Animal Instinct

by Rosenfelt, David

  “He wouldn’t have to, but I’d bet he does. He’s a slimeball.”

  “How could I confirm this?”

  Crystal shrugs. “Maybe find some of the victims? That’s your job, not mine. By the way, did you ask your former cop friends if they need a computer guy? I could be in charge of the union stuff. And if any bad things came up, like a cop took a payoff, I’d bury it in a cyber file where no one would find it.”

  “I’ll talk to them. Sounds great.”

  “Bullshit; you’re not going to talk to them. All you cops lie through your teeth. Just for that, I’m gonna have the tartuffo; it’s unbelievable.”

  “THESE guys are really good,” Sam says. “I ran into a dead end on the phone.”

  He’s talking about the phone I lifted off Carlos, the guy whose brains I spent the morning wiping off my door and wall. If I have ever spent a more disgusting hour, I can’t remember when.

  Dani was at work and even Simon left the room; his attitude was that all he did was chew on the guy’s arm. He had nothing whatsoever to do with the brain spatter; that’s my problem.

  “What does that mean?” I ask, although dead end is a pretty obvious visual. I just want a sense of what Sam considers really good.

  “Well, Carlos made very few calls from that phone, only eleven in the last three months. They were all made to one particular number. Unfortunately, that number was just a routing device to another phone, or phones. So the phone he actually spoke to was hidden.”

  “No way to get to it?”

  “No way. Like I said, these guys are good.”

  This conversation has not been a good way to start the day. It’s about to get even worse; I’ve asked Andy to update me on where we stand heading into the trial.

  Simon and I head over to Andy’s. He and Laurie don’t know it yet, but I’m going to ask them to take care of Simon if I wind up in prison. I can’t think of better people to adopt him, especially since he’s such good friends with Tara.

  So far I haven’t been able to bring myself to have the conversation; it’s as if verbally recognizing the possibility makes it more likely to happen. But my head is not so far buried in the sand that I’m able to completely shut reality out. Over 90 percent of jury trials end in conviction on at least some of the charges; maybe I’ll be the exception, but more likely not.

  Andy and I go into his den; at the kitchen table Laurie and Ricky are playing some kind of board game that is bewildering to me. She keeps moaning and Ricky keeps laughing, so my guess is that he’s winning. Laurie shows no inclination to join us in the den; maybe she doesn’t want to face the bad news either.

  “So where are we?” I ask, as soon as we’re seated.

  “I wouldn’t say we’re in deep shit. Probably waist-high. Dylan has two main things going for their side. One, you hated Kline and believed that he was a killer. You felt that you let Lisa Yates down by not arresting him the night of the domestic violence call, and you wanted to ease your guilt by nailing him.”

  “That’s a little strong.”

  Andy nods. “It’s their characterization, not mine. But you did basically say that out loud, and to a cop, no less. The second and more important piece of their case is the murder scene itself. You were there, obviously, and your bloody clothes were found not far from the scene.”

  “Both of those things are true.”

  Andy nods again. “Yes, they are, and they are going to have to be explained by us.”

  “Can we do that?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. But whether the jury will buy it is another matter.”

  This is depressing, but no more so than what I expected. “So that’s their case; what is ours?”

  “We have to be able to point to the chaos going on around us. Lisa Yates, Jana Mitchell, and now Carlos Evaldi have all been killed, in addition to Kline. We have to show that there is some unseen killer out there operating in service of some unknown conspiracy. One problem is that unseen and unknown are not words that juries like. They want to make someone pay for the crime, in this case Kline’s death. You are their only tangible choice right now.”

  “You said one problem.…”

  Andy nods. “Right. The other problem is that we need to be able to get those other deaths in front of the jury in the first place. The judge has to find them relevant to the Kline case, otherwise he’ll rule them inadmissible.”

  I already knew this, but it’s still difficult to hear. “Any good news in this?”

  “Absolutely,” Andy says, surprising me. “Lisa Yates’s death is the easiest for us to get in, since the prosecution will open the door by using Lisa as part of your motive. You were avenging her death.”

  “So it makes no sense that I would have killed her.”

  “Right. And if you didn’t, then someone else did. Their counter to that, of course, would be to imply that Gerald Kline killed her. They’ll say that you were right in thinking Kline did it, but that doesn’t justify your slitting his throat. You positioned yourself as judge, jury, and executioner, which are three major no-no’s.

  “Jana Mitchell is the tough one. The Cincinnati police see it as a home invasion. We have an uphill fight to make our judge believe it is tied into our case.”

  “And Carlos?”

  “Basically works for us. You are investigating to find the real bad guys, so they tried to silence you. That has the advantage of probably being true. But their position might be that Carlos was an associate of Kline and was avenging his murder. Or more likely that he had nothing to do with this case at all and was getting revenge over something you did in your days as a cop.”

  “Can we win?”

  Andy pauses a moment. “We can win, but if you were betting it, you’d want odds. I could use some more bullets in the defense gun.”

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I can’t supply those bullets by sitting in court all day. I need to be out in the world, investigating.”

  “Don’t go there. That’s a nonstarter. You have got to be in court.”

