Chasing Justice: A Matt Royal Mystery (30 page)

“No problem.”

“Let’s keep this one quiet, Doug,” J.D. said. “Nothing that the press can pick up, a blackout on information going out of the hospital. At least for the next couple of days. I’ll do the paperwork in the morning.”

Jock walked over. “Hey, Doug.” They shook hands.

“Good to see you, Jock. Glad you were here to pull Matt’s butt out of the fire.”

I walked back and spent the next few minutes with the man on the ground. He had become very docile and helpful. I don’t think he wanted to spend any more time with Jock.

* * *

The three of us were sitting in my living room. We hadn’t felt like going to the Haye Loft after the events in the parking lot. We had all calmed down, the adrenaline shock wearing off. Jock was the calmest of the three of us. He hadn’t even broken a sweat putting the jerk in the parking lot out of commission. I couldn’t help but chuckle at his comments to the guy he’d put down so easily.

“You’ve never seen tough until now?” I said. “Who do you think you are? Arnold Schwarzenegger?”

Jock grinned. “All the bad guys watch those action movies. They like that kind of stuff. Makes them think I’m badder than they are.”

Jock Algren was the toughest man I’d ever met. He and I had grown up together in a small town in Central Florida, two boys from difficult homes who clung together trying to survive the perversity of teen angst and the dysfunctional families who raised us in poverty. We’d stayed close as our careers took us in different directions, Jock into government service and I into the law. Jock was a regular visitor to our key and he’d made a lot of friends on the island.

Jock had gone straight from college into the U.S. government’s most secretive intelligence agency. He was a spy and a sometime assassin. He did things for the good of our country that often disgusted him, but he was good at what he did, and he understood that in our world there was a need for men like him to protect us all. So he did his duty, and when it was done for a while, he’d come to my cottage on Longboat Key and reset his life. He’d let the horror of what he’d seen and done ooze out of his system, knowing that he was among the people who loved him the most, J.D. and me. We were his family and the key was his place of refuge, a place to recharge and gather the strength to go back to the dark world where he plied his trade.

“How did you end up here?” I asked. “I didn’t know you were coming.”

“I didn’t, either. I got a call this morning from a local cop who had been in touch with a man who needed to be escorted from Houston to Sarasota. He needed to get here quick and in total secrecy. I agreed to help. Can’t very well turn down the local law.”

If I were in a cartoon, a light bulb would have appeared above my head. “Favereaux?”

“Yep.”

“And the cop didn’t happen to be a little cutie from Longboat Key?” I asked.

“Watch your mouth,” J.D. said. “Favereaux called me this morning and told me that he had followed his wife’s murder case in the papers and knew I’d hit a dead end. I told him I knew she was his daughter and explained to him the DNA hits we’d gotten on Linda and Connie.

“He told me he was holed up near Houston. He’s been hiding out because he thinks somebody in Homeland Security has been feeding information to the South Florida drug cartels, and he’s afraid they’re looking for him. He’s been following Abby’s trial, and he says he knows what actually happened, and he can’t watch an innocent woman get railroaded. He wanted to testify, so he took a chance and called me. He said he’d come to Sarasota, but he was concerned about his safety. He thinks he knows who the rogue agent is at Homeland, and the rogue’s high enough in the food chain that he would have access to all Favereaux’s aliases. He could also have a watch placed on airlines, so that if Favereaux used his own name or any of the aliases, he’d place himself in great danger. The rogue would be instantly notified and alert the druggies. So, I called Jock. He worked a little magic, and here he is.”

“Where’s Favereaux?” I asked.

J.D. grinned. “My condo.”

“How did you do it, Jock?” I asked.

“I called Favereaux at the number he’d given J.D. and told him I could get him to Sarasota. I told him my name and asked if he knew Dave Kendall, my boss. He did. I suggested he call Dave. He did and called me back. Dave sent an agency jet for us. Favereaux met me at Hobby airport, and here we are.”

“Do you think he’ll stick around?” I asked. “He won’t just up and leave?”

“I don’t think so,” said Jock. “It’s taken him all this time to figure out that there’s a rogue in his agency. He wants to find him and take him out, but he wants to clear up things for Abby first. He’ll be here.”

