The Justice Game (37 page)

    The fourth caller had called from an unidentified private number during lunch. Kelly had returned to the courtroom early and shut off her phone. She must have just missed him.

    The voice sounded like a male’s, but it was hard to tell because it had been digitally altered. The connection wasn’t the greatest, and Kelly had to listen twice in order to make out exactly what the person said. What she heard made her heart stop cold.

    “Kelly. This is Luthor. Keep Juror 3 and Juror 7 on your jury. If you do, your secret’s safe with me.”

    After listening the second time, she hung up the phone without checking her other messages. She had kept both jurors on the panel—why wouldn’t she have?—but that’s not what bothered her. Luthor was interfering with the case. Giving her direct orders. If he had been watching jury selection, he would think that he had her, that she had acquiesced to his requests.

    In truth, she had resolved to do just the opposite. She was going to represent Blake Crawford to the best of her ability no matter the cost.

    From the looks of things, the price could be high. She had gone along with this demand, albeit unintentionally. How long before Luthor made another demand that she couldn’t comply with?

    She called Judge Shaver to let him know she had heard from Luthor again. He didn’t answer his phone, so she left a cryptic message.

    “This is Kelly Starling. I just heard from a mutual friend named Luthor. He’s fine right now, but I’m afraid it might just be a matter of time. Thought you’d want to know.” She left her cell number and hung up.

    She wondered what she had missed about Jurors 3 and 7. She had frankly been a little surprised that Jason had not struck Juror 3, Rodney Peterson. Now she wondered:
Were they plants for the other side?

    It seemed unlikely. Luthor appeared to be on her side. He had already provided the damaging cross-examination material for Ed Poole and the copy of Case McAllister’s cost-benefit analysis. But how could she know for sure? Maybe Luthor was just trying to gain her trust in order to betray her in the end.

    She still didn’t have the foggiest idea who Luthor was. The only thing she could do was focus on the case. Maybe in the meantime Luthor would slip up and Kelly would learn his, or her, identity.

    Either way, if Luthor thought he could control Kelly Starling, he had another think coming. If her affair with the judge ever became public, it would get ugly, but Kelly would survive. After that, Luthor would wish he had never met her.

    That was all for later. Right now, she needed to focus on her opening statement.

Jason drove back to the office slowly. He didn’t want to face Andrew Lassiter. In fact, he wasn’t even sure that Lassiter would be there. Andrew believed so strongly in his jury vetting system that he would likely take Jason’s actions today as a personal slight.

    Jason also dreaded seeing Bella Harper and Case McAllister. They believed in him. They had worked so hard on the case. Now, to save his own skin, Jason had sold them all out.

    He rolled up his sleeves on the way home, stopping at a 7-Eleven to fill up with gas and grab a soda. He was in a funk. He felt as if he were walking around with his soul separated from his body, suspended in some weird state of purgatory after being purchased by Luthor and his e-mails. Yet even in the emotional darkness, Jason recognized a single ray of light. It might not be a way out… but it
was
a place to start.

    Ironically, the documents sitting on the passenger seat provided the one advantage Jason had in his battle with Luthor. Jason assumed that Luthor had provided these documents to Kelly. If Jason hadn’t been so shocked when he first received the documents, he would have asked Kelly about Luthor right there in the hallway and watched closely to see if she flinched. He still planned to ask her at some opportune time during the trial.

    Luthor’s only mistake thus far was that he hadn’t factored in Kelly Starling’s ethical standards. He had counted on her to keep the documents to herself and spring them on Poole during cross-examination, the way most lawyers would. That way, Jason wouldn’t have known until later in the case that Luthor was definitely working against him. Instead, Kelly had provided the documents to Jason early, and now he knew, right from the beginning of the case, that Luthor was trying to sabotage him, not help him.

    It was a slim and temporary advantage, but it was something. In order to leverage this knowledge, Jason needed an investigator he could trust.

    He pulled his truck into the parking lot of his office and let it idle for a few minutes. He pulled out his BlackBerry, took a deep breath, and called his father.

    Listening to the phone ring, Jason almost hung up. He put his mind in neutral, forcing himself to say on the line.

