Key Witness (80 page)

“Yeah.”

“This is what, about five days after the last murder took place?”

“Five days, that’s about right, yeah.”

“You were back on the case and you wanted to review the earlier killings, is that why you took them out?”

“Sure.”

“That’s SOP?”

“Yeah,” Marlow answered laconically, shooting his cuffs. “So what’s the problem?” he asked with the peevish voice of a busy man who’s wasting his time here.

“I’m trying to find out if there is a problem,” Wyatt told him, “because the particular time you took these files out you did it via your computer. They were transmitted to you through the modem in your computer, Detective. Here.” He turned to another page and showed Marlow where the access status was listed. “It says it right here: ‘accessed via computer.’ ” He turned to face Marlow directly. “You testified under oath that you had never accessed these files by your computer, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” the detective answered grumpily.

“That you always did it by going down to the records department and taking them out in person. You said that?”

“Yes,” came the world-weary response.

Wyatt shook his head. “This says otherwise, Detective. And the fact that it was done three days before Dwayne Thompson went to the grand jury makes me suspicious, you know what I mean?”

Marlow reared up in his seat. “What, are you accusing me of passing information on? You gotta be crazy. I never even met this guy.”

“Then how do you account for this?” Wyatt demanded, shaking the report in Marlow’s beefy face.

“I don’t know. But I never took any files out over my computer. I don’t know how to do it,” he said plaintively. “Ask anyone in the department. They’ll tell you.”

“You’re certain you didn’t take this set of records out through your computer,” Abramowitz asked, now that it was her turn.

“I just said that, Ms. Abramowitz,” he told her, clearly showing signs of stress and anger.

“But you might have taken them out,” she went on. “By going down to the records department. You were taking records of the murders out around this time, correct?”

“Of course. Especially after this last one, with all the heat that was coming down.”

“Let me show you something, Detective.” She walked to her table, picked up a bound stack of papers, and carried them back to the witness stand. “Would you look at these, please?”

While he shuffled through the set she’d handed him one of her flunkies tossed a duplicate set onto the defense table. Wyatt glanced at them quickly and put them aside.

“Do you recognize these reports?” she asked.

“Sure,” Marlow replied. “They’re the files from a series of armed robberies I worked on about three years ago.”

“Your files.”

“Yes.”

“Turn to page seventeen, please,” she asked him, “and read the sentence I’ve highlighted.”

He turned to page 17, which was the second-to-last page. “ ‘Report accessed via phone line to requestor’s computer,’ ” he read.

“Did you request this report to be transmitted to your computer three years ago?” she asked him.

“Hell, no.” He turned to the jury. “Sorry.” He looked at Abramowitz again. “I didn’t even own a computer three years ago.”

“Then how do you account for …? Ah, one moment, please.” She turned the last page over. “Here we are.” She read, “Transmitted over counter. Correction to previous listing.” She showed the last page to Marlow. “Is that what this says?”

He glanced at where her manicured finger was pointing. “Yeah,” he agreed, “that’s what it says.”

Wyatt looked at the last page of the report. The mistake had been fixed, in living black and white. He dropped the report on his table like it was a steaming dog turd.

“In other words,” Abramowitz continued, “the previous accounting for how this was given to you was in error.”

“That’s what it looks like,” he agreed again.

“Clerical error.”

“Yeah.”

“Does that happen occasionally,” she asked him. “Clerical errors in the police department? Or are you guys normally perfect, and this was a onetime mistake?”

“Perfect we’re not,” he said. “We’re way out-of-date, Ms. Abramowitz. These kinds of mistakes happen all the time.”

Putting that report down, she referred to the one Wyatt had brought in. “So it’s possible that the way you got hold of this report was also erroneously recorded?”

“Very possible.”

She walked back to her side of the room, shooting Wyatt a smug “Don’t fuck with me” expression. “No further questions, Your Honor. I hope we’ve finally put this red herring to bed,” she added pointedly.

Win some, lose some. Abramowitz had made a point with the jury with that clerical-error bullshit, but that didn’t mean the transmission of the Alley Slasher files had been screwed up the same way. There was no correction on the current report. As far as he was concerned, until he was shown conclusively that it hadn’t been sent via phone line to someone’s computer, he was going to go on the supposition that it had.

