Authors: Phillip Margolin
Tags: #Fiction, #Thrillers, #General, #Suspense, #Mystery & Detective
A solidly built black man stepped into his cell, and the door slammed shut behind him. Dupre looked terrified. He was taking short, shallow breaths.
“Relax, Jon,” the man said. J. D. Hunter recognized flight-or-fight behavior when he saw it, and there was no place for Dupre to run. The agent held his hands up, palms out, knowing that if he had to, he could curl them into fists faster than Dupre could cross the cell.
“Easy. I’m here to help you.” Hunter kept his voice calm and low. “I’m the agent who was working with Lori Andrews, and, believe it or not, you weren’t the prize we were after. Help me and I can help you, and you need all the help you can get.”
Dupre had not relaxed one bit. His upper body was swaying, his eyes were riveted on Hunter.
“Who sent you?” Dupre asked. His voice was hoarse and choked by fear.
“I’m with the FBI.”
“Bullshit!”
Hunter slowly reached into his jacket pocket to take out his identification.
“I want you out of here,” Dupre said.
“This could be your only chance, Jon.”
“Don’t come a step closer,” Dupre warned.
“Okay, Jon, if that’s the way you want it, I’ll leave.”
Hunter rapped on the door and it swung open. Before he left, the agent flipped his card onto the bunk.
“Do yourself a favor and call me.”
“Get out!”
The cell door slammed shut and the light went out. Dupre dropped to the cot and put his head in his hands. He was shaking. After a while, he calmed down and lay on his back. His hand dropped to his side and his fingers brushed Hunter’s card. It had the seal of the FBI and j.d. hunter embossed on it. Dupre’s first instinct was to rip it to shreds, but what if Hunter really was with the FBI and could help him? He pulled the card in front of his eyes so he could study it in the dark. The card looked real, but that didn’t mean a thing. He started to crumple it up but stopped and slipped it in the pocket of his jumpsuit. He was too stressed out to think. In the morning, if he could sleep and clear his mind a bit, he would try to come up with a plan.
There were no visible signs of the killing, but Amanda had seen the crime-scene photographs and she kept her back to the spot where Hayes had died. To distract herself, Amanda took out her pad and her file. She was arranging them on a small, circular table, when the lock on the back door snapped open and the guard motioned Jon Dupre into the room. He stared at her for a moment before shuffling to the table and sitting down.
“We’ll be right outside,” Dupre’s escort told her, gesturing toward the guard who was watching through the window in the corridor. Amanda studied her client. He looked just as angry and defiant as he had during their first meeting, but she thought she sensed something else—desperation.
“Good afternoon, Jon,” Amanda said when the guard had locked them in.
Dupre slouched in his chair and didn’t answer her. Amanda decided to go over some basics, to try and get Dupre involved and because it would help her calm down.
“Before we discuss your case I want to make sure you understand the attorney-client relationship.”
“Oscar Baron told me all this shit.”
“You may find that Oscar and I practice law a little differently, so humor me, okay?”
Dupre shrugged.
“First, anything you tell me is confidential, which means I won’t tell anyone about our conversations without your permission, except the attorneys in my firm who are working on your case and Kate Ross, our investigator.
“Second, you are perfectly free to lie to me but I’m going to use the information you give me to make decisions in your case. If you do a great job fooling me and it causes me to do something that loses your case, please remember that you’ll go to jail and I’ll go home and watch cable TV.
“Third, I will not let you lie under oath. If you tell me that you murdered Senator Travis, I’m not going to let you testify that you were in Idaho when he was killed. I won’t tell on you because we have the attorney-client relationship, but I will remove myself from the case. What I’m getting at here is that I am very honest and very ethical and you need to know that about me up front so that we don’t have any misunderstandings down the line. Any questions?”
“Yeah. What’s in this for you? Court-appointed lawyers aren’t paid shit. You must be pretty hard up if you’ll work for peanuts.”
“Trying a death case is a specialty. Very few attorneys have the training to handle a capital case. Judge Robard asked me to represent you as a favor to him.”
“Why is that?”
