The Disappearance (46 page)

He sits up. “Well, that’s one I certainly missed. I should’ve talked to her earlier. I messed up good.”

“Luke, you’re too hard on yourself.”

“I’m trying to think of the consequences. Allison claims he didn’t know why she was calling, but what if the reverse is true, that he did know and was freaked out by the news? Knocking up his boss’s fourteen-year-old daughter—nothing but catastrophe there. He got her pregnant, she found out, something was going to happen. Either she tells the world who did it—him—or she wants him to help her go through the abortion process, or something equally dangerous. Dangerous not only for her life but for his career. At that moment, Joe Allison wouldn’t have given a shit about Emma Lancaster’s condition, or any danger she could be in. His ass is what he would have been worried about. So what do you do? You get rid of the evidence against you. You kill it.”

“You have good material of your own,” Riva reminds him. “Especially about Doug Lancaster. And other things, too. Your day to present your side is coming. You have to stay with the big picture, and your theme. Isn’t that what you keep telling me?”

“I know all that,” he acknowledges grudgingly. He’s on one of those down trips where you don’t want to be reminded of the good side, it’s like you want only the dark side, you wallow in it, almost, as if it’s your deserved fate. “But I keep getting tripped up by my own client,” he says. “That scares me.”

And now the sun dies in the sky and there is only a pale thin ribbon of yellow to commemorate its passage. Overhead the dense, fast-moving clouds, heavily moonlit, seem even brighter now, a night-blooming celestial cloak.

She turns to him. “Do you want to know what I think?”

His elbows leaning on the protective redwood railing, he says, “Yes, of course.” Then, “Am I going to like this? I’m not looking to get kicked anymore, not for what’s left of this day.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t.”

Sighing, he says, “Tell me. You always do. You’re my lodestar, you have to.”

“He did it.”

His stomach contracts violently. This hurts worse than the bullet he took.

“Not killed her,” Riva says, reading him, knowing he didn’t want to hear this, that he’s been avoiding confronting it. But he has to hear it, he isn’t the judge or the jury, he’s the lawyer. His job isn’t about innocence or guilt, it’s about defending his client as well as he can. If that’s the truth, he has to know it, take it in, deal with it. “He got her pregnant.”

As his stomach loosens, his heart starts pounding. “Is that what you believe?”

“Yes.” She waits before adding the rest. “Don’t you?” She reaches over and takes his hand.

“I don’t know. Maybe.” He nods confirmation. “Yes, he could have. At least he could’ve been sleeping with her. There could be someone else out there who was, too, besides the health-store guy. Someone we’ve never uncovered.”

“Yes,” she agrees, “but does that matter? The prosecution’s entire case is based on that synergy—whoever got her pregnant killed her. But that’s not your case. Keep your focus on your case, Luke.”

“My case is Doug Lancaster. I don’t know what else I have. And that could blow up in my face so easily, the martyred father. The jury could hate me and Allison before I even got to present that. I could be talking to the air.”

“They’ll listen. You’ll make them. It’s a good case, especially in raising reasonable doubt. Or unreasonable doubt.” She moves close to him, nuzzling his cheek with her lips. “There’s still a long way to go.”

He holds her, feeling her body against his, the stomach starting to show now. “It’s the lying that’s bothering me. Every time I turn around, I find out something new about Allison, and it’s never good, it’s always bad. Either he’s unconscious, which is hard to believe, or he’s hiding key things from me, which is easy to believe. That’s what’s bugging me, babe. I’ve got a client who isn’t straight with me. And the way it always goes—I can go back over hundreds of cases—when your client is doing that, he’s guilty. Of something.”

“Then you need to confront him again.”

He shakes his head. “It’s too late now. Whatever happened, happened. This is the hand I’ve been dealt, and I can’t throw in my cards. Whatever it is, I’ve got to play it.”

Officer Caramba, his uniform pressed to knife-blade sharpness, his hair freshly cut Marine-DI-style, sits in the witness chair like a tin soldier. He stares directly at Ray Logan. He does not look at the jury, nor does he look over at Joe Allison and his lawyer, the turncoat former district attorney. He is crisp, he is concise, he is coiled tight as a steel spring. Last night, for several hours, he went over his recitation with Ray Logan and Logan’s staff. Sheriff Williams was also present, even though Williams isn’t his chief, as he’s a city cop. Williams, though, is the ranking peace officer on this case. Once the initial arrest was made, his department led the investigation and found the evidence in Allison’s house. But he, Caramba, a city police officer, made the initial arrest. He got the ball rolling. Without him, there is no case. The city police force wants some of the glory, too. He’s their poster boy. It’s important that he do a good job today. That’s what he’s going to do. And he’s not going to let ponytail over there break him down.

