Read Afraid of the Dark Online
Authors: James Grippando
O
n Thursday morning, two hours before the scheduled arraignment of Jamal Wakefield in Miami-Dade County circuit court, Jack went to the Pretrial Detention Center with just one objective:
“I’m withdrawing as counsel,” he told Neil.
The long prison corridor was lined with iron bars, and Neil had been waiting for Jack outside one of the attorney-client conference rooms. Charged with a capital offense, Jamal was held in a safety cell, away from the drunk drivers and petty thieves, which meant that he was allowed just two “under glass” visits per week. Inmates were allowed to meet and talk privately with their lawyers, however, and Jamal Wakefield was waiting on the other side of the locked door. Jack blurted out the words before Neil could even say hello.
“I’m sorry,” said Jack. “I’ll do whatever I can today to transfer the case to you. But I’m out.”
Neil just smiled, completely unfazed. “Like old times, isn’t it?”
It was indeed déjà vu. Jack had probably resigned a dozen times from the institute before actually packing up and leaving. It wasn’t just the emotional drain of defending the guilty. As he’d told Neil more than ten years ago, he probably could have stuck it out if he had met just one guy on death row who was genuinely sorry for what he’d done. But those weren’t the kind of cases that the institute handled.
“Give me one chance to change your mind,” said Neil.
“It won’t work.”
“I’ll cut off my ponytail if it doesn’t.”
Whoa.
That was serious. “You’re on,” said Jack.
The guard unlocked the door from the inside, and the two lawyers entered.
“I’ll be back in thirty minutes,” the guard said, and then he closed the door.
The fluorescent lights overhead were so bright that Jack almost needed sunglasses. The floor was bare concrete, and the cinder-block walls were pale yellow with no windows. Seated at the Formica-topped table was Jamal Wakefield. The transformation since Gitmo was startling. A shave and a haircut alone made him look years younger, and even after three years of incarceration, it was easy to see how handsome McKenna’s boyfriend had once been. Jack truly didn’t recognize him.
The silver-haired man seated beside Jamal, however, was another story.
“Long time no see,” said Peter Swenson.
In a classic case of overcorrection, Jack had literally switched sides after leaving the institute, spending the next two years of his career as a federal prosecutor. As Neil knew well, Swenson was the polygraph examiner that Jack had used regularly to test his informants.
“With my ponytail on the line, I wanted Jamal to be examined by someone you trust,” said Neil.
“All right,” said Jack. “You got my attention.”
Advance clearance was required to administer a polygraph in jail, but Neil had taken care of that, and Swenson’s equipment was ready to go. Two fingers on Jamal’s left hand were wired to electrodes. Pneumograph tubes wrapped his chest and abdomen. An inflatable rubber bladder rested on the seat of the hard wooden chair beneath him, and another was behind his back. A blood pressure cuff squeezed his right bicep.
“Time’s a-wastin’,” said Neil. “Let’s roll.”
Swenson turned his attention to his cardio amplifier and galvanic skin monitor atop the table. The paper scroll was rolling as the needle inked out a pulsating line.
“All set,” he said.
Jack knew the drill, and Swenson had taken care of the preliminaries before his arrival. The first task was to put the subject at ease. He started with questions that would make Jamal feel comfortable with him as an interrogator. Do you like music? Have you ever owned a car? Is your hair purple? They seemed innocuous, but with each answer Swenson was monitoring the subject’s physiological response to establish the lower parameters of his blood pressure, respiration, and perspiration. It was almost a game of cat and mouse. The examiner needed to quiet him down, then catch him in a small lie that would serve as a baseline reading for a falsehood. The standard technique—Jack had seen it unfold many times—was to ask something even a truthful person might lie about.
“Have you thought about sex in the last ten minutes?”
“Uh, no.”
Jamal blinked about five times. It wasn’t something that men necessarily liked to admit—especially when charged with the obsession-driven murder of their girlfriend—but it was a scientific fact that anyone with a Y chromosome thought about sex every three minutes. The room fell silent as the examiner focused on his readings. He appeared satisfied. He knew what it looked like on the polygraph when Jamal lied. Now he could test his truth telling on the questions that really mattered.
“Is your name Jamal Wakefield?”
“Yes.”
“Are we in Miami, Florida?”
“Yes.”
Jamal seemed almost robotic in his responses—and rather than staring off blankly at the wall or the ceiling, he was looking straight at Jack, fully aware of the man he needed to convince.
“Is today Sunday?”
“No.”
“Are you fluent in Chinese?”