“I’ll be straight with you, Jon. He asked me for two reasons: First, I’m a very good lawyer, and second, the other lawyers who could handle death cases were afraid of you.”
“And you’re not?” Dupre said with a smirk, holding up his manacled hands, giving Amanda another look at the cuts on his hands and forearm.
“You have no idea what I had to go through to get Judge Robard and the jail commander to agree to a contact visit of any kind.”
“Yeah,” Jon answered sarcastically, “I bet you’d be dying to be locked in with me if these chains were off. You’re scared to death.”
“Do you think that my fear is unreasonable? Please focus on the fact that I’m willing to fight very hard for you knowing that you murdered your first lawyer.”
Dupre leaped to his feet. He looked furious.
“Fuck you, bitch. I told you the last time I didn’t murder anyone, and I don’t want a lawyer who thinks I did.”
The front and rear doors flew open seconds after Dupre leapt to his feet and started screaming at Amanda.
“Please . . .” Amanda started as the guards grabbed Dupre, but her client cut her off.
“Get me out of here,” he screamed. The guards obliged.
The doors slammed, temporarily locking Amanda in with her thoughts. This was never going to work. Dupre was a lunatic. He’d murdered two men and he deserved anything he got. It suddenly occurred to Amanda that Dupre’s rage had been sparked by her assertion that he had murdered Wendell Hayes. Now that she thought about it, Dupre had also gone ballistic the first time she’d implied that he was guilty. Dupre had insisted that he hadn’t killed anyone both times, which was ridiculous in light of the evidence. Then she remembered something that she had forgotten in the excitement, something that had bothered her the first time she met with Dupre and continued to bother her now—something that made her wonder whether it was possible that Dupre was telling the truth.
“They’re treating me like shit, Oscar. They’ve got me in fucking solitary and they stuck me with a cunt for a lawyer. Some bitch who’s scared to be in the same room with me.”
“Amanda Jaffe, right?”
“How did you know?”
“She visited me.”
“What was she doing at your office?”
Dupre sounded outraged. Baron smiled.
“Calm down. She just wanted the police reports from the case I got dismissed.”
“Don’t give her shit, Oscar. I’m getting rid of her as fast as I can.”
“Did you come up with the dough for my fee?”
“No, I can’t make that.”
“Then you might want to stick with Jaffe. She’s okay.”
“I don’t want ‘okay,’ Oscar. This is my goddamn life we’re talking about.”
“She did that serial case and the case for the associate at Reed, Briggs. She knows her way around.”
“Look, I didn’t call so you could give me a pep talk about Amanda Jaffe. I need you to do something for me.”
“What?”
“I don’t want to talk about it over the phone. Come over to the jail. And don’t worry about getting paid. Ally is on the way over with enough money to cover the fee for what I want you to do.”
“I’ve got a few questions I wanted to ask you about a new case I’ve got,” Amanda said as she opened her briefcase and took out a manila envelope.
“The Travis and Hayes murders?”
Amanda smiled. “You got it on the first try.”
“It wasn’t hard. I can’t read a paper or turn on my TV without seeing you. I should probably get your autograph.”
“If I gave you my autograph you’d be able to sell it and retire. Who’d do my forensic work?”
Baylor laughed as Amanda took a stack of photographs out of the envelope and handed them to him.
“Jail personnel took these right after Wendell Hayes was stabbed to death. What do you make of these cuts?”
Baylor shuffled through the pictures, stopping to study some of them longer than others.
“They’re defense wounds,” Baylor said when he was ready. “When you have a homicidal attack with a knife, the victim’s wounds will normally be deep or long and haphazardly spaced. You’re going to find cuts like the ones in the photos on the victim’s hands, fingers, palms, and forearms, because he’s going to throw up his hands and forearms automatically to ward off the attack, or he’ll try to grab the weapon. That’s what we have here. A long deep cut on the forearm, a slice on the webbing of the hand, and cuts on the palms and fingers.”
“Is there any way that the person wielding the knife could have received those wounds?”
“Sure, if this was a knife fight where both people were armed or one person lost the knife and the other person got it for a while. But those wounds were received by someone who was being attacked.”
