Rescued

by David Rosenfelt

  I ask Ralph very little on cross-examination, just enough to reassure the jurors that the dogs are fine and that nothing bad happened to them. Carla objects when Ralph refers to me and the Tara Foundation as the dogs’ rescuers, but Avery overrules her. The facts are the facts.

  The morning session is over, and in basketball terms, we have suffered “no harm, no foul.”

  That’s going to change.

  I head to the cafeteria for a quick lunch but stop to check my phone messages. The first one is Givens, from the FBI, telling me it was important that he hear from me ASAP.

  I call him and am immediately put through.

  “I need to see you right away.”

  “I’m in court.”

  “Can you get out of it?”

  “Sure. Give me a note. Just write, ‘Andy can’t come to court today because he has a cold.’”

  “You really are a pain in the ass,” he says.

  “And you need to get new material. What’s going on?”

  “When can you be here?”

  “Five o’clock. Is it going to be just you or the dark-suited gang of seven?”

  “Just me. Five o’clock.”

  I have no idea what Givens wants and no time to worry about it.

  Carla is about to call a bunch of witnesses who will make it obvious to the jury that Kramer committed murder.

  The fact is that whatever Givens wants, he’s going to be disappointed. I’m quite sure he’s not calling me in to give me information I can use; he wouldn’t have been so anxious to meet right away. But I’ve got nothing else to give him, much like I have nothing else to give the jury. When it comes to Givens, my negotiating gun is unloaded.

  Carla’s next witness is Alan Delaney of the state highway department. All he is here for is to say that he retrieved the rest stop video from the time in question and gave it to Captain Pete Stanton. He’s a chain-of-custody witness and so unimportant that I don’t even question him.

  Next is Sergeant Tom Quaranto, who executed a search warrant on Kramer’s house. He testifies that he originally went to the house to take Kramer into custody, but he wasn’t home. He waited there for forty-five minutes until a search warrant could be secured, at which point he went in. Kramer’s handgun was on the kitchen table, and Quaranto confiscated it. He says that it was obvious that it had recently been fired.

  On cross, I ask, “Sergeant Quaranto, how did you know that Mr. Kramer was not at home?”

  “There was a note on the door to that effect. I also rang the bell and knocked on the door. I still wasn’t positive he wasn’t home; he could have been deliberately avoiding us. But it turned out that he wasn’t there.”

  I introduce the note that Kramer had left as evidence and ask him to read it. It clearly says that he is at the home of his attorney, Andy Carpenter, and it gives my address. At the time he wrote it, I wasn’t his attorney, but I don’t think I’ll point that out to the jury.

  “So he told you where to find him?” I ask.

  “Yes.”

  “And was he telling the truth? Was he in fact at my house?”

  He nods. “I believe he was, yes.”

  “Do you often get that kind of information from fugitives?”

  “Every case is different,” he says, avoiding my question.

  “Thanks for sharing that,” I say. “Have you ever had a fugitive leave a note to tell you exactly where he is?”

  I get a grudging “no” from Quaranto.

  “Were you surprised that he wrote the note in the first place, since it shows he knew you were coming for him?”

  “Somewhat.”

  “Were you surprised that he left his gun out where you could easily find it?”

  “No. We would have found it by thoroughly searching the house wherever he hid it.”

  “If he had thrown it in the Passaic River, would you have found it by thoroughly searching the house?”

  “No.”

  “So just to recap, he told you where to find him, and he placed his gun in a location where you couldn’t miss it. Is that accurate?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you send him a thank-you note for making your job so much easier?”

  Carla objects, and Judge Avery sustains … business as usual. It doesn’t matter; my point was made.

  “No further questions. Thank you.”

  Sergeant Rebecca Camp is next in line in the boring witness parade. She ran the ballistics tests on the gun and determined it was Kramer’s. She also ran tests on the bullet that killed Zimmer, which showed that it came from Kramer’s gun.

  It does not come as a shock that she testifies to all of this. She comes off as a competent, credible witness, and she also has the advantage of being correct.

  My approach with witnesses like this is simple. I can’t shake them or cast doubt on their credibility, because the facts are not in my favor. But I don’t want to let them off completely unscathed, because I don’t want a prosecution steamroller effect to be generated.

  “Sergeant Camp, do you know who fired that weapon?”

  “You mean when Mr. Zimmer was shot?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “I do not.”

  “Do you know the circumstances under which it was fired?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, for example, was the shooter lying in wait to gun down his victim? Or was it self-defense? Did the shooter use his left hand or his right? Was the victim blindfolded and given a final cigarette? That’s what I mean. Any circumstances at all. Do you know anything about the shooting other than that there was a shooting and this was the gun used?”

  Carla objects that I’m badgering the witness, which I am. Judge Avery overrules the objection and lets her answer the question, but admonishes me.

  “I have no knowledge as to any of that one way or the other,” she says.

  “Thank you.”

