Dead Lawyers Tell No Tales

by Randy Singer

  “I know. That’s why I married you.”

  “Very funny.”

  “I’m not kidding.”

  Landon leaned back and shot her a glance. Is she serious? “I don’t know anything about this. It would be federal court and the First Amendment—”

  “I could teach you the First Amendment stuff about confidential sources.” She stopped walking and stood next to him. “It seems to me that court is court.”

  He frowned. Representing yourself was always a bad idea. The only thing worse would be representing your wife.

  “Kerri, this is a big deal. I can’t just walk in there and—”

  “Fine,” she cut him off. “I’ll do it myself.”

  “You can’t—”

  “Landon,” she said, interrupting again, “you said you didn’t want to do it. The station’s lawyers are too scared to do it. So I guess that means I just do it myself.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. We’ll hire a lawyer out of our own personal funds.”

  She groaned. “Have you seen our funds lately?”

  Landon sighed. He blew out a breath. He didn’t need this. But he also didn’t need his wife in jail. He had heard the stories about other reporters who refused to divulge sources. Some of them were locked up for months. Knowing how stubborn Kerri could be, she had the potential for setting a world record.

  “Who are your sources?” Landon asked.

  Kerri eyed him with curiosity. He had taken his first nibble. “I can’t tell anyone,” she said. “That’s the whole point.”

  “Do you want me to be your lawyer or not?”

  “I think we established that.”

  “Then tell me who your sources are.”

  “If I do that, and they send me to jail, how do I know you wouldn’t divulge them?”

  “Fair question. But you’ve got to trust me.”

  He had said it largely without thinking. But as soon as the words were out of his mouth, he understood the implications. Trust me. He hadn’t spoken those words since the night Kerri had laid out the pictures.

  She came over and placed her hands on his arms. “I trust you,” she said softly. She had that look, the same one she had used when they said their vows. “But I can’t put you in that position. I don’t want you to have to choose between your loyalty to my principles and having me locked up in jail. I need you to help me out on this, Landon, but I’m not going to beg. And I can’t reveal my sources.”

  His lawyer instincts were telling him this was a terrible idea. There were so many things that could go wrong. He could lose and look like a fool in the process. Kerri could end up behind bars, and it would all be on his shoulders.

  But his husband instincts were telling him something else entirely. He needed to do this. They had always been there for each other. Crisis brought them together. How many times had she covered his back? Now it was his turn to cover hers.

  “Let me do a little research,” Landon said. “And then, if I decide to take the case, we can discuss my retainer.”

  She stood on her tiptoes and kissed him. A down payment?

  “If you expect that kiss to turn this frog into a First Amendment lawyer, I hope you’ve got a backup plan.”

  Kerri smiled, and it dawned on Landon that it was the first time he had seen her do that since she had seen the pictures of him and Rachel.

  “You are the backup plan,” she said.

  58

  ON THE MORNING of the subpoena hearing, Landon took Maddie to day care just like any other day. But today, Kerri tagged along. She hugged Maddie at the door and held on until Maddie started squirming. Grudgingly, Kerri let her go.

  “Have fun,” Kerri called out as Maddie turned to attack the day. “Be a good girl.”

  Maddie turned around—one last backward glance. “Don’t worry,” she said. Then she disappeared around the corner.

  Kerri stood up and walked back to the car. Her eyes were wet, and she held Landon’s hand. He wanted to comfort her but really couldn’t think of anything to say. Besides, he was probably more anxious than she was.

  ///

  Like the nervous rookies they were, Landon and Kerri arrived at federal court thirty minutes early. Media trucks lined the front of the large stonemasonry building, but there was none of the usual shoving of microphones under the noses of the litigants and asking of obnoxious questions. Kerri was, after all, one of them—fighting for their right to protect confidential sources.

  “Any statements, Kerri?”

  She shook her head.

  “Good luck,” someone said.

