Close Case (23 page)

“I’m sorry, Samantha, but Lisa Lopez is back. Do you want me to tell her you’re in a meeting?”

“No, send her in.”

“You sure?” Alice was careful never to pry, but she could clearly tell that I was upset.

“I’m having the worst thirty-six hours of my career. Why stop now?”

She smiled sympathetically and sent in the beast.

Lisa made herself comfortable in one of my guest chairs and pulled a thin file folder from her briefcase.

“Lucas Braun called me yesterday. I can’t believe that idiot was going to have Hanks testify.”

I couldn’t believe that Lucas had told Lisa about our deal before I’d even debriefed his client. “So now you’re here shopping a plea for Corbett? Forget it. You’re too late, Lisa.”

“No, I’m here to get the charges dismissed.”

“You really have caught me at the worst possible time for game playing—”

“I have ironclad proof of innocence.” She handed me a printed page of paper with a notarized signature at the bottom. “This is an affidavit from a girl named Tamara Lyons. She was with the defendants from a quarter to ten until one in the morning the night Percy Crenshaw was killed.”

I gave the document a perfunctory perusal and handed it back to her. “In case you haven’t noticed, Lisa, little girlfriends willing to serve as bogus alibis are a dime a dozen around here.”

“She’s not a little girlfriend. She’s Hanks’s ex, and she called her best friend a little after one in the morning because she’d just been raped by Hanks and Corbett. She called the crisis center two hours later.”

“No way, Lisa. Both defendants have confessed at one point or another to killing Percy. You might have gotten your guy’s statement tossed, but that doesn’t change the fact that he made it.” I was arguing on reflex, but internally I flashed back to the rape crisis counselor, Annie of the pierced nose, asking at the arraignment whether the defendants had any chance of release pending trial.

“My guy confessed because your detective gave him no choice. What was he going to say? Offer up an alibi of ‘Sorry, officer, but I think I was busy raping someone?’ It lands him with a mandatory minimum sentence of a hundred months, and only makes him look worse. Your detective gave him the out of shifting the blame to Trevor Hanks, and that’s what he did.”

“But even after he blamed it on Trevor, we still arrested him. Why didn’t he say something then?”

“Honestly? He started to think maybe they did do it. He was high out of his mind and couldn’t remember everything that happened between Twenty-third Avenue and Tamara. When Hanks called him in the morning, saying he found blood on his jean jacket, Todd assumed it was from Tamara. But when Calabrese confronted him about Percy, he started to wonder.”

“And what about Hanks? According to Lucas Braun, I’ve got the right men.”

“That’s because Lucas is an unethical idiot who figures seven years for manslaughter is better than eight and a half years for rape, truth be damned.”

“Why didn’t this girl Tamara Lyons say anything?”

“Because those wackos at the Rape Crisis Center told her no one would believe her. Corbett and Hanks showed up at Fred Meyer right before closing. She works there. Her coworkers will confirm that she said she was leaving with her ex and one of his friends. Hanks had some meth, and she was willing to kiss and make up for the night to get in on the action. When they went out to the river by the airport, things got out of hand. Both of them raped her. When she realized Tuesday morning they’d been arrested for something even worse, she figured it was kismet or something. I talked to her myself last night.”

I thought about the methamphetamine-related date rapes I’d seen at MCU, like so many alcohol-induced cases, but rougher and more prolonged. “So how’d you get her to sign the affidavit?”

“It wasn’t easy. I assured her that Corbett would plead to Rape One and testify against Hanks so she wouldn’t have to go through a trial. I also gave her my opinion that Hanks would probably plead guilty once he realized Corbett was coming clean, and that the likely sentence was the mandatory minimum.”

“And you’ve talked to the people at the Rape Crisis Center?”

She nodded. “This morning. Tamara agreed to it. They confirmed that the call came in Sunday morning around three. Tamara told the counselor she’d left with the perpetrators from work. Fred Meyer confirms she clocked out at ten. That means Corbett and Hanks weren’t in the parking lot when the super saw two men there and when the neighbor heard the comment about the car.”

I shook my head. “I don’t get it, Lisa. How long have you known about this?”

“You know I don’t have to tell you that.”

“And you know that it affects whether I choose to trust you.”

