David Ellis - The Wrong Man

From his viewpoint, which he revealed drip by drip through various comments, I had a circumstantial case against Global Harvest at best. None of the sales of fertilizer or nitromethane were illegal. In fact, they were openly disclosed to the authorities. I claimed the quantities were underreported, but I had no proof of that. And my theories on how Kathy Rubinkowski and Bruce McCabe died were just that-theories. Yes, it helped my cause that two people from GHI’s law firm had been murdered, and it helped that white Aryan supremacists named Patrick Cahill and Ernie Dwyer, in custody on federal gun charges, worked private security for GHI. But at the end of the day, all of my arguments were colored by the fact that I lacked a smoking gun, and I was a defense lawyer desperate to use these facts to exonerate his client.

“So this map came from Stanley Keane’s house,” said Lee Tucker. “And you take these X marks to be bombing targets.”

“Don’t you?” I replied.

“And Stanley Keane is in the hospital right now with multiple broken bones, recovering from shock.”

I nodded. “In his rush to hand me the map, he fell down the stairs.”

Tucker didn’t even smirk. “He’ll tell that story the same way?”

“Lee, are we here to discuss whether I assaulted this asshole, or are we here to discuss whether he plans to detonate bombs in our city someday soon?”

Tucker thought for a long while, perused his notes, and then gave a presumptive nod. “Okay, Kolarich, I got it,” he said.

Okay, he got it. He wasn’t going to give me anything more. But I’d done my duty. Again.

Joel and I got back to the law firm at four. Shauna was in her office, busily typing. Tomorrow morning, we were going to present Judge Nash with a written motion outlining all of the evidence we had uncovered and why it merited either a mistrial or a delay. If Judge Nash denied it, I was going to file an emergency motion in the state supreme court, which has supervisory powers over every court, every case, and ask them to halt the proceedings based on this emergency development. I would make sure that Judge Nash knew of my plan B. My best chance was that, with the specter of the state’s highest court looming over him and the stakes being so high, the old codger would at least grant me a small delay in the trial. Most judges would. Then again, Judge Nash ain’t most judges.

Regardless, this written submission had to be spot-on. I needed the best written product I could muster, and that meant Shauna. She knew this stuff, but she had been focusing on forensics, so I wanted Joel Lightner around this as well. I called Tori in, too, because she’d seen much of this up close. We would need a sparkling brief and affidavits as well, supporting our factual contentions.

“Okay, do your magic,” I said to Shauna. “And Lightner, behave yourself around these two beautiful women.”

“Yeah?” he said. “And where the hell are you going?”

I stretched my arms. “I’m going to prepare my closing argument,” I said. “In case Judge Nash tells us to go fly a kite.”

I worked on two things for the remainder of the night and well into the morning: my argument on why Judge Nash should let us reopen this entire case and investigate my new evidence, and, in the event he shut us down, my closing argument to the jury on why the prosecution hadn’t proven its case against First Lieutenant Thomas Stoller.

I finally cried uncle at three in the morning. Tori, who had stayed with me at the firm and even listened to my summation a couple of times, accompanied me to my hotel room.

My hotel room was a piece of shit, but I could see part of the city’s north and east side where most of the young people lived, where most of the socializing took place.

Even now, at half past three in the morning. Some of these places had four A. M. liquor licenses. I remember that time, before I was married, when you didn’t get started before midnight, when four A. M. meant you were done drinking and it was time to find an all-night diner or some burrito joint.

“You’ve done your part and then some,” Tori said to me, sitting on the bed. She was wearing a gray T-shirt and nothing else. Under any other circumstances, I would be powerless to resist. I’d be jumping on the bed.

“Maybe, maybe not. If I hadn’t been so consumed with Gin Rummy, I would have had Lightner investigating Randall Manning earlier on. All this stuff that happened with him and his family-and Stanley Keane’s and Bruce McCabe’s families? The Brotherhood of Jihad shit? If I’d known that weeks ago, we could’ve made more of it.”

“You were playing catch-up all along,” she said. “You thought this was a simple insanity case. You said so yourself. When it was handed to you, you were told it was a simple case. I mean, Jason, the guys who had this case before you-they didn’t come up with any of this, did they? You should be proud of what you’ve uncovered in such a short amount of time.”

Down on the street, a couple blocks away, a man wearing several layers of clothing was staggering across an intersection. He looked drunk. He looked homeless.

This all started with Tom, and my promise to Deidre Maley that I would do everything I could for her nephew.

Tori climbed off the bed and came to me. She put her arms around me and wrapped her warm body against mine. We stood like that forever. I rested my head on hers and looked out over this city where I grew up, where I lived, and where I would die.

“What if we just left?” she whispered to me. “When this is over, I mean. We could leave. I have money saved up from an inheritance. We could do it, Jason. We could leave this all behind.”

I turned and faced her. I touched her cheek and looked into her eyes, desperately searching mine. “You’d do that? With me?”

She looked into my eyes and nodded.

“Where would we go?” I asked.

“Anywhere.”

Anywhere with me? I had misread her. I knew things were moving forward, but I didn’t think she’d traveled this far. Had I?

“Let’s get through this first,” I said.

“No, you’re right.” There was an imperceptible nod of her head. It made sense. We both knew that. I had no idea how this would end. And I had no idea what would remain of me when it did.

I arrived at the criminal courts building early the next morning. I walked through the lobby, flashed my bar card to the deputy, took the elevator up to the seventeenth floor, walked into the courtroom, and sat down. Shauna showed up a half-hour before court. Wendy Kotowski and the prosecution team weren’t far behind. “Got your brief,” she said to me, holding it up. “Half an hour ago,” she added, an octave lower. “Not exactly advance notice, Counselor.”

I nodded at her. “You gonna do the right thing today, Wen?”

“I always do the right thing,” she said without looking up from her document.

Aunt Deidre came in just then. I conferred with her briefly, giving her little but platitudes, a pep talk. The truth, that I hated to confront, was that the judge would have a reasonable basis to deny everything I was trying to do here.

They brought in Tom at a quarter to nine. He looked a bit disheveled this morning, which seemed appropriate to his state of mind. I leaned into him and asked, “How were the eggs this morning, Tom?”

He actually smiled for a moment, which I took as a good omen.

“Terrible,” he answered.

At five minutes to nine, the court bailiff, an old guy named Warren Olive, stuck his head into the courtroom and looked around. “You all here on Stoller?”

“We are,” I said for everyone.

“Judge wants to hear this in chambers,” Warren said.