Unleashed (12 page)

He looked in the window and saw three men, including the man Marcus had believed to be Susser. They were standing close together and just talking, but it seemed fairly intense, and “Susser” was shaking his head no.

Marcus went around to the door and quietly turned the knob. It was unlocked, which made things easier. Marcus opted not to take out his gun; he didn’t expect he would need it, and at this point there was no reason to kill anyone.

Displaying amazing swiftness, he opened and pushed through the door. To the three men inside, it seemed as if he exploded into the room. If they backed off, Marcus would not hurt them but rather find out what the hell was going on.

They didn’t back off. After a moment of initial surprise, the two newcomers to the room moved toward Marcus, one of them reaching into his jacket pocket for what Marcus decided to assume was a weapon.

He grabbed that man’s arm and snapped it at the wrist, then picked up the screaming man and threw him, full body, at his partner. The flying man was the bigger of the two, so he collapsed the smaller man and they landed in a pile.

Marcus quickly frisked and took a handgun from each of the fallen men. He turned and took a quick look at the man he figured was Susser. He appeared shocked and scared but did not make any threatening gestures, so Marcus didn’t touch him.

Which was just as well, because it was time to talk.

The meeting doesn’t exactly follow my planned agenda
.
I figured it would be just Susser and me, and he would tell me why he was afraid and what it had to do with Barry Price. I’d help him if I could, if he deserved that help, and then I’d go home to put the information I learned to good use defending my client.

Instead, when I get there, Marcus is in the room with three men, and the place looks like a bomb went off in it. One of the men is holding his arm at an awkward angle and moaning; people moan a lot around Marcus. Another man looks somewhat dazed and out of it, another Marcus trademark.

The three men glance at me briefly, but their real focus is on Marcus. It’s a very logical attitude for them to take.

“What’s going on, guys?” I ask, and Marcus nods to the unharmed man, which serves as a clear instruction for him to answer. But he hesitates.

“Are you Donald Susser?” I ask. It’s an educated guess; he’s unshaven and wearing dirty jeans and a flannel shirt that looks like he hasn’t taken it off since the first Clinton administration. He also looks scared, though with his having just seen Marcus in action, that’s not exactly a surprise.

He nods. “Yes.”

“Who are these two?”

“They’re my friends. That’s Billy Jordan and that’s Teddy Ellis.” Ellis is the one with the broken arm.

“You said we’d be alone. Why are they here?”

“They were sent to kill me,” Susser says, and Ellis shakes his head weakly in disagreement.

“Sounds like really good friends,” I say. “Why were they sent to kill you, and who sent them?”

“We told him everything,” Susser says, meaning Marcus.

If I have to get the story out of Marcus, I should have it by the time of Denise Price’s third or fourth parole hearing. “I want to hear it from you,” I say.

So he tells me that a man named Carter had hired them to commit a murder, though he called it an assassination. He claims they didn’t know who the target was, that Carter hadn’t told them yet. But they were each going to get two hundred thousand dollars for their efforts.

“Why did this Carter pick you three?”

Susser nods toward Jordan. “Because Billy was army artillery; Carter put him in charge.”

“What kind of weapon?”

“We weren’t told yet.”

I ask a bunch more questions, mostly about Carter, but he seems to be pretty much a mystery man. They could be withholding something, though Marcus usually extracts all there is to extract. Susser does say that his two friends were supposed to kill him for talking to Barry Price, which made him a threat to the operation. But he swears they weren’t going to actually do it. They were just going to tell Carter that he was dead and hide him until after things quieted down.

“Why was Barry Price coming here?” I ask.

“I don’t know.”

“You didn’t call him?”

He shakes his head. “He called me, said he wanted to talk. That’s how all this started.”

I ask Marcus if he thinks there’s more to be gotten from the three, and he shakes his head. So we let them go, which seems to be something they’re rather happy about.

I decide that we should spend the night in Maine. This is not exactly a tough call. First of all, there are no more flights out of Portland tonight, so the alternative is to spend seven hours in a car with Marcus. It’s not the worst thing imaginable—Hike would be worse—but it’s pretty bad.

