Project Moses - A Mystery Thriller (Enzo Lee Mystery-Thriller Series) (7 page)

“What was she working on that night?” Lee finally asked. “You know. The night that she died.”

“I don’t really know. Just going through her usual backlog, I suppose. We always had briefs pouring in. She was one of the few judges who actually read the things all the way through. Footnotes and everything.”

“Hmmm. What was her last day like?” asked Lee. “Do you remember what happened in court that day?”

“Oh sure. It was a strange case,” she said. “A trial that lasted four or five days. It was a mistrial because some crazy woman would not vote to convict. It seemed an easy decision to me.”

“Someone mentioned that case to me,” said Lee, feigning forgetfulness as he tapped his forehead with his pen as if trying to knock loose a memory. “Was it Whittington or Wellington, something like that?”

“Warrington. Right.”

“What was it?” said Lee. “Burglary?”

“Right. The police caught him coming out of one of the University of California medical buildings.”

“Where?” asked Lee. “Parnassus Heights?”

“Right. Somewhere near the hospital,” Melissa Jensen replied. “He was coming down the fire escape. He admitted breaking a window and everything.”

“Sounds guilty to me. What was his defense?”

The law clerk tilted her head and adjusted herself in her chair. Lee felt a legal discourse in the works.

“Well, for burglary you need breaking and entering,” she said. “That wasn’t an issue. But you also need intent to steal something. That wasn’t so clear. See, Warrington didn’t have anything with him from the lab. He said he went in there to get information about illegal experiments on animals.”

“I see,” said Lee, digesting the information. “But, wouldn’t that be stealing information?”

“Maybe. Who knows? It might be something that was, or should be, public information. If you believe him, it gets murky as to whether his intent was to steal. You might think illegal experiments are a greater evil than stealing the information.”

“Wow. That sounds like a creative defense. But, it also sounds like something a lawyer would dream up.” Lee glanced at his watch. “Say, I know you’re probably going to lunch. May I look at the judge’s office? It’s just so I can describe where she worked.”

Melissa stood up and opened the door that connected the outer office with the inner chamber. He stepped inside. He noticed the blue volumes lining the back wall with the wide desk sitting just in front. The desk was stripped clean. Just bare, gleaming wood. No papers lay on it.

Lee circled the desk slowly. When he reached the opposite side, he noticed the gray plastic wastebasket underneath the desk. He pulled it toward him. The only thing in it was a empty package made of some sort of clear plastic material. It was about the size of a pack of cigarettes and had been ripped open.

Chapter 8

MELISSA JANSEN HAD let Lee peruse the court file for the Warrington case. He found the old police report of Warrington’s arrest which listed an address on McArthur Boulevard in Oakland. He should have used the time to make some more telephone calls to wrap up the reporting for the profiles of Miriam Gilbert and Orson Adams. But, he headed to Oakland anyway. He was curious about this Warrington character and his animal rights defense. Was it mere coincidence that the judge and prosecutor had shared the same courtroom before their deaths? What the hell, he thought. He was already on Pilmann’s shit list. If he ended up needing an extra day for the profiles, it couldn’t get much worse.

It was early afternoon by the time Lee got to Oakland. As he pulled in front of a yellow stucco house with a covered porch that spanned the entire front, Lee saw a tall, skinny black woman in silver high heels, red hot pants and a skimpy white vest waving at him from the intersection just ahead.

An early bird, he thought. By nightfall she would be fighting for curb space.

Lee went to the door. He was greeted by a heavyset guy wearing a blue ambulance company uniform with “Nick” stitched onto a patch. He had a stringy black goatee and was puffing on a Marlboro. Lee looked past him and saw plastic garbage bags sitting on the kitchen floor. The carpet in the living room was dark green, threadbare and splotched with what Lee guessed were the stains from beer, wine, coffee and the pitbull pacing behind Nick with an anxious whine.

“Ain’t here,” said Nick. “Don’t know where he is. Don’t think he works. He’s a weird fuck.” He tossed down the Marlboro and crushed it with his foot on the door sill.

“Try People’s Park,” added talkative Nick. “He ‘angs out with the homeless bums.” He exhaled twin plumes of smoke as he shut the door.

