A Reason to Live (Marty Singer1) (11 page)

It didn't amount to squat. In court, Landis was unable to project the image of Wheeler as an obsessed stalker, refusing to make more than a passing mention of Brenda Lane's calls to the station complaining about his attentions. Atwater, despite her inexperience, used the same episodes to paint Wheeler as a devoted community peacekeeper, an example of his dedication to protect Brenda Lane and the neighborhood. She cited a rise in local crime to back up the need for vigilance--never mind that the "rise" consisted of statistics taken from the rest of DC and not the patty-cake problems the Palisades suffered from. Lawrence Ferrin, Wheeler's partner and friend, gave an impassioned description of Wheeler's service to the community and his fitness as a brother police officer. With sly looks in my direction, he described how brusque I'd been at the crime scene and my dismissive attitude.

The case progressed and Atwater ripped the lab team apart, describing their examination of the crime scene as a comedy of errors. She intimated that the body had been moved and created a colorful misinterpretation of the timing of things, deftly making Wheeler's alibi--impossible from what I'd seen two hours after the event--perfectly acceptable. The head of the forensics team defended his department's actions on the stand, but when Atwater pointed out several black-eyes suffered by his unit in three previous cases, all having to do with crime scene taint, his credibility went down in flames.

The coup de grace was a chain-of-evidence fuckup of monumental proportions. The tape of Brenda Lane's call the night she was murdered--her panicky, gasping reaction to Mike Wheeler breaking into her house minutes before she was shot to death--up and lost itself.

Lost. Vanished. As in, we couldn't find it.

I'd listened to it dozens of times. But when the original was sent by courier to Landis's office, it never got there. It grew legs and walked off. No one had made copies, even though that was standard procedure, so the only evidence of Brenda Lane's damning call was the fuzzy memory of the harried switchboard operator on duty that night.

The dirty little secret that no cop or prosecutor wants to admit is that...it happens. Things go missing that shouldn't. But you don't lose something of this magnitude. The tape wasn't just a piece of physical evidence, one block among many in the wall we were building around Wheeler. It was that all-important emotional denunciation that juries lap up, the stand-up-andpoint moment that knocks the defense's house of cards down like a hurricane hit it. Would anyone have truly believed Wheeler was there to check on a burglary after hearing Brenda's voice, the recognition in that one word, "
You?
"? Does a woman aiming a pistol at a potential attacker stay on the phone and scream "
Don't, don't, don't!
" instead of firing? Those twelve angry men would've been in and out with a guilty verdict so fast the door wouldn't have had time to swing shut.

Instead, Landis called us in a rage a few days before trial, wanting to know where the tape had gone. A massive, unsuccessful hunt for the thing followed, succeeded quickly by a lot of finger-pointing. No one seems to know who picked up the tape or signed for it, or whether it even got to the goddamn prosecutor's office. My team ripped into each other until I told them to knock it off and concentrate on the case. Communication with Landis's office reached an all-time low in both volume and civility.

I was furious--not to mention dejected--at the setback, but still thought we had enough to pin Wheeler to the wall. As for getting the jury emotionally involved, we'd lost our ace when the tape went missing, but I thought we might have a chance when Wheeler took the stand. The man was so naturally arrogant that he was his own worst enemy.

But Atwater had coached Wheeler well. He was the model defendant: humble, courteous, contrite, nearly breaking into tears when he fielded a soft-pitch from Atwater about how the shooting might mark the end of his law enforcement career. Landis did his best to rattle him and a few times I thought I saw the true Michael Wheeler rise to the surface. But each time that happened, either Wheeler recovered himself, Atwater objected, or Landis failed to follow through. Atwater took the point in that game and the defendant's testimony--so often the straw that breaks the jury's back--did nothing but pave the way for the eventual verdict.

Not guilty.

