by C. J. Box
“Sounds like one of our clients,” Rachel said with a smile.
“I can’t say.” Cassie knew that Antlerhead’s attorney had been assigned through the public defender’s office for his new trial and that Rachel took fewer and fewer of those kind of charity cases. Either way, it was unprofessional for Cassie to discuss her clients.
“Well, I’m glad you’re in one piece,” Rachel said. “It can’t be fun going after desperate people.”
“It isn’t. But it’s part of the job.”
“You’re doing well for yourself,” Rachel said as she glided into her chair. “I’m very pleased to see how well you’ve done here.”
“Thank you.”
“I think it’s important that we stick together as much as we can, you know?”
Cassie nodded her agreement. They’d had this conversation before. Like her own small private investigations firm, Mitchell-Estrella was owned solely by women. Rachel seemed to be more concerned about the fact than Cassie ever was, but it was certainly a bond between them and something Rachel often brought up. This was Montana, after all—the land of big skies, Gary Cooper, ranches the size of small countries, and barely a million people. Cassie had grown up there and was pleased to be back. But there was no doubt that prejudice and misogyny lingered in backwards pockets.
A criminal defense firm run by women was a rarity. Rachel had once told Cassie that when she got together with Jessica Estrella to form their partnership, they were both known by their middle name of Angela. Angela Estrella and Angela Mitchell. They’d agreed to change their professional names to avoid being marginalized and lumped together in the legal community and law enforcement as “the Angelas.”
“And how is Ben?”
“He seems to be doing all right,” Cassie said. “It’s hard for a teenager to fit into a new place and a new school but he seems to be doing fine.”
Rachel nodded her approval. She’d remembered Ben’s name and Cassie couldn’t recall any of the names of Rachel’s boys. She felt her neck flush red. Rachel had a way—whether intentional or not—of making Cassie feel inadequate. Cassie thought it might be one of Rachel’s techniques for getting what she wanted out of people, and it likely served her well with witnesses in the courtroom.
“Jake, Van, and Andrew are doing well,” Rachel said breezily as if to bail her out. “They grow up so quickly, but I’d be lying if I said I wanted all my little boys back. Jake and Van have discovered girls and I’m lucky to see them at all. Andrew, though, is like a young Bull. All he wants to do is go up into the mountains to fish and kill animals. He’s been hardwired like that since he was a baby.”
“Ben’s a wrestler,” Cassie said. “He’s not very good but he’s trying.”
In fact, he’d lost every match thus far in the season. She hoped he’d stick with it. Isabel disliked sports and encouraged Ben to “find his passion,” whatever that was. It was one of several items of contention between Cassie and her mother in regard to raising Ben.
Cassie contemplated trying to get Ben together with Andrew Mitchell because Ben complained about never having the opportunity to go fishing. Cassie felt guilty about that but she didn’t know how to teach him and at the moment there wasn’t a man around who could. She wondered if Andrew would take Ben under his wing or if that was a disaster of an idea cooked up by a sometimes desperate single mother.
There was a pause and Rachel said, “We’ve got a new client and I’d like you to investigate the circumstances of his arrest.”
There it was.
Cassie raised her eyebrows. “The circumstances of his arrest?”
“Everything about it. From the charge to the investigation to the arrest. I’m very interested to hear what an experienced investigator like yourself thinks of everything that has happened to date.”
“Who are we talking about?”
“Our client is Blake Kleinsasser.”
Cassie jumped in her chair as if poked from behind. “No way.”
“Hear me out,” Rachel said without a smile.
*
Cassie had read about the case and heard officers gossip about it. Blake Kleinsasser was the oldest son of a very prominent ranch family that owned a huge cattle and hay operation in the shadows of the Bitterroot Range up north in Lochsa County. Kleinsasser had been away for years under a black cloud but had recently returned under mysterious circumstances. He’d been accused of molesting and sexually assaulting the fifteen-year-old daughter of his younger sister—his own niece—at a distant outbuilding on the ranch and leaving her there when he was through. The victim had come forward and named her uncle as her assailant. His arrest had created a great deal of attention because of the Kleinsasser name and their influence in the area.
Fifteen years old, Cassie thought. Just a year older than Ben.
“No way,” Cassie repeated as she shook her head back and forth. “I won’t help you defend a child rapist. I put bad guys like him away, Rachel. I don’t get them off. We talked about this. You agreed.”
“We talked about finding justice,” Rachel said evenly. “Everyone deserves that.”
Then she asked, “Why are you so sure I’m asking you to help a guilty man go free? Are you saying the cops and overzealous prosecutors don’t make mistakes?”
Cassie paused. “What mistakes?”
“I don’t know and neither do you,” Rachel said. “This arrest took place up in Lochsa County, and I wasn’t there to see it go down. Until I talked to him and reviewed the charges and the evidence—or lack of it—I knew as much about this case as you do right now and it all comes from newspapers and gossip.
“Up until a week ago he wasn’t on my radar at all and I probably had the same view of him as you do,” she said. “This was all a Lochsa County crime and I don’t know my way around up there. Blake Kleinsasser hired a local attorney named Andrew Johnson for the arraignment and preliminary hearing and he wasn’t my client. We didn’t get involved until a week ago when the trial was moved here and Blake’s counsel removed himself from the case for health reasons.”
