Prime Witness (23 page)

She looks perplexed, like she can’t figure why I would want to do this.

“I don’t know,” she says. “Not off the top of my head. We control the proceedings, but that’s a far reach. Some appellate panel looking at the transcript later might question the relevance,” she says. “Might even find prejudice if they believe we used the stuff to further incriminate Iganovich without charging him with the murders.”

“You wouldn’t recommend it then,” I say.

She shakes her head, still a bit puzzled. “Why do you ask?” she says.

“Nothing,” I say. “Just a thought.”

We end. She leaves me musing in my office.

It’s what professional prosecutors call “a cop shop.” Buried two floors beneath the Davenport County Sheriff’s Department, down a long corridor marked by outdated and faded civil defense signs, is a single door of solid wood, with no glass panels or windows, and no sign. We open it and step inside.

Lenore’s behind me. I look at her. “What do you think?”

She makes a face. “For the kind of party we’re throwing, it looks about right. How many cops upstairs?” she asks Claude.

“During the day shift, in the office, maybe ten, twelve.”

It seems we have found our grand jury room. It’s a problem in this state. With the high court decision fifteen years ago, grand jury rooms with their windowless facades, designed for secrecy, fell into disuse, and over the years were commandeered for courtrooms, or consumed by other burgeoning bureaucracies.

I have decided to convene the grand jury here in the basement of the sheriff’s office for reasons of security. Since Iganovich was delivered back to Davenport County we have received more than a dozen threats on his life.

We lock the doors and head back upstairs. Behind the public counter Emil Johnson is waiting for us.

“Counselor. You got a minute?” He wags at me with his finger, then turns and heads for his office.

I nudge Lenore to join us, and the two of us follow Emil’s big haunches toward his office.

Inside he closes the door and asks us to take a seat.

“What’s this I hear about a special grand jury?” he says. “What’s wrong with the one we got?”

“The key man system?”

He nods.

“Key man” is the selection process that permits a few powerful judges and elected politicians to put their friends and, in some cases, family members on the county grand jury.

“It won’t work, Emil.”

“Why not?”

“Because the defendant has a right to a representative grand jury, a cross section of the population,” I tell him. “Have you taken a look at your grand jury lately? It’s whiter than snow. It has only two women.” I don’t mention that one of these is the concubine of a county supervisor. “There are no Hispanics or blacks.”

“Two thirds of that jury was appointed by the superior court judges. You’re telling me that ain’t good enough?”

“The white friends of white judges don’t cut it,” I say.

This sets him back on his heels. By the look on his face I can tell that my words will be passed along, chewed on over stale sourdough rolls and wilted lettuce at the next meeting of the Lincoln Club with all the county pillars.

“Politics has nothing to do with it, Emil. Read
Smith v. Texas
and
Alexander v. Louisiana
,” I tell him. “U.S. Supreme Court decisions. They give the defendant the right to question the composition of the grand jury that indicts him. He can file a motion to discover the demographics of the jury as well as the method that was used to impanel it. If it’s not representative, any indictment would be quashed. I assume you don’t want to do this more than once?”

He shakes his head. “We’ll do it your way.” In the final analysis, Emil is a pragmatist.

Chapter Eighteen

“
L
et’s see what we’ve got,” I say.

“Not much from my end. Like I told ya, a pack a tree-huggers.” This is how Claude describes his telephone inquiries into the World Center for Birds of Prey.

Lenore’s back from the library, leaning against the edge of my desk. Claude’s in one of the client chairs on the other side.

“I checked with the Boise police,” says Dusalt. “It’s a research outfit, and a sanctuary for birds. Cops don’t know much about ’em. They pulled a few records for me, looked the place up on a map.”

“What do they do exactly?” I ask.

“According to the cops, they raise raptors.”

“You make it sound kinky.” Lenore winks at him.

“Birds of prey,” he says.

“I know.” She smiles.

“Hawks, falcons, birds of prey,” he says, “they hatch ’em, raise ’em, and let ’em go in the wild. A labor of love,” says Claude. “I’m told that the center is one of a kind. They take in birds from all over the world, breed them, and then do their thing to reorder the balance of nature.”

