Close Case (11 page)

A voice mail from Jessica Walters was waiting for me. “Hey, girl. I saw your defendants on the news this morning. Your instincts paid off, with the added bonus of solving my little PR problem. Good job.”

I called her back and gave her the details from the night before, including my confrontation with Calabrese.

“Oh, I see. When you offered to lend me an MCT guy for my vandalism case, you were farming out the team’s biggest hothead?”

“I didn’t know that at the time, but, yeah, pretty much. Now we just need to figure out how to merge our cases. My inclination is to get the murder indictment, then use the crime spree on Twenty-third to connect the defendants to the murder. Unless your victims are going to freak, I’d rather not water down the indictment with a bunch of criminal mischief and assault charges.”

“Sounds like a plan. I’ll explain it to them.”

“Thanks.” I still needed to talk to Percy’s parents in Los Angeles and establish a long-distance rapport with them. “So the television stations have the story already?”

“I saw it this morning,” she said. “Nothing detailed. Just that they were suspects in the Twenty-third Avenue mess and in the Crenshaw case.”

That’s all the radio news had too. The bureau’s press release on the arrest must have been bare bones, the best kind as far as I was concerned.

Ten seconds after I hung up, Raymond Johnson’s head popped around my door. I wondered if the timing was fortuitous or if he’d arrived earlier and overheard my Calabrese-bashing to Jessica.

“What’s your pretty face doing in here?” I asked cheerfully. Was I usually that cheerful, I wondered, or was I trying to be nice in the event he heard me bad-mouthing his colleague? No, I was always that cheerful. Definitely.

And Johnson’s face was awfully pretty. At least, it was usually. But this morning, he looked exhausted.

“I was dropping off some evidence across the street, so I figured I’d stop in.”

“Are you up early or late?” I asked.

“Way, way too late. Jack and I pulled the all-nighter, since we’re the leads. Not that it feels like it, of course. Damn Calabrese, stumbling on the bad guys like that. He did one hell of a job on Corbett, though. Full signed confession.”

It was a normal enough comment, but it made me wonder again if he’d heard me on the phone or perhaps spoken to Calabrese.

“He was something, all right,” I said. “Anything I need to know about?”

“We finished the searches. Walker oversaw the work at Corbett’s house, and I stayed at Hanks’s. We took the clothes from the washing machine, still wet. No visible blood, but the lab’s working on it.”

“Did you find the bat?” According to Corbett, Hanks had thrown the bat into the back of the car he was driving Sunday night.

“Nope.” Ray was obviously disappointed. “But the car Corbett described matches a Jeep Liberty that was parked in the driveway, registered to Hanks’s dad. Henry Hanks. Can you believe that shit?”

“No kidding. You mean he lives in a house like that and drives a Jeep?”

“A new one too. The lease company already called. Henry’s three months behind on the payments, and they’re ready to repo it. Anyway, Hanks must have gotten rid of the bat before we showed. We got the Jeep at the lab, though. Maybe they’ll find something.”

“Very good. So do you finally get to go home now?”

“Ah, if only I could. I just got one last thing to do. Peter Anderson finally paged me back. The condo super? I guess he was out all night with his buddies. Anyway, he says he’s in a good enough condition to talk now, so I’m headed up there. You can indict the case either way, though, right?”

“All set,” I said, pointing to the charging instrument I was writing on my computer screen. Just as Mike had said, DAs love cases with confessions.

“All right. Catch you later.”

“Catch some
sleep
!” I hollered down the hall as he left. I noticed other office lights on, but still no Russ.

Just as I was printing out the charging instruments for Hanks and Corbett, Alice Gerstein walked in. Alice, senior MCU paralegal extraordinaire, has many talents: typing, filing, mailing, printing, researching; the list goes on. But Alice’s most important skill—the reason why she is the only indispensable member of the unit—is her ability to force this motley crew of misbehaving children with law degrees to follow the rules. And one of the rules was that I—still, after six months, the newest member of the unit—was supposed to pull screening duty first thing in the morning. Before I touched a single file, I was supposed to review the police reports that had been put aside as potentially major enough for our Major Crimes Unit to handle.

