Cover-up (36 page)

The cell door was wide open, and a number of uniformed men
crowded around the prone figure. To Melanie’s great relief, she saw that at least two of them were EMTs, not guards. She angled her way in and grabbed the arm of the nearest EMT, an enormously tall guy with red hair in a ponytail, who was holding a roll of bandages and watching his colleague attend to Welch.

“I’m the prosecutor. Will he make it?” she asked.

“Oh yeah, sure. This ain’t nothin’. Shallow cuts on both wrists. Didn’t go deep enough to even nick a vein.”

“Does he need to go to the hospital?”

“Not for his hands. Carlos is taping the cuts now. He’ll be fine to do his court appearance—physically, I mean. Only thing is, with meth withdrawal cases, we normally take ’em over to Bellevue for a psych eval, unless you’d prefer to have the prison shrink do that.”

“I have to ask the judge what he wants to do. Do you know how the prisoner got the knife?”

“Oh, it wasn’t a knife. It was just a little bitty nail he picked up off the street when he pretended to trip while being transported. He hid it in his shoe. Hold on, I’ll show you.”

He passed her a plastic bag containing a small nail encrusted with both rust and blood. “Small” was too generous a word—it was minuscule.

“Suicide by tetanus is about all that’ll do for you. He knew it, too,” the EMT said.

“So you don’t believe this was a serious attempt?” she asked.

“He’s a drama queen. We see a lot of this when people get arrested. He wants a bed in a nice rehab program instead of at Otisville.”

“Not gonna happen if I have anything to say about it,” Melanie said.

Several of the guards helped Welch to his feet. He caught sight of Melanie. His eyes without his contact lenses in were dark brown instead of violet, with a crazy glint that hadn’t been there yesterday. He looked…unhinged. The transformation from suave Upper East Side society doctor to strung-out junkie was startling.

“Are you happy, you bitch? Is this what you wanted?” Welch cried.

Two guards instantly grabbed him by the arms. He screwed up his lips and sent a gob of spit hurling in Melanie’s direction. It splattered on the floor a foot short of her. Mark Sonschein grabbed her arm and pulled her forcibly from the bull pen as the guards wrestled Welch to a sitting position on the floor.

“You think we can arraign him like this?” she asked Mark. Melanie was shaking but her voice was steady. She was damned if this lowlife would make her flinch.

One of the EMTs was now administering a sedative.

“Frankly,” Mark said, “I think you ought to go out there and ask to have the prisoner sent to Bellevue for evaluation. At least then he’ll be on a locked ward. With Warner on the bench, you never know, he might release the guy otherwise. Especially given the Brady material.”

Melanie looked at Mark sharply. Brady material was exculpatory evidence that prosecutors were required to hand over to the defense prior to court proceedings.

“
What
Brady material?” she asked suspiciously.

Mark gaped at her. “You know.”

“No. I don’t.”

“The fact that your one eyewitness states that your suspect doesn’t look like the killer. And you don’t have DNA results back yet, so there’s nothing to contradict that.”

“Nothing except the victim’s missing driver’s license in his desk!” Melanie exclaimed.

“I agree that’s good evidence. But you know Warner. He’ll want Welch’s fingerprints on it before it’s worth anything to him.”

“The killer wore gloves.”

“Nothing we can do about that. We’re still required to disclose Harris’s failure to identify Welch from the photograph.”

“Mark, what kind of stickler are you? Harris only saw the Butcher from behind.”

“What kind of aggressive hothead are you?”

“One with a psychotic killer stalking her. If you tell Warner that, we’ll lose. He’ll cut Welch loose.”

“That’s exactly what makes it Brady material. Maybe you should recuse yourself from prosecuting this case, Melanie. Because I know my ethical obligations, and if you don’t disclose this information, I will.”

“Ahem.”

Melanie and Mark both whirled. Judge Warner’s deputy clerk, Gabriel Colón, who was a good courthouse buddy of Melanie’s, stood in the doorway, having cleared his throat theatrically to get their attention. Or to get them to stop blabbing their secrets in front of him.

“Defense counsel just showed up,” Gabriel said. “Judge wants you front and center.”

“Thanks, Gabe,” Melanie said.

As she passed by him on her way back to the courtroom, Gabriel winked at her. “My lips are sealed,
mami,
” he whispered.

