It had been one hell of a party.
'He's not coming, Martin,' Stenner said, breaking his reverie. Vail snapped around towards him, aware that he had been staring at the door revisiting the past.
'Mind reader,' Vail said.
'I sometimes have a moment…' Stenner started but never finished the sentence.
'I'm sure we all do from time to time,' Vail said, turning back to his paper.
To Vail, on that chilly morning, the landfill case was a curiosity, an annoyance, something else to clutter up the already crowded agenda of the district attorney's office. In fact, the landfill mystery would lead to something much bigger. Something far more terrifying than the decomposed bodies in the city dump. Something that would force Martin Vail to come to terms with his past.
A name that had haunted Vail for ten years would soon creep back into his mind.
The name was Aaron Stampler.
Three
Shana Parver rushed through the frigid morning air and climbed the steps of the county criminal courthouse. Overly sentimental and idealistic by nature, although she shielded it with a tough, aggressive facade, Parver always got a rush when she saw the front of the hulking building. 'The law is the only thing that separates us from animals,' Vail had once said. Of course, he had added his own cynical postscript: 'Although, these days, you'd never know it.' But looking up at the Doric columns soaring above the entrance, each surmounted by allegorical figures representing Law, Justice, Wisdom, Truth, Might, Love, Liberty, and Peace, reassured her faith in the sanctity of the law and reaffirmed her belief in the profession she had chosen while still in grammar school.
She was early this morning. In forty-five minutes she would be face-to-face with James Wayne Darby, and while it wasn't a courtroom, the interrogation was the next best thing, a chance to match wits with the flabby, smart-alec chauvinist. She would take a few last minutes to prepare herself mentally for the meeting.
Naomi Chance had beat her there as usual. The coffee was made in Vail's giant urn, and she was at her desk ready to do battle when Parver burst in at eight-fifteen. Naomi was always the first to arrive, walking through the sprawling office, flicking on lights before making Vail's coffee. Her look was regal and intimidating. She was a stunning ramrod-straight woman, the colour of milk chocolate, almost Egyptian-looking with high cheekbones and wide brown eyes, her black hair cut fashionably short and just beginning to show a little grey. A widow at fifty, she had the wisdom of an eighty-year-old with the body of a thirty-year-old. She was a quick learner and a voracious digger. Give her a name and she'd come back with a biography. Ask for a date and she'd produce a calendar. Ask for a report and she'd generate a file. She could type 80 words a minute, take shorthand, and had earned her law degree at the age of forty-six. Her devotion to Vail superceded any notion of practising law. She had taken care of him from the beginning, knew his every whim; his taste in clothes, movies, food, women, and wine; and was, without title, his partner rather than his associate prosecutor, a title he had invented for her because it was nebulous enough to cover everything and sounded a lot more important than executive secretary. Naomi gnawed through red tape as voraciously as a beaver gnaws through a tree bole, had no use for bureaucratic dawdling, knew where to find every public record in the city, and acted as surrogate mother and a friendly crying shoulder for the youthful staff Vail has assembled. If Vail was the chief of staff, Naomi Chance was the commanding general of this army.
Parver was the youngest and newest member of what Vail called the Special Incident Staff - better known around town as the Wild Bunch - all of whom were in their late twenties and early thirties, all of whom had been 'discovered' by Naomi, whose vast authority included acting as a legal talent scout for the man they all called boss.
Shana Parver was the perfect compliment to Naomi Chance. She was not quite five-two but had a breathtaking figure, jet-black hair that hung well below her shoulders, and skin the colour of sand. Her brown eyes seemed misty under hooded lids that gave her an almost oriental look. She wore little makeup - she didn't need it - and she had perfect legs, having been brought up near the beaches of Rhode Island and Connecticut, where she had been a championship swimmer and basketball player in high school. She was wearing a black suit with a skirt just above the knee, a white blouse, and a string of matched pink pearls. Her hair was pulled back and tied with a white bow. Dressed as conservatively as she could get, she was still a distracting presence in any gathering, a real traffic stopper, which had almost prevented Vail from hiring her until Naomi pointed out that he was practising a kind of reverse discrimination. She had graduated summa cum laude from Columbia Law School and had made a name for herself as assistant prosecutor for a small Rhode Island county DA when she applied for a job on the SIS. Naomi had done the background check.