I recognized the familiar Redweld file in her hand. It appeared unusually fat for a Tuesday. “Ahem. Why are these reports still on my desk, Ms. Kincaid?”

“MCT made two arrests last night in the Crenshaw case. The documents are printing as we speak. I was going to grab the screening pile on my way back from the printer.”

She eyed me skeptically.

“I swear.”

“Well, then, I guess I saved you a trip,” she said, handing the file to me. “I’ll put a file together for Crenshaw and bring your documents in for you to sign.”

“You won’t let me leave this office, will you?” I asked.

“Of course I will,” she said, “just as soon as you’ve read every last one of those reports.”

How does she do it?
I wondered, opening the file. I bet Mike Calabrese would have listened to Alice Gerstein if they had been her knuckles against the glass last night.

At least I’d managed to achieve efficiency in my screening duties. I learned months ago that others in the office used the MCU screening pile to cover their asses. The reports dropped there rarely detailed anything other than minor offenses. But any incident that might arguably fall within the technical definition of a major crime has to be reviewed by an MCU deputy, just to make sure that MCU takes the heat if a big case slips through the cracks. Lucky
moi
.

Some of this morning’s gems didn’t even pass the straight-face test. Did I really need to see the report about Peter Medina, who ingested enough Ecstasy to seek sexual gratification from a tree in front of an assisted living complex? OK, for pure entertainment value—yes, I did need to see that one. By the time the police arrived, the parking lot was lined with onlookers and their walkers, and the naked and oblivious Medina had found true love, refusing to go to the hospital without his beloved sycamore.

But what about Patricia Roberts? She had just returned from a toy-shopping lunch break when she learned that one of her fellow cubicle-inhabiting Dilberts, Jason Himes, had boosted credit from the boss for one too many of Patricia’s ideas. Out came the Nerf missile launcher that Patricia had purchased for her eleven-year-old son. Apparently Himes thought beaning someone in the head with a sponge ball warranted a police response. Perhaps, but it certainly did not constitute assault with a dangerous weapon.

I entered a log note rejecting felony charges against Roberts. And I did it in all caps with lots of underlining. How’s that for adamant? I sent the file back to intake to decide whether to proceed on any misdemeanor counts. If it was up to me, I’d give her an oatmeal cookie and a pat on the back for a well-fired f-you. Maybe I’d stop by Toys R Us on the way home for a new office supply.

I delivered the completed screens back to Alice Gerstein. “Still no Mr. Frist?” I asked.

She turned and looked at his darkened office down the hall. “Not yet.”

“In light of all the enforcing this morning with my screening duties, you might want to check on him, don’t you think?”

“You know, I might just have to track that boy down,” Alice said, reaching for her Rolodex.

A few minutes later, my phone rang.

“Kincaid.”

“You’re sounding awfully perky this morning.”

The voice was familiar and yet unfamiliar. “And you sound awfully friendly for someone whose voice I don’t recognize.”

“It’s Russ.”

The trademark Frist boom was seriously off. “Wouldn’t have known that, but—speak of the devil—Alice and I were just talking about you.”

“You sicced that scary woman on me, didn’t you?”

“I simply inquired as to your whereabouts. And where exactly are your current abouts?”

“In my bed. I’m sicker than Gary Busey on a bender. It’s like what I had yesterday, times a thousand.”

“You exert yourself at Gold’s again?”

“No way this is from lifting, but talking about it’s making it even worse. I saw your arrests on TV this morning. How’s it look?”

“Good, I think.”

“That’s not a voice of confidence,” he said.

“Well, one defendant, Todd Corbett, confessed, so that’s good. And he lied every step of the way. First he didn’t know anything about anything. Then he took some meth and broke some windows but didn’t know anything about Percy. Then he tried to steal the car, but Hanks was the one who got violent. Then he finally admitted taking his turn at the vic too, so they’re both looking at Agg Murder charges. But Calabrese pushed pretty hard to get every bit of it.” I gave him a quick summary of the interrogation.

“Even so,” he said, “you put that confession in front of ten judges, and eight of them would let it in.”