T
he fact was, it was very important to Melanie to be an ethical prosecutor. She honestly thought Mark Sonschein was being overly legalistic in his interpretation of the evidence. Surely, if a witness hadn’t gotten a good look at a suspect, his failure to recognize him in a photograph was not exculpatory Brady material. If she’d had time to do legal research, Melanie was confident she could have found dozens of cases supporting her view. But she
didn’t
have time.

She waited in front of the bench. All the stars had lined up against Melanie this morning, because Donald Kerr, the prominent and respected defense attorney representing Welch, was good friends with Judge Warner. Melanie stood in silence while the judge and the defense lawyer gossiped about some charitable board they served on together.

After a few minutes, Welch was brought out from the bull pen. The sedative had been quick acting. He looked meek and glazed and pathetic in his bloodstained prison blues. Welch’s wife, Gloria, sat in the front row of the spectator benches clad in a demure black suit. Mrs. Welch gasped when she saw him, and began weeping copiously and loudly.

Gabriel Colón called the case, and the judge began by demanding a report on the defendant’s suicide attempt. Melanie repeated exactly what the EMS technician had told her about the self-inflicted and minor nature of the injury. When Judge Warner wasn’t satisfied, Melanie got the tall, red-haired guy to come out and testify about it in person. Any other judge would have recognized the suicide attempt as the blatant ploy it was, but with Warner, it was an error on the prosecution’s part, and it put Melanie on the defensive. Donald Kerr saw that and exploited it for everything it was worth.

“Your Honor, Mrs. Welch is seated in the front row,” Kerr said in his impressive baritone. “She is distraught at her husband’s condition, as you can imagine. She has called in the best professionals in the field to address this extremely regrettable case of a man of medicine falling victim to addiction. We see it more and more. The stresses of the medical profession—”

Melanie just couldn’t stomach that pretentious garbage given what she knew about the defendant.

“Your Honor, this man isn’t even a doctor, and his name isn’t Benedict Welch,” she interrupted.

All hell broke loose. Melanie did her best to present the evidence concerning Welch’s false identity, but somehow she just ended up getting accused of sandbagging the defense by not disclosing her argument ahead of time. She trotted out Detective Hay to testify about the methamphetamine bust, and Donald Kerr turned that into a case of a hardened drug dealer—Miles Ortiz—entrapping a reputable man by taking advantage of his substance-abuse problem. Finally, Melanie
pulled out her ace in the hole: the very real possibility, the likelihood even, that Welch was the killer that the press was calling the Butcher. The bloody driver’s license found in Welch’s desk. The e-mail sent from his office. The fact that he’d ordered the burglary of Suzanne Shepard’s apartment. But standing up before the judge, with the deputy chief of the Criminal Division looking over her shoulder and a court reporter taking down her every word, Melanie couldn’t allow herself to put her own safety before her sworn duty. She disclosed David Harris’s statement that, from behind, Welch didn’t resemble the man who’d kidnapped him.

And she lost.

48

D
isheartened and anxious,
Melanie trudged back to her office to find Detective Pauline Estrada still there, on the telephone, with a worried look on her face.

“I’m on endless hold,” Pauline announced, “but have I got news for you.”

“I’ve got news, too.
Bad
news. We lost the bail hearing.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. The judge let Welch out on home confinement. He has to wear an ankle bracelet. That’s the thing that Martha Stewart bragged on national television that she knew how to take off.”

“Don’t get upset.”

“Don’t get upset? Pauline, if I’m lucky, when he breaks out of his apartment, a little bell will sound in an office somewhere, so that when they fish my body out of the East River, some bureaucrat will go, ‘Oh, that’s what that noise was.’”

“Not that this is going to make you feel any better,” Pauline said, “but Welch isn’t the only guy you should be worrying about.”

“Why do you say that?”

“While you were gone, a couple of agents stopped by to deliver copies of a file from your search yesterday,” Pauline said.

“Agents Waterman and Mills?”

“Sounds right. Anyway, I was sitting here with nothing better to do, and I knew the file was about Welch, so I sneaked a peek. Hope that was okay.”

“An extra pair of eyes in a case like this is a blessing, Pauline. What’d you find out?” Melanie asked.

“Nothing you wouldn’t have found yourself the second you read my file on the Tulsa boys’-home arson. The man convicted for the Cheryl Driscoll murder, do you remember his name?”

