Steve Martini - Prime Witness

Adrian turns on Lenore. She is back up, climbing the stairs to the bench, her only avenue of escape. She is to the top step when he grabs her ankle, rips the spiked heel from her foot and sends her careening into the flag. She kicks him with her other foot, and Adrian is driven backward within range. Getting dizzy, going dark, I lash out at his leg, ripping through his pants, driving the point feebly into one thigh. It is not deep, but it gets his attention.

Chambers turns on me. Rising up over me, a hulking, brooding figure, his eyes glazed like some rabid dog. The blue serge of his suit coat lifting with the rise of his shoulders, he brings the metal stake, gripped in both hands, arms extended over his head, the vision of a high priest doing sacrifice to the gods. And suddenly through the seam of his shirt, like the shaft of an arrow, the razor-sharp tip of a spear comes six inches through the wall of Adrian’s chest. He is suspended in air, frozen in place by the shock. In an instant there is the gurgling sound of blood as it rushes to fill his lungs, an expression almost quizzical, as if somehow he has seen beyond the veil. Then Adrian Chambers collapses in a heap on the floor. The partially furled flag, wrapped around its stanchion, protrudes from his back.

Beyond him, her feet spread for leverage, blood on her chin, Lenore stands, looking down at the lifeless body on the floor. In the white of her eyes, the cut of her jaw, is not the slightest hint of pity or remorse. The vision burned in my mind as my eyes go dark, is of fire and wind, sparks on the air, the burnished image of some ancient goddess of war.

It has now been five months. The Russian’s case has ended in a mistrial, poisoned by the devious plotting and double-dealing of his lawyer.

Today my shoulder is a brooding ache. I have learned with this thing there are good days and bad, a lasting memento from Adrian Chambers. The doctors tell me that in time and with therapy I will fully recover.

Through all of this, the last months of pain, Nikki has been good to me, putting aside the danger that I had unwittingly exposed us all to. It seems the reason I could not reach her by phone that afternoon up at the inn in Coloma was that Nikki had carted Sarah off to a movie in Placerville. She had hired a cab for the twenty-mile drive there and back. I now have the bill to prove it.

In the weeks after I came home from the hospital, Nikki spent time nursing me, draining my wound and packing it. We have talked long hours, about life, and the value of love. In the end, I have learned that among all of her qualities Nikki is, first and foremost, forgiving. Today she waits for me in the car outside.

As I pass through the reception area Jane Rhodes greets me with a smile. The mood in this place seems lighter. I suspect that this is in part a reflection of my own delight in passing the torch to another. I am no longer district attorney of Davenport County.

As I head for the door a man in white overalls is busy scraping gold letters from the mottled glass, the final vestige of Mario falling in chips to the floor.

I will need some help packing boxes to the car. For this a couple of the people from the office have offered.

Bits and pieces of the story are still coming out. I was three days in the hospital before I discovered what happened to Claude outside in the hall that night. He ended up with a massive concussion, and was out on leave for nearly a month. The impression left on his head matched precisely a heavy marble gavel, a paperweight from Ingel’s desk. It seems the image I saw in the shadows that night crouching behind Claude was not Denny Henderson at all, but Adrian.

The police have traced his steps from the few items dropped in his travels. After killing Ingel, and tying Lenore on the couch, Chambers exited the courtroom by way of the locked corridor in the rear. By propping open a door that led to the main hall, he was able to come up on Claude from behind and return to the courtroom by the same route. The rest is history.

It seems that Adrian had managed to place himself heavily in debt, real estate deals gone sour in his time before reinstatement to the practice of law. This was the result of declining land values and Adrian’s high living. I have now seen the offices of “A.C. Associates” in a high-rise across the river in Capital City, more tony than the pope’s private john and with nearly as much art. He had spawned a considerable Ponzi scheme to keep himself afloat, stealing money from later investors to pay off early claims. The bean counters, a small army of accountants, are now trying to determine the full extent of these losses and the ensuing fraud. My own count stopped when they reached twelve million dollars. I am told that figure may well double before they are finished.

Adrian was under the gun. With time running out, he had a deal from developers on the Putah Creek property, a sale with the potential to pull himself even. And then came the birds.

The peregrine falcons first came to Adrian’s attention when a farmer in the area noticed them killing his pigeons. The man complained to Chambers, this according to the man’s wife who is now a grieving widow. A month after talking to Chambers the farmer died in an accident, mysteriously crushed under the tires of his tractor and cut to ribbons by the sharp metal discs it was pulling through a field. The cops are now looking into this accident. We will probably never know whether Adrian had a hand in this.

A few questions and a little research and Adrian soon understood the peril. Any development of the property would require an environmental impact report, a document longer than the Bible, and filled nearly as much with the story of creation. When government agencies discovered from this report the presence of endangered species on the land, Adrian could kiss his sale good-bye. The state would force a major set-aside of the land as natural habitat, severely restricting its development and value. Unable to account for vast sums of money stolen from investors, Chambers would soon be looking at another stint in prison, this one much longer than the last.

Enter Cleo Coltrane. When the Scofields discovered the birds were dying in droves, the victims of some natural predator, they were closing in on Cleo and would soon be onto Adrian. Chambers, strapped for cash, struggling to capitalize on the only thing he owned of any value, was forced to rid himself of another problem. What were two more deaths, more or less? By now he had the cover of the Putah Creek murders. There was no need for further unexplained accidents like the one that claimed the farmer.

I should have seen it, the endless attempts to fold the Scofield murders into the plea bargain for the others. Chambers was confident that once a court passed judgment on Andre Iganovich for all of the murders the cops would close the case on the Scofields. No jury would ever convict another suspect, when the Russian was already doing time on these crimes. To Adrian it was not a question of justice, but efficiency. He knew that Iganovich had done the first four. He was a natural for the Scofields.

As for the Russian, police in Oregon and Orange County have now closed the loop in the unsolved murders there. They have found physical evidence linking Iganovich to those killings. With time and the help of the State Department we have discovered a long and lurid trail of littered bodies and unsolved murders, at least twelve in three countries in Eastern Europe, places where Andre Iganovich traveled and lived while he was waiting for his U.S. visa. That this man could so easily become a security guard says reams about this industry.

We have also found the missing piece of cord in our own case. Like serendipity, it turned up, still in its marked plastic evidence bag, lying in plain view on the floor in the library nearly at the site where the photographers were processing it the day it disappeared. It was found the day after Chambers drove the stake through my shoulder. It seems Roland was seen doing research at the stacks in this room moments before a secretary found the missing evidence. I am told he has a meeting with one of Claude’s deputies this afternoon to explain this.