“Sure, but two wouldn’t. Without the confession, we won’t have much.”

“What did the other defendant say?” he asked.

“Trevor Hanks. He’s the tougher of the two. Been through the system a lot. He invoked immediately, but when he came out to the car, he wound up saying we’d ‘never pin that coon’s death’ on him. If I can get that in—arguably to show motive—it also just makes the guy look like a shit.”

“So first you say Hanks
wound up
saying something after he invoked. Then you say
if you can get it in.
What aren’t you telling me? Did your boyfriend screw something up?”

“You mean Detective Forbes? No, he didn’t mess anything up.”

“But?”

“Well, I happened to be in the car when Forbes brought Hanks out. Hanks asked who I was, I told him, and then he blurted out his nice little statement.”

“You just
happened
to be in the car. I assume you’re giving me the edited version.”

“I might have left out a few cuss words and some spit—his, not mine. Anyway, Hanks is the one who initiated the conversation, so I’m pretty sure we can get the statement in. But even so, I’m toast if Corbett’s confession gets kicked. Plus, I know his attorney will make a fuss about Percy sleeping with a cop’s wife. I even thought about leaving that part out of the discovery—”

“You know you can’t do that.”

“All I said was that I
thought
about it. Don’t worry, I’ll do the right thing.” The irony wasn’t lost on me. Only attorneys would see anything
right
about injecting an innocent couple working to save their marriage into the trial process. “It still comes down to Corbett’s confession. I’ve got to get it in.”

“Even if you do, it’s only admissible against Corbett.”

I didn’t need Russ’s reminder. One of the few bones thrown to criminal defendants by the current Supreme Court has to do with a defendant’s right to confront witnesses. It’s hard to confront a codefendant who invokes his right not to testify at trial, so when I tried Hanks I wouldn’t be allowed to introduce Corbett’s statement at East Precinct. I’d have to convince Corbett to testify in court against Hanks instead.

I explained my strategy to Frist. “If a court upholds Corbett’s confession, I sort of assumed he would be willing to testify against Hanks to avoid the death penalty.”

“Then make the deal now,” he said.

For a second, I thought I’d misheard him. It was not like Russell Frist to start talking about deals before the defendant had even been arraigned.

“I think you better call the doctor, Russ. Whatever you’ve got really is making you weak.”

“I’m serious, Sam. You’re in trouble. Call the lab and press them for some kind of estimate on whether they’re going to get you any physical evidence. Unless they can tie at least one of the defendants to Percy, I think you should talk to Corbett’s attorney sooner rather than later. I doubt we’ll pursue this as a death case anyway, so if he’s willing to cooperate in exchange for taking the risk off the table, you should do it. No-brainer.”

He was right. Duncan would make the official call later, but I doubted he’d go for the death penalty against two kids with no serious priors in a carjacking gone bad. “Still, plead it out already? What if the super at the vic’s building can give us an ID?”

“It’s still not enough to get you beyond a reasonable doubt,” Russ said. “He didn’t see them with Percy.”

“I don’t know—”

“Look, we almost always wind up offering a life sentence for Agg Murder in exchange for a plea. So it’s better just to wrap it up now with Corbett, flip him against Hanks, and avoid any possibility of the confession getting suppressed. You may even need to sweeten the pot beyond that, but we can talk about that later.”

“All right. I’ll go over to the arraignment and talk to Corbett’s attorney as soon as he gets one.”

“Good. Let me know what happens. In the meantime, I’m going to my doctor. And since you were the one who dimed me up to Alice, you can be the one to cover me.”

“For what?”

“A community action meeting about Delores Tompkins. It’s at the Kennedy School at eleven. And don’t say you’re busy. I already asked Alice to check the docket.”

“I don’t know, Russ, that sounds pretty important. Are you sure you trust me to go?” I asked sarcastically.

“You’ll be fine. Just tell them how bad off I am and that the grand jury’s scheduled for Friday. Don’t make them any promises. We’ll be presenting the evidence and letting the grand jury make the call.”

“I think I can handle that.”

