The foreman, a retired hardware store owner, was the first to speak. Allison knew she could always count on Gus Leonard to ask questions. Lots and lots of questions.
“What’s this girl’s family like?” He tilted his head to the side, looking like a curious old bird regarding a hole that might or might not contain a worm. “Any chance one of them could be involved in this?”
“The dad is a well-known contractor,” Nicole told him. “The mom does volunteer work. There’s also a younger sister. They are beside them-selves with grief.”
Gus and a few of the other jurors asked a half dozen more questions. Once they had satisfied their curiosity, Allison excused Nicole and stood to address them again. “There is a chance that Katie may still be alive, but we have so few clues to go on. Given Katie’s blogs, I’m asking you to issue a trap and trace on Senator Fairview’s phones to see if there is any evidence of a relationship between them.”
Unlike a wiretap, which recorded the contents of a conversation, a trap and trace was merely a record of calls made and received. The trap and trace on Katie’s phone had turned up little that was suspicious. In fact, it had hardly turned up anything at all. And that in itself had raised Allison’s suspicions. A girl that age would be on the phone all the time. Maybe Fairview had called her in her dorm room.
“Are you saying Senator Fairview is a suspect?” a grand juror named Helen asked.
“No. He’s a person of interest.”
Ever since the Atlanta Olympics bombing debacle, when Richard Jewell had been declared a suspect and turned out to be a hero, law enforcement had shied away from calling anyone a suspect until they were certain.
Allison let her gaze sweep the room, taking a few seconds to look each juror in the eye. “But if the trap and trace comes back with a lot of activity that seems out of line when you consider that he’s a senator and Katie’s just a kid in high school, then yes. At that point, I will consider Senator Fairview a suspect.”
LAW OFFICES OF STONE, HUTCHENS, AND LANGFORD
December 23
Michael Stone always made it a practice to meet potential clients in his own office, where he was clearly the top dog. No matter who the clients were, no matter how rich or how powerful, he always made them wait at least twenty minutes in the reception area.
He made no exception for Senator Fairview. When his secretary ushered Fairview in, Stone apologized effusively for making him wait.
“I was on a conference call with a client. I can’t mention the name, but you might have seen him on the front page of the New York Times last week.”
In reality, Stone had spent the twenty minutes instant messaging his kids to remind them to do their homework, as well as making arrangements for a fourth for golf on Saturday morning.
“Let me just say, Senator, that I feel honored to be chosen as the attorney for someone I have always admired.”
As he spoke, he could see the tension ease from Fairview’s shoulders. Stone took a seat behind his desk while his client settled into one of the guest chairs. Stone’s chair was six inches higher than anyone else’s—a little ploy he had learned from Johnny Cochran.
He sat back in his chair, smiling congenially. “So, Senator, were you making it with this girl or what?”
“What?” Fairview looked too shocked to be angry.
Good. Stone wanted to keep him off-balance. His clients had to know who was boss—and it wasn’t the person who was paying the bills.
“I’ve seen her pictures. She’s a cutie. And you’re a big shot senator. I’ll bet you were like a rock star to her. So were you getting it on with her?”
“No!” Fairview was now light-years away from being relaxed. “I was mentoring her,” he said, sounding like he was reading from a tele-prompter. “I often take a special interest in one or two of the pages every year, because that’s an integral part of the internship program and—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look, here’s the deal. It’s very simple. They’ve set up a grand jury to investigate her disappearance. Now they’re going after your phone records. If you had sex with her or killed her or even sent her that last crappy Paris Hilton YouTube clip, there is no way you should be talking to the feds or any other law enforcement people. Don’t worry, I’m not here to judge you. I am here to try and point out the Indians behind the trees. I just want to make sure you even see the trees!”