Prime Witness (6 page)

“Sure,” he says. Then a look that is a naked attempt to work over my pride, little jabs around the belt in the clinch.

I swallow hard. A piece of my dignity goes down with the saliva. But I think maybe he’s about to let me go.

“I have a private practice,” I say. “My arrangement was intended to be short-term. A few months. I would not have taken the position otherwise.”

He doesn’t say anything. He knows as well as I that, once started, the Putah Creek cases will be like an Asian land war, much easier to get in than to get out.

“Some people have told me you’re a good lawyer,” he says.

I make a face, like compliments are nice.

“In coming here your reputation precedes you,” he says.

Now he’s sugarcoating it. From Hyde to Jekyll in a heartbeat. The man is mercurial, more faces to his character than Lon Chaney.

“But I for one don’t think much of lawyers who bed their clients,” he says.

Like the wind’s been knocked out of me, a sucker punch. My face goes cold. He talks about dirt in my past, allusions to my earlier affair with Talia Potter, before her case, when Nikki and I were separated, ancient history. This is not news, I think. It was in all the local papers, my cross to bear during the Potter trial. And I’d thought it was over, killed by the heat and bright lights of public exposure. Now Ingel is dredging it all up.

I say nothing, but sit there and take his shellacking.

“As a courtesy, Judge Acosta called from Capital City,” he says, “when he read that you’d been appointed as special prosecutor here. You will learn,” he says, “that judges talk.”

Apparently like fishmongers. Ingel’s been holding forth with the Coconut, Armando Acosta, Mexico’s answer to the Lord of the Flies. I should have seen it coming.

Acosta presided over the trial of Talia Potter, whom I defended in Capital City on charges of murdering her husband. This was seven months ago. Before that, during a period that I was separated from my wife, Nikki, and long before the Potter trial, Talia and I had had an affair. This was to my eternal discredit, because Talia’s husband, Ben Potter, had been a friend and benefactor. I had not disclosed my earlier relationship with the defendant to the court when I took the case. By that time the affair was long over. It was ancient history. But to my chagrin, the papers and the Coconut found out, during the trial. Acosta had threatened to draw and quarter me during the case. And to this day he has not forgiven me for this deception.

“He was not pleased that we took you on,” says Ingel. “He has particular reasons for this.” He’s talking about Acosta.

“I can imagine.”

Right now the Coconut’s pleasure is not my concern. I am seething out to the tips of my ears. That Acosta should pack his arrogance across the river to poison my well on this side has me wondering if I have grounds to lay complaint to the Commission on Judicial Performance, the agency that dogs judges for misconduct in this state. No doubt my temporary role as public official swathes his slander in the protections of the First Amendment.

When I protest, Ingel tells me there’s a reason for all of this. He means the Coconut’s involvement in a case outside his own county.

“One of the victims,” he says, “the coed Sharon Collins, was his niece.”

I sit slack-jawed.

“His younger sister’s daughter,” says Ingel. He’s giving me a lecture on the Coconut’s family tree. Poor Mexican immigrants who made good, though his sister is not so well connected as the judge, so he is taking the lead on her behalf, according to Ingel, looking for a little extra justice no doubt.

Sonofabitch, I think, of all the people on this planet.

“From what I understand, Judge Acosta was like a father to the girl. Mother was divorced,” he says. “He is pretty broken up over the whole thing,” he tells me.

Ingel looks at me like I’m supposed to do something about all this.

“Sorry to hear it,” I say. “He probably has a lot of company.”

Ingel stares at me.

“The parents of the other victims, the other kids,” I tell him. The message is clear. Tell the judge to get in line.

He gives me steely eyes.

“We need to get something straight,” he says. “While you may have slipped through the cracks in getting here, you have a contract, and you will fulfill it, or I will see to it that you answer to the State Bar.”

“On what charge?” I say.

“Abandoning a client,” he says. “Unless I am wrong, that is still grounds for legal discipline. And don’t think about dumping the Putah Creek cases, rolling over on some early motions, allowing the cases to be dismissed so somebody else can refile them later. If I smell any collusion or negligence, I will have your ticket. You’ll be writing briefs by mail order for lawyers in other states. Do I make myself clear?”

