RK02 - Guilt By Degrees (11 page)

With no
avenue to pursue until I sat down with the prosecutor or the IO on Zack’s murder, I had a lot of anxious time to fill. On Saturday, I saw Graden for a casual dinner at our favorite haunt, the Pacific Dining Car—a real railroad dining car near downtown that was converted into an elegant restaurant with fantastic food and one of the best bars in town. We’d had our first date there, and now we thought of it as “our place.” On Sunday, my nerves propelled me to do something,
anything,
that felt like progress on the case, so I worked on my to-do list. After a few hours, feeling frustrated and stuck, I decided to schlep my sorry ass to the gym. It was sorry because I hadn’t been in a while, and now it was dragging.

By Monday morning, I was ready to jump out of my skin. For all I knew, footage of Lilah was wending its way onto YouTube at that very moment. I’d just poured myself an unneeded third cup of coffee when my cell phone rang. The number on the screen was unfamiliar.

“This is Larry Gladstein returning Rachel Knight’s call.” The voice was gruff, the tone irritated and defensive.

A foul-tempered DA, first thing in the morning. Who says that’s not fun?

“Hi, Larry, thanks for returning the call—”

“Look, let me save you some time here,” he interrupted. “I’ve got nothing more to say about the case. Check with Media Relations if you want information. And maybe the IO.”

Checking with the head of Media Relations, Sandi Runyon, wasn’t a bad idea. She was as sharp as they come and she’d probably have some valuable insights as to why the case went belly-up. And Bailey and I fully planned to talk to the investigating officer, Rick Meyer. But neither of them could give me the lawyer’s point of view, and that’s what I needed right now.

“Larry, I’m not calling to talk about what you did or what went wrong,” I said, knowing he’d probably been second-guessed to death. “I’m calling because we have another murder that seems to be related to your case, and we need the background information.”

There was a beat of silence, then Larry asked me to explain. I filled him in on the stabbing murder of Simon Bayer.

Larry said nothing for so long, I wondered if we’d been disconnected. Finally he spoke.

“I’m real sorry to hear this,” he said, his voice now low and sad. “I had a feeling Simon wasn’t going to be able to move on. But this…” He fell silent again, then sighed. “Okay, we’re instructing the jury on my child molest this morning, and I’ve got a prelim this afternoon, but I should be done by around four o’clock.”

I agreed to meet him at four thirty and texted Bailey.

We left at two. Bailey took the Golden State Freeway north to the 14 Freeway north, and within half an hour, stark, imposing mountains rose on either side of the road with small, isolated ranches sprinkled across the valleys. Above us, downy white clouds floated, creating patches of shadow and light as they moved across the sun. Hawks rode the air currents with graceful power in search of prey. Nothing about this place said “L.A.” For all intents and purposes, we could’ve been in Montana.

I’d done a little homework on Larry. I’d known that he was reputed to be a good lawyer and a hard charger, but what I hadn’t known was that in the twelve years before he picked up the Zack Bayer murder, he’d only lost one robbery case—an impressive record.

Mark Steiner, a buddy of mine who’d worked in the Van Nuys branch with Larry, told me that when Larry’d first caught the Zack Bayer case, there’d been more than the usual jealous carping by other prosecutors.

“Which was completely ridiculous on every level,” Mark said heatedly. “Not only is Larry a great lawyer, but not one of those nimrods would’ve wanted to work that hard or deal with the pressure.”

“Since when did that ever stop them?” I replied.

“Yeah.” Mark sighed. “Anyway, Larry took that part in stride. What got to him was the shit he took after the verdict. He worked his ass off on that case, and I could tell that losing it just about killed him. So it was just a bridge too far when all the hallway hotshots went around bragging about how they could’ve won the case and made asinine claims to the press about what he did wrong. It was all bullshit, but you know how it is, DAs can be cannibals…”

I did. And they were.

“So Larry
asked
for Antelope Valley?” I said.