“The rogue will disappear as soon as Favereaux shows up to testify,” I said.

“My boss is working on that,” said Jock. “He knows the Homeland Security director and they’re having dinner this evening in Washington. Favereaux gave him the name of the man he suspects is the rogue. Homeland will lock him down, and the first move he makes when he finds out that Favereaux is testifying, they’ll have him.”

“I need to talk to Favereaux,” I said.

“Let’s go to my place,” J.D. said.

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

Thursday morning, the fourth day of the trial, and it was my turn at bat. This would be the day that would make or break my case, determine the fate of Abby Lester, and perhaps that of her husband and J.D. If Abby were convicted, Bill Lester’s career as a cop would be finished, and depending on how he reacted to me as the one who lost the case, J.D.’s career might go down with Bill’s.

Jock, J.D., and I had spent a couple of hours the evening before with James Favereaux and then talked late into the night, trying to sort out what we’d learned from Kent Walker, the man who had threatened to shoot me in the Haye Loft parking lot, and figure out how it might play into what we already knew and how I might use it in the trial.

Walker had told me he worked for Mark Erickson, the University of South Florida professor. Walker’s duties had nothing to do with the university. He was employed by a charitable organization called Unlimited Futures, founded by the Ericksons. J.D. Googled it. The charity’s stated purpose was to assist poor children in Sarasota County with private school and college tuition and to support other charitable organizations that assisted poor children in nearby counties.

“Did your boss think I was standing in the way of children going to college?” I’d asked Walker as he lay on the parking lot.

“Guess again,” Walker had said.

He’d assured me he wasn’t sent to kill me. His job was to bring me to his boss, and then, if necessary, kidnap J.D. and use her as leverage against me. They wanted me to throw the trial. Apparently, my cross-examination of Tori had rattled Erickson. He was afraid that I was moving toward exposing his operation in which Tori played a major role. He thought I knew more than I probably did.

It was becoming obvious that Erickson was involved somehow in drug operations. He was connected to the Favereauxes and Bannister. Erickson had been with Bannister when Bannister tried to borrow money from Jon Boscia, and Bannister had transferred all his stock in BLP, Inc. to Erickson in return for ten million dollars and the promise of fifteen million more. The money from Erickson had gone into BLP, Inc., which Erickson now controlled, so the net effect was that Erickson had lent himself the money and he now owned the real estate on which the project was to be built. It was a nice slight of hand and a good way to launder drug profits. There was still the question of where Erickson would have gotten the ten million. Had to be drugs.

J.D. went to a website where she could access tax return summaries of not-for-profit corporations. Unlimited Futures showed a very high percentage of its proceeds going to administrative expenses and another large part being contributed to other charities. She could find no information on the other charities.

“My guess is that most of that money is going back into dealers’ pockets,” J.D. said, “but it seems like a pretty basic scheme. You don’t have to look too deep to find that the money trail peters out.”

“But who’s going to be looking?” I asked. “You have a distinguished professor and his wife running a charity to help kids, and the administrative expenses are high but not completely unreasonable. The charities that Unlimited Futures sends money to haven’t filed returns, but maybe they’re so small, they don’t have to file. If the charity’s income is less than twenty-five thousand dollars per year, it isn’t required to file a return.”

J.D. took another look at the information on the computer screen. “There are a lot of charities supported by Unlimited Futures, but every one of the contributions to those entities was just under the twenty-five thousand mark.”

“There you go,” I said. “Unless somebody was really looking for it, Erickson would just continue to slip in under the radar.”

“I’ll bet you anything Unlimited Futures takes in a lot more money than it reports,” J.D. said.

J.D. had made sure that Walker was completely isolated so that Erickson would not know what happened to him. She put out a press release saying that the Longboat police had found a body on the key, that of a man who had died of a heart attack. The story included an artist’s sketch of Walker, but there was no identification on the body, so the police were asking the public to call if they thought they knew the victim. It wasn’t perfect, but we hoped the ruse would hold for a day or two. The story ran in the Thursday morning edition of the
Sarasota Herald-Tribune
, so that by the time the trial resumed, chances were good that Erickson would think his man had not made contact with me before he died.

