The Last Plea Bargain (26 page)

59

Bill Masterson was not in the office on Thursday. According to his assistant, he had decided to take Thursday and Friday off after his big primary win and decompress at a friend's cabin on Lake Oconee. It was, she said, his first time off in months. He was trying to read through some policy papers and get ready for the fall campaign. He had left Regina Granger in charge of the office, and he wasn't answering his cell phone.

I left the office at noon, went home to change, and picked up my file with the information about Judge Snowden and my dad. With any luck, I would be at Lake Oconee by four.

I thought about calling LA, but I knew he would try to talk me out of it. If he truly cared about me, he would understand.

The “cabin” where Bill Masterson was staying turned out to be a beautiful two-story house on a private wooded lot shaded by two-hundred-year-old pine trees. It had a long, sloping backyard that led down to the lake. Masterson's car, a Ford Taurus, was in the driveway. I knocked on the door of the house a couple of times, each time louder than the last, and even rang the doorbell. When there was no answer, I wandered around to the back.

I spotted my boss at the end of an enormous pier that stretched out onto Lake Oconee and served as a dock for two Jet Skis, a motorboat, and a small white yacht. I started walking down the hill, file in hand, and called out to him. Masterson pulled his sunglasses down and squinted at me over the top of them. Once he recognized me and the shock wore off, he put the sunglasses back on and waved for me to come on down.

He was wearing only a pair of baggy shorts; I felt a little awkward seeing my boss with his shirt off, especially since nobody had ever accused Bill Masterson of staying in shape. If the voters could see him now, I thought, his poll numbers would drop by 20 percent. He was a hairy man, and he had either layered on gobs of sunscreen or he was sweating like crazy in the ninety-degree heat. Under the hair that covered his arms, chest, stomach, and back, his skin was white except for the farmer's tan he had from the biceps down. He had broad shoulders and a thick chest, but his gut hung over his shorts. He didn't seem the least bit self-conscious about it—I noticed a T-shirt on the deck, but Masterson made no effort to put it on.

“Jamie! What a great surprise! I didn't know you and I shared the same fishing hole.”

It wasn't until he said it that I noticed a pole propped up with its line in the water. But the boss didn't seem to be paying much attention to it. A pile of briefing books surrounded his chair, and he had been lost in his studies when I first approached.

“Sorry to interrupt. I know you only have a few days to wind down, and I wouldn't be out here unless it was an emergency.”

He waved it off. “Don't worry about it. I was already getting lonely. Had half a mind to start going door to door around the lake, passing out political flyers just to get my daily quota of handshakes. Here, have a seat.”

He moved some books, and I pulled up a lounger a few feet away. I was wearing shorts and a tank top, and I kicked off my flip-flops. It felt good to be out in the sun.

“It's beautiful out here,” I said.

Masterson talked for a few minutes about the friend who was letting him use his lake house and how hunting and fishing helped him keep a sense of perspective. He warned me to be careful—my life would be consumed by the law if I never took time to smell the roses.

“You think you're indispensable,” he said. I sensed that he was talking more about a younger Bill Masterson than about me. “You think you're Superman. But as you get older, you get burned a few times, and you get pretty cynical. One of two things can happen. Either you get obsessed with putting the bad guys away and start to cut corners to make it happen, or you just throw your hands up and say, ‘What's the use?' You feel like you're trying to drain the ocean with a teaspoon. I've seen a lot of good prosecutors either blur the lines or get burned out.”

The boss looked out over the water and spoke with his relaxed Southern drawl. For the first time, I noticed the beer on the other side of his chair. “I don't want that to happen to you, Jamie.”

It should have been easy to assure him that it would never happen, but I wasn't so sure anymore. Lines that once seemed clear had already started to fade.

“Actually, that's why I'm here. I need to talk to you about Caleb Tate's case, and I needed to do it now because it may have some bearing on Antoine Marshall's execution.”

The boss put down a briefing book and took a swig of his beer. “Okay. Shoot.”

It turned out to be a good setting for me to walk him through everything that had happened in the past several weeks. There were no interruptions. No smartphones buzzing to distract the boss's attention. No computer screens to glance at. I took him back to the Georgia Supreme Court hearing and Caleb Tate's threat. I told him about my search of the computer records and my discovery that my father and two other criminal-defense attorneys had enjoyed improbable success in front of Snowden. I left out my conversations with LA and Gillespie, but I told the boss that I had been wrestling with whether to say anything for weeks. I told him that, with Antoine Marshall's execution just a few days away, I couldn't keep this information to myself any longer.

