Eight in the Box (18 page)

CHAPTER 55

A
s Connie finished his baked potato and drank the last of his skim
milk, Angel Alves pushed open the conference room door, balancing a cup of coffee and a stack of reports. “I can’t stay and visit,” he said. “Connie, these are the FIOs you asked for.”

“Sweet.”

“What’s an FIO?” Monica asked, sipping her mug of tomato soup.

“Field Interrogation and Observation report,” Connie said. “Every time the Youth Violence and the Anti-Crime guys see someone they know hanging out on a corner, they take down all their information, name, DOB, address, who they’re with. Then they enter all that info into a report.”

“Connie wanted to know what our boy Jesse’s been up to, so I ran his name and came up with this,” Alves said, waving the reports in front of him. “Wait till you see the rapscallions he’s been hanging with.”

“Jesse who?” Monica asked.

“Wilcox,” Connie said.

“Connie’s white whale.” Mitch was wrapping up the rest of his sandwich.

“Be careful with this guy. You don’t want him thinking it’s personal,” Brendan said.

“Don’t worry about me.”

“He already beat you on the motion,” Nick said. “He’s halfway to another acquittal.”

“I have faith in Connie.” Alves slipped the FIO reports onto the table.

“Anything new in the Blood Bath case?” Connie knew everyone was interested in the topic, but he knew Alves well enough to ask.

“Nothing specific. Checking known sex offenders, recent DOC and jail releases. Even halfway houses. Mooney’s still considering them possibly sex-related. I’m not so sure anymore.”

“Makes sense to see if he just got out of lockup,” Connie said. “He’s probably some scumbag that’s walked through the system a million times and keeps getting off with a wrist slap. Our system is such a joke.”

“What are you talking about?” Brendan said, his mouth full with the last bite of his Italian sub from Spinale’s. “You think you’d be more than happy with the way you’ve been banging out guilty verdicts lately.”

“Who cares about guilties?” Connie said. “I’m talking about a system where we end up with uneducated people deciding the fates of criminal defendants who are facing the loss of their precious liberty. I think it’s fucked up.”

Nick put down his burger, wiped his mouth with a napkin, and straightened up in his chair. “What’s so fucked up about it?” he asked. “The right to a fair trial by a jury of our peers is the heart of our legal system. It’s one of our most fundamental rights guaranteed by the Constitution.”

Connie laughed. “The only thing the system does is guarantee that every person with a brain is too busy to serve on a jury, leaving us with jurors that belong in that
Star Wars
bar.”

“The Cantina?” Brendan interrupted.

Mitch laughed, nearly choking as he sipped from his thermos cup of black tea.

Connie said, “What we need in this country are panels of judges or professional jurors with a certain level of intelligence. Then we’d be guaranteed true and just verdicts.”

“You don’t think we get just verdicts?” Monica asked.

“All we have is a game where the defense attorneys try to get a bunch of half-wits on the jury so they can trick them into finding a reasonable doubt. I’ve had success over the past year because I’ve learned how to play the game better. Why should I care about getting a true verdict if no one else does?”

“Have you forgotten that you’re a prosecutor?” Nick asked indignantly. “You’re not supposed to blindly advocate for convictions. You’re supposed to uphold the law and try to do justice. You can’t look at this like it’s a game you’re trying to win. That’s unethical.”

“Don’t give me that
unethical
shit. The reason we have to play these games is this ass-backward jury system. We need a system where professionals who are well schooled in the law determine the facts of the case and then mete out punishment.”

“You mean like Richters?” Mitch said.

“What?” Nick asked.

“In Germany they use panels of judges instead of jurors. They’re called Richters. One of the useless facts I remember from Crim Pro.”

“I like that word,” Brendan said. “When I grow up I want to be a Richter.”

“Who the hell wants to live in a society where a select group acts as judge, jury and executioner?” Nick asked.

“I do,” Brendan said.

Nick shook his head. “What are you, a Nazi?”

“Here we go. Calling me a Nazi to attack my credibility is an argument
ad hominem,
” Brendan said.

“I don’t know anything about
hominem
s, but I don’t think that the Germans have historically been fair in the way they hand out justice,” Nick said.

“I’m with Brendan on this one,” Connie said.

“Me too,” Mitch chimed in.

“Ditto.” Alves hadn’t said much. He seemed ready to leave at any moment but looked to be enjoying himself. “If you had panels of judges, you’d be less likely to end up with bag jobs like the one Connie and I just got hit with on the Wilcox case.”

Connie turned to Monica. “You’re still new, so you should learn this now, before you’re led astray by defense-attorneys-in-training like Nick. The first day I walked into this courthouse Liz told me that none of this was on the level. I didn’t know what she meant at the time, but I figured it out soon enough. If you follow my lead, you’re definitely going to win some trials, unlike Nick, who’s lost all ten of his trials.”