“Not exactly,” Mark replied. “Larry asked for a transfer. What they gave him was Antelope Valley.”

Nice. A man gives years of dedicated service, and his reward is to get planted out in the middle of the desert.

But that didn’t mean the verdict had been wrong.

Thanks to Bailey’s lead foot, we reached our destination with half an hour to spare. As she parked, I saw that the courthouse was the farthest outpost of civilization in the town. Just across the street, an unbroken expanse of Joshua trees stretched out to the horizon as far as the eye could see. An aged stucco building next door bore a faded sign saying
KNIGHTS OF COLUMBUS.
But the courthouse building was relatively new, and a lot nicer than the one I worked in. We made our way through the metal detector and upstairs to the reception area.

I introduced myself and Bailey to the secretary and told her why we were there.

She made a call announcing our arrival, then hung up. “He’ll be right out.”

I’d pictured Larry as a big barrel-chested guy in a tweedy jacket with full, ruddy cheeks. The man who came out to greet us was maybe five feet eight, on the slender side, with thinning brown hair and wearing a belt with a huge silver buckle and pointy-toed cowboy boots. So I was close.

“Come on back,” he said, waving us in.

It was a nice office by county standards. Unlike mine, there was room for a normal-size person to walk behind the two visitor chairs that faced his desk, and he had a tall gray filing cabinet in the corner and two six-foot metal bookcases, all of which looked new, against the wall to the left of his desk. The view was great too—if you were into mountains and cacti.

We all sat down, and Bailey pulled out the still photograph taken from the surveillance footage that showed the woman in dark sunglasses. “Do you recognize her?”

The moment Larry saw the photograph, his mouth set in a grim, hard line and his jaw clenched. “I sure do. That’s the defendant, Lilah Bayer.”

Just to be on the safe side, I showed him the photograph of Simon.

He nodded. “That’s Simon.” He shook his head sadly. “What happened to him? I mean, other than the obvious. This is not the guy I knew during the trial.”

“He’d been on the streets.”

I explained what we knew so far about Simon’s murder, then relayed the information I’d just gotten from Scott, the coroner’s investigator, earlier in the day.

“According to the coroner, Simon’s condition indicated he hadn’t been living out there for years, but he’d been out long enough to show some wear and tear…obviously.”

“I knew Simon took it hard. I just didn’t know it got that bad,” he said, gesturing to the photograph I’d shown him.

Larry’s suffering was palpable, the air around him heavy with grief. He seemed to turn in on himself, his eyes, focused on a point outside the window, unseeing. We sat in silence for a long moment.

Larry continued to look outside as he spoke. “Simon was…a little too good for this world. What happened here would’ve been a lot to deal with for anyone, but for him…” He sighed heavily, the corners of his mouth turned down. “He wasn’t exactly a flower child or anything, but he kind of had that softness, you know?”

I did. I shook my head sadly. The world seemed to grind up people like that.

Larry continued, “I remember when they read the verdict, he went a little nuts, almost had to be restrained.” He paused a moment and kept staring out the window. “I gotta admit, I wasn’t far behind.”

“You know he tried to get the Feds to file the case?” I asked.

“Yeah. But I knew it was hopeless. They only take the slam dunks.”

“Guess that should be a little reassuring to you, no?” I asked sympathetically. The Feds’ refusal to file showed they didn’t think they could win it either.

Larry shrugged. “Maybe so, but it doesn’t help. If I’d had my druthers, the Feds would’ve taken it and won it.”

I nodded. I would’ve felt the same. Of course, the other possibility was that the Feds might’ve refused to file because they didn’t think Lilah Bayer was guilty.

“You think Simon was after Lilah?” he finally asked.

“It seems logical, since they were on the same stretch of sidewalk at the same time,” I replied. “I don’t like coincidences. And at the very least, regardless of why Simon was out there, Lilah was close enough to see who actually stabbed him. We need to find her, if only to question her.”

“And she might very well be involved,” Larry suggested, looking at me closely.