With every sentence, I felt the weight of this secret, which had been beating me down for two months, slowly lifting. Part of it might have been the day or the setting, but it felt undeniably right to talk to my boss about this. I knew this step was irrevocable and that once Masterson had this information, he would have to do something with it. And I knew in my honest moments that it would mean the end of my father's reputation. But Dr. Gillespie was right—if I didn't share this information, it would mean the end of who
I
was and what
I
stood for.

Masterson showed no emotion, even when I detailed the statistics implicating my own dad. He had a few questions—the same ones I had already answered to my own satisfaction—about my father's success rate in front of other judges and whether this might just be an aberration. Then he took off his sunglasses and rubbed his face for a minute, deep in thought. He noticed what he thought was a nibble on his line and quickly jumped up, jerked the fishing rod, and reeled in the line.

“Nothing,” he said. He cast it out again before he sat back down.

“I wish you had said something earlier,” he said. “But you did the right thing coming to me before the execution.”

He leaned forward and looked out over the lake again. “It's in my hands now, Jamie. I can make some decisions that you can't make without being accused of protecting your father and trying to make sure your mother's killer doesn't get another reprieve or even a new trial.”

“I appreciate that, but it's not why I told you—”

“I know that,” Masterson interrupted. “But you're not the first person to make these kinds of allegations about Judge Snowden.” He let that thought seep in before he continued. “I've already started a below-the-radar investigation on her. I'll add this to the file.”

Add this to the file?
It wasn't the reaction I had expected. Prosecutors had a duty to share exculpatory information with defense attorneys.

“Don't we need to tell Mace James?”

Masterson shook his head. “Not until we confirm some kind of link between these defense attorneys and Snowden that's based on more than just statistics and conjecture. Case results are public information. James could have figured this out on his own. Maybe he already has. Besides, I can't let our investigation of Snowden hit the press just yet. And don't worry; your dad's cases haven't come up in that investigation.”

His approach made me uncomfortable, but I reminded myself that I had come to Masterson for precisely this reason—because he saw the big picture.

“She'll find out about it anyway in a few weeks,” I reminded him. “If we put Rafael Rivera on the stand, Tate will use it on cross-examination.”

Bill Masterson took a deep breath and looked straight at me. “With what you've just told me, we can't go to trial against Tate. He'd destroy us. Not only would his cross-examination of Rivera be devastating, he'd be able to put into evidence the fact that he told you about these matters two months before the execution of Antoine Marshall and that you just sat on them until after he died.”

“It's not too late,” I said. “We could still give this stuff to Mace James and take away that argument.”

“I'm sorry, Jamie, but not after you've been sitting on it this long. The courts would have a field day with that. Plus, it would compromise my investigation of Snowden.” He shook his head. “Caleb Tate is a big fish, but there are bigger fish out there. I know you don't like this part of what we do, but we're always making choices. And this one's pretty clear. We preserve our investigation against Snowden, protect your father's reputation, and make sure Antoine Marshall gets exactly what's coming to him.”

“But what about Caleb Tate? He's the reason every defendant in Milton County has quit plea-bargaining. Not to mention the deaths of the ones who did.”

Masterson didn't respond immediately. When he did, his tone was low and reassuring. He didn't want a debate. And he wasn't the one who had been withholding the information for two months.

“We don't know that for sure. But if he
is
behind these recent killings, we'll eventually catch him. Somebody will talk; somebody will slip up. They always do.”

“And if they don't?”

Masterson looked at his line. “Jamie, you ever go fishing?”

“No. I don't like taking the hook out of the fish's mouth.”

“Well then, let me tell you the first rule about fishing. Even the best fishermen don't catch 'em all.”

I understood exactly what he meant. But in typical Bill Masterson style, he left nothing to chance.

“And neither do we,” he said.

60

Thanks to Atlanta traffic, I had a four-hour drive home to think about what Bill Masterson had said. Before I left, he agreed to leave the overall investigation of Caleb Tate open but said we had to nol-pros the pending case since we were only three weeks from trial. If we obtained new corroborating evidence linking Tate to the drugs, we could reindict.

I called LA as I approached Alpharetta, and he agreed to meet me at a local Starbucks. I thought I owed him a face-to-face explanation.

He sipped on a latte and listened without expression as I described my meeting with Masterson. There was a long and awkward silence when I finished.

He ringed the top of his glass with his finger and said softly, “I thought we agreed to keep that information to ourselves. At the very least, I didn't think you'd go to Masterson without letting me know.”

I shifted in my seat. I was tired of apologizing to everybody for doing the right thing. And I was still thinking about the letter I had been handed in the Peachtree Road Race. Was LA really disappointed, or was he just acting the part?

