“Okay. Well, I don’t want to beat around the bush here. I need some information about your husband and your ex-boyfriend.”
“Ms. Ross, I think that I told you that I’m going to plead the fifth on that.”
“There’s no pleading the fifth right now. You’re not under oath. I’m not making a record. You can’t take the fifth. You can refuse just to answer me, but I need to tell you one thing – I know what happened. I know who killed Judge Sanders. I know that you were involved with it, and I know that Gerald was too.” I was bluffing. I didn’t know any of these things, but I had to make her believe that I had the goods. That was the only way that this whole gambit was going to work.
She rapidly shook her head. “What do you mean? What do you mean? I don’t know anything about that murder. I wasn’t involved with it.”
“Oh, but you were. You were. Here’s what happened. Your husband, Gerald Stone, is the CEO of Stone Enterprises. Stone Enterprises is the parent company of Dowling Chemicals. Dowling Chemicals has been criminally negligent in the handling of a particular chemical, known at Toluene. This chemical has affected thousands of people. It has made them very sick and it has caused fetuses to suffer brain damage in utero. Because of the way that Dowling Chemicals has handled the Toluene, they were going to be found liable and, under Judge Sanders, they would have been slapped down with hundreds of millions of dollars in punitive damages. Gerald Stone didn’t want that, so he had Judge Sanders killed. But, before he had Judge Sanders killed, he first tried to blackmail Judge Sanders with a bogus paternity case that purportedly showed that Judge Sanders impregnated his own daughter. Personally, I think that’s the most disgusting part of this whole sorry scenario.”
I watched as Kayla’s face got whiter and whiter, and she started to bite her nails. I knew then that I had put this whole thing together perfectly. The only question was how Michael fit in with it.
“What do you need from me?” Her voice was tiny and fearful.
“I need for you to tell me what happened. In your own words. How exactly the judge was murdered, who did it, and who poisoned him.”
“What will happen to me? I mean, if I tell you everything, what is going to happen to me?”
I almost felt sorry for her. Almost. I mean, I had a good feeling that Kayla was heavily involved in the murder because she was going to be cut out of her prenuptial agreement. Therefore, she was just doing it for greed. But I also had the feeling that she was intimidated into doing it by the two men who were squeezing her on her right and her left – Gerald and Michael.
“I have enough evidence to go to the police,” I said, knowing that was a big, fat lie. “And the three of you are going to be hung out to dry. But if you tell me the truth, then I’ll ask the police to not only go easy on you, but offer you immunity in exchange for your testimony. Believe me, getting somebody like Gerald and Judge Perez would be worth it to the police. If Gerald could do this to a judge, he could do it to anybody. As for Judge Perez, a corrupt judge does not need to be hearing federal cases that potentially involve millions of dollars. You can be a hero, Kayla. You only need to tell me what happened.”
She continued to bite her nails as she nervously looked to the door and then back at me. I saw her shaking and then she lowered her head and started to cry.
I wordlessly handed her a box of Kleenex. She took the box and brought one of the Kleenexes to her nose and blew it. “Oh, God,” she said. “I knew that we weren’t going to get away with this. I knew it. I told them.”
I nodded my head. “You told them? Who was involved besides Gerald? I mean, who was involved in the murder?” I doubted that Judge Perez was involved in the murder, but I knew that he was involved in possibly blackmailing Judge Sanders and I knew that he was involved in making sure he would be the one who tried the Dowling case. I wondered if money had changed hands there. I was quite sure that it did.
She sighed. “Ms. Ross, I know that you’re going to think horribly of me. But I need to tell you the story. The whole story. Please, when you go to the police, please ask them to go easy on me. Please ask them to offer me immunity. I’ll tell them anything that they want to know. But I might have to go into the witness protection program too.” She looked at the door again, looked back at me, and went back to biting her nails.
“That’s why you’re here.”