“Sure. Edward Allen Harvey. I was thinking I should fly out to California and interview him. Ha, in all my spare time.”

Pauline pointed at the telephone she held against his ear. “I’m on hold with Pelican Bay right now.”

“Pelican Bay?”

“The maximum security facility in Northern California where Harvey was doing a fifteen-to-life bid.”

“Was?”
Melanie asked, with a sinking feeling.

“Harvey was released four weeks ago. Fifteen years doesn’t equal fifteen years when you subtract out good time and so forth.”

“Where is he now?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out. They’re supposed to know. He was convicted of a sex crime. Second-degree murder and sexual assault. That means he was required to register as a sex offender and give notice of his address.”

“Did he?”

Pauline shrugged and gestured hopelessly at the phone.

“Why am I getting a bad feeling about this?” Melanie asked.

“Because you have good instincts,” Pauline said. “The second I saw Harvey’s name, I made the connection. Edward Allen Harvey was one of the delinquents who absconded after the arson at the boys’
home. The news accounts said that he was the biggest troublemaker in the place, too, the one they suspected of killing the boy and setting the fire.”

“Harvey had two rape convictions before he was ever arrested on the Driscoll murder,” Melanie said. “And we have signature mutilations in the two murders. Carving a nasty word on the victim’s stomach is a highly unusual move. We’re looking at the same killer. Or
killers
. I knew that as soon as I read about the Driscoll case. The only difference is, I was thinking it was Welch. But maybe it was Welch and Harvey together.”

Pauline held up her finger and sat up straighter in her chair. “Here we go! Yes, hello, I’m still here…Huh, really?…What do you normally do in a case like that?…. I see. Well, pardon my French, but that sucks.”

Pauline fell silent while the person on the other end of the line spoke at some length. She took a few notes. At one point, Melanie caught her eye, and Pauline shook her head and made a disappointed face. Finally, she hung up.

“Well?” Melanie asked.

“In the wind. They don’t have the first fricking clue where he is. But here’s something interesting. You know who visited Harvey in jail the weekend before he was released?” Pauline asked.

“Who?’

“Suzanne Shepard. She must have tracked down the Driscoll case somehow, and come to the same conclusion you did, that Welch was in on it. So she went all the way to California to interview Harvey.”

“All she accomplished was attracting their attention. She dug her own grave.” Melanie picked up the group photo from the boys’ home, which had been lying on her desk. “Which one is Harvey?” she asked.

“Top row, far left.”

Melanie looked at the boy in the picture, who was big and blond
and moon-faced, and the hair all over her body stood on end. “I’ve seen him before!” she said.

Pauline gasped. “Oh my God! Where?”

Melanie smacked herself on the forehead. “Shit. I don’t know, I don’t know.” She shook her head. “I just don’t know.”

49

W
ith two potential killers after her,
Melanie suddenly found herself much happier to have Pete Terrozzi’s company. She decided not to make a move without his protection, and when she learned that Terrozzi’s ex-partner was currently assigned to the home-confinement monitoring division of the United States Marshal’s Service, she actually hugged the diminutive deputy. Terrozzi made a couple of phone calls, and pretty soon he’d put Melanie on the line with the guy who was personally handling the Welch case. That deputy, whose name was Curtis Jones, had just come back from Welch’s apartment, where he’d fitted and tested Welch’s ankle bracelet and the portable tracking unit that went along with it. Not only did the thing work, Jones reported, but it was one of the newfangled bracelets that utilized GPS technology. Light-years ahead of the old models that merely sounded an alarm when the defendant broke confinement. If Welch left his apartment, not only would Jones call Melanie immediately, but he’d be able to inform her of every move that Welch made.

Melanie was relieved to have this inside connection. She just didn’t expect to take advantage of it so soon.

Half an hour later, she was sitting in the sixth floor war room digging through the boxes from Target News that Assistant D.A. Janice Marsh had never finished searching. If Suzanne Shepard had interviewed Edward Allen Harvey mere weeks before her murder, Melanie reasoned, maybe there was a chance she’d kept in touch with him. Maybe she’d written down a phone number or an address that could lead them straight to Harvey. Melanie was deeply engrossed in Suzanne’s datebook when the war-room phone rang.