The Last Plea Bargain (12 page)

23

Ten minutes after Caleb Tate's media coup, I was called into Regina Granger's office. Masterson, who was campaigning in one of the far reaches of the state, was on speakerphone. Regina looked glum, and it was clear to me that she and Masterson had already been going at it.

“Jamie is here now,” Regina announced.

“Regina says you watched the Tate interview with her,” Masterson said.

“I did.”

“We've got to put out a statement right away denying those lynching comments. I've already had a dozen reporters call. That whole episode taints the integrity of our investigation.”

Masterson paused for a moment, and I decided not to answer.

“We could also put in the same release some verbiage about the unreliability of polygraph tests and urge everyone to withhold judgment until the police have completed their investigation. We need to have a measured but quick response.”

In a prosecutor's office, there are things said and things left unsaid. That's especially true when it comes to legal ethics, where everyone tiptoes and talks in ambiguities.

Masterson was a wily veteran and one of the most straightforward and ethical men I knew. But you don't become DA without an extra portion of street smarts. I noticed he had never asked me if I made the statements. And that was no oversight. As long as he didn't know one way or the other, he could authorize the DA's spokesperson to issue a denial. It would be our word against Tate's.

But these were not the kinds of games I played. It was the same reason I could never bring myself to plea bargain. I had this idealistic view of justice where there were good guys and bad guys. And when you start blurring the lines—a white lie here, a little deal there—it becomes impossible to distinguish them again.

“What does Regina think?” I asked. It was playing Mom against Dad, but I needed some help.

Regina gave me a sideways look as if she didn't appreciate being put on the spot. “Regina thinks that no prosecutor in her right mind would threaten a defendant that way.” Her voice was cold, and she clipped her words. “I would hope people in our office would appreciate how repulsive that imagery is to African Americans.”

Regina glared at me, and I cast my gaze toward the floor.

“But I also told Bill I see no need to respond with any kind of public statement. It just dignifies what this clown did and deflects the focus from whether he killed his wife to whether someone in our office threatened him.”

I nodded, though I didn't look her in the eye. I'd seen Masterson upset before, blustering about the office, chewing people out. But Regina was normally bubbly and cheerful, the grandmother who only saw the good in her grandkids. Seeing her this upset was unsettling.

“Let's cut the BS,” Masterson said, his voice booming over the speaker. “Did you threaten to lynch him?”

I hesitated as my brain sifted through a hundred calculations. I had worked so hard the past four years, possibly harder than anyone. My integrity and judgment had never been questioned before. I was a rising star in the office, smart enough to know that a comment like this could be fatal to my career. I couldn't see myself in private practice. And I knew that nobody would ever be able to prove whether I said it or not.

But I also knew that I had to live with myself. Good guys make mistakes. But they don't lie to cover them up.

“Well?”

“I don't think I used the word
lynched
. But I did say something about stringing him up.”

“A distinction without a difference,” Masterson said. His voice was more resigned now, the tone of disappointment. Regina gave me a sympathetic glance.

“It's been a tough couple of weeks for her,” Regina reminded the boss. “And it's not like Tate is a black suspect. We need to cut her some slack.”

“It was stupid,” I admitted. “I lost my temper. I've got no excuses.”

Masterson made us both wait a full five or ten seconds that seemed even longer. I was mad at myself, embarrassed for the office, ashamed. Basically, I just wanted to melt into the floor.

“I need time to think about this,” Masterson eventually said. “We'll need to sort through it and see if we can survive the blowback. But in the short term, we've got to do two things. First, Jamie issues an apology. Second, I take her off the case pending a full investigation. Although it may be a moot point if we can't get enough to indict.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but Regina held up a hand. “I think that's a mistake,” she said. “I'm okay with making Jamie apologize, but we can't let this publicity stunt dictate who handles the case. Put Jamie in front of the cameras, and let her do a complete mea culpa. She can talk about her mom and Tate's role in defending Antoine Marshall. She can mention losing her dad. The public will come around.”

“We can't take that chance, Regina. It was a risk putting Jamie on this case to start with. We can't jeopardize the investigation.”