“No.”
“Did you kill McKenna Mays?”
“No.”
“Have you ever climbed Mount Everest?”
“No.”
“Are you a man?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sitting in a chair?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know who killed McKenna Mays?”
“No.”
Not a flinch. It was making Jack uncomfortable, the way Jamal had locked eyes with him, but Jack wasn’t going to be the one to back down.
“Do you wear eyeglasses?”
“No.”
“Are you in jail?”
“Yes.”
“Is your prison jumpsuit orange?”
“Yes.”
“Were you in the United States at the time of McKenna Mays’death?”
“No.”
“Are you glad this test is over?”
Jamal almost answered, then realized that he was being toyed with. He almost seemed to smile as his gaze slowly shifted from Jack to the examiner.
“I guess so,” he said.
Swenson disconnected the monitors. “I’ll need a few minutes to interpret the results,” he said as he packed up the equipment.
Neil summoned the guard. The door opened, Swenson left the room, and the lawyers were alone with their client.
Jack looked at Neil and said, “If that test shows any signs of deception, I’m out.”
“Understood,” said Neil.
“Even if the test is clean, I’m probably still out.”
Jamal spoke up. “I didn’t kill McKenna.”
Jack glanced over. “You shouldn’t have waited until today to tell me that.”
“Last time we talked, I hadn’t been charged with anything.”
“The guy has a point,” said Neil.
Jack and Jamal had locked eyes again. “You don’t deny the fact that you were McKenna’s boyfriend, do you?”
“I don’t deny that.”
“So you knew you were the prime suspect in McKenna’s murder.”
“Yes,” Jamal said. “I knew.”
“And that never once came up in our conversation at Gitmo, even after we switched to English.”
Jamal paused, then said, “That wasn’t my fault.”
“Whose fault was it?”
“Yours.”
“Mine?” said Jack, incredulous.
Jamal’s expression was completely serious. “I thought if I started speaking English to you that it would help build trust between us. The opposite happened. The way you reacted, you just shut me down.”
Jack replayed the moment in his mind. The English had definitely come as a surprise, and in hindsight Jack probably could have handled it better.
“I don’t remember shutting you down,” said Jack.
“I’m not saying you did it intentionally. That’s just the way it played out. You mentioned your grandfather was from the Czech Republic, and I told you I’d been there.”
“You told me in
English
,” said Jack.
“And from that point on, the whole conversation was all about my native tongue. We never followed up about Prague.”
“What was there to follow up about?”
Jamal gave him an assessing look. “That’s where I was when McKenna was murdered.”
The words came over Jack like an arctic front. Before he could speak, there was a knock at the door. Neil opened it, and Swenson entered the room. The lawyers and their client looked at him with anticipation, and Swenson delivered the news without delay.
“The test shows no signs of deception in any of the three areas of examination,” said Swenson.
Neil was openly smug about it, and he couldn’t help summarizing: “He didn’t kill McKenna, he doesn’t know who did, and he was outside the country when it happened.”
It was a bit of theater orchestrated by his old boss, but Jack had to admit that it was pretty effective.
The examiner’s work was finished. Neil thanked him, and Jack did likewise, and when the door closed, Jack’s gaze shifted back to the young man seated at the table before him. There were definitely still signs of prolonged incarceration—the thin face, the skin tone a bit off, the unhealthy fingernails. But Jamal was becoming more of an enigma with each passing minute.
“Something is missing here,” said Jack. “The police have a recording of the victim saying in her dying breath that you killed her, but you were in Prague?”
“That’s right,” said Jamal.
“Am I to believe that this case is as open and shut as handing over your passport to the state attorney?”
“My passport won’t show that I went anywhere.”
“Were you traveling illegally?”
“You could say that.”
“What about an airline ticket?”
“I can’t help you there.”
“Credit card statements or cell phone records?”
“Nothing like that.”
“Any photographs of you out of the country?”
“No.”
“Travel records of any kind?”
“Unfortunately, no.”
Jack puzzled for a moment, then asked, “Were you traveling with someone?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“That’s not really clear.”
“Are you being a smart-ass?”
“Not at all.”
“How did you get there?”
Jamal glanced at Neil, apparently seeking a green light—as if to ask,
Do you think Swyteck is ready for this?
Jack followed the prisoner’s gaze toward Neil, who simply pulled up a chair for his co-counsel.
“It’s a long story,” said Neil.
Jack didn’t move. Then finally, he came to the table and took a seat.
“All right,” he told his client, “let’s start at the beginning.”
