Impasse

 

Begin Reading

Table of Contents

About the Author

Copyright Page

 

Thank you for buying this

St. Martin's Press ebook.

 

To receive special offers, bonus content,

and info on new releases and other great reads,

sign up for our newsletters.

 

Or visit us online at

us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

 

For email updates on the author, click
here
.

 

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way.
Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author's copyright, please notify the publisher at:
us.macmillanusa.com/piracy
.

 

This book is dedicated to those among us who are not terribly fond of lawyers.

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I'd like to thank my editor, Brendan Deneen, primarily for being a cool guy.

 

PROLOGUE

“No body, no case,” Stuart Stark's fellow attorneys at the Bristol County, Massachusetts, DA's Office had warned him. He'd tried the Butz murder anyway. But as he lay dying in a ramshackle cabin in the middle of the Alaska interior wondering if he could fit the business end of the borrowed Browning .30-06 in his mouth and still reach the trigger, he wished he had listened to them.

When Marti Taylor remarried to become the second Mrs. Raymond Butz, her decision had been bad for a number of reasons besides the obvious downgrade in surname. One of those reasons was Ray's anger problem. Marti struggled with a scrapbooking addiction, and on March seventeenth at five thirty in the evening, after a Visa bill containing three hundred dollars in charges from the Scrap-a-Doodle store arrived in the mail at their subsidized low-income apartment in northern New Bedford, Ray had strangled her to death with a ligature—probably his belt; he worked construction and didn't own a tie. It was a clean killing that left no blood at the home, the presumptive murder site. The blood came later, on Bolt Construction's private fishing boat, the
Iron Maiden
, where Butz worked as a deckhand when construction was slow, and where he cut his wife into pieces with a blue Ryobi reciprocating saw. Marti and the Ryobi then went over the side, never to be seen again.

Over the three years taken to investigate the case, Butz was interviewed a total of six times. The first five times he was not in custody when questioned, and so his Miranda rights were neither required nor given. He provided bits of incriminating information each time. On the final occasion, he was arrested, Mirandized, and he quickly exercised his right to have an attorney present, effectively ending the interview. Thirteen days later, in the local jail while awaiting trial, he gave his cell mate a full description of what he'd done, not realizing that such information could be used by his questionable confidant as currency to secure a plea bargain in his own drug offense. Between Butz's six interviews and blathering in jail, Raymond fully admitted the crime and twenty separate corroborating details. Enough for up-and-coming Assistant District Attorney Stuart Stark to convict him at the highest profile trial in New Bedford history since Lizzie Borden.

The news crews were camped out at the courthouse—a true-crime author was including the case in a book—and
America's Unsolved
followed Stu around with cameras during the trial, putting his confidence and legal prowess on display for the entire world, or at least the true-crime and reality TV–watching world.

After the verdict, Stu played modest, crediting his sharp lead detective, Randy “Rusty” Baker, for obtaining the confessions. It was always good for a prosecutor to give the investigating officers credit—they earned it, and it earned Stu Rusty's undying friendship. Stu told his adoring public that he was satisfied with the outcome, but that it was unseemly for an assistant DA to publicly celebrate the condemnation of a man. Then he returned to his office, closed the door, and called his greatest cheerleader—his wife, Katherine—who celebrated for him.

“I can't wait to tell everyone I'm married to the most famous lawyer in Massachusetts!” She whooped into the phone.

Nine months later Butz walked out a free man.

It was “unfortunate,” in the opinion of the Court of Appeals, a quirk in the law, they said, but dictated by precedent.

The corpus delicti rule in a no-body homicide required proof that (1) the person was dead, and (2) that a criminal act caused the death. Simple enough. But the cause of death had to be established by other evidence
before
the suspect's own statements could be admitted. Otherwise, a crazy person could confess to crimes that might never have happened, the Court said. The prosecution had to prove there
was
a murder before anyone could confess to it.

Regrettably, in this particular no-body homicide, a missing woman was not enough to establish murder as the cause of death. The fact that Butz wore a belt didn't prove anything without his confession to his cell mate that he'd used it to choke the life out of his compulsively scrapbooking spouse. The missing Ryobi? The absence of evidence was less compelling than the useless presence of the belt. And the blood that might have indicated a death by criminal means? On the deck of a fishing boat regularly awash with fish guts, the forensics produced little more than conflicting results and a lot of hydrogen peroxide.

Without Butz's full confession, there was simply no evidence to establish that Marti had been murdered. The Court had no choice, the justices lamented, but to suppress everything Butz had said. They sent the case back for retrial, disallowing the confession, knowing full well that, without it, refiling the case against Raymond Butz would be impossible.

