Bury the Lead (4 page)

• • • • •

I’
M OUT OF THE AIRPORT
in five minutes, leaving Laurie to fend for herself. If Linda Padilla has been murdered, then this case is going to explode. And if Cummings is still in the middle of things, then as his lawyer, I have to make sure it doesn’t explode in his face.

Four years ago Linda Padilla was a middle-level bureaucrat working in the State Housing Administration. Having grown up in low-income housing herself, she was aware of the rather large need for improvement in most of these developments.

What she had not been aware of was a conspiracy among some of those above her to embezzle money meant for housing construction. When she discovered it, she feared that it would be swept under the rug, so she went public with the revelations. People went to jail, others turned state’s evidence, and she became an instant media star.

Superstar whistle-blowers don’t remain in bureaucracies long, and Padilla left to start a watchdog operation. Emboldened by her actions and aware of her reputation, others in different areas of government and the private sector started coming to her with their tales of official and executive wrongdoing. Padilla eagerly and effectively presented them to the world. It wasn’t long before people in power were, if not cowering, at least fearful of becoming her next target.

Padilla took advantage of her fame to become very wealthy. She was a highly sought-after figure on the lecture circuit, and the word was, she could command more than fifty thousand dollars per speech. She also wrote a best-selling book on her exploits; she had reinvented herself as a cottage industry and made a fortune in the process.

Three months ago Padilla announced her candidacy for governor in next year’s election. The public responded almost instantly, and poll after poll showed that she had the very real potential to turn the state’s political landscape upside down.

But Vince’s words make all that moot, and her murder is likely to initiate a media earthquake. I listen to the radio on the way there, and the news is sketchy at this point. All that is known is that Linda Padilla has been killed, and there is speculation that she is in fact the latest victim of the serial killer that has been stalking the area.

It takes me almost twenty minutes to get to Eastside Park and another ten minutes to work my way close to the crime scene. If I were a looter anywhere else in New Jersey, I’d be salivating, since there’s no doubt that every cop in the state is here in Eastside Park. There are so many car lights and floodlights that it seems like daytime, though it’s approaching nine
P.M
.

Since in the eyes of the police I have no standing in this case, I’m limited as to how close I can get. I’m trying to maneuver around that problem by finding cops I recognize when I see Vince pointing to me and talking to an officer. The officer nods and comes over to get me, bringing me inside the barricades. As I walk toward Vince, I look around but don’t see Daniel Cummings.

Vince grabs me by the arm. “Come on.”

He starts taking me toward the crime scene, which means we have to navigate through what seems to be five million people.

“Where’s Cummings?” I ask.

“With the state police.”

“Was he contacted by the killer?”

He laughs a short laugh. “Yeah. You might say that.”

A few moments later I understand his cryptic comment. Cummings is leaning back on a chair as a paramedic bandages his head. It appears the bandage is protecting a wound on the left side of his temple.

The medic finishes and nods silently to Captain Millen, the state cop who ran the press conference and who is in charge of what is rapidly becoming a train wreck of a case. Millen walks over to Cummings and starts talking to him.

“So, Mr. Cummings, you feeling okay?” I can tell his concern lacks something in the sincerity department, since he does not wait for a response. “Tell me everything that happened tonight. Leave out nothing.”

Cummings frowns his displeasure at this. “Captain, I already told the story to the officer. Can’t you—”

“No, I want to hear it from you.”

“Captain Millen, my name is Andy Carpenter,” I say, my voice deep and powerful so as to convey my authority. “I’m representing Mr. Cummings.”

“Good for you.” He doesn’t seem to be cowed.

“My client is obviously injured.”

“And Linda Padilla is obviously dead. So stop interrupting or I’ll have you obviously removed.”

He’s speaking to me as if I am an annoying child. This is unacceptable and demeaning, but I back off, so as to avoid getting sent to my room for a time-out.

Cummings, coherent enough in his injured state to know that he’ll get no help from me, begins to tell his story. He had received a phone call on his cell phone while driving on Route 3, about fifteen minutes from here. It was the killer, who told him that the next victim was about to be killed in Eastside Park, near the pavilion.