“Perfectly. I take it the county has no intention of retaining a permanent prosecutor for these cases?”

He makes a face, like if he knows, he’s not saying. He picks up his watch. “If I can ever do anything more for you,” he says, “feel free to ask.” He looks at me stone cold, something from Rushmore. I get up, out of the chair.

“One last word of advice,” he says. “There will be a lot of people watching you.”

“Because of Judge Acosta?” I say.

“He does have a personal stake in all this.”

Sure he does, and he’s driving it into my ass.

Chapter Four

T
he state crime lab is an immense, low-lying block of a building, a modern concrete fortress. It is set back the length of a football field from the street, behind a verdant lawn bisected by a ten-foot-high iron fence that surrounds the entire facility.

The largest of its kind outside of the FBI’s lab in Quantico, Virginia, this place is the province of the state attorney general.

Claude Dusalt has set up this meeting. He wants to familiarize me with the evidence early, in case his investigators need a quick search warrant. The Putah Creek killer is drawing increased press attention and Claude wants to be ready to move on a moment’s notice with the first break.

Derek Ingel, Davenport’s answer to Roy Bean, has been looking over my shoulder on every move, wanting to know the state of our evidence. No doubt so that he can pass it back to the Coconut. So far I’ve been able to keep him in the dark, because that is where I am. Ignorance is bliss.

I fill out a form and get a security badge from a guard in a kiosk inside the main entrance to the crime lab.

A few minutes later I hear the click of heels on concrete. A woman is approaching down a long corridor. I can see her through the slotted glass of the security door. From a distance she has the look of a secretary. Her eyes reading me as she walks tells me this is my escort. She is short and a little dowdy, to the far side of middle age. There’s something familiar about her, but I can’t place it.

“Mr. Madriani.”

She is stone-faced, seemingly preoccupied. But in her tone I sense this is no receptionist.

“Kay Sellig,” she says. “The director has asked me to brief you.” Brown eyes caught between a few wrinkles and crow’s-feet look at me from under a salt and pepper wedge cut, something easy to care for. She doesn’t offer her hand, but instead reads my mind.

“Not what you expected?” she says. She is a quick study.

“I don’t know,” I lie.

Finally there’s a smile, not amiability, but satisfaction at having read my thoughts.

In the limited universe of criminal forensics the name Kay Sellig conjures legend, a reputation that belies the image standing before me now.

We make small talk as she leads me through the labyrinth, the maze of little chambers inside this building.

Then as I watch her walking from behind it settles on me, this sense that we have met before.

“You were there,” I say. “On the creek.”

She nods. “I processed the scene.”

I have heard the name Kay Sellig for a dozen years, mostly banter in courthouse corridors, the war stories of lawyers, embellished with each telling. But I have always accepted as fact my good fortune that I have never had to cross this woman in court. In her time she has buried more than her share of criminal defendants behind the concertina-wired walls of Folsom and San Quentin.

Three more turns, down a short hallway, we enter a larger room, and she slows to half speed. I sense that we have arrived.

The place is not unlike a high school chemistry lab in one of the upscale suburbs. Bathed in fluorescent light are a dozen large stainless steel tables bolted to the floor.

“Has Lieutenant Dusalt given you much detail so far?” she asks.

“We’ve had one meeting,” I tell her. “What I know so far is what I read in the papers, and the few files that Mario—Mr. Feretti—compiled before his death.”

“You want to ask questions, or should I do a narrative?” she asks.

Not having read the file, I’d rather listen. I tell her so.

“Fine.” Not looking at any notes she wings it, impromptu. “The killer usually doesn’t leave ID’s, wallets and purses. He takes them. Except for the last murders, we’ve never found any of them. He probably has a shrine somewhere, someplace where they’re all piled up. We’ve had to roll prints each time to identify the victims.”

