The Liar

by Steve Cavanagh

  Harper took us into the multi-story parking lot and wound up three levels until I spotted my car. There was a space just opposite. She reversed the car into the space and I got out.

  I’d driven into my space, the front of my car almost touching the concrete wall. Harper got out of her car and lit up a cigarette.

  In the trunk of my Mustang I had a pale blue suit, a fresh white shirt and a couple of ties. Popping the lid of the trunk, I peeled off the bloodstained jacket and shirt, removed my cell from my jacket and dumped the clothes in a bag in the trunk. My cell had two missed calls. Harry Ford. He’d left a message to say he was in White Plains, in a jazz bar, and he’d wait for my call. I put the cell in the trunk and paused when I saw my hands. I hadn’t washed them yet. Dry, ochre-red stains were ingrained in the grooves of my palm, my fingers. Blood sat thick and black beneath my nails.

  Harper said, “You’ve got a lot of scars for a lawyer.”

  Dropping my hands by my sides, I turned my head toward her. She was looking at my chest, my arms, even scanning the scar tissue over my knuckles. When she realized I was watching her she quickly turned her back, coughed and looked at the painted concrete floor.

  “Cuts, broken bones, even puncture wounds – they all heal,” I said, taking the lid off a water bottle that I kept beside a tire iron. I poured the water over my hands, started using my nails to dig out the blood. In the last few years I’d had a few trips to the ER with injuries. I didn’t care. What kept me awake at night was the blood on my hands that I couldn’t wash away.

  Harper’s cell chimed – echoing around the parking lot.

  She took the call, and stood close enough that I could hear Washington on the other end of the line.

  “Is Eddie Flynn still with you?” said Washington.

  “I’m standing right next to him,” she said.

  “Get him over to White Plains PD. Don’t go back to the court. We need him right away.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Scott Barker just dropped a hand grenade into the Howell case,” said Washington.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Washington waited for us in the lobby of White Plains PD. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, impatiently. He told Harper that the judge had pulled the case for the day. The trial was scheduled to begin again at nine a.m. It was almost five o’clock, so it was quitting time for the judge and jury anyway.

  “What’s happened?” said Harper.

  “I haven’t been briefed yet, but Lynch looked like he was about to burst a blood vessel in his forehead so it can’t be good for the prosecution. All I know is there was an incident in the courtroom with Barker and he’s been taken into custody. He’s in the cells, downstairs,” said Washington.

  The lobby of the police department was fairly quiet. Half a dozen folks sat around on wooden benches – no doubt patiently awaiting their turn to lodge a complaint, or meet an officer about an ongoing investigation. Washington took us through a door to the left of the lobby and up two flights of monochrome blue stairs in a pale gray stairwell. The stairs led to a long corridor, painted white, with rows of thick pine doors on the right hand side. We walked past the first five offices and Washington knocked at the sixth door before opening it.

  Inside was a long pale room with no windows and a pine conference table. Agent Lynch sat beside two police officers in uniform. Seated at the other end of the table was ADA King and her associates. One of the uniformed cops stood and offered me a hand.

  “Mr Flynn, I’m Captain Powers, this is Lieutenant Groves, and I understand you know everyone else?”

  I shook hands with Powers, a tall, good-looking man in his fifties with elegant fingers. Groves was short, rotund and had a wicked smile.

  “Please take a seat.” Powers gestured to an empty chair.

  I sat down and Groves pulled a laptop toward him. The lid of the laptop was open and it was powered up. He tapped on the keys and began weaving patterns on the track pad.

  “What’s going on? There was an incident in the courtroom and you need me here, that’s the message we got. Now I see the prosecutor is here …”

  “Hi, Eddie,” said King, with as much politeness as she could muster. She looked pissed but was doing her best not to show it.

  “Hi, Michelle,” I said. “Don’t suppose you have any updates on my guy?”

  “Actually, we just heard from the hospital. Your client is critical, but stable. He’s still unconscious, but it looks like he’ll live,” she said.

  My eyes closed as I raised my head to the heavens. The relief was bitter.

  “I asked the prosecutor to be here,” said Powers. “And you. Although, your presence was also requested by the man we have in custody.”

  “What man?”

  “Scott Barker,” said Powers.

  I placed my hands on the table, leaned forward. If Barker had been arrested this could be good news for Howell. But arrested for what?

  “You had better tell me exactly what’s going on here,” I said.

  Powers gestured toward Lieutenant Groves, who swiveled the laptop around and pushed it toward Powers. In turn, Powers slid the computer toward me, the screen facing me.

  “Look at this,” said Powers.

  The screen was security footage of the courtroom. It was from a camera mounted high on the southwest wall of the court, close to the ceiling.

  “I didn’t know the courtroom had a security camera,” I said.

  “It’s disguised to look like an old fire alarm. There have been incidents in the last few years and most courtrooms now have clandestine cameras fitted. The rest will be installed shortly. It’s protection for the judge and the jury. Jury intimidation is on the rise, so now we monitor everyone who uses our courts,” said Powers.