“I know.” She hung her head. “Okay. I’ll just start from the beginning. Gerald and I were having marital problems, and I met Michael. I met him on-line. On one of those dating sites. The one that is catered to married people who are looking to have affairs. I know, I know, it’s really sleazy. I don’t think that that site is even around anymore.”
“Ashley Madison,” I said. “I remember that site. Actually, it is still around, believe it or not.” That site was hacked and thousands of names were divulged, but it somehow managed to survive.
“Yes. Ashley Madison. I was unhappy, Ms. Ross, with Gerald. He was never at home, and I mean never. He practically lives at the office. I wanted children when we got married. He promised me that we could have a family. But after we got married, he told me that he didn’t want children, so he forced me to have my tubes tied. So, he lied when he told me that we could start a family.”
“When you came into the marriage, you didn’t have any assets or property, did you?”
She sighed. “No. I didn’t. I’ve worked my whole life, and I was working as a nurse when I met him. But I could never hold onto money. I always just lived in small apartments, I leased my cars, and I never opened up any financial accounts. So, yeah, when we got married, I came into the marriage with nothing. Literally nothing.”
“And Gerald was already wealthy.”
“Yes. Very wealthy.” She sighed again and shook her head. “And he made me sign a pre-nuptial agreement before we got married. Basically, if we ever divorced, I would get 25% of the property that Gerald brought into the marriage and 50% of the property that was acquired during the marriage. I thought that was very fair. But he put in a clause that said that I wouldn’t get a dime of property if it was found that I had been unfaithful during the marriage.”
I tried to act surprised about what she was saying, but I was a terrible actress. I was afraid that she was going to see right through me. However, she was so distraught by this whole situation that she didn’t even look at me, so I relaxed.
She stopped talking and then looked out the window. She looked past me and then started to bite her nails again. “Gerald found out about Michael. He had a private investigator, and he had all the pictures that he needed. He threatened to divorce me and leave me penniless.”
“Okay. Kayla, can I ask you a personal question?”
She nodded.
“What would be the harm in Gerald leaving you penniless, as you say? I mean, you were a nurse before you met him. You were living in a small apartment. Couldn’t you just go back to nursing and living in another small apartment and just start over?”
I couldn’t quite understand her mentality. If she got involved with the murder of the judge so that she could get a nice settlement from Gerald, why would she do that? Was it really worth it to her to make sure that she remained wealthy after she was divorced from Gerald that she would do anything, even get involved with murdering somebody?
“Yes. In hindsight, I should have just broken away from him. Let him cut me out. I haven’t worked in 15 years, though. That’s how long we’ve been married.”
I bit my tongue, but I wanted to ask her another question, and that was why did she quit her job? She didn’t have children with Gerald. She told me that she never saw the guy. I had no idea how she spent her time, but, if it were me, I would still be working, even if I was married to a wealthy guy. I couldn’t imagine living a life of leisure.
I leaned back in my chair and put my pen in my mouth. Kayla could probably see the judgment in my eyes, although I hoped that she didn’t.
“Well, as I said, he threatened to divorce me and
leave me with nothing. But he made me an offer.”
“An offer. Tell me about the offer.”
“He told me that he needed me to help him kill Judge Sanders. He told me that it was almost perfect that I was having an affair with Michael, because he was Judge Sanders son-in-law, so Michael had perfect access to Judge Sanders. He told me that if I got Michael to kill Judge Sanders that he would take the clause out of our prenuptial agreement that said that I wouldn’t get anything if I was unfaithful.”
I nodded my head. This was good. This was very good. “And you got Michael to do this?”
“Yes. I got Michael to put poison into the judge’s orange juice. Arsenic. Michael went over to Judge Sanders’ house every Sunday, and he refilled the judge’s pills every week. When he went into the judge’s kitchen to refill his pills, he put some poison into the judge’s orange juice too. Just enough poison to kill Judge Sanders slowly.”