“I’ve known the whole time.” Her voice rose over my protests. “What was I going to do, Sam? Try to help my client by telling you he’s a gang rapist when he takes too much meth? Hanks and Corbett couldn’t give us a firm enough timeline to provide an alibi. If I’d mentioned it earlier, you would have tacked on a rape charge to the indictment and argued they did everything as one big crime spree. Tamara’s affidavit changes that.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know, Lisa. Maybe the girl’s messed up on the timing. Or who knows? Maybe Hanks called her at two in the morning and talked her into cooking this up as a worst-case defense.”

“Oh, come on. Do either of these kids strike you as that smart?”

No, they didn’t. But there was too much evidence: Peter Anderson’s eyewitness testimony, the baseball bat near Hanks’s house, the fibers from his Jeep. I wasn’t buying it, and I told her so.

“That’s what’s been bothering me too,” she said. “From the first time I sat down with Todd, I was never really worried about the case. I had a get-out-of-jail-free card if the case really fell apart. But then you seemed to keep finding more evidence. I think you’ve got a serious problem on your hands.”

“Like what, Lisa, a secret evidence maker? You know, you’re so quick to put the blame on everyone else instead of just coming to terms with the fact that your clients lie to you.”

Still, in the back of my head and, more importantly, in my gut, I felt that Tamara Lyons was telling the truth. I remembered Annie’s secrecy and obvious discomfort at the arraignment. I thought about the look of shock and fear on Todd Corbett’s face when Calabrese had brought up Percy’s murder. It was an entirely different look than the nervous, defensive expression he bore when Mike initially accused him of the vandalisms.

“Trust me,” she said, without the slightest irony, “I’ve looked at this from every angle. Don’t you think I went back to my client when new evidence kept trickling in? But I talked to Tamara myself. You should too. She’s the last one who would lie to help these guys; her hatred for them just oozes from her. So, yeah, I’ve been scrutinizing the evidence like crazy. Your eyewitness? I’m not saying he’s an outright liar. He could have seen the news report while he was shaving or something without even thinking about it. Then, when he saw the throw-downs, two of the guys looked familiar. He assumed it was from the parking lot.”

“Even if I were to buy that, Lisa, there’s the bat.”

“I know,” she said, nodding. “And I really have no way of knowing whether it’s the same bat they used for the vandalisms. They both say they got so high they must have lost it somewhere in the night. But how hard is it to buy a baseball bat and dump it in an alley near one of the suspects’ houses?”

“And put Percy Crenshaw’s blood and your client’s car fibers on it?”

“That’s why I said you might have a problem on your hands. Let me be real clear here: I think I can get a dismissal of the murder charges just on Tamara’s testimony. And, like I said, my guy’s fully prepared to admit the rape. This next part you can take for what it’s worth, because I know how you protect your cops.”

“Attacking me’s not helping, Lisa.”

“All right, fine. If this thing had gone to trial—which it’s not—I was going to go after the girlfriend’s husband.”

“Matt York? He was on duty.”

“Right. And I got the call-out records from Central Precinct for that night. He and someone named Ben Hayden both logged in as responding to a call of protesters blocking the entrances at the City Grill at nine-thirty that night. York didn’t clear until eleven.”

I recalled my conversation with Chuck after our visit to Matt York’s house. The discussion itself had been lengthy as Chuck struggled to describe his friend’s pain and his own discomfort raising the questions that had to be asked. But as a briefing from a detective to a prosecutor, it had been quick; the alibi checked out. I had a vague memory of the printout Chuck had run of Matt’s calls that night. “So? Something like that could easily take a couple hours.”

“But Hayden’s report shows he cleared from the call before ten, and no one else was sent to that address after he left. So either York stayed alone at the site of a confrontation—which cops are always testifying on the stand that they don’t do—or we don’t know where York was after Hayden cleared. And the bat? I looked at the autopsy report. The ME never said the weapon was a bat, just a blunt instrument. My expert said it could have been anything, like maybe a police baton. And when word got out that Calabrese had a couple of bat-wielding suspects in custody, how hard would it have been for a cop to wipe some blood on a bat and get a few fibers from the Jeep in the impound lot?”

I wasn’t buying it. I’d had dinner with Matt York. The man I lived with loved him like a brother. No way.

