A Plague of Secrets (31 page)

“Was there an investigation back then?”

“No,” Glitsky said sarcastically. “Homicide just decided not to look into this particular murder. It seemed like too much work.” A beat. “Of course we opened an investigation.”

“And?”

“And we closed it about a month later.”

“No suspects?”

“Not a one.” He pulled an envelope from his inside jacket pocket. “I copied the file and brought it around for you, though as you can see, it’s a little thin.” Then, gesturing back to the dining room where Hardy’s binders were spread out on the table, “Not that it looks like you need much more reading material. I gather that’s your case in there.”

“What there is of it.” The microwave’s timer sounded and Hardy crossed over, took the cup out, and handed it to his friend. “Santé. How about witnesses?”

“Witness. One. You can see him in there. Old Asian guy, coming out of a bar across the street, twelve-thirty on a Tuesday night. And the fog was in, evidently heavy. Plus, he’d had a few. Anyway, he heard the shot, saw somebody run out of the store, get in a car, then take off.” He pointed down at the envelope. “It’s all in there.”

“Yeah, but, so a driver? More than one guy? Two guys waiting in the car?”

“He doesn’t say. And I know what you’re thinking, that this is your Paco.”

“It could be. Is this the only liquor store shoot-up in those years?”

“No. There were actually six of them, homicides. But believe it or not, we got four of the guys, all solos, although to be fair, two of ’em got shot themselves by guys they shot behind the counter, which made it a little easier. The other one was a woman, never caught. That left whoever killed this guy Gomez. Maybe your Paco, after all.”

Hardy nodded with satisfaction. “That’s pretty thorough. You ought to do this stuff for a living.”

Glitsky blew over his tea. “I’m motivated. But none of this ancient history is helping much with Ruiz.”

“You haven’t got anything?”

“Well, we’ve talked to most of the workers at BBW. That’s going to go on for a while. But so far, not much, just everybody shocked that Ruiz could have been involved in drugs.”

Hardy chuckled. “I can imagine. But none of this helps Maya either.”

“I never thought it would.”

Sitting at his dining room table, having already scrutinized his binders all the way through again until he was nearly blind, Hardy accepted a kiss on the cheek from his wife at around ten-thirty and told her he’d be up in a while.

“This is going to be over soon, isn’t it?” Frannie asked.

“One way or the other, a day or two.”

“That’d be neat. I’ve been thinking it really wouldn’t be so bad having a husband again.”

“I know.”

“It’s why I’ve stayed married to you. To have a husband.”

“I know.”

She kissed him again. “I’ll probably still love you.”

“Good. That’d be good.”

But in reality barely hearing her, kissing the air in front of her face, reaching for another pass at one of the binders.

Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

He closed the black binder and stood. Going back into the kitchen, he opened the refrigerator, closed it back up, cricked his back, and saw Glitsky’s envelope on the counter. This Gomez killing thirteen or fourteen years ago wasn’t his case, Glitsky had given him the summary, and even if it had been Paco, so what? So he’d left the envelope and gone back in to try one last time to find something in his binders.

Standing at the counter, he pulled out the half dozen or so pages-incident report, copies of some pictures of the deceased, autopsy, ballistics, two pages of testimony from Mr. Leland Lee, pretty much as Glitsky had described it.

More nothing.

He started through the pages again, his routine, more slowly this time. Eyes burning, he forced himself to read every line.

Wait a minute. Wait.

He turned back to first the autopsy, then the ballistics report. The bullet that had killed Julio Gomez was a.40-caliber. A handwritten, barely readable scrawled notation by an unidentified ballistics lab worker read: “Probably Glock.40. Ballistics markings unidentifiable.”

Okay, he had to make some assumptions, but they seemed warranted. And what other choice did he have anyway? Somehow these long-ago and near-invisible events and relationships, he was sure, were at the heart of the case that had consumed his life for the past six months. It was all about, perhaps not Maya at all, but certainly Dylan and Levon and the mysterious Paco.

Back at the computer in his family room he suddenly realized that although Hunt and Chiurco had looked into them, he himself had never really pursued any of the details in the robbery that Dylan and Levon had been convicted of.

And why should he have? It was, at best, tangential to Maya’s situation, and again in the far distant past.

But now he suddenly realized what he should have considered a couple of days ago, when he’d first become aware of the existence of Paco-that if there had been a trial back then, or even a plea bargain, there would have been both witnesses for the prosecution and possibly friends for the defense, friends and witnesses whose association with Dylan and Levon might have extended back beyond when Maya had met and hung out with them, back when Paco had been in their crowd, and as a real human being, not a nom de guerre.

