Final Exam: A Legal Thriller (44 page)

The Protector walked quickly down the steps and turned toward the parking lot.
 
Rounding the corner in the general direction of the bar, the sound of the alarm grew fainter.
 
You almost couldn’t hear it from out here,
the Protector thought.
 
The Protector turned and looked back toward the garage - n
o one coming.
 
Look like you belong.
 
Then the Protector walked, never run, that would be too obvious, through the parking lot to the bar, climbing the steps and entering through the back door.
 
The Protector stepped right up to the bar and asked for a gin and tonic, placing a five dollar bill on the bar.
 
A moment later, the bartender, a burly man with an unusually large head and prominent jaw, returned with the drink and picked up the money.
 
As the Protector took a sip of the drink, a squad car, with lights on, but no siren, passed by on Irving Park Road.
  

The Protector watched the squad car turn left and head back toward the law firm, swallowed, smiled and said, “Keep the change.”

38

Ben grew suspicious after the tripping of the alarm, particularly since he had only left the building moments before.
 
He confirmed that he had been the last one in the building, but insisted that he had locked all of the doors before he left.
 
The Ithaca Police later said that the front door was unlocked and the building was empty when they arrived in response to the alarm.
 

A few days later, Ben and Mark sat in the garage talking about it with Ken, who had stopped in with some additional materials for the Motion to Suppress.
  
Ken laughed at them.
 
“You bozos haven’t thought of the most important possibility.
 
Maybe the alarm got tripped while someone was trying to get out, not while someone was trying to get in.”
 
Ben looked at Mark, who raised his eyebrows as if to say, “C
ould be
.”
 
“You said you locked the front door, right?” Ken continued.
 
“If that’s true, maybe somebody was inside until after you set the alarm and took off.
 
That happened to me a couple of times while I worked upstairs in your office,” he said gesturing to Ben.
 
“Guys on the other side of the building would leave and set the alarm without checking and not realizing that I was still upstairs working.
 
I would come downstairs, get caught by one of the sensors and trip the alarm.
 
Next thing you know, the Ithaca cops are here.
 
One time, I realized that somebody had done it and I called to have somebody come over and turn the alarm off.
 
I had to sit at my desk for about forty-five minutes so I wouldn’t set the alarm off.
 
You know, Phil gets pissed when that happens.
 
The police charge for false alarms.”
  

Ben nodded.
 
“So I’m told.”
 

He thought about the possibility of someone unknown being in the building with him the other night and didn’t like the idea.
 
Ken and Mark could read the discomfort on his face.
 

“Don’t like the sound of that, do you?” Ken said.
 

“No, not really” Ben replied.
 
“I don’t think I’ll share that one with my wife.”

The defense filed a Motion to Dismiss and a Motion to Suppress Evidence, both basically designed to attack the evidence proffered by the State.
 
The Motion to
Dismiss
the indictment never really stood much of a chance.
 
Ben knew that, but filing it was just one of those things you had to do in a case like this.
 
You couldn’t just roll over and take it.
 
The Motion to Suppress, on the other hand, was an entirely different matter.
 
It focused on the small building blocks of the State’s case, the individual pieces of evidence from which inferences could be drawn to plant the seeds of guilt in the minds of the jury.
 
If enough of these building blocks could be knocked out or excluded from the trial, the State’s case could very well collapse under its own weight, leading to a not guilty verdict or a directed verdict entered by the Court at the end of the State’s case.
 
Although this was an unlikely scenario, the dynamics of a jury trial were such that a lawyer could never know for sure which piece of evidence could become significant in the minds of the individual jurors.
 
Therefore, the more bits and pieces you knocked out, the better off you would be.
 

The defense focused on three key pieces of physical evidence - the blood on the scarf, the hair and the fingerprints on the baseball bat.
 
In ruling against the defense, Judge Wilson concluded that any arguments proffered by the defense went to the weight and sufficiency of the evidence, not to its admissibility.
 
Although disappointed, Ben couldn’t really disagree.
 

The defense enjoyed mixed results with the other evidence as well.
 
Judge Wilson agreed that any mention of the paternity of Anthony
Cavallaro
should be excluded from the trial.
 
This was likely a foregone conclusion once the results of the DNA tests had been learned.
 
Conversely, the defense lost in its efforts to have certain phone records excluded from evidence, namely records of phone calls made from the law school to Megan either at her townhouse or her office at the Appellate Court.
 
The defense reasoning revolved around the way the law school phone system routed and tracked outgoing telephone calls.
 
The system did not trace outgoing calls back to a particular telephone in a particular location.
 
For example, it was impossible to identify all of the specific calls made from the telephone in Daniel Greenfield’s office.
 
To the contrary, the calls could only be traced to a series of phone lines which handled outgoing calls from the law school building.
 
Thus, the defense argued that anyone at the law school could have made those telephone calls.
 