Millen interrupts. “How did he know you’d be out with your cell phone?”

Cummings shrugs. “For all I know, he tried me at home first.”

As the conversation continues, I learn that the police had been tapping all of Cummings’s phones except the cell phone that the killer called on. It was not Cummings’s personal phone; it was one supplied by the paper, which he kept in the car and rarely used. He hadn’t thought to mention it to the police and is baffled as to how the killer could have gotten the number, since he doesn’t even know it himself.

“What did you do next?”

“I rushed here, of course. And I tried to keep him on the phone as long as I could. I thought maybe I could save whoever . . . if he was talking to me . . . well, he couldn’t do anything.” He glances over toward the inside of the pavilion, where Ms. Padilla’s body lay covered. “Finally, we got cut off as I reached here. I tried calling you, but there wasn’t any cell phone reception. So I went in . . . hoping to stop . . .”

My own cell phone goes off, rather untimely considering what my client has just said.

“Hello?”

It’s Laurie, calling from the airport. “Where are you?”

“I’m at Eastside Park . . . there’s been a murder.”

Millen looks over at me, then back to Cummings. “How come his cell phone works here?”

Cummings has a flash of anger at Millen. “I don’t know . . . and I really don’t care.”

“Who was murdered?” Laurie asks.

“Linda Padilla,” I say. “Take a cab home. I’ll call you.”

I hang up, having smoothly accomplished the difficult feat of making my own client look like a liar.

“Good job” is Vince’s sarcastic whisper.

I shrug as Millen questions Cummings in excruciating detail about the phone conversation, seeking to find out every possible nuance, probing for exact words used, tone of voice, et cetera. Finally, Cummings tells Millen that he doesn’t remember much more. He was apparently hit on the side of the head by an unseen assailant. He was knocked out, though he doesn’t know for how long, and when he came to, he called the police, since the cell phone’s reception had somehow been restored.

“Did you see him at all?” Millen asks.

“No.”

“His car?”

“No.”

Cummings seems to wince in pain and touches the bandage on his head.

“Captain,” I say, “he needs to get to a hospital.”

Millen seems about to argue, then changes his mind. “We’ll be in touch tomorrow.”

The paramedics load the reluctant Cummings into the ambulance, which will take him to the hospital for X rays. Once he is gone, Vince and I walk off to talk alone.

“What do you think?” Vince asks.

“How well do you know Cummings?”

“Very well,” says Vince, a little too quickly. “Well enough. Why?”

“He was lying. The cell phone story was bullshit. I walk Tara around here all the time, and I’ve never had a problem with reception. And I heard Laurie clear as a bell.”

“So maybe your—”

“You got one? Call your office.”

Vince takes out his phone and dials his office. After a few moments he cuts off the call; it obviously worked.

“Why would he lie?” Vince asks.

“I don’t know . . . maybe he wants to be a hero and catch the killer himself. But if
I
knew he was lying, then you can be sure Millen knew it even faster. And with the pressure that’s about to come down, he’s not a guy to jerk around.”

Vince doesn’t say anything for a few moments, worry etched on his face. There’s something going on here, and as the lawyer, it would be nice if I knew what it was.

“Vince, are you telling me everything? Because I feel like there’s a whole bunch of missing pieces here.”

“I’ve told you everything I know. Why wouldn’t I?”

I shrug, since I have no idea, and he continues. “I’ll talk to Daniel in the morning. You wanna go grab a beer at Charlie’s?”

Charlie’s is a combination sports bar/restaurant that is my favorite sports bar/restaurant in the entire world. Simply put, it is the Tara of sports bar/restaurants. But there is absolutely no chance that I will be going there tonight with Vince.

“Let me see . . . ,” I say. “A beer with Vince, or seeing Laurie for the first time in two weeks? Mmmm . . . Vince or Laurie . . . Laurie or Vince? Gorgeous woman . . . or fat slob? A terrific evening with the woman I love . . . or a night of burping and slurping with a pain in the ass? Help me out here . . . I just can’t decide.”

