False Witness

by Karin Slaughter

“Was there any evidence of tampering?”

  “Not that the officer reported.”

  “Three to five hours.” Liz seemed to understand the problem. An argument could be made that Andrew was testing the response time. Not to mention that, for three to five hours, his whereabouts were likely unknown.

  Liz said, “I’ll see what I can find out.”

  Leigh wasn’t finished. “Did you speak to Reggie Paltz yesterday?”

  “I gave him the encryption key to upload his files onto our server,” she said. “Should I log in for you on your desktop?”

  “I’ve got it, thanks.” Leigh appreciated the way she had worded the offer, leaving out you ancient dinosaur. “Did Paltz ask any questions about me?”

  “Lots, but he was mostly confirming,” Liz said. “Where you went to school, how long you worked at Legal Aid, how long you were on your own. When you started working here. I told him to go to the website if he wanted your CV.”

  Leigh had never once considered that she was on the company website. “What did you think about him?”

  “Work-wise, he’s pretty damn good,” Liz said. “I read his background profile on Tenant. Very thorough, doesn’t look like there are any skeletons, but I can backstop it with one of our usual investigators if you want?”

  “I’ll ask the client.” Leigh was perfectly fine with letting the prosecutor surprise her with a dark detail from Andrew’s past during the trial. “But what about in general terms? How did Paltz come across to you?”

  “Kind of a dick, but okay-looking.” Liz smiled. “He’s got a website, too.”

  Another technological blindspot on Leigh’s part. “I want you to put him on the Stoudt case. He’s willing to travel, but keep him on a tight leash. I don’t want him padding the bill.”

  “He’s already doing it, judging by the invoices Octavia sent over.” Liz tapped one of the boxes with her hip. “I went through these last night. Paltz doesn’t take a dump without charging a quarter for the extra flush. His timeline is an illustration of five-star Yelp reviews.”

  “Let him know we’re watching.”

  Liz was already out the door by the time Leigh took off her mask and woke up her computer. Bradley, Canfield & Marks had exactly the sort of boring website you’d expect. The thick borders were red and black in honor of UGA. Times Roman font. The only embellishment was the curly ampersand.

  Appropriately, Leigh found her name under LAWYERS. The photo was the same as the one on her employee badge, which was mildly embarrassing. She was listed as of counsel, a polite way of saying she was not a partner but also not an associate.

  Leigh scrolled past the first paragraph, reading that she had appeared before State and Superior Courts and specialized in litigating DUI, theft, fraud, high-net-worth divorce, and white-collar defense. The Atlanta INtown article was hyperlinked for anyone seeking a urine law specialist. The next paragraph listed her awards, pro bono work, various speaking engagements, and articles she had written in the early days of her career when that kind of thing had really mattered. She slipped down to the last line—Mrs. Collier enjoys spending time with her husband and their daughter.

  Leigh tapped her finger on the mouse. She was going to have to give the private investigator’s story the benefit of the doubt. It seemed plausible that Reggie had shown Andrew the INtown article featuring Leigh’s photo and that Andrew had recognized Leigh’s face. It also seemed likely that Andrew would have had Reggie do a background check on Leigh before hiring her. Actually, Reggie was probably more dangerous at this point, because he struck Leigh as the type of investigator who was good at digging up skeletons.

  Which was why she was going to get Reggie out of the state. Jasper Stoudt, her divorce client’s cheating husband, was about to take his mistress on a ten-day fly-fishing trip to Montana. Leigh imagined Reggie would be too busy ordering catfish tacos off of the room service menu to worry about Andrew Tenant.

  For her part, Leigh was doing enough worrying about Andrew for both of them. She bolstered herself by mentally bulletpointing Callie’s speech last night.

  — If Andrew had proof of the murder, then he would’ve shown it to the police.

  — If Andrew had one of Buddy’s videos, all it would show was that his father was a pedophile.

  — If Andrew had put together the clues because Callie couldn’t stop tracing a damn artery on a diagram of a leg, then so what? Even Nancy Drew had to show some actual evidence.