“Believe it or not, Kincaid, you’ve actually got pretty good people skills—until someone pisses you off.”

I called Raymond Johnson midmorning for an update.

“Good timing,” he said, when he recognized my voice. “I’m just leaving Vista Heights. I am pleased to report that the seriously hung-over Peter Anderson has just identified Todd Corbett and Trevor Hanks. Picked them both out of the throw-downs. I also showed him a picture of the dad’s Jeep, just in case, but no luck there.”

Russ’s words still rang in my ear. “But Anderson didn’t see them near Percy, right?”

“You never cease to amaze me, girl. I rope you a cow and you’re, like,
I want the whole damn herd
.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I just want to make sure I know where things stand.”

“No, he didn’t actually see them do the deed, but you already knew that. He says he saw a couple kids in the parking lot. His best estimate when I first talked to him was a little after ten o’clock at night. The ME puts time of death between nine and midnight, so we’re looking pretty good.”

“Did Anderson see a bat?”

“No. But if they brought the dad’s car up here, like we think, they probably had the bat in the back while they were scoping out the possibilities.”

“And then they saw Percy come in with his shiny car, and they followed him,” I said, completing the logical sequence.

“Right.”

“So will this Peter Anderson guy make a good witness?”

“I think so. He seems pretty straightforward.”

“Did you run him yet? Any priors?”

“He’s got some issues.”

“So you’re telling me he’s got priors?”

“No convictions, but let’s just say you wouldn’t want to marry the guy. There’s a pattern of domestic calls culminating in an arrest two months ago. The wife didn’t pursue the case. She moved out. She got a restraining order two weeks ago, claiming he was harassing her on the phone. No problems since.”

“All right. No impeachables?” You know you’ve become a trial attorney when you don’t think twice about a star witness who beats his wife. According to the rules of evidence, a witness’s prior convictions were admissible to impeach his credibility only if they were felonies or involved crimes of dishonesty. Anything else, I didn’t need to care about.

“Nope. We’ve got a law-abiding citizen who picked the defendants from a throw-down. It’s about as good as it gets.”

“But it only puts them in the parking lot. The defense will say they went up there as part of their other mischief and had nothing to do with the murder.”

“That’s where the confession comes in.” Right, I thought,
if
it comes in. “You need anything else? I need to catch some serious z’s.”

“You have a number for the victim’s parents?”

“Yeah, hold on a second.” I cringed at the thought of him half asleep, on the phone, looking through his notebook while he maneuvered the turns down the hill from Vista Heights. He rattled off the number. “Larry and Patricia Crenshaw. You might have missed them, though. I think they were planning on coming up here today.”

“OK, thanks.” I wished him sweet dreams, hung up, and dialed the bureau’s crime lab. I learned that John Fredericks was handling the Crenshaw evidence and asked to be transferred to his line.

“Hey, John, it’s Samantha Kincaid. How’s the game going?”

“Wet.”

Fredericks was a transplant from the Las Vegas Police Department and a rabid golf addict, despite the rain. We were on the same team for last year’s Guns, Gavels, and Gurneys tournament, the annual golf gala for cops, prosecutors, and medical examiners. I chalked up the win to John’s long drives and my wicked short game, but the sore losers accused us of cheating. Our unfair advantage? We played sober.

“I’m working on the Percy Crenshaw case. What are the chances you’re going to find me some blood evidence?”

He exhaled loudly, then clicked his tongue a few times before he spoke. Not a good sign. “I’m not real hopeful right now. The car’s definitely clean. Well, not exactly clean, but nothing that helps the good guys. The back was full of old boxes and papers, so a bat dropped in there wouldn’t have touched the carpet fibers. I didn’t find blood when I ran the black light through.”

“They were probably smart enough to dump whatever was next to the bat when they got rid of it,” I suggested.

“Right. And so far there’s nothing on the clothes, either.”

“Not even the jean jacket from Hanks?”

“Nope. Denim’s always tricky because of the density, and Hanks probably scrubbed it down before he washed it. I’ve got one more test to run, but usually that’s only good for isolating something testable when I’ve already got a potential sample. I don’t even have a sample yet. Like I said, I’m not hopeful.”

