The Liar

by Steve Cavanagh

  King nodded. All were in agreement.

  “I’ll see you there. I just need to make a stop first,” I said.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Harper’s Dodge pulled up outside a jazz bar, one of the few in White Plains. She’d agreed to give me a lift back to court and didn’t mind picking up one more on the way. Harry Ford stood on the sidewalk, wearing a red sweater, tan pants, a gray coat and matching gray cashmere scarf. At first, he didn’t approach the Dodge. He was still gazing up the street, looking for my Mustang.

  “Is this another member of the defense team?” said Harper.

  “Not exactly, but you can trust him. Harry might be able to help figure this whole thing out.”

  I wound down Harper’s window and called out.

  Harry stood with his back to the bar, silent and still, framed in neon and scotch. Under his left arm was a thick file of papers. The Rosen case.

  I called again, louder this time.

  He saw me, and came over. I got out of the car, shook hands, folded the passenger seat forward and climbed into the back of the Dodge. There wasn’t much room in the back. There was a shelf that passed for a seat. I knew Harry couldn’t fold himself into the back without incident – certainly not after a lengthy wait for me inside a jazz club. Harry threw the seat back, and it crushed my knees. He didn’t notice. He just got in, closed the passenger door and introduced himself to Harper.

  “What’s going on?” said Harry.

  As Harper took off into the two-lane, I filled Harry in on what had happened so far that day.

  He didn’t interrupt, just nodded every now and again while Harper took us toward the courthouse. With Harper present, I didn’t mention anything of my theory that this case and the Rosen case were somehow connected. I didn’t want Harper to know. Not yet. And Harry didn’t react to the name Scott Barker. I’d leaned to the side, careful to watch his face in the vanity mirror when I said the name. It looked like the name was not known to Harry.

  “This is delicate,” said Harry. “I don’t think the judge will let you talk to him. She can’t. Any way you look at it, whatever you ask him is going to have an impact on the case, and therefore his testimony. If anyone talks to him about Caroline Howell outside of the witness stand it’s an automatic mistrial. It’s lucky he didn’t say anything under police questioning. And do law enforcement know who this guy is?”

  Harper told him they had agents working with the police on this, building a picture of Barker, but at the moment they had nothing to connect Barker to Howell.

  We parked outside the courthouse. As I got out of the back, Harper took a call on her cell. Lynch, Washington, and the PD brass were standing outside the courthouse. At a guess, I’d say the call lasted close to a minute before Harper hung up, without having spoken a word.

  A hundred feet ahead of us, outside the courthouse doors, Lynch reached into his jacket for his phone and I saw one side of his face light up as he took a call.

  It could’ve been a coincidence, but I noticed Harper watching Lynch. Similarly, Lynch didn’t seem to be talking. He ended the call and put his phone away.

  New information. And Harper had made sure she got a call before the senior agent.

  I stood beside the Dodge, hands in my pockets. After a few steps, Harper and Harry turned around, surprised that I hadn’t followed them onto the sidewalk.

  “What did you get on Barker?” I said.

  Harper took a second to weigh up her options. I didn’t flinch from her gaze while she decided if I’d made her. She stepped closer and spoke softly. Harry stood a little away from the two of us but close enough to pick up every word.

  “Fingerprints threw up a couple more hits. Different IDs. He got pulled over on a DUI as Luke Pelley in West Texas, possession of narcotics as Scott Franklin in LA, and a different ID again in Westchester New York. Despite all the arrests, and different identities, Scott Barker has never done any time.”

  The agent had her hands in her pockets, her head to one side, and she’d been looking at the floor as she spoke. Only way you get busted and not go to jail is if you make a deal.

  “Is he a professional snitch?” I said.

  Her shoulders dropped an inch. She knew he was. A paid informant can take many forms. The pros make it their living to change identities and infiltrate criminal gangs. They’re not cops and don’t have to abide by the normal rules of an undercover, which means they can get deeper into the organization, and much faster.

  “We don’t have a clear picture on Barker yet. We’re gathering everything—”

  “But you suspect he’s a pro snitch, and you already have something that’s making you nervous,” I guessed. “Come on, Lynch is going to tell the judge anyway – I may as well hear it from you.”

  She kicked at the ground, sighed and said, “From what I can gather he started off being a snitch, then went AWOL. Seems he had a talent for reinventing himself and disappearing. He was discharged five years ago. The cop who was handling him had to drop him after an operation went south and they did a psych profile on Barker. I’m getting clearance for it to be sent over now. He’s a borderline sociopath, but – and here’s the kicker – he’s also highly intelligent. Like, seriously intelligent. He’s got the IQ of a chess grandmaster. And he can become anyone.”

  “Is there any connection to Howell from his file?”

  “We’re working on it.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Judge Schultz sat in a fat leather chair behind her desk in the judge’s chambers, which were really just a large office, with two couches underneath the windows, and four swivel chairs arranged around her desk.

  We filled up the whole place.

  King, Powers, Groves and I sat in the office chairs, facing the judge. Lynch, Harper, Washington and the ADAs took up the couch space.