“Did you call the place, talk to anybody?”

“Yeah.” Claude looks at his notes again. “I tried for this guy William Rattigan.” If Nikki is right, this is the “Bill” from Karen Scofield’s computer files.

“He was away on business. I guess he runs the place. The director. That’s his title. The woman on the phone was cooperative, but she didn’t know a lot. Abbott Scofield was a regional representative for the center in this area, sat on its board of directors with Rattigan. They were involved in a number of projects together.”

“Did she say where Rattigan had gone?”

“East coast for a seminar. I got the number of the hotel he’s staying at. He was out so I left a message at the desk for him to call me back.”

“Anything else?” I ask.

He shakes his head and turns a blank page on his notebook.

I turn to Lenore. “What did you find?”

She’s been at the university library most of the afternoon.

“Guess how many listings?” she asks.

I shake my head, like I have no idea.

“Five,” she says.

Goya’s been playing with the computerized version of the
Guide to Periodical Literature
. Checking to see what she could find out about the center in any magazines or other publications.

She reaches into her purse and pulls out a long narrow sheaf of paper folded down the center. She opens it up. It’s several pages of letter-sized paper stapled together at the top left corner.

“This was the best of the lot,” she says, “out of
Audubon
.”

I open the photocopied article and read.

She takes it from my hands and turns a few more pages, then flips it around and drops it on the desk in front of me again, tapping one of the photos with her finger.

I look at the picture, a wooden tower built at the edge of some rocky precipice, a silhouetted figure climbing a makeshift ladder to the top. I read the cutline underneath.

On Idaho’s Grouse Peak, university ornithologist Abbott Scofield climbs to a hack box to place extra food for young peregrines.

“If you want my guess,” she says, “that’s the project he was working on when they were killed.”

Lenore has wandered into my office. “What are you doing for lunch?” she says.

I reach for my coat.

“My turn,” she says. She means to pay for lunch. The last two have been on me.

“I won’t argue.”

“You know,” she says, “the thing we talked about the other day. The Scofield evidence. There may be a way to get it in.” She means before the grand jury.

“Let’s walk and talk,” I say. We head out the door.

“It’s a little duplicitous,” she says.

I wrinkle an eyebrow.

“We’d be setting up the other side, just a bit.” She explains that there would be no deception on the court.

“All’s fair in that war,” I say. “Within limits. What’s your idea?”

“I’ve been doing a little research,” she says.

Neither of us is well versed in the aspects of a grand jury. To find the people best honed in this, you would have to go back through a generation of lawyers, most of whom are now retired.

“
People v. Johnson
,” she says. “What’s called a ‘Johnson letter,”’ she tells me.

I’ve seen the case before, somewhere, but can’t recall its rule.

She explains. It seems the courts have held that while the defendant has no right of representation before a grand jury, he has the right to insist that all exculpatory evidence, anything that could point to his innocence, be disclosed to the jury, which then can choose to look at it in detail, or not, as the jury chooses.

“What’s the ‘Johnson letter’?” I ask.

“It’s the mechanism the courts came up with to trigger the requirements of the case. If the defendant sends the prosecutor a letter,” she says, “demanding that certain evidence, deemed to be exculpatory, be given to the grand jury, the prosecutor has no choice. He has to disclose that evidence. If he doesn’t, it’s automatic reversal. The indictment will be quashed.”

I whistle, a high pitch. “A real silver bullet,” I say.

She nods.

We’re out the front door, down the steps.

“Where do you want to go?” I ask.

“How about Quiche Alley,” she says. This is the salad and soup spot a block away, light fare. We head in that direction.

“What I don’t understand,” she says, “is why you want to do it. The Scofield stuff could be dynamite. Confuse a jury with it and Chambers will turn it into the best defense going.”

“Very likely,” I say.

“We don’t charge his client with the Scofield murders, but instead admit that there’s probably another killer out there someplace, still on the loose. If I were defending, I’d love it,” she says.