I
was born in Somalia,” said Jamal, “my father’s homeland. My mother is a U.S. citizen, so I am, too. She and my father never married, and she took me to Minneapolis when I was a baby. Lots of Somali immigrants there.”
“I didn’t know that,” said Jack.
“Somalis, Scandinavians—who can tell the difference?”
A sense of humor.
That’s new.
“My father still lives in Mogadishu,” said Jamal, “so I speak Somali as well as English. I lived with my mother until I dropped out of high school and got the hell out of the freezer. I hopped on a bus to Florida and took an apartment in Miami Beach. I waited tables for about a year, then finally got a job with Mr. Mays.”
“I presume that’s how you met McKenna,” said Jack.
“Yup. He’s a self-taught computer whiz who never finished high school. Just like me. We hit it off. He introduced me to his daughter. I was nineteen. She was sixteen—but very mature for her age.”
Neil popped open his briefcase. “I have pictures,” he said as he laid them out on the table.
The difference between Jamal’s appearance then versus now was not as dramatic as Jamal-the-client versus Jamal-the-Gitmo-detainee, but it was striking nonetheless. Not so long ago, Jamal had sported nothing short of movie-star good looks. Even so, one’s eyes naturally gravitated toward McKenna.
“Pretty girl,” said Jack.
“Beautiful,” said Jamal. “I used to kid her that she was the perfect blend of obnoxious blond father and stunning Bahamian mother that modeling agencies looked for.”
Jack held his next question, choosing instead to observe for a moment. Jamal was unable to look away from the photograph, his eyes moistening. It was the first real show of emotion Jack had seen from his client.
If it was real.
“Did you get along with her mother?”
“It’s funny. I thought we were going to get on just fine. McKenna told me that her grandfather was Muslim, like me. But I guess her mother had rejected Islam.”
“Did she reject you?”
“It wasn’t anything specific. I just got a vibe that she wasn’t nuts about me.”
Jack checked his watch. The arraignment was less than an hour away, and he needed to speed things up.
“Let’s fast-forward a bit,” said Jack, “to the time before McKenna’s death. Tell me how you came to leave the country.”
“I was abducted.”
“Abducted?”
“Yes,” he said with a straight face.
“By whom?”
“I don’t know for sure. But I believe it was the U.S. government.”
“Okay, I’m outta here,” said Jack as he pushed away from the table.
“No, no, listen,” said Neil.
Jack shook his head. “I took this case pro bono because you were right, Neil: Everybody deserves a lawyer. But I’m a sole practitioner, and I don’t have time to talk spy novels to a circuit court judge.”
“My father is a recruiter for al-Shabaab,” said Jamal, “the Mujahideen Youth Movement.”
That got Jack’s attention. While preparing for the trip to Gitmo, he had heard of al-Shabaab. Officially designated a terrorist organization by the United States in March 2008, it had been waging a war against Somalia’s government to implement sharia—a stricter interprentation of Islamic law.
“Yesterday I stood before a federal judge and assured him that there was no basis to detain you at Gitmo,” Jack said, his eyes narrowing. “
Now
you’re telling me that you were an al-Shabaab recruit?”
“I have nothing to do with them,” said Jamal, “but they definitely tapped into my old neighborhood in Minneapolis.”
Neil added, “Ethiopia invaded Somalia in December 2006 to push the Islamists out of Mogadishu. It was an outrage to most Somalis, which made it an easy rallying cry for al-Shabaab. Ever since then, they have been reaching out to young Somalis all over the world, recruiting them to fight.”
“At least two of my friends from high school ended up dead in Somalia,” said Jamal.
Jack settled back into his chair, willing to listen a little longer. “What does any of this have to do with your being abducted?”
“Two high-school friends of mine were killed fighting in Somalia. My father was a recruiter in Mogadishu. Obviously, my name landed on somebody’s list of suspected terrorists.”
Things were slowly starting to sound more plausible. Jack checked his watch again. Time was short. “Tell me what happened. The short version.”
“Like I said, I was working for McKenna’s father in Miami. He did a lot of secret projects, some for the government, some for private industry. I never knew who the clients were, never got the details. But he had this one called Project Round Up, and I knew it was big.”
“Big in what way?”
“The supercomputer ability, the amount of data being gathered, the data-mining capabilities—everything was out of this world.”
“What part of the project were you involved with?”
“Encryption,” said Jamal.
“How to encrypt your own data, or how to read through someone else’s encryption?”
“At the time I was abducted, I was doing both.”
