Judgment Calls

Judgment Calls By Alafair Burke

Synopsis:

An apparently simple assault case spirals into a complex web of violence and deception in this bold debut thriller.

Deputy District Attorney Samantha Kincaid walks into her office in Portland’s Drug and Vice Division one Monday morning to find three police officers waiting for her. A thirteen-year-old girl has been brutally attacked and left for dead on the city’s outskirts. Given the lack of evidence, most lawyers would settle for an assault charge; Samantha, unnerved by the viciousness of the crime, decides to go for attempted murder. But as she prepares for the trial, she uncovers a dangerous trail leading to an earlier high-profile death penalty case, a prostitution ring of underage girls, and a possible serial killer. And she finds her judgment not only in matters of the law but in her personal life called into question.

In Samantha Kincaid, Alafair Burke has created a complex, appealing character a woman consumed by a sense of justice, who is tough enough to take on a man’s world. Seamlessly moving between courtroom and criminal investigation. Judgment Calls reveals not only an insider’s knowledge of the justice system but a fresh new voice in the world of crime writing, and the start of a great new series.

JUDGMENT CALLS

Alafair Burke

ORION

First published in Great Britain in 2003 by Orion, an imprint of the Orion Publishing Group Ltd.

Copyright 2003 by Alafair Burke

The moral right of Alafair Burke to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 0 75285 714 2 0 75285 715 0 Set in New Aster

Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St. Ives plc

All the characters in this book are fictitious,

and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

Orion House

5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane London, we2H 9EA

For my loving parents, James Lee and Pearl Chu Pai Burke

One.

A February morning in Portland, Oregon, and it was still dark outside when I walked into the courthouse, the air thick with the annoying drops of humidity that pass for rain in the Pacific Northwest. No surprises there. What did surprise me was finding a Police Bureau sergeant waiting in my office.

I’m a deputy district attorney for Multnomah County, making me about one percent of the office that prosecutes state crimes committed in the Portland area. Since I took this job three years ago, I’ve gotten used to having voice mail and e-mail messages waiting for me on Monday mornings. People just don’t seem to realize that government law offices aren’t open on weekends. It’s unusual, though, and rarely a good sign, to find a cop waiting for you first thing in the morning.

At least I knew this one.

“Hey, Garcia, who let you in?” I said. “I thought we had some security around here.”

Sergeant Tommy Garcia looked up from the Oregon State Bar magazine he had lifted out of my in-box. He smiled at me with those bright white, perfectly straight teeth that contrasted beautifully with his smooth olive skin. That smile had led me to believe he was a nice guy when I met him for the first time three years ago, and I had been right.

“Hey, Sammie, what can I say? I love reading the part at the back that tells about all the bad lawyers and what they did to get disbarred or suspended. Gives me a sense of justice. You should be careful about giving me such a hard time, though. I might start to think you’re like the rest of the DAs around here, with a stick up your ass.”

Tommy’s in charge of the bureau’s vice unit, so I know him well. As a member of the eight-lawyer team known as the Drug and Vice Division, I talk to Tommy almost weekly about pending cases and see him at least once a month at team meetings.

“You must want something from me big and bad, Garcia, to be buttering me up like that. What is it,” I asked, “a warrant?” The local judges won’t even read an officer’s application for a search warrant unless it is reviewed and approved first by a deputy DA. In a close case, the cops tend to “DA shop.”

Garcia laughed. “You’re too smart, Kincaid. Nope, no warrant. I do need your help on something, but it’s a little more complicated.” He reached behind him to shut the door, looking at me first to make sure I didn’t mind.

“MCT picked a case up over the weekend, thinking it would be an attempt murder. The suspects are bad, bad guys,

Sammie. Two of them grabbed a girl out of Old Town. One of them started to rape her, but couldn’t get it up, so he beat her instead, and then the second guy finished what the first couldn’t. When they were done, they left her for dead out in the Columbia Gorge.

“I don’t know all the details, but apparently the initial investigation was a bit of a cluster fuck. It sounds like everything’s on track now, but O’Donnell was the riding DA and got pissed off at some of the early mistakes. So he’s planning on kicking it into the general felony unit for prosecution. You can pretty much figure out what’s gonna happen to it.”

The general felony trial unit is a dumping ground for cases that aren’t seen as serious. The trial DDAs often have extremely limited time to spend on them, and the overwhelming majority plead out to reduced charges and stipulated sentences during a fast-paced court calendar referred to as “morning call.” It’s the criminal justice system’s ugly side. Tim O’Donnell was a senior DDA in the major crimes unit. If he bumped a Major Crimes Team case down to general, he knew it was gone.

“Sounds bad, but it also sounds like MCT’s beef is with O’Donnell.”

“Yeah, well, O’Donnell’s mind’s not an easy one to change, and I think there’s another way to go here because of a vice angle. The victim’s a thirteen-year-old prostitute named Ken-dra Martin. Unlike most of ‘em, she doesn’t try to look any older. Wears schoolgirl outfits like that one girl used to wear on MTV before she got implants and started running around naked. What’s her name? My daughter likes her. Anyway, she looks her age, is my point.

“Turns out her injuries weren’t as bad as they first looked,

so the MCT guys know it’ll be hard to get attempted murder to stick. But they kept working the case, even after they realized that they could’ve handed it off to precinct detectives. This case is under their skin.”

Any reluctance on the part of the Major Crimes Team to hand over a case to precinct detectives was understandable. In theory, regular shift detectives are perfectly good investigators, but in reality, disappointed precinct detectives who were passed over for the elite MCT frequently drop the ball, deciding their cases must not be sufficiently “major” to warrant good investigations.