I returned his look. “Like I said, I don’t believe in coincidences—”

“Neither do I,” he agreed.

“I’m not committing to any particular theory yet,” I continued. “But the fact that both she and
Simon
and someone with a knife all managed to find their way to the same few square feet at the same time in a city as big as L.A. presents a strong likelihood that they’re all connected.”

“Well, if you can tag her for Simon’s murder, you’ll have my undying gratitude,” Larry said. “So what do you want to know?”

“Was Simon close to Zack?” I asked.

“He was devoted to Zack,” Larry replied. “Simon was about six years younger, so they didn’t exactly share a childhood. But Zack was kind of a hero to him. You know, the cool older brother. Though with Simon, it seemed to be more than the usual.”

“Because?” I asked.

Larry paused for a moment. “You’ll probably get a better sense of this from the parents, but I got the impression that Simon had been a timid kid, probably got pushed around some in school. From what people told me, Zack was a lot tougher and much more social. He’d protect Simon when he could, though what with the age difference and all, he wasn’t around a whole lot.”

“What can you tell me about Lilah?” I asked.

Larry’s expression, soft while reminiscing about Simon, suddenly hardened, deepening the lines in his face and giving his eyes a flat, dead look. “Lilah was a real looker and no dummy. Put herself through law school, eventually got hired in one of those big corporate law firms.”

“A partner?” I asked.

“Nah, too young,” he replied, shaking his head. “She was just a new junior associate when she killed Zack. Though, from what I heard, she was on the partner fast track.”

I paused, struck by Larry’s reaction to Lilah. Whenever her name came up, everything in his demeanor changed—his voice, his features, his posture—the hostility, even rage, still burned through his pores. I’d expected him to be bitter. No prosecutor likes to lose. But Larry’s attitude didn’t strike me as the typical anger we all feel when a guilty defendant walks out the door. It was much deeper, much more personal. Now, I admit that I’ve occasionally run into defendants who made me want to run them over with a bus…repeatedly. But once the case was over, I let it go—win or lose—as we all do. Larry’s fury, both in its magnitude and persistence, was unusual…and troublesome. “What was your take on Zack?” I asked.

Larry shrugged. “An ambitious guy on his way up. Popular with the troops, smart, good-looking.” He turned and pulled out the murder book. He opened it to a page, put the book in front of us, and pointed to a photograph.

Zack was in uniform, and the photo looked like the kind taken to commemorate a formal event. Judging by how young he seemed, my guess was that it was taken when he graduated from the police academy. An open smile on a pleasant, even-featured face, warm brown eyes, regulation-length brown hair, a nose that might’ve been broken in the past and never set properly—not quite rugged, but fairly handsome.

“Was he a good cop?” I asked.

“Good, but from what I hear, more into the politics than the police work,” Larry said.

“Think we’ll have any problems getting his friends to talk to us?” Bailey asked.

A not-guilty verdict can make friends and family a little less than cordial toward the prosecution.

“I wouldn’t think so,” Larry replied. With a bitter note, he added, “Unlike some in this office, they understood it was a softheaded jury.”

I nodded sympathetically, though since we hadn’t heard the evidence, I wasn’t ready to commit to the “crazy jury” theory yet. It was time to find out what kind of case Larry’d had against Lilah.

“So how
did this go down?” I asked. “Did the defense try to claim this was a burglary gone bad?”

“No,” Larry replied. “They couldn’t. There was no evidence of ransacking at all.” He turned and pulled another binder out of the cabinet behind his desk. “Check out the crime scene photos.”

He flipped to the section and turned the binder around so we could have a look. The house was as neat as a pin.

“I’ll get you a copy of the murder books so you can see it all for yourself,” Larry said.

“But if it wasn’t a burglary, then the defense had to have claimed that someone targeted Zack,” I said.

“Sort of,” Larry replied. “You didn’t read the news articles?”

“I figured I’d get a straighter story from you,” I admitted.

That elicited a tiny smile. “Wise of you.” Larry stared over my shoulder, collecting his thoughts, then he began.