Using maps, photographs, and other visual aids, Logan walks Caramba through his arrest of Joe Allison. Following Allison down Coast Village Road late at night, observing him driving erratically, finding him flushed and not totally coherent, then discovering the open bottle in the car, and subsequently finding the key ring belonging to Emma Lancaster in the suspect’s glove compartment, which, Caramba is quick to point out, the suspect himself had opened.

It’s a good tight presentation. The kind a cop who’s on the ball gives in a trial. Then Luke takes over. He opens the officer’s file on the podium. There are only a few sheets of paper inside, primarily his notes from their interview, which he had scrawled down afterwards to make sure his memory stayed fresh.

“Good morning, Officer.”

Caramba nods, but doesn’t say anything.

“You stopped Mr. Allison because his driving was erratic, is that right?”

“That’s right.”

“How long did you observe Mr. Allison before you pulled him over, Officer?”

“Thirty or forty seconds.”

Luke frowns. He looks at his notes. “When I interviewed you, you told me fifteen seconds. Ten or fifteen seconds.”

“More or less,” the cop says.

“Let’s get this straight, how long did you follow my client? Ten seconds, or forty? Which is it?”

“Closer to forty.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

The guy’s lying. Is the jury scoping that out? He looks over at them, but he can’t read them. “Whatever it was,” Luke throws away, “ten seconds or thirty, it was a short period of time.”

“Forty,” Caramba corrects him. “Not ten, not thirty. It was long enough for me to make my decision,” he says firmly. “It’s what I’m trained to do. If we followed every DUI suspect for too long, you could have a fatality, and that’s a lot worse than not following someone long enough. If I’m wrong,” he says, repeating what he’d told Luke in their interview, “I apologize and they go on their way. Most law-abiding citizens are appreciative of that.”

“Not every law-abiding citizen is agreeable to being stopped on a hunch, Officer,” Luke says argumentatively. He glares at Caramba. Caramba glares back at him, but doesn’t respond in kind.

Luke continues. “After you stopped my client, and began questioning him, did you ask him to step out of his car?”

“Not at that time.”

“Okay, so he’s sitting in his car, talking to you, you’re checking out his driver’s license and registration, I presume—”

“He was having a hard time finding his registration,” Caramba interjects. “That was another reason I started suspecting him. He seemed flustered about that.”

“I see.” He waits a moment, then asks, “Did he find his registration, Officer?”

“Yes, he did.”

“Where did he find it?”

“In his glove compartment.”

“Which is where people normally keep them. Did it check out? The license and registration?”

“I didn’t get that far.”

“Why not?”

“Because at that point in time I saw the open bottle in his car, so I was going in a different direction then.”

“And how was it that you saw this open bottle, Officer? On a dark night, with the driver sitting in his car with the doors closed.”

“I saw it when he opened his car door. I could see onto the floorboards in the back, behind his front seat.”

Luke thinks a moment. “Why did he open his car door? Did you ask him to?”

“I did,” the officer answers in a flat monotone.

“For what purpose?”

“So I could administer a field sobriety test.”

Luke steps back. This is what he’s been working to. “So at that point you gave my client a field sobriety test?” He makes a show of rummaging through the few remaining sheets of paper in the officer’s folder.

“No.”

Luke looks up. “Why not?” he asks, as if surprised.

“Because of the open bottle,” the cop says patiently. He doesn’t want to get into a pissing contest with this lawyer, who knows all the ins and outs from his time being the D.A.

“You found an open bottle and you didn’t give him a sobriety test?” Luke puts on a good show of being puzzled. “Why wouldn’t you do that? Isn’t an open bottle further indication that he might have been driving under the influence?”

“Yes, it would be,” Caramba admits. “And I was going to.”

“So why didn’t you?”

“Because now I was suspicious.”

“Suspicious? Of what?”

“That maybe there were other things in his car that could be illegal.”

Luke stops to think about that. He looks at the jury; they too are wondering about why this police officer acted as he did. “That doesn’t make sense,” Luke says.

