The Last Plea Bargain (28 page)

64

Chris asked me if I wanted him to stay with me Tuesday night, but I lied and said I would be fine. I had always thought that once Antoine Marshall was executed, I would experience a sense of closure and be ready to move on to the next phase of my life. But on the way back from Jackson, I realized how much this struggle had defined me. Now that he was dead, now that the fight was over, I felt like a big part of me had died as well. What made it worse was the convoluted way it had all ended. Antoine Marshall had stepped up and done the right thing, taking responsibility for his actions. But I had dodged my responsibility to the justice system, finding ways to keep harmful information secret—an approach that had sealed Antoine Marshall's fate.

It was over so abruptly. And the image of Antoine Marshall strapped to the gurney, eyes closed and the IVs in both arms, was seared into my memory. That night I took the Lunexor that Gillespie had prescribed but didn't experience the same type of high I had experienced before. It did help me sleep, but the next day I couldn't force myself out of bed before eleven. I just wanted to stay in a fetal position under the blankets until the pain went away, until my mother and father came back and the ache in my heart disappeared.

For two days I stayed in my sleep clothes until the afternoon hours and seldom ventured outside my house. I had a session with Gillespie on Thursday night, and he tried to walk me through some relaxation techniques, but nothing worked. With the death of Antoine Marshall, and especially the circumstances surrounding his death, I had lost my zeal for being a prosecutor. Without that, I wasn't even sure who Jamie Brock was anymore.

I spent most of Friday going through old scrapbooks and memorabilia that reminded me of my mom. When I was a teenager, I hadn't been that interested in her work as a forensic psychiatrist. But now, as I read some of the newspaper clippings she and my dad had saved, I gained a new appreciation for what a powerful witness she must have been. She testified all over the country against defendants who claimed insanity through irresistible impulse. She had apparently developed a subspecialty in what it took for somebody to be brainwashed and was the psychiatrist of choice for many high-profile cases when prosecutors were debunking that defense.

Out of all the articles I read, it seemed that she lost only once. The defense lawyer was a young showboat from Las Vegas named Quinn Newberg.

But my mom testified for the defense side as well. On that side, she specialized in cases involving alleged sexual abuse when the victims claimed to recall the abuse under hypnosis. My mom was apparently a national leader in showing how persons who were susceptible to hypnosis were equally susceptible to the power of suggestion from the person who had hypnotized them. Oftentimes the counselor or psychiatrist would help the “victim” create a detailed account of sexual abuses that never actually occurred.

It was such a tragic waste that my mom had been cut down in the prime of her professional career, not to mention at a time when her daughter needed her most.

I called Chris a few times, and he seemed to be moving on better than me. But then again, he didn't have to live with the secrets I did. I had decided that I would never tell him. I felt I was already paying a high price to protect my father's reputation. There was no sense destroying Chris's memories as well.

Late Friday afternoon, I finally got sick of feeling sorry for myself and called Bill Masterson. He asked how I was doing, and I told him I had been better. His solution didn't surprise me.

“I think it's time that you get back in the saddle. That's what both your mom and your dad would have wanted.”

I agreed with him because I didn't have the energy to tell him the truth—that I was wondering whether I even wanted to be a prosecutor anymore.

“We need to get the Caleb Tate case nol-prossed next week,” Masterson said. “And we need to get ready for the press onslaught when we do.”

I knew what that meant. I would be the one to face the reporters and tell them we didn't have enough evidence to go to trial. Everybody knew how much I wanted to nail Caleb Tate. The fact that we were backing off, at least for the time being, would go down easier coming from me.

When I went to bed Friday night, the last image in my mind was the same one I had seen every other night before the medication kicked in—the face of Antoine Marshall, a man who was haunting me in death as much as he did in life.

65

The phone woke me out of a sound sleep early Saturday morning. Too early. I checked the caller ID—LA—and rolled over to go back to sleep. Next he sent a text message saying we needed to talk and followed this with another phone call. He left a voice mail, but I was too tired to check it and before long had dozed back to sleep, the medication doing its job.

But LA knew how to be persistent. The next time I woke up, it was because Justice was barking like mad at somebody knocking on the front door. I decided to ignore this too, but whoever it was couldn't take a hint. I squinted at the clock. It registered 7:05. I tried to shake off the effects of the medication, and it finally dawned on me that nobody would come to the house this early unless it was an emergency.