  There was no time stamp on the footage. The judge’s seat was empty, but Scott Barker sat with his head low in the witness stand. I could see a few people scattered around the public seats, and the court officers were keeping a watchful eye on him. I guessed that when this was happening I was tearing through the streets in Harper’s car. The court wouldn’t adjourn until they found out exactly what was going on and why I wasn’t there, and why my client wasn’t there.

  Nothing happened for a few more seconds, then Barker’s head whipped up in the direction of the door. He’d seen someone enter the courtroom. He got up and out of his seat, opened the half door of the witness stand and stepped lightly down the three steps. He strode confidently toward the nearest court officer – no dragging his foot, no limp, no arching of the back – he moved swiftly and confidently. The court officer was already moving toward him, hands up, making sure he didn’t leave the courtroom. From his jacket pocket, Barker produced a white envelope and handed it to the officer. They talked for a moment. The officer called over his colleague. The officer with the envelope spoke to his associate, and Barker walked back toward the witness stand, opened the door, got back in and sat down.

  The officer with the white envelope began walking toward the doors, while the other kept an eye on Barker.

  The screen then shifted to a camera outside the courtroom. I saw the officer entering the hall with the white envelope in his hand before he gave it to a young woman in a cream suit.

  I looked up. The woman in the cream suit was sitting at the conference table beside King. It was someone from her prosecution team.

  I pushed the laptop away and saw King holding a clear, plastic evidence bag in her hand. Inside the bag was the envelope.

  “We’re showing you our chain of custody here, Eddie,” said King. “I want you and the court to know that none of this came from us, that we’ve not withheld any evidence. This is the envelope that Barker handed to the court officer.”

  She put down the evidence bag, reached below the desk and came up with another evidence bag. Inside was a photograph. It looked as if it was printed on letter-sized paper, from an ordinary home printer. She slid the bag across the table to me and said, “We found this i
n the envelope.”

  Harper and Washington had remained standing at one end of the conference table, a little to my right.

  Harper saw the photograph before I did. So did Washington. I could tell by their eyes, which widened and then instantly narrowed. Washington clenched his fists, Harper bit her lip and gave Lynch a look like she wanted to slam his head into the table.

  “Don’t say it. We don’t know what this means,” said Lynch.

  “Oh, I’m going to say it. I’m going to keep on saying it, Lynch. You’ve got the wrong man,” said Harper.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  The photograph came to me. I picked up the clear bag and examined it.

  Caroline Howell’s wrists were bound behind her with cable ties. Her feet too. She lay on her right side with her legs curled up, her knees almost touching her chest. She was dressed in the same clothes as she’d worn when she went missing – white shirt, blue jeans. No biker jacket covered in pins, though. Her hair appeared wet and slicked back, away from her face. The blonde, full hair that I’d seen in the other photographs of her now looked lank and greasy.

  Her face angled toward the camera. In this picture she was bone pale, and her cheeks had a sunken, hollow aspect. It may have been an effect from the flash, but I thought she looked as though she hadn’t been out in daylight in some time. Her mouth was parted, and her teeth bore a yellow scum.

  So much had changed about her. She had lost a lot of weight. I could tell, not just from her face, but her clothes seemed to hang on her – baggy where once they’d been tight. The only thing that had not changed were her eyes. They were the same as the other photographs of her in the basement that Howell had been sent. Still brilliant, still blue, still roaring in terror.

  I looked at the rest of the photograph – the surroundings. She was no longer in a basement. At first I wasn’t sure if the photo had been shopped with some kind of software, because at first it looked as though there was a frame around the photo. A black tint around the edges that became a hard gray rectangle that contained the image of Caroline Howell in the center. Then, when I held the photo closer, I realized what I was looking at. The photographer was standing in an elevated position, probably on dark soil, and they were bending over to photograph Caroline as she lay six feet below them at the bottom of what looked to be a concrete grave.

  I put the photograph down. Pinched the bridge of my nose and closed my eyes.

  “What is Barker saying?” I said.

  “Nothing, for the moment. We don’t know when this was taken. We don’t know by whom, we don’t know where. There’s a lot that we don’t know. And he won’t talk to us,” said Powers.

  I looked at the prosecutor. King was staring straight at me – waiting for the question.

  “Are you going to pull the trial, withdraw the charges?” I said.

  “No. Barker could be Howell’s accomplice,” said King.

  “He’s said he won’t talk to the DA. Or us, or the FBI,” said Powers. “He said he’ll only talk to you or Howell.”

  “Me?” I said.

  “That’s right. This is all very unusual, Eddie. Ordinarily we wouldn’t even contemplate it. But he’s lawyered up and it’s all been explained to him. At the moment he’s been arrested for perverting the course of justice and withholding evidence. The only reason we’re even thinking about this is because of what he said to the court officer,” said Powers.

  I thought back to the exchange I’d seen on the video.

  “What did he say?”

  Powers looked around the room before he spoke – there were no objections.

  “After he told the officer to give the envelope to the prosecutor, he made a comment,” said Powers, as he drew a notebook from the table, flicked through a few pages.

  “He said – quote: ‘Howell is guilty.’”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Washington and Harper immediately started arguing with Lynch who stood his ground. Powers and Groves both got to their feet and tried calming things down. King just looked at me.