“The letter from Marshall changed things. It made me realize that I couldn't just sit on this information and let him get the needle. That's not the way I do things.”

“But that's what's going to happen anyway. Except now your boss is going to sit on it, and the price of him doing that is that Caleb Tate walks free.”

“It's out of my hands,” I said.

“Is it? I don't know much about the politics of the DA's office, but I do know one thing: you're the biggest story in that office right now. If the press had its way, they'd just declare you a saint and get it over with. Even judges who hold you in contempt get skewered. If you insisted on something, Masterson wouldn't cross you.”

I thought LA was overestimating my popularity, but I could see his point. I also knew he had worked so hard on nailing Caleb Tate that he couldn't let it go. And frankly, neither could I.

LA had interviewed more than forty witnesses. We had put together a compelling case of financial motive, marital disputes, and eerie similarities with the Kendra Van Wyck case. Trial was only three weeks away. But it still all hinged on the testimony of Rafael Rivera.

“We can still make the case if we can get some corroborating evidence on Tate's access to the drugs,” I said.

LA frowned. “That's just a bone Masterson threw to you. Doing that is impossible, and he knows it.”

I spent nearly an hour with LA at the Starbucks before I excused myself. I had to go home and take care of Justice. I left feeling unsettled, and I could tell that LA felt the same. The chemistry from our prior times together was gone. It had been replaced by a battle of wills between two professionals who no longer seemed to entirely trust each other.

I couldn't shut my brain down that night even after taking an Ambien. I was tormented by the thought of Caleb Tate winning this legal battle without ever going to trial and even more by the possibility that my father had been walking on the dark side of the law. But those concerns, grave as they were, took a backseat to the one vision that literally made me sick. In five days, I would be standing in a small room at the Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson, watching medical technicians inject a deadly mixture of sodium thiopental, pancuronium, and potassium chloride into Antoine Marshall's veins. How could I stand there in silence, knowing that there was evidence that might provide a legal defense? But how could I turn over that evidence when I had been ordered by the DA not to and when I knew that doing so might free my mother's killer?

I had nightmares about the execution on both Thursday and Friday nights and woke up in a cold sweat Friday and Saturday mornings. Even during the day, I couldn't get my mind off the impending execution of Marshall. It wasn't just my dad's reputation or my obligation to the system that kept my stomach in a knot; it was my belief in a God who rewarded those who honored him and punished those who didn't. Even if we never tried Caleb Tate and the allegations about my father never came out, God would know that I had this information and had stood idly by while Antoine Marshall was put to death.

Late Saturday afternoon, I called Masterson and shared my concerns. “Whether or not we try Caleb Tate, I think we've got a duty to share this information with Mace James,” I said.

“You're too close to the case to make that call,” Masterson said evenly. “You did the right thing by bringing it to me. I'm having some people double-check your results. If the data holds up, I'll share it with the AG's office first thing Monday because they're the ones handling the appeal. I'll let them know I'm concerned about jeopardizing the investigation of Judge Snowden, but if they decide it's exculpatory and material evidence, they should disclose it. In my view, the appellate courts have already ruled that Snowden acted appropriately in this case. I don't view this as exculpatory evidence. I think it would be just another red herring for Mace James to carry on about.”

“Shouldn't we at least ask the AG's office to agree to a stay pending the results of the Snowden investigation?” I asked.

“Jamie, you're the last person I thought I'd be saying this to, but this man's had plenty of stays over the last eleven years. There's always going to be some new piece of information or a different angle the courts haven't considered. At some point, we've got to let the authorities finish the job.”

When I hung up, I still had a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. Masterson was playing this like the ultimate politician—taking his time and then passing the buck to the AG's office. By the time they got the information on Monday morning, it would be too late to verify much of anything, and they would probably decide the information wasn't material.

On Saturday night, I called my brother and asked him to explain again why he had signed an affidavit trying to get Antoine Marshall's death penalty commuted to a life sentence. This time, I was ready to listen.

He said a lot of things, but my mind was racing so fast that I couldn't really concentrate on most of it. It was the usual stuff about our duty to forgive and the state's inconsistent application of the death penalty and the fact that he believed Antoine Marshall was a changed man. All of that I had heard before. But he quoted a Bible verse I never knew existed, and it was the one thing that stayed with me long after our conversation: “Judgment without mercy will be shown to anyone who has not been merciful. Mercy triumphs over judgment.”

At eleven o'clock on Saturday evening, I picked up the phone and did the unthinkable. I called Mace James and asked him for a meeting first thing Sunday morning.