The Gods of Guilt (Mickey Haller 5) (44 page)

“Thank you, Mr. Lankford,” the judge said. “You may sit down now.”

“I have a pocket knife, too,” Lankford said. “Is that a problem?”

“No, Mr. Lankford, that is not a problem. Please be seated.”

There was a collective exhale of relief in the courtroom as Lankford sat down and Hernandez took the gun to his desk to lock it in a drawer. Four deputies flooded into the courtroom through the rear door and the holding area entrance. The judge immediately told them to stand down and called for the jury to be returned to the box.

Three minutes later, things seemed to have returned to normal. The jury and witness were in place and the judge nodded at me.

“Mr. Haller, you may proceed.”

I thanked the judge and then tried to pick up at the point where I had been interrupted.

“Investigator Lankford, did you tell Agent Marco to meet you there at the Franklin address?”

“No, I called him and gave him the address. Shortly after that I left. I was done. I went home.”

“And two hours later, Gloria Dayton, the woman using the name Giselle Dallinger, was dead. Isn’t that right?”

Lankford cast his eyes down and nodded his head.

“Yes.”

I once again checked the jury and saw that nothing had changed. They were mesmerized by Lankford’s confession.

“I’ll ask you again, Investigator. Did you know she would die that night?”

“No, I did not. If I had . . .”

“What?”

“Nothing. I don’t know what I would have done.”

“What did you think would happen once you gave Gloria Dayton’s address to Marco?”

Forsythe objected, saying the question asked for speculation, but the judge overruled it and told Lankford he could answer. Like everyone else in the courtroom, Leggoe wanted to hear the answer.

Lankford shook his head.

“I don’t know,” he answered. “Before I gave him the address that night, I asked him again what was going on. I said I didn’t want to get involved if she was going to get hurt. He insisted that he just wanted to talk to her. He admitted that he knew she was back in town because she had called him from a blocked number and told him that she’d gotten a subpoena in some civil case. And he said he needed to find her to talk to her about it.”

I underlined that answer with some silence. Essentially my case was made. But it was hard to end Lankford’s testimony.

“Why did you do this for Agent Marco?”

“Because he had a hold on me. He owned me.”

“How?”

“Ten years ago I worked that double-homicide case in Glendale. On Salem Street. I met him on that and I made a mistake . . .”

Lankford’s voice trembled slightly. I waited. He composed himself and continued.

“He came to me. He said there were people . . . people who would pay for the case to remain unsolved. You know, pay me not to solve it. The truth was, my partner and I probably weren’t going to close it. Not a shred of evidence was left in that place. It was an execution and the hitters had probably come across the border and then gone right back. So I thought, what difference would it make? I needed the money. I had gotten divorced and my wife—my ex-wife—was going to take our son away. She was going to move to Arizona and take him, and I needed money for a good lawyer who would fight it. My boy was only nine. He needed me. So I took the money. Twenty-five thousand. Marco made the deal and I got the money and after that . . .”

He paused there and seemed to go off on some internal flight of thought. I thought the judge might step in again here because, statute of limitations notwithstanding, Lankford had certainly now confessed to a crime. But the judge remained as still as every other person in the courtroom.

“After that, what?” I prompted.

It was a mistake. It brought Lankford back angry.

“What, you want me to draw you a picture? He had me. You understand what I’m saying? He
owned
me. This little hotel thing wasn’t the first time he used me or told me what to do. There were other times. A
lot
of other times. He treated me the way he treated his snitches.”

I nodded and looked down at my notes. I knew the case was over. I didn’t need to bring back Marco or put any of the other witnesses on. Moya, Budwin Dell—none of them were needed, none of them mattered. The case ended right here.

Lankford had his head down so no one could see his eyes.

“Investigator Lankford, did you ever ask Agent Marco what happened that night to Gloria after you gave him her address?”

Lankford nodded slowly.

