Authors: Alafair Burke
Never Tell (18 page)
I
t was Thursday—three full days since Julia Whitmire’s body had been found, nearly two since they’d arrested Casey Heinz—and Ellie was the last to arrive at the conference room of the district attorney’s office.
“You see the cover story on this week’s
New York
?” She tossed her copy of the magazine, fresh from the newsstand, onto the faux veneer of the table for Rogan and Max to see.
“Prep School’s Deadly Pressures?” was the cover story, complete with side-by-side headshots of Julia Whitmire and a boy named Jason Moffit, smiles beaming, full of life.
Max flipped to the article. “Says here the NYPD continues to investigate Whitmire’s death but that inside sources say it’s almost surely a suicide.”
“Don’t look at me,” she said. “I don’t leak to the press. There was no shortage of people at the callout who were thinking the same thing, though. The article’s not really about Julia, even. They’re using her death plus this other student’s heroin overdose to shine a light on the pressures those Casden kids are under. That headmistress is probably tearing up the pages into little pieces as we speak.”
Donovan looked at his watch. “Folger sent me an e-mail saying he was running a few minutes late. Traffic on the FDR.”
They were waiting for Casey Heinz’s defense attorney, Chad Folger. A sit-down between the investigating detectives and the defense attorney wasn’t typical, but from the start nothing about this case had been normal. The initial label of suicide. The involvement of a hired investigative firm. The reward money.
“Folger’s a heavy hitter,” Rogan said. “How’d a kid from a homeless shelter swing his retainer?”
“He didn’t. Folger’s doing it pro bono. The lady at the shelter—”
“Chung Mei Ri,” Ellie offered.
Rogan pointed at her. “Rainman, right here.”
“Ms. Ri called one of the big, national LGBT advocacy groups. Folger’s on their list—a gay brother or something. Now Folger says he has important information and wanted a meet as early as possible. This case is such a quick-moving target that I insisted you two participate.”
They heard a rap on the door before it opened. A well-suited man in his early forties walked in. Ellie recognized him most recently from daily trial coverage of one of the country’s biggest corporate fraud prosecutions. The defense had won.
“Hey, sorry for the wait. You must be Ellie Hatcher and J. J. Rogan. Casey told me you guys have been pretty decent to him, under the circumstances.”
Rogan raised a skeptical brow. “Can’t say we’re used to defendants calling us the good guys.”
Chad Folger smiled broadly. “Maybe ‘good guys’ is pushing it a little. But decent. He definitely said you were decent. High praise, though, compared to what I usually hear.” He offered a quick handshake to Max. “Donovan.”
Once they were seated at the table, Folger immediately leapt to his feet again, taking over the small room with his pacing. “So, let me start by thanking you for hearing me out today. I want to make clear at the outset that Casey isn’t raising any allegations of wrongdoing or abuse against you guys, or anyone at the NYPD for that matter.”
“Because we’re decent,” Rogan said with a smirk.
“Precisely. But Earl Gundley’s another matter. And the Neanderthals he hires as quote-unquote security associates are even worse.” He reached into his briefcase, pulled out a Redweld folder bulging at the seams, and dropped it to the table. It landed with a loud thud. “Those are complaints filed against Gundley when he was still with the department.”
“We were told he was never disciplined,” Max said.
“True, the complaints were eventually dismissed, but I think we all know that smoke sometimes means fire.”
“Only sometimes,” Max emphasized.
“And
that
is why I also have three file boxes in my office, each filled with civil complaints against Gundley’s security company. Excessive force. Breaking and entering. One lady whose husband hired Gundley to document her infidelity alleged that these guys snuck into her bathroom to photograph her and the personal trainer going at it in the shower. They call themselves security, but they’re glorified thugs.”
Ellie could only imagine what a lawyer with Folger’s talents would do with the fact that someone had threatened Adrienne Langston—a continuation of activity that began with Julia—yesterday morning while his client was in custody.
“With all due respect, Mr. Folger, I was unhappy about Gundley’s involvement, too,” Ellie said. “But it doesn’t change the fact that Casey had a key to Julia Whitmire’s house and a pair of her panties.”
“She gave him the key two months ago, just in case he ever needed a place to stay in an emergency. It was an act of kindness on her part, but not one he intended to take her up on. He honestly forgot he had it.”
“Big thing to forget,” Max said.
“It’s not like you guys asked if he had a key. You asked how many times he’d been alone with her, and he told you the truth. As it turns out, during the last of those times, they were intimate together. She tucked the panties in his jacket pocket as a little surprise for later or something.”
Ellie couldn’t recall a defense attorney ever confirming such an incriminating fact.
Apparently neither had Max. “Chad, you sure you’re not working for us on this one?”