People’s Park, adjacent to the UC Berkeley campus, still held some mystique for Lee as an early battleground that helped define the 1960s counterculture. Perhaps that was why it always depressed him to see the place now, a square block that looked like a vacant lot, overgrown with weeds interrupted only by clumps of small, deformed trees. Strewn around the park were clusters of people, surrounded by shopping carts, plastic garbage bags and bedrolls. Green wine bottles were making their rounds.

People’s Park had taken on a new, surreal quality since Lee had last been there. After 30 years of failure, the university had finally managed to put its stamp on the park in the early 90s by constructing two volleyball courts. In the late afternoon shadows, trim college sophomores wearing gym shorts and clean T-shirts spiked, blocked and dinked while the burned out, chewed up and spit out sprawled on the sidelines.

Lee found Lloyd Warrington sitting on blankets with two other guys and a girl. He was skinny, built like a gawky kid although he looked like he was in his 30s. He had shoulder-length blond hair tied back in a ponytail and wore black-framed glasses on his narrow face. The smell of marijuana was in the air but Warrington, sitting cross-legged and straight-backed, looked at Lee with eyes that were clear and appraising.

“You Lloyd Warrington?” asked Lee.

“Who are you?”

The beefy guy in dirty jeans and Mexican serape sitting to Warrington’s left laughed.

“That your name, man? Lloyd.”

“Shut up,” said Warrington. “What do you want?”

“I work for the News. I wanted to talk to you about your case, about the trial.”

Warrington examined Lee for few moments. He tapped his fingertips on the brown blanket underneath him.

“You must think I’m pretty stupid,” said Warrington. “Talk to my lawyer.”

“Listen, I’m not trying to get your confession,” said Lee. “I want to talk to you about the experiments. The illegal experiments. About why you were at the labs in the first place.”

Warrington was silent. He started rocking back and forth to the sound of a couple guys playing congas at the other end of the park.

“Can we talk about this somewhere else?” asked Lee.

After a few seconds, Warrington stood up and walked slowly with Lee until they were out of the earshot of his companions.

“So, tell me about the experiments,”

Lee said.

“Are you religious?”

“Yeah. Sure. I believe in a god.”

“If you know anything about religion. I don’t mean Sunday School bullshit. I mean
religions
. Not just Judeo-Christian ideas. Then you know that Western culture and religion is the most egocentric and ethnocentric in the world.
You
should know that. It is ends-oriented totally. It excludes every other way of thinking. It is basically intolerant, of other religions, of other people, of other beings and creatures, even though we all come out of the same slop.

“That’s where it starts,” Warrington continued. He was getting cranked up now and shook a fist in Lee’s face. “Sacrifice everything for the greater glory of mankind. The environment. The land. The forests. Screw the animal kingdom. If they’re below us on the evolutionary ladder, screw ‘em. Where does it end?”

“So, what were you trying to do in the labs?” interjected Lee.

“Stop the killing. Do you know how many monkeys die in this country every year in the name of medicine and developing new drugs? More than 28,000. Think of it. You could populate a couple of rain forests. If you count the number that die during capture or because of disease, the number is probably twice that.

“That’s just the beginning,” continued Warrington. “There are hundreds of thousands of cats, dogs, rats, rabbits. It’s just too horrific. To a Hindu, that’s unbelievable. It’s criminal. Somehow, it must be stopped.”

“Okay. So what specifically were you trying to do?” asked Lee. “Do you know about specific experiments? Are there some specific documents? Maybe I can get them through a public document request.”

Warrington laughed.

“This is all covered up,” said Warrington. “You think they’ll just
tell
you? Lawrence Livermore Labs is involved. The UC School of Medicine uses thousands of dogs each year. There’s no record of it. It’s all off the books. That’s where we’ll get ‘em. The coverup. You’re a reporter. You should know that. Watergate, right?

“That’s all I can tell you, man,” said Warrington suddenly, turning his back on Lee and walking toward his group. “Talk to my lawyer if you want anything else.”

Lee watched as Warrington sat down again on the brown blanket.

“Hey, Lloyd,” the guy in the serape greeted him.