She moves toward a big chalk board, one of those things supported on a rolling wooden easel. She flips the board to the other side. Here the surface is cork. Pinned to it is an array of glossy colored pictures. Faces, head and shoulder shots of death, taken against the stainless steel autopsy tables of the county morgue.

“The first one was nineteen—Jonathan Snider.” She points. Even in death this face has the artless countenance of youth.

“His girlfriend was eighteen. Her name was Julie Park.” From her picture she was Asian, young and pretty. “They were found on the Putah Creek twelve days ago. The killer made no attempt to conceal the bodies.”

She moves down with her pointer. “The next two were found four days later. Sharon Collins, twenty-two, Acosta’s niece, and Rodney Slate, same age. Again no ID’s. The bodies were left exposed on the ground.”

She points to the next faces of death, more aged this time, staring out at me from the cork board. “The last two you saw at the scene, Abbott and Karen Scofield.”

The woman’s head reveals a dark forlorn cavern on one side of her face, the grotesque image of an empty eye socket, several sharp cuts on the cheek and brow around the vacant cavity.

“For some reason he left their wallets and her purse. Maybe something disturbed him, we don’t know. Scofield and his wife were divorced. He was a member of the faculty at the university, a scientist. Ornithology, I believe.” For the first time, she is looking at notes.

I make a face, like this is Greek to me.

“Study of birds,” she says.

She approaches one of the tables, this one heaped with clothing. It might be anyone’s laundry, except for the large blotches of dried blood on the white shirt and trousers in one of the piles. These are sorted on separate areas of the table, ready for placement in large paper bags numbered and marked for identification, part of the budding chain of evidence.

I notice that the buttons are all missing from the dress shirt. She tells me she cut these off at the crime scene and bagged them for evidence. They have gone down to latent prints, to be smoked in a chamber of heated super glue. It’s a long shot but maybe the killer got careless and touched one of the buttons without gloves.

If the local politicos are worried about a botched crime scene, in Kay Sellig they have been smiled on by the gods of good fortune.

Sellig tells me that the stains on the victims’ clothes were caused by gravity, blood flowing along the ground to the neatly folded articles of clothing placed around the bodies. There are no cuts or tears in any of these items, no evidence of any physical altercation.

“The pattern is always the same,” she says. “The victims are always naked when killed.”

They have found one other piece of evidence. At the first murder scene police believe the killer may have inadvertently left a large plastic trash bag, the kind used to line trash containers. It was found near the creek, probably carried by the wind. It was empty, but a hole had been poked in the bottom. Sellig thinks this may have been used by the killer to carry the stakes and cord, the implements of death. She thinks one of the stakes may be responsible for the hole.

She has not had time to examine the stakes and the cord from the Scofield killings. The cord appears to be similar to that used in the other murders. The stakes are downstairs in latent prints.

“Any evidence of sexual assault?” I ask.

“Not that we can find,” she says. “Medical examiner found sperm in the vaginal vault of the Park girl, but whoever left it there was a secretor, and the blood type matches her boyfriend. Pubic combings turned up some foreign hair on the boy that matches the girl’s.” She pauses for a second to let the obvious settle on me.

“Kids on the campus say the two were an item. We’re thinking the victims got it on together, maybe an hour or two before they were killed.”

“How does he do couples?” I ask. “A little risky, isn’t it?”

“He’s probably armed, he may have help, we’re not sure yet. The victims were all taken from deserted areas, abandoned parking lots late at night. In every case they were the last ones to leave some social function, or a workplace. The killings were done in remote areas, except for the last one. The last one, the Scofield thing, was gutsy,” she says. “He got a little close to the road.” She speculates that this may be part of his growing MO, an unmet desire for added chance. “But he was also lucky,” she tells me. “We’re looking for motorists who might have passed that spot late at night, people who might have seen something. So far we’ve come up with nothing.”

She tells me that the profile experts, psychologists who make their life’s work the study of demented minds, have, despite the lack of any evidence of sexual assault, not ruled out the possibility that the crimes might be driven by a sexual psychosis.

“Some of them think the metal tent stakes are phallic,” she says. “According to this theory, what he does with them may be his own sick form of intercourse.”