  The judge leaned back in her chair and stared at the ceiling. She’d refused to look at the photo that Barker had produced to the court officer. I thought that was probably the right decision; Judge Schultz wanted to avoid any hint that she had prejudiced herself by examining something that wasn’t yet admitted as evidence in the case.

  But she listened to King as she laid out what had happened since the adjournment. The judge already had a lot of the story from the clerk who’d talked to the court officers.

  “What do you have to say about all this, Mr Flynn?”

  “Your Honor, my client is still in the hospital, so I don’t have his view on this – but I don’t see how anyone can talk to Mr Barker without compromising both his testimony and the entire trial.”

  She nodded. Took a good ten seconds to examine her ceiling fan. The soft burr of the fan blades cutting the warm air was the only sound in the room.

  “Your Honor,” said Powers, “We have arrest warrants out for Marlon and McAuley – Barker is very likely a co-conspirator. It may be that he will tell the court that the defendant arranged the kidnapping, or he may tell us where we can find our missing suspects and the ransom money. We don’t know until we question him. But we absolutely must do so. And our twenty-four hours on the detention clock are ticking by.”

  “I appreciate the urgency of this matter,” said the judge. “Mr Flynn, bearing in mind your client’s condition, do you have any objections in relation to simply resuming the case with this witness, right now?” said the judge.

  I thought it over. Howell had to hear this, but he was still unconscious.

  “My client should be in court when this witness is questioned,” I said.

  The judge nodded and said, “I have to balance the prejudice to your client, with the urgency that has now entered this portion of the trial. In my view, this witness has to be dealt with quickly so that he can questioned by law enforcement. I’m also conscious that it appears to me that your client attempted suicide. He put himself in the hospital, Mr Flynn. It may be that his ultimate goal wasn’t to kill himself, but simply delay the trial.”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but Ju
dge Schultz held up her hand to silence me.

  “At the end of the proceedings today – bearing in mind the strange statement made by Mr Barker – I expected the media to be speculating, wildly, about his testimony. That was a real concern to me – I had the jury sequestered.”

  King and I looked at each other. Neither of us knew about this.

  “It was just for one night, initially. I wanted to see what the media were making of it and if there was a real risk of prejudice to the jury. So, in short, the entire jury is at a motel, right now. I imagine they’re having dinner and we can probably get them all back into court within an hour. My ruling is we deal with this witness in open court, tonight. We resume in two hours.”

  Getting a doctor on the phone is like placing a call to the White House and asking to speak to the President. Eventually, after I threatened to get the doctor subpoenaed to appear in court the next day, I got thirty seconds with the physician. The news made me want to hammer my head into the desk in the small consultation booth two doors along the hallway from the courtroom. Howell should’ve been awake by now. But he wasn’t. The reverse had happened. He was showing all the signs of coma. Apparently coma can occur in cases of heavy blood loss. The doc called it hypovolemic shock. Howell probably would wake up, but he could wake up in one hour, one week, or one month from now. Or possibly never. CT scans of the brain were good, a blood transfusion had saved his life but there was no sign of him regaining consciousness any time soon. We just had to wait.

  Harry had spread out the Rosen case over the desk in the consultation room. He sipped at vending-machine coffee, made palatable with a splash of bourbon from his hip flask, as he read over the transcripts of the Rosen trial. We had some time before the case resumed and Harry wanted to refresh his memory.

  I disconnected the call and tossed my phone onto a pile of documents.

  “Howell is still out. It could be a coma,” I said.

  Harry nodded.

  I picked up the last chunk of pages from the file and flicked through them. Nothing. I’d read the entire Rosen case from beginning to end. All of the witness statements, police evidence, and the court transcript. So had Harry. No mention of her sister, Rebecca, no mention of Howell or Barker. The last thing on the file was the booklet of photographs. I picked it up, watched Harry turn away. I didn’t blame him. He had to look at those photos once, while preparing for the trial. He didn’t need to look at them again. They would play like a reel of film in front of his eyes for the rest of his life. He’d warned me about the photos. Said there was nothing there. He was probably right, but I needed to make sure.

  I flipped open the cover, scanned the photos of the blackened walls. The house had been totally gutted by fire. Sure enough, the nursery photos were there. And photos of the collapsed cot. I’d already read the forensic report. There was very little of the body left. Part of the rib cage remained, a partial thigh bone, and skull fragments. The rest was ash sitting on the metal springs of the mattress. When fire has an accelerant such as gasoline, the heat destroys everything. A human skull will fracture, flesh and sinew falls away, bone is reduced to powder. I closed the photo booklet, whispered a half-remembered prayer and closed my eyes as tight as I could.

  “Maybe we’re seeing this the wrong way,” said Harry.

  I opened my eyes, looked at him and said, “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe it’s not the case, but Julie Rosen herself. Something in her past that I didn’t know about, or didn’t know enough about at the time.”

  “The psychiatrist’s report,” I said.

  Julie had pleaded not guilty to the murder of her child, Emily Rosen. The case took ten days and the jury considered their verdict for all of twenty-three minutes.

  Julie Rosen was found guilty.