Kayla started to cry. “Oh, I just can’t believe that I did that. I mean, what kind of person am I? That I would do that just because I wanted to make sure that I left my marriage with millions of dollars. I just don’t know what I’ve become. I know you don’t believe me, but I never cared about money before I met Gerald. But you don’t know what it’s like to go from living in a small apartment with a cat to going to a life where you’re eating at 5 star restaurants all the time, and you’re going around the world staying in the best hotels. All of a sudden, you have personal chefs and personal trainers and an indoor pool and maids. You’re spending your winters in Belize and Costa Rica, when you’re not skiing in Switzerland. Your summers are spent in the South of France. You can go to any department store and just pick up anything you want and never have to worry about the price tag. That’s not an excuse, but you just don’t know what it’s like.”
“I know that I don’t know what that’s like,” I said. “I’ve always worked for a living. I’ve worked for everything I have. I don’t spend my winters in Belize and my summers in the South of France, and I probably never will. But I can look at myself in the mirror. I know that I would never get involved with a murder just to keep my lifestyle. I guess that makes me different from you.”
“I know that you’re judging me, and I don’t blame you. I would judge me too if I were in your shoes. But, truly, you simply don’t know how being really wealthy changes you. You don’t know until it happens to you.” She paused again and rubbed her eyes. “Anyhow, I got Michael to do that.”
“And what did Michael get out of this deal? I see what you got out of it, but what did he get out of it?”
She shook her head. “Michael did something to Gerald’s sister. It was really sick, but Gerald’s a wily one. He found out that Michael was a serial rapist. I didn’t know this, of course, otherwise I never would have gotten involved with him. But Gerald wanted to trap Michael, so he set his sister up with him. He didn’t tell his sister, whose name is Emily, about Michael’s violent tendencies. But Gerald was pretty certain that Michael was going to attack her. She’s very beautiful and he’s just Michael’s type, but she doesn’t sleep around, so Michael was going to have to force her to have sex with him. And he did. He did, and Gerald had it all recorded without Michael or Emily’s knowledge.”
“He had it recorded?”
“Yes. Recorded. He videoed it all with a hidden camera and hidden microphone. Then he showed Michael the videotape, which showed Emily clearly saying no, and him clearly holding her down and raping her while she screamed no, over and over again.” She shuddered. “He showed me the video, as well, and it made me sick. Literally.”
“Oh, I see. Gerald blackmailed Michael into going along.”
“Yes. He bribed me and blackmailed him. Michael didn’t want to do it, because obviously murder is worse than rape, but he rolled the dice. He figured that Gerald could prove the rape beyond a shadow of a doubt, but if he murdered somebody, perhaps he could get out of it by showing it wasn’t him. In other words, if Michael didn’t go along with murdering the judge, he would for sure serve time in prison for the rape. If he did go along with it, then he had the chance to go free.”
“But why involve you? Why didn’t Gerald just deal with Michael and cut out the middle-man?”
“He needed both us working hand in hand. I was Gerald’s eyes and ears and Michael was the one who actually did the poisoning. I basically was the one who made sure that Michael was doing what he was supposed to be doing.” She looked down. “I was the one who made sure that Michael was poisoning poor Robert Sanders.”
“I need to back up a bit. How did Gerald know that Michael was a serial rapist?”
She cleared her throat. “The PI knew that Michael was a serial rapist. The PI that Gerald hired knew two different women who recognized Michael as being the man who raped them. So, Gerald knew that Michael had that in him, so he knew that he could blackmail him if he could get him on video raping Gerald’s sister. Gerald’s own sister was used as bait. That’s how sick Gerald is.”
“I see. Go on with your story.”
She shrugged. “Michael poisoned Judge Sanders, but Gerald was getting impatient. The judge was getting sicker and sicker, and Gerald started to freak because he thought that sooner or later a doctor was going to find out what was going on, and possibly would have been able to treat the judge and bring him back to health. So, Gerald told Michael that he needed to end it completely. He told Michael that he had to go ahead and shoot Judge Sanders.”