“I don’t doubt their earnestness, but I still don’t see why they’d come to DVD with this, let alone to me. I’ve never even handled an MCT case.”

“They figured because of the vice connection that someone in DVD might take the case from O’Donnell and run with it on something more serious than a general felony. And I’ve been watching you since you got here, Kincaid. You’re good, and this could be a case for you to show what you can do when given the chance.”

“Don’t think you can play me like that, Garcia. I know an ego stroke when I see it.” Of course, recognizing the stroke for what it was didn’t prevent me from succumbing to it. The truth was, he was right. I’d been eager to get my hands on a major trial. It’s a no-win situation: DVD cases aren’t sexy enough to prove yourself to the guys running this place, yet you’re supposed to prove yourself before you can try victim cases. Garcia was dangling a way for me to beat the system.

I wasn’t about to sign on for this, though, without knowing the details.

“I don’t think there’s much I can do about it, but I’m willing to talk. Have someone call me?” I asked.

“I can do better than that,” he said. “I got two MCT detectives waiting for you down the street.”

Garcia must’ve known he’d be able to work me. He had told Detectives Jack Walker and Raymond Johnson to wait for us at the cafeteria in the basement of the federal building. Created to provide subsidized meals to low-level government workers, the cafeteria had found a cultlike following among the city’s law enforcement crowd. A three-dollar tray of grease dished out by lunch ladies in hair nets had a certain retro appeal.

I exercised some moderation and got a bowl of oatmeal while Garcia waited for his plate to be loaded up with bacon and home fries. After he’d paid for our meals, he led me to a corner table.

“Jack Walker, Raymond Johnson, this is Samantha Kincaid.”

I shook their hands. Jack Walker was a beefy man in his fifties, starting to lose his hair, with a full mustache. His short-sleeved dress shirt stretched tight across his belly, the buttons pulling in front. His grip was almost painfully firm, and his palms were rough. He looked like a cop, through and through.

Johnson was a different story altogether. A tall well-built African American in his mid-thirties, Raymond Johnson looked and dressed like a GQ model. He wore a collarless shirt with a three-button charcoal suit. His hair was close-cropped, and he wore a diamond stud in his left ear. He shook my hand and held it just a little longer than necessary, which was fine with me.

“It’s nice to meet you both,” I said. “I’ve seen you around the courthouse, but I don’t think we’ve ever actually met.”

Jack Walker spoke first. “Yeah, likewise. I’ve been hearing a lot of good things about you from Tommy, here, and Chuck Forbes says you guys go way back.”

Suddenly, Johnson’s handshake made a little more sense. To say that Chuck Forbes and I go way back is to sanitize the situation considerably. I didn’t think Chuck would tell all to his cop buddies, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he had said something in a certain way with that grin of his that would clue a guy like Raymond Johnson in to the gist of his reminiscing.

I hoped I wasn’t blushing. “Well, I don’t want to disappoint you, but it’s a long shot that I’ll be able to help.” I asked them to tell me about the case from the beginning, and Johnson took over.

“We got the call around three on Sunday morning. A group of high school kids went out near Multnomah Falls to party. They were all pretty drunk, and a couple of them hiked into the forest to get it on. The girl tripped over what she thought was a log. Turns out the log was Kendra Martin.”

He explained the facts in detail; I could see why he enjoyed a reputation among the DDAs as one of the bureau’s best witnesses. “She was wearing a bra and a skirt pulled up over her hips, nothing else. No purse, no ID. Real beat up, finger marks on her neck, blood coming out of her bottom.” I looked down, trying to hide my discomfort. Johnson continued. “The kids called police and medical. Looking at her, everyone assumed the worst. Her pulse was slow, she wasn’t moving or talking, her face and body were covered with blood. The med techs took her straight to Emanuel Legacy, and patrol cops called in MCT. We page O’Donnell and tell him what we have, and he says we don’t need a DA to come out. We don’t have a suspect in custody yet, and the scene where we found the vie, even if it turns out to be the crime scene, is already fucked up by the high school kids. He tells us to keep working and to page him if we get a suspect or if anything big comes up over the weekend.”

This was promising to be a long meeting if Johnson didn’t speed it up, so I broke in. “How’d you guys split up the investigation?”

“Chuck and his partner, Mike Calabrese, supervised patrol in securing the scene, and Jack and I went to Emanuel to follow up with the vie. By the time we arrive, she’s been there almost an hour and doing a lot better. The ER doc told us that most of the blood was from the anal tearing and a single large laceration on her face. She was out of it and had a slow pulse because she was on heroin. To be on the safe side, the doctor gave her Narcan to knock the heroin out of her system and keep her from ODing. She was bruised up pretty bad, but she was basically OK by the time we got to the hospital.”

“So that’s when you realized it wasn’t a Major Crimes Team case after all,” I said, letting them know that Garcia had already filled me in on the jurisdictional problems.

Jack Walker responded. As the senior detective he probably felt the need to justify the decision to keep the case with MCT. “Depends on how you look at it. Yeah, if patrol had known at the scene what the vicactual injuries were, they probably wouldn’t have called us out. But once we got involved, we had a teenage vie saying that a couple guys pulled her into their car and raped and beat her. She told the doc she didn’t know how heroin wound up in her system; that they must have injected her during the assault without her realizing it. It looked like a straight stranger-to-stranger kidnap, doping, rape, and sod of a little girl. It didn’t seem right to bump the case down to shift detectives.”