She nodded her head. “I see. The man who raped you in the fraternity house.” Her face was impassive, which drove me crazy, because I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. She had quite a poker face. I didn’t like that.
“Yes. The man who raped me in the fraternity house.”
She leaned back and made notes. “Tell me about the case. What is he charged with?”
“He’s charged with murdering his father-in-law, who also happens to be a judge.”
“Yes,” she said. “Now I remember reading about this case in the paper. He came to you to ask you defend him. Why do you suppose that he would choose you for that?”
I shrugged. “I’ve pondered that question myself. I don’t really know. He said it was because of my reputation and the fact that I’ve been able to win some impossible cases. I guess that’s true, because I have won some cases that seemed unwinnable at the outset.”
“Well, I’m certain that’s true, but let’s try to unwind what you’re really thinking about why he would have chosen you, out of all the attorneys in the city, to represent him.”
That was actually a question that I hadn’t really considered. I just took it on face value that he chose me because he felt that I was the best person for the job. “I don’t really know. Maybe he chose me because he unconsciously wanted to make amends. He says that he does. Want to make amends, that is.”
“Do you believe that?”
“No. I don’t believe that.”
“Then why do you believe that he chose you because he wants to make amends?”
I shrugged. “I guess that was just the first answer that popped into my head. It’s probably wrong, though.”
She made some more notes. “What are some other possibilities?”
I pursed my lips and shook my head. “I don’t really know.”
She nodded her head. “Well, let’s move on. I suspect that you’re really here because you’re questioning why you would take the case. I am correct about that?”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s exactly why.”
“Tell me your thoughts on it, and then I’ll give you my theory.”
I took a deep breath. “I want him to fry. I desperately want him to go down in flames. I’m afraid that if a different attorney took his case, he’ll get away with killing the judge. If he’s guilty of the crime, I want to make sure that he doesn’t get out of it.”
She nodded her head. “But only if he’s guilty of the crime? What if he’s not guilty of the crime? How will you feel when you secure his freedom? And how will you know for sure that he is guilty or not guilty? That question can never be known beyond a shadow of a doubt, unless the person actually confesses to you. How are you untangling those questions in your head?”
I looked out the window. “I want him to be guilty,” I said softly. “So I can make sure he gets the justice that is coming to him. I want him to die in prison.” I hung my head. “I’m his attorney and I want him to die in prison. I’m having a hard time squaring that desire with the ethics that I practice under and with the oath that I took when I was sworn into the Missouri Bar. I know that I’m bound to represent him zealously, no matter if he’s guilty or not, but, in truth, I’m trying to find a way to make sure he goes to prison for life.”
Dr. Rosen was correct about one thing – I never would know if Michael was guilty or not guilty. I could only find evidence that would point one way or another, but, unless he came right out and told me he did it, it would be impossible to prove with 100% certainty. Juries convicted on the preponderance of the evidence, which means that the evidence would show, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the person did the crime. The term reasonable doubt, however, didn’t mean 100% certainty. It simply meant that the evidence showed that the defendant most likely committed the crime.
She cleared her throat. “Here is my suspicion on why you took this case. I believe that you took it because seeing justice given to Michael will help you finally move on. I know that what he did to you has led to some deep-seated issues that you and I have tried to work through, but, as of yet, we have not been successful in working through them together. When you stopped our therapy before, you told me it was because you felt that you weren’t making progress. I wonder if you took this case so that you could get closure on your feelings about the rape.”
“Yes,” I said. “I think that you’re right about that.”
“I am worried, however, about what will happen if he is found not guilty. I worry that such an outcome will cause you to regress even further.”
I sighed. “I’ve considered that possibility.”
She nodded her head. “You might consider that you might have to withdraw from his case,” she said. “For the sake of your mental health. You’re gambling that the outcome isn’t going to be the outcome that you want. I think that you need to think about the possibility that you will never see that Michael has the justice that you want for him.”
I bowed my head and felt hot tears coming down my cheeks. “I know,” I said softly. “And I might never have a decent relationship. I still can’t bring myself to even think about being intimate with a man. I have a man now, a man who says that he loves me and will wait for me, but he won’t wait forever. I’m afraid that if Michael is found not guilty and he walks away, I might never get to the point where I can be free. Where I can feel safe. Where I can feel that the unjust will be punished.”
She nodded her head. “And how do you feel knowing that, in your past, you have defended guilty people and that some of them have gone free? How does that fit into that dynamic?”
I blinked my eyes, seeing that she was getting at the crux of the matter. She was stabbing at the heart of why I was feeling so loathsome about myself. I was raped and my rapist was still walking around free. Nothing happened to him – in fact, he apparently went on to rape multiple other women. Yet I defended criminals. I celebrated when I got a not guilty verdict for them, even if the person was actually guilty. I liked to think that most of my clients who went free through my efforts were actually innocent, but I knew that wasn’t always the case. John Robinson was one example, but I was sure that there were others.
