Talon Winter Legal Thrillers Box Set

by Stephen Penner

  “And what if I don’t want to release it?” Fassbinder asked. “Because I can tell you, Talon, I do not want to release it. Not to anyone. But certainly not to you, under the circumstances of this case.”

  Talon smiled. “Believe it or not, Martin, I understand that. In fact, I would expect nothing less. That’s why I’ve come here. To change your mind.”

  Fassbinder’s hands were still folded calmly in front of him. “And how do you expect to do that, Talon?”

  Talon reached into her briefcase and extracted the 8.5 x 11’s of Officer Dickerson’s white supremacist past. Mostly the photos Meagan had found, but also screenshots of some attendant posts and shares, all suggesting more than a passing interest in the alleged superiority of the White Race. “With these.”

  Fassbinder scanned the documents, his smile completely forgotten. After a moment, he looked up again. “I’m sure there’s an explanation for this.”

  “I can certainly think of one,” Talon answered. “But let’s cut to the chase, shall we?”

  Fassbinder didn’t respond audibly, but he gave Talon a nod.

  “Great.” She pulled the photos from Fassbinder’s hands to put them back in her briefcase. “These photos are from a long time ago. Long enough that there’s a good chance the judge would never let the jury see them in the actual trial. You and I both know that, right?”

  Talon wasn’t sure Fassbinder actually knew that. He was an in-house police legal advisor, not a trial attorney. But he seemed smart enough to know that she knew it.

  “The only way they’re really useful is to show the judge that Officer Dickerson might actually have some predisposition to racial animosity. Did I mention my client’s friend, the one Officer Dickerson shot dead, was Hispanic?”

  “I’m aware of Mr. Maldonado’s ethnicity,” Fassbinder replied. That smile was long gone.

  “Are you also aware of the recent survey that showed one in five police officers have online connections to hate groups?” Talon asked. “What about the FBI’s 2006 study that concluded there was an intentional and concerted attempt by white supremacist groups to infiltrate local police and sheriff departments?”

  Fassbinder said nothing.

  “Ok, good. We understand each other,” Talon said. “So, these photos of Officer Dickerson at the white hate rally? Yeah, they’re really old. No way the trial judge lets me tell the jury about something that happened that long ago. They’re really only useful if I want to go back in front of Judge Kirshner and ask her to reconsider her ruling. To do that, though, I would have to file these photos. And once something is filed with the court, it’s an open court record. Anyone who wants to can just open the court file and look at them. Heck, they can even get copies. And they’re court records, not just public records, so there are no redactions, no hiding the truth. You know all that, too, right?”

  “I know how the Public Records Act works, Ms. Winter.”

  “Talon. Remember?” Talon was having no trouble smiling. “So, you see, if I have to go back to Judge Kirshner to get Officer Dickerson’s personnel and disciplinary files, then I will have to file these photos and they will be available to any Tom, Dick, and reporter who wants to thumb through the court file. Or…”

  Fassbinder took up the invitation, but still with a stony expression. “Or I could agree to give you the records and you wouldn’t need to file a motion to reconsider.”

  Talon grinned for both of them. “I knew you’d understand. I just want the records, Martin. Give them to me and there’s no reason for any of this old stuff to be dragged up. Unless…”

  Fassbinder sighed. “Unless there’s something similar in his disciplinary files.”

  Talon nodded. “You know what’s in those files, Martin. I know you’ve read them. Cecilia Thompson says there’s nothing in there that will help my client. So, is she right? Are you going to hand them over quietly? Or am I going to have to make a scene? Amy Koh from Channel Eight owes me a favor.”

  Fassbinder leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers. “You don’t play around, do you?”

  “I don’t have the time,” Talon agreed. “Or the patience. So, what are you going to do, Martin? Or rather, what am I going to do?”

  Fassbinder took a deep breath, then exhaled through his nose. “Fine,” he conceded. “I’ll produce the records. But you’re going to have to find at least a little patience. It’s going to take me a few days to pull everything together.”