Caramba bristles, but holds his temper in check. “Everything I did was perfectly legal,” he says in his defense.

“I didn’t say what you did wasn’t legal,” Luke corrects him. “I said it didn’t make sense. If you think a man has been driving while drunk, shouldn’t you test him to find out if he is? If he isn’t, you let him go, isn’t that what you just told us?”

The officer shakes his head. “Not in this case. Once that open bottle was found, that made it a different story.”

“You’re splitting hairs on me here, man,” Luke says in an annoyed tone. He wants people, especially the jurors, to know that he’s annoyed with a sworn peace officer who’s pulling legalese to avoid answering questions. “You stop someone you think might be driving drunk, you find an open bottle of whiskey in his car, and then you don’t test him. You go rummaging around in his glove box instead. What were you looking for, another open bottle? You already had one, one’s enough, more doesn’t matter.”

“I was looking for whatever I could find.”

“Really? Like what? Drugs? Guns? Or some piece of planted evidence that would tie my client to an unsolved murder!”

“Objection!” Logan is on his feet, on his toes, foaming, his hand shooting up into the air like a student desperate for the teacher to call on him. “This is totally inflammatory and irrelevant!”

Ewing hits the gavel. “Sustained.” To Luke, he says in a harsh, tight voice, “You’re about this far from contempt, Mr. Garrison.” He’s holding his thumb and forefinger half an inch apart. “No more questions like that, do you understand me?”

Luke’s teeth are grinding. “Sidebar, Your Honor.”

He and Logan stand at the side of the judge’s bench, out of the jury’s hearing. Luke fights to keep himself under control. “I understand you, Your Honor, but this goes to the heart of my argument about this evidence,” he says passionately. Gesturing across the bench at Caramba, he says, “This officer stopped the defendant on a possible DUI. He was obligated to give him sobriety tests to find out if he was over the limit. The law is clear on that. If he wasn’t drunk, there was no reason to search his car, regardless of whether there was an open bottle in it or not. Both of those offenses are misdemeanors. That’s all they are. He signs a ticket, agreeing to appear in court, you send him on his way—assuming he’s sober.” Forging on, he says, “But this officer decided to go on a fishing expedition, instead of following standard, established procedure. In fact,” Luke continues, his forcefulness picking up steam, “the defendant was
never
given a sobriety test in the field, and he was
never
informed that he was a suspect in a murder case. All he ever thought or was told was that he had been arrested for possible drunk driving, which he was never tested for. That is a fundamental violation of his rights under the Fourth Amendment. All the evidence gathered against my client is illegal, and I submit that it should not be allowed into evidence.”

“Your Honor—” Logan begins.

Ewing has already started to get up. “The court will recess for one hour,” he declares. “Opposing counsel will meet me in chambers.”

Ewing, the Federal and state Penal Codes open on his desk, is leafing through the search and seizure sections. He looks up at Logan. “What do you think?” he asks the D.A. “He’s your witness.”

“The officer acted properly within the law, Your Honor,” Logan insists. “He stops a man who’s driving erratically, he sees there’s an open bottle in the car, that not only grants him the right to search the rest of the car that isn’t locked, it’s dangerous for him not to. What if there
is
a gun hidden under the seat, and the driver decides to use it? He knows there’s an outstanding charge against him and he doesn’t want to come in. Bingo, one dead police officer.”

Ewing is listening sympathetically.

“Once the officer found the key ring in Allison’s car, the case moved beyond a simple DUI,” Logan continues. “You don’t waste time testing someone who might be a murder suspect. You bring him in for questioning as fast as you can.”

Ewing nods. “That sounds reasonable to me,” he says to Luke.

Luke shakes his head. “I disagree. The man produced his license and registration. He’s out of the car. How can he get his hands on a gun
inside
his glove compartment if he’s
outside
his car? The procedure is to check out his license and registration, find out if there are any outstanding warrants on him, field-test him for sobriety. If he fails, you cite him for drunk driving and having an open bottle in his car—they go together, it’s a good bust. But if he passes, you take the bottle, write up a ticket, send him on his merry way,
because he isn’t drunk
. Anyway,” he adds, “it’s a lot more complicated than simple DUI and having an open bottle, because of the subsequent investigation at the jail.” He takes the sheets of paper from the folder he’s been carrying, hands them to Ewing. “And this.”