The Wrong Man (14 page)

“Did you give anything to the police or the prosecutors?” I asked. “I didn’t see anything in the discovery.”

Ray, who had been ramping up to bawl me out again, was disarmed by the innocuous question. “I—I don’t think so.” He looked at his wife. “Dor, did we give Wendy anything?”

“That legal document,” said Doreen. “From the FedEx.”

“Oh, right. There was one thing,” he said to me. “But I don’t think there was anything to it. Wendy didn’t seem to think so.”

I looked at Lightner. I had nothing to lose at this point.

“Did you keep a copy?” I asked.

Randall Manning smoothed his hands over his oak desk at the headquarters of Global Harvest International. It was the desk his father had when he ran GHI years ago, back when there was no “I” in the initials, when the company was simply selling fertilizer products in a three-state region. The desk was largely empty. There was a computer monitor and mouse, which he considered garish but necessary, and on the right a line of family photographs. His wife, Bethany. His son, Quinn, with his wife and their daughter, Cailie.

Manning prided himself on a clean desk. It gave the impression of control. Sometimes Manning wondered if that was a misimpression.

“Go ahead, Richard,” he said in a calm voice.

“Mr. Manning, it’s Patrick Cahill. Again,” he added. Richard Moore was GHI’s head of security. He was a former state trooper who cashed out after his pension fully vested and took a job with GHI. He was a reliable employee, in Manning’s opinion, but in this case a nuisance.

“Insubordination, in a word,” Moore explained. “Cahill wouldn’t take direction from his supervisor. This particular supervisor is African-American. The supervisor directed Cahill to lock up one of the sheds, and Cahill refused. They almost came to blows, sir. They had to be separated. When it was all said and done, according to three separate witnesses, Cahill was heard saying—this is a quote—‘I’m not taking directions from no…’ and then he used the N-word.”

Manning closed his eyes. He squeezed the rubber stress ball in his
hand. Squeezed it until it caused pain. “What’s your recommendation, Richard?”

“One-month suspension, sir. And probation. One more incident and he’s gone.”

“But you’ve not instituted that yet?”

“No, sir. I have your clear instructions on Cahill. No discipline without your approval.”

Manning had personally hired Cahill and had explained to Moore, at the time, about Cahill’s difficult upbringing and the need to give second chances to individuals in life. The background story had been largely false. The justification for hiring Cahill was entirely bogus.

“If I may say so, sir.” Moore cleared his throat. “This will become a morale problem if we let him skate on this.”

“I understand, Richard. I have no intention of letting him ‘skate.’ I only wonder if there are other ways to handle this.”

“Sir, if I—”

“That will be all, Richard. I’m going to speak with Patrick, and I’ll let you know.”

Moore paused, a delay that bordered on insubordination, before he nodded curtly and left the room.

Twenty minutes later, Patrick Cahill was standing at attention in Manning’s office. Cahill was age twenty-seven, built like a truck, with a penetrating stare and a natural scowl to his face. He’d flamed out of the military, failed to qualify as a local cop, and bounced around personal-security firms and gigs as a bouncer at various bars. Virtually all of them had ended badly, insubordination and fighting being the principle causes.

He was an unstable and violent personality. He was a terrible choice for an employee.

But he was a perfect choice for the Circle.

“Patrick,” Manning said, standing face-to-face with Cahill. “What am I going to do with you?”

“Sir—”

“Racial epithets, Patrick? Are you out of your
mind
?”

Cahill kept his eyes forward, military posture.

“You are never to call attention to yourself.
Never.
Understood?”

“Understood, sir.”

Manning shook his head in exasperation. “Now I have to discipline you, Patrick. Because if I don’t, I’ll be calling even more attention to you.” He pointed to the door. “Richard Moore wants to suspend you for one month. But I can’t do that, can I, Patrick?”

No, he couldn’t. Because a one-month suspension would take Cahill out of commission until December 15. And Randall Manning needed Patrick on the fence before then.

