Executive Privilege (14 page)

Sunday morning, Brad and Ginny drove down I-5, past the prison, and turned onto a state highway heading east toward the Cascade Mountains. The outlet malls, motels, and gas stations that passed for scenery on the interstate gave way to farmland then forest in almost no time. The pace of work at Reed, Briggs had been so intense that Brad hadn’t had a chance to explore Oregon, and he was surprised by the rapid disappearance of anything remotely resembling the crowded, tightly packed urban and suburban areas he’d grown up with on the East Coast. The population of the towns they drove through was often listed in three or four digits, and the road ran parallel to rivers and dense forest instead of strip malls and tract homes. Every once in a while the course of the two-lane highway would veer and without warning the snowcapped peak of a huge mountain would loom over the vast expanse of green foothills, only to disappear when the road changed direction again.

“Does this look anything like the Midwest?” Brad joked.

“Are you kidding? A five-story building passes for a mountain where I come from. This is awesome.”

“Long Island’s flat as a pancake, too. It’s where the glaciers stopped. When they retreated they turned the whole place into a parking lot. And I can’t remember seeing this much green outside of Saint Patrick’s Day.”

Ginny smiled. Then she took another look at the MapQuest directions she’d gotten from the Internet. It was almost an hour and a half since they’d turned off I-5.

“Start looking for signs for the Reynolds Campground. It should be on our left.”

Ginny was wearing a T-shirt and shorts, and Brad caught himself casting surreptitious glances at her legs. He’d donned a T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers, the only items in his wardrobe that seemed appropriate for a hike in the woods, something he’d only done at summer camp when he was ten.

“There it is,” she said, pointing to a highway sign that was posted just in front of a gravel road.

Brad made the turn. A quarter mile later they found themselves in a primitive parking lot. A wooden sign pointed them toward a dirt path that served as the trailhead for part of the Pacific Crest Trail that wound through the Mount Jefferson Wilderness on its way from Mexico to Canada. Little had instructed Brad to follow the Pacific Crest Trail for a half mile before turning off onto another trail that would eventually take them—if Brad’s client was to be believed—to two decomposing bodies and a Mason jar filled with pinkies.

Brad and Ginny had purchased some collapsible digging tools at an outdoor store. They put them in their backpacks along with a few cans of soda, some bottled water, and a few sandwiches. Ginny claimed to have an excellent sense of direction and insisted that she lead the way. They set off after Brad gave her the directions Little had dictated in the prison.

The day was perfect for hiking. When they’d left Portland it had been warm and unusually muggy, but they were almost three thousand feet above sea level and the air was cooler. As soon as they were in the forest the shadows cast by the leafy canopy lowered the temperature some more. Even so, Brad’s lack of exercise began to tell after they’d walked only a mile and he began sweating and taking swigs of bottled water.

“How much farther?” he asked a little while later.

“You asked me that same question ten minutes ago. I feel like I’m stuck in a station wagon with an eight-year-old. ‘Are we there yet, Mommy?’”

“Give me a break. I’m not used to jungle treks.”

“Well, Jane, I’d guess we’ve got another thirty minutes before we get to the side trail to the waterfall. Think you can make it, or do I have to have the apes carry you?”

“Very funny,” Brad muttered as he forged on.

The area around the waterfall was idyllic. Most of the sun’s rays were blocked by the trees that stood on the crest of the high cliff where the water began to tumble down, leaving the ground in shadow. Green clumps of iridescent moss clung to the shiny black rock face, and a mist formed where the cascading water splashed into the pool at the bottom. They ate their lunch sitting on a log with their feet dangling in space as they watched the swirling stream formed by the falling water rush by with a soft shushing sound.

Brad wasn’t so certain that it was a good idea to eat so soon before digging up a moldering corpse, but he was starving and too exhausted to pass up food. He decided that he’d deal with a queasy stomach when the time came. He still wasn’t completely convinced that they would find anything anyway and he occasionally flashed on a chuckling Clarence Little brightening the days of his fellow death row residents with his hilarious tale of the gullible lawyer and the phantom pinkies.

“Have you thought about what we’re going to do if we find the bodies or the pinkies?” Ginny asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Do we have to tell the police where they are?”

“I guess Susan Tuchman will make that decision. We’ll have to tell her what Little’s told us if we find anything that supports his story. But I did do some research, so I can advise her if she asks me what we should do.