  The courtroom was a massive space, designed to intimidate, with vaulted ceilings and carved marble and fifteen rows of wooden pews on each side. Landon sat in the front row, next to Kerri, and reviewed his notes.

  The waiting was always the hard part.

  Ten minutes before the hearing, the assistant U.S. Attorney entered the courtroom. He set up shop at the prosecution table and came over to give Landon a firm handshake.

  “Mitchell Taylor,” he said.

  “Landon Reed. Good to meet you.”

  Mitchell had a reputation as a straight-shooting and talented attorney who had cut his teeth on state-court murder trials. He looked like a Marine in a dark-blue business suit. His hair was short—not quite a jarhead but close. He had that stiff Marine posture—the head held unnaturally high—and a jutting jaw. Landon could tell that the man had law enforcement in his veins. Everything was black-and-white, good guys and bad guys.

  “I’m sorry to put your wife through this,” Mitchell said, surprising Landon with the comment. “But if her report is true, we’re looking at some serious crimes by these executives. My job is to make sure they pay for them.”

  “And my job,” Landon said, “is to make sure my wife goes home today.”

  ///

  Judge Lincoln Greer normally sat as a federal court judge in the Richmond division but had been assigned to this hearing in Norfolk because the local judges either had conflicts of interest or previously scheduled hearings. Judge Greer had been appointed by President Carter in 1981, had taken senior status in 2008, and showed no signs of slowing down.

  He was a short man with an eggshell skull, mostly bald with a few tufts of gray. He had been wearing the same pair of wire-rimmed bifocals for the past fifteen years, and his frame was as wiry as the glasses. His spinal column had been permanently molded into the shape of a question mark from his hunched posture on the bench. He was everything you could ever want in a federal court judge—patient, firm, fair, and decisive.

  “I’ve read Mr. Taylor’s motion and his accompanying brief. Mr. Reed, I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure of meeting you before.”

  Landon stood. “That’s probably because I’ve never been in federal court before.”

  “Well, we don’t bite,” Judge Greer said. “But we do like to run things efficiently and get right to the point.”

  “Point taken,” Landon said, and he sat down.

  Mitchell Taylor took his place behind the podium, and his argument was as crisp as his suit. If Ms. Reed could be believed—and Mitchell had no reason to doubt her veracity—then she had uncovered corruption at a very high level in both a major pharmaceutical corporation and the federal government. She had unearthed a wide-ranging conspiracy involving drug companies and doctors, a conspiracy that was undoubtedly harming patients even as he spoke. It was, he said, a jaw-dropping piece of journalism.

  It was also his job to see if those allegations were true. And for that, he needed the names of her confidential sources.

  “As you know, Your Honor, witnesses can be intimidated. Their memories suddenly fade or their minds change or they become confused about facts that once seemed so clear. If the allegations made by Ms. Reed are true, then some very powerful men and women could be facing a long time behind bars. They may be working on her sources right now to get them to change or conveniently forget their stories. My greatest fear, and something that weig
hs heavy on the court as well, is that some of the confidential sources may ‘disappear’—” Mitchell put air quotes around the word—“without federal protection in place. We see it happen all the time.”

  “It happens in narcotics cases and gang wars,” Judge Greer interrupted. “But do you have any evidence that executives of Universal Labs or the FDA have intimidated or pressured witnesses?”

  Landon loved the question. But Mitchell didn’t blink.

  “Before this journalistic report, we had no evidence that executives at Universal Labs or the FDA were involved in conspiracies to illegally market drugs and bribe doctors. My experience is that desperate men and women do desperate things. But even if the witnesses are not in danger, it’s still my job to prosecute crimes. The law says that we’re entitled to know Ms. Reed’s sources if there are no alternative ways to find out the same information. Trust me, Your Honor, if there were another way to go about this I would be using it.”