Someone handed Warrington a bottle half filled with a pink fluid and he took a quick swig, keeping his eye on Lee the whole time.

Lee walked back to Warrington and stood over him.

“What about your trial?” said Lee. “You know the prosecutor and the judge both died after your trial.”

Warrington shaded his eyes with one hand as he squinted up at Lee. He took another swig from the bottle in his other hand.

“I guess the Bible would call that justice,” said Warrington.

***

AFTER THE THIRD ring, the computer 3,000 miles away answered the call. A few seconds later, a soft squeal was audible as the connection was made. “Access code:” read the white lettering that suddenly appeared on the deep blue screen of the monitor. The man sitting in front of it typed in: “Nightwriter.” Next, the computer asked for his user ID. He typed in the initials “GWK.” Finally, he was asked for his personal code, and he typed in: “Gloria.” He wondered for a moment who “Gloria” was. Maybe it was the wife or daughter of the person whose initials were “GWK”. Perhaps his mistress. Or his poodle.

The menu of words that suddenly appeared across the top of his screen flushed away the Intruder’s idle speculation. The list told him that with a few keystrokes he could look into GWK’s personal documents files, explore his electronic mail and even look into the computerized calendar to see what appointments were scheduled for the next day. But, the only thing about GWK that interested the Intruder was that through him the Intruder could access the same information for any of the 44 reporters on the staff of the San Francisco News.

In a couple of minutes, he was rummaging through the stored files of Enzo Lee. He bypassed 90 days worth of old newspaper stories and concentrated on everything the reporter had input into the computer since the day that Judge Miriam Gilbert and prosecutor Orson Adams had died. He was delighted to find that the reporter used the computer for everything: notes of interviews; telephone numbers of contacts and sources; appointments; even reminders to send birthday cards.

The Intruder was less sanguine to see that Enzo Lee had been assigned to cover the deaths of
both
Miriam Gilbert and Orson Adams, and that Sarah Armstrong was in his telephone list. But, the Intruder had anticipated the possibility that someone might try to link the deaths of the judge and prosecutor. As a hedge, he had made sure they were provided with such a connection in the form of a petty burglar named Lloyd Warrington. He was relieved to see that the planning was paying dividends. When he was finished with his electronic foray, the Intruder turned off the lights in his government office and joined the evening commute on his way home.

•   •   •

“
NI HAU MA, lai lai
,” said Lee.

His grandmother was staring out the window of her small room. She shuffled slowly on the green linoleum in her brown, fuzzy slippers until she could see Lee. She was tiny and seemed almost childlike to Lee. She was bent forward, her head naturally angled toward the floor unless she exerted the effort to lift it as she did now.

She blinked at Lee, focusing through thick eyeglasses that magnified her eyes to twice their size. Her hair was white and fell to her shoulders. Her face was round and held a wistful expression. She remained silent.

Lee walked over to her and guided her to a soft chair with padded arms.

“Sit down,” he said. “Look what I brought you.”

He produced a wrapped slice of wintermelon.

“Ummm,” she said, accepting the melon in both hands and inspecting the pale flesh. “Doeng gwa. Makes good soup.”

Lee usually brought his grandmother some sort of Chinese vegetable. She didn’t seem to realize that she couldn’t cook in the rest home. She would give the food to a nurse to keep for her and then forget about it. But, she enjoyed getting it.

In his youth, Lee had seen his grandmother on rare occasions, usually at the weddings and funerals of relatives. It wasn’t until he was a teenager that he learned his grandparents had broken off all contact with his mother before he was born. She had refused his grandparents’ order to end a relationship with a young man considered unsuitable. She not only defied her parents but had the audacity to accept her lover’s proposal. Thomas Lee was Italian-Scottish and died in an auto accident when Enzo was 8. The rift within his mother’s family survived.

Then, Ben Hom, one of Lee’s cousins, had called him one day in New York. It was soon after his grandfather had passed away. His mother had died a few months earlier. Only his grandmother had attended his mother’s funeral. And, Lee hadn’t bothered to attend his grandfather’s. Ben’s message was simple: His grandmother was ill and wanted to see him.