“Let’s get back to that. When you say you were abducted . . .”
“I mean exactly that,” said Jamal. “Some goons came into my apartment in the middle of the night, threw me on the floor, put a hood over my head, stuck me in the ass with a syringe . . . and then it was lights-out.”
“Did you get a look at them?”
“No way.”
“Then what happened?”
“I woke up in a dark room strapped to a table. And from then on, it was like a scene out of
24
.”
“What to you mean?”
“Bright lights, then total darkness. Loud calypso music, then total silence. Exteme cold temperature, then hot. Every time I fell asleep, a sprinkler in the ceiling squirted me with ice-cold water. The only time I wasn’t shackled to the floor was when they put a hood over my head, so I kept walking into the walls. They wouldn’t let me use the bathroom when I needed to, didn’t feed me until I was starving, and then after I finally got something to eat they served me another three meals ten minutes apart. All of this was obviously designed to disorient me. Then the interrogation started.”
“What did they ask you about?”
“Project Round Up. I told them everything I knew about the encryption, but they insisted that I knew more than I was telling them.”
“And all of this happened in Prague?”
“I had no idea where it was. Until they let me go.”
“They just turned you loose?”
“They gave me another injection to knock me out. I woke up on a bench near a bridge. As soon as I figured out where I was, I ran to a pay phone and called my mother in Minneapolis. That was when I found out that McKenna had been murdered and that the cops were looking for me.”
“How long had you been out of the country at this point?”
“I had no idea, until my mother told me what day it was. It was even longer than I’d thought: seventeen days.”
“Did she believe you?”
“Of course. The last time we’d talked on the phone was ten days before McKenna was killed. I used to talk to her every day. She knew something had happened to me.”
“Did you talk about coming home?”
“Are you kidding? She said I would be handing myself over to a lynch mob. A cop was blinded, CNN aired a tape recording of McKenna naming me as the killer, my picture was all over the news, and every cop in America was on the lookout for me.”
“What did you do?”
“I headed for Somalia to hide with my father.”
“The terrorist recruiter?”
“At the time, I didn’t know he was involved with all of that. He was just my father, and I needed help.”
“Did you stay with him?”
“For about a week. He got me a fake passport to turn me into Khaled al-Jawar, which is the name you knew me by.”
“Was that a real person or a made-up name?”
“I have no idea, and I was so scared that I didn’t care. This was at the height of the Ethiopian invasion. I could hear the gunfighting in the city, especially after dark. Then one night the troops busted down the door to my father’s apartment, and they took me away. You know the rest of the story. It was exactly what you told the judge in Washington. The Ethiopians forced me to confess that I was sheltering al-Qaeda operatives, and then they handed me over to the CIA.”
“Probably for some amount of bounty money,” said Neil.
“I’m sure,” said Jamal. “Next thing I knew, I was on my way to Gitmo.”
“And you didn’t bother telling them who you really were.”
“Well,
duh
. I would have been sent to Miami on murder charges. I figured that if I kept quiet—if I could play the part of a Somali peasant named Khaled al-Jawar—the Americans would have to release me sooner or later.”
“So no one at Gitmo ever accused you of being Jamal Wakefield?”
“Nope.”
Jack looked at Neil. “They must have known. Fingerprints or something.”
Jamal glared, as if he resented having to repeat himself: “They never said anything about it,” said Jamal, his voice taking on an edge.
Jack said, “Obviously the interrogators in Prague knew your true identity, right?”
“Oh, they knew everything about me there. And they used it, too.”
“In what way?”
“Threats, mainly.”
“They threatened you?”
“All the time. It started mostly with threats against my mother—the things they were going to enjoy doing to her if I refused to talk about Project Round Up.”
“Any other threats?”
“Yeah. Including one that they kept.”
“Tell me.”
Jamal’s expression turned very serious. “They said if I didn’t give them the information they wanted, they would kill McKenna.”
His words hung in the air, as if her violent death had taken a whole new turn.
There was a knock on the door, and the door opened.
“Showtime,” the guard said.
Jamal’s arraignment was scheduled for eleven
A.M.
, and there was just enough time to get the prisoner downstairs for a court “appearance” via closed-circuit television from the jailhouse.
“So,” asked Neil, “does this mean I get to keep my ponytail?”
Jack had almost forgotten that Neil had bet his precious locks that Jack would stay on the case after hearing Jamal’s story. But it didn’t take the smartest lawyer in the world to see the problems in Jamal’s case—even if he was telling the truth.
“For now,” he said. “But keep your scissors handy.”