“Unfortunate,” the Court declared in its unanimous written opinion.

The opinion was unfortunate enough that the young assistant DA and star of
America's Unsolved,
who had boldly volunteered to handle the case and become a media sensation, was fired. The elected DA of Bristol County, Robert Malloy, couldn't weather being blamed for having a confessed murderer walk free on his watch, not in an election year. Instead of being his boss's presumptive successor, Stuart Stark became the most famous lawyer in Massachusetts ever to lose a case and his job in the same week.

And so, after placing his law enforcement badge in Malloy's in-box, Stu returned to his office, closed his door, kicked his government-issue metal desk once as hard as he could, swore quietly to himself, and limped away from criminal law forever.

 

CHAPTER 1

Stu circled the block to find street parking. He could usually get a spot by the curb in front of the firm, and he finally squeezed his aging Ford Taurus between a beat-to-hell Chevy Silverado and the orange Prius with a white skull on its hood, owned by the tattoo artist down the block. He slid coins into the meter for the maximum two-hour period. He would hustle downstairs to feed it again three more times that day at ten, during lunch, and at two in the afternoon. Parking enforcement knocked off at three thirty. It worked out to a monthly amount that was less than a parking garage, even if he included the inevitable ten-dollar ticket he received on occasion.

The two-man firm's office was a low-rent second-floor space in the five-story Bluestone Building in Clark's Cove. A relic of New Bedford's textile industry past, the Bluestone was almost devoid of tenants. It also wasn't as close to the courthouse as he would have liked. Nor was it blue or stone or particularly attractive. But after shelling out good money for their online research service and a full-time secretary, they couldn't afford much more. They had, however, invested several thousand dollars they couldn't afford in the huge
BUCHANAN, STARK & ASSOCIATES
sign, which lorded over the postage stamp patch of grass out front. Stu fertilized the lawn himself early every fall and mowed it each week. There were no true associates in the firm, but they did partner with other local attorneys when cases were outside their expertise, and they had a recent graduate working ten hours per week doing cheap research for them while she studied for the bar exam.

BUCHANAN, STARK & ASSOCIATES

Stu took a moment to hate the gaudy sign. His partner was Clayton Buchanan, the handsome face of the tiny firm who jokingly called himself the Drizzle Maker. It was a modest nickname; Clay was as gregarious as Stuart was cautious. As a result, Clay brought in the work, and Stu did it. Stu had become the quiet workhorse, something Katherine lamented. Wooing clients was a game for the bold, the risk-takers. Not him. Not anymore. Clay, on the other hand, could backslap a local politician, swap profane limericks with a dockworker, and pick up a virgin in a church pew. Clay had once gotten them a client by taking a smoke break with a guy, despite the fact that Clay didn't smoke. He'd grabbed a dirty butt from the cat-litter-filled ashtray atop the public garbage can, stuffed it in his mouth without hesitation, and joined the man in the Plexiglas shelter. After ten minutes of empathy puffs, he walked away with 33 percent of a solid L&I claim. In this, and other creative ways, Clay found clients, while Stu buried himself in cases and codes. It was satisfactory to Stu. And besides, Clay hated doing work.

Stu hiked up the worn concrete rear stairwell to the second floor—the landlord no longer maintained the elevator in the foyer. He still marveled at how he'd fallen in with Clay, who was not from New England originally. They'd gone to the same law school, the University of Oregon; that was the root of their association. Stu had impulsively gone west because his college sweetheart had told him he had “no sense of adventure” when she broke up with him just before going to Europe her junior year. He still wasn't sure why Clay had landed at U of O.

So they were both Fighting Ducks. But Stu had been in the class a year ahead of Clay, and they hadn't spoken more than a few words to each other in the two years they'd overlapped. Stu had noticed Clay's arrival at Oregon. Everyone had. The guy had shown up a neatly dressed kid with an undergraduate record cobbled together from several obscure colleges, and he strutted into the law school's huge main hallway looking far too comfortable for a recent undergrad stepping into the pressure cooker, already joking with the back-row guys, and with his hand on the hip of Sophia Baron, a shockingly pretty second-year gal from Portland, Oregon, who Stu hadn't even had the courage to speak to his entire first year.

The only class Stu and Clay had taken together was Civil Procedure II in Stu's third year, Clay's second. Clay sat mostly in the back, but one day he'd plopped himself down next to Stu with nothing but a pencil and a single sheet of paper, whereupon they'd had their most memorable, and longest, exchange of law school. The professor was already lecturing when Clay sat down, leaned over, and whispered to Stu in an overly familiar manner, as though they were already in on a secret together.