’d gotten that gun.

  Shortly after the fire, when I was still recovering from being shot and trying to sell my condo and get out of Oakland, a former client had come to see me, and, after hearing about my troubles, offered to give me a clean gun, no charge. The guy’s name was Roland McEwan, and he’d just gotten out of prison after serving a two-year term that should have been ten, given the facts. He owed me a favor for my unpaid fee and, in a moment of weakness, I’d taken him up on the offer. A week later he’d called and told me he had the piece. I’d taken it and felt better for a few days, but it spooked me to carry a felony in my pocket. When I moved to the city, I put the weapon in the drawer for good.

  Only now, over a year later, did I understand that Bo Wilder most likely had set me up. It was the only possibility that made any sense. But I couldn’t tell Chen that. Revealing the truth would be the equivalent of admitting I knew who’d killed Russell Bell, and who was to say I hadn’t known it before the deed was done?

  “I’m asserting my right to silence. If you intend to keep questioning me, I want a lawyer present.”

  “You’re going to need one,” Chen said as he rose.

  It was six o’clock when the booking process was finished and I was finally allowed to call Jeanie Napolitano, my brother’s ex-wife and my first boss, a criminal defense lawyer in Contra Costa County.

  “It’s me,” I said when she picked up.

  She knew from caller ID that I was calling from jail at 850 Bryant. “What’d you do?” was all she asked, her voice more amused than anything.

  “Nothing. But that doesn’t matter. They haven’t charged me yet.”

  “With what?”

  “Russell Bell’s murder.”

  “That’s just perfect.” Jeanie was angry now and immediately on my side. “We’ll have you out of there first thing tomorrow morning. Unfortunately there’s nothing I can do tonight.”

  I thanked her and hung up. I hadn’t told her close to everything she needed to know, but no client ever does. They—we—always hold the worst facts back. Jeanie would learn the whole story soon enough. It’d almost be a relief to finally be able to come clean with her.

  I went back to my dorm unit and stretched out on my lower bunk, then closed my eyes and waited for sleep to come, but all I could see was the leering smile of a man I’d never met.

  Bo Wilder.

  The next morning I had to spend a few hours in the holding tank before Jeanie came back to retrieve me. “No charges today,” she announced. But her attitude was different now from the instant solidarity of the previous evening. She was curt, as if she needed to be somewhere else. In fairness, I’m sure she did.

  She wouldn’t meet my eyes. “You didn’t tell me your gun was at the scene.”

  “See if you can get a copy of the ballistics report. I don’t trust the police.”

  “For now, there aren’t any charges. That means they aren’t giving you or me jack shit because they don’t have to until there’s actually a case. Do you really think the police would jerk you around that way?”

  “If they’re not setting me up, then Wilder did.”

  “I don’t want to hear about it. We’re not going to have a big attorney-client-privilege come to Jesus. When you called last night, I thought this was going to be a simple thing. Obviously, you forgot to mention a few important details, such as the fact that you’d asked your girlfriend to get rid of the murder weapon that was found at the scene of her death.”

  She uttered these words with the kind of disgust that implied a complete los
s of faith in Teddy, Lawrence, and me. What other conclusion could she come to except that we’d been lying to her and to everyone else since the day Bell had been gunned down? “I’m not going to be sucked back into the Maxwell family dirt,” she continued angrily. “I’m just not. You’ll have to find another lawyer, one who doesn’t mind getting her hands dirty, operating blindfolded and with one hand tied—the whole works.”

  I knew Jeanie too well to buy must of what she was saying. She was only venting. She didn’t really believe we were crooked, or if she did, found it easy enough to overlook. She’d been married to Teddy during the period when he was working for Santorez, after all.

  “A former client gave me that gun after Bo burned my office,” I told her. “This is payback.”

  “Payback for what?”

  “For refusing to work for Bo, refusing to pay off the favor he thinks he did us. The trouble is, no one asked him to kill Russell Bell. None of us knew it was going to happen before it did. Bo’s counting on me not being able to tell the police the truth. Plus, he knows there’s no reasonable explanation I can possibly give for having that gun.”

  “So you think we can expect more of these little hidden bombs to go off?”

  “Probably not. He just wants to make it impossible for me to work for anyone other than him. This was the whole point of coming to work at the PD’s office.”

  Jeanie just nodded, like this was what she’d expected. Still, her expression was concerned, wary. “You may think they don’t have enough to establish probable cause for murder, but the DA’s office can do what it wants. If they think you’ve got information, they won’t hesitate to use the gun as leverage.”

  She was telling me the obvious. It was hard for her not to assume I was as much of a novice as I’d been when I first worked for her.