Dark Ambition (29 page)

After she complied, he searched inside. Once he found her cell phone, he shoved that into his jacket pocket and returned the purse.

"Get out," he said. He'd be well out of sight by the time she found a car to stop. He wasn't worried about her seeing the license plates of the maroon Camry. It had been stolen in Ohio. The plates were phonies. As a precaution, he'd abandon the car in a deserted area of rural Virginia, where nobody would notice it.

Watching him pull away, Ann breathed a large sigh of relief. Ten minutes later, just as it was starting to rain, she flagged down a cab with a passenger who was willing to help her out when she said she had had a fight with her boyfriend, who had driven off, leaving her in the park.

All the way back, she couldn't stop trembling. She had to call Jennifer as soon as she got home.

 

 

 

Chapter 18

 

Ben's secretary handed him a white envelope with his name scrawled on the front. "Somebody slid this under the door," she said, puzzled.

Ben tore open the envelope. As he began reading the barely legible handwriting, a stunned look formed on his face.

 

Dear Mr. Hartwell:

I confess to the murder of Robert Winthrop. I killed him just like you said, to get the money. I brought a gun with me on Saturday. I knew where Mr. Winthrop kept money in his house. He surprised me when I was taking the money. So I shot him. I am sorry I did this bad thing. Please tell the judge that I want to change my plea to guilty.

 

It was signed,
Clyde Gillis.

Ben read the letter again. Then, deep in thought, he let it drop to his desk. He should be jumping up and down for joy. The case he had never wanted was over. He had another notch in his prosecutor's belt, as Jenny had put it to him on Sunday night. He could go back to the Young investigation full-time. He'd be able to take Amy to Aspen for Christmas. So why wasn't he happy?

Because Clyde Gillis's confession didn't make sense. In all of Ben's experience as a prosecutor, no defendant had confessed right after entering a not-guilty plea. And no defendant represented by counsel had confessed without first making a deal on sentencing. It was obvious that Gillis hadn't consulted Jennifer. Ben was certain that she had no idea about the confession. Christ, he could take this confession and go for the death penalty. If Jenny was right that he had no soul, and he was anxious to get even with her, that was what he would do.

Ben picked up the phone and called Ed Fulton's office.

"He's up on the Hill with Senator Wallingford on the tax bill," Fulton's secretary said. "He asked me not to disturb him unless it was an emergency."

"Have him call me when he gets back," Ben said, happy that he could have some additional time to mull over the confession before talking to Fulton, who no doubt would want Ben to race back in to Judge Hogan this afternoon.

Ben reached for the phone to call Jennifer. Then he hesitated, thinking over what had happened. Why had Gillis decided suddenly to confess? Was he guilty, and he decided he could get a lesser sentence? Was he trying to clear his conscience? Neither of those fit the man he had interviewed Sunday night.

Then what? Had someone coerced him into confessing? Who? Why? Or paid him off? Jenny had said a foreign government was involved. Were they behind all of this?

He picked up the phone and called the jail. "Check today's visitors log," he said to the clerk on duty, "for Clyde Gillis."

After several minutes Ben heard, "Only visitor today was his wife, Lucinda, at one-ten this afternoon. Left at one-forty."

Ben immediately dialed Jennifer.

"You'd better sit down," he said to her, "and hold on tightly to the arms of your chair. I want to read you something that just arrived in my office."

She didn't say a word while Ben read. She waited for him to say, "Give me your fax number and I'll shoot over a copy." Then she exploded.

"Okay, Ben," she cried, "what did you guys do to get him to write that document?"

Ben was so indignant that he could barely speak. "I... I... I had nothing to do with it. I don't know that anybody did anything to your client."

"C'mon, Ben," she said with a snarl. "I wasn't suggesting that you were personally involved, but somebody did something to my client. You know that."

Ben figured she was right. Still he didn't respond. This confession was so unexpected.

"What are you going to do with it?" she asked.

"I don't have any choice, Jenny. I have to take it to Judge Hogan tomorrow morning and ask her to call the defendant back in for another hearing. Then I'll present his confession to the court. If it smells fishy, she'll bear down hard on him with her own interrogation."

Jennifer was still outraged. "I'll be egging her on."

"I figured as much."

"I'll say someone drugged my client. He wouldn't even talk to me."

Suddenly, Ben realized that the hearing before Judge Hogan could be the way to stop the government's railroading of Clyde Gillis. If the gardener didn't kill Winthrop, then whoever was responsible for the secretary of state's death might have made a serious error by obtaining this confession. "Look," Ben said, "suppose I offer to cut you a deal. The same deal you could have had before the confession."

Without hesitating, Jennifer responded, "No deal. My client didn't do it. I read the transcript of the tape of your interview with him, or at least the part of it you gave me. It confirms for me that Clyde's innocent. If you go before the judge tomorrow, you'd better bring the tape of that interview, because I want the judge to hear it. She'll know something funny's going on. Lucille may be the judge from hell for guilty defendants, but she also has a deep sense of fairness for innocent ones. She'll do her job conscientiously. You know that damn well. Personally, I think you guys screwed yourselves when you rigged the system to get her."

Ben had to agree with her on Judge Hogan. Hennessey hadn't consulted him before he made that call. He didn't know the judges nearly as well as Ben because he hardly tried cases anymore himself. He relied on the rumor mill. He wasn't down in the pits with the rubber and the grease.

Ben returned to the transcript of his Sunday interview with Gillis. "Plenty of guilty people have claimed they were innocent in an initial interrogation. That doesn't prove a thing."

"I have other evidence to prove somebody else killed Winthrop. Solid evidence, not conjecture."

Here it was again, this evidence she had. "Please, Jenny, share it with me."

