Indefensible: A Novel Read online

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  For Dana and Isabella

  Each lawyer must find within his own conscience the touchstone against which to test [his actions]. But in the last analysis it is the desire for the respect and confidence of the members of his profession and of the society which he serves that should provide to a lawyer the incentive for the highest possible degree of ethical conduct. The possible loss of that respect and confidence is the ultimate sanction. So long as its practitioners are guided by these principles, the law will continue to be a noble profession. This is its greatness and its strength, which permit of no compromise.

  —from the Preamble to the ABA Model Code of Professional Responsibility

  PART I

  CHAPTER 1

  I don’t honestly expect to find a body. Someone has to go look, though, and on a day like this—the first Friday in June with the memory of cold winter lost beneath the trilling surface of summer—volunteers abound. Carpe diem; I have been offered an excuse to spend a couple of hours in sunshiny woods.

  We take the river road to the highway, passing century-old mill buildings. Some are crumbling, encircled by chain-link and razor wire, and others are merely shuttered. They seem to stretch for miles, rotting corpses of an old economy, lining the banks of the Aponak River.

  The westbound ramp will clog to a standstill by midafternoon, everyone going to lakes or mountains, but it’s early now, and I speed around the curve with tires squealing. On the highway, other travelers are making an early break from the city. Some have windows open, husbands driving while their pretty wives ride shotgun with hair blowing in the wind and flip-flopped feet up on the dash. Kids ride in back with Nintendos and iPhones, ball caps pulled low. A dog in a minivan paints the rear window with slobber as I pull alongside, and a boy presses his face to the side window and watches me. He thinks I’m a criminal because I’m at the wheel of my Volvo wagon doing twenty over the limit with the troopers behind me, blues-and-reds flashing, and behind them is the coroner’s van (just in case), its antennas bending in the wind. I slow enough to give the boy a goofy, cross-eyed look, and he responds with a smile so huge and gap-toothed that I’m laughing out loud with my head pressed back against the seat. The boy laughs too, and his mom, fresh from the pages of L.L.Bean’s summer catalog, looks over. We exchange knowing parental smiles. Then I speed away.

  “Oh God,” says my daughter, Lizzy, in contempt of my inexplicably good mood, “you’re such a . . . weirdo.”

  I look in the rearview for a glimpse of her complex smile. Lizzy is fourteen. Everything is a test.

  “I’ve never seen a dead body before,” Lizzy says.

  “Redundant,” I answer. “The word ‘body’ implies it’s dead.”

  She thinks for a second, then snaps, “That is so not true. Like in health class, they used to say, ‘At a certain age, you begin to notice mysterious changes in your body.’ ” (This last part she squawks in her old-biddy voice.) “So are we all, like, dead?”

  “Point taken,” I say, “but in any case, you’re not going to see any dead body, you’re staying in the car. And there might not even be a body.” I look at Cassandra, who is in the front seat beside me. Cassandra smiles and says, “I guess we’ll see.”

  If I really believed for a second we’d find a body, I wouldn’t have come myself, and I certainly wouldn’t have brought Lizzy. Crime scenes aren’t places for teenage daughters. But with Cassandra here beside me, I need to pretend there’s a possibility. Cassandra is a civilian. I’ve known her under two hours. She is dressed in olive cargo pants with the cuffs tucked inside white socks. She wears a tight pink tee, which would look silly on a woman her age—early forties—except that she also wears a loose, unbuttoned work shirt over it, changing it from inappropriately adolescent to enticingly youthful. She is a younger version of my ex-wife, Flora, Lizzy’s mom.

  “We should have brought Bill-the-Dog,” I say to Lizzy, “maybe let her run in the woods.” I explain to Cassandra that Bill-the-Dog is Lizzy’s border collie, a female.

  “Oh, sure,” Lizzy says in a mocking voice, “Bill could help you dig. Maybe she’d find herself a nice arm or leg bone to chew on.”