No biggie. Agnes Carpenter had come through great, and his ace was still in the on-deck circle. Tomorrow, when she testified, he was going to nail this fucker shut.

F
ROM THE REAR OF
the large chamber, hunched down in her seat so she wouldn’t be spotted, Violet Waleska had watched Wyatt’s virtuoso handling of Agnes Carpenter. He’s convincing me, she thought; and although she wanted only the best for him, her paramount concern was seeing her friend’s murderer brought to justice. But the deeper they got into it, the more doubts she had about whether or not Marvin was guilty. The woman could have been lying, to make her husband look bad. Any woman knew that feeling and could empathize with her; but it also meant that any woman could understand her less-than-pure motives; more than a man could, even a man as smart as Wyatt Matthews, her once and pray-to-God future lover.

She went to lunch, and by the time she got back it was too late to get inside for the Marlow reexamination. She would do so after the next break; if that wasn’t possible, she’d be here bright and early tomorrow morning to make sure she got the seat she wanted. Now she sat on one of the hard, worn, epithet-carved wooden benches outside the courtroom, watching the astonishing variety of human experience pass before her eyes.

A group of male prisoners, shackled, handcuffed, and bound together by waist chains, shuffled by her. They were led fore and aft by deputies, who ushered them into the courtroom across the hall from the one in which the murder case was taking place. As they passed her, something about one of them made her look at him more closely.

For a moment, the prisoner’s eyes met hers. Then he turned away and followed the man in front of him into the courtroom.

Who is that man? she thought. I’ve seen him somewhere. Where could it have been? She burrowed into her mind, but couldn’t place his face with a location. Having nothing better to do, and feeling a nagging urge to satisfy her curiosity, she got up and pushed open the double doors, entering the courtroom where the prisoner had been taken.

The room was almost empty; only a few spectators were scattered about in isolated pockets. The prisoners, now unshackled and uncuffed, sat shoulder to shoulder in the front row on the other side of the barrier. Violet, taking a seat near the rear exit, found her man easily; she could identify him by the back of his head—the hairdo looked familiar.

The men were being arraigned. As each name was called the prisoner stepped forward, to be joined by one of the lawyers who were congregated in the first few rows up front. The charges against them were read, they made their pleas in turn, the judge set bail, and the next prisoner was called.

“Elvis Burnside,” the bailiff read off from the list on his clipboard.

The man she’d been watching stood up. As he did, he glanced lazily around the room, as if to convey his extreme boredom with the proceedings. Again, for a fleeting moment, his eyes met Violet’s.

She remembered where she had seen him.

Staggering to her feet, her legs suddenly gelatinous, she walked as fast as she could to the doors and out, barely hearing, as they swung shut behind her, the charge against him, aggravated rape with deadly force, and his plea—“not guilty.”

She fidgeted nervously, shifting her weight from foot to foot, praying for a recess in Wyatt’s courtroom before the proceedings in the one she’d just left were over, so she wouldn’t have to see the man again when he came out.

Mercifully, the doors to courtroom 1 swung open. Spectators came out, stretching their limbs from the confinement of sitting still. She pushed past them into Judge Grant’s courtroom.

Wyatt was standing at the defense table, talking with his client and a black woman who was there every day and must be the client’s mother. As she walked down the aisle toward them he looked up and saw her. His eyes narrowed as he recognized her; he immediately gave an imperceptible shake of his head.

She knew better than to approach him. Instead, she walked to the woman who was working with him, his paralegal assistant she had talked with over the phone.

“Could I have a word with you?” she asked Josephine, bending her head in close so she could keep her voice low.

Josephine, startled by this sudden, unexpected approach, looked to Wyatt, who nodded, his eyes engaging Violet’s for the briefest of moments. “Okay,” she said warily. She led Violet to the rear of the courtroom.

Violet told Josephine about what she had seen in the adjacent courtroom. “Are you sure?” Josephine asked, feeling a rush of blood to her head.

“I’m positive.”