A rebellious kid who had made straight A's without cracking a book, Parver had raised almighty hell and flunked out of the upscale New England prep school her parents sent her to. Accepted in a tough, strict institution for problem kids, she had made straight A's and from then on had been an honour student all the way through college and law school.
'What happened?' Naomi had asked in their first face-to-face interview.
'I decided I wanted to be a lawyer instead of a big pain in the ass,' Parver had answered.
'Why did you apply for this job?'
'Because I wrote a graduate piece on Martin Vail. I know all his cases, from back when he was a defence advocate. He's the best prosecutor alive. Why wouldn't I want to work for him?'
She had had all the right answers. Naomi's reaction had been immediate.
'Dynamite.'
Vail had expected anything but the diminutive, smart, sophisticated, and aggressive legal wunderkind.
'I want a lawyer, I don't want to give some old man on the jury a heart attack,' he had said when he saw her picture.
'You want her to get a face drop?' Naomi had snapped.
When Parver stepped out of the lift and walked resolutely towards his office for her first interview, Vail had groaned.
'I was hoping the pictures flattered her.'
'There's no way to unflatter her,' Naomi had offered. 'Are you still going to hold her looks against her?'
'It's not just looks. This child has… has…'
'Magnetism?' Naomi had suggested.
'Animal magnetism. She is a definite coronary threat to anyone over forty. I speak from personal experience.'
'You going to hold her looks against her?' Naomi had asked. 'That's discrimination. Marty, this girl is the best young lawyer I've ever interviewed. She's a little too aggressive, probably self-protective, but in six months she'll be ready to take on any lawyer in the city. She has an absolute instinct for the jugular. And she wants to be a prosecutor. She doesn't give a damn about money.'
'She's rich.'
'She's well off.'
'Her old man's worth a couple million dollars - fluid. I call that rich.'
'Marty, this young lady reminds me so much of you when we met, it's scary.'
'She's a woman, she's rich, and she's gorgeous. The only thing we have in common is that we inhabit the same planet.'
'You better be nice to her,' Naomi had warned, leaving the office to greet her.
Six months earlier, Parver had tried two cases and blown one. Vail had told her later that she was too tough, too relentless.
'The jury likes tough, they don't like a killer,' he had said. 'You have to tone down, pull back. Study juries, juries are what it's all about. I had a friend we called The Judge who used to say that murder one is the ultimate duel. Two lawyers going at it in mortal combat - and the mortal is the defendant. Excellent analogy. Two sides completely polarized. One of them's right, the other one's wrong. One of them has to perform magic, turn black into white in the minds of the jurors. In the end, the defendant's life depends on which lawyer can convince the jury that his or her perception of the facts is reality. That's what it's all about, Shana
, the jury.'
Toning it down hadn't come easily.
'You ready, Miss Parver?' Naomi asked, shaking her back to the present.
Parver scowled at her. 'It's not like it's the first time I ever questioned a murder suspect, Noam.'
Parver was the primary prosecutor on the Darby case but had been in court and missed Darby's first interrogation. Now it was her turn to have a shot at him.
'This Darby is a nasty little bastard. Don't let him push you around.'
Parver smiled. 'Be nice if the creepy little slime puppy tries,' she said sweetly.
'You haven't met Rainey yet. Be careful, he's a killer. A good honest lawyer, but a killer. Don't let that smile of his fool you.'
Parver drew herself a cup of coffee, sprinkled in half a spoonful of sugar, stirred it with her finger then sucked the coffee off it.
'Somebody said he's as good as Martin was in the old days,' she said casually, and waited for the explosion.
'Ha!' Naomi snorted. 'Who the hell told you that?'
'I don't know. Somebody.'
'Don't let somebody kid you, nobody's that good - or is ever likely to be.'
'You never talk about those days, Naomi. How long have you been with Marty?'