  It’s 4:00 P.M., and since Judge Avery has now learned that in Carla’s hands there is no such thing as a quick witness, he adjourns for the day. I call Laurie and tell her I’ll be late, that I’ve been called to another meeting at the FBI.

  “Do you know why?” she asks.

  “No. It could be that they just like having me around, because of my bubbly personality.”

  “No,” she says. “It couldn’t.”

  Givens was telling the truth; he’s alone waiting for me in his office.

  “How’s your trial going?” he asks.

  “A laugh a minute.”

  “I assume your client is innocent?” he asks in a tone that says that he believes the opposite.

  I nod. “Pure as the driven snow.”

  “Who actually got Elway’s fingerprint off the phone in the Caymans?”

  “I guess we’re done shooting the breeze. It was an attorney in my firm, Hike Lynch.”

  “Could he have done anything to alert Jeffries to the fact that he was onto him?”

  “Why? Did Jeffries disappear?”

  “Could you please answer the question?” he asks.

  “Obviously, he could have made a mistake, but he said he didn’t, and he’s a smart guy. He waited until Jeffries got in his car and left, and then a few minutes later, he went to the phone and got the print. Then he washed off the phone so that no one could tell what he had done.”

  “You’re sure of all this?”

  “I’m sure that’s what he told me. And I’m sure that those were my instructions to him when he went down there. And I’m sure he would have no reason to lie to me.”

  Givens nods; I’m sure he expected me to tell him all of this. “Well, something spooked Elway, because he’s nowhere to be found.”

  “It could be a coincidence.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  I nod. “I don’t either. But I really doubt that Hike did anything that would result in this.”

  There’s a knock on the door, and another agent opens it and asks if he could speak to Givens outside for a mom
ent. Givens tells me he’ll be right back and goes out into the hall with the agent. This would be a good opportunity for me to look through the papers on his desk, except for the fact that there are no papers on his desk.

  It’s probably five minutes before he returns. “They found Jeffries.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “His body washed up on the shore.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m going to level with you, and if I find out you revealed any of what I’m about to tell you, your body will be the next one to turn up on a beach,” he says. “We had information that Jeffries had arranged the purchase of some dangerous weapons. They might be meant for domestic use. We don’t know where, or when, or even why.”

  “Mushroom cloud–type weapons?” I ask.

  “No, thank God.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because we were searching for Jeffries for months, and you found him before we could. So whatever your sources of information, or your methods, if they turn up more relevant information, I want it.”

  “Our deal is still in place,” I say.

  He nods. “Yes, it is.”

  “Then I have nothing right now,” I say. “But if I get anything, it’s yours.”

  I spend the drive home trying to make sense out of all this. It seems very likely that Hike’s uncovering Jeffries’s whereabouts and identity led to his death. It’s not certain; there is always the possibility that his death was unrelated to Hike retrieving the print. But that would be way up on the coincidence scale, substantially past my belief level, and apparently past the FBI’s as well.

  My view is that Eric Benjamin, and his coconspirators, believed that Kramer was a threat to them. They tried to kill him, and when that failed, they framed him in order to take him out of commission.

  Then Tina Bauer either helped them kill John Craddock or was a witness to it. Either way, she is gone, and I have my doubts that she is alive.

  Now Bennett Jeffries, likely one of the key conspirators, was himself killed because his partners thought he was about to be exposed.

  If Craddock was murdered, and I believe that he was, then there are only two possible reasons that I can think of. One is money, but the fact that his wife inherited most of it, and that his company has deteriorated in his absence, makes that hard to understand.

  The other possibility is the nature of the company itself. Perhaps Craddock’s genius in robotics was somehow threatening to the conspiracy.

  The drive isn’t long enough for me to figure out what’s going on. I could drive to Tibet, and it wouldn’t be long enough.

  This is not going to be a fun weekend.

  I will spend it going over all the documents related to the case and preparing to cross-examine the prosecution witnesses that are coming up. Of course, now that the football season has begun, my preparation will pause on Sunday at one o’clock to watch the Giants game.

  Saturday morning, I settle down in the den with the documents, but first I open yesterday’s mail, which I had not gotten to. It’s just a few bills and two letters from credit card companies congratulating me on being preapproved. I’m humbled by their confidence in me and touched that they are willing to do all of this for only 25.99 percent interest.

  There’s also a statement from my broker, Edna’s cousin Freddie. It’s a notice informing me that he sold our shares in Victor’s Donuts, as per our direction. Laurie will be pleased to know we no longer own any part of “that complete and total pig’s company.”

  I open it and see that all of our previous profits on the stock had disappeared, and then some. Victor Andreson’s arrest and removal from the company caused investors to decide to bail out. By the time we joined them, we had taken a big hit.

  The stock fiasco reminds me of the situation at Roboton after Craddock’s death. I call Freddie at home and tell him I want to talk to him about the sale.

