Disturbed Ground (22 page)

Judy Moise was called upon to say a few words, and she stepped forward, gripping her notes and swallowing emotion, to speak of the kind, misunderstood fellow who had brought them here. "Despite his affliction, he was a warm and gentle man. Everybody liked him," she said. "Alvaro Montoya was not a man to be overlooked. We will all miss him."

To complete the service, Beth stepped forward
,
drew a deep breath, and delivered a stirring rendition of "Amazing Grace." Her golden a cappella tones suffused the wintery air, as beautiful as an elegy to even the wealthiest man. When the final notes dissolved, the knot of attendees began to unwind. It was too blustery to linger, and after a few parting words they went to find their cars.

Inarticulate yet unforgettable, Bert had touched all of their lives, and long after the service was over memories of Bert Montoya lingered—particularly for Judy Moise, who was anticipating dinner with Henry and Laura Montoya and her boss, Leo MacFarland. That afternoon, she located the videotape of Bert and bundled it with some papers that she thought Bert's nephew might like to see.

The documents stirred memories of how fervently she and Beth had wished for Bert's identification, kneeling before Our Lady of Guadalupe, praying for assistance. She recalled how ecstatic they had been when Bert's official ID had finally arrived. She had really believed she'd delivered him from hopelessness. In fact, she thought gloomily, her efforts to "save" him had only sealed his fate.

At dinner that evening, Henry Montoya accepted the video with thanks and reviewed his uncle's papers with interest. But when Judy handed him the beautifully embossed birth certificate with its colorful stamps, he stopped her with an unexpected comment. "This isn't right," he said, staring at the parchment in his hands. "It says he was born in San Juan."

Judy was perplexed. "He wasn't born there?"

"No, he was actually born just outside of San Juan, in a little town called Guadalupe."

"Guadalupe?!" The name was bittersweet. An image of Our Lady of Guadalupe swam before her eyes, and Judy was struck by an odd sensation of symmetry. With an ironic smile she thought:
Wait until I tell Beth.

But by the time she got home, Judy's smiles had vanished. A comment from Bill Johnson came ringing in her ears:
Bert was like a sacrificial lamb. His death put a stop to the killing.

Maybe it was true. If Bert hadn't been killed, how many more would have died? How long would until Dorothea Puente would have been caught? Judy embraced the idea hopefully, but there was something dismal lurking just behind this thought.
Bert had a premonition that an old woman would kill him.
Again, she heard Bill Johnson's voice and realized that he'd also said that Bert once told him he'd dreamed that a white-haired grandmother would kill him.

She swallowed the painful realization that she had delivered Bert to his doom. She saw with piercing clarity that they were all at fault, everyone who had circled Dorothea Puente yet failed to sense deception and danger. "I'm sorry, Bert," she whispered. "I'm so sorry
."

It was too much. The troubles of the day combined like an emotional cocktail. Judy's fortitude dissolved and sobs shook through her as she struggled to contain her sorrow and guilt.

Part IV: LIES AND POTIONS

Lies confuse. The evil are "the people of the lie," deceiving others as they also build layer upon layer of self-deception.

— M. Scott Peck, M.D.,
People of the Lie

"Well, Mortimer, for a gallon of elderberry wine I take a teaspoonful of arsenic, and add a half-teaspoonful of strychnine, and then just a pinch of cyanide."

—
Joseph Kesselring's
Arsenic and Old Lace

CHAPTER 23

Worry was etched across his brow as toxicologist James Beede maneuvered through traffic, transporting his carefully packaged cargo to the Department of Justice. He just hoped this foul-up didn't get leaked to the press.

As supervisor of the coroner’s toxicology lab, Beede was convinced that the fault lay with the DOJ lab, not his. But he couldn't prove it. After all, few people besides him had any opportunity to handle the tissue samples taken from the seven corpses. After the samples had been lifted at autopsy, they'd been locked inside a large, refrigerated cage at the morgue, safe from tampering. Beede himself had taken the tissue samples upstairs for processing.

Clad in a lab coat and wearing latex gloves, he'd weighed out twenty grams of tissue for each specimen, blending it with a measured amount of pure distilled water, then pouring it into a sterilized glass jar. For each, he'd carefully mixed two homogenates, one of liver tissue, one of brain tissue. (Except for Leona Carpenter, whose liver wasn't identifiable, and Betty Palmer, of course, since her head was never found.)

Beede had had to overcome a natural revulsion to the brain tissue, which looked to him "like cream of mushroom soup." And he couldn't get that awful stench out of his system; it seemed to cling to his olfactory glands. He'd wake up and smell it.

This case was anything but normal, and the putrefied state of the bodies had certainly complicated things. But Beede was sure—wasn't he?—that everything had been sterile, that the specimens had been processed according to standard procedure. The only thing that was clear in his mind was that someone had unwittingly contaminated two of the samples. And the buzz was that the Puente case hinged upon cause of death. Damn!

Now all of the specimens had to be resubmitted for testing. Beede wheeled into a parking space and hurried a new batch of specimens into the hulking Department of Justice building. Inside, he signed them over to the forensic toxicology lab, where William Phillips, a stocky, graying scientist, would again analyze the homogenates.