Lisa must have sensed my resistance. “The other possibility is that whoever killed Crenshaw was smart enough to dump the bat near Hanks’s house after the news was out. Then, afterward, looking for something to shore up the case, one of your MCU detectives let a few fibers touch the bat.”

I sighed loudly.

“Come on, Sam. You know that kind of stuff happens. They get convinced they’ve got the right guy and want to make sure they seal the deal. Can you honestly tell me it’s not at least a possibility with a guy like Calabrese?”

I took the affidavit back from her. “Is this all you’ve got?”

She opened the file in her hand and began handing me more documents. “This is the printout from the call with York and Hayden, showing Hayden cleared more than an hour before York. These are my investigator’s notes from a phone interview with Annie Hunter at the Rape Crisis Center. And these are his notes from interviews with two of Tamara’s coworkers at Fred Meyer, confirming she said she was leaving with an ex-boyfriend and his friend.”

“All right. I’ll get back to you.”

“He didn’t do it, Sam. You need to do the right thing. Despite our history, I’m trusting you on this.”

The second Lisa left, I began a furious review of the file, searching for something to contradict her version of the story. Instead, I found what in hindsight appeared to be obvious signs that Corbett’s so-called confession was indeed false. I read the statement that he signed. Every fact contained in it—the car, the bat, the carport—had been mentioned directly by Calabrese during the prolonged questioning. Corbett had offered absolutely no independent detail that could be corroborated. We should have insisted that he provide verifiable specifics. But we were stressed, exhausted, and relieved to get the statement. We got sloppy.

Then there were the notes from my conversation with Jake Meltzer, the sheriff’s deputy who transported the defendants back to holding after arraignment. The mean one didn’t ask the stupid one why he told the police what happened. Rather, he asked him why he
didn’t
tell the police what
really
happened. At the time, I thought Hanks was angry that Corbett hadn’t taken more of the responsibility in his so-called confession. Now it sounded like he’d been referring to Tamara.

I read everything about Peter Anderson’s identification again. His initial description appeared to match the defendants. On the other hand, it was vague enough to describe most young white men. As for the throw-downs, human memories are notoriously malleable. Anderson could very well have caught a glimpse of the defendants’ pictures on television during the fog of his hangover, without even realizing the distortion of his own recollections.

I studied Tamara Lyons’s affidavit. The defendants showed up at Fred Meyer at a quarter to ten, rowdy and ready to party. She told them to get lost, having tired long ago of Hanks’s unreliability. When Hanks threw in the promise of meth, she changed her mind. Two hours later, she was bent over the backseat of Hanks’s Jeep, the defendants taking turns on her from behind. An hour after that, she called her girlfriend; then it was on to Annie the counselor. I’d have one of the detectives verify it, but I could tell it would all check out.

I turned to the physical evidence. The discrepancy between the amount of blood in Percy’s carport and the absence of blood on the defendants’ clothing was newly troubling. Whatever small amount of blood that had been on Hanks’s jean jacket was gone, and it could have been Tamara’s. No blood in the Jeep. That left just the bat.

I called John Fredericks at the crime lab. “Tell me about carpet fibers.”

“They’re these fibers, and they come off of carpets.”

Sarcasm’s the price you pay in my business. “I’m serious. About that bat: I know fiber comparisons aren’t as reliable as DNA, but how good are they?”

“When done well, they’re good. And we do them well. Between me and you, is it
possible
that the fibers came from somewhere other than the Jeep? Sure, because, like you said, carpet’s not unique, like DNA. But I can tell you that whatever carpet the fibers came from, it was the same kind and color as the carpet in the car. Why all the questions?”

“I’ve got a defense attorney crying bullshit, that’s all.” There was no need to fill Fredericks in on the details yet. “So if she argues at trial that someone put the fibers on the bat after the fact to frame the defendant, is that even possible?”

“Again? Between the two of us? Yeah, because the blood on the bat was in fact smeared, most likely against the victim’s own clothing, which was smooth microfiber and didn’t shed any fibers. So the bad guy could take the bat, rub it against the Jeep’s carpet, and there you go. The problem with that scenario is there’s no blood transfer to the Jeep. Not a problem for us, though, because of all the crap in the truck. The fibers were probably loose, and whatever garbage was beneath the bat got tossed at the same time.”