  “Is that a rule?”

  “It’s my rule. Legally, you don’t have to be there. It’s your right to confront your accusers, but not your obligation. But your not being there would be a disaster.”

  “Why?”

  “Two reasons. First of all, the jury will look negatively on it. They’ll think that you don’t give a shit about what’s going on and what they’re doing. It’s arrogant. Secondly, it will negatively impact your ability to appeal certain issues if we lose.”

  “I’m trying to get us not to lose.”

  Andy shakes his head. “Laurie and Marcus will be working on it, and you can help them on nights and weekends. But when court is in session, you need to be there.”

  I’m not happy about it, but Andy is the expert and I promised to follow his advice. “Okay.”

  “Good. You have a nice suit to wear?”

  “The last suit I wore was to my friend Bobby Rosenberg’s bar mitzvah.”

  “Sounds perfect, but leave the yarmulke at home.”

  AMONG the many things that are bugging me, two stand out.

  One is Steven Landry, son of the deceased Doris Landry. Both Andy and I independently believed he was lying to us at breakfast that day. It was about relatively innocuous stuff, like did he notify his mother’s many email friends about her death. And it was strange that he wasn’t at all curious about why we were asking our questions. But if he lied, and we think he did, then that sticks out in any criminal investigation.

  People lie for a reason, sometimes important, sometimes not. Unfortunately for this theory, Sam had checked him out and found nothing to cause suspicion.

  The other thing gnawing at me is Rico. Unlike the Steven Landry situation, we have factual evidence of Rico’s existence. Lisa spoke about her fear of him to Doris Landry in that email. If she feared for her life at his hands, and then shortly thereafter she was murdered, that makes him an important piece in finding her killer.


  I don’t believe that the Rico we confronted in the parking lot that night had anything to do with either Lisa or Kline, which leaves us with a missing Rico.

  But I also believe that whatever is going on is tied into Ardmore Medical Systems. Could it be that Rico, whoever the hell he is, is somehow involved with Ardmore?

  I could call Jason Musgrove or Richard Mahler, the CEO and the head of IT, respectively, at Ardmore and ask them if the name Rico rings a bell, but I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to reveal my knowledge of Rico at all, and even though I don’t necessarily suspect Musgrove or Mahler of anything, they could inadvertently mention something to someone else.

  Instead I call my pajama-footed, Tang-drinking, tartuffo-eating pal, Don Crystal. “I’ve got another question,” I say, after he answers the phone with “Yo.”

  “Any chance we could do it over a meal? I know a great barbecue place.”

  “Not this time; you’ve got a rain check.”

  His sigh is audible. “Okay, what’s the question?”

  “Does the name Rico mean anything to you?”

  “Like Puerto Rico?”

  “No, like a person’s name. I’m trying to find out if there’s a person named Rico at Ardmore.”

  “Not that I can think of, but I still have a copy of the company phone directory somewhere. I could find it and look.”

  “I’d really appreciate that. One more question…”

  “For a total of two? I should be sucking down a slab of ribs for this.”

  I ignore that. “Was there a drug culture at Ardmore?”

  “A drug culture?” Whatever he thought I was going to ask, this clearly wasn’t it.

  “Yes. Were drugs prevalent there?”

  “If they were, I’d still be there.”

  I laugh at that. “Thanks, Don … that was really helpful. Will you check the phone directory?”

  “You got it. Next time, barbecue.”

  Having made no noticeable progress on the Rico front, I turn to our suspected liar, Steven Landry. He had little information to offer about Lisa Yates, other than that his mother liked her and tried to help her in the same way that she tried to help everyone else. There is a chance that Doris Landry was more open with her friends about it than with her son, who did not live near her.

  I call him and say, “Steven, I had breakfast with you and Andy Carpenter the other day.”

  “Right.”

  “I wonder if you could help me with something. Can you give me contact information for some close friends of your mother? Maybe she shared information about Lisa Yates with them.”

  He hesitates, as if unsure how to respond. Then, “No way. I know who you are; you killed that guy.”

  “Actually, I didn’t. But this is for Andy.”

  “I don’t care who it’s for. Leave my mother’s friends alone.”

  Click.

  ANDY warned me that jury selection would be total torture, and he was right.

  The worst part, he cautioned me, was that while you make picks, you have no idea until the end of the trial if you chose correctly. He compared it to betting on a basketball game, but forgetting who you bet on. So you watch the game, and as each basket is scored, you have no idea whether it is good news or bad news.

  That would be more than enough to stop me from watching the game, but I am forced to sit here and watch the jury selection. The thing that Andy did not tell me, but that I started realizing ten minutes in, is that it is also crushingly boring.

  He says that he doesn’t use jury consultants because he doesn’t trust them any more than his own gut, even though he has no confidence in his own gut at all.

  One of my problems is that I hate every single potential juror that is called up to the stand to answer questions. For one thing, I keep thinking, Who the hell are you to judge me? And then I picture each of them voting to send me to prison for the rest of my life, after which they go home to tell stories at parties about the cool time they had on jury duty.

