Prime Witness (29 page)

“Let’s ignore the trifling matter of justice for the moment and discuss only the practical,” I say.

Smiles from Shaw and Cayhill. They like this.

“Aren’t we taking some chances if we sit on this, ignore the evidence of a second killer?”

“What do you mean?” says Cayhill.

“What if this phantom, this second killer, what if he or she, or they murder again?” I say. “What then?” Suddenly there’s a perplexed look on Emil’s face. He has not considered this possibility.

“Who among you,” I say, “wants to tell the family of the victims that we had every good reason to suspect the existence of another killer, but that we conspired to suppress this information, in the interests of public calm?”

Silence around the table. I pause several seconds waiting for volunteers. No takers.

“Let me ask you a question,” says Shaw. “Do you have another suspect in the Scofield murders?”

“No. Not yet.”

She looks at Emil to see if maybe he has somebody in mind. Johnson shakes his head.

“Then I agree with George,” she says. “We should not go public, not yet. What do you think, Don?” She looks at Esterhauss.

They’re beginning to sound like this is a council meeting, as if with a quorum and a quick second, the item will be history.

Esterhauss has a troubled look, like a politician in deep squish. He can’t make up his mind.

“We can’t weather any more trouble, Don.” She looks at him, intense, stern, trying to assemble a quick backbone and jam it up his ass.

“Well?” she says. Shaw is a combination of Little Nell and Lady Macbeth.

“I guess so,” says Esterhauss.

“Agreed,” she says. “There will be no press conference.”

“Excuse me,” I say. “But I don’t recall asking for permission.”

I get an imperious look from Shaw.

“Let me make this as simple as I can for you.” She has suddenly turned to the darker side.

“So that there is no misunderstanding,” she says. “We are empowered by our various bodies, the city council in my case, the board of supervisors in Don’s, to instruct you not to discuss publicly the existence of another killer.”

“You’ve taken this up in public session?” I say.

“Of course not,” she says. “We treated it as a matter of litigation in closed emergency session yesterday afternoon.”

“Then you violated the open meetings act,” I say.

She looks at me and swallows.

“That exception, allowing closed meetings for items of litigation, applies only when the city or the county is a party to a lawsuit. It is not available for you to go behind closed doors to discuss the appropriate strategy in a murder trial, even if that were your role in the order of things, which it is not.”

I can see ire mixed with a lot of fear in her eyes, the realization that she has just owned up to a breach of the criminal statutes.

“Apart from any misdemeanor violations of the law,” I say, “the last time I looked, the litigation of a capital case was not something for a committee of the city council or the board of supervisors. The tactics of trial, the charges to be brought, are matters for a public prosecutor,” I say. “They are not points for political debate.”

Shaw gives me a stiff look, sorry that she’s been so cordial.

“You were appointed by the board, sir,” she says. “I would expect that you can be just as easily removed.”

“Nothing would please me more,” I tell her, “than to withdraw, to leave you with this case, but unless you know something about the presiding judge of your court that I do not, that isn’t going to happen.”

She still doesn’t get it.

“What’s he talking about?”

“We didn’t make the formal appointment,” says Esterhauss. “That’s the way the local papers reported it. Technically, the appointment of Mr. Madriani was made by Judge Ingel.”

“Certainly if we made a recommendation to the court, he’d have to listen,” she says.

Clearly the lady has never met Derek Ingel.

“Remove me,” I say, “and the attorney general will be called in to replace me.”

This draws a sober look from Shaw and Cayhill.

“Of course you could make your pitch to him,” I say. “But the court’s not going to remove a publicly appointed prosecutor because you have some political problems.” This last comment chills the conversation, just as our meals arrive.

I pick gingerly through the pricey pink shell of my lobster, as Janice Shaw sits next to me, choking down the white breast of chicken Marsala, like maybe it is crow with the feathers still on it.