Nevertheless, pending the testimony at trial, Judge Wilson concluded that the jury should be entitled to hear the evidence and determine the appropriate weight to give it subject to the cross-examination by the defense.

On the drive back to the office, Ben and Mark were musing about the various rulings issued by the Court and their potential impact at trial.
 
“My view is the blood was the key one,” Mark said.
 
Ben grunted in agreement.
 
Mark continued.
 
“I wish we had a way of proving that the blood came from his nose like she said it did and not from the wounds on the rest of his skull.”

“Does that really make that much of a difference?” Ben asked.
 

“Well, sure it could.
 
If you remember the pictures, the front of his face wasn’t really caved in.
 
All the damage was to the side and the back of his head.”

“That’s true.
 
So what?”

“I don’t know.
 
It just seems significant, that’s all.
 
I don’t think there was any blood that came out of his nose at the scene was there?”
 
Ben shrugged.
 
“I don’t know,” Mark said.
 
“I’ll check the file.”

Mark’s words percolated in Ben’s head as he pushed the SUV up to eighty and flew past the Harlem Avenue exit.
 
Lost in his thoughts of the blood evidence, Ben didn’t notice when Mark began speaking again.
 
There was something about the blood that didn’t seem quite right.
 
What was it?
 
Ben turned the thing over and over in his mind as he drove.
 
Mark could have been talking to himself because Ben didn’t notice a word he was saying.
 
Finally as the kernel of an idea dropped into place, Ben said, “Huh?
 
What?”

“Hey,” Mark said pointing, “you just missed the split.”

“What?”

“You just missed the split.
 
We needed to go to the right.”
 

Ben looked up and realized what Mark was talking about.
 
He had stayed to the left when the road split instead of going off to the right toward the office.
 

“God damn it,” he said.
 
“We’ll just have to get off at Route 83 and head back north.”

“What were you thinking about?” Mark asked.
 

“What do you mean?”

“You looked like you just thought of something.”

“Yeah, I did.”
  

When they got back to the office, Ben went upstairs, thumbed through his rolodex, picked up the phone and dialed.
 

A few seconds later, Dr. Stanley Liu was on the line.
 
“What can I do for you, Mr.
Lohmeier
?” he said.
 
Dr. Liu was the blood expert hired by the defense and one of the most renowned, and most expensive, blood and blood splatter experts in the world.
 
To date, he probably felt underutilized by Megan’s defense team.
 

“I think I have a project for you, Doctor,” Ben said.
 
“Do you have enough samples of the blood found on the scarf to do additional testing?”
 

“Why, yes, of course.”

“And you have the results of the blood work supplied by the State?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Good,” Ben said.
 

39

“Fuck, this is boring,” Ben moaned.
 
He held up a stack of exam papers and gave them the evil eye.
 
“I don’t know how you could do this year after year.”
 
He tossed the papers on a stack on the conference room table.
 

Across the way, Mark laughed.
 
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said.
 
“It’s not that bad.
 
At least at the end of the day you get to assign grades to the arrogant fuckers.”

“True enough, but what grades do you give them?
 
I don’t think I’ve read any good answers yet,” Ben said.“He went to more trouble with these than I ever would have imagined.
 
I always figured he just threw them down the stairs.
 
The ones left at the top got A’s, the ones at the bottom got C’s.
 
At least that’s what everybody always thought.”

“He did seem to put a lot of effort into it,” Mark agreed, “but I can’t figure out how he decided what to give credit for and what not to give credit for.
 
I’ve got an exam over here with an 85 on it that didn’t seem nearly as good as one with a 64.”
 

Ben shook his head.
 
“You’ve got to understand, he never actually practiced law.
 
He was just a professor.
 
He probably didn’t know what he was talking about.
 
You’ve been doing this shit for years and you do know what you’re talking about.”

“I’d like to think so.
 
Check this one out,” Mark said holding up a copy of an exam.
 
“See the dark spots?
 
I think this must have been blood.
 
Several of these were found under him when he fell, like he had them in his hand when he got whacked.”
 

“Probably stuffing them into his briefcase, right?” Ben said.
 

“It looks that way.
 
This one seems to have been partially graded.
 
I guess you could call it the final exam or the final
final
exam.”

Ben shook his head again and stared at the exam Mark was holding.
 
“What a shitty way to go,” he said.
 
“Of all the good things you could do in life, to be knocked off while trying to grade the exam of some arrogant little shit who probably thinks he’s smarter than you are.”
 
Ben paused.
 
“Do you think we were like that?” he finally asked.

Mark shrugged.

The two men sat in silence reviewing exams for a long while.
 
Ben got up and went to the bathroom and then returned.
 
As Ben pushed through the door into the garage, Mark said, “I didn’t tell you.
 
I went through Jason Hahn’s final again the other day, yesterday I think it was.”

“What’d you think?”