  Mitchell went through a list of cases supporting his position and answered questions from the judge for about thirty minutes. It was clear to Landon that he was now in the big leagues. The judge had read every case cited in Mitchell’s brief and asked him detailed questions about them.

  Mitchell more than held his own. He had all the cases neatly organized in a black three-ring binder and seemed to know them by heart. He even corrected the judge a couple of times on the intricacies of First Amendment law.

  They had lost Landon about fifteen minutes into the argument.

  59

  WHEN IT CAME HIS TURN to approach the podium, Landon took his yellow legal pad full of handwritten notes and his iPad, which contained copies of the five most important cases he had studied the prior night. He suddenly felt woefully unprepared.

  He began his argument with a little speech about the importance of the First Amendment, but Judge Greer cut him off.

  “What if your client talked to the only witness in the rape of a ten-year-old girl and reported that story on the air? What if that witness didn’t want to get involved and your client promised him or her confidentiality? Would you be making this same argument?”

  Landon thought about it for a moment. “No, because my client wouldn’t do that. We’ve got a five-year-old daughter.”

  Greer gave him a lopsided smile. “But in principle, it’s the same thing, isn’t it? Doesn’t a reporter’s First Amendment right to protect confidential sources have to yield to the government’s ability to prosecute serious crimes?”

  In a nutshell, Landon knew, that was the law. And whether he had five cases with him or fifty, they all seemed to say the same thing—a reporter had only a qualified right to protect her sources. She lost that protection if those sources were witnesses to a crime and the government couldn’t prove that crime without their cooperation.

  “In certain situations, Judge, that’s correct. But only if the prosecutors have exhausted all other means of getting the same information. And with all due respect for Mr. Taylor, he hasn’t even tried any other sources. I mean, he has all the firepower of the federal government at his disposal. Subpoenas. Search warrants. Wiretaps. He knows the exact company and the FDA officials who are being accused. But instead of doing his own exhaustive investigation, he just wants to piggyback on my wife’s investigation.

  “Judge, that’s bad policy for a number of reasons. It would make prosecutors lazy. It would also dry up sources for investigative journalists. Let’s at least have Mr. Taylor make a good-faith effort to conduct an investigation on his own before he deputizes my wife.

  “The only thing she knows about law enforcement is what she learned from visiting me in jail. If she can break this story with that limited knowledge, certainly Mr. Taylor can nail down the same information if he takes a few weeks and really tries.”

  The back-and-forth with Judge Greer would go on for another forty-five minutes, but the money line had already been delivered. “The only thing she knows about law enforcement is what she learned from visiting me in jail.” It was jotted down almost verbatim by every reporter at the hearing.

  Judge Greer found Landon’s argument compelling enough. He quashed the subpoena. He told Kerri that he didn’t agree with her decision to run a story based on confidential and unnamed sources but that the Constitution and case law gave him no real say in the matter. “Mr. Taylor, you’ll have to conduct your initial investigation without Ms. Reed’s help. If you hit a stone wall and come back to court with a subpoena for her sources as a last resort, rather than a first resort, we might get to a different result.”

  On a slow news day, the story was too juicy for the media to resist. Even though Kerri and Landon had no comment after the hearing, the video of the two of them walking hand in hand away from the courthouse made for interesting B-roll. The story had so many angles! Landon’s firm was under siege. His wife had put her future in the hands of her husband, a first-year lawyer. Here was a budding legal star and a budding media darling all rolled into one happy little family. And not only that, but this lawyer was a one-time felon who had found religion and gone straight!

  The talking heads on cable loved it. Conservatives denounced Judge Greer’s opinion. He had caved to Kerri Reed, a member of the hated mainstream media, and now a bunch of corporate criminals would get away with the equivalent of murder! On the other side, the media protected one of their own. She was a courageous investigative reporter. Freedom of the press was what made this country great. If she could find these sources, why couldn’t Mitchell Taylor?