“I’m going to dock you a month’s pay,” Manning said. “I’ll have accounting shave it off your weekly wage over six months’ time. And then I’m going to pay you out of my own pocket, so you’re made whole. But Patrick, this is your last chance. If you screw up again between now and the operation, I’m going to be impatient.”

Manning moved to within an inch of Cahill’s face.

“Who took you in when you had nobody?”

“You did, sir.”

“Who gave you a job and a place to live?”

“You did, sir.”

“Who has given you the opportunity to change the world?”

“You, sir.”

“This is a war, Patrick, and very soon everyone’s going to have to take a side. Make sure you’re on the right side. No more mistakes. Now go.”

Patrick Cahill turned on his heel and marched out of the office.

Joel Lightner and I listened to the footfalls of Ray Rubinkowski, the arthritic clicking of his ankles, as he came back downstairs. Neither of us really understood what he was about to show us. When Ray came back into the parlor room, he handed me a two-page stapled document.

“I don’t know if this means anything to you,” he said. “Wendy said it didn’t to her.”

That was the second time he’d said that.

It was a legal document. The heading said
Exhibit A: Response to Interrogatory #2
. In the header of the document, right-adjusted, was the name of a lawsuit and a docket number: 09 CH 1741. That told me the lawsuit was a civil action in state court that was filed in 2009.

The lawsuit was styled
LabelTek Industries Inc. v. Global Harvest International Inc.

I didn’t recognize LabelTek or Global Harvest International. Nothing in the document told me the subject matter of the lawsuit.

“This is a discovery document in a lawsuit,” I explained. “Kathy was a paralegal, so discovery would be her primary responsibility.”

“That’s right, it’s what she did,” said Ray.

Each side in a lawsuit gets to ask questions, and request documentation, from the other side to get ready for trial. We call this “discovery.” When a party submits written questions to the other side, they are known as “interrogatories.” I consider this aspect of being a lawyer “boring” and “unbearable.”

But maybe not this one time. The document I was holding was a response to an interrogatory. The answer was long, so the party answering this interrogatory had apparently made its response a separate exhibit. For all I knew, that was standard. But I didn’t really know. Discovery was largely for civil litigants. I avoided civil litigation like I avoided raw vegetables.

The response to the interrogatory listed a number of companies. The list filled two pages, with forty-seven companies. There were a couple of recognizable Fortune 500 companies on this list but mostly names I’d never heard.

I looked up at Ray Rubinkowski, who was watching me closely. “Kathy gave you this?” I asked.

Ray nodded. “A couple of days after Kathy died, I got a FedEx package. It was a birthday card for me, a gift-wrapped sweater, and this document.”

I didn’t see the relevance of this document to anything I wanted to know.

“For all I knew, it was accidental,” he said. “It fell in or something. I’ve been known to misplace an item now and again, and I figured she probably did just that.”

Sure, that was possible. “So she mailed this a day or two before her death?”

“Yeah.”

It was hard to believe that was a coincidence. “It was for your birthday—the package, I mean.”

“Yeah. My sixty-first birthday. Our birthdays were the same week. I turned sixty-one, she would’ve turned twenty-four. She wasn’t going to make it out here to see us until the following weekend, so I suppose she wanted to make sure I got my present on time before my birthday. That would be like her.”

Okay, so maybe a coincidence. “Do you still have the FedEx package?”

He shook his head no. That was okay. We knew the approximate date it was sent and the sender and recipient. If we needed proof of the delivery, we’d get it.

“On the back,” Lightner said to me.

I turned to him. “What?”

“The back of the document,” he said.

I flipped the document over. There was handwriting. A grand total of four letters, followed by two question marks:

“I have no idea,” Ray said, when I asked him if the initials AN or NM meant anything to him.

“Did Kathy say anything about sending you something in the mail?” I tried.

“Not that I can remember. No, I don’t think so.”

“Did she say anything about her job near the time she died? Anything about trouble she was having at work or anywhere else, for that matter?”

Ray jabbed a finger at me. “You’re doing it again. You’re trying to dig up dirt on my little girl.”

I raised my hands. “I wasn’t. But never mind.”

Kathy’s parents stared at me for a long time. It was clear that I’d reached my limit.