In fact-

He pulled his legal pad around and wrote a note to call Wyatt Hunt and leave him a message and instructions for tomorrow as soon as he’d finished his computer search here. He’d just realized that Cheryl Biehl and the other three female witnesses that Stier had never called might fit into this same category-of people who’d been at USF back then and had known Dylan and Levon. And who might have known Paco under his real name.

But in the meanwhile he could do a quick search for the case that had involved Dylan and Levon, and armed with that he might be able to have Hunt or Chiurco identify the actual case files, the officers involved, other witnesses.

He went to Google and typed in Dylan Vogler’s name, recalling even as the short page came up that Wyatt Hunt had told him that there was little mention of Vogler on the Net other than the recent details about his death. Shifting over to California Inmate Record Search, he again entered Dylan’s name and there he was, at Corcoran State Prison in 1997 for robbery. Likewise, here was Levon Preslee in the system, starting two months into Dylan’s time.

Did any of this mean anything? Or help Hardy in any way? Certainly, these facts told him nothing about the actual crime they’d committed together. He spent another fifteen minutes or so searching the various criminal databases to which he had access. He found Dylan and Levon in several of them. What he didn’t find was any indication that they had committed their crime together, or had gone to trial together. That information had apparently vanished into the mists of time.

And if that was the case…

Suddenly, staring at the screen, the issue that had nagged at him for days came into focus with a startling clarity, bringing with it a jolt of adrenaline so powerful that it threw Hardy back into his chair, suddenly breathless, blood pounding in his ears. He brought his hand up to rest over his heart.

Thought it all through, beginning to end. It had to be.

It had to be. There was no other option.

And, late though it was, he reached for the telephone.

Hardy didn’t know
if it was because of her recent, albeit clandestine, interaction with the DA and the chief of police, but for whatever reason, Kathy West with her attendant entourage was back in the first row of the gallery when Hardy entered the courtroom from the holding cell with his client. Sitting between Joel Townshend and Harlen Fisk, she had also brought her trail of reporters, and once again the gallery was filled to overflowing.

In this Friday morning’s paper the mayor had gone public with her suspicions, completely unfounded by any evidence Hardy had seen or heard about-and he’d heard plenty by now from Glitsky-that the Ruiz murder was intimately connected to the events surrounding Maya’s trial and the deaths of Dylan Vogler and Levon Preslee. And this, of course, had ratcheted up the sense that something dramatic was going to take place in the courtroom today. Something, perhaps new evidence, that would remove once and for all the Townshend/Fisk/West family connection from the slanders of the past several months.

And the mayor wanted to be there for it. To show her face for her niece, if for nothing else. Kathy West didn’t believe that Maya had done anything wrong, and she was going to make sure that the jury understood that clearly before they went in to deliberate.

But such was Kathy’s gravity in the city that the mere rumor, much less the actual fact, of her presence again in the courtroom served also to draw in a host of the politically involved, the suddenly interested, the professionally concerned, the simply curious-DA Clarence Jackman, Police Chief Frank Batiste, U.S. attorney Jerry Glass, Glitsky, even the wheelchair-bound
Chronicle
“CityTalk” columnist Jeffrey Elliot. Gina Roake sat halfway back next to Wyatt Hunt, ashen-faced and presumably as sleep-deprived as Hardy himself. Catching Hardy’s questioning eye, Hunt gave a short and solemn incline of his head. The entire gallery sounded to Hardy’s ear like a race car, loud and thrumming at the pole. The jury, collectively, seemed to be mesmerized by the energy level, the shifting planes of volume, intensity, and nerves playing out in front of them.

At the prosecution table, and since Debra Schiff had already given her witness testimony and it was allowed, Stier had brought her back in as moral support to sit next to him, and the two of them were head-to-head in conversation as Hardy, Maya, and the bailiff crossed in front of them. And then, after a few words of forbidden greeting to her family members in front of the starstruck and forbearing bailiff, Maya was at last in her seat and Hardy was arranging his papers when the clerk entered and, clearing his throat, spoke up loudly. “Ladies and gentlemen, Department Twenty-five of the Superior Court of California is now in session, Judge Marian Braun presiding. All rise!”

Getting three new names approved onto his witness list had entailed another small battle with Braun and Stier this morning in the judge’s chambers, but in the end Hardy argued that he had discovered new evidence that, in the interests of justice, the jury would need to hear in order to reach the correct verdict.

Of course, this announcement had aroused Stier’s deep suspicion and ire, and he’d demanded to know the substance of the prospective testimony. Hardy acknowledged that in the first case-Jessica Cunningham-it was fingerprint evidence; and in the second- Jennifer Foreman-Stier already had had access to everything she might know, since she was on his original witness list. Indeed, she was one of the three uncalled old college friends of Maya.