“I spent six hours with this kid yesterday, and I think I get it now. He is seriously in love with one of Julia’s friends.”
“Ramona Langston,” Ellie offered.
“Exactly. Even the way the kid says her name, you think his eyes are going to roll out of his head. But not every girl’s ginning up to date someone in Casey’s . . . situation. And then here’s this adventurous, beautiful girl, Julia, laying it on pretty heavy. It happened one time, and that was it. Casey didn’t want Ramona ever to find out.”
“Not even when his arrest was at stake?” Ellie said. “He didn’t say a word when he realized what we’d discovered.”
“The kid was absolutely terrified. Gundley’s guys were completely out of control. They yanked Casey off the street. They threatened him. They hurt him. And that was only the beginning. What they did to him amounted to psychological torture.”
“Oh, come on,” Ellie said. “Torture?”
“I don’t use that word lightly, Detective. These men should have been the ones placed under arrest. Initially, they grabbed at Casey’s chest from the outside of his shirt. When they realized he had flattened his breasts with an Ace bandage, two of them reached beneath his shirt and pulled the bandage down. Then they moved on to placing their hands against his crotch, mocking him for the obvious absence of male genitalia. One of them even said, and I quote, ‘You’re obviously confused, sweetie. You just need me to straighten you out.’ Casey would have confessed if they’d told him to, but they probably knew anything he said would’ve been completely inconsistent with the crime scene. So instead they coerced his consent to search his room at the shelter.”
Ellie thought about the grass stains on Casey’s pants. They could have come simply from the attempt to get hold of him at the park. Or they could’ve been from exactly the conduct Folger described.
Max tapped his knuckles against the conference table. “Anything else?”
“I know that lobbying for a client preindictment is old hat, but not from me. I’m telling you: Casey did
not
kill Julia Whitmire. In your gut, do you really believe you would have hooked him up if he had explained to you about the key and the underwear at the shelter Tuesday night? I’ll also have psychiatric experts testify that Casey is particularly susceptible to coercion. The trauma he has suffered in the past as a result of being female-to-male makes him especially fearful of the type of abuse that these men were threatening. He is also under psychiatric treatment for bipolar disorder, which can reduce a person’s ability to resist pressure.”
“Casey was doing handstands in the park a couple of days ago,” Max noted. “And these detectives talked to him at length. He didn’t seem either depressed or manic.”
“Manic-depressives aren’t constantly at one pole or another. Many can maintain periods of a normal mood for large segments of time. They can also suffer from mixed states in which signs of mania and depression occur simultaneously. You’ll see on the jail intake form that my client was carrying two powerful antipsychotic drugs prescribed to him by a Dr. David Bolt.”
As Ellie jotted down the name in her notebook, she realized it looked familiar. When she’d watched the online video of that debate at NYU, Bolt had been the expert defending the use of psychotropic medications in children.
“My understanding is that it’s an experimental use of the drugs. Ironically, it was your star witness, Brandon Sykes, who told Casey about the clinical trial. I’m still gathering information about Casey’s diagnosis, but I’m confident it might also help you understand why Casey seemed so resigned when he was arrested. As for Brandon Sykes and Vonda Smith, I’m just beginning to scratch the surface with those two, but I can already tell you, Max, you don’t want them in front of a jury. Vonda’s an addict who routinely flirts with old men and then steals their wallets once grandpa takes her home.”
Ellie shot Max a concerned look. The lawyer’s characterization was consistent with what they’d learned from Chung Ri.
“And that drug trial Brandon got Casey into? Turns out Brandon faked his diagnosis. Think about that: he’s taking an experimental antipsychotic for a mental condition he doesn’t even have, all for the hundred bucks a week being paid by the researchers. You don’t think he’d lie about Casey with a hundred grand on the line?”
Folger finally took a seat and placed both palms firmly on the table. “Look, I’d usually just wait for trial, but I really think if you take a close look, you’ll see that dismissing this mess before it goes any further is the right thing to do. Otherwise, I
will
advise Casey to exercise his right to testify in front of the grand jury. You might think you can control what happens in a grand jury room, but I guarantee you that someone on that panel
will
want to hear the full story. The grand jurors can then call their own witnesses. They will ask Gundley the hard questions, whether you want them to or not. They’ll want to meet Vonda and Sykes. They’ll want to know more about Julia, which means hauling in her parents and those zombies from Casden. We’ve got a
New York
magazine article saying it was suicide. And even if the grand jury indicts, we still have trial. Right now, neither the DA’s office nor the NYPD is implicated in what has happened to my client. But if you side with Gundley’s team on this, I won’t have a choice. You will become responsible by association.”
