All Day and a Night (21 page)

“There hasn’t been anything thorough about this,” Rogan said. “We’re two people, essentially working outside the department, trying to work seven different murders across two decades in two cities, all at the same time.”

“Fine.” Max’s clipped tone made it clear that he was fighting to keep his cool. “The process hasn’t been ideal. I know that. I did what I thought was right, both in terms of getting Martin to approve your travel up there, and also keeping him up to speed, which is my job.”

Rogan groaned, but Max didn’t hear it and continued. “Martin, in turn, felt obliged to notify the court, because she gave us the week on the understanding that we’d be trying to shore up the evidence against Amaro. Instead, we found more exculpatory evidence, and Martin takes very seriously our duty to disclose, even after conviction.”

“Let me guess,” Rogan said, “in the interests of
transparency
. And it’s not exculpatory. Hatcher felt hinky about the ID, but the witness is still onboard. Usually prosecutors try to back up their own witnesses.”

“You can yell at me all you want, Rogan, but it won’t change where we are. Moreland pushed for an immediate release.”

“But we have until Friday,” Ellie said.

“Not anymore. You saw the judge. Linda Moreland already had her convinced this was an exoneration case and that Buck Majors went rogue. Now she finds out that instead of finding evidence that helps keep him in, we
may
—though I get Rogan’s point—have more reason to doubt his guilt.”

“So convince the judge to keep the same timeline.” Yesterday Ellie had thought it was insane to expect them to produce new evidence in three days. Now she was clinging to every last second of time. “We’re getting more evidence. We just talked to Harris. He says Amaro admitted—”

“The judge didn’t care about Harris,” he said. “I tried buying time by saying you were up there to interview him. Moreland went nuts that the tip came in completely anonymously. I said the tipster didn’t matter if the information panned out with Harris himself. But Johnsen slammed the door on it. She said it’s fundamentally unfair to justify Amaro’s conviction with evidence that we didn’t even know about at the time he was charged.”

“But if he’s guilty, he’s guilty.”

“Not to the judge. She said Amaro has a due-process right to have his conviction set aside if all of the government’s original evidence has been undermined. If we have completely new evidence against him, the most she would do is to vacate his conviction without prejudice so we could at least retry him. Please tell me Harris is a smoking gun. At this point, we need Mother Teresa with HD photographs of Amaro burying the bodies.”

“Well, not a smoking gun exactly, but he says Amaro admitted to killing the Utica victims.” She did her best to explain Harris’s belief that Amaro had actually confessed, not merely expressed a concern that he’d be perceived as guilty.

Max didn’t even pause before writing off the information. “Not even close. The way Johnsen put it, Amaro’s conviction rests on a nest filled with eggs. And each one—Buck Majors, Christy McCann, the new DNA evidence belonging to who knows who—breaks one of the eggs. She said we can break an egg or two and still have a nest, but at this point, every single egg is cracked, and we look like we’re switching them out after the fact.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Ellie said. “A nest is made of twigs, not eggs. We should be able to switch the eggs if we need to, until we’re—I don’t know, breaking them and scrambling them and turning them into an omelette.”

In that moment Ellie decided that metaphors were officially stupid.

“Well, the way Judge Johnsen put it, we can’t prove we got the right guy but with the wrong evidence. She signed the writ.”

A writ of habeas corpus.
You have the body
, as the Latin term puts it. A petition for habeas corpus is a request by a prisoner to gain his release, claiming insufficient grounds for his detention.

“For when?”

“For
now
. She signed it. The paperwork takes a while to get processed, but he’ll be getting out soon.”

“Have someone sit on him. We need eyes on him at all times.”

“That’s why I’m calling you. He’s not down here. That was part of his plea—to be housed closer to home. He’s at Five Points. For now. But the release is in the computer. How quick can you get to him?”

Five Points was a maximum-security prison between Syracuse and Rochester. “An hour at least,” Rogan said, more familiar with the geography than she. “Maybe an hour and a half.”

“We’ll go now,” she said. “Damn it. We should have gotten a statement from him at the very beginning of this.”

“You do what you need to do as part of your investigation. I’m just letting you know that he’s getting released.”