  Harry had asked for a psychiatric evaluation prior to sentencing. The psychiatrist interviewed Julie, looked at all of her past medical history, her doctors and hospital records from birth, and found that she was suffering from a psychotic breakdown brought on by drug addiction and post-natal depression. She admitted smoking crack. The prosecution argued the drugs and the depression made her kill her child. The fact that she hadn’t left the house or dialed 911 also led the prosecution and the psychiatrists to believe she was attempting suicide. They all believed Julie wanted to burn to death in that house, along with her baby. She was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. After two years inside the prison authorities managed to move her to a facility for the criminally insane. At least there she would get treatment.

  Both of us stood at the desk, moving piles of documents, looking for the psychiatric report.

  “It’s not here,” said Harry. “I’ll get a copy from court records.” He got on the phone to his clerk and told him to get down to court and email him the record.

  “We’ll have it within the hour,” said Harry.

  “Howell told me that Julie Rosen killed her sister, his wife. You have any inkling of that when you represented her?”

  “No. She told me there was no family. I’m not even sure I knew she had a sister before today. There’s something in the back of my mind, though. I think I read something about her family. Maybe there’s more detail on the family in the psych report.”

  Harry rubbed at the gray hairs on the top of his head that he could never seem to flatten down no matter how much hair product he used.

  “Maybe we’re looking at the wrong case,” he said. “We need to go through every piece of the Howell case, from top to bottom, this time looking for Rosen and Barker.”

  “I don’t think I missed anything but, sure, go ahead,” I said.

  Bundling up the Rosen case, Harry put it to one side as I handed him the files in Howell’s case. Harry slipped on his earbuds, selected Beethoven on his iPod and started to read. He listened to classical music when he read. Said it helped the creative side of his brain: Bach for personal injury cases, Schubert for robberies, but it was always Beethoven for murder. When he wasn’t working it was the Stones on vinyl. He said it was the only thing that helped him relax.

  I got up, stretched, and left the consultation room in search of more coffee. The vending machine sat at the end of the hall. There was no one else around, and I heard my footsteps echoing as I made my way toward the machine, searching for change in my pocket. The sun had gone down and the ceiling lights made the place feel strange – somehow unfamiliar. Two of the lights were out at the end of the hall, making the small LEDs on the vending machine brighter and sharper by contrast.

  Standing in front of the machine, I leaned toward it, trying to use the light from its electronic display so that I could see whether I had the correct change.

  That’s when I felt a hand clamping my mouth shut and a strong arm reaching over my shoulder from behind and pulling me toward a pitch-black alcove.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  My change clattered onto the floor, my heels bouncing along with the coins as I was dragged into the dark.

  I felt myself being spun around, a palm flattened my lips and buried the back of my head into the wall. A fist shot out from the dark and into my ribs before I could get my hands up. Then someone gripped my tie and pulled it tight, choking me.

  It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust, but I saw who it was. There was no attempt at disguise.

  Agent Lynch spoke quietly, but I could hear the anger and fear in his voice, rippling the tone and sending it high and then low.

  “You listen to me, you piece of shit,” he said. “I know it was you who switched the ransom money in the suitcase. I can’t prove it, but I know. I won’t let you destroy this case. The prosecutor is not going to ask Scott Barker any questions. None at all. Neither are you. He’s going to be in and out of that witness stand in ten seconds and then I’ve got him. I can make him talk. If you start asking questions it might tip off McAuley and Marlon. I don’t want that. Neither do you.”

  To emphasize his point, he pulled harder on my tie and slammed
my head against the wall again. My vision blurred, but only for a second, and I could feel the back of my skull pulsing with pain. I scanned the corners of the hallway that were visible to me – no security cameras covering the alcove. Lynch had chosen this spot carefully.

  “Don’t worry. No one can see us. Now, do you understand me? When Barker gets on the witness stand you keep your mouth shut. If you mess up, I’ll make sure you and your client will pay for it,” he said.

  I nodded and he eased the pressure on my face, then took his hand away completely and let go of my tie. He was out of breath, but his hands weren’t shaking. He had let his anger get the better of him – he needed Howell to be found guilty to validate his handling of the investigation. He’d made the call on arresting the father of the murder victim and he’d been the one to lose the insurers’ ransom money. If Howell turned out to be innocent then Lynch’s career was finished.

  My ribs were burning from Lynch’s cheap shot, and I had to pull hard on my tie to loosen the tightened knot, letting me breathe again. I pushed off the wall, leaned out of the alcove and looked to my right, along the corridor. I knew there was at least one security camera halfway down the hall.

  It was pointing in the opposite direction.

  Lynch stood with his hands on his hips, watching me.

  “Like I said, nobody can see us. Did you think the camera recorded me grabbing you at the vending machine?” he said, smiling. “Don’t underestimate me. I had the cameras point the other way. Law enforcement sticks together, you know. Don’t even think about running to Powers about this. It’s your word against mine. This little conversation never happened.”

  His head turned to the left, to look at the camera; making sure it was still pointed away from us. He looked back at me, smiled and said, “Sorry to disappoint you.”

  “Oh, I’m not disappointed,” I said. “I’m delighted.”