“Low blow.” Brendan laughed.

Monica turned toward Nick in disbelief. “You’ve lost ten trials in a row.”

Nick looked down at the table.

“I don’t mean that as an insult to you,” Connie said. “You’re the one who thinks this isn’t about winning and losing. It’s about justice being served, right? Maybe justice prevailed at each of your trials. Maybe those defendants were innocent. All we can do is take the facts we’re given, then paint them in the light most favorable to our cause. If that’s not a game, I don’t know what is.”

“It’s not a game,” Nick said. “I don’t prosecute someone unless I truly believe they committed the crime. I need to believe it beyond a reasonable doubt before I try to convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.”

“You can believe it beyond all doubt, but you still don’t know what happened. Everything really starts with jury selection. You need to figure out which jurors are going to connect with you and trust you. Otherwise you’ll never win.”

“It always comes back to winning and losing with you,” Nick said. Monica was still glaring at Nick, but he wasn’t looking back. “Maybe it does bother me that all of my trials have been not guilties. But maybe those defendants
were
all innocent and justice did prevail.”

“Let me tell you something about justice,” Connie said. “Everyone we prosecute is judged to be guilty or not guilty. Nobody is found innocent, because nobody is innocent. Today’s victim is tomorrow’s defendant. Justice does come down to winning and losing. If I think a defendant is guilty, the only justice I’m looking for is a win and a guilty verdict.”

“You need to change the way you look at things. I don’t expect you to be totally idealistic, but it would help if you had some faith in the system you’ve chosen to work in.”

“You misunderstand me.” Connie stood up from the table. “I have absolute faith in the system. I have faith that jurors are stupid and gullible. I have faith that I know how to manipulate them. And I know I am going to launch Jesse Wilcox, even without the evidence Judge Ring stole from us.”

“That’s what I like to hear,” Alves said.

CHAPTER 56

“I
think that went well, don’t you?” Mooney said.

Alves couldn’t even look at Mooney as they closed the door to the commissioner’s office behind them. “My career is over,” Alves said. “I just made Homicide. Everything was going so well. Now it’s over.”

“I’m not going to let you get hurt,” Mooney said. “I took the hit. He knows I’m the one who shit-canned our friends from Quantico. I’ll be sure to tell the mayor too.”

“You saw him, Sarge. He blames us both. He thinks I should have stopped you.”

“Don’t worry, Angel. I’m the one that’s going to get screwed when this investigation ends. At least we’ve still got the case. That was the plan all along.”

“Sarge, he said he’s going to ship you to Evidence Management in Hyde Park.” Alves pictured the aluminum building that resembled a cavernous storage shed stuck on a tired street at the edge of Boston’s city limits.

“Yeah, but he won’t do it until we close the case. By then, all will be forgiven. He’ll assign me out there for six months just to send a message, then he’ll put me somewhere else.”

“Back on Homicide?”

“I don’t think so. He’s pretty pissed. I made him look bad with the feds and he’s one of the biggest FBI suck-ups around. He’s a member of the National Academy Associates.”

“I thought that pin on his lapel said NRA.”

“I wish. He took the NA course with the FBI back when he first made sergeant twenty years ago. He wears that pin every day. Civilians don’t realize what it is. I mean, what high standards! They even make you get a high school diploma,
or its equivalent,
before they let you in!”

“All that matters is that the guy wearing that pin is going to ruin our careers.”

“
My
career,” Mooney corrected him. “Stop crying about it and tell me what you’ve come up with on that funeral home angle.”

Maybe Mooney was right. No one was going to get in their way while they were working the case; and once it was solved they would be heroes. They just needed to focus on their work and they would be fine. “Nothing yet. But I’m looking into every one of them. If there’s anything there, I’ll find it.”

CHAPTER 57

T
he mayor, flanked by the DA, and the Boston Police Commissioner,
was having his usual difficulties saying exactly what he meant. Speaking without notes as he did, the man had a tendency to ramble and say too much. Halfway through a press conference updating the media on the progress of the investigation, the mayor announced that “The FBI profilers called in to assist on this case believe the killer has committed similar crimes, maybe in another city.”

“Good luck with that lead,” Richter said to the images on the television screen. The Tucson police had had no reason to focus their investigation on him. How would the police in Boston ever link him to what had happened so many years ago?

Sunday night, the end of spring break, but Richter hadn’t gone away because he needed to study for midterms.

Richter’s eyes were sore and his brain was pudding from reading all day. A trip to the men’s room, a splash of water on his face and neck, a quick lap around the University of Arizona’s main library and he’d be ready to focus again.