  “You mean you didn’t have them all ready to hand over in case I won the hearing?” Talon teased.

  “We both knew you were going to lose that hearing,” Fassbinder asserted.

  Talon didn’t admit to her overconfidence prior to the hearing. Instead, she stood up and smiled down at him. “But I kinda did win in the end, didn’t I? I’ll expect the file by Friday, Martin. I have work to do.”

  CHAPTER 25

  A lot had happened since the last time Talon had actually seen Luke, as he was being led away after the judge denied her motion to get at the cop’s personnel file. He was too young and ignorant to be making the important decisions on his case, but it was still his case and Talon needed to apprise him of developments at least occasionally.

  Which was always easier to do when she had good news to share.

  “Good news,” she began when Luke entered the jail conference room. It was near lunchtime. The whole wing smelled like cafeteria food and astringent.

  “Yeah?” Luke asked, but almost disinterestedly. As if he didn’t believe her. Or he didn’t think it would matter. He sat down opposite her, but didn’t look at her. Talon took a moment to appraise him before she shared her news.

  “What’s wrong?” Talon asked.

  “What’s wrong?” Luke repeated. “I’m in jail, and I’m probably never getting out again.”

  “Who’s telling you that?”

  A thumb jerked back toward the cells. “Everyone in here. They all say I’m screwed. I killed a cop. That’s it. I’m never getting out again. We’re all gonna be convicted. Every one of us. And we’re all going to prison. That’s how the system works.”

  “That may be how it works for them.” Talon nodded toward the door. “But not for you.”

  Luke finally looked her in the face. “Why not for me?”

  “Because,” Talon answered, “you hired me.”

  CHAPTER 26

  Confidence was good. Bravado even had its place. But the true currency of success in any endeavor was hard work. And for lawyers, that meant reading. A lot of reading. And Talon’s ‘to-be-read’ pile increased significantly that Friday afternoon when Lieutenant Avery Johnson of the Tacoma Police Department arrived at her office with a banker’s box full of papers.

  “There’s a Lieutenant Johnson here to see you,” Hannah informed Talon over the phone. “He says he has a delivery for you.”

  Talon smiled to herself. “Right on time.”

  She hung up the phone and strode out to the lobby to accept her delivery from Fassbinder. She was surprised by the size of it.

  She nodded at the document box Lt. Johnson was holding in front of him. It looked heavy. “I thought the report was only a hundred and seventeen pages.”

  Lt. Johnson smiled, then set the box on the floor. It sounded heavy. “This is everything. Every scrap of paper with his name on it. Even the public records request you made. I read it. You didn’t ask for all of the records with the exact right language.”

  Talon crossed her arms. “I bet I did. But again, how can I know what’s being hidden when it’s, well,” she gestured again at the box, “hidden?”

  “Not my department, ma’am,” Johnson replied. “You lawyer folk figure that out. I’m just producing the results.”

  Talon smirked at the ‘ma’am’. She wasn’t a fan of the tradition of women’s salutations being divided into young and old, married and unmarried, etc. And she wasn’t that old. But Lt. Johnson seemed to mean the term with genuine respect, even as he was unaware of its tr
oublesomeness.

  “Thanks for the results, Lieutenant,” she said.

  “Do you want me to carry it back to your office?” he offered.

  “Is it really that heavy?” she asked.

  Avery thought about it for a moment, then looked at Talon. “I bet you can manage it.”

  Talon smirked again. “I bet you’re right.”

  * * *

  It was official: Todd Dickerson was a jerk. Hardly a surprise to Talon. In her estimation, anybody who actually wanted to be a cop should automatically be disqualified from becoming one. What kind of person wants to exert that kind of physical control over another human being? But Dickerson was a cop’s cop. A jerk’s jerk. He butted heads with command staff and routinely got in trouble for things like turning in his reports after his shift—an overtime violation—because he wanted to use every minute he was on the clock ‘chasing the bad guys,’ as he put it in one disciplinary interview.

