The Wrong Man (39 page)

Manning had to cancel the public offering of GHI, naturally. The things he was going to do, he couldn’t be answering to a board of directors and shareholders. No, he’d have to keep the company private, so he was the one and only boss, free to do whatever he pleased with the company. Like selling an inordinate amount of ammonium nitrate fertilizer to a small farming company. Like keeping people such as Patrick Cahill in a job, so he had the right people watching the gates and driving the trucks.

He thought the hardest part would be finding recruits, people who detested the government and were willing to take up arms against it and
risk their lives in the process. He was surprised to learn that this was the easiest part.

Tuesday, December 7, was the ideal date. The symbolism was perfect, and it gave them sufficient time to stockpile materials for this attack and future ones, and to recruit and train the soldiers.

Manning stretched his nervous limbs and sat down on the bed. He looked at his prepaid cell phone again, an untraceable phone he’d purchased at a convenience store two days ago with a package of two hundred minutes. The FBI had come calling today. They didn’t search the place. They just came by to chat.

So they’d gotten wind of things, probably from Jason Kolarich, but it didn’t sound like they were close.

Not close enough. Not soon enough.

The attack was less than forty-eight hours away.

After Joel Lightner’s briefing, he and I spent the next several hours with Lee Tucker of the FBI. This time, Lee Tucker wasn’t wearing a patronizing smirk. I’d made some headway with him, and the information Joel and I gave him now only solidified our position.

Not that Lee gave up a single damn thing in return. He didn’t confirm or deny anything. He gave no indication whether my information was news to him or stuff he already knew. I couldn’t tell if he put the threat risk at low, medium, or high, or the imminence of that threat as near or far.

From his viewpoint, which he revealed drip by drip through various comments, I had a circumstantial case against Global Harvest at best. None of the sales of fertilizer or nitromethane were illegal. In fact, they were openly disclosed to the authorities. I claimed the quantities were underreported, but I had no proof of that. And my theories on how Kathy Rubinkowski and Bruce McCabe died were just that—theories. Yes, it helped my cause that two people from GHI’s law firm had been murdered, and it helped that white Aryan supremacists named Patrick Cahill and Ernie Dwyer, in custody on federal gun charges, worked private security for GHI. But at the end of the day, all of my arguments were colored by the fact that I lacked a smoking gun, and I was a defense lawyer desperate to use these facts to exonerate his client.

“So this map came from Stanley Keane’s house,” said Lee Tucker. “And you take these X marks to be bombing targets.”

“Don’t you?” I replied.

“And Stanley Keane is in the hospital right now with multiple broken bones, recovering from shock.”

I nodded. “In his rush to hand me the map, he fell down the stairs.”

Tucker didn’t even smirk. “He’ll tell that story the same way?”

“Lee, are we here to discuss whether I assaulted this asshole, or are we here to discuss whether he plans to detonate bombs in our city someday soon?”

Tucker thought for a long while, perused his notes, and then gave a presumptive nod. “Okay, Kolarich, I got it,” he said.

Okay, he got it. He wasn’t going to give me anything more. But I’d done my duty. Again.

Joel and I got back to the law firm at four. Shauna was in her office, busily typing. Tomorrow morning, we were going to present Judge Nash with a written motion outlining all of the evidence we had uncovered and why it merited either a mistrial or a delay. If Judge Nash denied it, I was going to file an emergency motion in the state supreme court, which has supervisory powers over every court, every case, and ask them to halt the proceedings based on this emergency development. I would make sure that Judge Nash knew of my plan B. My best chance was that, with the specter of the state’s highest court looming over him and the stakes being so high, the old codger would at least grant me a small delay in the trial. Most judges would. Then again,
Judge Nash ain’t most judges
.

Regardless, this written submission had to be spot-on. I needed the best written product I could muster, and that meant Shauna. She knew this stuff, but she had been focusing on forensics, so I wanted Joel Lightner around this as well. I called Tori in, too, because she’d seen much of this up close. We would need a sparkling brief and affidavits as well, supporting our factual contentions.