I was willfully blind and I had to be to do my job. I had to always imagine, no matter how much my gut was telling me otherwise, that my client was innocent. Factually innocent. If I didn’t do that, if I didn’t tell myself that, then I couldn’t do what I did. I couldn’t put all my effort into somebody who I knew to be guilty, even though I needed to do just that. I was ethically bound to do just that.
Was I a whore? I went to the highest bidder and took cases in a mercenary fashion – if they could pay my bill, I gave them representation, come Hell or high water.
John Robinson was the one exception to my willful blindness notion. I knew him to be guilty, and I gave him my all. And look what happened there. He murdered Gina Caldwell, and now her girls were in my custody. I was going to adopt Gina’s girls, and I loved them, but they really needed to be with their mother. They couldn’t be, because I did my job too damned well.
“I don’t defend rapists,” I said, knowing that was a weak excuse. No, I didn’t defend rapists, but I defended murderers, arsonists and people charged with assault. I defended people who got behind the wheel, blind drunk, and killed multiple people with their car. I defended drug dealers who dealt drugs to children. I defended all manner of loathsome scumbags, and I did it all without really examining why. Why I would be so willing to be a part of these people being returned to the streets?
She nodded. “Michael is a proxy. Have you ever thought about that possibility?”
“What do you mean?”
“You were victimized by Michael. You’re in a profession where you defend people who have hurt others, as Michael hurt you. I wonder if you want to make sure that Michael gets a long prison sentence not just because you want to see justice done in his case, but also because you secretly feel guilty for all the other clients you have managed to set free. Client
s who you suspect, if not known for sure, were guilty of the crimes for which they were charged. In that way, Michael is a proxy for all the other clients who you have managed to set free.”
I pondered her words. They made sense. Maybe she had a point. Maybe I secretly felt shame for working so hard to set criminals free, so I put all my shame onto Michael. Let Michael pay for what he did, and maybe I could assuage my guilt for all those other clients who went on to walk the streets after I took their case and secured not guilty verdicts for them.
“Maybe,” I said.
She nodded her head. “Again, I want you to imagine how you are going to feel if Michael goes free and you’re a part of the reason why. If he goes free and then goes on to hurt somebody else, as he hurt you. How will you feel if that happens?”
I felt a knot in my chest as I thought about that possibility. It was a cold knot, bound up in fear and loathing and anger. My heart started to pound and I felt nauseated.
I finally took a deep breath and looked Dr. Rosen directly in the eye. “I will feel like Hell, but I’ll really feel like Hell if I withdraw from the case and find out that another lawyer makes sure that he walks free. I think that this case is better in my hands.”
She nodded. “It sounds like you have your mind made up.”
“I do. But you’re right. I will be devastated if he walks free.”
We talked for the rest of the hour about what had been going on in my life. I told her about John Robinson and the girls and how I felt about all of that. I never got over what had happened there, although I was somewhat mollified by the fact that I had the girls at my house. I would rather that Gina be alive, however. I was quite sure that the girls felt the same.
After our session was over, I walked out of the office feeling slightly better, but only slightly. I was still going to walk into the lion’s den and represent the scumbag Michael. I was playing with fire. I knew that.
But if it all worked out, it might be the first step to freeing me.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The next day was the day of the autopsy. I was down at the Medical Examiner’s Office, as was the prosecutor in the case. April Todd was an experienced prosecutor with 20 years under her belt, but I had felt, and so did many others, that she was rapidly burning out. That worried me. I needed her on the top of her game if I was going to make sure that Michael got his just desserts.
“Okay, Harper,” she said, joining me by sitting next to me on the chairs just outside the ME office. “Why don’t we exchange some dates on when we can get our discovery into one another. I just got a notice from the trial court, and this trial is set for February 10 of next year. I would like to close discovery by January 15. Would you be able to do that as well?”
“I would. Do you have an offer on this case?”
She shook her head. “I haven’t been authorized to give an offer just yet. As of now, my boss isn’t backing off asking for the death penalty. She might never back off that, either. Unfortunately, Judge Sanders was a close friend of hers, so I think that she’s taking it personally. Looks like we’re going to try this thing no matter what.”
I sighed. I was hoping for a plea bargain. One that was decent, which meant that I had the possibility of talking Michael into taking it. I certainly didn’t anticipate that there wouldn’t be any plea bargain possibility at all. “That’s rather unprofessional, isn’t it? That your boss won’t authorize you giving a plea offer on this case just because she was friends with the victim?”
She shrugged. “Yes, I agree with that, but here we are. I don’t want to try this, either. The media has been all over it. We’ve been contacted by every news organization there is, even some of the national ones. There’s even talk of allowing cameras in the courtroom. I hate it when the media gets involved, and they’re very much involved in this one. It’s not every day that a federal judge is murdered, after all.”
“I haven’t been too inundated with media requests,” I said. “Actually, I haven’t been at all.”
“Just wait,” she said. “You just entered your appearance on this case. The media hasn’t had the chance to harass you. You better run for cover on this one, especially if it goes south for us. You’re going to be blamed for it.”