“How is that possible? They beat a man to death. I would’ve thought they’d be covered in blood.”

“You should talk to the ME. It depends on how the fight unrolled; I’ve seen cases without a single drop of blood. You’ve got a confession, though, right?”

Once again, it all came back to that.

The Kennedy School is just one of the fifty-two links in a microbrew chain owned by the McMenamin brothers. They started years before the microbrew craze with hippie hangouts catering to Deadheads craving Hammer-head ales, Terminator stouts, and gutbuster sandwiches like the Stormin’ Norman. But a few years ago, they started using the beer money to create a local entertainment empire of pubs, theaters, restaurants, hotels—even a winery and a golf course. It was a brilliant move.

Of all of the McMenamins’ clever ventures, the most impressive might just be the Kennedy School. Until the two beer-brewing brothers stepped in, the former elementary school was shut down and boarded up. Where the children of North Portland had once studied their three
R
’s, hookers turned tricks and addicts shot up until police chased them out, reboarded the place, and resumed the cycle again the next day. But then the city struck a deal to transfer the building to the brothers for one dollar. In exchange, the neighborhood got a hotel and an entertainment complex that not only attracted a new demographic to North Portland but also contained open meeting rooms available to the community.

By the time I walked into the meeting about the Delores Tompkins “incident,” as the bureau referred to it, others were taking their seats around a conference table. The meeting wasn’t what I had pictured. Other than me, there were only three other women and a man in the room, and they all seemed to know each other. I was the only non-African-American.

I soon learned that an action meeting was more like the planting of a grassroots effort: Only community activists who were most directly involved had been invited. As the participants explained it, they were brainstorming ways to keep pressure on the public, the police, and my office to remember Delores Tompkins, to learn from her death, and to make sure that nothing like it happened again. And they didn’t call it an
incident,
they called it Delores’s
murder
.

We started with introductions. The man was the Reverend Byron Thomas, pastor of First United Baptist, one of the larger churches on the north side. He looked to be in his mid-forties, wore horn-rimmed glasses, and probably made church a lot more fun than I remembered it. Janelle Rogers was the president of the Buckeye Neighborhood Association. She was about the pastor’s age and made a point of telling me that she was a regular participant in the bureau’s community policing efforts. Sitting next to Janelle was Selma Gooding, an elderly woman who must have been something of an institution in this neighborhood. For her introduction, she simply said, “And I’m Selma Gooding. I…well, I guess you’d say I’m Selma.” I smiled, but the rest of the group giggled knowingly.

Rounding out the group was a woman who looked to be Selma Gooding’s biological age, but she seemed much older in spirit. I soon learned why when Selma introduced her. “This fine woman beside me is Marla Mavens, my dear friend since we were in middle school at Harriet Tubman. Marla is Delores’s mother,” she said, looking directly at me.

I muttered something about how sorry I was for her loss, realizing how hollow it sounded. I had to give Russ some credit. He must have been doing a good job with the bedside manner to have been included as part of this small group.

I’m not much better with people names than case names, so I came up with a quick mnemonic. The minister was easy; the priest at my church growing up was Father Thomas. Janelle Rogers was the youngest of the other women; JR for junior. Delores’s mother, Marla Mavens; M is for mom. And Selma Gooding. S is for senior citizen, and she seemed like a genuinely good person. Silly tricks, but they’d help my short-term problem.

Once introductions were over, Janelle Rogers thanked me for coming. “In light of what happened at the protest on Sunday, we were hoping as a group to have a more open channel of communication with the authorities. An officer from the community policing department was supposed to join us today, but I got a very late phone call saying he couldn’t be here. I’m disappointed, to say the least.”

I started to offer up a list of possible excuses for this anonymous officer, but thought better of it. “I know Russell Frist was very sorry he couldn’t make it. I spoke to him myself this morning, and he sounded terrible. Sicker than Gary Busey on a bender, is how he described it.”