“Bill, I think—”

“I'm not open for debate on this. Jamie, this is in your best interest. And frankly, none of this would be happening if you hadn't let this guy bait you into making some stupid comments.”

“Yes, sir.”

One thing I appreciated about my boss was that he didn't pull any punches, even when it hurt. You always knew exactly where you stood.

Yet this one was hard to swallow. If I ever needed somebody to cover my back, it was now. I felt like I'd given the last four years of my life to this office, and now the DA was leaving me flailing in the wind the first time I messed up. I wanted to ask him how much of this was covering his own rear in the political campaign. But my big mouth had already gotten me in trouble once, so I decided to swallow the words this time.

“Regina, why don't you help Jamie craft an appropriate apology, and I'll work with you on a statement about the investigation.”

“I think Jamie's capable of doing her own apology,” Regina said.

“Fair enough. Jamie, shoot me an e-mail within thirty minutes.”

After the call, Regina asked if I needed to talk. I told her I thought things were pretty clear. I stalked down to my office, pounded out an e-mail apologizing for my insensitivity, and fired it off to Regina and Masterson.

When that was done, I headed home. I was tired of working late hours and getting no support in return.

24

I spent hours that night in my father's study, Justice lying next to the front window, while I obsessed over the blogs. I knew better than to surf the Internet and read all the vitriol from the hatemongers, but I couldn't help myself. The paper already had an article online about Tate's polygraph test and my “lynching” comment. My apology—short, sweet, and unconditional—was contained in the final paragraph. The comments following the story were brutal. One person called me the Mark Fuhrman of the DA's office. More than half the negative comments were aimed at Bill Masterson—another alleged Republican racist who tolerated folks like me in his organization.

I had a few defenders. One said this entire thing was overblown and that Tate had no business playing the race card. Another guy, who didn't attach his name, said my comments sounded presidential, citing an Andrew Jackson quote when the South threatened to secede from the Union: “If any man has been found to be plotting secession, I will find the nearest rope and hang him from the nearest tree.”

But many of my defenders were explicitly racist. And seeing the online fury my statement had elicited, I felt more ashamed than ever.

Earlier that day, I had been angry at Masterson for not standing up for me. But as I spent time online, I realized that he had no choice. I was lucky I hadn't been suspended from the department altogether.

It was astonishing how one stupid comment and a clever media ploy by Caleb Tate could turn the momentum so quickly. I felt like I had betrayed not only the DA's office but also my family's quest for justice.

I was still in my dad's study at nine thirty when I saw a small sports car come flying around the corner into the cul-de-sac. There were only seven houses on our cozy little court, and from watching out the window in my dad's study, I knew by heart the types of cars that came and went. Once in a while, someone would come in and hang a U-turn, but this car came straight into my driveway and parked behind my dad's car. It was a red convertible, a car I had never seen before, and I wondered if the press was going to start stalking me over this story. I quickly left the study before I could be seen and peeked through a window in the dining room. Justice, on the other hand, stayed at the picture window in the study, his tail straight up and wagging, barking to welcome the new visitor to the Brock estate.

To my surprise, LA got out of the car and walked up the hill toward the house. He was wearing jeans with holes in the knees, a white T-shirt, and sandals. Definitely off duty.

What was he doing here?

The doorbell was Justice's cue to go bonkers, which was exactly what he did. I commanded him to sit, and he crouched into a near-sitting position, his butt a few inches from the floor, ready to pounce. His tail was wagging fiercely, he was already hyperventilating, and his wild eyes were focused on the handle of the door.

I cracked the door open, and Justice rammed through, jumped on LA, and began licking the poor man and rubbing against his legs.

“Hey, big fella,” LA said. I could tell by the way he started scratching Justice's back that LA had a dog.

“Think your mom will let me in?” he asked Justice.

“You got a search warrant?” I asked.

He patted his pockets. “Uh . . . left it at the office.”

I showed him in and Justice calmed down. A little. He fetched a rope toy, hoping LA would play tug-of-war.

“You want anything to drink?” I asked. “Or something to eat? I've probably got some two-week-old funeral food.”