I knew that to be true. It was true in the John Robinson case, and it was bound to be true in this case as well.
“What discovery do you anticipate you’re going to be giving me?” she asked. “And, by the way, the gun has been recovered. They recovered it from a landfill.”
“I knew that it would be. As for discovery, I pretty much just plan on doing depositions. I don’t anticipate doing much more.” Usually, I would get experts to go through the crime scene in cases like this, to show that my client wasn’t present in the room when the person was killed. They had ways of showing this by estimating when the footsteps of the client hit the hardwood floor. I would usually have some kind of forensic analysis done on the gun and bullet in the gun, to show the glove prints that were on the gun. A well-paid expert can trace the glove prints to a certain pair of gloves, for the glove prints were really similar to fingerprints.
Not that I wasn’t going to introduce an expert to testify to the glove prints. I would only do that if the glove prints at the scene of the crime could not be matched with any pair of gloves that Michael owned. If they did match a pair of Michael owned, then I might go ahead and bring in the expert to testify. That was one way that I could make sure Michael went down. I could feign innocence pretty easily if the expert testified that the glove print matched Michael’s glove. I could simply tell Michael that I thought that the expert would have testified the other way.
“Only depositions? You aren’t going to be doing forensic analysis or anything like that?”
“I don’t anticipate doing that.”
“Okay then. We plan on bringing in the cops on the scene. We’re also going to be bringing in the testimony of Christina Sanders.”
“Christina Sanders. What is she going to be testifying to?”
“The relationship between your client and Judge Sanders. She doesn’t want to testify, so I’m probably going to have to treat her as hostile, but I think that she has a lot to say about how Michael Reynolds and Robert Sanders got along. Which wasn’t well, to say the very least.”
I nodded my head. “Anybody else? Who else are you going to call?”
“We’re still doing our investigation, and, to tell you the truth, who we call is going to depend on how this autopsy goes. Obviously, if it turns out that the judge had been poisoned for a matter of months, there’s going to be more investigation into how that fits into the overall scheme of things. I’ll definitely let you know, however, who we’re going to call and what evidence we plan to present.”
The Medical Examiner came out and the two of us stood up. “Our preliminary examination does indicate that there were signs of poisoning in the system of the judge at the time of death. That is only the preliminary finding. We are going to have to send tissue samples for further analysis, but I’m reasonably confident that the judge was, in all likelihood, poisoned.”
I nodded my head. I knew that this was coming.
I left the office and called Michael. He was going to have to know what was going on, and I wondered if he would be able to supply me with some kind of explanation on who he thought poisoned the judge and why.
Speaking with him made me sick, but I knew that I had to do it. I still needed to make sure that I did my job.
I only hoped that “my job” would end up in a conviction for the scumbag.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“Dad was poisoned?” Michael asked me when he arrived in my office. “Seriously?”
“Seriously,” I said. “He was poisoned.” I narrowed my eyes. I was going to have to figure out, from Michael, if there was any alternative explanation for the poisoning. I hoped that he did it, but I needed to rule out other people. “Do you have any explanation for this, Michael? From where I sit, you a
nd Christina had the best access to the judge. The two of you would have been able to administer the poison to him. Nobody outside your circle would have been able to do that for such a long period of time. The only other person who might have been able to do that would have been your mother-in-law, Ava.”
Michael’s eyes got wide and he shook his head. “It wasn’t me, of course. As for Christina, I don’t know if was her or not. I can’t imagine that my mother-in-law would do it, either. I don’t see why she would do something like that.”
I raised an eyebrow. “I see that you answered that question very different for your wife and for your mother-in-law. You said that you didn’t see why Ava would poison your father-in-law, but you just said that you don’t know if Christina would do it or not. There’s a very subtle difference in those two answers.”
He leaned back and appeared to think about my words. “I don’t know who else would have done it. I mean, dad had a domestic servant. Her name is Anita Gonzalez. She lived with my dad. Maybe she was the one who did it.”
I sighed. “Why would this Anita Gonzalez kill your father? Did she have any motive at all?”
He shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe dad was diddling with her. That could be. You never know what goes on behind closed doors.”
That made me sick. It sounded like Michael was trying to toss poor Anita under the bus. It made me twice as suspicious that Michael was responsible for poisoning the judge. “I guess I’m going to have to look into that. I need Anita’s phone number, because I’m going to have to interview her. I’m also going to have to interview Christina.” I thought back about how she reacted when I petitioned the court to have Judge Sanders’ body exhumed. She was near hysteria. That made me suspect her right away.
I had the feeling that Michael was putting up Anita as a smoke-screen.
“Here,” he said, writing down a phone number on a piece of paper. “Call her. Talk to her. I doubt that you will get straight answers, though. Not when mom is still alive and employing her. She has reason to lie. And you might try to bring a translator, too. She knows very little English.” He chuckled.
Harper Ross Legal Thrillers vol. 1-3 Page 43