  As their names were bandied around the airwaves, Landon and Kerri retreated to their condo and unhooked the umbilical cords to the outside world. No Internet. No television. No phone calls. They put Maddie to bed early and hunkered down for the night, secretly hoping that something more explosive would happen in the nation’s capital or the Mideast or in Hollywood that would redirect the collective curiosity of the American people to a new set of victims.

  60

  ON SATURDAY NIGHT, Landon fell asleep reading Maddie a story. It was almost midnight when Kerri, who had been asleep herself on the couch, staggered into Maddie’s room and woke Landon up. “Let’s go to bed,” she suggested.

  It took Landon a second to respond. He had been sleeping so hard that there was drool on the pillow. He felt like his body weighed a thousand pounds.

  “Okay.”

  But Simba had other plans. He was doing his little I’ve got to go this very minute! dance, and Landon wanted to drop-kick him.

  “When’s the last time he went out?” Landon asked.

  “Right after dinner.” Kerri was rubbing her eyes, sending every possible message that she wanted Landon to take out the dog. But he wasn’t going down without a fight.

  “It’s part of my legal fees,” he said.

  “I paid your fees last night.”

  “Odds or evens?” Landon asked.

  “It’s your turn.”

  Landon finally gave in, put Simba on a leash, grabbed a plastic bag, and took one last shot over his shoulder. “This dog wasn’t my idea.”

  Kerri didn’t respond.

  As usual, Simba had to find exactly the right spot to do his business, and that process couldn’t be rushed. The cool night air woke Landon up a little and made him shiver. He waved at the police officer sitting in his car a few spots down from the condo entrance. It had been eight days since Brent’s and Rachel’s deaths. Landon wondered how long it would be before the city reassigned its officers and he and Kerri were on their own.

  By the time he got back into the condo and brushed his teeth, Kerri was sound asleep. But having slept a few hours already, Landon had a harder time dozing off. He stared at the ceiling for about twenty minutes and then decided to get up and sneak a look at his iPad. He sat at the kitchen table and read yesterday’s stories about the hearing in federal court. Most of the press coverage was positive, but the haters were filling up the comments pages. They slammed lawyers and slammed reporters and complained about
the fact that a convicted felon was allowed to practice law.

  Simba heard the commotion first and started barking immediately, running in circles. There was shouting in the hallway outside the front door and a few thuds. Simba was at the door in a flash, as if he wanted in on the fight. Landon hurried to the door, and Kerri came stumbling out of the bedroom, groggy-eyed, with a gun she had purchased the previous week.

  “Is it loaded?” Landon asked. With Maddie in the house, they had agreed to keep the bullets stored separately in a sock drawer.

  “I don’t know.”

  There was a loud bang on the front door accompanied by cursing, and Landon looked through the peephole. Kerri was right behind him and handed Landon the gun. Maddie was awake now and calling for her mommy.

  The cop Landon had seen earlier was a few steps away from the door, his gun drawn and pointed at two men on the ground.

  “What’s going on out there?” Landon called.

  “Hands in the air, now!” the officer yelled.

  Maddie was at the end of the hallway, crying. “Take care of Maddie,” Landon said to Kerri. He shouted at Simba, but the dog kept barking wildly.

  Eventually the officer shouted that the coast was clear and Landon could come out. Landon opened the door just a crack, the chain lock still in place, and stared at the scene in front of him.

  He dropped the gun to his right side, shut the door quickly, and unhooked the chain. He reopened the door and couldn’t believe his eyes.

  “Tell Chuck Norris here to get off my neck,” the big man on the ground said. His hands were cuffed behind him, and his voice was hoarse. The lithe and muscular man on top of him—the man with the bushy eyebrows, long sideburns, and deep-set eyes—was Daken Antonov. He had his knee on the other man’s neck. The cop had his gun trained on the big man as well.

  “This right here,” said Landon, “is why I had so many sacks in college football. Officer, I want you to meet the starting center for the Green Bay Packers, Mr. Billy Thurston.”