He smiled and showed off the dimples. According to my sources, that smile was nearly legendary for putting female witnesses at ease, even to the point of telling LA their deepest secrets. And now I realized I had
already
been acting a little stupid, trying a joke that was moronic at best.

I decided to keep my guard up.

LA and Justice had taken center stage in the family room, flexing their muscles. Justice hunched down, one end of the rope between his teeth, jerking as hard as he could. LA smiled and laughed while he egged Justice on with some trash-talking. I couldn't help but notice the muscles in LA's right arm, the one pulling the opposite end of the rope. I made an effort not to stare.

“I actually didn't have supper yet,” LA said. “And funeral food wasn't exactly what I had in mind.” He dropped his end of the rope—
darn
—and rubbed Justice's head. “You win, buddy. You're too tough for me.”

He stood and showed me the dimples again. “Great dog.”

“Yeah.”

“Listen, I've got some theories about the Tate case that I want to bounce off you. Wanna go grab a bite?”

“I'm not on the Tate case anymore.”
Where have you been?

“I know,” LA said. He knelt down and started petting Justice again. “But I thought as a completely disinterested observer with total objectivity, you might be a good person for me to talk to. And I hear there's an outside possibility that if you behave yourself and kiss all the right rings, they might ultimately allow you the honor of working 24-7 on the case again so you can make Masterson look good at trial.”

Despite my cynical man-shield, I was starting to like this guy. As for Justice, he was on his back, allowing LA to rub his stomach. “Well . . . I actually haven't eaten either.”

“I'll take that as a yes. But we'll have to take your car,” he added.

“What's wrong with yours?”

LA gave me a hurt look as if he were shocked that anybody could suggest something was wrong with his car. “It's a Mazda MX-5 Miata with heated leather seats, a turbo-charged engine, and a six-speed manual transmission. Best car on the road. But it does have one glaring weakness.”

I'm not much of a car person, so I gave him a bored, unimpressed look.

“It's only got room for two,” he said. “When I take my dog, I drive the Element.”

Okay, this guy was good. The way to a woman's heart is straight through her dog. But I wasn't going down without a fight. And I made a mental note—two vehicles on a detective's salary.

“I don't like to leave him in the car that long, especially at night.”

“Who said anything about leaving him in the car? I say we get the food to go and eat in the car with him. We can stop by the grocery store and get him a rawhide.”

“You've got a dog, huh?”

“An English bulldog,” he said proudly. “Greatest breed going. . . . Well, maybe second greatest.” He gave Justice a pat.

“What's his name?”

“It's a her. And her name is J-Lo.”

“Figures,” I said. Then I went to get my shoes.

25

We drove to a nearby Steak 'n Shake and ate burgers and fries in the parking lot. For dessert, LA added a vanilla milk shake. He was sitting in the passenger seat sneaking fries into the backseat floor area, where Justice anxiously awaited the next installment.

“He's not allowed to have people food.”

LA quickly showed me both open palms, his bottom lip sticking out. “I have no idea what you're talking about.”

But Justice didn't know he'd been busted. He pawed at the outside of LA's seat as if he couldn't understand why the conveyor belt had slowed down.

“Bad dog,” LA said.

I punched him playfully. “See what you've done?”

I then scolded Justice and made him climb up on the backseat, and the conversation with LA returned to the case.

We had two different theories about the polygraph. LA assumed that Dr. Feldman had been bought off. I thought it more likely that Tate was such an accomplished liar, he could beat the exam. I had talked to several prosecutors who said Caleb Tate could make the most outrageous arguments in his cases and act like he believed them 100 percent. I knew people who could self-delude to the point that they believed their own lies. I figured Caleb Tate was one of them.

But what really intrigued me was LA's theory about the hair evidence. “You remember that case out in Los Angeles where Kendra Van Wyck was accused of poisoning her backup singer after she found out that her husband and the backup singer had an affair?”