  — No one had ever found Buddy Waleski’s body—or the pieces of his body. There was no blood evidence on the steak knife. There was no forensic evidence taken from the Waleski house. There was no forensic evidence found in Buddy’s burned-out Corvette.

  — There were more than likely no official documents regarding Callie’s beating, and certainly nothing that tied it to Buddy’s disappearance.

  — No one had ever asked Leigh about the $82,000 she had used to help pay her way through law school. Before 9/11, nobody was asking questions about piles of cash. Even with Buddy’s ill-gotten gains, Leigh had worked as a waitress and a bartender and a delivery driver and a hotel room cleaner and even lived out of her car to save money. It wasn’t until Walter had found her nesting in the stacks of the Gary Library and invited her to sleep on his couch that Leigh had ever had a sense of permanency.

  Maddy. Walter. Callie.

  She had to keep her eye on what was important. Without them, Leigh would’ve already taken the Glock and ended Andrew’s miserable life. Despite evidence to the contrary, she had never thought of herself as a murderer, but she was damn sure capable of pre-emptive self-defense.

  There was a quick knock before the door opened. Jacob Gaddy, one of the associates, was balancing a sandwich and a can of ginger ale on two file boxes. He set them down on the floor, telling Leigh, “I confirmed the tox screen was negative. You’ll find the indexes on top of the boxes. The search of the house turned up some really high-end, artistic S&M photos framed in one of the back hallways, but nothing in the bedroom.”

  Leigh wasn’t worried about the photos. Fifty Shades had taken the shock away from millions of housewives around the world. She waited for Jacob to put her lunch down on the edge of her desk. She knew why he had volunteered to play waiter. She would need a second chair at the defense table, and the associates would go into a cage match if it came to that.

  She decided to put him out of his misery. “You’ll be my second. Make sure you know the case backward and forward. No mistakes.”

  “Yes ma—” He caught himself. “Thank you.”

  Leigh banished the almost ma’am from her mind. She couldn’t suspend her review of Andrew’s files any longer. She took a sip of ginger ale. She finished the sandwich as she flipped through the pages of notes she’d made so far. With any case, she always searched for weak spots that the prosecutor could exploit, but now she was looking to see how she could use those weak spots to build a shadow case that would send Andrew away for the rest of his life.

  All while keeping herself and Callie free.

  She had argued against the prosecutor before. Dante Carmichael approached his job with a front-runner’s sense of entitlement. He liked to brag about his win/loss record, but it was easy to brag about your wins when you only ever tried cases you were ninety-nine percent certain would go your way. This was the sole reason that so many rape cases were not prosecuted. In matters of he said/she said, jurors were inclined to believe a man was telling the truth and a woman was looking for attention. Dante’s plea deals were more like extortion to keep his record untarnished. Everyone who worked at the courthouse had a nickname, and Deal ’Em Down Dante had come by his honestly.

  Leigh paged back through the official correspondences. Dante had proffered an incredibly generous deal in April of last year, a month after Andrew’s arrest. She was loath to agree with Reggie Paltz, but her gut was telling her that Dante Carmichael had laid a trap. Once Andrew took a plea on the Karlsen assault, he’d be linked by MO to the three othe
rs. If Leigh was careful, if she was clever, if she was lucky, she would find an alternate way to push Andrew into that trap.

  By habit, she picked up her pen. Then she put it back down. Strategizing her potential crimes on paper was never a good idea. Leigh mentally ran through her options, trying to find different ways to screw up while holding herself blameless.

  Andrew wasn’t her only obstacle. Cole Bradley had forgotten more about the law than Leigh had ever learned. If he thought she was throwing the case, firing would be the least of her worries. The timing was also an issue. Normally, Leigh had months if not a full year to prepare for a criminal trial. And that was when she was honestly defending her client. Now, she had six days to become intimately familiar with the crime scene photos, forensic reports, timelines, witness statements, police incident reports, medical reports, rape-kit analysis, and the heartbreaking victim’s statement, which had also been recorded on camera.