  “You having second thoughts?” he asks. “Because we could buy it back for what we sold it.”

  “No, I wanted to ask you about something you said last time we talked. You said you wish we had been short the stock.”

  “Right.”

  “What does that mean?” I ask.

  “You short a stock when you think it’s going to go down. What you’re doing is borrowing the shares, then you sell them, but you have an obligation to return them to the person you borrowed them from. If the stock goes down, you buy them back at the lower price so you can return them. The difference is your profit.”

  “Freddie, I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

  He sighs. “Okay, let’s say stock A is twenty dollars a share. I own one hundred shares, and you borrow them from me. You then sell them for twenty dollars each. You expect the stock to go down, which is why you’re doing it. So it does go down to ten dollars. You then buy it back at the ten-dollar price and return the stock to me.”

  “So I originally sold it for twenty, and bought it back for ten,” I say.

  “Right. The ten-dollar difference per share is your profit.”

  “Are you familiar with a company called Roboton?”

  “Of course. That was John Craddock’s company.”

  “Could someone have shorted that stock and in the process made a lot of money when he was killed?”

  “No,” he says.

  “That’s not the answer I was looking for. Just for future reference, when I ask a question like that, I’m hoping for yes.”

  “Sorry, Andy. You know I don’t like to disappoint you, but the answer is a definite no. It’s just not possible.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Roboton is a privately held company. The Craddock family owns almost all the shares. I believe the employees own the rest. You can’t short a stock that isn’t publicly traded.”

  “That’s unfortunate,” I say.

  “Andy, what are you looking for? Maybe I can help.”

  “I’ve been trying to find someone who profited from Craddock’s death and the effect of that death on his company.”

  “Well, then, I’ve got good news for you,” he says. “You did.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You have some shares in a stock called Sky Robotics; I got a bunch of my clients a small piece of it in the IPO. You were one of them, but you don’t have that much of it. I wish you had more.”

  “It went up when Craddock died?”

  “Way up. They were working on similar products, very competitive. Two of Craddock’s employees actually left to go to Sky when he died.”

  “So Sky is a public company?” I ask.

  “Yes. IPO stands for initial public offering. That’s what you do when you open up the company to public ownership.”

  “How much did it go up in value?”

  “Market cap?” he asks.

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Market capitalization. It’s the number of shares times the value of each share. It shows what the company is valued at.”

  “I just want to know how much Sky Robotics was worth before John Craddock died and after he died.”

  “Market cap. I’d have to check. Can you hold on a minute?”

  “Sure.”

  He takes twice that time, but Freddie finally comes back. “Sorry, took longer than I thought. Here it is. The day John Craddock died, Sky Robotics had a market cap estimated at seven hundred million. Today, it is a billion nine.”

  “So Sky gained over a billion dollars because John Craddock died?”

  “I can’t say that it is all attributable to that, but I bet a lot of it is.”

  “Freddie, you’re a genius.”

  He laughs. “Andy, you do realize that most of that billion is not yours, right?”

  “Even if I made only a half billion, I’m happy,” I say. Then I thank him, hang up, and go into the kitchen to tell Laurie what I’ve learned.

  Laurie thinks it’s definitely a viable possibility tha
t Craddock’s murder was designed to bring down his company so someone could profit from the downfall. But she adds a note of caution, pointing out, “We can’t even be positive that Craddock was murdered.”

  “He was.”

  “Can you prove it in court?”

  “No.”

  “There’s one other thing, Andy. Even if we’re close to proving Craddock was murdered and close to proving a motive, how does that help us convince the jury that Dave is innocent?”

  “Laurie, if you’re going to insist on using logic and reality, I’m not going to be able to talk to you anymore.”

  Robbie Divine is one of the richest men in the country.

  I met him at a charity dinner once, and we’ve become sort of friends. I think he hangs out with me so he can understand how the peasant class lives.

  Robbie knows more about markets and money than anyone I know, and I’ve called on his expertise a few times to help with cases. He once confided in me that he loves money, literally loves it, but is bothered by the fact that he can never have all of it.

  I call him at home, although I have no idea what home he is in. Robbie has it set up that when someone dials his Manhattan apartment number, it rings in all of his homes. At last count he had seven of them, four in the US and one each in Anguilla, London, and Hong Kong.

  “It’s two thirty in the morning,” he says, instead of hello. He sounds wide awake.

  “Hong Kong?” I ask.

  “Hong Kong. What the hell do you want?”

  “Are you familiar with Sky Robotics?”

  “Why do you insult me?” he says. “From now on, just assume that I am familiar with every company that has a market cap higher than your average convenience store.”

  “I know what market cap means.”

  “Congratulations. What about Sky Robotics?”

  “Do you own a piece of it?”

  “No,” he says. “And I remain pissed about that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I was all set to participate in the IPO in a major way, and then Greg Hepner came up with outside money. Then the damn thing took off.”