I started to feel excited. It was all coming together. The only problem was, how was I going to prove it? I could tell the prosecutor about Kayla, tell them what I found out from her, and suggest to the prosecutor that she should give Kayla immunity from prosecution in exchange for her testimony, but how could I do that ethically? Michael was my client. I couldn’t just tell the prosecutor about this without violating my ethical duty to represent Michael zealously. I was going to have to figure something out.
“What did you understand happened with Michael when he shot the judge? I mean, why did he do things the way that he did them? Why did he go to the scene and call the police? When he did that, he became the prime suspect.”
“We talked about that, Michael and me. We agreed that if he did that, he wouldn’t look guilty. If he was the one who shot the judge, why would he call the police? Wouldn’t he do a better job of covering it up? That was our thought. We knew that if the judge was just found dead by Ava Sanders that the spotlight would probably shine on Michael anyhow, because the prosecutor was bound to find out that Michael was running around on Christina, and that the judge had threatened him with turning him into his daughter. Michael stood to lose a lot in a divorce. He was like me, in that, individually, he’s broke. Michael knew that this was the motive that an investigator would give to him, and he knew that he would become the prime suspect. So, we decided that if he was the one who called the police, it would make him look innocent. That backfired, of course, because the police settled on him immediately, just because he was the one on the scene. We didn’t know that it would have backfired, though. We thought that we were being clever.”
“Well, 20/20 hindsight,” I said. “Well, okay, then. I thank you for this. I needed this information.”
Kayla had a Kleenex in her hand, and she was wringing it over and over as she looked down at my desk. “What’s going to happen now? I mean, I’m very sorry for my role, but I really didn’t do anything. I was just the go-between in the middle of Michael and Gerald. I know that I’m not innocent, but I’m the least guilty. You can get me a deal, can’t you? I mean, you can encourage the prosecutor to give me a deal, right?”
I didn’t want to tell her the truth, and that was that I didn’t have power to do much of anything. I had the satisfaction of her telling me her story, but her testimony was incriminating for my client, so I had to pretty much sit on this information if I wanted to keep my bar license. The only way that I could divulge what Kayla just told me would be if it was in a deposition and the prosecut
or specifically asked for the information in a discovery request. I didn’t depose Kayla and, thus far, the prosecutor hadn’t asked for witness testimony in a discovery request, so I couldn’t just volunteer it.
I sighed. I had to figure something out. Some way to point the prosecutor in the right direction, without the prosecutor knowing that it was me who was doing that.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
She nodded. “Thank you. I’ll testify at court, but only if I get immunity.”
Again, that wasn’t my call. That would be the prosecutor’s call. How was I going to get this information to April?
“Thank you for coming in,” I said. “I’ll see what I can do.”
She hesitated. “You don’t sound very sure about that.”
“I’ll see what I can do. That’s all that I can promise.”
She stood up, realizing that she had been played. “That’s really a dirty trick you played,” she said. “A really dirty trick.”
I sighed. “No, really, you’ve been helpful, much more than you know. I just have to figure out how to put these puzzle pieces together so that they fit. I mean, I need to figure out how to get information to the prosecutor’s office about what you’ve told me.”
She looked unconvinced. “I want you to get me a deal.”
“I can’t possibly. Michael’s my client. You’re the co-conspirator. I obviously can’t represent both of you. You’re going to have to lawyer up, but not with me.” I was breaking every ethical rule just having her in my office, rolling on my client, asking to cut a deal in exchange for her testimony against my client. Every ethical rule was being broken.
“You lied to me.”
I nodded. “I did. I’ll admit it. But you need to lawyer up. I can give you some referrals.”
“The Missouri Bar will be hearing about this.” She turned and dramatically left my office and I shook my head. She could easily have my bar license for this dirty trick I played on her. Easily. I was going to get a complaint from her, no doubt about it. And, after I did what I needed to do with respect to Michael, he, too, was going to have reason to make a complaint against me. If the two of them teamed up, I could be doing dishes for a living.
Harper Ross Legal Thrillers vol. 1-3 Page 58