I'd been involved in enough trials to see it coming, but refused to believe it until I heard the actual words come from the jury rep's mouth. The crowded gallery broke into a raucous mix of cheers and groans; like the police, the city, and the public, the audience was split in their support. Landis stared straight ahead, his gaze caught somewhere between the floor and the judge's dais. He didn't even blink when the verdict was read. Atwater had almost the same look, with just the merest blush at her success. I remember thinking at the time that she seemed under-whelmed by the victory.

Then I caught sight of Wheeler. He was standing, surrounded by supporters. Lawrence Ferrin and Tim Delaney from the night of the shooting were there along with a bunch of other cops that I hoped I never had to work with. There were backslaps and jokes all around.

I stared at Wheeler, not quite believing what had happened. He was shaking someone's hand, when Ferrin--grinning so wide the skin of skull seemed ready to split--nudged him in the ribs and he turned my way. His face was so self-satisfied, so full of triumph, I almost vaulted the railing to get at him. Wheeler was guilty as hell and we'd let him slip away. It was, perhaps, the worst moment of my professional life. I kept my cool, but while he was still turned towards me I cocked an imaginary gun, aimed, and shot.

He just smiled, a jackal's grin, and shook his head.

. . .

The rest of the year petered out, sluggish and uninspired. To a man, my department knew we'd blown it. Half the fault might be the DA's, but you don't look at it that way. As a matter of survival, I forced everyone to focus on the current cases and let Wheeler go. There was no shortage of people out there killing other people and they deserved our attention. Over time, the team let the case slide from the front of their mind to the back and eventually out altogether.

Of course, I didn't follow my own advice. Months after I watched Wheeler swagger out of the courtroom and Kransky had left Homicide cursing my name, I would go home and look at my personal file of the case, wondering where we'd missed the golden nugget that would've put him away. I never found it. Or we'd had it and lost it. I blamed myself, my fellow cops, the legal system, the government. I blamed Atwater and the whole sub-human race of criminal defense lawyers, then I blamed Landis and every federal prosecutor who'd ever lived. More than once I sat in my living room with a fifth of whiskey on the floor to the right and the phone to the left, got stinking drunk, then called Landis to heap abuse on him. To my surprise, he stayed on the line and took it, at least the first three or four times. Even after that, he would simply listen for a minute, then hang up quietly. Dods--newly assigned to me--got wind of what I was doing and threatened to cut my phone lines, then my fingers, if I didn't stop.

If there was any silver lining, it's that I didn't have to see Wheeler afterwards; he seemed to disappear after the trial. His cronies--Lawrence Ferrin and the others--gave me looks and threw some remarks in my direction when they saw me, but nothing ever came of it and they, too, seemed to melt away once the fireworks were over.

A year later, long enough that I didn't blame myself too much, Landis walked out of his brownstone in Old Town Alexandria, swallowed some pills, and laid face-down across the railroad tracks north of town. An exercise path runs alongside the tracks, separated by a narrow stretch of grass and a chain-link fence. His body, or what was left of it, was an early-morning find by two joggers I'm betting never took that particular trail again. The coroner found traces of alcohol and prescribed anti-depressants in his blood. In the wake of the Lane trial and bolstered by testimony from his coworkers and his psychiatrist, an inquest deemed it a suicide, no contest.

When I heard, I sat at my desk for a minute, saddened, then went to lunch. I had only recently managed to forget about the debacle when Don killed himself, so I'll admit with some guilt that, when he was gone, he was one less reminder of our inability to put Michael Wheeler behind bars. Memories of the trial and our colossal failure surfaced like sunken debris that had been temporarily dislodged. I gazed dispassionately at my anger and frustration…then let them sink back into the murky bottom of my emotions from where they'd come.

iv.

She was older, of course, and taller, but there was still a lot of the girl in her that he remembered. The hair was the same and she was still slender. Her face had the same distracted air, like she was listening to someone or something no one else could hear.

There were differences. As a girl she'd been awkward and clumsy growing into her body, falling off her bike and cutting up her knees. As a woman, she was lithe and walked gracefully even when she was hunched over with her books. Shy twelve years ago, she seemed popular now: she smiled and chatted with students and teachers on her way to class.