    “Yeah.”

    “Dad, it’s Jason.”

    A pause. “I know,” his dad said. “Caller ID.” He waited another few seconds. “It’s been months.”

    
There’s no law that says that you couldn’t have called me.
“I’m sorry, Dad. I’ve been busy.”

    They talked for a few minutes, a clipped and awkward conversation about the case. His father’s bias against MD Firearms was still evident. The man spoke with a thick tongue, and Jason could picture him sitting in his living room, wearing jeans and a white undershirt, empty bottles scattered around the room.

    Jason stared out the windshield, wondering if this was the right move after all. “I could really use some help on this case, Dad. I need somebody I can trust to investigate a couple of the jurors.” He hesitated, his dad’s silence unnerving him. “I was thinking, I dunno, like maybe you could take a few days off to come and help.”

    The silence on the line seemed interminable. Jason’s heart pounded in his ears. A second passed… two. Jason wished he had never asked.

    “Seems like you’d want an investigator who didn’t need to be in rehab,” his dad said bitterly.

    Jason didn’t know how to respond. “Dad, I did what I thought I needed to do. Julie and Matt too. If that hurt you, I’m sorry.”

    “You’re not sorry, Jason. You need something. It’s what you’ve done your whole life. You come crawling home to fleece the old man; then I don’t hear from you for months.”

    Jason wasn’t in the mood for this. It had already been a long day. He didn’t need his dad piling on. “You know what, Dad? Just forget it. I shouldn’t have called.”

    His dad snorted. “What do you need?”

    But it was too late. Every time he tried to reach out to his dad, this was the reward. Rejection. Humiliation. Criticism. Jason just wanted to punch something.

    “I don’t need anything from you,” Jason said.

    And with that, he hung up.

    A few minutes later, after calming down, he walked into the office. Bella was at her station.

    “Turkey and cheese on your desk,” she said.

    “I’m not hungry.”

    “Eat it anyway. Trials are like a marathon. You’ve got to stop at the juice stations.”

    
Actually, trials are more like waterboarding,
Jason thought.

    He made his way back to the conference room, which looked worse than ever. He had to step over a box and a pile of documents to get through the door.

    “Didn’t expect to see you here,” Jason said.

    Andrew Lassiter thumbed through some papers. “We’ve got to get our shadow jurors in place,” he replied, not looking at Jason.

    It was Andrew’s way of saying he was going to stick around despite what Jason had done in court. They talked for a few minutes about the shadow jury, neither saying a word about Jason’s selection of the actual jurors. Andrew thought that he could have a shadow jury in place by Thursday.

    “Do the best you can,” Jason said. “And Andrew—” his friend looked up—“I appreciate you hanging in there with me.”

    “Don’t worry about it,” Andrew said, the eyes blinking. “You’re going to make me rich.”

    Jason furrowed his brow. “How?”

    Andrew put on his glasses, brushed his hair out of his eyes, and stared at Jason for a few seconds. “When we impanel this shadow jury, I’m going to bring in two extra jurors who will be just like the last two that you kicked off the panel. When the case is over, we’ll compare the opinions of the two you picked with the two I recommended that you leave on. It’ll make for great marketing materials: man versus machine—look what happens when you rely on your instincts.”

    “Clever,” Jason said.

    “Yeah. And if you lose with the panel you selected, particularly if my jurors would have gone the other way, it will be great for business.”

    “No offense,” Jason said, “but I hope your marketing plan goes down in flames.”

“Ms. Starling, does the plaintiff have an opening statement?”

    “We do, Your Honor.”

    Kelly stood and walked toward the jurors, holding nothing but a remote control. After months of pretrial discovery, deposition disputes, and a bevy of motions, she couldn’t believe that the moment had finally arrived.

    “‘By our readiness to allow arms to be purchased at will and fired at whim, we have created an atmosphere in which violence and hatred have become popular pastimes.’”