Cassie smirked. In her experience the only time defense attorneys resigned or stepped aside was because their client was either supremely difficult to work with or so obviously guilty that they didn’t want to be associated with the accused. It happened more often in rural communities than urban environments, Cassie knew. Small-town attorneys had to live there after the trial.
“Why was the trial moved?” she asked.
“There are some highly unusual circumstances in this case but they’re not all bad. My client was arraigned up there and entered a not guilty plea and bail was denied because Kleinsasser is considered a flight risk. During the pretrial hearing, the judge did a loopde-loop and agreed with the defense that it was unlikely my client would get a fair hearing in Lochsa because the Kleinsasser family is an institution of some kind up there. I agree with that decision.
“Then after the case was assigned to here, my client’s lawyer withdrew from the case for health reasons.”
“What health reasons? That sounds hinky.”
“I agree but I can only guess because my client won’t share much with me,” Rachel said. “But after looking at the charging documents and the evidence I think the attorney made the right decision for whatever reason. Let’s just say that in my opinion there were a lot of things his previous counsel didn’t do, and a lot of evidence he didn’t challenge for some reason. Maybe he was just out of his depth with these kinds of serious criminal felony charges. I’ll leave it at that because I’m hesitant to disparage another defense attorney.”
“You people do stick together,” Cassie observed.
“It’s a small community. Too small to burn bridges, Cassie. Blake Kleinsasser’s ex-lawyer may turn out to be the judge I’m trying a case for one of these days. You never know.
“Have you been to Lochsa County before?” Rachel asked.
“A million years ago. Not since our girls’ basketball team played
there in high school.”
What Cassie could remember was murky. She recalled a bus ride on narrow country two-lane roads through miles of dark timber, the emergence of the snow-capped Bitterroots through the windshield as they neared the rural high school, and a foreboding sense of claustrophobia within the town of Lochsa Springs itself. It had been so unlike the rest of the state with its open vistas and wide skies that it stuck in her memory.
The game itself had also left a bad taste in her mouth. It was played in a tiny and ancient gymnasium and the stands were packed with local fans who booed the interlopers from Helena with a vehemence that rattled all the players. The Lochsa Springs girls were rough and nasty, and Cassie’s team got killed.
“Lochsa County is an odd place,” Rachel said as if reading Cassie’s thoughts. “Some people might say it’s about as backwards and inbred as you can find in this state. It’s like the twenty-first century passed it by. Maybe even the twentieth.”
She continued, “We can be grateful that the judge up there agreed to change the venue of the trial and we don’t have to go up there for it. Did you know that there has never been a murder conviction in Lochsa County if the accused is from there? I’ve heard from prosecutors that if you’re a local and you shoot someone in that county it’s probably because they deserved it. Seriously. But if an out-of-stater is on trial for doing something to a local you can be pretty much assured that they’re going to end up in Deer Lodge. So, we dodged a bullet there.”
Cassie squirmed in her chair. “So, you think he’s innocent?”
“I didn’t say that. But I think he’s entitled to a fair trial. Don’t you agree?”
“A fifteen-year-old girl said he did it,” Cassie said. “I don’t want to be in the position of impeaching the testimony of a scared fifteen-year-old girl.”
“It may not come to that.”
Cassie sat back in her chair and grimaced. She wanted no part of this.
*
“We’re waiting for all the prosecution discovery evidence to arrive,” Rachel said. “In my opinion they’re slow-walking everything, which unfortunately isn’t that unusual. We’re also waiting for the files from my client’s ex-attorney that he prepared for the case before he withdrew. But I can tell you what the prosecution’s case consists of because we have the transcripts from the preliminary hearing.”
Cassie nodded for her to go on. Although Cassie knew it was lawyer-speak, she found Rachel’s constant use of the term “my client” interesting. Cassie guessed that if she used “Kleinsasser” it would be confusing because the case was filled with Kleinsassers. If she said “Blake Kleinsasser” each time it would sound stiff. And simply “Blake” would convey familiarity that could come across as unprofessional.
Rachel consulted no notes and she met Cassie’s defiant glare with a no-nonsense look of her own.
“According to the prosecution, my client arrived back in Lochsa County three months ago—in June. For years he’s been on the East Coast working in the financial industry. I don’t know the details of what he did except I take it he made a small fortune for himself and apparently didn’t keep in contact with his immediate family. It’s well known up there that he’s the black sheep of the Kleinsasser clan and apparently no one was very happy to see him come back.”
“Why?”
“My client’s problems with his parents and siblings go way back,” Rachel said. “I don’t have many details but I think it boils down to the fact that he’s seen as a turncoat—a climber—who abandoned his multigenerational family legacy as well as the area. He’s the oldest and firstborn son. You know how that goes.”
Cassie was well aware of the phenomenon known throughout the Mountain West as “the curse of the third generation,” wherein the founders of the ranch passed it on to their children, who later passed it on to their children. But it was that third generation where the situation sometimes went nuclear: family members who either did or didn’t want to carry on the tradition, members who wanted to sell the whole place to get out and avoid taxes, members who went to war with brothers and sisters for what they saw as their rightful inheritance.
