Prime Witness (17 page)

Yesterday I caught him mucking in Iganovich’s case, returning a phone call to the U.S. Department of Justice through which all correspondence must flow on its way to Canada. The U.S. Attorney General is the diplomatic conduit for all formal communications in the international law of extradition.

I chewed on Roland for five minutes and told him he was not to intervene in this matter again. He called it an emergency, something that could not wait. I kneeled on him one more time, and he appeared properly rebuked, said he understood. But with Roland, I suspect that such assurances are only good until the next time.

The menus arrive. Overroy recommends the lobster to me. “Delicious,” he says, kissing three fingers like a five-star chef. At market price it should be.

There are a few toasts around the table. Goya to the secretaries for their silent tribulations in making the office function.

Overroy, not to be outdone, offers another.

I propose a quiet toast to Lenore Goya, a shameless attempt to pluck at the strings of guilt.

“To a great lawyer,” I say. “Someone we respect and who we will miss greatly.” I nod toward her.

Lenore takes up her glass and smiles at me. With all that has happened, she still harbors me no ill will.

“I can honestly say that for the most part working with all of you has been a pleasure, a high point of my life,” she says. She is smiling. “And there are others that if I lived two lifetimes, I will never forget.” I catch her glancing slight sideways slits of hostility at Overroy, who is oblivious, working on one of the little snails with a thing that looks like a chrome cross between a nutcracker and pliers.

Harry Hinds has come over, across the river, in response to my call. He thinks maybe I’m getting ready to pack it in. Harry has come to encourage me to do the right thing, to cut and run. We are in my office with the door closed. I can hear Overroy outside at the public counter telling some off-color joke in a feigned Mexican accent.

“Got yourself in a little mess?” says Harry.

“What makes you think that?”

“With a hiring freeze, in a few months the place will look like a ghost town, you and an empty office.”

“Nonsense,” I tell him. “Nobody would hire Overroy.”

He laughs at this.

“I’ve got a plan,” I tell him.

“So did Hitler,” he says. “It ended outside a bunker where they turned him into crepes suzette. Why don’t you tell ’em to jam their case where the sun don’t shine and come back where you belong?”

What he means is on the right side of the law, with the honest perpetrators of crime. There have been times in the last weeks when this has looked appealing.

“The supervisors will authorize one more body under contract,” I tell him, “part time, to help out with the Putah Creek thing. They figure they can still save a little money on the benefit package.”

“Good! Some fool’s gonna buy bleeding ulcers with no health insurance,” he says.

I arch an eyebrow and look at him.

There’s a moment of silence, mental telepathy as my thought waves settle on him like ether.

“Wait a second,” he says. “No way. Not a chance. I’ve got my own practice. Uh-uh.” He says this with meaning.

I give him a look, like what are friends for?

“You’re incredible,” he says. “I’m shoveling shit against the tide trying to hold your practice together while you’re over here, and now you want me to join you in this fools’ paradise?” Harry is now overseeing two younger associates, lawyers he has brought in to handle some of my lighter cases.

“It pays three thousand a month—for half-time work,” I tell him.

I can see a look in his eye, the glint of money. But he hesitates for only an instant.

“Not a chance,” he says.

Though I tempt him like a demon, it is what I expected from Harry. He has an abiding distrust of all things governmental. To Harry, signing on with the state would be to deal with the devil. He leaves me no choice. I will go and grovel with Goya.

I have no manhood left, but I have at least solved my problem. Two days have passed, and my knees still feel the psychic ache of having crawled on the hard linoleum of her office floor. Harry is back in my office, bringing papers for me to sign, some cases from my office that are being closed out.

There’s a knock on my door.

“Come in.”

It’s Overroy, his head and shoulders through the jamb of my door.

“Paul, you gotta come out here for a second,” he says. “There’s some screwup over at county general services.”

It seems two guys are here with dollies to move furniture out of his office. He is all sunshine and smiles waiting for me to correct this little blunder. His office is palatial, bigger than my own. Feretti had not taken it from him when he struck Overroy’s title from the rolls as chief deputy.

“No mistake, Roland, they’re here to move you.”

