Roger Stelljes - First Case

“I think I can make it,” Meredith answered as she poured coffee in her travel mug.

At the station, Mac and Lich discussed the case over coffee and came to the conclusion they needed to go back to KBMP and interview everyone again. Mac brought in two additional veteran detectives, Frank ‘Double Frank’ Franklin and Rick Beckett, as there were upwards of eighty people to go back through. It was a long morning and early afternoon. Mac and Lich re-interviewed everyone from the day before while Franklin and Becket interviewed others in the office that had less exposure to Oliver.

A little after three p.m. they reconvened in a small law firm conference room to review notes. Stan Busch gave Mac and Lich a list of cases that Oliver had worked on for him the past six months. Michael Harris worked on most of the cases with Oliver but recalled nothing about the cases that were a problem.

“Gordon could be extremely combative in depositions, at times overly so,” Harris said. “I’ve seen him piss off opposing counsel and deponents more than once. But that’s standard and most of the people we had Gordon depose were usually lesser players in the cases. I tended to handle the bigger fish so I’m hard pressed to think of anyone in a case that would want to kill Gordon. I can’t think of one case where that was an issue.”

“How about clients?” Mac asked. “Was there ever a client that Oliver had issues with?”

“Not one that I can think of,” Harris answered. “Like I said the other day, Gordon was really attentive to our clients and our clients are pretty happy. Stan reels them in and I do the litigation work with Gordon’s help, at least until yesterday. Gordon was a pain at times, detective, but like I said yesterday, I’ll miss the guy. As a young associate, he was money.”

Further interviews with the rest of the firm’s lawyers revealed that in the last six months most of Oliver’s work was with Stan Busch. There was some real estate litigation that Oliver worked on for Marie Preston and one case for another partner, Jackson Lund. No problems were noted with those cases yet more names were collected to potentially interview.

Franklin and Beckett interviewed the firm’s staff and their results reaffirmed one immutable truth of the work place, the staff always knows more about what’s going on in the office than the bosses. Turns out that Gordon Oliver had slept with not three, not four, not even five, but six different women in the firm, including one partner. Beckett and Franklin interviewed the law firm’s IT manager who said that Gordon told him one time that he had his own little Yahtzee card. It required sleeping with a receptionist, secretary, paralegal, associate and a partner. The staff knew that he’d completed the card by recently bedding a forty-three-year-old partner named Constance Bernier on the leather couch in her office.

“She said ‘he got me at just the right time,’” Double Frank said.

“This dude was good,” Beckett added.

“He’d fuck a goat if you held it for him,” Mac replied disgustedly.

“You saying he had it coming, Mac?” Franklin asked.

“No. I’m merely stating the fact that he was a douche bag when it came to women.”

“It’s probably what got him killed though,” Dick added. “We just have to find the person he pissed off the most and we have our killer.”

“How about the other women he slept with?” Mac asked. “Do any of them look good for it? Have boyfriends or husbands who look good for it?”

Franklin and Beckett shook their heads. “Two of the women now have boyfriends although they didn’t while they were serving as a love receptacle for Gordo,” Beckett said. “They both claim they were home with their new boyfriends last night. We’ll follow up but I’d bet my pension they alibi out.”

“What about Bernier?” Mac asked.

“She flew in from Atlanta this morning. She was there for the last four days.”

“We could look at her financials and see if she hired someone to do it?” Lich speculated.

“We can and should but does this really look like a hit to any of you guys?” Mac answered, shaking his head. “If it were a hit, there would be a bullet in his head or a hitter would have known enough to make it look like a robbery gone bad. He would have taken Oliver’s wallet and watch. This looks like neither.”

“So what is this then?” Beckett asked.

“This is someone angry at Oliver who made a mistake, didn’t mean to kill him or made a split-second decision to kill him for some reason. This person didn’t really know what they were doing, panicked and quickly hid the body and ran.” This train of thought gave Mac an idea. “Maybe there’s a surveillance or security camera that caught our guy nearby?”

Lich was skeptical. “Mac, none of the buildings in the alley had any cameras, at least not ones on the alley.”

“I know that,” Mac answered, thinking broader. “I’m thinking in the vicinity, within the three or four block area. Maybe we’ll get lucky and see someone walking, running or driving away from the area that is tied to Oliver, The Mahogany and the law firm.” Mac thought for another minute and looked at Beckett. He was good with video and computers. “Rick, you and Franklin hit the establishments around The Mahogany and get any video running in the time window of the murder. Maybe we’ll get a hit off of that.”

“What are you guys going to do?” Beckett asked, a tinge of bitterness in his voice, knowing how boring surfing hours of video could be.

Mac looked at his watch which said 3:44 p.m. “We’re going to go back to the station for a few hours. I want to go over everything we have and then Dick and I are going over and re-canvassing The Mahogany when it starts getting busy. I want to hit it when most of the staff and regulars are around.”

“It must be the law firm.”

Lich said he needed a break before they went over to The Mahogany. Mac was okay with that. It gave him some time alone with the case to work through the evidence. One thing Mac learned from watching his father over the years was that at some point in a case you needed to sit down and take a look at everything and see if a pattern, string or trail developed.

In law school, a professor happened along Mac studying in the law library. He saw Mac had written ‘jurisdiction’ and drawn a box around it on his legal pad. He had a line to the left that read ‘personal jurisdiction’ and a line to the right that read ‘subject matter jurisdiction,’ the two components necessary for a court to have jurisdiction over a particular case. Then notes were jotted around each of the words. The professor smiled and said, “Mr. McRyan, you are mind-mapping.”

A mind-map is essentially a diagram that uses words, ideas, tasks or other items arranged around a central key word or idea. Mac saw his father do it when he was a kid. Mac picked it up and used it in college and then law school. He never knew it was called mind-mapping but that’s what Professor Becker was telling him and Mac apparently had a good understanding of jurisdiction. He aced the Civil Procedure final.

While Lich took his leave for a few hours, Mac jotted ‘Gordon Oliver’ in the middle of the page, drew a rectangle around it and started jotting down notes in bullet point format:

• Associate at KBMP for 4yrs.

• A very good young litigator according to several attorneys including Preston, Busch, Bernier, Anthony, Lund and Harris.

• Worked killer hours, strictly litigation, going to trial next week.

• No problems professionally at work.

• Mr. “All the tools in your toolbox.” His signature catch-phrase for work and pleasure.

• Womanizer. Slept with at least six women at law firm, probably more. 1. Burrows alibi’d out. 2. Mathis home with boyfriend. 3. Bernier in Atlanta. Other women are not good suspects, no apparent motive (might need to evaluate further?).