* * *

The show was about to begin. The jury was in the box, and it was time for me to give the opening statement I’d deferred until the state had finished its case. I planned to keep it short. I didn’t want to give away any of the surprises I had in store for the day.

I wanted to hit Swann cold with the facts as they came from the witness stand. He’d have no time to prepare, to figure out how to dilute the impact of the testimony. That is, unless he knew a lot of what I’d discovered, unless he was better prepared than I thought, unless he had some surprises for me, unless he was a better lawyer than I believed him to be, unless he had not underestimated me and my case, as he seemed to have done. That little devil on my shoulder, the bane of every trial lawyer, was whispering baleful predictions of doom, and warning me of my inadequacies.

I stood before the jury, not close, no hand on the rail like they always do on TV. I didn’t want to invade their personal space and make them uncomfortable. I wanted their attention. I needed to grab it and hold onto it for the few minutes I would need to make my statement. I knew the importance of not promising them evidence I could not produce. I had neither podium nor notes, and I did not smile or chuckle or try to pander to them in any way.

“May it please the court,” I said with a nod to the bench. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you have heard Mr. Swann’s case and now it’s time for me to present the defense’s evidence, the evidence I believe will prove that Abby Lester did not kill Nate Bannister. Mr. Swann has done a masterful job of presenting every shred of evidence he has, and he will argue that those facts are all you need to convict.

“Perhaps he would be correct if there was no other evidence. Unfortunately for the prosecution, there’s a lot more evidence, and I will present it to you over the next day or two. You will begin to see that Mr. Swann’s case is very weak to start with, and it falls completely apart when you hear the testimony that will come to you today and tomorrow.

“My job is not to prove the innocence of Abby Lester, although I think you will have no doubt of her innocence. The burden of proof is on the state to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Abby killed Mr. Bannister. The prosecution’s evidence has been designed to point in only one direction, that Abby was the killer, that there is no one else who had motive, opportunity, and the means to kill Mr. Bannister. But Mr. Swann’s evidence isn’t all the evidence.

“By the end of tomorrow, you will have seen that there are a number of people who had better reason to kill Mr. Bannister than any Mr. Swann has attributed to Abby. You will also hear the evidence that Abby didn’t even know the victim and that she certainly did not have an affair with him.

“I’m not suggesting to you that Mr. Swann has deliberately attempted to convict an innocent woman. I am suggesting that the evidence will show that the state may not have done as good a job as it should have in following up on evidence that was available to them. You—”

“Objection, Your Honor.” Swann was back on his feet. I’d thought that last statement might raise his blood pressure a bit. After all, I was suggesting that he was incompetent. I expected the objection, and I was pretty sure it was not one the judge would sustain. I was walking a fine line between arguing the case and explaining to the jury what evidence I would present, but I hadn’t stepped over it. Well, not more than a little bit. I also knew that the objection would focus the jury on the very point I was making.

“Grounds, Mr. Swann?” Judge Thomas asked.

“He’s arguing. This isn’t closing.”

“I’ll let him finish. I grant you that he’s walking close to the line, but he hasn’t stepped over it. Yet. Overruled.”

“Thank you, Your Honor,” I said. I turned back to the jury. A faint smile crossed the face of Judith Whitacre, the fragrance company executive. “As I was saying,” I continued, “I am suggesting to you that the evidence you will see, the rest of the evidence, will be that Abby Lester has been the victim of an elaborate frame-up. You will hear from some of the players in this drama, people whom Mr. Swann chose not to call as witnesses. You will hear the reason Abby is being framed is to hide the identity of the real murderer, and you will hear of other people who had reason to kill Mr. Bannister. Abby Lester played no part in any of this, except that she was an unwitting victim herself.

“The United States Constitution says that Abby Lester cannot be compelled to testify in this trial. She cannot be subjected to cross-examination if she does not testify. But Abby will testify. She will open herself to cross-examination by Mr. Swann. She will tell you the truth. You will see the real person, this high school history teacher married to a career police officer, and you will be able to distinguish between the real Abby Lester and the calculating, sex-crazed monster that Mr. Swann has tried to make her out to be. Thank you.” I took my seat and smiled at Swann.