David Ellis - The Wrong Man

“Just checking to see if you’re still alive,” I said. “Are you still alive?”

“I am. Are you?”

“I think so.”

“How’s the knee?”

“It’s seen better days.” I had my left leg up on a chair in my office. Keeping it straight kept it from stiffening up. When I got out of bed this morning, I couldn’t even put weight on it. I had to hop on one foot into the shower. I wasn’t really sure how I’d hurt it-I was a little preoccupied with bullets flying past me and ducking for cover-but I was hoping it was just a sprain and not ligament damage or anything.

I hated immobility. I tweaked a hammy my freshman year at State and could barely walk for a few days and I went crazy. Today, I missed my morning run for the first time in weeks, but worse, I’d have trouble pacing, which was how I did my best thinking.

Tori said, “And you’re positive those guys from last night were the same ones who bought me those drinks and grabbed me at Vic’s?”

“I’m sure, Tori.”

“That’s so weird.”

“Not really. It tells me the Capparellis were looking at me. I checked my date book. That friendly encounter at Vic’s came after Lorenzo Fowler had called to make an appointment. It was before we actually met but after he’d set up the meeting with my secretary. So they knew he was coming my way and they were watching me. They’ve been watching me the whole time.”

“I guess that makes sense,” she said.

It did, but something about it still felt wrong. I wasn’t sure what.

“Be careful,” I said. “We’re all here at the firm if you want to join us.”

I hung up with her and returned my attention to the motions in limine that the prosecution had filed. As much as I hated paper and preferred the give-and-take of witness testimony, pretrial motions could have a devastating impact on a trial. You prepare for months or years for a trial and in the final days, the other side takes a shot at excluding your prime piece of evidence or your best argument, and you hold your breath and pray for the right outcome. The wrong result can fundamentally redirect your defense on virtually the eve of trial.

The principal bomb that Wendy Kotowski had dropped was asking the judge to exclude any evidence of Tom Stoller’s heroic military background and, thus, the testimony of Sergeant Bobby Hilton, his friend. Now that the defense of post-traumatic stress disorder had been excluded by the court, she argued, Tom’s military biography had no relevance to whether he killed Kathy Rubinkowski.

She was right. But getting sympathy out of the jury for a war hero who lost everything when he returned home was one of the only arrows I had left in the quiver. So we had our work cut out for us to convince the judge to allow the evidence, and Bradley John’s first draft of the defense’s response, which was due Monday, wasn’t satisfactory, to my mind.

If Judge Nash was a normal human being, he’d feel like he owed me one at this point. That’s how most judges think-if they stick one side with an adverse ruling, they try to restore the equilibrium with a favorable ruling on something else. They want to finish a trial knowing that they screwed over each side about the same.

All told, Wendy had filed no less than sixteen motions in limine. It was a routine tactic to inundate the other side with these motions so they spent their last days before trial tied up in paper and legal research. It was a tactic of which I disapproved. I deplored it, in fact. The adversarial system wasn’t intended to be a game of one-upsmanship but, rather, a sincere search for the truth.

Which was why I filed only fifteen motions on our side.

Either way, it was going to be a long weekend.

My office phone rang, my direct line that almost nobody knows.

“Yeah, hello?”

“Yeah, hello,” Joel Lightner said. He was back at his office, doing his digging on Randall Manning and those other shady characters. Another investigator was helping him. He’d warned me that he’d have trouble getting to some information until Monday, when everyone returned from the long holiday weekend, so I hadn’t expected magic from him yet.

“You don’t answer your cell now?” he complained.

“Oh, sorry.” It was sitting on my desk, but somehow I’d missed the buzzing.

“So I got something.”

“On that one thing?”

“No, the other thing.”

I’d grown paranoid since someone tried to ice me last night, so I was assuming the worst-including that my phones were tapped. Thus, the code-speak.

“The new thing?” I said.

“Right,” he said.

The new thing. My heart did a flip.

“You free for lunch?” I asked.

He said, “Just what I was thinking.”

Patrick Cahill and his partner, Dwyer, had spent the better part of the last hour walking the block of Jason Kolarich’s townhouse. The lawyer lived on a relatively isolated residential street near the lake, and the sidewalks weren’t heavily traveled with the temperatures in the mid-thirties, all of which made the two of them conspicuous standing out here, not doing much of anything but studying the townhouse.

Cahill didn’t have a better idea. Kolarich had aborted his run this morning. Cahill didn’t know why. Maybe it was a one-off, an exception, and tomorrow he’d return to his routine. Maybe Cahill could wait that one more day.

But he needed a plan B. And he hadn’t come prepared with one. It wasn’t like he’d spent weeks planning this thing. It had all happened pretty fast: the guy was nosing around, he had to be eliminated, they knew he went for jogs along the lake-Patrick, get rid of him. Okay, well, now Patrick had to improvise.

He knew where Kolarich worked, but it was a downtown high-rise building, and it wasn’t the easiest or cleanest thing in the world to go after someone in a building like that. There were cameras and locked doors and security guards and people in relatively confined spaces. It would take lots of preparation and planning, and Cahill had time for neither.

But Kolarich had to come home at night. It was only noon right now, so that was hours away, especially for a lawyer getting ready for a trial in less than a week. Maybe he wouldn’t come home until two in the morning. But he’d come home. And they had to be ready.

“The garage,” said Cahill. Next to his brick townhome with white trim was a brick garage with white trim. It was a one-car job but presumably had some room built in for movement.

“Two possibilities,” he said. “We break into the garage and wait for him inside. But I’m not sure how we get in there. There isn’t a window. The door’s automatic, so it won’t lift manually. So the better idea is we wait for him outside. He pulls into the driveway, he opens the garage door, as he pulls the car into the garage, we slip in before he lowers the door.”

“So we’re doing it inside a closed garage. Good,” Dwyer agreed. “And where do we wait?”

The answer, Cahill thought, was blindingly obvious. Cahill pointed to a thin strip between Kolarich’s townhouse and the one next to it to the east. It was technically the neighbor’s property, a walkway that ran the length of the townhomes and dead-ended into a gate accessing the neighbor’s back patio. God, these city people didn’t have much real estate. Cahill was sure he could stand on that walkway, extend his arms, and touch both houses.

“We can squat down there,” he said. “We’ll pick a spot so we can see his car coming, but as he pulls in, the angle will be so he can’t see us. Not that he’d be looking.”

“Right.”

“Then we move forward and once he pulls his car in, we scoot inside. He hits the garage door button without thinking. It closes up and we make our move.”