From benches and doorways and street corners he'd watched for days, trying to remember her. He'd monitored himself, alert to any of the desire he'd had for her before, surprised when he felt a stirring of the old emotions. Not the rushing burn he'd had back then, but enough of a tickle to make him doubt what he was doing. He'd been dead inside for twelve years. Was he the same person? She had changed; maybe he had, too.

He'd arrived with a mission, strong and confident, ready to act. Now he felt the first stirring of doubt, a crack in the foundation of his plan. If he wasn't ready to do what needed to be done, he didn't deserve the chance. Second chance, he corrected himself.

Maybe he'd sensed his own doubt. The flower had been as much a test for him as a message to her. He'd felt a strange tumult of emotions when he'd left it for her, and later, when he saw her pick it up. Satisfaction at her shock, cold rage at the thought of the years behind him because of her--but hardest of all--the unexpected wriggle of desire. He'd assumed he'd feel nothing but cold direction; now, his emotions were confusing and muddling his focus. He needed something to tell him how to proceed.

It was time to push the boundaries.

I drove away from Atwater's house mad. Memories of the trial were hard to swallow, naturally, but the encounter itself was difficult to take, too. I wasn't used to having to dance around subjects or witnesses. When you're a thirty-year veteran of the MPDC, you usually get what you want. Not that I was a bully. I didn't slap people around like some Prohibition-era thug with a badge. But I had resources, from outright arrest to more subtle ways to pressure people into doing what I needed them to do. Like suggesting they might get a parking ticket on the hood of their car every day for the rest of their natural life. That kind of thing. Those days were gone. Atwater knew that I could make her life inconvenient, but when push came to shove, she could tell me to get the hell out of her house and that was the end of it. It was another adjustment I was going to have to make.

I blew out a breath and concentrated on driving. I felt like I'd had a load of bricks dumped on my shoulders. I hadn't done anything like face down the boys from SecureTrex or work on a reluctant subject like Atwater in months. It should've been a piece of cake. Now all I wanted to do was pull over to the side of the road and take a nap. I gritted my teeth, put my hands at ten and two, and blinked rapidly until I pulled in front of my house.

I dragged myself inside, shut and locked the door, and collapsed onto the couch. From my back, I tossed my keys on the table and meant to do the same with my phone, but only got as far as pulling it out of my pocket before I fell asleep with it in my hand.

Which was a stroke of good luck, since it was the phone that finally woke me. I'd had it on vibrate and apparently it had been buzzing and jiggling enough to send it tumbling out of my hand to the oak floor where it landed with a loud
clack
. The noise of its impact and the persistent vibration fished me out of the coma I was in.

I sat up, stupid with sleep. It took me a minute to register where I was, when I was. It had been early afternoon when I'd stumbled through the front door and fallen onto the couch. Now it was pitch black outside, Pierre was doing a hot cakes dance in front of me, looking for food, and my phone was making a sound like an angry cicada stuck on its back.

I scrubbed my face with my hands, then picked up the phone. I punched the button to stop the alarm, then checked the time. 9:25. The day before, I'd set the phone to go off on the nines, am and pm, to remind me to check in with Amanda. She was almost a half-hour late calling in. A walnut-sized lump of anxiety took shape in my chest, but I clamped down on it and hit the speed dial number for her. I began rationalizing. We'd only been doing the call-in for a day or two; it wouldn't be that strange if she'd forgotten or blown it off, though the second thought made me burn. If she wasn't going to play by my rules, she could find someone else to worry about her.

The call was on its sixth ring and headed for voice mail. I cursed, ended the call, then hit speed dial again. It chirped four times. Five. Six. I was about to hang up when I heard it pick up. A loud bang made me wince, then Amanda's voice came on.

"Hello? Marty?"

"Amanda," I shouted.

"Sorry, I dropped the phone," she said, out of breath. "Oh, shit. It's past nine, isn't it?"

"Yeah," I said. "You were supposed to call in, remember?"

"I'm so sorry. I totally forgot. I gave an exam two days ago and I promised my students I'd get their scores back--"