“There’s a split of opinion about whether we have to call the cops. If we take possession of the pinkies we’ll probably have to tell the police about them eventually, but we should have a reasonable amount of time to have a private forensic expert print them. I’m not sure about the bodies. We’ll know where they are, but we won’t be in possession of them.”

“Damn straight,” Ginny said. “I’m not carrying them out.”

“I hadn’t planned on dragging a rotting corpse down the trail, either. But some legal experts think we have to tell the police the location of the bodies and others don’t think a lawyer who just sees the corpse has any obligation to reveal the location to the cops.”

“What about attorney-client confidentiality?” Ginny asked.

“That just extends to what the client says to you and not to physical evidence. We can’t be forced to tell the authorities how we knew where to find the bodies or the pinkies but we may not be able to keep them a secret.”

“It won’t take a genius to figure out that you got the information from Clarence.”

“True. All they’ll have to do is check the visitors’ list at the prison to find out who I visited or look up the records to see the list of my criminal cases—all one of them. But there won’t be a big battle over this. Little wants me to give the pinkies to the police so he can prove he’s innocent of the Erickson murder and he doesn’t seem to care if they nail him for Farmer.”

Ginny shook her head. “Your client sure has a twisted set of principles.”

“That could be one of the great understatements of all time.”

Ginny stood up and stretched. Her T-shirt rode up her flat belly. Brad looked away, embarrassed, and concentrated on picking up his trash.

“According to Little’s instructions, the bodies should be two miles in,” Ginny said.

“I can’t wait,” Brad answered with a shudder.

As it turned out, he could have waited—forever. That’s what Brad told himself as soon as he’d used a napkin Ginny handed him to wipe his mouth after throwing up in a bush a few steps from Peggy Farmer’s corpse.

“Sorry,” he mumbled.

“Don’t mention it,” Ginny said as she placed the soiled napkin in the bag they’d brought for their trash before handing Brad a bottle of water so he could wash out his mouth. “I did the same thing the first time they brought a really bad accident victim into Emergency while I was training to be a nurse. This guy’s stomach was ripped open and his intestines—”

“Please,” Brad begged weakly as he bent over, eyes squeezed shut, and fought to keep from tossing his cookies again.

“Oops, sorry,” Ginny said sheepishly.

Little had told Brad that he’d buried Peggy Farmer and her boyfriend a few yards into the forest from a fallen tree. The tree was supposed to be an eighth of a mile off the trail that led past the waterfall. Ginny used an odometer to pace off the distance, and they found the thick capsized trunk exactly where Little had said it would be. So were the bodies, although there was a lot less of them than there had been when they were buried years before.

Scavengers had uncovered the shallow grave, and there was very little flesh left on the skeletal remains. Even so, the sight of a real dead body disoriented Brad even more than seeing Laurie Erickson’s autopsy photos. Ginny helped him sit with his back against a tree in a position where he couldn’t see the corpses. While he recovered his equilibrium, Ginny returned to the fallen tree and started digging under the trunk where Little said he’d buried his collection of severed fingers.

“I’ve got them,” she told Brad. “There’s no reason to look if you think it will upset you. I can just put the jar in my backpack.”

“No, I should look at them,” Brad said as he pushed himself to his feet. “I’ll have to at some point, and you’ve already seen me make a fool of myself.”

Brad took a deep breath and forced himself to walk over to the Mason jar Ginny had placed on top of the tree trunk. Brad was surprised that he didn’t have the same visceral reaction to seeing the fingers he’d had when they’d unearthed the bodies. Maybe between seeing Laurie Erickson’s autopsy photos and the dead bodies he’d exhausted his capacity for horror. Brad studied the fingers. They forced him to see his client with a clarity he’d been unable to achieve before. Clarence Little wasn’t weird or clever. Clarence Little was pure evil. Brad’s duty to do everything in his power to clear Little of Laurie Erickson’s murder made Brad feel worse than he had when he’d discovered Peggy Farmer’s body.

“Sit, sit,” Susan Tuchman said when her secretary showed Brad Miller into her office, first thing Monday morning. “How’s your project coming?”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” Brad answered nervously. “There have been a few developments.”

“Good. Tell me about them.”

