Joseph Teller - Depraved Indifference

But no, Abe Firestone had been no surprise.

Travis Hinkley had been the surprise. Smart, quickwitted, focused on the issues and, above all, strong enough to keep from getting steamrolled by the likes of Firestone. In an absurd hurry to move the case to trial, but Jaywalker would figure out a way to slow her down. He was good at stuff like that. The question of whether they could get a fair trial from her, given the hugely lopsided equities of the case, remained to be answered. Jaywalker hadn't much cared for her little speech about bail, which had been an almost verbatim reprise of the previous judge's comments. But he could only imagine what would have happened if she'd lowered the bail, and Drake got out and killed another nine people. Forget her judgeship; there'd be no place on earth safe for her. So he could understand that, and he'd already told his client to accept it and get used to his new home.

"Can you get me a quick trial?" Drake had asked him some time ago, prompting Jaywalker to give him a short tutorial on the magical healing powers of delay. But at least for the moment, it looked as though Drake might well get his wish.

The morning's court appearance had been brief but instructive. In addition to serving as an introduction to the major players, it had produced a good ninety pounds of reading material, which, it turned out, the D.A.'s office had boxed up several days ago, apparently figuring that single act fulfilled their obligation to turn it over to the defense. And Jaywalker had even learned a few things about the case. As he'd expected, because Carter Drake had turned himself in, there'd been no physical evidence seized from him, and following his lawyer's advice he'd made no admissions or confessions. But there had been a lineup, at which the driver of the pickup truck, the same guy who'd recognized the make of Drake's Audi and remembered part of its plate number, had picked him out. That was a surprise in itself, given Jaywalker's own recent experience with headlights and night blindness. But equally surprising was the fact that neither Drake nor either of his previous lawyers had mentioned it. Chester Ludlow had surrendered Drake. That meant there was a lawyer in the case, a lawyer who had a right to be notified by the police or the prosecution that a lineup was going to be held, and provided a reasonable opportunity to attend and observe it. Had Judah Mermelstein taken over from Ludlow by the time the lineup took place? If so, had he been alerted? Had he witnessed it? Did he even know about it?

The discovery material would no doubt provide Jaywalker with some answers, or at least give him a few clues.

What the discovery material actually provided Jaywalker with was a monumental headache, and an awareness that Abe Firestone, for all his bluster and buffoonery, had a shrewd side to him.

Despite the fact that it had taken Jaywalker three trips to load the cartons into his car, and another three to haul them up to his apartment, he'd been consoled by the fact that there was such a volume of material. New York law carefully spelled out the things the prosecution was required to turn over to the defense at this early stage of the proceedings, and the list excluded not only the names of witnesses Firestone intended to call at trial, but any prior statements those witnesses had made regarding the substance of their testimony, whether written, recorded, or uttered in front of the grand jury. Those statements, which normally made up the vast majority of discovery material, didn't have to be turned over until the trial had actually begun, with the selection of a jury.

Yet here Firestone had put together no less than three full cartons of stuff. To Jaywalker, that had to mean one of two things. Either the D.A. didn't know the law and had included witnesses' statements through ignorance, or there was an awful lot of other relevant stuff for Jaywalker to sift through and exploit.

Neither turned out to be the case.

Barely twenty minutes into the process, he realized what Firestone had done. He'd crammed the boxes full of multiple copies of wordy documents that bore little or no relevance to the case. He'd included, for example, more than five hundred photocopied pages of excerpts from the Vehicle and Traffic Law, pages that Jaywalker could have read from his own copy. Then there were lengthy accounts of the nine funerals of the victims, copies of every newspaper item that even mentioned the case, as well as many that didn't. There were redundant printouts of the penal law sections charged in the indictment, and long court decisions that touched only tangentially on some of the issues likely to be raised at trial.

Even worse, none of these documents were bound, stapled or even paper-clipped together. Instead, their pages had been stuffed into the boxes almost haphazardly, as if the only concern had been making them fit. There'd been absolutely no regard to keeping them in order, or to separating them from the pages of other documents.

Jaywalker had been bombarded with garbage.

But why?

Was Firestone so perverse that he took delight from a schoolboy's dirty trick? Would he spend his weekend laughing at the thought of his adversary poring over mounds of paper, only to discover that every last sheet of it was totally worthless?

Jaywalker thought not. Dumb like a fox w as the expression that kept coming back to him. So he gritted his teeth, cleared as large a section of his floor as the dimensions of his apartment allowed, and began sorting. It infuriated him and took him well past midnight, but in the end he was left with twelve piles of pages stacked against one wall. Eleven of the stacks were taller than they were wide, and were largely worthless. But then there was the twelfth stack, though in its case, stack w ould have been a misnomer, since it contained only four sheets of paper.

Once, more years ago than he cared to admit, Jaywalker and his wife and daughter, who'd been a toddler at the time, had panned for gold. They'd done it as a lark, stopping at a roadside tourist attraction by a Colorado creek and paying fifty dollars against a promise that they could keep all the gold they found. The operator had known what he was doing, of course. At the end of two hours, their backs ached and their sifting pans had yielded maybe a dozen tiny grains of what might or might not have been the real thing. Had they lumped them all together, they might have had enough for a dental filling, provided the cavity was a small one. The only certainty, in fact, was that they were fifty bucks poorer.

Except for one thing.

Jaywalker's daughter, now a grown woman with children of her own, had every one of those grains to this day. She'd kept them in a tiny glass vial, absolutely convinced they were treasure. She'd found them panning for gold in the Rockies, after all, with her mother, who was now long gone, and her father, who'd been absent too often, off in a place they called Court.

The four sheets of paper were Jaywalker's treasure. He'd panned for them as surely as he and his little family had panned for gold that long-ago afternoon in the Colorado sun. Abe Firestone and his staff had gone to considerable lengths to hide them, burying them deep among the mud and silt. The only conceivable reason they would have done that was to keep Jaywalker from discovering them and realizing that they were pure gold.

Over the next two weeks, Jaywalker busied himself preparing for Carter Drake's hearing and trial. Not that he expected it to begin the first week of September, or any week of September, for that matter. No judge, not even Travis Hinkley, would push a murder case to trial within three months of the arrest over the objection of the defense. Maybe in Yemen or Bangladesh or Texas. But not in New York. Not even in Rockland County.