Ellie knew that the professional rules of ethics prohibited Max from contacting, or even directing contact, with a represented party. But Ellie and Rogan weren’t lawyers. The only rules they had to follow came from the Constitution, and as far as the Constitition was concerned, Amaro was fair game unless he expressly told them he didn’t want to speak to them. As a result of the discrepancy between the rules for lawyers and law enforcement, it was common for prosecutors to “allow” police to contact represented parties without actually “directing” it.

“Got it,” she said. They all knew the code. “We’ll head to Five Points, just to make sure we keep eyes on him. We’ll set up shop, however long it takes.”

“That would be a lot easier if Judge Johnsen had put any limitation at all on his release: electronic monitoring, daily reporting, perhaps a
current address
. No. Once he’s released, he’ll be in the wind, out there in the world, with no supervision whatsoever. I put in a call to the Oneida County DA. They’ll be pissed we didn’t loop them in earlier, but I’m going to see if they can take what we have and get an arrest warrant for Amaro on the old cases.”

“They can do that?”

“Oh yeah. He was never prosecuted in Utica, so there’s no double jeopardy. I think that’s why Johnsen was so willing to sign the writ. She can tell herself she’s doing the right thing by setting aside a wrongful conviction, with the knowledge that Utica still has another bite at the apple if Amaro really is the guy. They can use what we have on the Garner case—weak as it is—and throw in whatever you got from that cellmate. It’s not nearly enough for a conviction, but it should be enough for probable cause. That’s all they’ll need to hold him on new charges.”

“We’ll see what we can do,” Ellie assured him before saying goodbye.

Rogan gunned the engine. “We’ve got to get to this guy before he’s out on the streets.”

T
homas took the McDonald’s bag from Carrie with two fingers.

“Trust me, Thomas. The taste of warm, soft pickles on ketchup-smothered meat product is way better than you’re going to want to admit.”

“Well, with that kind of sales pitch, how can I possibly resist?” He removed the contents and smoothed the paper bag on the hotel room’s desk like a placemat. If he asked for a knife and fork, she was going to snatch that food away from him and make him starve.

“You did a great job,” she said, looking around the room. She had spent the morning at the library, printing out archived articles about the case, and at the city attorney’s office, requesting public records. In the meantime, he had converted the non-bedroom areas of her suite—the largest in the hotel—into a functional working space. He had pulled the desk away from the wall and scrounged up an extra chair, creating a two-sided desk, complete with both of their laptops. He had placed the various boxes and Redwelds of files, neatly labeled, around the small table in the corner.

“Linda said we can take a meeting room if we need more space,” he said. “I thought it was easier to make do here than to have to traipse down to the lobby constantly.”

“Makes sense to me.”

“Okay, but Linda told me to make sure you got the message: Spare no expense. This case could be worth millions of dollars. It’s very exciting, don’t you think? And I have to admit: this hamburger is much better than I remembered. I don’t think I’ve had McDonald’s for ten years.”

Based on Carrie’s experience, the people who insisted they never ate fast food had a cabinet full of Happy Meal souvenir cups. But she was starting to think that Thomas was as honest and eager as he appeared. As someone who had frequently been criticized for being “overly earnest,” she appreciated his openness.

She heard the first few bars of a Journey song on his cell phone. “It’s Linda!” He couldn’t have been more excited if Santa Claus himself were calling. “Hi, Linda. I was just talking to Carrie about the workspace here, and she agrees that we’re fine for now. We’ll let you know if that changes . . . Uh-huh . . . Yes, she’s right here.” He held the phone in her direction. “She wants to talk to you.”

“Hi, Linda.”

“Are you sitting down?”

“Yeah, sure.” As a hat tip to the virtue of honesty, she made a point of perching on the edge of the bed.

“I have amazing news. Amazing! Martin Overton called me first thing this morning. He has those two detectives up there. They’re scrambling for more evidence because—get this—we were right. Not only did Majors lie about that confession, he also led their one eyewitness. We’ve taken down their entire case. And I convinced Judge Johnsen that if the only evidence they had is invalid, they can’t swap out new evidence eighteen years later. And guess what? We won!”

