The Last Plea Bargain (3 page)

3

On the way home, I called Regina. “He didn't even put up a fight,” I said excitedly. “He said I could ride second chair as long as he controlled the strategy.”

There was silence on the other end as Regina processed the information. “I was afraid of that,” she eventually said.

“Huh?”

“The boss could be planning on either not charging Tate or negotiating a quick plea. He knows that if he has you involved, the press will have a harder time attacking him for being soft because they know how much you hate Tate. You're his buffer, Jamie. Blunt any criticism in the midst of an election campaign.”

I hadn't even thought of that. And for a moment I wondered if I would ever be half the lawyer my mentor was. Or Masterson either, for that matter.

“But the autopsy's not even done yet.”

“When's the last time the boss reacted instead of being proactive?”

Regina had a point.

“So you're saying I shouldn't take it?”

“No; he wants you involved,” Regina said. “And you know Bill. If he believes Tate poisoned his wife, he'll charge hell with a water pistol to convict him. He's just making sure he's covered if he decides to pull the plug.”

“Nice to know I'm valued,” I said.

My spirits lifted when I walked in the front door of my house and was greeted like a rock star by my black Lab. We wrestled for a while on the floor and played tug-of-war with some well-worn interconnected rubber rings. He growled like a he-man and jerked his strong neck muscles back and forth to pull the toy out of my hands. I growled back and then loved on him and fixed him dinner. He'd been cooped up in the house for more than twelve hours and was starved for attention.

“It was a good day for the good guys,” I said to Justice. He looked up at me with those adoring brown puppy-dog eyes and tilted his head to the side.

“We're going to get this guy,” I promised him.

4

On Wednesday, my BlackBerry alarm went off at 5 a.m., a half hour earlier than normal, and Justice decided it was time to eat. Normal people could work their snooze alarms for a good fifteen or twenty minutes, but not me. Like one of Pavlov's dogs, Justice thought the unique alarm on the BlackBerry was designed solely for him and meant one thing and one thing only. He pawed at my hand until I reluctantly rolled out of bed and padded downstairs to the kitchen. I fixed a cup of coffee for me and breakfast for my housemate.

I lived in my parents' house, the same house where I had grown up. It was a nice place in the upscale Seven Oaks subdivision of Alpharetta, Georgia. The house was over three thousand square feet, and Justice and I used a grand total of about four rooms. A year ago, my brother and I had decided that my father could no longer live here alone. Chris, a pastor for a small church in northern Georgia, offered for Dad to move in with him. But my father's independent streak and stubbornness nixed that plan. We quickly realized that the only way my father would accept help was if Justice and I moved back home.

This was also the house where my mother was killed. For the first month after I returned home, I had nightmares every night. But my father had refused to move out, believing that he would be severing his last connection with my mom. And so I left the chic urban setting of my apartment at Atlantic Station to move to suburbia, to a neighborhood of families and married couples who embraced me and Justice warmly. And now, after a year in a house with a fenced-in backyard, I doubted whether I would ever be able to go back to the life of studio lofts.

I let Justice out the back door and started preparing mentally for the day's events. I put on my workout clothes—long running tights and a T-shirt for a brisk March morning. Justice and I would go for a run through the neighborhood, and then I would be on my way to work by seven.

I was the busiest prosecutor in Milton County, and I would have it no other way. When I interviewed with Bill Masterson, I explained to him that I was philosophically opposed to plea bargains—deals cut by prosecutors in 90 percent of their cases that usually allow the defendants to serve less time in exchange for a guilty plea. He explained that Milton County handled about eight thousand felony cases a year and that the system would shut down without plea bargains. We eventually agreed on a compromise—I could implement a no-plea-bargain strategy on my own cases as long as I got the job done and handled the same caseload as everyone else. To the surprise of most people in the office, my strategy worked. Many of my defendants pleaded guilty even without a deal, hoping the court might show some leniency.

Defense lawyers hated me for it. Even the judges thought I was a little crazy.

At seven o'clock, I left the calm of my home behind and started navigating traffic on the back roads to my office. On the way, I thought about the frantic appeals Mace James would be filing, and I thought about my dad. I also thought about the meeting that would be the highlight of my day. The autopsy had been completed on Rikki Tate.

Milton County's top medical examiner, a feisty lady named Grace O'Leary, didn't look much like a distinguished doctor. She was short and plump with unruly black hair. She smelled like cigarettes, which I found ironic because I knew she had seen up close what cancer could do to a person's lungs. But she was unimpeachable on cross-examination, a bigger-than-life presence in the courtroom.

The first time I worked with Dr. O'Leary, she had made it clear who was boss. I was second chair on a murder case, and one of my jobs was to prepare O'Leary for cross-examination. She took this assignment as a personal insult and reminded me that she had been doing autopsies since before I was born.