I looked at my bed hair in the mirror and matted it down a little before I padded to the front door. I squinted at the sunlight and saw LA standing there, hands in his pockets, patiently waiting. I opened the door, and Justice jumped on LA, licking as usual. I tried to think of something clever to say, but my mind wasn't really functioning yet.

“Can I come in?” he asked. “We've got to talk.”

I could tell by the grave look on his face that something was desperately wrong. Perhaps Caleb Tate had gone public with the information about my father and Judge Snowden. Maybe the press was getting ready to do an exposé about something someone had dug up on Masterson. It was still hard for me to concentrate and formulate my thoughts, like my mind was wading through a swamp.

“Sure. I'll make some coffee.”

LA came in and sat down at my kitchen table. He absentmindedly rubbed Justice's head while I got the coffeemaker started.

“Remember the kid who pleaded guilty on Monday?” LA asked. He wasn't going to wait for the coffee. He just needed to unburden himself.

“Yeah. But I don't remember his name.”

“Latrell Hampton,” LA said.

I was standing next to the coffeemaker with my arms crossed. This whole conversation wasn't making sense. “Okay,” I said.

“We put him in solitary,” LA said, his face ashen. “We did everything we could to protect him. We knew the gangs would try to take him out.”

As I waited for the coffee to brew, the cobwebs started clearing. Something had happened to Hampton.

“That was my case. I put 24-7 surveillance on both his mother and his former girlfriend for two days. But resources are scarce, so we reduced it to drive-bys. Late last night, they attacked his girlfriend and her three-year-old son. Slit the girlfriend's throat. Stabbed her thirty-two times. Killed the kid, too. Stabbed him multiple times.”

The thought of it made me sick. And I knew the newspapers would be all over this. The cops would get crucified.

“I spent the night over there working the crime scene. Jamie, we just didn't have enough officers available to stand watch at that house and at his mom's house 24-7. And now . . .” His voice trailed off.

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“I've worked a lot of crime scenes,” LA continued, looking at me with those sad, steel-blue eyes, “but I don't think I've ever seen so much blood.”

The coffee finished brewing, and I poured our cups. I sat at the opposite end of the kitchen table from LA and spent thirty minutes trying to tell him it wasn't his fault.

He asked if he could hang out at the house for a while, and I went upstairs to take a shower and change clothes. When I came back down, he was sleeping on the couch.

We spent the day together and avoided talking about Latrell Hampton except for a few phone calls LA had to field about the investigation. We went out to dinner that night at a local Macaroni Grill. It was the first time I had felt like a human being in a week.

When he dropped me off at the house, I stayed in his car and talked for another thirty minutes. Just before I got out, he steered the conversation back around to the case that brought him there in the first place.

“We both know who's behind this, Jamie. You can't let him off the hook on that murder case. Until we take him out, we'll never break the back of this conspiracy.”

“It's out of my control,” I said. “Masterson made the call.”

LA turned in his seat and looked at me. “You know what I love about you? You have no idea how popular you are. If you threatened to quit over this, there's no way Masterson would let you.”

“You don't know Masterson.”

“I know he's a politician. And I know the surest way to lose votes right now is to tell the public that he forced Jamie Brock to nol-pros the Tate case and she quit. Think about how that would play out.”

LA had a point, but I knew it wasn't that easy. “If we go to trial, all this stuff about my dad comes out. Tate will annihilate Rivera on cross, and the press will crucify Masterson and me. It's too late now.”

“That's where you're wrong,” LA said, his voice animated. “First, I don't think you had any obligation to divulge that information to Mace James. Nobody can prove anything except that your father did well in front of Judge Snowden. And even if you did have a duty to divulge it—you told Masterson, and he told the AG. What more could
you
do?”

“I don't know,” I said. “It sounds logical sitting here tonight, but Caleb Tate would play it—”

“Jamie,” he interrupted, “they made the little boy watch while they slashed his mother's throat. The CSI guys could tell because of the blood-spatter evidence. What kind of animals do that? What kind of warped man incites them?”

It seemed to me that LA was piling assumption on top of assumption. But I shared his burning desire to take down Caleb Tate. Maybe I was doomed to live life as a fighter, my self-image defined by my enemies more than by the people I loved.