  But there were no sustained findings of excessive force, although there had been complaints. Then again, every cop got those. The judge wasn’t going to let Talon smear Dickerson’s reputation with unfounded accusations by criminals Dickerson had pushed a little too hard into the back of his patrol car. No prior incidents of shooting unarmed suspects either. Just a hard-charging, overconfident meathead of a cop.

  And Talon Winter knew overconfident.

  But there were nuggets. Small indications of incidents that might have been more than they seemed in the whitewashed language of an internal review. She hadn’t been there during those investigations, of course, to ask Dickerson incisive questions about his conduct, in order to draw out anything that might help Luke Zlotnik. Which confirmed she needed to interview Dickerson. And now that she had his file, she could prepare to do that in the most effective way possible.

  She opened her desk drawer and took out a selection of highlighters and page tabs. It was going to be a long night.

  CHAPTER 27

  Talon wasn’t the only one who’d had a late night, it turned out, as she discovered when she arrived at her office the next morning and walked into a lobby full of police officers.

  “What the hell is going on?” she demanded.

  “Talon!” Hannah called out from behind her desk. “We were robbed.”

  Talon frowned. “Was anyone here? Or did it happen overnight?”

  “Uh, overnight,” Hannah answered.

  “Then we were burglarized, not robbed,” Talon corrected.

  “Fine.” Hannah crossed her arms. “You were burglarized.”

  “Me?” Talon’s eyebrows shot up. “Just me?”

  “Just you,” Hannah confirmed, with a nod toward Talon’s office.

  “Oh, hell no.” Talon pushed past the officers in the lobby to the one standing in her doorframe, camera pointing inside her office.

  “Get out,” she commanded, physically pulling the officer away from his task. “Do not take photographs of my office. I’m a criminal defense attorney. There’s attorney-client privileged matters in there.”

  “Not unless they’re on the floor,” the photographer-officer replied. “With everything else.”

  Talon turned away from the officer to scan her office. The cop was right. Everything was on the floor. Books, papers, pens. Everything had been turned over and spilled out. But even in the mess, it didn’t look like anything was actually missing. Certainly not anything a burglar would normally consider worth stealing, like computers or other electronics.

  Talon’s heart sank. The most valuable commodity in her line of work wasn’t electronics. It was information.

  She pushed the officer aside and kicked her way through the mess to her desk. To her computer.

  “You can’t go in there!” the officer protested. “It’s a crime scene.”

  “The hell it is,” Talon shot back. “I’m the alleged victim. It’s not a crime scene unless I say it is.”

  “Uh,” the officer rubbed the back of his neck, “I’m not sure it works that way.”

  “Yeah, well I am,” Talon answered. She pointed to the framed diploma, hanging askew on the wall. “And I’m the one with the law degree. Now be quiet while I figure out whether whoever did this did anything more than make a mess for me to clean up.”

  The officer opened his mouth to reply, but then thought better of it. Instead he walked back toward the lobby, presumably for reinforcements.

  Her computer was still on, which was worrisome in itself because she always turned it off when she went home at the end of the day.

  Her password still worked, which meant they hadn’t changed it. They’d cribbed it somehow, or bypassed it.

  Once her desktop appeared, it only took a few mouse clicks to confirm what she already knew. Everything on the Zlotnik case was gone. Every file, every photo, everything she’d had scanned and digitized before destroying the paper copies provided by the prosecutor. Plus, the things she had created and collected herself. All of her motions, all of her notes, and all of her materials about and from Dr. Natalie Ross, Ph.D.

  They had it all.

  And they wanted her to know it.

  She raised her head and did another scan of the office. The one thing missing was the one thing so new she hadn’t gotten used to it being in her office. The box of documents from Lt. Johnson. It was definitely gone. Everything from the Zlotnik case was gone.

  “Excuse me, miss.” It was one of the officers from the lobby. He had stripes on his sleeves, and the photographer officer peering over his shoulder. “Officer Greene says you entered the crime scene without permission.”