'Eighteen years,' Naomi said, tracing a long black finger down Vail's calendar for the day. 'When I started with Martin, he charged fifty dollars an hour and was glad to get it. And all I knew about the law was that it was a three-letter word.' She paused for a moment, then: 'My God, wait'll I run this by him. A luncheon and a cocktail party, both on the same day. The State Lawyers Association. I'll wait to tell him, he's liable to go berserk and kill Darby if I tell him before the inquiry.'
A moment later Vail stepped out of the lift, threading his way through the crowded jungle of glass partitions, desks, file cabinets, computers, blackboards, telephones, and TV screens towards his office. It was in a rear corner of the sprawling operation, as far away from the DA Jack Yancey's office as it was possible to get and still be on the same floor.
God, Naomi thought, he must've dressed in the dark. Vail was wearing an old grey flannel suit, unshined loafers, and an ancient blue knit tie that looked like it had been used as a garrotte by stranglers from Bombay. 'Christ, Martin,' Naomi said, 'you look like an unmade bed.'
'I am an unmade bed,' he growled, and stomped into his office. 'How old's this coffee?'
'Fifteen minutes.'
'Good.' He went to the old-fashioned brass and chrome urn he had taken as part payment for handling a restaurant bankruptcy years ago and poured himself a mug of coffee. Parver and Naomi stood in the doorway.
His cluttered, unkempt office was a throwback to what Naomi sometimes referred to as the 'early years'. It was dominated by an enormous, hulking oak table that Vail used as a desk. Stacks of letters, case files, and books littered the tabletop, confining him to a small working area in the centre of the table. There were eight hardback chairs around the perimeter of the table. He flopped down in his high-backed leather chair, which was on wheels so he could spin around the room - to overrun bookshelves or stuffed file cabinets - without getting up. An enormous exhaust fan filled the bottom half of one window. Vail was the only smoker left on the staff and no one would come into his office unless he sat in front of the fan when he smoked.
'Stenner had me up before five taking a nature walk in the city dump,' Vail muttered, and sipped his coffee. 'Good morning, Shana.'
'You were out there?' Parver said with a look of awe. 'Is it true they found three bodies in the landfill?'
'What?' Naomi said.
'Three corpora delicti,' said Vail. 'And they were in there a looong time. Wonderful way to start the day. You don't want to hear any details.'
'Do you think it's murder?' Naomi asked.
'Okie'll let us know. Ready to take on James Wayne Darby and Paul Rainey?' Vail replied.
'Yes.' Emphatically.
'Want to talk about it? We have fifteen minutes before we go down.'
'If you do,' Parver said with confidence.
'Ah, the audacity of youth,' Naomi said, rolling her eyes. 'Oh to be thirty again.'
'I'm twenty-eight,' Parver said in a half-whisper.
'Twenty-eight,' Naomi said, shaking her head. 'I don't even want to think about my twenties. I'm not sure, but I think twenty-eight was one of my bad years.'
Vail casually studied the young lawyer. She was cool and steady, very self-assured for a twenty-eight-year-old. He had assembled his group of young turks carefully during the past six years, moving the assistant prosecutors from Yancey's old staff - mostly bureaucratic burnouts and unimaginative lawyers who preferred plea bargains to trials - into routine cases: drive-by gang shootings, local dope busts, assaults, robberies, burglaries, and family disputes, many of which ended in homicide. Gradually he had phased out several of them, replacing them with younger, more aggressive, yet unspectacular lawyers who preferred the long-term advantages of security to making a name for themselves before moving out into the private sector. Under Vail's careful guidance, they handled the bulk of the 2,600 murders, robberies, rapes, aggravated assaults, burglaries, car heists, child molestations, and white-collar felonies the DA's office handled every year.
The Wild Bunch was something else. Young, aggressive, litigious, and brilliant, they took on the complex, multifarious cases, acting as a team. Although they were extremely competitive, they were bonded by mutual respect, arduous hours, meagre pay, and the chance to learn from the master. Some, like Parver, had applied for the job. Others had been tracked down by the tenacious Naomi Chance. Through the four or five years they had been together, each had become a specialist in a certain area and had learned to depend on the others. They were backed up by Stenner and his investigators, seasoned cops who were experts at walking the tightrope between statutory compliance and forbidden procedures. They were all cunning, adroit, resourceful. They questioned legal theory and were not above taking tolerable risks if the payoff was high enough, and on those rare occasions when they screwed up, they did it so spectacularly that Vail, an outrageous risk-taker himself, was usually sympathetic.
