Unleashed (7 page)

“Right. He was out on a nature walk, and he picked a piece of fruit off a botulism tree.” As a former cop, Laurie is considerably more likely than I am to come down on the prosecution side. That can actually be helpful to me, in terms of my understanding how the other side is thinking.

“There’re a lot of ways it could have happened, and a lot of people who could have caused it to happen.”

“Or maybe Sam’s high school sweetheart isn’t quite so sweet.”

“Poor Sam,” I say.

“He’ll get over it.”

“But it will hurt. If this went down as the prosecution says, then she was going to kill Sam as well. She expected him to be on the plane.”

“Until that dog intervened.”

I nod. “Good old Crash.”

The garage was the tip-off. Detective Burke realized it even before Special Agent Ricardo Muñoz, the FBI agent he was guiding through the investigation. Not that Muñoz didn’t notice the obvious; it just took him a split second longer.

So far the relationship between the two men was going uncharacteristically smoothly. Burke was investigating the death of a fellow cop, a friend, and he made it clear to Muñoz that he was not backing off. It was his case.

Muñoz was fine with that. Rather than adopt the more traditional FBI scornful attitude toward the locals, he recognized that since he was on assignment out of the New York City office and unfamiliar with Concord, Burke could be a help in showing him the lay of the land.

Their first stop was at the home of Alex and Rodney Larsen, the brothers whose bodies were found in the service station with Drew Keller’s. It was a small house in a very run-down area, no surprise since records showed that both men, while listing their occupation as auto mechanics, were receiving unemployment insurance.

The front door was locked, so Burke tried the garage, which opened. And there it was, pristine clean and in mint condition, a new, fully loaded pickup truck.

“Unemployment must pay more than it used to,” Burke said.

The rest of the house revealed similar nuggets. There was a new TV, an apparently new computer, and a DVD player that was still in the box.

Burke called in the license number on the truck and learned that it was not stolen but in fact purchased by Alex Larsen six days prior. Muñoz, in the meantime, was phoning in a request to get the financial and banking records of the two brothers as soon as possible.

Burke had arranged for a forensics team to meet them at the house, and the team showed up a few minutes after they had entered. They were to retrieve as many prints as they could. Someone had killed the brothers, and it could well have been a coconspirator. If so, at some point he might have been in this house.

Burke and Muñoz carefully searched the house but did not turn up any obvious evidence that they could use. They impounded an old computer that was on the desk, as well as the new one, which would be examined by experts.

As they were getting ready to leave, Muñoz got a phone call from his office. When he got off, he said to Burke, “Alex Larsen had one hundred thousand dollars wired into his account two weeks ago.”

“From who?”

“They’re running that down now. There is eight thousand in the account now; I’ve got a hunch he didn’t put the rest into T-bills.”

“So not only were they going to kill a big shot, they were being paid real money to do so,” Burke said. “You think it was their employer who decided they were expendable?”

“Maybe your friend showing up scared him off,” Muñoz said.

“Or maybe the employer looked at the way they were spending the money and the way they talked to Drew and decided they were too stupid to rely on or allow to live.”

“You got a lot of big shots around here?” he asked, though he knew the answer.

Burke nodded. “It’s the state capital; we’ve got a few.”

“I think the plan was to reduce the number.”

Reading the discovery material presents a bad news/bad news situation
.
As Thomas Bader had said, these are only the beginning in what will be a series of discovery documents. But what is here is damaging enough to Denise Price.

Barry Price probably died of botulism poisoning; the injuries he suffered when thrown from the plane were all, according to the coroner, likely postmortem. It’s hard to tell exactly, since the effects of the poison had certainly set in long before the crash. It’s entirely possible that the impact mercifully finished the job.

I take a few minutes to Google botulism, and the facts can be molded to fit the prosecution’s theory and time line, as I expected they would.

There were traces of the poison found in a basement sink drain in the Prices’ house, which certainly tends to implicate Denise. She and Barry are the two obvious candidates to have had access to that sink, and he could safely be characterized as being in the clear.