“Didn’t we basically win yesterday?” Carrie was pretty sure that their success was the reason she was in Utica.

“We made progress, but I’m saying it’s not about Friday anymore. Amaro is getting out. Today. Now.”

“What do you mean, out?”

“Out. A free man. No more business with the New York County Courts. We have a ton to do, but I wanted you to know as soon as possible. He’ll need a ride from Five Points. Can you look up the directions?”

“Um, sure. So, you want me to get him a car or something?”

“No, silly. You’re his attorney. Go pick him up. I wouldn’t be surprised if other attorneys try to poach him, so make sure he understands how hard we’re working on his behalf. I’ll take a train up in the morning. In the meantime, you need to look out for him. I expect them to try to arrest him on the Utica charges. It’s what I would do if I were in their shoes. Find a motel for him—outside the city, one that doesn’t ask for names. Something cheap, so if they find him, it doesn’t look like he’s trying to cash in on his potential lawsuit. But pick him up now, okay? We’ve got to keep him protected.”

To Carrie, this form of protection sounded like harboring a fugitive. “Um, are we allowed to do that? I mean, ethically, if they’re trying to arrest him?”

“Until we know there’s an arrest warrant in place, we can actively help him. After that, we don’t have a duty to turn him in, but actual assistance gets dicier. That’s why we have to act fast. Prepay the room for—I don’t know, ten days. I’m wiring you cash through Western Union, but take care of that after you’ve got him in the car.”

Carrie’s head was spinning.

She had assumed this case would take years to resolve. She had expected prosecutors to fight them every step of the way. She expected the bureaucrats who ran the prison system to drag their feet, terrified that they might be freeing a killer. This case was moving faster than it would anywhere else in the country at any other time, and she had to believe it was because of the political tide that had so drastically and decisively turned against New York City law enforcement in the past year. The judge and the district attorney were worried about being reelected, and vindicating an innocent man would make for a good 30-second television ad.

But was Anthony Amaro really innocent?

“You still there, Carrie?”

“Yeah. I think my phone cut out for a second.”

“Oh, another thing: the ADA told Judge Johnsen that his detectives are up there talking to a jailhouse snitch who says Amaro confessed to him. I guess they got the guy’s name from an anonymous tip. You know anything about that?”

“No.”

“You didn’t see anything in the old police records about a cellmate informant?”

“Not yet, but I’m still working my way through it all. Do you want me to try to track it down?”

Linda paused. “No. Let’s stick with pinning blame on the police department. Any progress there?”

“Shouldn’t I be leaving for the prison, Linda?”

“Yes. I just wanted a quick update on your progress.”

Geez, she and Thomas had only been in Utica for eighteen hours. Linda Moreland seemed capable of moving five times faster than the rest of the world. “Well, the original Utica detective in charge of the case was in the process of retiring when the NYPD arrested Amaro. At that point, Amaro’s guilty plea to the downstate case was enough to shut down the investigation here. The new detective basically just served as a contact person. That’s all I’ve got for now.”

“What do you mean,
all you’ve got
? That’s what we were hoping to find. Some lazy cop who didn’t give a rat’s ass about a bunch of working girls.”

Carrie felt disgusted. She needed to find a way out of this. She could quit, but it was too late: Linda would just find someone else to do the same work. Carrie decided to take a shot at changing Linda’s strategy. Maybe she could try to mitigate the damage by operating from within.

“I get what you’re saying, Linda, but the detective—his name’s Will Sullivan—I’m not sure that throwing him under the bus is going to work. He’s beloved here. A widower. Single father. He raised his boy all alone, and they’re both considered huge success stories for the city. His son is Bill Sullivan . . .?”

Linda squealed into the phone. “The boy wonder? Seriously? That’s
brilliant
! The son can leverage the power of the state. Pitch into the settlement on behalf of the crime lab and the Department of Corrections. Maybe even stipulate to the release of other prisoners locked up by Buck Majors. This is
huge
. Huge! Okay, stay on Sullivan. And, oh, I’ve kept you on the phone too long. You hit the road now. Oh—and can you put Thomas back on? I need him to clear my schedule before I leave the city. You can find your way to the prison on your own, yes?”