“I asked him point-blank if he killed her, because I didn’t want that on my conscience. He said no. He said he went to the apartment, but when he got there she was already dead. He said he set the fire because he didn’t know if she had anything that would link him to her. But he claimed she was already dead.”

“Did you believe him?”

Lankford paused before answering.

“No,” he finally said. “I didn’t.”

I paused. I wanted to hold the moment for the rest of my life. But then finally I looked up at the judge.

“Your Honor, I have no further questions.”

I passed behind Forsythe on the way to the defense table. He remained in his seat, apparently still deciding whether to mount a cross-examination or simply ask the judge to dismiss the case. I sat down next to Jennifer and she whispered urgently in my ear.

“Holy shit!”

I nodded and leaned toward her to whisper back when I heard Lankford speak from the witness stand.

“My son is older now and he’ll be okay.”

I turned back to see who he was talking to, but he was bent over in the witness stand and obscured by the wood paneling. It looked like he was reaching down to something that had fallen to the floor.

Then, as I watched, Lankford sat up straight and brought his right hand up to his neck. I saw his fingers wrapped around a small pistol—a boot gun. Without hesitation he pressed the muzzle into the soft skin under his chin and pulled the trigger.

The muffled pop from the gun brought a shriek from the jury box. Lankford’s head snapped back and then forward. His body listed slowly to the right and then dropped down behind the front panel of the witness stand out of sight.

Screams of horror and fear came from all over the courtroom, though Jennifer Aronson never made a sound. Like me, she sat there speechless, staring at what now appeared to be the empty witness stand.

The judge started shouting for the courtroom to be cleared, though even her high-pitched and panicked tenor drifted into the background for me. Soon it was as though I couldn’t hear a thing.

I looked over at the jury box and saw my alpha, Mallory Gladwell, standing with her eyes closed, hands pressed against her open mouth. Behind her and to either side of her, other jurors were reacting to the horror of what they had just witnessed. I will always remember the composition of that scene. Twelve people—the gods of guilt—trying to unsee what they all had just seen.

MONDAY, DECEMBER 2

T
he Gloria Dayton case is long over. Six months later, its ripples on the surface of my life still move with a current all their own. The trial ended, of course, when Lankford pulled his backup gun and took his own life in front of the jury. Judge Leggoe declared a mistrial, and the case went no further than Department 120. Unsurprisingly, the District Attorney’s Office chose to dismiss all charges against Andre La Cosse, citing the “likelihood” of his innocence and other extenuating circumstances. Of course, no one at the DA’s Office or the LAPD admitted they flat out got it wrong from the start.

After his release, Andre was transferred to Cedars-Sinai, where he was treated by the best of the best, underwent more surgeries, and recuperated for six weeks in state-of-the-art medical surroundings. I sent every invoice that came from a doctor or the hospital to Damon Kennedy at the DA’s Office. I never heard back.

When Andre finally left the hospital, he walked with a cane, and he likely always will. Grateful for the outcome of the criminal case, he agreed to allow me to handle a civil claim against the city and county, seeking damages for his wrongful arrest and incarceration and the physical and mental harm to him that resulted. Neither of the defendant governments wanted to go anywhere near a courtroom with the case, and we negotiated a settlement. I started by demanding a million dollars for every stab wound my client suffered but ultimately we settled for $2.4 million on top of all the medical bills.

My cut amounted to the biggest single paycheck in the history of Michael Haller & Associates. I gave bonuses to everyone on the defense team and sent a check for a hundred thousand to Earl Briggs’s mother. I thought it was the least I could do.

That still left me more than enough for a three-week Hawaii vacation with Kendall and to buy a pair of Lincoln Town Cars. One was to use immediately, one to save for the years ahead. They were both low-mileage 2011 models, the last production year of the luxury model’s thirty-year run.