That got a good solid chuckle from Dr. Thomas and Mrs. Gooding, who spoke up next. “We had invited Mr. Frist, hoping he could give us some indication of what we could expect in the days to come. We’d like to know whether or not your office intends to bring charges up against Officer Hamilton.”

I told them about the upcoming grand jury date and gave them an overview of the process. Seven adults gathered in a small meeting room would hear the evidence presented by Russell Frist regarding the shooting without the formalities of a trial. No defense attorney, no judge. Grand jurors could question witnesses. They also had the power to subpoena additional witnesses and evidence. Once the grand jurors believed they’d gathered sufficient information, they would decide whether or not to indict Officer Hamilton and, if so, for which charges.

That should just about do it, right? After all, the statement was exactly to Russ’s specifications. Lesson number one: When someone suckers you into doing something simple, you can be sure it will be anything but.

“I very much appreciate the legal background,” Dr. Thompson said with his lilting voice, “but we’d like to know what your office plans to say to those grand jurors before they make the decision. We’ve known enough boys to go through the system to recognize the realities, you understand?”

I made another attempt to stick with Russ’s message. “Like I said, Russ Frist will be the one in the hearing. But I’m confident he’ll make sure that the grand jurors understand the required elements for any potential charges. He’ll certainly go over the statutes that define a police officer’s right to use force, including the requirement that the force has to be reasonable.”

As I found myself rambling about the definition of reasonableness, I surveyed the response in the room. I do the same during closing arguments, gauging my audience’s reaction as I’m speaking, taking note of who I’ve got in my corner and who’s still on the fence. In trial, I don’t sit down until I’m sure I’ve persuaded them all.

Good thing I was already sitting, because this crowd was not convinced. Byron Thomas shook his head in disappointment. Janelle Rogers rolled her eyes. I heard a serious
tsk
escape Selma Gooding’s lips. And Marla Mavens’s glance fell to the table, her lips pursed as if she should have known not to get her hopes up.

A hostile audience makes me nervous. Worse, it makes me stray from my prepared points. Once that happens, I never know what will pop out. In one of my first trials in the office, I was taken by surprise when the jury appeared doubtful about my drug case. Before I knew it, I was comparing the defendant’s unlikely explanation for carrying drugs to a new paisley-print skirt I had just purchased—it looked good by itself but it didn’t match anything else in the closet. Needless to say, the analogy between clothing and evidence didn’t go over very well, and the jury handed me my ass with its verdict sheet:
Not guilty. And we didn’t care for that prosecutor.

So far, this gang of four didn’t seem to like me any better. My natural unpopularity detector kicked in, and, sure enough, extemporaneous thoughts began tumbling out. Before I knew it, I was babbling; about what, I can’t even remember. At one point I decided to be as straight with them as I knew how. And I do know how to be straight. I remember telling them they needed to understand that most people start out with a presumption in favor of police. I know I said something about people viewing a shooting differently when it’s committed by an on-duty cop and not a regular citizen.

And I said we’d probably never see eye to eye about many of the confrontations that police have with members of their community. I told them that when a person runs from a police officer or resists an arrest, I tend to support the use of some force. I even think I said something about not paying police officers to lose fights. Janelle Rogers looked alarmed about that.

But I also said that, despite our differences, and even though I wouldn’t be handling the grand jury myself, I was pretty sure that the grand jury would notice that, in this particular case, the decedent was an unarmed woman whose only known offense was an attempt to drive away from a traffic stop. It would be up to the grand jurors to decide whether Hamilton should be treated like a criminal, but, if nothing else, they’d know that Delores did not deserve to die.

I don’t know which part of the babbling worked. Maybe none of it. Perhaps they just wanted me to shut up. Whatever it was, the eye-rolling,
tsk
ing, lip-pursing, and head-shaking stopped. Instead, I saw pleasant smiles, nods, even an
amen
from Mrs. Gooding. Finally, it seemed safe to stop talking.

When the meeting was over, Janelle invited everyone to stay for some cookies and fruit salad. I said I needed to get back to the courthouse and was on my way out when I made the mistake of looking at the cookies. Home baked. Lots of chocolate. No icky nuts to get in the way of the good stuff.