  I find myself wanting to strangle them with my bare hands, but that would mean another arrest for murder, another trial, and another awful session of jury selection to sit through.

  That I cannot be out in the world, working the investigation and trying to prove my innocence, seems likely to cause my head to explode. Andy can tell what I’m going through, and a few minutes ago he leaned over and whispered a question: “Having fun?”

  At the defense table with Andy and me is Eddie Dowd. Eddie played for the football Giants for a couple of years, then went to law school and is Andy’s second-in-command when he has a case. Andy says that Eddie is an excellent lawyer and better than Andy when it comes to writing briefs and motions.

  Dani is not here; I told her not to come. She reluctantly agreed, but insisted that she’ll be here for the actual trial and has already notified her company that she’s going to be taking her vacation days soon.

  What I need to do is pretend to be interested in the voir dire, while instead thinking about the case and what I can do when I get out of here. I’ve brought a lot of documents with me, which I can go over during breaks. But I’ve committed so much of it to memory that I almost don’t need to look at them.

  During the first break, which will last a whopping ten minutes, I check my cell phone. There is a message from Dani asking me how it’s going, and another from Don Crystal. He says that he’s checked the Ardmore office phone directory that he has, and an Enrique Lopez is listed. Maybe his nickname is Rico?

  Lopez is listed as working in the client management department, which means he keeps Ardmore’s clients happy with their service. Crystal says he called one of his few remaining friends at Ardmore, who says that Lopez left the company two months ago, though the person did not know why.

  “Might be worth checking out,” Crystal says in his message. “If it comes to anything, you owe me a slab of ribs. If it doesn’t, you still owe me a slab of ribs.”

  If it turned out to be meaningful, I would buy Crystal a herd of cows. But even though I doubt that it will go anywhere, I call Laurie and give her the information to check out. She says that she will get on it and asks me how it’s going in court. “Jury selection can get boring,” she says.

  “I noticed.”

  When court resumes, I use the opportunity to reflect on my last meeting with Don Crystal. He offered two possibilities when I pressed him on what could be going on at Ardmore. One possibility was blackmail, that people at Ardmore were using sensitive and possibly embarrassing information on wealthy people as a threat to get them to pay.

  It seems unlikely to me; whatever is being done is happening on a large scale. To pull off such a huge operation, it would require the blackmailing of a large group of people. At least some potential victims would balk and go public with what was going on.

  The other possibility that Crystal mentioned seems even more unlikely. He said that someone at Ardmore could be adjusting the records to help people get insurance at a lower rate. If insurance companies see a potential client as a significant health risk, the premium would be higher.

  I just don’t see how the change in premiums could in any way pay off in the way the people running the conspiracy would need. They could charge people for adjusting the records, but the potential savings for those people would not be enormous. To pay the Ardmore conspirators a mere percentage of those savings is not nearly big enough to justify these murders.

  I’ve been thinking that life insurance might be more interesting, if only because more money would be at stake. Life insurance policies can run to a million dollars, and sometimes more. A person’s health history can be crucial in determining the premium one would pay, and even in getting insurance at all.

  Where it falls apart, at least in my mind, is the Ardmore connection. How would they profit from it? As in the case of the medical insurance, clients paying a fee for Ardmore to adjust their medical records just wouldn’t pay off on the kind of scale necessary to take these kind of risks
, and to commit these kind of murders.

  The only way it would make sense is if the bad guys could somehow get a large piece of the life insurance payoffs. But that again crumbles under any kind of analysis. Why would a beneficiary, a family member, turn over their money to someone at Ardmore?

  Could Ardmore take out a secret policy, naming one of their own as a beneficiary? I suppose it’s possible, but they’d have to know who was going to die relatively quickly, otherwise they would be paying the premiums for many years.

  Might their knowledge of the person’s health records help them predict who would die relatively soon? I suppose it’s possible, but way too complicated and way too speculative.

  Could they be taking out a policy and then murdering people? Is that what happened with the three people whose obituaries Lisa Yates was hiding? It just does not seem possible to be doing that on a large scale, and I’m not aware of any media stories speculating that any of those three people were murdered.

  Since I know that Steven Landry is Doris Landry’s only immediate surviving family member, I make a note to ask Sam to find out if he received a payout on any life insurance policy that she had.

  Even if that is the case, I still don’t know how that could benefit anyone at Ardmore. But it can’t hurt to find out.

  I also make a note to myself to check out the death certificates that Sam got for the three people. I want to see if there is even a hint that any of them could have been murdered.

  This is what is known as grasping for straws … but it sure beats jury selection.

  LAURIE was able to track down Enrique Lopez.

  She initially called Jason Musgrove, who coldly told her that he was finished talking to anyone involved in my defense. Maybe the publicity about the upcoming trial has hardened his attitude, or maybe it is something else. I can’t say either way, but if something is going on at Ardmore, as CEO, Musgrove would be in prime position to be involved.

  Instead Laurie turned to Sam, who found Lopez’s home address in Garfield. She went to see him, but came away close to positive that he is not our “Rico.” He is in his sixties and retired due to failing health. She cannot see him as a dangerous drug dealer, and nothing he said to her changed that feeling.