Steve Martini - The Jury

“How are you feeling?”

“Better,” he says.

“Are you up to a ride?”

“If you drive.”

Ten minutes later Harry and I are headed up I-5, cutting in and out of traffic in Harry’s Toyota.

“You should be careful,” he says. “Unless you wanna get clocked by a cop. And I’d rather not flash all over my own front seat.”

“Sorry. But we don’t have much time.” I get into the fast lane and try to smooth it out, just staying ahead of the flow of traffic. “I can’t be sure, not certain enough to call the cops, but unless I miss my bet our visitor has one more stop to make.”

“What the hell’s going on?” Harry looks a little green, head in his hands.

“The information was in front of us all the time. Jordan and Epperson were competing for money on different portions of the research project. They’d filed competing grant applications; drawing on funds Crone had set aside. I didn’t realize it until I went looking back through the papers tonight. Up until a month before Kalista Jordan was murdered, there was a surplus of funds. Not a huge one, but enough. A hundred and eight thousand and change, according to the figures. That’s what the argument between Jordan and Crone was all about.”

“Money?” asks Harry.

I nod. “I’ve got no hard evidence. No proof. But I think I know what happened. Crone had carved the surplus out of funds originally earmarked for their budgets. Jordan found out. She went to him, and they argued. Crone refused to rescind his action, so she took some papers from his office. My guess is they were funding documents, probably conditions for the grant from Cybergenomics. As far as Jordan was concerned, she was entitled to the money and she was going to get it. She tried to turn the screws on Crone, but he wouldn’t budge. She was angry. It became a blood feud. She ended up filing the sexual harassment complaint. He probably was harassing her, but it had nothing to do with sex. He wanted the papers back. She wouldn’t give them to him, and he wouldn’t back away on the funding issue. As far as Crone was concerned, it was his project. He was calling the shots.

“So she went to Epperson, and the two of them filed supplemental applications to get the money back. They probably went around Crone to the university. Jordan did a little lobbying. Crone wasn’t well loved in high places, and she ended up getting the funds restored for their research. Suddenly the surplus disappeared.”

“I don’t get it,” says Harry. “Why was Crone holding back funds?”

“Because I asked him to.”

“What?”

“It was Penny Boyd: the children’s research project. Crone had come up with the funding by cutting into Jordan’s part of the pie. She got it back, and the children’s project died.”

Harry is looking at me, the details beginning to seep in even as the lump on the back of his head throbs.

“There were three signatures on the final forms,” I tell him. “Jordan and Epperson signed the supplemental applications to get the money back. But Crone must have refused to consent to it, because even after the university ordered the funds to be restored, he didn’t sign the form authorizing it. He had Tash do it.”

Harry looks at me, a question mark.

“What he didn’t realize,” I tell him, “is that Tash was signing his death warrant.”

Suddenly it registers on Harry.

“I didn’t realize until I put it all together. That and the conversation I had with Frank Boyd. He was around the bend, but I didn’t realize how far.”

“It was Boyd,” says Harry.

I nod. “I didn’t realize it until tonight. He must have gone out of his mind when the project for Penny was killed. He was convinced it would save her life. I tried to tell him it was a long shot at best, but he wouldn’t listen. I should have realized when he came to me talking about divorce.”

“He murdered Jordan because he held her responsible for killing the project,” says Harry.

“And Epperson, and anybody else whose fingers might have touched the thing. I suspect he came to the office tonight because he thought we’d figured it out.

“Why did he think that?”

“Because you retrieved the file from Doris, the one she gave you, the one I left at their house after I did the original workup with Crone. That file had everything in it, the project application for the kids’ portion of the Huntington study, along with the copies of the supplemental applications for funding from Jordan and Epperson. I’d let Doris keep them because they had nothing to do with the firm. They weren’t legal files. She and Frank clearly had a larger stake than I did. All the while Frank was watching the money dry up in front of his eyes.

“My guess is he didn’t know you’d come by to pick up the file until he went looking for it. He probably asked Doris. She would have told him where it was.”

“It’s a wonder he didn’t kill me,” says Harry.

“He was interrupted.”

Harry looks at me wide-eyed.

“He was gathering information. Probably figured he had one last chance to get anybody who was involved before we turned him in and the cops got him.

“When I got there tonight the lid was off one of the boxes out in the reception area. You didn’t do it. He nailed you before you got the lights on. So it was Frank. He saw the same papers I did. The stuff you got from the university. The ones with Tash’s signature on them restoring the money and killing the project. They were open on the desk. Those weren’t in the file I gave to Doris. The twisted mind,” I say. “He probably figures Tash was in it with them from the beginning.”

Tash lives in a condo development out on the rocky shoals a few miles below the village, just south of a place known to surfers and locals as Wipe-out Beach.

It takes Harry and me twenty minutes to find the area, stopping twice for directions. When we finally locate the street, we are confronted with another maze. Every unit in the massive complex looks like every other one, with numbers on the clustered mailboxes out front.

We find the address for Tash’s unit and park in front.

“He’s probably out with Crone celebrating,” says Harry.

“Let’s hope.”

I reach for the door

“Let’s think about this,” says Harry. “We could call the cops.”

“And tell them what? Tate and Tannery aren’t exactly in a mood to accept my theories on the case at the moment. They’re not likely to put out an APB on Boyd based on a few documents. But then they didn’t have the conversation I did with Frank about schemes for divorce to avoid medical bills. The guy was desperate.”

It’s the problem any prosecutor would have at this point. After holding Crone in jail for months and trying him on capital charges, it’s tough to go before the public and tell them, “Oh, by the way, we found another perpetrator.” They are not likely to do it, even if it’s the right perpetrator.

“So what are you gonna tell Tash when you find him?”

“For starters, I’ll tell him to get a hotel room for the night. He and Crone both. I don’t know exactly what Frank has in mind. But I’d rather not find out. Tomorrow I’ll try to get ahold of Tate. It’s Saturday, the offices are closed, but somebody should be able to reach him. Maybe I can convince him to bring Boyd in, at least for some questioning.”

“If you’re right, he’s a nut case,” says Harry.

“I’m banking on it. I’ll warn the cops every way I can.” If they approach him, I am thinking Frank may go berserk. If they can get him into custody safely, that would cause them to take a hard look.”

“What about the family, Doris and the kids?” says Harry.