  “Well, I didn’t mean let her out at the scene; I was thinking we could stop on the way home. Pick up sandwiches someplace and . . . you know.” I stop. The idea is ludicrous: turning a possible crime scene visit and exhumation into a picnic with the witness. I brace myself for the onslaught of Lizzy’s ridicule, but in the rearview, I see her watching Cassandra.

  “Oh, that sounds lovely, Nick,” Cassandra says, “let’s do.” She turns to look at Lizzy in the backseat. “Is Bill-the-Dog named for Bill-the-Pony? From Tolkien?”

  “My mom named her,” Lizzy says. “My mom’s kind of weird, like she has this sign outside the house: WELCOME TO MIDDLE EARTH.”

  “Do you have a dog?” I ask Cassandra.

  “Definitely,” Cassandra says. “Having a dog is one of the best things about being human. One of the ten best.”

  “And the other nine?”

  “I don’t know. Love, dancing, good coffee, kids, summer? I never made a list. But if I did, dogs would be on it.”

  “Jane Austen would be on it,” Lizzy says, and I look in the rearview just before her mouth tightens into a disdainful line of pursed lips. But it was there for a second: her metal-mouth smile showing those red-banded braces like a centipede across her teeth.

  Cassandra turns again to look at Lizzy and says, “Definitely Jane Austen.”

  CHAPTER 2

  I’d been sitting at my desk reading a state police bulletin about several missing children from Rivertown when Agent Chip d’Villafranca called from the FBI. “Nick, I have a long-shot theory on our college boy,” he said. “We’ve maybe got a body. I mean, we don’t got it yet, but we’re going to got it,” and he chuckled, because this mangling of tenses was Chip’s idea of humor. I like this about him. Maybe he hadn’t mastered ironic wit, but at least he’s less dour than some other agents at the Bureau who seem to think a sense of humor is vaguely seditious.

  “I just got a call from Captain Dorsey at the state troopers,” Chip said. “They have a woman, a bird-watcher, who maybe witnessed someone dumping a body out at the reservoir. Dorsey thought it sounded Mob-ish, is why he called me. So if it’s a body—big if—maybe your college boy didn’t exactly go missing of his own free will. I’m driving over to talk to the bird-watcher. Want to come?”

  I did want to. So I went to meet Chip at trooper headquarters, where Captain Dorsey introduced us to Cassandra.

  I offered my hand. “Nick Davis, U.S. attorney’s office.”

  We shook. She had a firm handshake, but then she stood awkwardly, uncertain what to do. In her other hand, she held a copy of Soldier of Fortune magazine.

  “Is that the issue with the article on rose-breasted sap suckers?” I asked.

  She laughed. “Officer Dorsey’s,” she said. “I . . . you know . . . picked it up to read while I waited.”

  Dorsey took the magazine from her. “I like to stay current on what the wack jobs are up to.”

  I had met Captain Dorsey only a couple of times, so I wasn’t sure whether to believe him. He seemed like the kind who might get more jollies from Soldier of Fortune than Playboy. He was a G. Gordon Liddy–ish guy with a black bottlebrush mustache and an everybody’s-an-asshole look in his eye.

  Cassandra and I stood
staring at each other, and I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I finally said, “Shall we get started?” I sat down, and Cassandra and Chip sat down, and Dorsey sat behind his desk.

  Cassandra told us she’d left home about four in the morning, driven to the reservoir, found an access road into the woods, parked, and followed a trail through the pine needles. The sun wasn’t up yet, and the thrushes were singing. “Pebbles falling down a drainpipe,” she said. “Hermit thrush. Have you heard it? Pebbles in a drainpipe?”

  The trail she found skirted the edge of the marsh where she had hoped to see a yellow rail. The yellow rail, she explained, is a bird.