“Okay, do your magic,” I said to Shauna. “And Lightner, behave yourself around these two beautiful women.”

“Yeah?” he said. “And where the hell are
you
going?”

I stretched my arms. “I’m going to prepare my closing argument,” I said. “In case Judge Nash tells us to go fly a kite.”

I worked on two things for the remainder of the night and well into the morning: my argument on why Judge Nash should let us reopen this entire case and investigate my new evidence, and, in the event he shut us down, my closing argument to the jury on why the prosecution hadn’t proven its case against First Lieutenant Thomas Stoller.

I finally cried uncle at three in the morning. Tori, who had stayed with me at the firm and even listened to my summation a couple of times, accompanied me to my hotel room.

My hotel room was a piece of shit, but I could see part of the city’s north and east side where most of the young people lived, where most of the socializing took place.

Even now, at half past three in the morning. Some of these places had four
A. M.
liquor licenses. I remember that time, before I was married, when you didn’t get started before midnight, when four
A. M.
meant you were done drinking and it was time to find an all-night diner or some burrito joint.

“You’ve done your part and then some,” Tori said to me, sitting on the bed. She was wearing a gray T-shirt and nothing else. Under any other circumstances, I would be powerless to resist. I’d be jumping on the bed.

“Maybe, maybe not. If I hadn’t been so consumed with Gin Rummy, I would have had Lightner investigating Randall Manning earlier on. All this stuff that happened with him and his family—and Stanley Keane’s
and Bruce McCabe’s families? The Brotherhood of Jihad shit? If I’d known that weeks ago, we could’ve made more of it.”

“You were playing catch-up all along,” she said. “You thought this was a simple insanity case. You said so yourself. When it was handed to you, you were told it was a simple case. I mean, Jason, the guys who had this case before you—they didn’t come up with any of this, did they? You should be proud of what you’ve uncovered in such a short amount of time.”

Down on the street, a couple blocks away, a man wearing several layers of clothing was staggering across an intersection. He looked drunk. He looked homeless.

This all started with Tom, and my promise to Deidre Maley that I would do everything I could for her nephew.

Tori climbed off the bed and came to me. She put her arms around me and wrapped her warm body against mine. We stood like that forever. I rested my head on hers and looked out over this city where I grew up, where I lived, and where I would die.

“What if we just left?” she whispered to me. “When this is over, I mean. We could leave. I have money saved up from an inheritance. We could do it, Jason. We could leave this all behind.”

I turned and faced her. I touched her cheek and looked into her eyes, desperately searching mine. “You’d do that? With me?”

She looked into my eyes and nodded.

“Where would we go?” I asked.

“Anywhere.”

Anywhere with me? I had misread her. I knew things were moving forward, but I didn’t think she’d traveled this far. Had I?

“Let’s get through this first,” I said.

“No, you’re right.” There was an imperceptible nod of her head. It made sense. We both knew that. I had no idea how this would end. And I had no idea what would remain of me when it did.

I arrived at the criminal courts building early the next morning. I walked through the lobby, flashed my bar card to the deputy, took the elevator up to the seventeenth floor, walked into the courtroom, and sat down. Shauna showed up a half-hour before court. Wendy Kotowski and the prosecution team weren’t far behind. “Got your brief,” she said to me, holding it up. “Half an hour ago,” she added, an octave lower. “Not exactly advance notice, Counselor.”

I nodded at her. “You gonna do the right thing today, Wen?”

“I always do the right thing,” she said without looking up from her document.

Aunt Deidre came in just then. I conferred with her briefly, giving her little but platitudes, a pep talk. The truth, that I hated to confront, was that the judge would have a reasonable basis to deny everything I was trying to do here.

They brought in Tom at a quarter to nine. He looked a bit disheveled this morning, which seemed appropriate to his state of mind. I leaned into him and asked, “How were the eggs this morning, Tom?”

He actually smiled for a moment, which I took as a good omen.

“Terrible,” he answered.

