False Witness (34 page)

Snead sighed into the phone, as if he were talking to a renegade adolescent. “Did you tell them that particular deal's not on the table?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“It's the only deal they're willing to consider.”

“I see,” Snead said, though Isaiah was pretty sure he didn't. “Let me ask you a question, Mr. Haywood. And I want your gut-level, honest response.”

“Okay.”

“Do you believe them? Do you think the government is leaking information and using Mr. Hoffman as bait?”

Isaiah pondered this for a moment. “Honestly, I don't know.”

“I've been thinking,” Snead said. “Maybe we should up the ante and find out.” He couldn't have surprised Isaiah more if he had just announced his engagement to Jessica Simpson. “Instead of suing for specific performance of the memorandum of understanding, a case in which the government has nothing to lose, we could file for damages under the Federal Tort Claims Act.” Snead's gruff voice grew excited by the genius of his own idea. “We could take depositions and issue subpoenas—get to the bottom of this thing. We could sue for nine or ten million based on fraud and intentional infliction of emotional distress.”

Only Snead would think that a good tort suit could solve all of our problems,
Isaiah mused. “It'd be an even stronger case if the Hoffmans ended up dead,” he said sarcastically.

But Snead missed the tone of voice, intoxicated as he was with trial lawyer greed. “Yes, but it's still pretty strong. The Hoffmans are in fear for their lives. I've tried some asbestos cases where we recovered for fear of cancer even though the patient had no manifestations. Fear-of-AIDS cases for bad blood transfusions. There's precedence out there . . .” Snead trailed off as if he had been talking to himself all along.

“I'll call Wellington immediately,” Snead said, changing direction. “I'll get him started on the research and the pleadings. They gave us twenty-four hours to respond. We'll give them a shot across the bow.”

“I'm sure Wellington's got nothing better to do,” Isaiah said.

Allan Carzak was eating a late dinner at one of his favorite Italian restaurants, regaling some friends with courtroom stories while his wife rolled her eyes. His cell phone rang, the ringtone from
Mission: Impossible
, and he checked the caller ID. Sam Parcelli, FBI, still on the job late at night.

The Hoffman case was the first time he had worked with Sam, but the man was living up to his reputation. Intense, tenacious, uncompromising. Sam never gave it a rest. He had called Carzak several times late at night or on the weekends—the clock and calendar apparently of no consequence.

Carzak answered and asked Parcelli to hang on for a minute. “I'll be right back,” Carzak said to his dinner companions, then left the restaurant so he could hear Parcelli better.

“Somebody killed that young female lawyer's dog tonight; what's her name? Hang on . . .”

“Jamie Brock,” Carzak said.

“Yeah, Jamie Brock. She left the dog with her brother in north Georgia. Somebody poisoned it, left her a note. ‘You should have called.'”

Carzak thought about this for a second, scrunched his forehead. “Any leads?”

“We're assuming it's the same guys who assaulted her the other day. We've got sketches out and we're working with the locals, but so far we've come up dry.”

“How would the triad know about the hearing?” Carzak asked.

He waited while Parcelli collected his thoughts. The FBI agent was always precise and calculating—in what he said, in how he investigated cases, and especially during phone calls with U.S. attorneys. “That's an open question. Lots of possibilities. We're running some background checks on everyone who was in that courtroom today as well as Judge Torriano's law clerks. We'll look at the court staff in the clerk's office who had access to the initial pleadings. Somebody could have tapped into the clerk's computers, followed one of the law students or the professor around . . . Who knows? There're a thousand ways these guys could have found out. Sealed proceedings are still a sieve; you know that.”

Carzak couldn't argue with him. How many times had sealed negotiations or the amounts of confidential settlements or the testimony from secret proceedings found their way into the press? Virtually every high-profile grand jury hearing Carzak had handled, for starters.

“We need to take exclusive jurisdiction of this investigation,” Carzak said. He had shifted into problem-solving mode. “Witness tampering, obstruction of justice—we've got three or four grounds for running off the locals.”

“We've already done that. It's our case.”

There was defensiveness in the agent's voice—one of the weaknesses Carzak had already discovered. With other agents, Carzak had managed to build trust quickly; they were on the same side, after all. Often, Carzak and the agents became friends. But with Parcelli, there was an invisible wall. Because of the importance of the case, Parcelli was reporting directly to the FBI's deputy director. He chafed at any direction from Allan Carzak.

But that wouldn't stop Carzak from doing his job.

“Sam . . .” Carzak paused. He had learned the value of letting a person's name hang out there for a second—it made your point better than cursing or screaming ever could. “This is getting complicated. We can't let anything happen to this girl. I'll put the marshals' office on her 24-7 if that's what it takes.” The insinuation was subtle, but pointed nonetheless. If the FBI couldn't do the job, Carzak would deploy the U.S. Marshals Service.