She could see why clients paid a pretty penny for this guy’s services. It didn’t always come down to skills in the courtroom. Folger had read the politics of the situation perfectly. He knew that the Whitmires and Casden were already pulling the district attorney’s office in two different directions. Now there was the prospect of front-page stories pitting the city’s wealthy and powerful against an abused homeless kid.
If Max was feeling the pressure, he didn’t show it. “I need some time to look at this.”
“Let me know what you decide. You’ve got until Monday to go to the grand jury before Casey gets sprung.”
T
he only psychiatrists Ellie had ever known were ones who worked for the state. The experts who evaluated defendants who claimed insanity. The ones who’d shown up for civil-commitment hearings back when she was on patrol and concluded someone had crossed the line from merely off their rocker to an official danger to themselves or others. The ones she’d been forced to meet with for her own supposed benefit at various times in her career—after the Wichita Police finally caught the serial killer her father had spent his entire adult life hunting, after she had killed a man at Gerard’s Point, after she had witnessed her lieutenant put two bullets in the neck and stomach of a former friend.
Based on the appearance of his Upper West Side digs, Dr. David Bolt wasn’t like any of those state-employed shrinks. Rather than utilitarian faux-mahogany office furniture, Bolt had opted for sleek, minimalist decor. Small footprint, they called it. White irises adorned the corners of the waiting room. A faint scent of ginger lingered in the air. The terrace in his office offered expansive Central Park views.
It didn’t seem like a place for crazy people. The space reminded her of the day spas her ex-boyfriend the investment banker used to try to send her to. According to him, those hours were supposed to teach her the values of “rest and relaxation.” He was trying to persuade her to “spoil herself.” But Ellie’s idea of rest and relaxation was a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black and an entire season of
30 Rock
in one sitting. Trapped in a dark room, being rubbed down like a piece of Kobe beef to the recorded sound of chirping birds, was her version of being drawn and quartered.
As for the man himself, she placed him at about fifty. She would have expected him to look slicker, based only on the office decor, but she’d already had a brief preview of his appearance online. Today he wore a gray wool sweater over a button-down shirt and black trousers. He had floppy, longish brown hair and a genuine smile.
As they explained the reason for their visit, he scribbled some notes on a Post-it and then crossed his arms like an umpire watching an instant replay.
“Ah, damn it. I’ve been out of med school twenty-six years, and, you know, this is only the third time I’ve been in this jam.”
“And what jam is that?” Rogan asked. Ellie noticed that Rogan had crossed his arms, too. Sometimes she wondered whether men had learned to mimic each other’s body language back in cave times.
“See? I am just not good at this. You come here asking me about someone named Casey Heinz. I’m not allowed to tell you whether I even know a person by that name. I guess you can probably draw some inferences from the fact I think this is a jam. My sister’s husband’s a cop. He’s in Detroit, though. My point is, I want to help you out.”
“So . . . sounds like we’re all on the same page,” Ellie said.
“Except I cannot reveal any individual person’s relationship to me as either a private client or a participant in a clinical trial. Were I to do so, I could have my ticket pulled by the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association, not to mention problems with the FDA for my research approval.”
“Casey Heinz told us that he was under your treatment,” Ellie said. “That waives privilege.”
“Except it doesn’t,” Bolt said. “A patient can reveal the fact of a doctor-client relationship without intending to disclose all of the details of said relationship. Or, at least, that’s what I’ve been told during my required continuing education classes. Not to mention, police officers sometimes bluff about what they already know about a person’s identity as a patient—not you, I’m sure, but I have colleagues who have fallen for those sorts of stunts.”
“So I guess we’ll meet with the district attorney and get a subpoena.”
“I really would like to help,” he said.
“Obviously.”
Usually that kind of sarcasm directed by Ellie at someone in Bolt’s socioeconomic status triggered phone calls to the lieutenant or lectures about respectful treatment of the public, but Bolt laughed. “Wow, I’ve become that dick my brother-in-law’s always complaining about. Tell you what, Detectives. I can’t reveal anything about individual patients, but I can tell you a little bit about my work in general.”
He extended his arm in the direction of two chairs on the opposite side of his desk.
“Equivan is a new pharmaceutical treatment for bipolar disorder, also known as manic-depressive disorder, or simply manic depression. Both the diagnosis and treatment of bipolar disorder in young people are controversial. Critics argue that kids will be kids. They say, for example, that while impulsive life changes might be clinically abnormal in an adult, young people aren’t yet able to gauge the seriousness of these decisions. Similarly, they say feelings of hopelessness and despair might be red flags in adults, but are simply a normal part of adolescence.”
“We just talked to a teacher this week who believes his students are all overmedicated,” Rogan said.