I thanked them profusely and left their house with the document in tow. When we reached our car and were well out of earshot of the Rubinkowskis, Joel and I looked at each other.

“Probably nothing,” I said.

“Yeah, probably,” he agreed. “But the timing sure is interesting.”

The conference room in our law firm had become the unofficial war room for the Stoller trial. We had blow-up photos of the crime scene on tripods in one corner. A television rested in another corner, with a DVD of Tom Stoller’s interrogation ready to play at any time. A few boxes rested on the conference room table.

The room was more than we needed. As these matters go, this wasn’t a document-intensive case. Most of the paper was the physical evidence and forensic reports concerning the same. At the moment, there wasn’t much for witnesses, either. We had Dr. Sofian Baraniq and Bobby Hilton, the Army Ranger buddy. Then there was a guy named Sheldon Pierson who lived right by where the murder occurred on Gehringer Avenue. He estimated that he was probably outside during the time of the murder, but he couldn’t add much because he couldn’t hear or see a damn thing.

But I thought he could add a lot for me.

I was reviewing the responding police officer’s write-up while Bradley was poring through the case file of
LabelTek Industries Inc. v. Global Harvest International Inc.
Yesterday, after my interview with the Rubinkowskis, I’d told Bradley to pull the entire file from the circuit court.

I was about to check on his progress when Shauna burst into the room like she had news.

“Yes, Ms. Tasker?” I said.

She held up a document. “Motion from the prosecution. You’re not going to like it.”

“Are you sure I’m not going to like it?”

“Pretty darn sure, yeah.”

“She’s moving to bar the insanity defense,” I said.

Shauna cocked her head. “How did you know
that
? Did she tell you?”

“No, but it’s what I would have done.” I nodded and held out my hand for the document. “She’s claiming lack of cooperation, right?”

“Right.” She handed me the motion.

I was actually surprised Wendy Kotowski had waited this long. When you plead insanity, you place your mental condition at issue, and you must permit the government’s shrinks to evaluate you. Tom had been as stingy with the prosecution’s doctors as he had been with Dr. Baraniq—and with me. The state was arguing that the defendant was making it impossible for them to fully evaluate him, and, thus, he should not be permitted to assert the insanity defense.

Bradley grabbed Shauna’s copy and read it over. “What does Nash do with this?” he asked.

“Grants it, probably,” I said.

“And you’re calm about this.”

“Does it help if I freak out?” I read the motion in its entirety. It was well done. Wendy was always a good writer. Before she started first-chairing in the felony courtrooms, a lot of the other ACAs would turn to her for help on briefs. There is a “brief bank” in the county attorney’s office where samples of various motions and briefs are kept, and many of them were penned by Wendy Kotowski.

Besides, she’d had plenty of time to draft this thing. She knew months ago she was going to argue this. Why not? It’s a free shot on goal. Knock out the defendant’s legal theory and he’s left with nothing. And even if you lose, you tie up defense counsel on the eve of trial, make him scramble to respond to this motion instead of preparing for trial testimony. Wendy knew full well how thinly staffed we were at the law offices of Tasker & Kolarich.

“If she wins on this, she goes after Hilton next,” I said. “She argues that there’s no relevance to his testimony because if PTSD is out of the game, it doesn’t matter what kind of shit Tom went through in Iraq. His war experience is irrelevant.”

“And then we’re fucked,” said Bradley.

I tossed my football in the air, putting some English on it. “Not necessarily,” I said.

“Why not necessarily?”

“For one thing, we can revisit fitness.”

“Fitness—for trial? What does that have to do with this?”

“Young Bradley, what is the standard for fitness for trial?”

“Fitness for… The defendant is able to…” He paused. “The defendant has to be able to assist his lawyers in the preparation of his defense.”

“Correct. And what’s his defense, young Bradley, in this case?”

“Well, insanity.”

“And if he won’t talk to me about the case, is that assisting me?”

Young Bradley paused. I winked at Shauna. “Wait for it,” I said.

“Oh,” Bradley said. “Oh, so now the prosecution’s saying the same thing as us.”