The two women stood in the doorway, looking out into the corridor. From the front of the courtroom, Wyatt watched them with intense curiosity. In a short while, the doors to the other courtroom swung open, and the prisoners, again cuffed and shackled, were led out by their deputy guards, heading for the elevators that would take them to the basement and then back to the jail.

As Elvis emerged into the hallway, Violet shrank back so that he wouldn’t see her. “That’s him,” she whispered to Josephine. “That’s the man I saw in Teddy’s bar the night Paula was murdered.”

B
Y THE TIME WYATT
had gotten back to the office at the end of the day, Josephine had culled through their messages and told him everything Violet had told her. That was awesome, shocking news. A man who was right now being arraigned for aggravated rape had been in the nightclub on the very night the last murder was committed?

Leafing through the message slips, he saw one that sparked his interest more than normal. Another chink in the armor, he hoped. Settling down at his scarred, paint-chipped desk, tie loosened, beer in hand, he dialed the law-bar examiner Joe Ginsberg had turned him onto.

“What have you got?” he asked. He listened for a moment. “You’re shitting me. Son of a bitch!” Some more dialogue from the other end, confirming his suspicions. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your doing this for me,” he thanked the man. Hanging up the phone, he called out to Josephine, “Hey! Come on in here!”

She scurried in, her own beer in one hand, a passel of paperwork in the other. Always with her hands full from the day I met her, he thought fondly. What would he have done without her? Whatever happened after the conclusion of this trial, no matter his status at the firm, he had to bring her along with him.

“What now?” she asked.

“Blake’s bar-exam score?” He smiled, leaning back in his chair and sucking at his beer bottle.

“What about it?”

“She got a sixty-six, not a seventy-six. I just got off the phone with my inside man.”

“So she was lying. Poor sad woman.”

“Uh-uh.” He waggled his head. “Not that simple. Her test book had sixty-six; but the recorded score on the computer was seventy-six.” He cocked his head at her, as if expecting her to figure out the rest.

Which she did. “The score on the computer was wrong.”

He nodded. “And …?”

“It was altered. Someone had changed it.”

His grin was wide and deep. “You betchum, little lady. Somebody hacked into their computer and changed her score. They’re compiling the information and messengering it over. I’ll have it before the end of the day tomorrow.”

She shook her head in amazement. “I wonder who.”

“Yes, it’s a mystery to me, too,” he said sarcastically. “Could the mystery hacker’s initials be D.T.? We need her computer, right now. What’s the deal with the court order for it?”

“Grant turned us down; the nexus isn’t strong enough, given that there’s no record of her taking out those files.”

“I’m going to go back to him again. He needs to hear about this latest development. There’s enough circumstantial evidence around Blake’s computer that we should be able to see what’s inside it.”

“If that doesn’t work, maybe it could get lost and some friend of ours could find it,” she offered. “People lose things. Stealing computers is a major industry nowadays.”

“I think not,” he said, reining in her enthusiasm. “It’s considered against the law to steal someone’s property.”

“I meant …”

“Let’s keep trying through legal channels. One more go-around, at least.”

“Okay.” She dropped into the chair opposite his. “This guy the Waleska woman saw. That’s major.”

“Maybe. Let’s not get our hopes up. Who’s baby-sitting Leticia Pope?” he asked, changing the subject to his main concern of the moment.

“Dexter and his posse. They’ve got her surrounded. Do you need her in here tonight, last-minute go-around? I could call Dexter on his pager.”

Wyatt shook his head. “That’s not necessary. I’ll spend an hour with her tomorrow morning before we go into session. She’s ready; she’s going to do fine.” He reached for his suit coat. “Let’s wrap for the day.”

They walked to the elevator together. “They’ve got Dwayne Thompson, we’ve got Leticia Pope,” Josephine commented as they rode down to the garage. “It doesn’t seem like an even match.”

“It isn’t,” he agreed. “He’s experienced, he’s persuasive, he’s done it before. She’s none of that.” They reached her car. He waited while she unlocked it and got in. “She only has one thing going for her that he doesn’t have. She’s telling the truth, and he isn’t.”