Another troublesome little tidbit is that Denise worked as a pharmacist’s assistant for two years before meeting and marrying Barry. It just contributes to the notion that she would have been capable of preparing the poison.

There is no possibility of successfully arguing suicide in this case. It makes no sense that Barry would deliberately ingest a poison and then get on that plane. If he wanted to kill himself, he could have just taken the poison, or more likely just gotten on the plane and flown it into the ground. There is no logical reason to do both.

The obvious conclusion, though not mentioned in the documents, is that the killer gave Barry the poison before he was going to fly, in the hope that the crash and subsequent explosion would incinerate the body and remove the chemical residue.

This too points to Denise; she knew that Barry was making the flight.

The police had moved quickly, and there are already interviews with friends of the Prices who claim that their marriage was a troubled one. None of them are yet ready to believe that Denise could have done it, but that will not be a help to her attorney. Somebody did it, and there is no reason the jury would consider her incapable of being the one.

So that’s the bad news.

And here’s the other bad news: I’m finding myself getting into it.

I’m reading these pages as if I am Denise Price’s attorney, and worse yet, I’m semi-okay with that. It’s forcing me to think logically, to start to problem-solve, and rather than dreading the work, I’m sort of looking forward to it.

Is industriousness contagious? Can you catch a work ethic from someone? And is there a cure?

“This is your fault,” I say to Laurie, who is reading the pages as well.

“What did I do now?”

“You made me get involved with this, and it is stirring my long dormant freeze-dried work juices.”

“You’re leaning toward taking the case?” she asks, obviously surprised.

“Unless I wake up tomorrow having come to my senses.”

“Are you reading something that makes you think Denise Price is innocent?”

“Nope.”

“Don’t misunderstand me, Andy. I think your getting back to work is great, but I thought your standard was you needed to believe in your client.”

“It is. But these pages, this investigation, are the work of the prosecution. And I’m more interested in what I’m not reading.”

“What might that be?”

“I’m not reading that Barry Price was looking for a criminal attorney.”

“So what if he was?”

“Well, unless he was worried about being charged with felony masturbation, his crime had to involve other people. People he either stole from or stole with or whatever. People who might have had a reason to kill him. The fact that he was killed the day he was looking for a criminal attorney creates a reasonable doubt, at least in my mind.”

She points to the documents. “This evidence is pretty compelling, and there might be more to follow.”

“It’s their job to assign guilt. My job is to develop my own facts and to attack their case.”

She smiles. “You have a job?”

“I’m afraid I might. Botulism is as bad as it gets as a way to die. I’d have to be convinced that the Denise Price I met, who Sam swears by, could do that to someone she lived with for twenty years.”

“You don’t know what went on behind their closed doors.”

“How would you kill me?” I asked.

“That’s easy. I’d get you to commit suicide.”

“How?”

“Make you talk about relationships, bring you to couples therapy, buy you a treadmill, disconnect your cable TV, get you a subscription to the ballet…”

“What an awful way to go,” I say.

She smiles. “Just don’t get on my bad side.”

“As far as I can tell—and believe me, I have looked from all angles—you don’t have a bad side.”

I’m human; I make mistakes on a case, and this first one is a beauty. I’m driving up to Connecticut to check out the scene where Barry Price’s plane went down. It’s not likely I’ll learn anything, but that’s not my mistake.

My mistake is bringing Hike along.

It’s about a two-hour-and-forty-five-minute ride, which means that round-trip will be five and a half hours, alone in a car with Hike. My only way out, and it is one I am seriously considering, is driving off the George Washington Bridge on the way.

Hike is going to be working with me on the case, if I make the final decision to take it, so I want him to start focusing on it. I always begin by going to the scene of the crime, usually with Laurie, since she is my lead investigator.

But because this was a plane crash, the benefit of going is not likely to be significant. Therefore I think Laurie is better off working on things in Jersey, hence my invitation to Hike.