“I’m buying,” he offers.

“Even though that would be a historic event, I’m going to pass. Call me in the morning after you’ve spoken to our boy.”

I leave Eastside Park and stop off at my house to pick up Tara before I go to Laurie’s. I never leave Tara alone in the house all night, and my plan is to spend this particular night at Laurie’s. Of course, it’s always possible that she’ll have a different plan. It’s her first night home . . . she might be tired or just feel like being alone.

I ring her doorbell and she comes to the door. She’s wearing one of my T-shirts and nothing else, and she kisses me in such a way as to make me confident that my plan is going to work.

And it does. Brilliantly.

• • • • •

T
HE FIRST THING
I do in the morning is turn on the television to see the kind of play the Linda Padilla murder is getting. It’s as big as I expected: national news and the lead story on the
Today
show.

I’m surprised when Daniel Cummings is Katie Couric’s first interview, from his hospital room. He tells what happened with a heavy emphasis on his heroism in the face of danger; if Eastside Park were Iwo Jima, Daniel would be commissioning someone to paint him planting the flag. It’s becoming increasingly clear that my client is trying to use these murders to achieve stardom.

As an ex-cop, Laurie is anxious to hear more about the situation, and she peppers me with questions. She can’t quite understand my role in this any better than I can, questioning why Vince brought me into the case. And questioning even more why I agreed to do it.

“He’s my friend,” I point out.

“But you don’t think he’s telling you everything.”

I nod. “That’s true.”

“Why are you letting him get away with that?” she asks.

“He’s my friend.”

She leans over and kisses me. “I love your simplicity.”

I nod. “Along with my virility, it’s one of my best traits. You want to work on the case with me?”

“For free?”

“Yup. But you’ll get to watch my simplicity close-up.”

“I’m weakening,” she says.

“And there’s absolutely nothing for us to do.”

“Then I’m in.”

I’ve now accomplished my main goal, which is to have company while I’m wasting my time. Had Laurie not agreed to be my investigator, I probably would have asked Tara next.

Since I have nowhere else to go, I suggest that our first stop should be the hospital to check on Cummings’s condition, though he seemed fine when he talked to Katie Couric. Laurie asks that we first stop off at the murder scene; she wants to get a feel for what happened.

I wait for Laurie to shower and dress, which is unlike waiting for any other woman. Laurie can get out of bed and be ready to leave the house in ten minutes, as fast as any guy I know. But she looks considerably better than any guy who ever lived.

We sample the radio stations on the way to the park. If the killer hoped to get maximum attention and instill maximum fear in the public, choosing Linda Padilla as a victim was a brilliant move. Her murder has ratcheted up the “state of siege” mentality in the community.

Just during our ten-minute drive, on news stations we hear straight reporting, rehashed but unsubstantiated rumors about Linda Padilla’s connections to organized crime, testimonials about the purity of her life, tip hot lines set up by the police, amateur profiles on the killer’s psyche, and quotes from Captain Millen and Cummings.

Over on talk radio the callers are angry, demanding action and FBI intervention in the case. “Harry from Lyndhurst” considers the problem one of police priorities. “They got time to give me a speeding ticket, but no time to catch this killer.” Harry, it turns out, is one of the more thoughtful callers.

There is still a police presence at the scene, and the public is kept away by the ten or so cops assigned to protect it. Two of them were trained by Laurie when she was on the force, and she has no trouble getting them to let us in.

Padilla’s body was found in the pavilion, so that is where we go. There is a chalk outline where the body had been. I wonder whose job it is to draw that, and if they give a class in it at the Police Academy. If I were a cop, that would be the assignment I’d go after. I’d even be willing to start as an assistant chalker and work my way up.

“She was strangled?” Laurie asks.

I nod. “From behind.”

“She wasn’t killed here.”

“How do you know that?” I ask.

She points to some scrape marks which lead to the area where the body was. “She was dragged . . . from that door . . . probably wrapped in a sack. If she was alive, he wouldn’t have bothered dragging her this far . . . he would have killed her closer to the door. There’s also no blood; if her hands were cut off here, even postmortem, there would be some blood.”