The young lawyers had one thing in common: they all loved the courtroom. It was why Naomi and Vail had picked them, a prerequisite. Like it was for Vail, the law was both a religion and a contest for them; the courtroom was their church, their Roman Coliseum, the arena where all their competitive juices, their legal knowledge, their resourcefulness and cunning were adrenalized. Vail had also instilled in each an inner demand to challenge the law, to attack its canons, traditions, statutes, its very structure, while they coaxed and manoeuvred and seduced juries to accept their perception of the truth. It was his fervent belief that this legal domain had to be defied and challenged constantly if it was to endure. He insisted that they spend two or three days a month in court, studying juries and lawyers, their timing, their tricks, their opening and closing statements, and he watched with satisfaction as each developed his or her own individual styles, his or her own way of dealing with this, the most intriguing of all blood sports.
The whole team disliked James Wayne Darby intensely. He was brash, arrogant, swaggering, and flirtatious towards the women on the team and surly towards the men. His lawyer, Paul Rainey, was just the opposite, a gentleman, but a hardcase, with a strong moral streak. He believed passionately in his clients. So far, no charges had been brought against Darby.
Parver was hungry to try another case to get over her recent defeat. Darby could be it - if they could break his story. But Vail was aware that Parver's eagerness could also be her undoing.
'This is our last shot at Darby,' he told Parver. 'Just remember, Paul Rainey can kill you with a dirty look. If he gets pushy, ignore him. You know the playing field; if he gets offside, I'll jump on him. You stay focused on Darby. Just keep doing what you do best.'
'I know,' she said.
'Do you have anything new?'
'Not really. There's one thing. The phone number?'
'Phone number?'
'The slip of paper with Poppy Palmer's phone number.'
Parver went through a thick dossier of police data, coroner's reports, evidence files, and interviews, finally pulling out a copy of the slip of paper, which she laid before Vail.
'This is the note that Darby claims he found beside the phone,' she said. It was a ragged piece of notepaper with the entry: Pammer, 555-3667.
'He says Ramona Darby must have written the note because he didn't - and also Palmer's name is misspelled. Two handwriting analysts had failed to come up with a conclusive ID.'
'So…?'
'So suppose he wrote it and left it there for Ramona to find. Or… suppose he left it there after the fact. Supposing Ramona never called Poppy Palmer at all and there were no threats? If we can prove Ramona Darby never called Palmer and never threatened to kill Darby, we raise reasonable doubt about his whole case.'
'Only if we get him into court. There isn't any case at this point. We don't have a damn thing to take to a grand jury.'
'There's some strong evidence here,' she said defensively.
'All circumstantial,' he argued. 'You can call it whatever you want: evidence, conjecture, guesswork, insinuation, circumstance, lies, whatever, it's all for one purpose. Define the crime and lure the jury into separating your fact from the opposition's fiction - and right now we don't have one, single hard fact to nail this guy with.'
'True. But suppose we could panic Palmer? She backed up his story. If she's looking at perjury and accessory before the fact…'
'So you're looking to shake her up, not him.'
'Eventually. Start with him, then take another shot at her.'
'It's some long shot,' Vail said.
'We're busted anyway. What've we got to lose?'
'Okay, let's see how good you are.'
Four
The office where prosecutors conducted interrogations and depositions was on the third floor of the courthouse, a floor below the DA's headquarters. It was sparsely furnished: a table, six wooden chairs, an old leather sofa and a chair in one corner with a coffee table separating them. There was a small refrigerator near a window. A Mr Coffee, packets of sugar and dry cream, and a half-dozen mugs were neatly arranged on its top. The view was nothing special. No telephone. It was a pleasant room without being too comfortable. The room was also bugged and had a video camera in one corner that was focused on the table.