He spends the first half hour of the ride reading discovery documents, so it’s mercifully quiet. Then all of a sudden he says, “Wow … botulism. That’s pretty cool.”

“You’re a botulism fan?”

“I know a lot about poisons; it’s sort of a hobby. Botulism isn’t my favorite, but it’s in the top twenty.”

I’m not sure I want to go down this path, so I don’t say anything. It doesn’t dissuade Hike from continuing the discussion.

“Did you know there are at least four thousand undiscovered poisons? And don’t get me started on viruses.”

I have absolutely no intention of getting him started on viruses. “How do you know about them if they’re not discovered?”

“Statistics. We know how many they find each year, so you just extrapolate it out. It’s basic math.” He looks at me with obvious surprise. “You don’t read the CDC reports on human toxins?”

“No, but I get
Entertainment Weekly.
” Please God, let this conversation be over.

It isn’t. “You want to know my favorite poison?” Hike asks.

“Not even a little bit.”

“It’s sarin. First it collapses your lungs; you feel like there’s a hippo sitting on your chest. Then you start unloading, I mean stuff starts coming out of every opening you’ve got, and some you didn’t know you had—”

“Hike, that’s—”

“Of course, it’s all over in like fifteen minutes,” he says with apparent sadness.

“You want it to last longer?”

“Depends on who takes it.”

Right about now I’d be inclined to take some, but I don’t mention this to Hike, because he probably has a pocket full of it. Instead I just point to the documents he hasn’t gone through yet. “Keep reading,” I say.

We’re met at the scene by Terry Bresnick, a retired investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board. As is the case in all plane crashes, NTSB is conducting the investigation, and the scene is still under their control.

Thomas Bader, in the homestretch in his campaign to be named “most cooperative prosecutor in America,” has arranged for us to get access.

I met Terry on a case about ten years ago. He was a witness for the prosecution, and I cross-examined him. I scored a lot of points, but he knew his stuff, and I thought he held his own pretty well.

But he was angry about the way I treated him, and once the trial was over, he came to my office to tell me so. Since he’s about six five and two hundred and forty pounds, I was less than delighted to see him. I would have hidden behind Edna, had she been in that day.

Within three minutes, we left my office, went over to Charlie’s, and had some beer and burgers, and we have been friends ever since. I’ve done him a couple of favors with legal work in recent years, and he’s always talked about wanting to repay me in kind. That’s why he jumped at this opportunity when I called.

Terry has gotten the lay of the land in advance of our arrival, helped along by his old friends from the agency. Because of that, he is able to take Hike and me on a quick tour. There is a large area that has been fenced off by the NTSB, and Terry walks us to the back end of the area, which is wooded.

“The plane hit in those trees,” he said, “and it started to break up. That’s where the pilot was thrown.”

“Is it possible to tell where he was in the plane when it happened?”

“That’s easy. He was still belted into the pilot seat.” He points toward an open, grassy area. “He came down over there. I’m told the body was pretty well intact.”

“Where did the rest of the plane come down?” Hike asks.

“I’ll show you.” He walks us what seems to be at least a quarter mile away, and we can see the wreckage strewn over a large area.

“Any chance the plane exploded?”

“You mean in flight, as if the explosion was the cause?”

“Yes.”

“Certainly doesn’t seem like it, not based on the way the wreckage lays out. But I don’t have access to all the facts.”

“So why did it come down?” I ask.

He hesitates. “I’ll tell you what I’ve heard, okay? But you didn’t hear it from me.”

I nod. “Deal.”

“It’s early, but they’ve found nothing mechanically wrong with the plane, and it was serviced and inspected the morning of the flight. There was some rain, but not enough to have caused a problem, and minimal wind.”

“So pilot error?”

He shrugs. “If by ‘error’ you mean he didn’t do anything. There’s no sign he took any action at all, and certainly he never got on the radio to say anything. Maybe the black boxes will reveal more, but I doubt it. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had a heart attack or passed out for some reason.”