  “So just as the trail got where I could see the reservoir through the trees,” she said, “I see this big boulder, but when I get close, it turns out not to be a boulder but a mound of dirt. So I go investigate, and there’s this hole somebody had dug right in the middle of no place. Kind of oblong. And recent. You can tell: The dirt was all fresh. You could smell it. And footprints all around. But I didn’t think much about it, and I’m standing looking at this hole, when I suddenly hear one: a yellow rail. Tap tap tap. So I went after it, and I got pretty close. It’s a tiny thing, you know, walks, mostly. Flies only when it has to. I stalked it for like half an hour. It was probably luring me away from its nest. It finally flew away, and I waited another half hour to see if it would come back, but it never did, so eventually, I got up and walked back toward the trail, and that’s when I heard voices. Two men. And there I am, a woman alone in the woods in the early morning, so even though I figured they were just park rangers or something, I sat down behind a tree and waited. But they didn’t sound like park rangers. Too gruff somehow, and laughing, but I couldn’t make out anything they were saying. I stayed hidden, and a long time goes by when I don’t hear them, so I get up and walk back to the trail. And the hole was gone. It was even hard to find where it had been, like they’d set aside the chunks of topsoil with ferns and everything and just fit it all back in place. And I still didn’t think much about it until I’m off looking for warblers and hoping to hear another rail, and I suddenly realize, “Holy shit, they were burying a body.”

  Dorsey stroked his silly merkin of a mustache. “Ms. Randall, here are the salient points,” he said too loudly, as if Cassandra herself were the body dumper. “First, they dug the hole ahead of time. Second, there were two of them. Third, they were quick. Fourth, they were jovial; fifth, they were, as you described it, exacting in covering the area.” Dorsey counted out these points on his fingers. “These are the reasons I opted to contact Agent d’Villafranca, because they bespeak a very calculated and dispassionate and professionalistic activity that suggests Mob activity, which then would make it the concern of both state and federal organized crime units.”

  Apparently, Dorsey was the sort who, the less he has to say, the more words he uses to say it. And he was probably also afraid that, compared to Chip (FBI) and me (U.S. attorney’s office), Cassandra might see him as just a floppy-wristed, cross-eyed hayseed of a state cop.

  Dorsey wanted to get out to the reservoir as soon as possible.

  Chip and I stepped out of the office to confer. “Sounds bogus,” Chip whispered. “She seems kind of, you know, skittish.”

  “Someone burying a cat, probably.”

  “Or she got disoriented and was looking in the wrong place for the hole.”

  We paused and considered the situation for several seconds.

  “But it’s a nice day,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t mind a day out of town,” Chip said.

  And what I thought but didn’t say was that I wouldn’t mind a chance to get to know this attractive bird-watcher who wore no wedding band.

  We went back into the office. “Tell you what, Captain Dorsey,” I said, “I’m kind of curious, too. I’ll come along. You can ride with me, Ms. Randall. My daughter, Lizzy, is hanging with me today; she’d probably like some female company.” I looked over at Dorsey and Chip. “If that’s okay with you gentlemen,” I said, making it more of an assertion than a question. I felt guilty, strutting in front of Chip like that. But since Chip had the advantage of youth (his mid-forties to my early fifties), I was using my advantage of rank.

  Cassandra stood and waited for us to tell her what to do, and I realized that she was actually quite frightened. I put a hand on her shoulder and said, “How are you holding up, Ms. Randall?”

  “I’m okay,” she said softly, but then she had her head against my chest, and I had my arm around her in a half-hug, and I felt her ribs under my fingers and smelled her floral shampoo. “If it hadn’t been for the yellow rail,” she said unsteadily, apparently believing that she might have joined the hypothetical body in the pit if the assassins had found her witnessing the burial. But a second later, she tapped on my chest in a way that said, I’m fine now, and she pushed away from me.

  Before hitting the highway, I swung back to the office to pick up Lizzy, who just got out of school for the summer and spent all yesterday lying on my office couch reading Northanger Abbey and carrying on a whispered conversation with the characters (who irritate her as much as I do).

  “Lizzy, road trip,” I said.

  “Do you have any orange yarn?” she answered, holding a skinny braid where she could see it by looking cross-eyed. She had arranged a biosphere around herself on the couch, the contents of her backpack unloaded onto my office chairs, which were pulled within reach—books, journal, cell phone, water bottle, jog bra, running shoes, granola bars, yogurt, and Gatorade.

  From my desk phone, I buzzed Kenny in the law library. “Hey, Kenny, there’s something or someone that needs digging up out at the reservoir. Lizzy and I are on our way. Do you want to come?”