“Very interesting.”
“Not to me. They’re exactly what I’d expect to find on Wendell’s arms and hands.”
“Oh, I agree there. Only these arms and hands belong to Jon Dupre.”
Frank put down his pen and leaned back. “For you, always.”
Amanda threw herself onto a chair that stood before Frank’s immense desk and told her father about Dupre’s violent reaction when she suggested that he might be guilty of the Hayes and Travis murders and about Ally Bennett’s assertion that Senator Travis had attacked Lori Andrews. Finally she told her father about her meeting with Paul Baylor.
“What’s your take?” Frank asked when Amanda was through.
“Those defense wounds bother me. Dupre was treated for them immediately after his arrest in the visiting room.”
“Any chance they’re self-inflicted?” Frank asked.
“Why would he cut himself?”
“To fashion a self-defense argument in a case that’s impossible to win any other way.”
“Who would believe Dupre, Dad?”
“No one. Which is the problem you’re going to have trying to sell this theory to a jury. The logical explanation for those cuts is that Dupre brought the shiv into the visiting room and Hayes somehow got the knife away from him and stabbed Dupre in self-defense. Before you can argue that Dupre acted in self-defense, you’re going to have to prove that Hayes smuggled the shiv in, which presents another problem. What motive could Hayes possibly have to attack Dupre?”
“What motive did Jon have to kill Hayes?” Amanda countered. “Don’t forget the fix Dupre was in when Hayes came to the jail. If he’s convicted of killing Senator Travis, he’ll get life in prison or a lethal injection. Wendell Hayes was a terrific trial lawyer. Why kill someone who could have saved his life?”
“Good point. Unfortunately the prosecutor doesn’t have to prove motive.”
“Yeah, I know.” Amanda looked dejected. “There is something else that’s bothering me, though. If Dupre brought the shiv to the interview room because he wanted to kill Hayes, he’d have to know that Hayes was the lawyer who was coming to visit him. Grant didn’t appoint Hayes until shortly before Hayes went to the jail.”
“So, we need to know when Dupre learned that Hayes was going to be his lawyer.”
“Right. If Jon didn’t know that Hayes was going to be his lawyer until he met him in the visiting room, why would he bring a shiv with him?”
“He may have had it for protection from other inmates.”
“Jon wouldn’t have had it on him when he went to see Hayes. He’d never risk having it found during a frisk.”
“Maybe Dupre planned to kill any lawyer who showed up so he could plead insanity.”
“Then why isn’t Jon acting crazy or suggesting that he is?”
“And he’s got those cuts,” Frank muttered to himself.
“What do you know about Wendell Hayes?”
“Not a lot. We socialized at Oregon Criminal Defense Lawyers Association meetings, Bar Association meetings, stuff like that. I’ve been on panels with him and we’ve had drinks together.”
“Did you ever hear anything that would suggest he was dirty?”
“There are always rumors when a lawyer handles a lot of drug cases.”
“Such as?”
“Money-laundering, that type of thing. But how would that explain Hayes attacking your client?”
“I don’t know, but it makes it more likely that he’d try to kill someone if he was bent.”
“Wendell’s career did start with a bang. There was the Blanton case and that one with the hit man—I can’t remember the case name. Things really broke his way in those cases.”
“What do you mean?”
“The DA had a slam dunk in
Blanton
until his eyewitness recanted, and the key evidence disappeared from the police property room in the other case. Most people thought he was lucky, but there were a few DAs I know who suggested that the breaks weren’t just luck.”
“Hayes didn’t do much criminal stuff anymore, did he?”
“Wendell still took on a few high-profile criminal cases but, mostly, he was handling business problems for people with money.”
“What type of problems?”
“He secured a very lucrative federal construction contract for Burton Rommel’s firm and he’s maneuvered a few land-use planning rulings for developers that were worth millions. That type of thing.”
“Deals that require political clout.”
Frank nodded. “Wendell had plenty of that. He was part of the Westmont crowd, old Portland money. He grew up on intimate terms with the people who make this state run.”