For a while after the trial, I couldn’t catch a break in the public relations department. I was once again vilified in the media and the courthouses, this time as the guy who went after a witness so hard and viciously that he killed himself on the stand. But eventually my reputation was saved by a three-part series that ran in the
Times
in September under the headline “The Trials of an Innocent Man.” The stories exhaustively detailed the trial, the attack, and the ongoing rehabilitation and recovery of Andre La Cosse. I came out looking pretty good in the stories as the lawyer who believed in his client’s innocence and did what he had to do to win his freedom.

The articles went a long way toward securing the financial settlement with the city and county. They went even further with my daughter. After reading the newspaper series, she tentatively opened communication with me again. We talk and text a couple times a week now and I have driven out to Ventura to watch her ride in equestrian competitions.

Where the articles didn’t help me was with the California bar. An investigator with the professional ethics unit opened a file on me shortly after publication of part two in the
Times
. That report interviewed the doctors who treated Andre after the stabbing and raised serious questions about whether Andre could have possibly been conscious and of clear mind when he supposedly signed the waiver of appearance I had brought to his bedside at County/USC. The bar investigation is ongoing but I’m not worried. Andre came through with a notarized statement attesting to my legal acumen and recounting how he knowingly signed the document in question.

My other one-time client Hector Arrande Moya was both a winner and loser in the course of the year. Sly Fulgoni Jr., with tutoring from me as well as from his father, won the habeas case, and Moya’s life sentence was vacated by the U.S. District Court. But upon his release from the prison in Victorville, he was immediately taken into custody by immigration officials and deported as an undesirable to Mexico.

Meanwhile, the fate and whereabouts of James Marco officially remain a mystery. He left the courthouse that day in June, slipping out in the confusion and alarm immediately following the Lankford suicide. He has not been seen since, and his face now graces Wanted posters in the same federal building where he once worked. He is the subject of wide-ranging investigations by the FBI and his own DEA. According to unnamed sources quoted in the
Times
series, the crimes and corruption of the ICE team he headed for over a decade run deep, and a federal grand jury will be hearing evidence well into next year. The unnamed sources said Marco was believed to have sided with one faction in a long-running war within the Sinaloa cartel and had been doing that faction’s bidding in Southern California. It was even suggested that the effort to put Hector Moya in prison for life came on orders from Marco’s bosses in Mexico.

Among the other things the grand jury is probing, according to the
Times
, is an alleged relationship between Marco and the female attorney who represented Patrick Sewell, the man charged with attacking Andre in the courthouse transportation center.

The U.S. Marshal’s Office is primarily focusing its search for Marco in southern Mexico, where it is believed he may have escaped to with the aid of the cartel leaders who long ago corrupted him. But I am pretty sure they will never find him. Hector Moya told me once about how his enemies disappear, never to be found. Two weeks ago I received an e-mail from an address unknown to me but with a subject line that simply said Saludos Del Fuego. I opened the e-mail to find an embedded video and nothing else. It was only fifteen seconds long, but the video provided a lifetime’s worth of horror. It depicts a man hanging by his neck from a tree. He is obviously dead, his badly beaten face swollen and bloody, his skin and clothes burned black in places.

I am pretty sure the dead man is Marco. I forwarded the video to the deputy marshal heading the search for him. Once it is authenticated, I expect there to be an announcement that Marco is believed dead, though it is unlikely they will ever find a body.

I have deleted the video from my computer but it will never be erased from my mind. I have no doubt that it came from Moya and no doubt that he wanted me to know what became of Marco. When I think about the rogue agent’s fate, I remember the night in June at the loft when I was surrounded by my team and raised a glass to justice for Gloria Dayton and Earl Briggs. Some forms of justice are more horrible than others. But in this case I think justice has been rightly served.

Officially, Gloria Dayton’s murder remains open because no one has been or will ever be convicted of the crime. The memory of Glory Days now resides in a city’s consciousness as she takes her place in the pantheon of public victims.

In the meantime, not so much attention has been paid to Earl Briggs. His case remains open and the subject of the grand jury’s ongoing investigations. But I mourn him more than Gloria or any other. I often think of the miles we rode together, the ground we covered on the road and in life.