  The video was the reason Leigh kept letting herself get distracted. She could run dozens of strategies on her shadow case against Andrew Tenant, but every single option would require her to aggressively question his victim. As a defense attorney, it wasn’t just expected of her, it was required. Tammy Karlsen had been violently attacked and raped, but those physical scars would pale in comparison to the emotional destruction she would undergo at Leigh’s hands.

  In Georgia, as in the majority of states, criminal cases did not allow for depositions except under extenuating circumstances. The first time that Leigh would speak to Tammy Karlsen would be during the victim’s cross-examination. At that moment, Tammy would represent the top piece of a very stable pyramid that Dante Carmichael would construct to support her testimony. The base would consist of a substantial cast of credible witnesses: police officers, medics, nurses, doctors, various experts, and the dog walker who had found Tammy handcuffed to the picnic table in the park. They would all give the jury a rock-solid reason to believe every word that came out of Tammy’s mouth.

  Then Leigh would be expected to take a sledgehammer and knock the pyramid down.

  BC&M spent a great deal of money finding out what motivated the average juror. They hired specialists and even brought in consultants on some of the higher-profile cases. Leigh had been privy to their work product. She knew that in rape trials, juror comments could run from insulting to demoralizing. If a victim was high or drunk at the time of the assault, then what did she think would happen? If she was angry or defiant on the stand, they didn’t like her attitude. If she cried too much or cried too little, they wondered if she was making it up. If the victim was overweight, then maybe she had been desperate and led the man on. If she was too beautiful, then maybe she was stuck-up and deserved what she had gotten.

  Whether or not Tammy Karlsen would be able to thread the needle was unknowable. Everything Leigh knew about the victim had come from crime scene photos and statements. Tammy was thirty-one years old. She was a regional manager at a telecom company. She’d never been married, had no children, and lived in a condo she owned in Brookhaven, an area that abutted downtown Buckhead.

  On February 2, 2020, she had been violently raped and left handcuffed to a picnic table inside an open pavilion located in a City of Atlanta public park.

  Leigh stood up from her desk. She closed the blinds on the windows and door. She sat back down. She turned to a fresh page in her legal pad. She tapped open the recording from Tammy Karlsen’s official interview and pressed play.

  The woman had been found nude so, in the video, she was wearing hospital scrubs. She sat in a police interview room that was clearly meant for children. The couches were low and colorful, with beanbag chairs and a play table filled with puzzles and toys. This was what passed for a non-threatening environment for a rape victim: stick her in a room for children to constantly remind her that not only had she been raped, she could also be pregnant.

  Tammy was seated on a red couch with her hands clasped between her knees. Leigh knew from the notes that Tammy was still bleeding at the time of the interview. She had been given a pad at the hospital, but, eventually, a surgeon had been called in to repair the internal injuries from the Coke bottle.

  The video captured the woman rocking back and forth, trying to soothe herself. A female police officer stood with her back to the wall on the opposite side of the room. Protocol required that the victim not be left alone. This wasn’t to make her feel safe. The officer was on suicide watch.

  A few seconds passed before the door opened and a man walked in. He was tall and imposing, with gray hair and a neatly trimmed beard. Probably mid-fifties, with a Glock on the thick leather belt that reined in his big belly.

  His appearance gave Leigh pause. Women tended to do these interviews because they made more empathetic witnesses on the stand. Leigh could still remember cross-examining a male detective who had confidently stated that he always knew a woman was lying about an assault if she didn’t want him in the room. He had never considered that a woman who had been raped by a man would not want to be alone with another man.

  It was 2020. Why had they sent in this bear of a detective?

  Leigh stopped the video. She clicked back through the incident reports to find the first detective on scene. Her memory was that the primary investigator was a woman. She checked the list, then the incident statements, to verify that Detective Barbara Klieg was the officer in charge. Leigh searched the other reports for a possible ID on the man in the video, then rolled her eyes because all she had to do was press play.

  He said, “Ms. Karlsen, I’m Detective Sean Burke. I work with the Atlanta Police Department.”