In typical Jamie Brock fashion, I'd badgered her for a meeting anyway and she had finally relented. But she had terms. The meeting was to take place at her lab; every prosecuting attorney should understand exactly how an autopsy was performed, or they would never be able to ask intelligent questions about it. It just so happened that she could squeeze in our meeting right after a scheduled autopsy she had the next day. Why didn't I come by early so I could see it? I should have known it was a setup, but I am Jamie Brock, athlete and hard-nosed prosecutor who is not afraid of a little blood. So I'd agreed to the invitation as though we were going to lunch.

On the way downstairs to the lab that day, O'Leary was talkative and upbeat. “Did you know that
autopsy
is a Greek word that means ‘see for yourself'?”

“Not really.”

“I'm just like every other doctor,” she explained. “It's just that my patients happen to be dead. Still, they have a story to tell, and it's my job on the witness stand to help them tell that story.”

I could already see why the prosecutors all said O'Leary was the best secret weapon we had in Milton County.

I held up pretty well during the external examination—O'Leary recording the height and weight of the naked, blue body and dictating notes about identifying marks, scars, and tattoos. As she chatted, I started getting a little nauseated just thinking about the fact that the man in front of us had stopped breathing nearly forty-eight hours ago. Rigor mortis had set in, and O'Leary treated him like a slab of beef.

My knees went weak when she performed the Y-shaped incision from both shoulders down through the sternum and then pulled back the skin and underlying tissues. I passed out before she got around to removing the brain.

When I returned to my office that day, I found out that only three ADAs had made it through an entire autopsy. But I was a little embarrassed to learn that nine out of ten made it further than I had. From then on, I decided O'Leary didn't require the kind of trial prep that most witnesses did.

“Jamie, great to see you again,” O'Leary said when I showed up to discuss Rikki Tate's autopsy. Thankfully, we were in her office. On the way over, I had been dreading the thought of her inviting me to the lab so we could talk while she carved up another dead person.

“Do you want to sit down before I show you the photos?” she asked.

“Thanks,” I said and took a seat. There was no sense trying to play macho with somebody who had already made me faint.

For the next few minutes Dr. O'Leary walked me through the autopsy, illustrating each step with graphic photos, inserting a few stories about other autopsy victims along the way. O'Leary had found no signs of trauma, choking, or any possible cause of death apart from the drug overdose. She had ruled out congestive heart failure and sudden acute heart failure.

“Rikki's lungs had pulmonary congestive edema, which is a very common finding in people who die of drug overdoses. It means her lungs were filled with fluid and that she basically suffocated. It's not a common finding in people who die of a heart arrhythmia.”

She explained that she had taken blood from a femoral artery and had sent that blood and Rikki's stomach contents to the state's toxicology lab. She checked the exact numbers on the tox report. “We sent 134 grams of gastric contents. The lab found 16 milligrams of oxycodone and 9 milligrams of codeine. In the blood they found .74 milligrams per liter of oxycodone and .27 milligrams per liter of codeine.”

“How do those levels compare with other levels you've seen?”

“They're toxic,” O'Leary said confidently. “The codeine alone would kill her. The oxycodone alone would kill her. Combined, they have an additive effect and are clearly the cause of death. You might see higher levels than these in hospice patients, but even for addicts, these levels are elevated.”

I had already heard by way of the grapevine that the tox lab had found elevated levels of drugs. But that didn't answer the most important question: “Is there any way to tell whether this is an accidental overdose or whether she was poisoned?”

O'Leary reorganized her papers and put them in a neat little stack. We were done with the hard data. Now for the analysis. “That's the question, isn't it?” Without waiting for me to answer, she launched into her theory.

“The best way to tell would be to send her hair to the lab for testing. Drugs in the blood bond to the roots of the hair. As the hair grows out, the drugs become an integral part of the hair shaft. Hair grows at a rate of about one centimeter per month, so depending on how long someone's hair is, you can sometimes determine how long they've been exposed to the drugs. Rikki had short hair, but you could still probably get six months of data.” Before I could ask any questions about the hair testing, she moved on to her second point.

“Another curious thing is that I found promethazine in Rikki Tate's stomach contents and blood. That's an antinausea drug that helps somebody absorb narcotics into their system. You usually don't see this unless it's a pretty sophisticated addict or a doctor prescribes promethazine along with oxycodone. When I checked Rikki's medical records, I didn't find any prescriptions for these drugs.”

O'Leary paused and studied my expression. She apparently wanted me to absorb this and consider the implications, which were not good for our case.

“If you're thinking that Caleb Tate poisoned his wife, he would have to be pretty sophisticated to stick promethazine in there as well. And if he were that sophisticated, he probably would have used drugs that would be more difficult to detect.”

“Where could we have the hair analyzed?”

O'Leary stuffed the pictures and autopsy report back in her folder. “There's a lab in Washington, DC, called National Toxicology Testing. They're the best in the business. They should be able to tell us how long Rikki Tate had been ingesting these drugs.”

“Let's give it a shot,” I said. But I didn't hold out much hope. Caleb Tate was not stupid. If he was cold-blooded and cunning enough to poison his wife, he would have done his research. He would have slipped the drugs into her food gradually, over time, culminating with one massive overdose. He would know all about hair testing. And he would use it to prove that Rikki Tate had been taking these drugs for a very long time.