  “No crime here, Sergeant.” Talon masked her thoughts with a smile. “Certainly nothing I want the police to investigate. Just a very messy office that I’ll spend the day cleaning up. My receptionist seems to have overreacted.”

  The sergeant frowned, eyebrows furrowing. “Are you sure, miss?”

  “I’m sure,” Talon confirmed. “And don’t call me ‘miss’.”

  CHAPTER 28

  “Wait, I’m confused,” Cecilia Thompson said after Talon explained why she had come to the prosecutor’s office unannounced. “Was your office burglarized or not?”

  Talon sighed. “It’s complicated. I just need replacement copies of the police reports you provided. And maybe a phone call to Martin Fassbinder, to let him know it’s okay for him to give me another copy of Dickerson’s file.”

  Cecilia thought for several seconds, then leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. “No.”

  “No?” Talon was taken aback. “No, you won’t call Fassbinder?”

  “No, I won’t call Fassbinder,” Cecilia confirmed. “And, no, I won’t give you new copies of the police reports.”

  “I can understand you not wanting to vouch for me with Fassbinder,” Talon conceded, “but you have to give me new copies of the police reports.”

  “Not if you lost them,” Cecilia returned, her arms still crossed. “That’s not my fault.”

  “I didn’t lose them,” Talon answered through gritted teeth.

  “Were they stolen?” Cecilia asked. “If they were stolen, you should call the police.”

  “I can’t call the police,” Talon said. “You know that. And you know why.”

  “I know nothing of the sort,” Cecilia insisted. “It’s not my fault you’re paranoid.”

  “When they’re really after you,” Talon replied, “paranoid is just smart thinking.”

  “No one is after you, Talon,” Cecilia scoffed. “Least of all the police.”

  “Most of all the police,” Talon asserted. “First my car, now my office. What’s next?”

  “Then report it,” Cecilia said.

  “To who?” Talon threw her arms wide.

  “The police,” Cecilia answered.

  “Right,” Talon said. “So, you see my problem.”

  Cecilia uncrossed her arms. “No, Talon, I don’t. This is serious. You don’t have to handle it by yourself. But you have to make it official.”


  “And let the cops investigate themselves?” Talon posited. “Let them into my office, onto my computer, into my car, all so they can say they just can’t quite figure out how to solve the case, ‘Gosh, sorry, miss or ma’am’? No, thanks. They can’t help me.”

  “Then I can’t help you,” Cecilia answered.

  Talon just stared at Cecilia, then shook her head.

  “I understand you don’t want to believe any of your cops would have done this,” Talon said. “I can even understand why you won’t call Fassbinder to help me get copies of reports I was able to get behind your back. But I don’t understand why you won’t at least give me a replacement copy of what you already provided.”

  “If you don’t understand that,” Cecilia responded, “then you don’t understand my job.”

  “Or I do understand it,” Talon countered. “And so do you. But you just don’t care anymore.”

  CHAPTER 29

  It was going to take a while to reconstruct what had been taken. The easiest was the stuff from Dr. Ross regarding the false confession. That took a single email and the good doctor resent everything she had already provided, including her expert report about why she believed Luke’s confession was coerced and false.

  Talon filed a motion to compel Cecilia to provide replacement copies of the police reports and had scheduled it for five days later, the minimum notice required under the court rules. Talon knew she would win that—and so did Cecilia. Even if Talon had just lost the materials, the judge wasn’t going to punish the defendant for that. Not when it was so easy for the prosecutor’s office to just make another copy. Although she would probably have to pay copying costs. And provide her own disks.

  Dickerson’s personnel box was going to be more difficult, it seemed. Fassbinder was simply ignoring her calls and emails. She’d left more than several, but received back not so much as an ‘out of office’ autoreply from the police department’s legal advisor. No wonder a cop had delivered it personally. No wonder he’d offered to carry it to her specific office.