Finally, Hardy said, “You know Chiurco. He’s one of my investigators. And here’s what he’s going to say.” And he handed the prosecutor Chiurco’s short signed statement. Stier grumbled for a moment that he should have gotten these witnesses at the beginning of the trial, but everybody knew that this was a nonissue. The witnesses would be permitted to testify. But, Braun warned him, Hardy had better be sure he was talking about introducing new evidence and not spending a lot of time rehashing.

But-the bottom line-he was going to be able to get it all in. And now, his palms wet, his mouth dry, Hardy lifted his exhausted body from his chair. “The defense would call Jessica Cunningham.”

The bailiff disappeared out through the back door of the courtroom and returned a moment later with a young woman in a police officer’s uniform. She made her way up the center aisle and into the bullpen, where she took the oath and then moved around to the witness seat.

“Ms. Cunningham,” Hardy began, “will you tell the jury what you do for a living, please?”

“Sure.” She turned to look at the panel. “I’m a technician in the police department’s lab here in the city.”

“In that capacity, do you have a special expertise?”

“I do. I do fingerprint analysis.”

“Identifying people by their fingerprints, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“And how long have you been doing that?”

“About six years.”

For a few more moments Hardy established Cunningham’s credentials as an expert in this field. Then he began to bring it closer to home. “Did you have occasion several months ago to analyze the fingerprints found in the home of one of the victims in this case, Levon Preslee?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Can you tell the jury what you found?”

Of course, this testimony had already been cursorily addressed in the testimony of Debra Schiff, but now he had the lab technician herself on the stand, and a completely different approach. Cunningham, enthusiastic and professional, nodded and again spoke directly to the jury. “Well, as in most locations, we found many fingerprints.”

“How many separate prints in all did you locate?”

“Oh, maybe fifteen or so.”

“Could you identify any of them?”

“Yes. Six came back from the victim.”

“Were you able to identify any of the other eight or nine?”

“A few, yes.”

“But not all?”

“No.”

“Is it unusual to find fingerprints at the scene of a crime that you cannot connect to any individual?”

“No.”

“And why is that?”

“Because, first, not everyone has their fingerprints on file. Secondly, sometimes, or really quite often, the fingerprints are not clear enough to match the computerized records. And finally, there are a limited number of databases we typically use to try to get our matches. Most of the time, for example, we’re trying to match a fingerprint to a known suspect, and in that case it’s a simple one-on-one cross-check.”

“Did you compare the defendant’s fingerprints to the remaining unidentified fingerprints at Mr. Preslee’s?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Trying to see if any of those belonged to the defendant?”

“Right.”

“And, just to restate it for the jury, you did not find any of the defendant’s fingerprints at Mr. Preslee’s, did you?”

“No.”

Hardy threw a gratuitous look over his shoulder at Stier’s table, where he and Schiff sat in miserable proximity. “Now, Ms. Cunningham, as far as you knew, back in November when you ran these comparisons, did you compare the unknown prints to anyone’s besides the victim, Mr. Preslee, and the defendant, Maya Townshend?”

“Yes. The other victim, Dylan Vogler, and Mr. Preslee’s friend, Brandon Lawrence.”

“So two more people?”

“Yes.”

“Could you identify any of your unknown prints from the crime scene to any of those?”

“Yes. Two of those fingerprints came back to Brandon Lawrence.”

“Leaving you with seven unidentified prints. Correct?”

“Correct.”

“Were you able to identify any of your remaining seven latents?”

“Actually, we identified four of them because they were in the criminal database, which is our primary tool.”

“So there were three that remained unidentifiable, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Now, Ms. Cunningham”-Hardy closing in on it-“have you had a recent opportunity to revisit the fingerprints you originally lifted at Mr. Preslee’s home?”

“Yes, I have.”

“And when was that?”

“Just this morning.”

Hardy felt some sonic energy begin to shoot through the gallery, but he spoke over it. “And how did that come about?”

“Lieutenant Glitsky of homicide reached me at home this morning and asked me if I would come in early and go back to the unidentified fingerprints and compare them to a specific other single set of fingerprints from another database to see if there was a match.”

“And was there a match?”

“Yes, there was.”

“You mean there was a specific individual who had left his fingerprints in Mr. Preslee’s home and whom this investigation had not discovered until just this morning, is that right?”

“That’s correct, yes.”

Braun gaveled down the now nearly constant, if low-pitched, hum of the gallery. After silence had been restored, Hardy came back at the witness. “Ms. Cunningham, did Lieutenant Glitsky ask you to review any other fingerprint findings this morning?”

“Yes.”

“And what were they?”