  “If you need me.”

  “Not a question of need, Kenny. Opportunity. Think of it as a day’s pay for a walk in the woods.”

  “Okay, if you want me to.”

  Kenny is my unofficial foster son and our office gofer. He’s smart enough to do more—could probably even get a paralegal certificate—but he just clings to his comfortable nonachievement while I persist, like a Boy Scout in the rain, in trying to light a fire under him.

  So it’s four of us in the Volvo: Cassandra Randall and me in the front, Lizzy and Kenny in the back, off to look for a body in the woods on a beautiful spring day. Kenny dozed off as soon as we hit the highway. In the rearview, I see him slumped in the seat, head lolling.

  “My baby brother,” Lizzy says of Kenny, who is in his mid-twenties, a dozen years older than she. Lizzy slips a couple of inches toward him so that if his head tips any farther, it will land on her shoulder. “I’m the big sister,” she says, “he’s my baby brother, and we’re in the family car riding to the country with Mom and Dad.”

  This is typical of Lizzy, pretending to have a normal family. She’s never lived in a two-parent home.

  CHAPTER 3

  At the reservoir district, Cassandra directs me along miles of rural roads to where she’d parked her car this morning. I put two wheels on the shoulder and turn off the engine. Heat waves rise from the asphalt, which is black and silver in the sun, and the sun catches on the wings of butterflies crossing from the weeds on one side of the road to the weeds on the other. My window is open, and for a second I hear the trills and rattles of bugs doing whatever they do on hot woodsy spring days (eating one another and mating, most likely). “How peaceful,” I say in the second before the other cars pull up behind and my rearview lights up like the Vegas Strip. The bugs are drowned out by police radios and car doors and the swish-swish jingle of cops scurrying back and forth.

  Dorsey immediately has his troopers walking the road in both directions, looking for anything of interest. “How far into the woods?” he asks Cassandra, and she says, “Five minutes. Maybe ten.”

  “Listen up,” Dorsey says to his men. “We’ll walk, eyes open for anything obvious, do a good survey before we dig. Leave it all untainted for forensics, in case we actually find somethi
ng.”

  I say, “You’re the boss, Captain, just tell us what to do.” The truth is, I don’t know squat about fieldwork and investigation. I’m just a prosecutor and administrator; Dorsey is the one with expertise, manpower, and high-tech laboratories.

  Dorsey doesn’t acknowledge my comment, but his granite jaw softens.

  Six cars are parked behind mine: two marked state police cars, Dorsey’s black sedan, the black van, a pickup truck pulling a four-wheeler on a trailer, and the local sheriff ’s vehicle. The sheriff is standing in the middle of the road in his many-pocketed vest, ready to direct traffic. Never mind that this road probably averages one car a week in the busy season.

  “Civilians will wait here,” Dorsey orders, clearly meaning Lizzy and Kenny and maybe even me, so I say, “Yes, Lizzy can help direct traffic, can’t you, hon?”

  “Sure, Daddy!” she says with saccharine enthusiasm, because I’d given her a chance to subtly ridicule the poor sheriff, whose forehead is already beading up with the first drops of sweat.

  We start into the woods. Dorsey, Cassandra, Chip, and I walk in front, but the trail narrows immediately, so Chip drops back. Behind him are the uniformed troopers and the four-wheeler pulling a flat trailer with tarps and shovels. Within a couple of minutes, my morning coffee hits bottom, and I dodge off behind a tree while the procession keeps moving. Then I hurry to catch up. Now Chip is between Dorsey and Cassandra, so I step in behind them, and darned if Cassandra doesn’t drop back to walk with me. She leans in, puts a hand on my shoulder, and whispers, “I’ll be pretty embarrassed if there’s nothing here.”

  She seems at home in the woods, instinctively turning toward birdsong coming from the trees, and regarding flowers and shrubs with a knowledgeable eye.

  “There,” she says suddenly. Everyone stops. “No, no,” she says, “just the bird. Hermit thrush. A pebble in a drainpipe. Listen.”