“Easy to say until you’ve got a child who’s slipping away.” Ellie remembered the passion Bolt had displayed in the NYU debate when he spoke about the pain and frustration he saw in his underage patients. “That said, many of the drugs on the market are experimental, and their use in young people is highly contentious. That brings us to my research. The idea behind Equivan is to use the active ingredient of an antidepressant, which can be quite risky as a treatment for bipolar disorder, but in combination with a mood stabilizer that has been found to be more effective alone than an antipsychotic.”
“You’re losing us, Doc.”
“Basically, we’re trying to blend the best of all worlds here. Take the good and counteract the bad. Equivan is actually an off-label combination of two currently available drugs. Equilibrium is the mood stabilizer; Flovan is the antidepressant—hence the name Equivan. We’re testing it specifically on subjects ages ten to twenty. This allows us not only to measure the effectiveness of the drug, but also to determine whether there is any interplay with age. Perhaps what works like magic in a young adult twenty years of age is detrimental to a ten-year-old. Obviously we want to know that. To participate in the trial, subjects must meet the criteria for Bipolar I disorder, the classic manic-depressive form of the illness according to the
DSM-IV
.”
Bolt started to explain the acronym but Ellie waved him along. Given the prevalence of mental illness among criminal defendants, every cop had heard of the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
.
“Subjects cannot be under any other current medication for depression or other mental illness. They must agree to the conditions of a drug research protocol, which includes a provision that subjects are randomly assigned to receive either active treatment or a placebo.”
“Not all the subjects are actually
getting
Equivan?”
“That’s correct. The use of a control group is standard in any respectable drug trial. If we gave every subject Equivan, we’d have no way of knowing whether improvements in mood and stability were due to treatment or some other factor, like weather changes, better employment stats, or plain, old-fashioned coincidence. So a quarter of our subjects get Flovan, a quarter get Equilibrium, a quarter get the Equivan combo, and the rest get a placebo.”
“So let’s say the drug combo works,” Rogan said. “That means you’re knowingly depriving some of these subjects of treatment, all in the name of science. Sorry, Doc, that sounds a little cold.”
“It’s not easy, Detectives, but that’s the scientific method. And that’s why our subjects have to sign rigorous disclosure and waiver forms. If it makes any difference, we can’t yet say we’re really depriving them of anything. Every subject receives outpatient therapy from me, a service for which some people in this city pay healthily, if I may say so. The whole point is that we don’t know yet whether the drug even offers a benefit. Equivan might do nothing. It might even make matters worse.”
“Our understanding is that subjects are paid to participate,” Ellie said. The Casden kids pay a fortune to be numbed, while the drug companies pay to get the rest of the population hooked as well.
“That’s not unusual. It’s not a tremendous amount of money, just modest compensation for time and transportation.”
Maybe it wasn’t a lot to an Upper West Side psychiatrist, but a hundred bucks to a sixteen-year-old homeless kid like Brandon Sykes was an entire day of panhandling plus a lot of luck. “Could someone fake a manic-depressive diagnosis?”
“In theory. It has happened before. But the
DSM
includes criteria that are specifically intended to help weed out false reports.”
“Got it. Now, still sticking to general information . . . is it true that someone with manic-depressive disorder might be more prone to coercion?”
“Certainly. In a depressive state, the person might not have the will to withstand pressure. They don’t really care about the downside because they’re feeling hopeless anyway, plus they don’t have the mental energy to counter the coercion.”
“And in a manic phase?” she asked.
“That one’s less intuitive. You might think that mania would cause a person to fight back. But in a manic episode, the person is not thinking about consequences at all. They start out dropping a buck in a homeless man’s donation cup. It feels so good to help another person that they hand the guy a twenty instead. The next thing you know, they’re at the bank, closing out their accounts to hand out cash on the street. In the situation you describe, a manic person might comply with one request, and before they know it, they’ve lost all control.”
“What about credibility? Might a manic-depressive be more likely to lie if he thought it would somehow help him?” She was thinking now about the credibility of Brandon Sykes.
“I mean we’re talking generalities, but, yes, that would be fair to say, for essentially the same reasons.”
“What about murder?” she asked.
“Excuse me?”
“Might a manic-depressive suddenly become violent and kill a friend during what should have been a minor argument?”
“It has certainly happened before. Manic episodes can be completely uncontrollable.”
“So if we have a homicide defendant who may be manic depressive, we’ll need to know whether they were taking drugs for the condition, right?”
“Well, the whole purpose of treatment is we hope it helps people. We hope that, with continuous use, it keeps them at normal for longer periods of time. We may not be able to cure the disorder, but we try to reduce the frequency, longevity, and severity of the swings between the two poles.”
Ellie smiled. She had thought Dr. Bolt’s offer to speak only in generalities would be a waste of time. She jotted down his last sentence verbatim in her notebook. He had just given them what they needed to force him to turn over Casey Heinz’s and Brandon Sykes’s patient files.