  Leigh wrote down the name and underlined it. The with made her think that he was a consultant, not an employee. She would need to know what cases Burke had worked on, how many successful prosecutions he’d been a part of, how many citations or warnings were in his file, how many lawsuits settled, how he behaved on the witness stand, what weak points had been opened up by other defense attorneys.

  Burke asked, “Is it okay with you if I sit down over here?”

  Tammy nodded, her eyes on the floor.

  Leigh watched Burke move to a straight-backed wooden chair across from Tammy. He was not slow, but he was deliberate. He wasn’t taking up all the oxygen in the room. He gave an almost imperceptible nod to the female officer against the wall before he took his seat. He leaned back, kept his legs from doing the usual manspreading, and clasped together his hands in his lap, making himself a study in non-intimidation.

  One giant mark against Andrew. Detective Burke exuded professional competence. This was why Barbara Klieg had called him in. He would know how to help Tammy lay down the foundation of her story. He would know how to testify in front of a jury. Leigh could parry with him, but she wouldn’t be able to break him.

  Not just a mark against Andrew, but a possible nail in his coffin.

  Burke said, “I know Detective Klieg already explained this to you, but there are two cameras in this room, there and there.”

  Tammy did not look to where he pointed.

  Burke explained, “You can see the green lights mean they’re recording both video and audio, but I want to make sure that you’re all right with that. I will turn them off if you don’t want them on. Do you want them on?”

  Instead of answering, Tammy nodded her head.

  “I should ask, though, is it okay that we talk in here?” Burke’s voice was soothing, almost like a lullaby. “We could go somewhere more formal, like an interview room, or I could take you to my office, or I could take you home.”

  “No,” she said, then quieter, “no, I don’t want to go home.”

  “Would you like me to call a friend or family member?”

  Tammy started shaking her head before he finished. She didn’t want anyone to know about this. Her shame was so palpable that Leigh pressed her hand to her chest, trying to keep her feelings in check.

  “All right, we’ll stay here, but you can change your mind at any time. Just
tell me you want to stop, or you want to go, and we’ll do whatever you say.” Burke was clearly in authority, but he was going out of his way to give her a sense of choice. He asked, “What should I call you—Tammy or Ms. Karlsen?”

  “Ms.—Ms. Karlsen.” Tammy coughed around the words. Her voice was strained. Leigh could see the bruises around the woman’s neck were already starting to come up. Her face was obscured by her hair, but the photos taken during the rape-kit collection had been a study in devastation.

  “Ms. Karlsen,” Burke confirmed. “Detective Klieg told me that you are a district manager for DataTel. I’ve heard of the company, of course, but I’m not quite sure what they do.”

  “System logistics and telecom engineering.” Tammy cleared her throat again, but the rasp would not go away. “We provide data support for medium to small businesses needing microsystems, optics and photonics, and systems controls. I’m in charge of sixteen divisions across the southeast.”

  Burke nodded like he understood, but the purpose of this line of questioning was to help remind Tammy Karlsen that she was a credible professional. He was signaling that he believed her story.

  Burke said, “That sounds a lot more impressive than my job description. I bet you had to go to school for that.”

  “Georgia Tech,” she said. “I have a master’s in electrical and computer engineering.”

  Leigh hissed out a long sigh. She knew one of Octavia’s boxes would contain information from Tammy Karlsen’s social media, specifically anything to do with Tech’s alumni page. Tammy’s classmates were at that age of nostalgia, and there were probably ample posts about wild college years. If Tammy had a reputation as a woman who enjoyed drinking or sex, then Leigh could bring that out at trial, as if every woman didn’t have a right to enjoy drinking and sex.

  Regardless, Andrew had probably earned a point in his favor.

  The video played on as Burke engaged in more small talk. The jury would follow him off a cliff. His easy confidence was better than Valium. His voice never left the lullaby register. He looked directly at Tammy even though she never looked up at him. He was attentive, believing, and, above all, compassionate. Leigh could’ve run a checklist from the police manual on the proper way to interview a sexual assault victim. That a police officer was actually following it was a stunning revelation.