But more important, I’m not leaving without talking to law enforcement about Donald Susser and his friends. If there really is to be a murder committed, by them or someone else, it’s information that I can’t sit on.

Marcus and I check into the Senator Inn, on Western Avenue in Augusta, and we head straight for their restaurant. They sell shrimp cocktail by the piece, and when the waiter asks Marcus how many he wants, he thinks for a moment and then says, “Thirty.”

“Thirty?” asks the waiter.

I nod. “He doesn’t want to spoil his appetite for dinner.”

I’m ready to go to my room an hour later, just about the time Marcus is starting on his third entrée, so I tell the waiter to charge the meal to my room. “The whole thing?” he asks.

I nod. “It’s fine; I took out a mortgage on the meal.” When I get back to the room I fall asleep immediately. It’s been a tiring and mostly wasted day.

In the morning, I head to the restaurant. Marcus is in there eating; for all I know he’s been at it all night. I tell him my plan, such as it is, which is to head for the local police to tell them at least part of what I know.

The nearest precinct is just a short drive from the hotel. I debate whether or not to have Marcus come in with me and decide that he should, though my plan is to do the talking. I don’t discuss this with Marcus first, since asking Marcus not to talk seems a tad unnecessary.

I tell the sergeant at the front desk that I have some information about a local resident named Donald Susser, who might be involved in criminal activity. I put it that way for a couple of reasons. In my experience, cops prefer to receive information rather than answer questions, and “criminal activity” is something that they have an instinctive interest in.

Whatever I said, it works. The sergeant says, “Give me a second,” then picks up the phone and talks softly into it. Less than a minute later, another officer comes out and takes us back to the office of Captain Luther Ketchell.

We introduce ourselves, but he barely looks at me; his focus is on Marcus. Finally he says, “Talk to me about Donald Susser.”

I lay it out for him, from Barry Price’s murder, to my representation of Denise, to the connection to Donald Susser and his phone conversation with Laurie, to the situation at Peaslee’s with Susser, Jordan, and Ellis, and finally to the murder they have apparently been hired to commit. Pretty much the only thing I leave out is the forceful means that Marcus used to get the information. “I thought you should know all this,” I say.

Ketchell thinks about this for a few long moments and then says, “Good thinking. Too bad you didn’t come in a little earlier.”

“Why is that?”

“Susser, Jordan, and Ellis are dead. They were found in Damariscotta State Park last night with one bullet in each of their heads. Lying side by side, staring at the moon.”

Ketchell decides there’s no way he can let us leave there without completely debriefing us on everything we know but may not yet have revealed. To do so, he separates Marcus and me so we can be questioned separately. It’s the first break I’ve gotten all day; watching them try to get answers out of Marcus would be too painful to witness.

After almost four hours, we’re finally told that we can go but that we might be hearing from Homeland Security. Protocol calls for Ketchell to contact them once the word “assassination” was raised.

We get a four o’clock flight out of Portland. It was a very worthwhile trip, except for the part where we lost our only promising lead, and the three people we talked to all got killed.

Everything’s really going according to plan.

The system is set up to work against us. I think it is pretty clear already that our main hope is to prove that Denise is not guilty, or at least credibly point to someone else as the killer. We will obviously also try to create reasonable doubt as to Denise’s guilt, but it’s unlikely that will be enough.

The situation in Maine leads me to believe very strongly that Denise did not murder her husband. Having met Susser and studied his background, I am sure that he was not someone Barry would have had investment business with. It seems far more likely that he was somehow involved in the reason that Barry needed a criminal attorney.

I have no way of knowing why Barry called Susser and then arranged to see him. They lived in different worlds, geographically and financially, and it is crucial that we find out Barry’s motive for making the connection.

The fact that Susser, Jordan, and Ellis were killed, and so soon after Barry’s murder, makes the coincidence way too great for me to believe all the deaths are unrelated. And of course it’s unlikely that Denise broke out of prison to murder Susser and his friends.