A murder case of this magnitude obviously demanded a precise accounting of whatever these seven victims had consumed before dying. But it would be particularly difficult to identify any ingested poisons in such decomposed bodies. Only the most sophisticated technology would be able to detect the trace amounts of chemicals that the forensic teams hoped to find, and the DOJ had exactly that: a $875,000 tandem mass spectrometer. This huge and complex piece of equipment was the only one of its type being used for forensic analysis outside of Quantico, Virginia, home of the FBI.

The problem with that first batch of samples had not been a failure of technology
.
No, the tandem mass spectrometer had hummed through its tests with amazing accuracy, striking molecules with an electron beam and identifying by molecular weight even infinitesimal amounts of an array of pharmaceuticals. Rather, the problem had been that expensive equipment cannot compensate for human blunders—a small spill, an unclean vial, a dirty fingertip.

A report showing contamination of any kind was bad enough, but this particular substance—which deteriorates much too quickly to be legitimately found in decomposed remains—had no business defiling specimens in a crime lab, of all places. Rumors flew and allegations simmered, yet no one came forward to confess how it happened that the specimens had become tainted with cocaine.

Assistant Public Defender Kevin Clymo could hardly keep from chortling when he heard the news of the latest gaffe in the state's case against his client. Cocaine use in the crime lab! Oh, the jury was going to love watching the toxicologists squirm while trying to explain this one!

This case was looking up. The toxicology reports were ambiguous and now highly impeachable. Puente's comments aboard the media jet would
be ruled inadmissible. And that Michelle Crowl character had retracted her statement about Puente's jailhouse outbursts. Good.

Clymo pulled one of his fat, new binders off the shelf and flipped open to the latest report. With his investigators working hard on the Puente case, the file was growing by about a binder a week. He'd found that Puente had "an astounding memory for a woman of her age," and each encounter with investigators sent them scurrying off in search of more information, more interviews, more reports to fill more binders.

Plenty had happened since Dorothea Puente's arrest. While driving to work the following morning, Clymo had noticed that "the whole downtown was crazier than usual." The next thing he knew, his boss, Public Defender Ken Wells, was offering him not only his first death penalty case, but the biggest murder case in Sacramento history. Soon he was rushing from the courthouse, swamped by "more reporters than I'd ever seen in my life," and the image of his bald pate shining above a sea of newspeople was being broadcast worldwide.

Such a high-profile case might have warranted a more experienced attorney, but Kevin Clymo was due for a major murder case, having already handled many less-serious murder cases—jokingly referred to around the office as "misdemeanor murders." Trying death penalty cases was voluntary, outside the ordinary rotation for major crimes, and Clymo could have turned it down, but he was ready and eager to accept. He'd almost felt this case coming, a visceral anticipation, a premonition in his bones. This was big. A career maker.

While the press had painted Puente as cool, calculating, and stoic, the woman Clymo had first met at the jail was "highly upset, emotional, crying, confused, frightened." He'd done his best to calm her down and explain what was happening. By now they'd established such a rapport that Clymo remarked breezily, "Dorothea is one of my favorite people."

Beyond the conventions of being a devoted father and an able attorney, Kevin Clymo was something of a character. He had an easy, unpretentious, down-to-earth manner, and a loose-jointed way of moving which led his foes in the DA's office to unkindly dub him "the man made entirely of spare body parts." Despite his tall
,
gangly stature, he had a gentle nature, his worldview having been shaped by the wide swath of experience he'd sampled as a young man. He'd had many jobs, but finally settled on a law career after growing bored with a job as a truck driver.

An odd mix of metaphysical and military terms peppered his speech: He might describe going to trial as a "multiyear war" requiring "guerrilla" tactics backed by a "defense arsenal," yet he spoke just as easily of philosophy, spirituality, or Karma. Apparently, this paradoxical blend was the linguistic residue of both his undergraduate major in psychology at Stanford and a stint in the Vietnam War.

Since California law allows a team of two attorneys to act as co-counsels in waging the defense in capital cases, the tall, bald, mustachioed Clymo was paired up with Peter Vlautin, his short, urbane colleague. Mutt and Jeff.

Vlautin, who often wore ties that coordinated with his fashionable, red-rimmed glasses, was cosmopolitan in dress and manner. Coming from a family of attorneys, he'd unswervingly pursued a law career, and now he could justly claim to have handled "more death penalty cases than just about anyone in the office." His walls were adorned with framed articles about clients he'd successfully defended, virtually lifting the noose from around their necks. He would point them out, saying, "These were 'hopeless' cases that in the end gave me the most joy."

Like many public defenders, both Clymo and Vlautin touted their work as a higher calling. Champions of the poor, defenders of the weak. "If there's a public defender archetype, I am one," Clymo declared. "It's who I am. It's what I do. Money has never motivated me."

The slightly younger and decidedly shorter Peter Vlautin was working closely with the less-experienced Clymo, who grinned and nicknamed him "Coach." Proving Dorothea Montalvo Puente innocent of murder became their common mission.

For the most part, this mission stayed secret. Only a few investigators and experts were privy to the inner workings of their strategy. The most that Clymo would say was that there were "people that no one has any awareness of that we rely on every day. A case of this magnitude, by its very nature, is so complex it requires a lot of the defense team."

Part of their team was already knocking on doors, recording interviews, getting results. They wasted little time, for instance, in subpoenaing the medical records of the deceased. Without a cause of death, the DA was going to have a tough time proving murder, and Puente's attorneys were set on making it nigh impossible. For while public opinion had branded her guilty until proven innocent, every public defender knows that, in the courtroom, presumption of innocence is paramount.