“I went to Salem like you suggested, to the penitentiary.”

“I bet that was quite an experience.”

“Yes, it was very…interesting. Anyway, I talked to Mr. Little about his case. He says he’s innocent.”

Tuchman smiled knowingly. “I had dinner with the attorney general the last time I was in Washington. He told me he felt terrible because every person he sent to prison when he was a district attorney in Arkansas claimed he was innocent. He said he wished he could have convicted at least one guilty person.”

Tuchman laughed. Brad smiled dutifully.

“Little may actually be innocent,” he said.

Tuchman stopped smiling. “Why do you say that?”

Her tone was not friendly, and Brad guessed that she was sensing that his pro bono assignment might take more time than it was supposed to, which meant it would cut down on Brad’s billable hours.

“Uh, well, I did read the transcript of his trial and there was only circumstantial evidence connecting him to the crime.”

“Most murderers are convicted with circumstantial evidence, since any eyewitness is usually dead.”

“Still, looking at the case objectively, the key evidence against Mr. Little concerned other murders, which—by the way—he doesn’t deny committing. If the modus operandi of those cases didn’t match the MO in Laurie Erickson’s case the judge would probably have dismissed the case when the defense lawyer moved for a judgment of acquittal.”

“But it did match.”

“Well, yes.”

“So there you are.”

“Someone could have killed Laurie Erickson and copied Little’s MO.”

Tuchman sighed. She looked disappointed. Brad was glad Tuchman didn’t know about Ginny’s part in his investigation.

“You’re young, Brad, and I’m glad to see you’re still idealistic, but you’ve also got to be realistic. There are copycat killers in the movies and in legal thrillers. In real life one sick bastard does all the dirty work by himself.

“You’re also losing focus. This whole discussion is irrelevant to your assignment. You’re handling a case in which the only issue is whether Little’s trial attorney was incompetent. The guilt or innocence of Clarence Little is not your concern.”

“That’s a good point, except I’ve found evidence that could prove our client’s claim of actual innocence.”

“Evidence?”

“Yes. Mr. Little told me his alibi for the night Laurie Erickson was murdered. He claims that he was murdering another victim named Peggy Farmer in the Deschutes National Forest. He said it was impossible for him to have kidnapped Laurie Erickson from the governor’s mansion because he was too far away from Salem when Erickson was kidnapped. I checked. He’s right. If he killed Farmer he couldn’t have killed Erickson and vice versa.”

“I’m confused here, Brad. He confessed to another murder in the forest?”

“Yes. The police don’t know about it. That was his alibi, but he didn’t tell his trial attorney because he didn’t trust him.”

“How do we even know there was such a murder?”

“Uh, well I know because I dug up the corpse.”

“You what!!!”

“Actually, there was more than one. Mr. Little killed Farmer’s boyfriend, too. He told me where to find the bodies and his collection of pinkies, which was buried under a fallen tree near the corpses.”

“What pinkies?”

“Mr. Little took the pinkies of his victims as souvenirs. The police could never find them.”

Tuchman looked stunned. Her mouth was open and she was staring at Brad. He pushed on.

“Mr. Little says Farmer’s pinkie is in the jar, but Erickson’s pinkie isn’t. I have the pinkies, or rather Paul Baylor, a private forensic expert, has them. I didn’t know how to preserve them. I didn’t want the fingers to fall apart anymore than they have already or we won’t be able to test them for fingerprints. Mr. Baylor is a respected expert and he knows how to preserve, uh, body parts.”

“Oh. My God, Mr. Miller. What have you done? That’s tampering with evidence and I don’t know what else. How could you go off on your own like that without my permission?”

“I went down to the penitentiary on Saturday and I dug up the bodies on Sunday. I didn’t want to disturb you on a weekend when I didn’t know if Mr. Little was telling me the truth. And then when I did it…I just decided it would be better to tell you when you were well rested.”

“I don’t believe this.”

Tuchman took a deep breath and regained her composure. “Okay, here is what we are going to do. I’m going to get Richard Fuentes in here. He was a deputy district attorney and an AUSA before he joined the firm. You’re going to tell him what you’ve done and he’s going to figure out whether you or our firm have any criminal liability because of your impetuous actions. Then we’re going to give those fingers and the location of the bodies to the authorities. When that’s all done I’ll figure out what to do about you.”