“One of my clients is presently on trial here.” The man’s voice was low and melodic. “I’d like to discuss a matter that’s come up. It involves you.”
“Who is your client?”
“He’s a Mexican national. If you follow the news, you might have heard of him. Eduardo Capilla. He is better known as El Halcón.”
Lincoln Rhyme was rarely shocked. But the ping in his insensate body was manifest as a significant throbbing in his head. This was the very case that he’d so wanted a piece of, but had been unable to participate in because of his commitment to Daryl Mulbry and the AIS down in Washington.
“I’m familiar with him. Go on, please.”
Carreras-López continued, “I know you understand the protocols of criminal trials. The prosecution is obligated to give the defense its evidentiary files prior to trial. In that material we received from the U.S. attorney, we discovered your name listed as a potential forensic analyst and witness. But a notation said you were not available.”
“I submitted my name to consult for the prosecution but I had to be out of town.”
“I looked you up, Captain, and was, I must say, impressed at your background and expertise. Extremely impressed.” He paused. “I gather that the consulting work you do is exclusively for the prosecution.”
“Some civil work—for plaintiffs and defendants—but in criminal, yes, I work for law enforcement.”
With the occasional spy thrown into the client mix.
“Yes, well, if I may take just a few moments of your time to explain. The trial is under way and the prosecution is presenting its case now. In looking over the evidence, our experts believe they have found something troubling. That the evidence, some of the evidence, has been manipulated by the police or FBI. My client is unpopular, and—frankly—he’s not such a very nice person. He has done some bad things in his life. But that does not mean he is guilty of the crimes he’s on trial for.”
“And you want to hire me to see if I can find proof the evidence was manipulated?”
“I think you are not a man who cares much about money, though we would pay a substantial fee. I think you are, however, a man who cares about right and wrong. And there is something very wrong about this case. But I can find no one who wishes to help me prove it. Of the four former prosecutors and retired forensic officers, and two professional forensic analysts I approached to help us, all have declined.”
“You’ve made a motion to exclude the evidence, or for a mistrial?”
“Not yet. We don’t want to do so without some substantive proof.”
Rhyme’s thoughts tumbled. “From what I read there were multiple charges.”
He heard a chuckle. “Oh, yes. Since you and I don’t have an attorney-client relationship, I will refrain from saying anything specific. But let me give you a hypothetical. A suspect is charged with five counts. There is no doubt he is guilty of one—let us say entering the country illegally. And there is ample evidence for that. And the jury will certainly convict. But the other, more serious counts, assault with a deadly weapon and attempted murder, he is absolutely not guilty of. Someone else committed those crimes and my client, my hypothetical client, was not even present when they happened.”
“Justice,” Rhyme whispered.
The lawyer said, “Yes. The very issue at hand. Mr. Rhyme, in reading about you, I saw you once testified at the petition of a man seeking release from prison on the ground that the laboratory technician had intentionally altered DNA results. You told the court that whether it was intentional or innocent, a forensic scientist’s errors in processing evidence are inexcusable. Truth is paramount, you said.”
He recalled the case, easily picturing the face of the man who’d served eight years for a rape he did not commit. The convict’s eyes, fixed on Rhyme’s, had been filled with hope and desperation. The woman technician who’d intentionally written the false report, because she believed him guilty, had not looked up from the floor.
Rhyme said, “I never make a judgment about the moral nature of the defendants in the trials I work. I’m in the midst of a big case at the moment but if you want to come to my town house, we can talk about it.”
“Ah, really, Mr. Rhyme? I am so grateful.”
“I can’t promise anything but I’d like to hear the details.”
They chose a time and Rhyme gave his address. They disconnected.
Rhyme wheeled up to the evidence charts. Cooper was writing up some recent information from the crime lab in Queens: The DNA and fingerprinting from the jacket found in the storm drain had come back negative. So had the hairs and swabs from the Gravesend attack.
Rhyme noted the words on the whiteboard. He tucked them away and then returned to thinking about what the Mexican lawyer had told him. He thought too of Sachs, Sellitto, Cooper and the others, hard at work on the Unsub 47 case and reflected, What would they think if they knew I’m considering signing on with the drug dealer’s team?
There was no good answer to that question and so he ignored it and returned to the evidence.
Chapter 36
The word “bedridden” didn’t really fit for the now. It fit for the then.
The long-time-ago then.
The Jane Austen then. The Bront? Sisters. The novels that Claire Porter used to read and reread—in college and after. Recently, some of them.
Bedridden.
Often, in those books, a character was tucked away under down comforters and thick blankets, with a compress on a feverish forehead, because of some mysterious unnamed disease. Or exhaustion. Exhaustion was a common malady in the then. When reading about life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Porter always wondered what could be so stressful back then that you had to recuperate by staying in bed for weeks at a time. Or taking a cruise (if you were one of the posh people).
Posh. Another good then word.
Nothing posh about my bedridden life, thought the thirty-four-year-old.
Lying on her Sealy Posturepedic in the bedroom of their first-floor apartment in Brooklyn, Porter looked out the window at Cadman Park, monotone and wet and chill today, which fit her mood pretty well.
The slim brunette barista had been sidelined not by exhaustion or a novelist’s anonymous disease but because she’d tripped over a dog. Not even hers, but a fuzzy little thing that’d slipped a lead while she and her husband had been out jogging and darted in front of her. She’d twisted away, instinctively, and heard a pop in her ankle. Down she went.
Hell, a sprain, she’d thought.
Wrong. It was one fucking nightmare of a break.
Two surgeries to start, then a battle with infection, then under the knife again—to place steel pins. Bionic woman, her husband had joked gamely, though he was clearly shaken by her pain—and, understandably, dismayed by his new responsibilities; the couple had an eighteen-month-old daughter. Dad—a graphic designer in Midtown—was now living a double-shift life. And she couldn’t even think about his cheerfully forced nod when the doctor said it was best to avoid “intimate relations” that would put the ankle at risk for at least six months. (Something Victorian about the MO’s phrase too, come to think of it.)
With a crutch, Porter could just about handle the basics: The bathroom. A trip to the mini fridge that Sam had set up in this, the guest, bedroom. She could get a bottle and the solid food to feed Erin, whose small bed was beside hers. That was about the extent of her activity until the wound healed. How she loved to cook, how she loved to run, how she loved the barista job—the banter, the quirky and bizarre people she met.
But it was another month of being bedridden.