"You'll hear about it in court if you're foolish enough to march to Judge Hogan with that confession."

"C'mon, I don't have any choice."

At last her voice lowered a few decibels. She knew there was no way Ben would ever coerce a phony confession. "My advice is that you sleep on it overnight. Let me know first thing in the morning if you still want to put your head in Lucille Hogan's noose. I'll do my best to help you."

Ben put the phone down and stared at the dirty window in his office for several minutes, idly watching a pigeon contributing to the debris on the ledge. What kind of evidence could Jenny possibly have? She had to be bluffing, stalling for time. Or maybe she wasn't. This case was starting to smell like fish that had been left out all week.

He walked into the outer office, made a copy of the confession, and handed one to his secretary. "It goes to Jennifer Moore at Blank and Foster by fax."

Ben turned around and had started back into his own office when he heard a man calling him from the corridor, through the open door. "Ben, I have to talk to you."

Immediately, he recognized Art Campbell's voice. Ben wheeled around and approached his visitor. "How are you, pal?"

"Pretty good for an old man with six grandchildren," Campbell replied, and then laughed.

Prosecutors and detectives often developed a bond from working together over the years, as the prosecutors depended upon the detectives for their testimony that was so critical at trial. But for Ben, his relationship with Campbell went deeper. The experienced detective was someone Ben had learned to trust. He was not only professional, but totally honest. Unlike many of his colleagues, he would never fudge the evidence to help get a conviction, even if he was convinced the defendant was guilty. And they had hit it off personally. For years they had lunch every couple of months. They went to a Wizards game together at least twice a year. Campbell, who had once played for Georgetown, would show Ben some of the fine points of the game. In June, Ben had attended the wedding of Campbell's youngest daughter.

Ben grabbed two cans of Coke from the small refrigerator in his outer office and tossed one to Campbell, who snatched it on the fly in his large right hand.

"It's about the Gillis case," Campbell said as he moved a pile of papers from a chair to the floor in Ben's messy office, popped open the can, and sat down.

"Yeah, I saw you in the courtroom today. I wondered why."

Campbell looked at Ben, puzzled. "You don't know?"

"Know what?"

"I was at the crime scene with my people before the FBI arrived."

Ben had raised his can to take a sip. He put it down with a thud, spilling some soda through the top. "I had no idea."

Campbell shook his head. "My fault. I should have figured they'd do it that way and gotten over here myself. I knew what those guys were like."

"Which guys?"

"Ed Fulton and Bill Traynor."

"Oh, them." Ben leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on the desk. "You want to start from the beginning?"

"Saturday, I was the first detective at the murder scene. Just starting my investigation when those two jerks showed up. Said they were running the show. Fulton treated me like I was a piece of dog shit. So I split and took my people with me."

Ben shook his head in disgust. That kid had messed up the case from the very start.

"After Saturday, I was so damn mad," Campbell continued, "that I didn't want to have anything else to do with the case. When I heard about the evidence they found in Clyde Gillis's truck, I figured he was guilty. I didn't think any more about it. Then your old girlfriend came to see me."

Ben bolted upright in his chair. "Jenny? What'd she want?"

"She said she was convinced Clyde Gillis didn't do it. She persuaded me to go back to Winthrop's house to check for additional evidence."

Ben was stunned. "You should have told me. I'm your friend. It was my case."

"With all the heat coming from the White House," Campbell said, looking apologetic, "I figured I'd be doing you a favor not telling you. If I didn't find anything, lots of useless shouting would be avoided. And if I did find something, I told her that I would take it to you as well as to her."

Ben held his breath. "And did you find anything?"

"A blond woman's hair on the blue carpet in the room where Winthrop was killed."

Ben waited for more. When it didn't come, he asked, "What's that prove? It could have been his wife's."

"Ann Winthrop has gray hair."

"Well, it could have been anybody's who visited the house in the recent past." Ben looked at him curiously. "I thought you found some evidence to help us locate George Nesbitt. He's the other suspect I've been worried about. We've moved heaven and earth to find him." He waved his hands, still nettled about the man's disappearance. "The blond hair doesn't do much for me. Did you tell Jennifer about it?"

"She was ecstatic. She has the idea that George Nesbitt was a woman dressed like a man who came ostensibly for sex and then killed Winthrop."

Ben rolled his eyes. "Other than one of Cinderella's blond hairs, does she have anything to back up that fairy tale?"

"She has a guard, Jeb Hines, who thinks Nesbitt looked effeminate. She has the stain on Winthrop's pants and the folder of condoms."

Ben gaped. "What are you talking about? What stain? What condoms?"

Campbell smiled. Usually Ben was the one in the know. "Yeah, that's the second thing that brought me here today. After I found the blond hair, I decided to read the FBI report. It didn't mention the two things I saw before the jerks arrived."

"Which were?"

"In a red file folder in a credenza, Winthrop had about fifty condoms stashed."

"Yeah, so the guy liked to fuck."

"And on the front of his pants, there was a fresh stain. It may have been semen. It could have been precoital fluid."

"Let me guess," Ben said. "The FBI report didn't mention the stain."

Art Campbell cocked his finger at him. "Even for a white boy, you're pretty damn slow, but eventually you get there."

Ben paused to consider these new developments. "Still," he said, "it might not have anything to do with the crime. Maybe Winthrop did have some blond bimbo in for sex, and his friends at the White House wanted to spare Mrs. Winthrop the brutal tabloid treatment. None of this tells me that Clyde Gillis didn't kill Winthrop."

Ben said it with bravado, but he knew the ground had shifted irrevocably. Even if this was the only evidence Jenny had alluded to on the phone, he'd have a problem with Judge Hogan. Plus, she might have something more that Campbell didn't know about.