“Lilah claimed they had breakfast together and he was still in the kitchen when she left for the office. It was Zack’s day off. We know he went down to the basement to work on one of his projects. He was an amateur carpenter, and he’d set up a workbench down there. Lilah claimed that as she was pulling out of the garage, she noticed a new gardener at the house across the street, someone she hadn’t seen before.”

“You verify that?” I asked.

“Didn’t pan out,” Larry replied. “Neighbors all denied having hired someone new, but gardeners sometimes bring in temporary help, so we had all the gardeners haul in all their workers, and we took photos. Either one neighbor or another recognized all of them.” Larry narrowed his eyes, concentrating. “I think you have those photos in the murder books.”

“You showed them to Lilah?” Bailey asked.

“Of course. Said none of ’em looked like the guy she’d seen.”

Of course she did. If Lilah was the killer, it’d be pretty dumb to identify her straw man—what if he had an alibi?

Larry continued, “Lilah said that after she got to work, she realized she’d left a file she needed at home. She went to lunch, and when she came back for the file, she found the body.” He paused, his eyebrows drawn together. “As I recall, Rick—the IO—nailed her on an inconsistent statement about that, but you’ll have to ask him for the details. Anyway, she said when she saw it, she threw up.” Larry’s tone was sardonic. “It was a pretty grisly scene—if someone just stumbled on it without warning, that’d be a natural reaction.” He nodded toward the murder book. “Check out the photos.”

Of all the crime scenes I’d ever seen—and I’d seen plenty—this was one of the worst. The body lay on the basement floor in the middle of a sea of blood. The head was severed from the spine, the arms and legs had been chopped off at the joints, and the body was hacked up as well, leaving gaping mouths through which intestines extruded.

A wife throwing up at the sight of her husband’s mutilated body tended to show she’d been shocked by the sight—an implicit indication that she wasn’t the killer. She certainly could’ve thrown up after seeing what she’d done. But someone who has the stones to commit an ax murder doesn’t strike me as the squeamish type. Or she could’ve made herself throw up to create the impression that she was innocent—but it would’ve been pretty sophisticated to even think of, let alone have the presence of mind to do.

“What did the crime scene analyst say?” I said.

“Crime scene analyst confirmed there was emesis on the floor that probably came from Lilah, and the coroner confirmed that they’d both eaten the same breakfast.”

“Where’d the murder weapon come from?” I said, tapping the ax shown next to the body in the crime scene photograph.

“Their garage,” Larry replied. “Which was usually kept locked. And, no, there were no signs of forced entry into the garage.”

“Score another point for the good guys,” I said.

“Just a half point,” Larry said. “A neighbor—one who didn’t particularly care for Lilah—said Zack sometimes left it outside in the backyard. The ax did have some rust and weathering, so that much was true.”

“Did you get anyone to blow up her timeline for when she left for work, got to work, left work?” Bailey asked.

“That unfortunately came up equivocal.” Larry sighed. “One neighbor swore she saw Lilah pulling out later than usual, at ten a.m., which would’ve been right after the murder. But another one was fairly sure she saw Lilah driving down the street at nine fifteen a.m.”

“She could’ve driven out earlier, come back in time to do the murder, then left again,” I pointed out.

“Sure, and I argued that to the jury, but the coworkers’ testimony muddied the waters,” Larry replied. He paused and stared at the wall behind me as he recounted the statements in impressive detail. “She was normally due at work by eight thirty a.m. Some of the staff swore she wasn’t there until after ten a.m., but others were sure they’d seen her by nine at the latest.” Larry tilted his head. “The testimony wasn’t particularly helpful, but it didn’t kill me either.”

I tended to agree. Contradictory stories of that nature often canceled each other out in the minds of the jury.

“Blood? Hair? Fiber?” I asked. “Especially blood. I’d expect to find something on her clothing.”

Larry nodded. “You would, but we didn’t. It was my theory that she changed and dumped the clothes she wore when she killed him.”