“Yeah. I've thought about the similarities.” I'd done my research on the Van Wyck case as soon as I learned about the hair results in ours. Kendra Van Wyck was acquitted because hair testing proved her backup singer had been taking the drugs in question for a long time. But in a subsequent civil suit against Van Wyck, a hotshot young attorney named Jason Noble had proven that the hair results probably represented false positives from surface contamination—the result of improper washing techniques in the lab. The verdict on behalf of the backup singer's family had been nearly twenty million dollars. But I also knew that National Toxicology Testing, the lab used by Dr. O'Leary, had addressed any problems with the wash procedures.

“I asked our computer guys and the special master the judge appointed to check Tate's computer to see if he had ever accessed details of the Van Wyck case,” LA said. “Even though they found cocaine in the backup singer's body—not a drug we found in Rikki's bloodstream—I just thought there were too many similarities for it to be coincidental.”

LA, probably sensing that he had my undivided attention, stopped to take a bite of his cheeseburger. I could see where he was going. What if the Van Wyck case had somehow triggered Tate's plan for Rikki? What if Caleb Tate had secretly drugged his wife for six months so that her hair would be full of drugs from the roots to the outer ends? He could use the Van Wyck defense. Juries loved CSI-type evidence, and maybe Tate had created some of his own.

“About seven months ago, Tate pulled down several documents from the Van Wyck case on Westlaw. Not just the court's opinion but the briefs of the lawyers discussing the hair-testing issues in great detail.”

LA was definitely proud of himself, and he took another bite to extend the drama. But I was already seeing holes in his theory. According to Gillespie's notes, Rikki Tate had problems with drugs off and on well before Caleb Tate accessed those legal documents.

“I also talked to some of Rikki Tate's friends about the change in her hairstyle,” LA continued. He turned on the lights and showed me two pictures of Rikki. The first one was from a year earlier, when Rikki had long dark hair. The more recent one showed the short and layered look I recognized from the autopsy pictures.

“According to her friends, guess who pushed Rikki to get her hair cut?”

“Caleb Tate?” I asked hopefully.

“Told her he liked it short. Told her it made her look younger and hotter. She changed hairstyles about six months ago, and according to her friends, he heaped on the praise. A month before her death, she got another trim. Conveniently short.”

And it was also convenient, I knew, that Tate had already disposed of his wife's old hairbrushes and other toiletries. “But what about Gillespie's notes? She had addiction issues for years.”

“I thought about that. But to me the notes seemed to suggest that she would go through periods of recovery and then slide back into addiction. Off and on. She tried to quit again after her religious conversion. Plus, we don't know how many pills she was taking or how often. We do know that Caleb Tate is a control freak. Maybe he read the Van Wyck case and started slowly pumping these narcotics into her. A pill here and there in her food, whatever. He increases the dosage over time to make her look like a typical addict. He convinces her to get a haircut so we can only see the pattern for the last six months, a dramatically higher level of drugs in her system, and then . . . boom. He gives her a megadose, and he's free to go marry that cute little legal assistant of his.”

“You've got more on the legal assistant?”

“I made a graph of Tate's phone calls.” LA pulled out another set of documents. “He spent a lot of time on the cell phone with her. I can't prove it yet, but Caleb definitely had something going on the side.”

LA had been working a lot harder than I'd thought. But we still couldn't put the drugs in Tate's hands. And phone calls were a far cry from an affair. Still, even this small bit of progress made me wish I hadn't been suspended from the case.

“I don't know,” I said. “If anybody checked our phones, they'd find a lot of calls to each other.”

“And . . . ?”

“And we're not having an affair. We work together. We've got a big case. . . .”

“Not yet.”

“Not yet
what
? What does that mean?”

LA smiled his best sly, shy, melt-the-girl's-heart grin. “Not yet we don't have a big case. But I'm working on it.”

I snorted. We both knew what he was really working on.

He wiped his hands on his pants and then handed me another photo. It was a shot of Rikki Tate's hands.

“What do you see?” he asked.

“Manicured hands. Bright-red fingernail polish. Surface veins.”

“And long fingernails,” LA added. “You know what you can do with fingernails?”

I thought for a second, and it hit me. “Please tell me you can grind them up, autoassay them, and test them for chemicals.”

He smiled, nodding. “Yep. And from the lengths of those babies from the cuticles to the tips, I'd say two years' worth. Fortunately, the Van Wyck case didn't involve fingernail testing.”