He has the look of a letter delivered to the wrong address.

“What?” he says. It’s a face unclouded by human thought, like a moose in the path of a high-speed train.

I’ll say it slower this time. Read my lips, I think. “They’re here to move you,” I say.

“Whataya talkin’ about?”

“You’re going down the hall,” I tell him, “into Lenore’s office.” I smile at him, a grin that says welcome to brick walls and bundles of files, asshole! In a more equitable world, Roland would be in a sealed coat closet with a naked light bulb.

“Aw-w-w-w.” He looks at me sideways like he smells a rat, like this is finally seeping in.

“Wait just a second,” he says. “What the hell’s goin’ on here?”

Harry looks at me. “Maybe I should leave,” he says.

“No.” I motion for him to stay.

“It’s just an office move,” I tell Overroy. “It happens all the time in corporate America.”

“Don’t bullshit me,” he says. “Tell me, what’s goin’ on?”

“Like I said, just an office move.”

“Sure,” he says. “You think I’m stupid?”

I give him a look that puts this question up for grabs.

Harry’s drifted off to the side, out of the line of fire.

“What did I do to deserve this?” Softer now, Roland changes moods on me, the injured whelp, big brown eyes in my door.

“Nothing,” I tell him. “This is not punitive.” I wrap this little package of insincerity with a bow and hand it to him.

“I’ve been in that office for sixteen years.”

“Then you should look forward to the change,” I say.

“Why didn’t you come to me,” he says, “and talk to me about this before you called the movers? This is highly unprofessional.” Now he’s playing the injured bureaucrat.

“It was a management decision, Roland. Not something that required consultation.”

“Paul.” He is big and soulful. “This just ain’t right.” He’s wobbling around in the doorway, stepping all over his tongue. He’s working his way toward my office, trying to worm his way into my heart, the door half-open behind him, his hands on the edge of my desk, trying to reason with me.

“You can’t do this. I’ve got seniority,” he says. He looks around behind him like somebody might be in earshot.

“Listen,” he says, “you need another office, take Goya’s. No. No. Better yet, take Boudin’s, or Samuels’s. Yeah, that’s good. Take Samuels’s. She’s low on the seniority ladder.” His voice never gets above a hushed whisper, Roland still looking around, over his shoulder as if the two of us are locked in the refined art of the deal. This is the Roland we all love, bargaining with someone else’s possessions.

“No. I don’t think so.” I mimic him, my reply in soothing low tones, as if it were the secret of the century. “I need yours,” I whisper.

“Sonofabitch.” He’s bellowing at the top of his voice. His body jerks up off my desk. He’s stomping around the office. “Fuckin’ A. This is bullshit.” Roland is back in form.

“Not at all.” I give him genuine assurances. “We need the space.”

“For what?”

“Oh, I forgot. I guess you haven’t heard. Lenore’s not leaving.”

He looks at me, dumbstruck.

“Yes,” I say. “I thought you’d be happy. It’s true. She’s staying on with us. As soon as I can clear it with the board of supervisors, she’s gonna be our new chief deputy. She’ll be working with me on the Putah Creek cases. She’ll be taking your office.”

This is a lot of body blows for Roland to take all at once. It’s a few seconds before he focuses. But then I see it, fire in Overroy’s eyes, unseen flames, like the super-heated vapor of an alcohol-fueled roadster. He looks at me. “This is bullshit,” he says.

“One more thing,” I say. “The files in Lenore’s office. They belong to you now. You’ve got a nine o’clock court call Monday morning. Good luck. And don’t let anything slip through the cracks.”

Harry stares at me, a mischievous look, the expression of opportunity, like maybe he could pick up one of the defendants on the Monday morning calendar and kick the other cheek of Roland Overroy.

Kay Sellig deposits a small suitcase behind the door in my office. She has just taken a cab here from the airport. She looks tired and drawn.

“How did it go in Ashland?” I say.

“They were helpful. Now ask me what it all means.” She shrugs her shoulders. “A few more pieces to the puzzle,” she says, “but who knows where they fit?