“Anything to back that up?” I asked.

“Now we come to the good part,” Larry said, showing some enthusiasm for the first time. “We found fibers on the ax that didn’t match what Zack was wearing. And given the way that ax had been wielded, anything that had been on it before the murder would likely have been shaken off or buried in the body.”

“So they were most likely from the clothing worn by the killer.”

“Correct. Our hair and fiber guy was a whizbang. He looked at the five or ten fibers we had and offered a few suggestions as to what kind of fabric and the color of fabric they could’ve come from. Wanna know what we found?” Larry now had a real smile on his face.

“Nah,” I joked.

“A photograph of Lilah with Zack up in Lake Arrowhead, wearing what? A coat that fit the exact fabric and color description given by our whiz-bang analyst. And where was that coat?” Larry asked.

I had a pretty good guess but shook my head to give him the satisfaction.

“Nowhere. That coat was nowhere to be found.”

“But that wasn’t definitive,” I said, plugging in the language fiber guys always used in their testimony. “The most he could’ve said was that the fibers appeared to be of the type that came from a coat like that or any other coat of a similar—”

“Blah, blah, blah,” Larry interrupted, waving a hand. “Yeah. But there’s more. We had evidence of forced entry at a side door they seldom used. A small—I mean a pin dot—of blood with skin was lodged in the splintered wood. We had just enough for DNA—it came back to her.”

“But she could’ve scraped her hand on that spot before, or even shortly after, the murder—,” I began.

“And that’s what the defense argued,” Larry said. “Except we had a neighbor with a colicky baby who woke her up at two thirty a.m. She was walking the floor, trying to pat the baby to sleep, when she noticed our girl Lilah standing at that side door at about two thirty-five a.m. Looked like Lilah was jiggling the door handle.”

I sat back in my chair. Proof that Lilah had deliberately rigged up evidence of forced entry was pretty powerful stuff.
So how the hell?

Larry watched my face and nodded. “Uh-huh. Well, first off, the neighbor went south on me when she took the stand. Said she was sure she saw
someone
at that door at two thirty-five, she just couldn’t be sure it was Lilah.”

I was perplexed. “What made her flip?”

Larry’s face darkened. “I never could figure that one out. She seemed sure of it during the interview. And when she flipped at trial, I questioned her up one side and down another, but there was nothing to indicate that she’d been bribed or threatened.”

“You don’t think Lilah got to her somehow?” Bailey asked.

Larry shook his head. “We checked the neighbor out. Went back as far as her freshman year in high school. Couldn’t find anything Lilah could’ve used against her, and I didn’t ever believe Lilah would’ve tried to physically threaten her.” He sighed. “Don’t get me wrong, that devil’s spawn wouldn’t have hesitated if she’d thought she could get away with it; but she was smart enough to know better.” Larry fell silent for a moment. “I guess I’ll never know why that neighbor went belly-up.”

Bailey was frowning. “They find blood anywhere else?” she asked.

“There was a small blood transfer on the wall next to the staircase that led up to the bedroom,” he replied. “But not enough to do any kind of typing. We questioned Lilah about it, but she didn’t take the bait. Said she didn’t know how it got there.”

Once again, an indication that Lilah was cool under pressure. Suspects often can’t resist the urge to explain everything in an effort to show how innocent they are, and those explanations can be the best gift the prosecution ever gets. A provably false story shows the defendant’s not only guilty but also a remorseless liar.

“The way it sounds from the cheap seats, even with the neighbor dumping you out, the case wasn’t a slam dunk, but it was there,” I said.

“It was,” Larry agreed. “But the defense had a helluva hole card.” I could hear the anger in his voice. “Six months before Zack’s murder, the Glendale Police Department had been targeted by PEN1, Public Enemy Number One, a skinhead group affiliated with the Aryan Brotherhood. A lieutenant in Glendale had targeted them after they shot one of his officers during a pursuit. The Glendale cops made a lot of busts, mostly for meth, and that really messed up PEN1’s major source of income. So the skins declared war on the Glendale PD. They rigged a zip gun to the gate at the officer parking facility—just missed killing a sergeant. Redirected a gas pipe to shoot toxic fumes into the lunchroom, and then firebombed the evidence room.”