The floor seemed deserted. Then he spotted a young woman sitting at one of the long tables. She looked up and gave him a nod as he walked past. Maybe she needed a break too. A good discussion to get the blood flowing. Richter twisted his head awkwardly to see the title of the small book she was holding. A treatise on anarchy.

“I am the chairwoman of the Anarchists Club.” She smiled at him.

“The Anarchists Club?” he asked. “An organization for people who don’t believe in organizations and their rules—isn’t that an oxymoron?”

“Up to the Os in your vocabulary builder?” she sniped. Richter couldn’t tell how tall she was because of the way she was sitting. She had dark hair and brown eyes. If she lost the glasses she would have been pretty. She half smiled at him, as if to say she was tolerating his comment, certainly not closing the door to the conversation. “It’s not that we don’t believe in organizations, per se. It’s all forms of government that we oppose, because governments, by their very nature, are oppressive. We examine the androcentric derivation of the rules and strictures that shape our lives in traditional forms of government.”

“Androcentric? Up to the As in your vocabulary builder?” he asked.

She smiled.

“Look,” he said, pulling a chair from another table and sitting with his chest against the chair back, “men may have formed the governments and laws, but those laws are there to protect women as well.”

“We women have to stop thinking of ourselves as victims who need to be given structure in our lives by those who oppress us.”

She took off her reading glasses and looked at him more closely. She really was pretty. As she used her glasses to punctuate her points, Richter saw that her nails were bitten to the quick.

“So you’re not so much against rules as you are against government forced on you by men. You’re more feminist than anarchist.”

“The whole concept of government is a male idea, so feminism and anarchism go hand in hand,” she said. “I don’t believe we need laws, because people in their natural state are good.”

“John Locke, right? I’m more of a Thomas Hobbes fan, myself. Life in a society without laws would be ‘solitary, nasty, brutish and short.’” Richter smiled. “All you need is one person like Hitler and that throws off your whole system.”

“Hitler was able to do what he did because of androcentric concepts like nation, race and superiority. Without those prevailing ideas, he never could’ve thrived.”

Richter was pleased to see that she wasn’t a pushover. She liked to argue and didn’t let her emotions get in the way of reason. A young philosopher in training. “What about Nietzsche and his notion of superiority, that a superman could make the decision as to whether another should live or die? Without our laws, what would prevent an intelligent, logical, rational person from coming to the conclusion that less valuable members of society are dispensable?”

“Again, you’re falling back on your male paradigms.”

“Unless you’re going to have an all-female society,” he said, “you’re going to have male influences. And if you’ve got males, you need laws to control their violent impulses. Let me ask you a question: Do you think it’s wrong to kill another human being?”

“Excellent question,” she said. “This is one of my basic problems with government. Sometimes killing is sanctioned—executions, times of war. Other times it’s punishable by death or imprisonment. There’s no consistency in the application of your laws.”

“If you want consistency, then you should be able to answer my question. Should we never be able to kill or always be able to kill?”

Her dark eyes and long brown hair, which fell down past her shoulders, were a nice change from the countless blondes on campus. “For starters,” she said, “if we had no television, no violent movies, no pornography, no men brought up with football mentalities, we might have a shot at living our lives in peace without the restrictions placed on our civil liberties by a government.”

“Plato never watched television and never played football. He wrote in
The Republic,
‘Mankind censures injustice fearing that they may be the victims of it, and not because they shrink from committing it.’ You still haven’t answered my question,” he said.

“Of course it’s wrong to kill.”

“Is it inherently wrong, or have our laws just made it illegal?”

“Inherently wrong.”

“Perfect. You believe it’s inherently wrong, but what if I don’t? Without laws, government, police, prosecutors, what would stop me from killing?” He suddenly realized how loud his voice had gotten. They both stopped to see if they were disturbing anyone, but their section of the library was deserted. “I’m with Plato. The only reason it’s wrong to kill is because we don’t want others killing us.”

“So you really don’t think it’s wrong to kill?” she leaned toward him intently and asked in a voice just above a whisper.

“I’m not saying it shouldn’t be illegal to kill. I’m trying to make a distinction between something being morally wrong and its being illegal. Our society is becoming devoid of any sense of morality, so why hold on to this hollow belief that there is something morally wrong with killing another person? You said it yourself, sometimes we sanction killing of humans and sometimes we condemn it. I think we should be consistent.”

“We couldn’t exist as a society if we said it was okay to go around killing one another.”

“Of course it has to be illegal to kill people, but it’s no more wrong than killing any other living creature. I eat meat every day. We as a society have massive factories where we kill animals on an assembly line and package the meat neatly so we can eat it at our convenience.” Richter had made these same arguments in his philosophy class and easily converted half the class to his view.