But there are evidentiary rules in a trial, much as I like to break them. For us to bring in outside evidence, such as Susser’s death, we need to show relevance. That is always difficult to do, and in this case will be even tougher.

Laurie and I are taking Tara for a walk when she says, “I wonder how they found Susser.”

I ask her to explain, and she says, “He was scared and obviously in hiding. Yet the other two guys knew where he was going to be and when he was going to be there.”

“They weren’t necessarily bad guys; they were apparently his friends. Don’t forget, they’re just as dead as he is.”

She shakes her head. “But he was in hiding from everyone. If they knew where he was, they wouldn’t have had to show up at your meeting to find him. They could have done so at any time.”

“An excellent observation,” I admit.

“Somehow they knew in advance that he was going to be there, and based on how he sounded on the phone, I doubt that he told them.”

“Susser said that this guy Carter sent them to kill him. Carter must have been the one who knew about our meeting. Maybe Susser’s phone was tapped.”

She shook her head. “You have to know where somebody is to tap his phone. Unless…”

She doesn’t have to finish the sentence. It’s crazy, but I know that she’s considering the possibility that our phone is the one that is tapped. “You have someone who can check it out?” I ask.

“Of course. Tony Vazquez is the best.”

“He won’t find anything,” I say.

“That would be the preferred outcome.”

“Call him.”

She nods.

It sounds like somebody is screaming in the background when Sam answers the phone. “What the hell is that?” I ask.

“Rage Against the Machine.”

I have no idea how I know that Rage Against the Machine is a band, but I do. And I also know that Sam’s idea of a wild night out is seeing
Fiddler on the Roof
at the dinner theater.

“Your taste in music is evolving,” I say.

“Crash likes alternative rock. It mellows him right out.”

“Then he must have a lot of it on his iPod, because he’s the most mellow dog I’ve ever seen.”

“Externally, yes. But inside he has a lot of stress. And he’s been through a lot—the accident, the surgery…”

I take a moment to silently give thanks that Tara likes Simon and Garfunkel, and then I say, “I need you to do something today, unless you’re taking Crash to a Metallica concert.”

“No, I’m on the case.”

“Okay. I want you to dig into the lives of three guys who lived in Augusta. Their names are Donald Susser, Billy Jordan, and Teddy Ellis.”

He already knew Susser’s name, but he pauses as he writes down the others. “Okay, good. I’m heading down to the bunker now.”

“The bunker?”

“Yeah, you remember, at the Holiday Inn. That’s where the team is.”

“Right. How are they doing?”

“Great. Hilda’s upset that room service doesn’t have potato latkes, but other than that it’s going really well. What do you want to know about the Augusta guys?”

“Everything. Employment, family, criminal record if they have one, financial dealings. Anything you can hack into will help.”

“And they all live in Augusta proper?”

“I’m not sure ‘live’ is the verb that applies anymore, but that’s the general area where they’re from.”

He promises to get right on it, and I head out to interview some of Denise and Barry’s friends, a number of whom are on the prosecution’s witness list.

It’s a depressing afternoon. Each of the people I speak with is in retrospect well aware of Denise and Barry’s marital problems and not totally surprised that things ended in violence. I don’t believe them; they are all employing twenty-twenty hindsight.

I don’t come on strong with them, just listen to what they have to say. I’ll be seeing some of them on the witness stand, and I certainly don’t want them to consider me a particular threat going in.

When I get home, there’s a car that I don’t recognize in the driveway. I get out of my car and see that Laurie has come out on the porch to greet me. She’s obviously missed me terribly, the poor thing.

“We need to talk,” she says.

“Uh-oh.”

“Tony Vazquez is inside.”

For a second the name doesn’t connect to anything, but then I remember that he’s the security guy who’s a friend of Laurie’s and who was going to check the phone for bugs.

“So why are we out here?”

“He’s coming right out.”

The door opens as she finishes the sentence, and he appears on cue. Laurie introduces us, and then he gets right to it. “Your phone is compromised,” he says. “Somebody is listening to every word you say.”