“We've got it covered,” Parcelli said quickly.

“Let's hope so.”

The drive from her brother's house in Rabun County to her home in Atlanta was one that Jamie relished during the daylight hours. The north Georgia roads would wind their way to the peak of a Georgia mountain, where a curtain would part on a panoramic view of God's creation—rolling mountains, the rich greens of pines and oaks, meandering streams gurgling their way down the hillsides. It was here that kayak companies and white-water rafting outfitters dotted the waterways—giving tourists the rides of their lives on frothing rivers with Indian names.

Jamie could navigate the Class IV rapids just fine but preferred the glassy surface of Lake Lanier on a calm summer morning. She thrived on mastering the technical aspects of flat-water kayaking. Form, efficiency of stroke, stamina, and speed were enough to worry about. White-water kayakers had to yield themselves to the river, riding the unpredictable current the same way a person would ride a wild stallion. Jamie did not love what she could not control.

At night, the spectacular drive became a harrowing descent. The roads seemed to narrow, the slopes steepened, and the ever-present fog cut visibility to a minimum. Most drivers would clench the steering wheel a little tighter and concentrate on the next bend in the road. Jamie pulled out her cell phone and dialed Drew Jacobsen's number. She was tired, drained from the emotions of the day. It was late. She needed to talk with somebody.

Rationalizations, she knew.

It was the third time that day she had called. The first time was shortly after she discovered the note on her windshield, as soon as she had gotten off the phone with Chris. The second time was after Snowball died and Jamie had regained her composure. Drew told her that he would call the Rabun County sheriff's office and the FBI, who showed up forty-five minutes after Jamie arrived at Chris's house. On the way home, as she prepared to call Drew a third time, she wondered if she was wearing out her welcome.

If she was, she couldn't tell from the tone of his voice. His concern warmed her. But her emotions, she reminded herself, were on overdrive following Snowball's death. She couldn't trust herself right now; she knew that much.

Drew explained that the feds had asserted their jurisdiction and he had been instructed to stand down. He asked Jamie if the feds had contacted her yet about round-the-clock security.

They had sent a few agents out to her brother's house to interview her, Jamie said. They were going to meet her at the condo when she arrived home and check it out. She didn't think they would be watching her 24-7.

“Sounds like you need your own private protection,” Drew suggested.

Jamie started to decline. She was going to be a prosecutor someday; she would have to get used to death threats. But for some reason, she let the thought linger for a moment.

Long enough, it turned out, for Drew to think she was worried about cost. “I know a guy who's very good. And very cheap. He's got a full-time job with the department, but he moonlights under the right circumstances.”

He paused for a beat. “I think he's available.”

“Drew, I don't need you to do this. I'll be fine.”

But Drew insisted, and after an appropriate amount of protesting, Jamie conceded. In truth, Snowball's death and her own abduction had her pretty well stressed-out.

“What time are you getting to your condo?” Drew asked.

“I told the agents I would meet them there at midnight. I don't know how long they'll take to check things out.”

“I'll be there by one,” Drew said.

That night, Jamie's emotions stewed together in a toxic mix that poisoned any possibility of sleep.
Anger and hatred.
The scums who killed an innocent dog just to make a point. She fantasized about a shoot-out, the Kimber taking them down.
Confusion.
Who were her stalkers? Did they belong to the triads that Hoffman testified against? Or was this the Russian mafia? How did they know where Snowball was?
Fear.
Was she next? When? How could she protect herself?

But mostly,
loneliness
. As a puppy, Snowball had slept in a crate. The adolescent Snowball earned his own soft mattress on the floor, right next to Jamie's bed. But then he began the assault. Every few nights he would try his luck, jumping up on the foot of the bed, waiting to see if Jamie ran him off. In less than a month, he had established new turf.

She drew the line when he tried to worm his way up to the pillows. And she woke up more than once to find he had crowded her over to the very edge of the bed, or forced her, in a half-asleep state, to curl into a tiny ball so he could sprawl across the bottom of the bed.

And now, tonight, when she was on the verge of dozing off, she could almost feel him nuzzle against the crook in her legs or flop a paw over her foot or make those guttural noises that signified a deep and contented sleep. But then she would open her eyes and see the emptiness at the foot of the bed, and the pain would stab at her heart.

At three o'clock, she threw on a pair of jeans, a sweatshirt, a ball cap, and sandals and walked outside to the street in front of her house. She spotted Jacobsen's car, right where he said it would be, and climbed into the passenger seat.

“The first night's always the hardest,” he said.