That was big-time…and outrageous. How come I’d never heard a word about it? Bailey looked equally shocked. As much as anything, the fact that we hadn’t gotten wind of this showed just how sprawling this county really was. But, intriguing as it seemed, I didn’t see how this tied into Zack’s murder.

“I get how the murder looked like the kind of overkill meth heads do,” I said. “But I thought you said Zack was a political player, not a big gun out in the field—”

“Yeah. No reason to think he got up in anyone’s face,” Larry confirmed.

“Then why Zack?” I asked, perplexed. “And why in his own home? I mean, it’s one thing to target the police at the station, but breaking into the man’s home and chopping him up in his own basement—”

“Is another,” Larry finished for me. “Which is, of course, what I argued.”

“Did the defense come up with anything to back up the ‘skinhead did it’ story?” Bailey asked.

“Sort of.” Larry sighed. “After they put the lieutenant on to testify about war with the skinheads, prison guards seized a kite between a couple of PEN1 inmates. Of course, the defense waved that puppy around the courtroom like it was their national flag. Which it pretty much was.”

A note between inmates could be pretty compelling evidence.

“What’d it say?” I asked.

“That PEN1 was getting the ‘credit’ for the hit and no asshole Nazi Low Rider better try and claim it—something to that effect. Rick’ll have the actual note if you want to see it.”

“No names mentioned?” Bailey asked.

“Nope,” Larry replied. “And it wasn’t even in code, which you know their stuff almost always is.”

That was significant. The white-supremacist gangs had an elaborate system of secret codes they used for all written communications. It usually took an FBI specialist to crack it. The fact that this note wasn’t coded was some evidence that it was just a couple of jerks bragging, rather than a real admission that PEN1 was behind Zack’s murder.

“And you let the jury know what that meant, I’m sure,” I remarked.

“Oh yeah,” Larry replied.

“Did you ever come up with any affirmative evidence to disprove that theory?” I asked.

“What was I going to do, put a bunch of skinheads on the stand to say they didn’t do it?”

I shook my head. “Probably only make the jury believe it more. Was there evidence connected to the scene that pointed to someone else being in the house besides Lilah?”

“Not really, but it played that way to the jury,” Larry responded. “There was a partial bloody print on the kitchen wall, but we couldn’t pin it to her. Insufficient ridge detail to rule anyone in or out—including Lilah. Basically, that print could belong to anyone. The defense went crazy with that.”

“Ouch,” I said.

Larry nodded his agreement. “Yeah. It hurt us. I remember thinking we were in trouble when the jury asked about that print during deliberations.”

A fingerprint in blood had the look of evidence that had to be connected to the crime. The failure to tie it to Lilah was a tough blow. That, plus the “blame the skinhead” defense, spelled big trouble for the prosecution. Then there was the neighbor who’d gone belly-up on the stand. No question about it, this was a tough case.

“Who represented Lilah?” I asked.

“Mike Howell. Know him?”

“Oh yeah.”

Mike and I had been hired at the same time, did Planning and Training together. But after packing in about a hundred trials, he’d decamped for the greater financial rewards and flexibility of private practice. Mike and I were still friendly, and it would’ve been nice to get his personal take on the case. But the attorney-client privilege lasts a lifetime—sometimes longer—so I knew there wasn’t much point in talking to him.

“The case had its problems, but even so, that defense probably never would’ve flown with another lawyer…” Larry trailed off.

We shared a look of understanding. Mike was one of the good guys who played it straight and fair, but he was unquestionably one of the best in the business. He knew how to zero in on every weak spot in the prosecution’s case, and how to play the jury. To call him a formidable opponent was like calling Bill Gates “comfortable.”