Lawyers and accountants had made their careers representing different factions of the third generation because the legal battles often went on for decades. It was the nastiest kind of war: brother versus brother, brother versus sister, sister versus sister.
“So, your client came back to reclaim his inheritance?” Cassie asked. “Sort of a backwards prodigal son thing?”
“Unclear, but that’s the assumption. Look, I’ll cut to the chase,” Rachel said. “The prosecution alleges that on the night in question, July second, Blake got in a big fight with his younger brothers and ended up drunk at a local bar. From there, he left in his rental car and picked up the fifteen-year-old victim—his niece—after a church event and drove her to a remote outbuilding on the property where he assaulted and raped her and left her to fend for herself. Her name is Franny Porché.”
“That’s exotic,” Cassie said. “Not Kleinsasser?”
“She’s from my client’s sister’s third marriage. The sister, named Cheyenne, is divorced from what I understand.”
“Okay,” Cassie said. She already knew that if she went forward one of her first tasks would be to sketch a family tree. Not that she intended to go forward though.
Rachel said, “The other side claims they have a mountain of evidence and the Lochsa County prosecutor agreed with them. So did the judge, obviously. They say they can place Blake in the bar that night and later at the church. They say they have witnesses who will testify they saw the niece get into his rental car and drive away. They say the niece gave a statement that led to his arrest at a motel in Horston the next day.
“Of course,” Rachel said, “They’re throwing the book at my client and overcharging him as usual. We’re talking felony sexual assault, kidnapping, criminal endangerment—the gamut.”
Before Cassie could ask about the credibility of Franny, Rachel held up her hand palm-out to quash the question.
“The charges go well beyond he said, she said if that’s what you were wondering.”
“I was.”
“According to the charging documents, the Lochsa County sheriff’s department have four pieces of physical evidence to bolster their case. One is a whiskey glass found in the cabin where the girl was raped that’s covered with my client’s fingerprints. Two, they’ve got tire tracks from his rental car on the dirt road from the highway to the cabin. Three, they say they have semen residue and DNA on her underwear that matches up with my client. And four, they say they processed a conclusive rape kit with hair, fiber, and DNA evidence pointing to my client.”
Cassie snorted and said, “Is that all?”
“I don’t appreciate the sarcasm,” Rachel said quickly.
“He’s guilty,” Cassie said. “Every box has been ticked. There’s motive: a dispute with his family. There’s opportunity: he was there. And there’s both direct and circumstantial evidence that he did it.”
“He says he doesn’t think he did it,” Rachel said. But her tone was tentative, not strident.
“You mean he says he doesn’t know?” Cassie asked.
“He says he remembers getting in the argument with his brothers and later getting hammered at the Hayloft Saloon in Lolo. I’ve been there—it’s a classic dive.
“My client recalls drinking shot after shot and then apparently blacking out. He didn’t come to until the Lochsa County deputies were banging on his motel room door the next morning.”
Cassie whistled. Open and shut.
Rachel sighed. “He insists on pleading not guilty, despite my advice.”
“Of course he does. Ninety-five percent of criminals think of themselves as victims, not perpetrators. He’s no different.”
Rachel leaned forward and steepled her fingers. She said, “I know how it sounds. It sounds that way to me, too. But you yourself just said there’s a five percent chance.”
<
br /> “I was pulling that number out of my butt,” Cassie said. “I’ve spent my life around these scumbags. They blame everyone but themselves for the things they do. Of course he’s not going to admit it.”
Rachel lowered her hands to the desktop as if showing a hand of cards. “I’m not asking you to compromise yourself. I don’t want that. I don’t want you to set out to free a child rapist.”
“Then what do you want from me?”
“I want you to step back a couple of years in time. You’re once again the chief investigator for Bakkan County and this horrific crime is presented to you. I want you to do the same things you’d do if you wanted to put this guy away for the rest of his life, which you probably do. Interview the witnesses,” Rachel said, tapping the tip of one manicured finger with her other hand to indicate one-two-three. “Examine the evidence. Go through the arrest warrants and the police reports. Look twice at everything you find to see if there are inconsistencies or holes. Do it not from the standpoint that you’re trying to help a defense attorney blow holes in the prosecution case against her client. Do it as if you want to assure the prosecutor that every step you’ve taken as lead investigator is by the book and one hundred percent legit.”
Cassie blinked.
“When you’re through I want you to brief me on what you’ve found,” Rachel said. “I want it straight, warts and all. If I learn from you that the prosecution’s case is as bombproof as it sounds, well, I’ll try a different tactic like a plea deal if I can convince my client that’s the only way he can go. I need an airtight argument to convince him.
“But if mistakes were made—I need to know that, too. And if you discover new evidence or inconsistencies, well, I need you to share them with me as well.”
Cassie thought about it. Rachel seemed sincere. It was almost as if she didn’t know what she was asking.
“Based on what you’ve told me I think he’s guilty as charged and he needs to go down for it,” Cassie said. “I can’t imagine a scenario where I’d change my mind.”