  I looked at her.

  “I can’t talk to him,” I said.

  No one heard me apart from King. She gave a false smile and a wink. Even in this shitstorm she was all about the win, all about the case, all about getting her conviction and covering her ass.

  “I can’t talk to him,” I said, louder this time.

  The cops and the feds stopped arguing and looked my way. I focused my attention on King, ignoring them.

  “If I talked to him, Ms King would go straight to the judge and tell her that I’d spoken to a witness who is still under oath. That compromises the integrity of that witness’s testimony, and that gives Ms King a mistrial. Right now, Ms King knows that calling Barker was a major mistake. It could derail her case. If there’s a mistrial the prosecution get to start afresh – this time with Barker struck off the witness list. I’m not going to fall for it, Michelle. You want me to talk to Barker – fine. I need permission from the judge.”

  Lynch placed both hands on his face, drew them down over his skin. The action popped open his mouth and eyes, and he shook his head trying to stave off sleep.

  When he spoke, his tone was heavy, strained – like every word was a struggle.

  “Barker has been playing a game for a long time. Four years he’s been working for Howell, apparently in disguise. We don’t know what he has to do with this, but he’s got a picture of our dead victim. I had an image tech take a look – and her guess is this photo could’ve been taken before the fire. Think about it – she was missing nineteen days by the time we found her. If she’d been kept in a hole with no food and little water – she could look like that. My theory is Howell faked the kidnapping, McAuley and Marlon helped him and they took off with the money. Barker was in on it too, but he was also planning something else. I don’t know what. But he’s involved in the kidnapping. We know that from the photo. He knows what happened and my guess is he knows where the money and the rest of the kidnappers are. And we have to know that too, right now.”

  “You said Barker lawyered-up, so who’s the lawyer?” I said.

  Powers nodded and said, “Max Copeland – I guess you’ve probably heard of him. We’ve been keeping an eye on them in the consultation booth. Neither of them have spoken to each other. They’re waiting for you.”

  My mind was already reeling, trying to decipher Barker’s actions – but this piece of information confirmed something for me. The Rosen case and Caroline Howell were inextricably linked. The feeling that I’d had earlier that there might be a connection was now proven.

  The rule of three. Coincidences can throw you into wild theories. But having the same thing confirmed to you three times was more than a coincidence.

  Howell’s sister-in-law was the late Julie Rosen. Harry and I got served with subpoenas in the Rosen case the night of the ransom drop. Max Copeland represents the Rosen estate and Barker. There had been a fire at Howell’s and at Julie Rosen’s property. And Copeland had been in court from the very beginning of the Howell trial. I’d thought he’d come to check out my courtroom style, study me, look for weaknesses. Turns out he was there to watch his client.

  I didn’t say a word of this in the room. Harry was involved and I couldn’t do anything until I’d spoken to him and made sure I wasn’t landing him in the middle of something horrible. Second, I didn’t trust anyone in that room, maybe apart from Harper. But it was too soon to spout theories – I needed more. I needed Harry.

  At that moment, thinking about Harry gave me a feeling that I was missing something else – something I’d just been told. Or seen.

  “Lieutenant Groves, can I see the video again?”

  He skimmed the laptop across the table. I opened it on the frozen image of the courtroom, moved the cursor over the play icon and clicked. While I watched, the others resumed their conversations, ignoring me.

  I was grateful for that.

  On the screen, I watched Barker sitting passively in
the witness stand. Then his head came up, and he moved off toward the guard with the envelope. I watched the camera shift to the hallway, and this time I saw Harry straight away. I was watching for him.

  He was typing on the screen of his cell phone. His back to the court.

  When Harry arrived, he would’ve gone straight into the courtroom, looking for me. When he discovered I wasn’t there, he would’ve left the courtroom and tried to contact me on my cell.

  I couldn’t be sure, but I felt strongly that Barker’s eyes locked on Harry when he came through the doors of the court. That’s who he was looking at. And seeing Harry, even briefly, sent him out of the witness stand with the envelope. Another possible connection with the Rosen case. Or not. Now he wanted to talk to me. Somehow, I got the impression that we were always going to end up at this point and all of it arranged by Barker’s hand.

  I needed to change it up. Barker had been waiting for Harry and I had no idea why.

  “Does anyone have any idea who Scott Barker is?” I said.

  Lynch had turned away from Harper, put his back to her. He answered me, as Powers was too busy talking to King.

  “We’re running his fingerprints and DNA to make sure it’s him, but he’s got priors. Scott Barker is forty-four years old, born in Philadelphia. He moved around a lot after high school – so we’ve got convictions for possession of narcotics in a couple of states before he settles in New York and starts his own business buying and selling rare books and paintings. Seems he tried to set himself up as an art dealer. Last time he was arrested was for supply in 1998. And then nothing. The rest of his record is sealed,” said Lynch.

  “What do you mean, sealed?”

  “I can’t access the rest of the file – there’s a court order sealing it. We’re talking to Justice now and we should have it lifted soon.”

  I nodded, closed the laptop.

  “Let’s go see the judge right now,” I said.