There’s something about the way she re-creates what happened here that both chills me and leaves me very sad. No one deserves to be dragged in a sack to be dumped on a cold floor. If there is a way to end a life, this sure ain’t it.

We’re quiet on the way to the hospital, each of us affected by what we have just seen. Laurie is frustrated; she knows this maniac has struck four times and will keep going until he’s caught. She wants to be involved in tracking him down, rather than simply hanging out with the lawyer for the newspaper that is reporting the story.

“Why would he pick a guy like Cummings?” I ask.

“Certainly, he wants attention, a forum to speak to the world without exposing himself to danger. But why Cummings? It’s hard to say. Isn’t he a law-and-order, tough-on-crime guy? Maybe that’s why the killer picked him. It’s another way to thumb his nose at authority. Which also may be why he picked Linda Padilla.”

“I’m not so sure,” I say. “There doesn’t seem to be any pattern to the victims. My guess is they were chosen at random. Padilla may just have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

We arrive at the hospital and walk through the lobby toward the elevators. Laurie sees the cafeteria down the hall. “I just want to get a cup of coffee first,” she says.

“More coffee?” I ask. “Doesn’t anybody drink tea anymore? What the hell is this society coming to?”

“Investments not going well?” she asks, but since she knows the answer, she doesn’t wait to hear it, and heads to the cafeteria.

When we finally get to Cummings’s room, he is sitting in a chair, fully dressed and talking to Vince. I introduce him to Laurie, and then Vince gives Laurie a big hug and wide smile. For some reason, Laurie brings out gracious behavior in human beings otherwise incapable of it.

Cummings says, with obvious frustration, “So, defense attorney, you specialize in getting clients out of confinement? How about getting me out of here?”

“What’s the problem?” I ask, irritated by his tone.

“Hospital regulation bullshit,” says Vince. “They have to do all kinds of paperwork before a patient can be released.”

“That’s nice for them, but they have five minutes. I have work to do.” Cummings looks at his watch, as if that will make his threat more credible.

“Relax, Daniel,” says Vince. “Your story for tomorrow is written already.”

Cummings’s face shows no sign of relaxing, and he opens the door, calling out to a nurse as she walks by the room. “Nurse, we need to get out of here.”

The nurse answers nervously, “I’m sorry, Mr. Cummings, I’m sure they’ll be here momentarily.”

She closes the door and doesn’t hear him ask, “Who’s ‘they’?”

Cummings doesn’t go back to his chair and instead paces the room. He turns to Laurie and me. “Are they making any progress on the murders? I’m cut off from the damn world in here.”

As I’m about to tell him that I have no idea, the door opens and Captain Millen walks in, flanked by five officers. They seem to come in a little too quickly, as if rushed, but that is not the most surprising thing about their entry. The most surprising thing is that they are holding guns.

“What the . . . ?” Cummings starts.

“Turn around! Hands against the wall!” Millen barks as his officers move toward Cummings.

Vince says something—I can’t make out what—and moves toward Cummings. Vince is pushed out of the way by the officers, and Laurie grabs hold of him, keeping him out of the fray.

“Are you crazy?” asks Cummings. “What the hell . . . ?”

Millen pays no attention, screaming even louder. “Now! Against the wall!”

Cummings still doesn’t react, and is roughly turned around, pushed against the wall, and his hands are cuffed behind his back.

“Daniel Cummings,” Millen begins, “I am placing you under arrest. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law . . .”

He completes the
Miranda
warning. By now Cummings has been reduced to stunned silence. “What is the charge, Captain?” I ask.

“For right now it’s just the murder of Linda Padilla. But my guess is, there will be others.”

He signals for his officers to take Cummings out of the room, and they do so immediately. As Cummings leaves, I say, “Do not say a word to anyone until I am in your presence.” Cummings doesn’t respond; the shock of all this is affecting his mind’s ability to process.

“Do you understand?” I ask. “Not one word.”

He finally nods slowly, then is led away.

As Millen follows them, he turns to me. “Well, lawyer, looks like you got yourself something to do.”