Chapter Twenty-three

T
he blast from our news conference earlier in the week, confirmation of a copycat in the Scofield cases, has now spent itself. It is no longer hawked as the lead on the evening news. It has moved to the inside pages of the morning paper, unless and until we have another similar murder.

Yesterday I took a hit, of all places, from Jess Amara, Jeanette Scofield’s brother. Under the guise of putting a face on it, like maybe he wants to patch things up, he told me maybe we got off on the wrong foot, apologized for his harsh words and manner at his sister’s house that afternoon. Then in his own breathless style he hit me with the real reason for the call, his pitch, and questions as to why Iganovich is not being charged with his brother-in-law’s murder.

“It’s tough on my sister. My only interest in the case,” he assured me. “While this thing remains unsolved, she is constantly forced to deal with it. I know you understand,” he said, more compassion in his voice than I can honestly credit him. “The sooner she can close this chapter of her life and move on, the better.”

I told him that if he or the city PD knew of any facts linking Iganovich to the Scofield murders, I would appreciate the information. This brought silence and an abrupt end to our conversation, like who gives a shit about the evidence? Even the grieving widow it seems wants the Russian nailed, the case closed.

Beyond this I am still eating the full fury of the county’s politicians, none of whom will now talk to me. Claude tells me that this includes Emil, though Dusalt still does his duty for me like a yeoman.

This morning we are gathered in the small law library in Davenport, with the door closed, a sign hanging from the doorknob on the outside, “DO NOT DISTURB,” something no doubt copped by one of the office staff from a motel on a county-paid trip.

The table is piled high with bound transcripts of grand jury testimony, declarations of witnesses, a few treatises and some code books.

Kay Sellig has dragged two sizable cardboard boxes to this meeting. Sporting Marlboro logos on the side, these cartons contain an assortment of paper bags sticking up out of the open tops. The bags are crammed with items of physical evidence, microscopic blowups, the cut ends of plastic cord magnified seventy times, the tent stakes, some of these still showing traces of dried blood on bright steel. There is the bloodied rag in hues of congealed brown stored in a clear plastic bag, looking as it did the day it was discovered in Iganovich’s van.

Sellig is now the custodian of these items, and a score of others. She is responsible for the chain of custody regarding all physical evidence in our case. Along with her other duties as chief forensic expert, she will testify at trial as to how each of these was found and tagged, the procedure for storage to ensure production at trial.

Claude and Lenore Goya round out our group. It is the first of what will be many strategy sessions in the months ahead, leading up to trial.

“What do we hear?” I ask Goya.

“Unusually quiet on the defense front,” she says. “But my sources tell me Chambers is busy at it.”

Lenore has had her ear to the ground over in Capital City. I have asked Harry Hinds to give her a little help. Though it is against his religion to assist any prosecutor, he made an exception after seeing Lenore. I think Harry is in love.

“What can we expect from Mr. Chambers?” I ask her.

Before his suspension from the practice of law, Adrian Chambers had earned the title among the local bar as the dean of delay. According to Goya he has not lost his touch.

“It’s shaping up as a battle on two fronts,” she says. “The first looks like a full-blown psych-eval. He probably figures that’s good for at least a year,” she tells us.

Psychological evaluation is a standard procedure in high-profile violent criminal cases.

According to Lenore, Chambers has been holding forth with anyone of the mental therapy persuasion who will talk to him, mostly psychiatrists and psychologists, people with sufficient credentials to qualify as persuasive experts with a judge.

“He’s shopping opinions,” she says. “Last week he even tried Forrest Hunter.”

Claude laughs. “He must be desperate.”

“That’s how we found out what he was doing,” she says.

Forrest Hunter is the psychiatrist of choice among district attorneys north of the Tehachapies. I have never known him to testify for a criminal defendant. He is a prosecution witness of the first order, capable under oath of telling a jury of firemen that Nero was sane.

“What do you think,” says Claude, “an insanity plea?”

She shakes her head. “Word is, he’s hoping for a long stretch of evaluation, maybe some treatment on the theory that Iganovich is incompetent to stand trial, unable to assist in his own defense. If he can make out a case to the judge, the competency hearing alone could last longer than most trials.”