At five minutes to nine, the court bailiff, an old guy named Warren Olive, stuck his head into the courtroom and looked around. “You all here on
Stoller
?”

“We are,” I said for everyone.

“Judge wants to hear this in chambers,” Warren said.

That wasn’t surprising. We all trudged back to the judge’s chambers. Judge Nash, having outlived every other human being on the planet, had photographs and memorabilia dating back more than seventy years. The walls of his chambers were lined with framed photos with every mayor going back as far as I can remember, a few presidential candidates on the Democratic side—I remember him mentioning he was a delegate to one of the conventions, maybe the one where they nominated Lincoln?—and all kinds of other politicos and celebrities. He received honors from all sorts of bar associations and civic groups and we got to read all about it. It looked like the inside of an old Italian restaurant in here.

Judge Nash resumed his seat in a high-backed leather chair, behind a walnut desk. Directly over his head on the wall was a flag of the United States and his certificate of honorable discharge from the U. S. Marine Corps in the 1950s after he fought in the Korean War.

Judge Nash waited for the court reporter to ready herself. When she gave him the high sign, he turned on me.

“Mr. Kolarich, I’ve had a chance to read your lengthy submission this morning, having just
received
it this morning. You’ve apparently raised issues that go beyond even what you discussed with the court last Friday.”

“That’s correct, Judge. We continue to learn new information. It proves more than anything that we need time to develop this evidence. When you consider—”

“Counsel, if this evidence were even remotely related to your theory of the case, I might be more sympathetic. But none of this has anything to do with your case. You’re off on a story about terrorists and cover-ups. The prosecution can rightly assert that this is coming out of the blue.”

“It’s newly discovered evidence,” I replied. “As soon as we learned it, we told the prosecution.”

The judge removed his glasses and wiped them with a handkerchief. “If I let every litigant create a brand-new case on the eve of trial—”

“This isn’t every litigant,” I said, interrupting the judge. “This isn’t every case.”

He let my interruption go without comment, which was an even
worse sign, because it meant he was definitely planning to rule against me and was cutting me some slack.

“Judge, I realize that the lawyer before me pleaded insanity and I was planning to do the same. But we’ve come up with evidence that goes well beyond a wild-goose chase. If you give me a week, I’ll probably be able to prove everything I’m alleging. Just give me a week.”

“No, Counsel. If you come up with something in a week or a month or a year, you can bring a post-trial petition. But we’re not stopping this trial.”

“Judge—”

“We’re done. I’ll give you until tomorrow, Mr. Kolarich, to call a witness or we’ll just go to summations. All right, everyone? December seventh, nine
A. M.
, Ms. Kotowski, I’ll expect you to be prepared to close first thing in the morning if the defense rests.”

I shook my head and looked at Shauna. We both knew this was a possible outcome. The judge was wrong, but he wasn’t going to change his mind. I stood up and stared at Judge Nash, who was already reviewing other papers on another case. I looked over his head again at the certificate of honorable discharge from the Marines. Next to that certificate was a photo of the judge in military attire, shaking hands with our city’s mayor, Mayor Champion, himself a former Marine who never missed a chance to honor the military, who even held parades and memorials on anniversaries that other cities and states had long ago stopped celebrating, like D-day and—

Oh my God.

And Pearl Harbor Day.

“Judge,” I said, “I understand your ruling, but could I ask for an additional twenty-four hours? If I could just have until Wednesday.”

The judge’s face scrunched up the way it always did when he was annoyed by something.

“Counsel—”

“Just one more day, Your Honor. That’s all I ask. I won’t request any additional time.”

The judge looked at Wendy, but he wasn’t seeking her guidance. He was probably thinking, after the different ways he’d screwed me, it would look
good to the appellate court that he gave me that extra day when I asked.

“Good enough,” he said. “Wednesday, December eighth, at nine
A. M.
We
will
reconvene at that time, and there will be no further continuances.”

With that, the judge ordered us out of chambers. It had been a bad appearance for our case but adrenaline was surging through me regardless. I had tomorrow open. And something told me I’d need it.