Steve Martini - Shadow of Power

“God knows where they went,” says Harry, “because they didn’t go home.” Harry knows this because our processor server, who has been camped in his car outside Ginnis’s house in Chevy Chase, hasn’t seen hide nor hair of the justice or his wife.

And there’s more bad news.

Wednesday evening, about the time Harry and I were taking off for Curaçao, Judge Quinn, on his own motion, decided to sequester the jury. After winning points with jurors, giving them what looked like a long weekend off, the judge was suddenly overwhelmed by second thoughts thanks to the budding news reports that Harv Smidt had filed on the AP wire.

Smidt no doubt had called the judge for a comment. The wire-service story about Scarborough’s having an important and perhaps historic letter in his possession when he was murdered, and mentioning in the same paragraph the name Arthur Ginnis, apparently sent shivers up Quinn’s spine. The fact that this story was obviously inspired by Quinn’s sharing clips from the restaurant video with some of his buds in black didn’t diminish the judge’s fear level.

How do you complain to a judge about his own violation of his own gag order?

Understandably, Quinn wanted to corral the jury before they piled up at the newsstands to buy Harv’s story. The judge dispatched half the county sheriff’s office and part of the highway patrol to round up all the jurors and have them get their toothbrushes and pajamas. He now has them all incarcerated in a hotel downtown, where they get to read censored newspapers with rectangles cut out of them and play around-the-clock Parcheesi with seven armed bailiffs.

Sequester a jury and the rule of probability is they will take it out on one person-the defendant.

Harry is seated across the table from me in my office as I paw through a stack of papers and envelopes in the middle of my desk, mail that showed up Thursday and Friday when we were gone.

I flip Harry a couple of catalogs-he likes to shop but never buys-and scan through the correspondence, which is already opened by my secretary, with the envelopes stapled to the backs of the letters in case we ever need proof of a postal date on anything.

I work my way to the bottom of the stack, and there is a large manila envelope with my name and office address printed neatly on a label. Just below this, in bold caps across the bottom of the label, are the words PERSONAL & CONFIDENTIAL, the reason the secretary didn’t open it. There is no return address. No stamp or postage-meter tape.

Herman has just arrived in the outer office. I can hear him chatting with Jennifer, the paralegal. The rest of the staff is off. It’s a holiday. All the government offices, including the courts, are closed. Jennifer should be home as well, but by now she is attached to Arnsberg’s case in the way a magnet attaches to metal.

“Where did this come from?” I look at Harry, who is still paging through one of the catalogs.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Jennifer, you out there?” says Harry. “Come in here for a second.”

A second later she slips her head around the corner of the door.

“Any idea where this came from?” I hold up the envelope.

She looks at it, then comes in and takes a closer look.

“How you guys feeling?” Herman comes in and leans up against the book cabinet inside my office.

“I could use a few more hours’ sleep, but other than that, a signed declaration showing proof of service for a subpoena on Arthur Ginnis and everything is chipper,” says Harry.

“Oh, that,” says Jennifer. “It was under the door when I got to work Thursday morning.”

Whatever is inside, I’m guessing a business envelope containing more than one page, based on the heft and the fact that it’s sliding around, too small for the larger manila outer envelope.

I can feel it in my bones. Tuchio is laying something on us at the last minute. I’ve been expecting it for days, the midnight motion. I talk with Harry as I slit the top of the manila envelope with my letter opener. I peer inside for the business envelope, looking for the district attorney’s printed address in the corner.

My fingers are halfway into the manila opening when I see what’s inside. Instantly I stop what I’m doing and withdraw my hand.

Harry reads my face and looks at the envelope as if maybe there’s a snake inside. “What’s the matter?”

Carefully I lay the envelope back down on the desk.

Harry and Herman are both looking at me, like maybe they should run.

“Do we still have those tweezers, the big forceps we use on the printer?”

“I think so. What is it?”

“Just get them, and a towel, something clean.”

In seconds Harry is back. He hands me the forceps, large tweezers about seven inches long. Harry bought these a few years ago in a hardware store. We use them for plucking small pieces of torn paper from the printer when it jams. I check them to make sure there is no ink or toner powder on the metal. He hands me a small, square cotton dust cloth from the cleaning closet, where the janitor keeps a supply in a bag.

“You’re sure it’s clean?”

“Got it out of the bag,” says Harry.

With the cloth I gently hold the manila envelope to the top of the desk and slip the forceps inside. I snag the folded pages and slide them from the envelope. With the folded letter now exposed on my desk, you can see it clearly: a fine, rust-colored filigree, oblong ringlets of blood where kinetic energy had stretched them as they collided with the paper and later dried.

This delicate, lacelike pattern is interrupted by four bloody dots, spaced in a slight arc in the middle of the folded page. I lift the pages with the forceps and check the other side: a single rust-colored dot near the bottom edge, where the killer’s thumb gripped the envelope on this side as he used the blood-soaked gloves to snatch it from the leather portfolio. The existence of this thumb mark on the letter explains the slight smear of blood at the lower boundary of the rectangle on the portfolio, made when the killer grabbed the letter.

“See if you can find something for that.” Using the cloth, I slide the envelope across the surface of my desk toward Harry. “Maybe a legal-size folder. Or something bigger.”

Jennifer’s fingerprints and my own are already on it, along with how many others, we don’t know.

I lay the folded pages, four of them from what I can see, on the blotter in the center of the desk.

The side of the paper facing up is covered by countless tiny, hollow, oblong ringlets in rust where it was spattered by Scarborough’s blood as it lay on top of the portfolio by the television in his hotel room.

Harry gets two more cloth dust towels and hands the rest of the bag to Herman in case we need more. Instead of a legal-size folder, which would be too small to encase and protect the entire manila envelope, Harry has an empty transfer box with the lid already off. Using two of the cloth towels, he picks up the manila envelope by the edges, carefully compressing the two edges between his hands to lift it, and when he does, an item I had missed inside slides out and falls onto my desk.

It is a tiny Ziploc bag, maybe two by three inches in size. I don’t touch it, but I look closely as it lies on the surface of my desk. Inside are what appear to be several short strands of blond hair.

“All of you saw it,” I say. “Where it came from?”

There are nodding heads all around, Herman, Harry, and Jennifer.

Twenty minutes later I’m on the phone. Judge Quinn is calling from his house. We have had to go through the bailiff’s office at the courthouse, staffed by only a skeleton crew on a holiday, to have them call Quinn at home and have him call me at my office, an emergency.