    She looked at Juror 3, Rodney Peterson, the only African American left on the jury. A history professor. A Democrat. A man active in the inner city. “Those are not my words,” Kelly said. “They are the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”

    She stopped a few feet in front of the jury box and surveyed all the jurors. “What Dr. King said is true. And nobody has been more ready to allow guns to be purchased at will and fired at whim than the defendant—MD Firearms.”

    Kelly had placed a large screen hooked up to an LCD projector in front of the witness box. She pushed a button on her remote, and the first fact flashed on the screen.

    “According to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the federal agency tasked with oversight of our gun laws, one percent of gun stores sell the weapons traced to 57 percent of gun crimes. ‘How can that be?’ you might ask. That doesn’t seem statistically possible. And you’re right—it’s not.

    “Unless . . . those gun stores help things along a little bit. Unless a few stores, a few renegade dealers, find ways to supply the black market for guns and make money from it. Maybe they sell a bunch of guns to legal purchasers, knowing that those purchasers are supplying the guns to criminals. Maybe they fudge the paperwork. Maybe they lose the paperwork. However they do it, these dealers are merchants of death, making money by supplying the street gangs and thugs and drug dealers with lethal firearms.

    “The evidence in this case will show that Peninsula Arms was one such dealer.”

    For the next few minutes, Kelly took the jurors through a series of PowerPoint slides that demonstrated her point. She started with a map of the United States, highlighting those cities that had filed lawsuits against renegade dealers. Using a blowup of the federal firearms transaction record, she explained how a straw sale occurred—having an eligible purchaser fill out the paperwork knowing that the gun was in reality going to somebody else who couldn’t have purchased it on his own.

    She showed them slides full of statistics gleaned from the various lawsuits. Two dealers had sold 30 percent of the guns traced to street crimes. One was Peninsula Arms. In 2006 alone, 251 guns previously sold by Peninsula Arms were linked to murders or aggravated woundings in Philadelphia, Washington, Baltimore, and New York City. As part of their investigation, undercover agents from New York City had enticed Peninsula Arms clerks into an illegal straw sale. It wasn’t hard.

    “MD Firearms knew about these lawsuits and these statistics. And what did they do with this knowledge about one of their biggest dealers?” Kelly asked. She walked over to the table where Jason Noble and Case McAllister were sitting. “Did they stop selling to Peninsula Arms until the dealer straightened up?”

    Kelly looked down at Case, who returned her gaze with an unrepentant stare. At that moment, she was pretty sure Case wanted to shoot out her kneecaps.
Perfect.

    “Did they help the ATF set up a sting so that Peninsula Arms could be prosecuted? Did they even send their dealer a lousy warning telling them to curtail the straw sales or MD Firearms might have to stop supplying them?”

    Kelly gave a small derisive laugh and headed back toward the jury. “No. I’ll tell you what they did—they kept on selling guns to Peninsula Arms. And you know why?”

    Kelly hit the button and showed the profit margins on an MD-9. “Here’s why—two hundred dollars per gun. Nearly a million dollars last year from Peninsula Arms alone.”

    She paused, letting that number sink in. “Now, in case you think I’m just making this up—that MD Firearms isn’t really motivated just by money, they did us the favor of putting it all in writing. How fitting that in a case about distribution of firearms, Mr. McAllister over there should be so kind as to create a memo that can only be referred to as a ‘smoking gun.’”

    Page by page, Kelly took the jury through the McAllister memo. The man had analyzed the profits made through four troublesome dealers, including Peninsula Arms. He had argued that shutting off these four dealers (which, Kelly pointed out, together accounted for over 50 percent of the guns traced to crimes in the northeast cities) would generate lawsuits by the dealers and serve as a tacit admission that MD Firearms had a duty to monitor its dealers.

    “According to Mr. McAllister, a cost-benefit analysis suggested that MD Firearms should continue selling guns to all licensed dealers—even if they were acting illegally in the sales of those guns.”

    Kelly got mad just thinking about it. She didn’t have to manufacture emotion—her anger was real. If McAllister and Davids had acted responsibly, Rachel Crawford might still be alive.

    “Do you know what’s missing from Mr. McAllister’s cost-benefit analysis?” Kelly demanded. “Do you know what just happened to slip his mind, just fall through the cracks?”