Steve Martini - Prime Witness

“It may explain,” says Lenore, “why Chambers was so willing to cop a plea on the Scofield counts. Maybe he knows his client did ’em,” she says.

“Damn it,” I say. I’m up out of my chair, pacing behind the desk. “Why is this information just coming in now?” I say.

“Took a while to find the flight attendant. She was out of town. Stays in Capital City on a rotating basis only once every three weeks.” Claude’s got a list of excuses. “Besides,” he says, “she’s equivocal. She thinks it’s him. Not absolutely certain.”

“Still,” I say, “we should have talked to her sooner.”

“Maybe we should charge him.” Lenore’s getting nervous.

I look at Claude. “What kind of a witness would your flight attendant make?”

“You want me to be honest.”

“Brutally,” I tell him.

“Not solid enough to put on the stand,” he says. “Chambers would have her for lunch, ‘maybe it’s him, maybe it’s not.”’

I’m leaning over the desk, looking down at the two of them.

“You can be sure if we charge him, Adrian will pull another witness from his hat,” I say, “some ten-time loser who will testify that he put Iganovich on the plane, kissed him on both cheeks and strapped him in his seat two days before the Scofields bought it.” Silence falls on our little group like a dark cloud. Given the evidence, I would rather have Chambers’s side of this case at this moment.

“How much leeway will Ingel give to amend?” says Lenore. She’s talking about an amendment to add the Scofield charges against Iganovich.

“Maybe to the close of our case-in-chief. Not beyond that,” I say. “Maybe not even that far. It would depend on the evidence. We’d have to have something hot.”

“A percipient witness,” she says, “somebody who saw the Scofields go down, with their own eyes.”

We both look at Claude. He knows what we’re thinking. The prime witness in the trees.

“Give me a lead and I’ll chase it,” he says.

“What have you got on him so far?”

“The spotting scope. Couldn’t trace it to the point of purchase, no usable prints, just one smudged, looked like a thumb,” he says. “Same result with the climbing gear, too common to trace. According to the information from Rattigan at the Center for Birds of Prey, their best guess is that the witness was a poacher, using an owl to kill peregrine falcons, adults and chicks. He figures this was done so whoever it was could work under cover of darkness, with no noisy gunshots to rouse the neighbors. Why they were killing the birds, Rattigan has no idea. He says he could understand if they were taking ’em alive. The birds apparently have some value. In good condition, Rattigan says a mature peregrine is worth in the neighborhood of fifty thousand.”

“Dollars?” I say.

He nods. “We’re in the wrong business. From the bits and pieces,” he says, “bones and feathers we found up in the blind and on the ground, whoever was in those trees that night killed a cool half million on the wing.”

But from what Claude is telling me, in terms of our search for a witness, it all adds up to zero.

“Something I want you to check,” I tell Claude. “Have one of your guys do a title search, over at the county recorder’s office, on the property where the Scofields were killed. I’d like to know who owns it.”

Claude makes a note. “Why?” he says.

“Just a hunch,” I say. “Maybe we’ve been working from the wrong end on this.”

Claude looks at me.

“Maybe we should be working backward from the other end, from the Scofields on the ground back the other way,” I say. “What do we have there?”

“Mice and pellets used to feed the birds, at least according to Rattigan,” says Claude. “Reams of working papers, unfortunately destroyed by Jeanette Scofield and Amara. And the travel claim I gave you. That’s it. Not much.”

I spin around in my chair, paw through a pile of items on the credenza behind me and come up with a single manilla folder. I put it on the desk and open it. Inside is the travel claim made out for Abbott Scofield, but never signed, and the attached receipts. I pick through these. The hotel bill and restaurant receipts. When Lenore looks at me I’m holding the two torn tickets, the ones reading “San Diego Wild Animal Park.”

“The zoo?” I say.

She makes a face, like search me.

I pull the AAA Tour Guide , something Mario left in the bottom drawer of his desk. I look in the front, under “San Diego” for attractions. Nothing. I look under “Other Points of Interest.”

“San Diego Wild Animal Park-see Escondido.”

I thumb back to the E’s. There it is, right under the “Lawrence Welk Resort Theatre.”

I read to Lenore and Claude:

San Diego Wild Animal Park embraces eighteen hundred acres about five miles east of I-fifteen, exit Rancho Parkway. More than twenty-five hundred animals, including elephants, tigers, rhinos, zebras, and giraffes roam over expanses of land that simulate Africa and Asia.

Visitors can view the preserve on a fifty-minute monorail ride or from lookout points along a one-and-three-quarter mile hiking trail. Animal and bird. .

I stop in mid-sentence.

bird shows are presented daily in Nairobi Village. .

My voice trails off. I look at Claude.

“You want me to get an airline ticket to San Diego?” he says.

Claude is stuck here to testify.

“Henderson on the next plane out,” I say. Something no doubt more to Denny’s liking than copying the reams that comprise James Sloan’s criminal history.

Claude Dusalt makes an impressive witness on the stand. Even I am a bit surprised by the bearing he brings to this. Claude has one of those faces, craggy and benign, something aristocratic in that slender, jagged nose, the piercing emerald eyes. He has dressed for the occasion, his best gray pinstripe three-piece. No power suit for this man. He will let his position as chief of detectives speak for itself.

He may be a little frazzled. It was a rush getting here from my office. Claude wanted to connect with the San Diego PD before Henderson’s trip south, a little diplomatic courtesy, and to coordinate in case Denny required assistance. We nearly ran the entire way here to avoid being late.

I lead him through his résumé, thirty years on the force, more than a hundred homicide investigations to his credit, his own estimate. He is here to lay the groundwork for our case.

Behind me, I am competing with the constant hum of human conversation, the undertone of the interpreter in Iganovich’s ear, calling the play by play to the defendant.

We take the murders in chronological order, Julie Park and Jonathan Snider first. Claude tells the jury that he was on the scene in less than an hour after the bodies were discovered, that he took charge to seal off the immediate area along the Putah Creek, and personally supervised the collection of physical evidence at the site.

“Did you oversee the taking of any photographs at the scene, by other officers?” I ask.

“I did.”

I move to the counsel table where Goya has these waiting for me. She hands me a file folder. Inside are three separate sets of photographs, one for the judge. I give these to the bailiff to deliver. A second set goes to Chambers, which I drop on his table, and the third I hand to Claude on the witness stand. I take my time allowing Ingel and Chambers to examine these, waiting for the screaming and gnashing of teeth from Adrian.

These photos are nothing if not inflammatory. Several full-body shots of the victims staked out on the ground are likely to leave the jury wishing it had skipped lunch.

Chambers fingers through them, dropping each facedown on the table after examining it. But he says nothing. Instead when he’s finished he looks at me standing in front of the witness box. The lack of expression in his face forms a veritable green light to go ahead.