“First the blood,” she says. Sellig has spent the last two days in southern Oregon, talking to experts at the National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory. They are working on the blood, bones and feathers found in the blind, high in the trees over the Scofield murder site.

“Most of it was animal, specifically avian. Bird blood,” she tells me.

“It’s not a domestic bird,” she says. “They’ve ruled that out.” This means it’s not a chicken, or other beast of flight in the commercial food chain.

“That takes the edge off our theory that they might have been part of a ritual slaying,” she says. She’s talking about the murders of Abbott and Karen Scofield. “It’s possible,” she tells me, “but those who go in for such things usually use domestic animals, something easily obtained from a farm, or from somebody’s back yard. Wild animals are too hard to come by.

“There’s also a wrinkle. Some of the blood, small traces, were human. Common type,” she says. “A. We think this belonged to Karen Scofield. Abbott was type O.”

“Could it belong to the guy in the trees?”

She shakes her head. “He was a secretor. Pretty rare, type B,” she says.

“Don’t tell me,” I say. “He peed for you in a corner of the blind.” I am wondering how they got their secretions to type our suspect.

“Close. He chewed tobacco. Spat the stuff in little black balls all over the platform. We were able to type the saliva,” she tells me.

“Remind me not to commit a crime in your jurisdiction.”

She smiles, a little satisfaction at this break. Sellig is unloading her briefcase on my desk, looking for her notes.

“The bones are mostly small, immature birds,” she says. “Most of them still in the nest.” Besides the bones they have confirmed this from the preponderance of molting feathers sent to the lab. Mature feathers from the top and underwing, the kind that could have supported flight, were missing from the samples they observed.

“So we have a baby bird killer,” I say.

“Not just any bird,” she says. “Birds of prey.”

I look at her.

“They examined the feathers. There’s no question. These were peregrine falcons. Chicks maybe a month, possibly two, from flight. Endangered species,” she says. “Protected by the federal government.” She tells me that the lab now has their own stake in this thing, that they are interested in whoever might have been involved in the killing of these birds.

“He could do some federal time if they catch him,” she says.

“They’ll have to wait in line.”

“You think he killed the Scofields?” she asks.

“Do you?”

“It’s possible. I suppose. They could have stumbled in on him. A federal crime. People have been known to kill for less.”

“But you’ve got to admit he was fast on his feet, pretty well prepared,” I say.

“The stakes and the rope?” she says.

I nod. If whoever was in the trees killed the Scofields, he didn’t lose a beat staking them off on the ground in copycat fashion. It is more likely, I think, that whoever was in the trees was not the perpetrator, but a witness. For the moment there are too many unanswered questions.

I’ve been stalled for almost a week now on the preparation of the documents needed to return Iganovich to the state. Under the law of extradition, I must decide whether to charge him with the Scofield killings. If I fail to do this and he is returned, I may not try him for these murders later. The rule is you must know what you’ve got before you extradite.

“Maybe Iganovich did it after all,” I say.

She shakes her head. On this she is adamant. “The discrepancies keep piling up,” she says. “We think we now know how he was able to subdue couples.”

“How?”

“A stun gun,” she says. “As an alien national, the law didn’t allow him to carry a firearm on the job. So his employer tells us he used a stun gun.”

She sees my eyes go big and round. I’ve already told her about the stun gun taken from Iganovich by the Canadian authorities.

“Exactly,” she says.

I ask her if she’s received it yet.

“It’s being shipped to us as soon as they finish processing it, up there.”

The law in this state establishes only minimal requirements for the possession of an electronic stun gun. There is no licensing or permit required.

“How did he get it on the plane?”

“It only has a few metal parts. Detector probably didn’t pick it up,” she says.

“Good to know we’re in safe hands in the air,” I say.

“Anyway, the ME believes the victims were taken down with a stun gun.”

“How effective is it?”

She makes a face. “Localized cramping of muscle groups, some intense pain. They’d be on the ground, pretty much out of it, anywhere from three to fifteen minutes, depending on the duration of the jolt.”

“Enough time to drag them into the van and tie them up.”

Sellig agrees with this.

“Would it make any noise?”

“About what you’d hear from a garden variety bug zapper.”