“There was a partial fingerprint on the brass bullet casing that was picked up at the scene of the Vogler murder.”

“A partial print? What does that mean?”

“Actually, most prints are partial prints. It’s rare on a forensic sample to get an entire fingerprint from somebody. But this print was a smaller section even than most.”

“And can that be useful for purposes of identity?”

“Often not.”

“And why is that?”

“Because it’s incomplete. Certainly a computer can’t read it, so you have to have the known prints of an individual, you have to do a manual comparison, and you have to find enough points of identification on the forensic sample to compare to your known prints.”

“Now, Lieutenant Glitsky asked you to run a manual test against the known fingerprint of a single individual whose prints were in Levon Preslee’s home, did he not?”

“Yes.”

“Did you find a match?”

“I’m sorry. The testing is not completed. As I said, it’s a very small sample and I just haven’t had enough time yet.”

Hardy would have given his left arm to know the final results of this test. But this was it. If he was going to spring this trap, it was going to happen right now before anyone got wind of what he was up to. He had to press ahead. “All right. So now, Ms. Cunningham, can you give us the name whose fingerprint you identified in Mr. Preslee’s home?”

“Yes, I can.”

“And whose fingerprint was it?”

“One of your investigators, Mr. Hardy. A Craig Chiurco.”

While the bailiff went to get the next witness, Stier asked Braun if counsel could approach, and at her impatient bidding both attorneys got up and walked to the bench.

“What do you want now, Mr. Stier?” Braun asked, clearly at the limit of her forbearance.

“Your Honor,” Stier began, “I haven’t got a clue as to what Mr. Hardy is up to. This seems irrelevant, immaterial, and just plain a waste of time.”

“I’m going to wrap this up, Your Honor, within the hour. Two more witnesses and I’m done.” Turning, and hoping to provoke an already rattled Stier, Hardy smiled sweetly. “I have to give you the discovery, Counselor. I don’t have to explain it to you.”

“That’s enough, you two!” Braun snapped, nearly loud enough for the jury to hear. “I’m tired of this bickering. Mr. Hardy, you’re going to call your witnesses and we’re going to get this thing done. Return to your counsel tables.”

Hardy wasted no time calling his second witness, and by now, as he approached the witness seat, his fatigue had dissipated. Jennifer Foreman had been another one of the USF cheerleaders-friends of Maya and Dylan back in the day-that Stier had originally put on his witness list and then elected not to call for direct testimony.

Late last night Wyatt Hunt had worked his magic and, in spite of the hour, had persuaded her to talk to him. Now, on the stand, and obviously dealing with a serious case of nerves, she appeared not to have had a great deal of luck getting back to sleep in the intervening hours. Or maybe it was the fact that Hardy and Hunt had asked that she check in upstairs, then wait at Lou the Greek’s, accompanied by Gina Roake, so that she wouldn’t come into contact with any other witnesses until she was called to the stand.

Still, she came across as poised, well dressed, competent and, always a plus, very attractive, as these ex-cheerleaders tended to be. A good, solid witness if Hardy could direct her where he needed to go. Hardy stood five feet in front of her and gave her a reassuring smile. “Mrs. Foreman,” he began, “you were a classmate of the defendant, Maya Townshend, at USF in the mid-nineties, were you not?”

“Yes, I was.”

“Were you in the same class?”

“No, I was a couple of years ahead of her.”

“But you were friends, were you not?”

“Yes, I thought so. We were cheerleaders together.”

“And during the time you were cheerleaders, did you also spend time with both of the victims in this case, Dylan Vogler and Levon Preslee?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Did you ever personally witness them smoking marijuana?”

“Your Honor!” Stier was standing up. “Mr. Hardy has promised us that he has new evidence, but this is all old news and irrelevant.”

But by now, after the previous witness, Braun was fully engaged and inclined to let Hardy go on, even without a strict evidentiary base. He’d already presented compelling fingerprint evidence that Stier hadn’t been able to supply, and even if the meaning of that was still questionable, there was no doubt about its possible relevance. “The objection is overruled, Counselor. Go ahead, Mr. Hardy.”

“Thank you, Your Honor. Now, Mrs. Foreman, should I repeat the question?”

“No. Did I ever witness Dylan and Levon smoking dope? Yes, of course.”

“Many times?”

Here Mrs. Foreman broke a small chuckle. “Pretty much all the time.”

Hardy let the moment of levity run its short course. “Mrs. Foreman, how did you meet Dylan and Levon?”

“We had a mutual friend in my class who everybody called Paco. He turned me on to them.” She shrugged and added to the jury, “If you’ll pardon the phrase. He was kind of the leader of the other, younger guys.”