Goya is right. It is not much of a reach to imagine Chambers selling this theory to the trial judge, who to date has not yet been named.

Under the due process clause, it is a cardinal rule that one who is not mentally competent at the time of trial cannot be convicted or punished for his crime. This does not go to the issue of the defendant’s sanity at the time of the crimes, but rather whether he is mentally present for the trial.

“You think he could make out a case?” says Claude.

“Expert opinions on the state of the human mind are for rent,” I tell him.

“We might be able to blunt the argument,” says Lenore.

I look at her.

“We could stipulate to a short-term period of evaluation in an institution, a state hospital,” she says.

This would avoid a protracted hearing on competence. Chambers wouldn’t like it, but a judge faced with the alternatives is likely to accept this lesser of two evils.

“We cut him off at the knees,” she says. “Ninety days for evaluation instead of a year for hearing and, if he wins, treatment.”

I agree that this could work to avoid considerable delay. We make notes to start assembling our own psychiatric experts. Chambers has knocked Hunter out of the box by talking to him, made him unavailable to us for reasons of conflict, the upside of tipping his hand. This was probably part of his plan.

Sellig says that the DA’s Association has a long list of expert psychiatric witnesses, people whose opinions are generally safe and available to the state.

“You say he’s dragging his feet with two arguments. What’s the other?” I ask.

“Change of venue,” says Goya.

This we have anticipated from the start. Based on the adverse pretrial publicity, it is a safe bet that Chambers will try to have the trial moved from Davenport to some other county in the state where his client conceivably can receive a more fair trial.

Ordinarily this would be a dead-bang winner. Except that in this case publicity has been so pervasive that there is not a county in the state that has not been deluged in the news of these crimes, bathed daily by a sobering immersion in the graphic details of these murders.

We have sampled public opinion in the seven counties of comparable demographics and size to Davenport, the most likely candidates for a change of venue.

According to Lenore, in four of these, if we send the defendant for trial, we can ship the cyanide at the same time. These are places where voters eyed Ronald Reagan suspiciously for his permissive views, and where gun control is defined as a steady hand.

It is the paradox of the Putah Creek crimes that Iganovich chose to kill in an otherwise rural county which ordinarily would harbor similar provincial attitudes of hang-tree justice, except that in Davenport there is the leavening effect of a major university.

“In the other three counties,” says Goya, “it’s a pull.” She means that there is no real difference in the views of the electorate in those counties. From the raw data, Chambers could not expect to get an appreciably better result if the case were tried in any of these, rather than Davenport.

“He may still try,” I say, “if for no other reason than to stall. We should firm up our data, put it in a form ready to present to the court when he makes his move.”

Goya agrees. She makes a quick note.

We turn our attention to Sellig and her cardboard boxes.

I’m looking at one of the enlarged photos of the cut cross-sections of cord as they make their rounds through our group. They are a little fuzzy, black-and-whites without much contrast. I tell Kay this.

“We could go for some higher resolution, color,” says Sellig, “but I would have to send the evidence to a commercial lab for processing.”

Goya and I discuss it. She says she thinks it will be critical that the jurors see for themselves the extrusion pattern on the inside of the cord. For this, clear enlargements that we can prop on an easel will be vital. It is the consensus that we shoot for higher quality, processed photos from a commercial lab.

Kay takes us on a quick tour of the evidence. A strong case she believes, but still one built on circumstance.

“The key is the van,” she says. “All of the incriminating evidence that we have was found in a vehicle registered to the defendant. That is the soft underbelly of our case,” she says. “Remove these items from possession by the defendant, and our case evaporates.”

“Then that’s where Chambers will go,” I say.

“He will come up with some artful explanations,” says Claude.

The most obvious of these is the broken window. Chambers will no doubt argue that the incriminating evidence was tossed into the vehicle by whoever broke the glass, after the van was abandoned by Iganovich. I point this out.