I finished my meal and put my trash in the bag, wadding it up. “Why are you telling me about this stuff now? I don't even know when or if I'll be back on this case.”

He took a long slug of his milkshake, slurping as his straw caught air at the bottom. “I don't suppose you'd be willing to go on the air and give a tearful apology,” he said. “Tell everybody about your dad dying. Tell them how this man who called your dad a liar got in your face and scoffed at you. Tell them how sorry you are for allowing your passion for justice to cause you to lose all sensitivity. You could melt a few hearts with those big brown eyes, especially if you could get them to brim with tears.”

“Fake crying's not really my thing.”

“Didn't think so. That's why I've got a plan B. Make sure you check the eleven o'clock news tonight on WATL.”

“For what?”

“You'll see.” And that was all he would say about the matter. Despite my cajoling, begging, and even pouting, I couldn't squeeze another word out of him about the upcoming newscast.

When we returned home, LA got out of my 4Runner, let Justice out the back, and gave him some love. Then he stood to face me.

“We're going to get you back on this case,” he said. “You're the best lawyer in the DA's office, and I'm not willing to go to war with anyone else.”

This man hardly knew me. Still, I appreciated his vote of confidence, especially on a night like tonight.

“Thanks.”

He told me to take care of myself, jumped into his sports car, and backed out of the driveway.

I had clearly underestimated the man, once again proving that Justice was a better judge of character than I was.

That night, a WATL reporter interviewed Isaiah Haywood, my law school buddy. Isaiah was the perfect choice for the interview, and I assumed that LA had met him at my father's funeral. Isaiah was not just a close friend; he was African American and a former football star at the University of Georgia. Most people in Atlanta knew of him. He now worked for a prominent sports agency.

“Jamie Brock is one of my best friends,” he told the reporter. “I can guarantee you one thing—that woman does not have a racist bone in her body. I first met her in law school. And racist girls don't usually go out with dudes like me. In case you haven't noticed, I'm not exactly the redneck type.”

Isaiah and I
had
been close friends. In truth, we had hung out together a lot, but I had refused every offer of a date. Yet I wasn't about to call the station to clarify.

“And I find it insulting that one of the other television networks would let this white criminal-defense attorney from an all-white law firm hide behind racism as if his people had somehow been the victims of lynchings.” Isaiah was getting fired up now, his neck muscles tight. The camera zoomed in so viewers could better see the fire in his eyes.

“I've done some checking on Mr. Tate, and I found that his firm only employs two African Americans. One is a personal driver for Mr. Tate and some of his high-paid partners. The other is a courier.”

Isaiah took a breath, and the reporter interjected: “Why is that relevant?”

“Because a guy who grew up in Buckhead with rich white parents and now runs with the country-club crowd shouldn't be allowed to trot out the race card against a young attorney whom I know to be one of the most tolerant and open-minded people I've ever met.”

The reporter wrapped up the interview with a cutaway line to the anchor while Isaiah posed for the camera. I wanted to kiss the TV. Instead, I called Isaiah immediately.

“You didn't have to do that,” I said.

“I got your back, Jamie. Just make sure you get a conviction.”

At midnight, I got my second unannounced visitor of the night. I had fallen asleep on the couch, and Justice went crazy when he heard the doorbell. I jerked awake, and my heart banged against my chest. I tried to collect my thoughts, separating the nightmare I had been experiencing from the reality I had just rejoined. I shuffled to the front door and turned on the porch light.

It was Chris.

I opened the front door, and Justice mauled him.

I had to blink twice to make sure I wasn't still dreaming. Chris lived several hours away in the mountains.

“Thought you could use a little company tonight,” he said. “Got any extra rooms?”

He came into the hallway, and I gave him a big hug. But before I could say anything, before I could even thank him for coming, I started crying. I put my head on his shoulder and let the tears flow. To be honest, I wasn't sure whether I was missing my father or thankful for my brother or mad at everything that had happened at work. I just knew I had to let it out.

“Okay,” I said when I finally pulled myself together. “I needed that. You can go back home now.”