The Rose Conspiracy (9 page)

B
lackstone retained Dr. Ken Coglin, a professor of materials engineering from the University of Maryland, as his expert examiner on the Langley notepad. Coglin had extensive experience as a forensic examiner of document imprint evidence.

AUSA Hartz immediately threw up roadblocks to the examination, but Blackstone wouldn't be diverted. Finally, he called an emergency conference call with Judge Templeton and AUSA Hartz in order to press hard for an immediate inspection of the notepad.

“I've given you a few days already,” Judge Templeton said to the federal prosecutor. “Let's not drag this out. I'm sure you can produce the notepad, Henry. Get it done.”

Twenty-four hours later Dr. Coglin and J.D. Blackstone were in a spare room in the complex of the U.S. Attorney's Office. The notepad was lying in front of them, sealed in a plastic evidence bag. FBI Special Agent Ralph Johnson, a veteran African-American FBI agent on the case, was in the room, and after snapping on latex gloves, he carefully unsealed the bag and then stepped a few feet away to observe. By agreement with Hartz, Blackstone had conceded that the government could have an agent present in the room during the document examination.

Coglin set up his high-powered microscope and focused only on the top sheet of the notepad. He set up several angled lights around the base for contrast. His microscope was then linked to a printer.

After several hours of examination, having powered down to a mere 10-4 m, Coglin printed out several versions of his microscopy view.

“Done,” he announced casually.

Agent Johnson placed the notepad back in the plastic bag and sealed it, signing off on the label on the exterior of the bag with the date, time, and his initials. Then, after a polite nod to Blackstone and Coglin, Johnson left for the FBI building, where he said he would be placing the bag containing the notepad back into the evidence room.

Coglin seemed satisfied with what he saw and explained to Blackstone that his next step would begin as soon as he returned to his University of Maryland lab.

“I will double-check my field findings,” he said, “and then feed the data on the gross outline of the impressions on the notepad into a special lexicon/epigraphy software system. I've used it in other document impression cases. I'll start with the assumption that Horace Langley was writing in English when he made his notes. But if the results are inconclusive, then I will try some other language variants. The software system I designed contains one hundred and five language identifiers. So my hunch is that we will be able to decipher the impression he left on the notepad.”

When Blackstone got back to the office later that day he noticed the light on in Julia's office down the hall. After he picked up a fistful of phone message slips from Frieda, he strolled down to Julia's office. He strode in and plunked himself down on the leather chair across from her desk.

Blackstone sat for several minutes silently, until Julia finally put down her pen, pushed her file to the side of her desk, and gave him a cold, hard look.

“Yes?” she asked.

“I just like watching you while you work,” he said with a smile.

“And I don't like being watched,” she snapped back.

“Well, I did have something to say,” he said, clearing his throat.

Julia continued to give him a cold stare.

“I admit I was condescending with you,” Blackstone said. “Sorry about that. Personality defect. Probably a defense mechanism as a result of my deep-seated insecurities.”

“Oh
please,
” she groaned.

“Okay. Apology given. Apology accepted. Moving on,” Blackstone
said with a smile, “I just got back from our examination of the notepad. Dr. Coglin's going to call me at home tonight with the results. Do you want me to conference you into the call?”

“Not really,” Julia said with a look of manufactured boredom. “I have a date tonight.”

“That's wonderful,” he said. “What's his name?”

“Oh, no. We're not going there,” she replied.

“Fine. Let's keep the professional hermetically sealed off from the personal.”

“Good,” she said. “Anything else?”

“Yes. Where's the results of your investigation into this Lord Magister Dee character?”

“I thought you'd never ask,” Julia said. Then she tapped a few times on her keyboard, waited for two seconds, and then turned to him and said, “There—I just e-mailed you my report on Lord Dee.”

“Why don't you just boil it down for me right here?” he asked. “I prefer the human touch.”

She sighed and then launched in.

“Strange guy. A member of the House of Lords. Mega-rich. Comes from old aristocratic money. Lives in a castle estate. Owns several other castles. He is a direct descendant of a guy named John Dee, who was a sixteenth-century mystic and astrologer in England. John Dee was full-blown occult practitioner and the personal mystic advisor to Queen Elizabeth I of England.”

“Why is Lord Dee's pedigree important?” Blackstone asked.

“Because,” Julia continued, “he's done a nice job of carrying on the family tradition…occult beliefs, theosophy, really medieval kinds of stuff.”

“Why did he want the Booth diary?”

“Really not sure.”

“Any wild guesses?”

“Well,” she continued, “he lectures in Europe and in the UK on what he describes as the ‘esoteric religious philosophy of the ancients.' That was the title of one of his talks. He hasn't published anything. But I notice that in his lectures he occasionally talks about the Freemasons. And also about the religious ideas of a very narrow slice of the Confederate leaders involved in the Civil War, who he describes as the ‘Gnostics.' ”

After a pause Blackstone asked, “Anything else?”

“Oh, yeah,” Julia added. “And this Lord Dee guy…he is a thirty-third-degree Freemason himself. That's as high as you can get in the hierarchy.”