“Exactly. You don’t think Chambers has already seen the possibilities in Scofield? He’d have to be a fool,” I say. “But it’s still an open question, how damaging the stuff would be.”

We walk a little further in silence. Then I speak.

“What are twelve innocent and objective souls going to say when they see the Scofield evidence at trial, when it’s mixed and stirred in a courtroom with the other testimony, the physical evidence? Is it going to explode in our faces, or go inert?”

She shrugs like she has no idea.

“Precisely,” I say. I look at her, a sideways glance as we walk down the street. “That’s why I want to take it in front of the grand jury,” I say, “to test-drive the case.”

She stops in mid stride and looks over at me, tracking on the strategy. She laughs a little. “Interesting,” she says, nodding her head. I can tell the wheels are turning upstairs. “He’s not there. Chambers isn’t there to see you do it.”

I smile. “Just like a shadow jury,” I say.

We start to move again, down the street.

It is the latest fad among the civil sharks who try the mega-buck tort cases. Hired, private focus groups, average citizens paid to be locked in a room for days with lawyers. There the attorneys sample their wares in advance of trial, their theories and evidence to see what will sell and what won’t, the best defenses. Mine is only a modest takeoff on this latest tool of litigation.

“But we won’t have to pay for it,” I say. “All we have to do is figure a way to get Chambers to ask that the Scofield evidence be played out in the grand jury.”

“That won’t be too hard,” she says.

I stop. I look at her.

“Simple,” she says. “We send him a letter telling him that it is not our intention to put the Scofield evidence before the grand jury, on grounds that it is irrelevant and could confuse jurors. We give him a citation to
Johnson
in the letter and let him read the law.”

I smile. Lenore Goya is becoming a quick study on the temperament and tactics of Adrian Chambers. Like blood to a shark, her correspondence will, no doubt, draw the quickest Johnson letter ever crafted by human hands in this state.

I smile at her. “My treat,” I say. Lenore has earned her lunch.

Chapter Nineteen

I
t has come like a hot rocket, Chambers’s rendition of the so-called “Johnson letter,” produced so promptly that it is difficult to believe it was crafted by human hands.

Lenore is ecstatic. It is all she could have hoped for, and as I read it, perhaps a little bit more.

“He’s probably waiting for us to file a motion by way of objection,” she says. Goya is certain that Chambers is girding himself for our pitch to the court, our anticipated argument to keep the Scofield stuff away from the grand jury.

“He’ll grow a long white beard on that watch,” I tell her. His letter is unequivocal. He’s thrown the door open wide for us. He won’t be able to complain later that the Scofield evidence is irrelevant or prejudicial to his client.

“If we can get the jury to bite,” I say, “we can run it up the pole and see how it flies.” I’m talking about the details, the discrepancies in the Scofield case. We are both wondering whether we will be able to convince a jury of the existence of another killer, a copycat. If we are lucky, we will have a dry run to find out.

Lenore has also given me some bad news in this meeting. It seems Kay Sellig with her ear to the ground at the Department of Justice has gotten wind that Acosta’s formal letter of complaint has arrived there, questioning my handling of the Russian’s extradition from Canada. She has no idea what the Attorney General will do with this thing, but for now it is ticking like a bomb in his in-basket. All I need right now is the bad press of some government inquiry looking over my shoulder.

For the moment I’m holding Chambers’s letter, studying its terms.

As if it were fired from a sawed-off barrel, Chambers’s Johnson letter has been loaded with a lot of scatter shot. He has reached into the hot ashes of defeat on his failed attempt for a quick preliminary hearing, and seeks to try his case before the grand jury by correspondence. This is, in my view, a mistake.

In addition to the physical evidence found in the Russian’s van, Iganovich had made those damaging utterances at the point of his arrest in Canada, statements overheard by the two security guards who took him into custody. While it is debatable whether any of these statements could be viewed as wholesale admissions, a jury might see them as concessions of guilty knowledge. It would not be a far leap of faith for a jury to conclude that it was not the vehicle which concerned the defendant so much as its contents.