“I'll think about it,” I said.

“That's all I can ask.” And then, as if to seal the deal, LA reached over and gently placed his hand behind my head. He leaned in and gave me a kiss, and I didn't fight him. It had been a long day, and my emotions were raw, but this felt right.

We pulled back and lingered there for a moment, a few inches apart.

“I need to get going,” I said.

I got out of the car because I didn't trust myself to stay there. I closed the car door but leaned back down. He rolled down the passenger window. “Thanks for the kiss,” I said.

“There's more where that came from.”

I smiled. Probably for the first time in more than a week. “I never doubted that,” I said.

66

I set my alarm for 6 a.m. on Sunday, and Justice forced me out of bed. He wagged his tail and jumped around while I fixed him breakfast, as if to celebrate the fact that his master was coming back to life. I worked all day on a memo arguing that we should proceed with the Tate trial, now scheduled to start in just eight days. I knew we could get a brief continuance and push the case into September if we needed to. But we had subpoenaed the witnesses more than a month earlier, and I had developed outlines for each person's testimony. I wanted to start on schedule.

Sunday evening, LA came to the house and fixed dinner while we discussed everything we needed to get done in the next few days if Masterson allowed the case to go forward. We avoided talking about the alternative—what would happen if Masterson called my bluff and I had to resign.

I got to work at eight o'clock Monday morning and left a copy of my memo on Bill Masterson's desk in an envelope marked
Personal and Confidential
. At nine, I checked with his assistant to make sure Masterson would see the memo that morning. He had gone straight to court, she said, but she would make sure he got it.

I checked back with Masterson's assistant twice and would have checked a third time, but she was clearly getting perturbed. At four thirty, just before I picked up the phone to call his cell, Bill Masterson walked into my office, shut the door behind him, and sat down across from my desk.

“I got your memo,” he said. “You put a lot of work into it.”

“We've got to take a shot at this guy. It's the right thing to do. As you can tell, I feel pretty strongly about it.”

There was no need to say anything else; I'd put it all in the memo. I believed Caleb Tate was the man who had initiated the no-plea-bargaining chaos. I was sure he had killed his wife. I was willing to risk the reputations of my father and Judge Snowden just to get a chance to argue Tate's case to the jury. My last paragraph contained my ultimatum. I would resign rather than drop the case.

Masterson and I talked for a while about how we might handle Rivera's testimony. Masterson confirmed that he had provided the information about Snowden to the AG's office. They had decided last Monday not to pass it along to Mace James.

“You're willing to put your dad's reputation on the line?”

“Yes, sir. I am.”

He rubbed his face and thought, staring at the floor. Then his eyes lit up as if he'd had an epiphany.

“Rivera's going to deny saying anything about bribing Snowden, right?” Masterson asked.

His excitement got my heart pumping faster. “Yeah. He denies that conversation ever took place.”

“Right. So Tate will ask Rivera about it on cross-examination. Rivera will deny the conversation ever occurred. Your dad's record in front of Snowden isn't direct evidence—at best it's corroborating evidence. But before corroborating evidence like that can be considered, somebody's got to testify about the underlying threat by Rivera. And who's the only person who can do that?”

“Tate,” I said. It suddenly seemed so obvious.
How could I have missed it?
“You're right,” I continued, thinking out loud. “Even if we believe Tate's version of events, Rafael Rivera never mentioned my father. He only mentioned Judge Snowden. The only witness who can drag my father into it is Tate. And if Tate waives the Fifth Amendment and takes the stand, we'll nail him.”

Masterson was standing now, watching it all play out in his mind. “So Tate can still gut Rafael Rivera's testimony, but the price he pays is that he's got to take the stand himself.”

“I think that's right,” I said. I was disappointed I hadn't realized this earlier. But at the same time, Masterson's excitement was contagious.

“And if he does that, this whole case will come down to our cross-examination of Tate,” Masterson said. I could tell by the look in his eyes that he relished the thought.

“Here's what we're going to do,” he said. “We go to trial next week. You take the opening and every witness except Rivera and Tate. I'll take those two and the closing.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

We discussed the details of the case for another hour. Masterson wasn't worried that he hadn't fully prepared for the case; he'd get up to speed watching the first part of the trial. I wished that I had half the man's confidence.

After he left my office, I called LA.

“We're in,” I said.