Blackstone stood up quickly and announced he was heading home to his condo. He added, “I think I need to do some reading up on the assassination of President Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth, and the War Between the States.”

“You mean like this?” Julia asked, and reached down to the floor to the side of her desk and picked up several books and held them out to Blackstone.

He glanced at their covers.

“Yes, exactly,” he said with a smile. Julia was waiting for a thank-you, but she didn't get one. Blackstone turned and quickly strode out of her office.

At ten-thirty that night, Blackstone was well into one of the books, when his phone rang. It was Dr. Coglin.

“Are you ready to jot this down?” Coglin asked.

“Sure,” Blackstone said, grabbing his pen and legal pad. “Ready.”

“Okay,” Coglin said. “I have no idea what any of this means. But I've reconstructed the impressions left on the remaining pages of the notepad. Here we go. The first line appears to be Langley's own comment. The remaining four lines I presume are a copy of what he read in the Booth diary pages:

A strange cipher appears in the Booth diary as follows:

To AP and KGC

Rose of 6 is Sir al ik's golden tree

In gospel's Mary first revealed

At Ashli plot reveals the key

There was a dead silence on the phone.

Then Blackstone spoke up first.

“That's it?”

“Yep,” Coglin replied.

More silence.

Then Blackstone grunted.

“Well, happy hunting, J.D.,” Dr. Coglin said, and hung up.

Blackstone looked over the cryptic four-line poem that, according to Dr. Coglin, was the last thing communicated in writing by Horace Langley before he was murdered.

Then Blackstone, staring at the four lines of coded nonsense as he sat in his empty living room, spoke out loud into the air.

“Rats!” he yelled out in mock anger. “I
knew
Mom should have never thrown away my secret agent decoder ring.”

CHAPTER 14

W
hen J.D. Blackstone got to his office at 8:15 the next morning and opened up his e-mail, the prosecutor had a surprise waiting for him.

AUSA Henry Hartz had electronically filed an emergency motion with Judge Templeton. In it, the AUSA was demanding that “defense counsel, J.D. Blackstone, be ordered
not
to divulge, to any other person, any impression made upon, or notes or other writings contained within, the notepad of Horace Langley found at the scene of the crime.” The motion also asked that Dr. Coglin be ordered not to further disclose his findings to anyone else at least until trial. Hartz was further demanding that Blackstone not reveal what Langley wrote on the notepad even to his own client and his own law firm staff, including his partner, Julia Robins.

After reading the motion on his computer screen, Blackstone was stunned. He had been engaged in legal disputes over confidentiality issues before. But nothing like this.

Hartz wants to bar me from disclosing the strange little poem that Langley wrote, clearly a key piece of evidence, even to my own co-counsel,
Blackstone thought to himself.
He'd better have some blockbuster arguments for something as mind-boggling as that.

Unfortunately for the defense, he did.

In a court hearing conducted by telephone that afternoon, Hartz explained that even limited disclosure of the Langley notes “could jeopardize our ongoing criminal investigation into the Langley murder.”

“I thought you'd indicted the person you consider to be the culprit here, Henry,” Blackstone replied. “You're going after my client, remember?”

But Hartz cut him off.

“You'll note that she is charged with being a
conspirator.
We're still investigating the other conspirators. If Langley's notes get out, the others may flee our jurisdiction.”

Then Hartz added, “Your Honor, you will note in the sworn affidavit we filed from Detective Victor Cheski, our chief investigator in this case, that exact allegation is set out in detail.”

“I suppose you don't want to give me a teeny-weeny little hint on who those ‘other co-conspirators' might be?” Blackstone said sarcastically.

Judge Templeton brought things to a head.

“You know, gentlemen, I know you both enjoy being my special phone-pals on these emergency motions, but I've got a docket full of other cases. Let's cut the squabbling and get to the point. I have to give a great deal of deference to Detective Cheski's affidavit. As a result, I am
not
going to allow an ongoing federal investigation to be interfered with.”

“The rights of due process and a fair defense trump that, Your Honor,” Blackwell interjected, his voice rising. “I need to share this information with my client—that's a fundamental part of trial preparation. And I need to give it to my law partner who is assisting me on this case.”

“Yeah, but there's always one lead counsel, Blackstone, and that's you,” Hartz chipped in. “You know what the notepad said—that should be sufficient. And you've shown no compelling need to have your client possess this sensitive information, either. Remember, Judge, Miss Archmont is out on bail, something I objected to. She is out there in the community, where she could share this critical information with others…and if she does, the remaining conspirators could hide or destroy evidence to make themselves unavailable for legal process.”

“Mr. Blackstone,” the judge finally ruled, “I can appreciate your desire to share this with your client, Miss Archmont. And I realize that my order is highly unusual. But for now, I am going to prohibit further disclosure of the contents of the Langley notes, subject to this: If you can show me a genuine, material need you have to get your client's input on this piece of evidence, then file a motion. Detail it. If you don't want opposing
counsel to know your strategies on why your client needs to see what's on that notepad, I can understand that—in that case, request that the Court review your arguments in chambers. There's my ruling. Henry, prepare the order accordingly. And gentlemen, please let me get back to the rest of my docket.”