“But those are just animals. It’s different with human beings. Human life is more valuable than farm animals or even pets.”

“Life is life. Let’s say I have a loyal dog that loves me so much he runs to me and jumps on me, licking my face every time he sees me. He brings so much joy into my life. Is my life any more valuable than his? Should someone be able to arbitrarily take that dog’s life?” Richter kept his voice low, but he could feel the anger building. He couldn’t allow that. He needed to control himself, not let emotion influence his argument.

“I see your point with pets, but as much as I love animals, we have to place a greater value on human life. How can any society, male or female, exist if people don’t have the basic right to live? Look at early human civilizations,” she said, frustration shading her voice. “These would be situations where killing for territory, family or self-preservation would be accepted. Such societies were based on aggressive male tendencies. The androcentric creations of nationalism and race are just extensions of those ideals.”

“So you think that if we had a society run by women we wouldn’t need laws to govern us?” he asked. “Let’s assume for a second that I’m living in that society. Without laws and the fear of being punished, what would stop me from getting up out of this chair”—he stood up—“walking over to you, and putting my hands around your neck?”

When Richter’s hands first touched her cool skin he meant only to demonstrate how easy it would be to kill someone, shattering the naïve fiction that people are good and don’t need laws to control them. But it felt so good, better than he had imagined. He was pleased at how thin and supple her neck was, his hands wrapping around it neatly, tightening his grip around her throat almost instinctively. She looked shocked at first, then hopeful he was just trying to make a point and not really hurt her.

He could feel her vulnerability as she strained to talk, to scream, to breathe. Her legs bumped under the table and she went after his fingers, trying to bend them back, but he was too strong. He felt her neck swelling, the blood backing into her chest and heart, trying to force its way to her brain.

It was incredible, holding life in his hands. How many times had he dreamt of this moment, never knowing if he would have the will to actually do it? But could he go through with it? He could simply pull away and she would live. It was too late for that. She was staring into his face. And it felt good to watch her life slip away, knowing that he was in control of the decision to kill her or let her live. He kept his grip on her as she struggled and fought until her body slid back into the chair.

People always thought about killing others when they were angry, but they seldom meant it. Richter had actually followed through on his desire, not out of anger, but simply because he chose to do it. He had wanted to know what it would be like to take someone’s life. The actual feeling was far more exhilarating than he had ever expected.

He stood there for some time, overcome by this feeling of power. Suddenly he remembered that he was still in the library. Stupid. What was he thinking? He spun around to see if there was anyone behind him. He walked up and down the adjacent corridor. The book stacks were clear. They were alone.

He started to walk away, and then stopped to look at her one more time. The pretty anarchist’s body was slouched in the chair with her head tilted back. Her eyes were open and bulging out of their sockets. The last thing they had seen was Richter. Her tongue was sticking out, her soft brown hair strewn across her face. It was a shame that she was going to look like such a mess when somebody found her. It seemed as though, in addition to losing her life, she had lost some of her dignity. For that he was sorry. He hurried back over to her, straightened her up in the chair and fixed her hair by brushing it off her face with the back of his hand.

She still looked terrible. He rested her arms on the table and placed her head down as if she were sleeping. That was better. She looked peaceful as long as you couldn’t see her face.

A flash of panic raced through him. Had anyone seen
his
face? Was the anarchist alone or was someone on the way right now to meet her for dinner? What about all the surfaces he had touched? He needed to stop, relax, think. He walked back into the men’s room and wet some paper towels. He wiped down everything he could think of, from the doors to the tables and the fixtures in the men’s room. As far as he was concerned he had never been anywhere near this woman, even if someone said they saw him with her.

Richter knew what he had done was impulsive, foolish, but he didn’t regret killing her, although he never should have done it in such a public place. For now he simply needed to make sure that he didn’t get caught. Should he leave the library? No. He’d be seen leaving the building around the time of her death and immediately become a suspect. His best course of action would be no action. He would go back to the carrel where he’d been studying and continue as if nothing had happened.

The police would be called when her body was found and Richter would say he was in another part of the library. The police would never expect the killer to stay in the library. Even if they did suspect him, it wouldn’t matter. As long as he stuck to his story, they would have no evidence against him. Never admit to anything. The best part was that he didn’t even know her name. If he didn’t know her, then he would have no reason to kill her. No motive. The perfect crime.

He took a final glance at her. As he studied her he realized that only a few minutes earlier he’d been talking and arguing with this woman. She’d possessed intelligence, feelings, beliefs and beauty. She’d had classmates, friends and family. Now he’d touched all of their lives as well. Richter, a person they would never meet, had made a massive, lasting impact on their lives and they didn’t even know it yet.