Indefensible Read online

  Tinga tinga tinga tinga ting.

  It is a descending note. Dorsey tries to catch my eye with a civilians are such idiots glance, but I avoid him. Chip tips his head sideways, listening to the bird, and says more to himself than to us, “Drainpipe: exactly. That’s brilliant.”

  We walk in silence until Cassandra tells us we’re getting close. She identifies a few landmarks and finally says, “Right here.” Dorsey pokes at the ground with a shovel. We establish what seems to be the perimeter of the disturbed area, but it’s been skillfully concealed, so we can’t be sure. One of the troopers lays out a tarp for the dirt, and they start digging. There is a sudden feeling of solemnity. My sense of adventure dies as the diggers work. The sound of their shovels, the labored breathing as they dig, the notes of another thrush coming from the woods, it all comes together. I understand that there will be a body. Everything has fallen into place too easily for it to be otherwise. The sod has clearly been removed and replaced: The underlying dirt is loose, the grass matted. I look at Cassandra. She is ashen. I have the strange urge to take her hand, but of course I don’t. Digging takes longer than I would expect, and there is almost a sense of release when the shovels hit something. Now the men work more carefully, clearing away dirt with hands and trowels, almost lovingly, and the shape of a body takes form in dark relief against the shadowy bottom of the hole.

  CHAPTER 4

  Dorsey radios back to set things in motion. Troopers string yellow tape. The men clear dirt away from legs and ankles and one of the arms. The other arm is beneath the body, which lies curled on its side because the original hole wasn’t big enough to allow a final slumber at full extension. He or she was tossed into the pit like garbage.

  I am a federal prosecutor, head of the criminal division of the district U.S. Attorney’s Office; I see it all. No, actually, I don’t see it all; I prosecute it all. I’m aware of it all. I read crime scene reports and confessions and autopsy results and witness statements. I study eight-by-tens of the most horrible things; I describe the hideous actions of hideous people to juries. I occasionally even attend autopsies. But rarely do I get out to see the actual crime scene. And while this particular incident is probably no great shakes to field-weary guys like Captain Dorsey and FBI Agent Chip, it feels miles more real than what I’m accustomed to.

  I feel—what shall I call it?—the chill. And before I know it, like a plant bending to the light or a dog curling up at the fire, I’m warming myself shoulder to shoulder with Cassandra.

  “You okay?” I ask her. She nods but says nothing.

  After the photographer has documented everything, they pull the arm out from under the body, and with a trooper at each leg and one at each arm, they lift the body from the hole and place it on a tarp. It is scraggly and male and at first looks of indeterminate age, but as dirt falls away from the face, I see he is not bearded and not scraggly. He is youthful, his features gentle, almost feminine, eyes maybe a bit too narrow but offset by a sharp jaw, sculpted nose, and strong cheekbones. His skin is unblemished and smooth except for the whisker stubble. He looks peaceful and asleep, which is comforting, because last time I saw him, he looked like shit, haggard and scared, with eyes bloodshot from a sleepless, tearful night. The college boy.

  • • •

  College boy, whose real name is—was—Zander Phippin, was a shy and likable kid who was selling pot to pay his college tuition. At first he was just selling a few bags on his floor of the college dorm, but when his immediate supplier finished a BA in cultural anthropology and moved away to grad school, Zander stepped up to fill the vacancy. He was in over his head, obtaining his product from some very bad people. When he came to our attention, we let him cook overnight without bail before having a sit-down with him in the morning. The crimes that we could nail him on were minor, good for eighteen months in minimum at most, and normally, we’d have just let the state handle it. But we were itching to get our hands on those suppliers.

  Our conversation with him was cordial. His biggest worry was how disappointed his parents were going to be. “They aren’t, like, hostile,” he said of them. “They just don’t know what to do with me. They, you know, had in mind a kid who could read, for one thing, and who wanted to sleep with girls instead of boys, for another.”

  “Zander has rather pronounced dyslexia,” his lawyer said.

  He seemed like an average kid, if you can call a gay dyslexic drug peddler average. After graduating from a high school for kids with learning disabilities, he had moved first to Provincetown, then to San Francisco, and finally back home.

  “I wanted to try college, get a business degree,” he said. “Maybe I would have followed in my dad’s footsteps after all.” And he began sobbing.

  I have a softness for mixed-up boys (evidence: Kenny), so I was glad to have a lifeline to toss him—forgiveness in exchange for cooperation.

  Who was the contact? Zander didn’t know any names. How did they communicate? The supplier called Zander’s cell to set up exchanges. How had they met? The anthropology student had hooked them up. Would Zander help us nab the contact?

  “No.”

  So Chip explained how, even though we knew Zander did nothing but sell pot, he could be charged as a conspirator in the criminal enterprise of his suppliers. Meaning he could be implicated in all of their crimes, including but not necessarily limited to selling crack cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine, as well as extortion, murder, kiddie porn, and prostitution, to name a few.

  “You help us, we’ll help you,” Chip said to Zander.

  The idea was to have Zander inform us of the next exchange. We’d spot the contact, surveil him, pick him up at a later time (to protect Zander), and hopefully work our way up the chain to some bigwigs. Zander would walk away clean. He wouldn’t even have to tell his parents.

  Zander agreed.

  I left him and his lawyer to discuss particulars with Chip, so I wasn’t there when Zander walked out the smoked-glass front doors of the FBI building, but I bet he stood breathing in the exhaust-y afternoon air of the city, feeling awed by his freedom. Certainly, he realized it could have gone differently; he could have been up for eighteen months of three hots and a cot at Club Fed just on the possession charges—life if we’d tied him in to a conspiracy. I hope he exulted in however many hours of freedom he got before they picked him up.

  CHAPTER 5

  At the Drowntown Café near the reservoir, we talk about how to play it. I’m in shirtsleeves, my tie loosened. Dorsey and Chip are still wearing suit jackets, as guys with holsters do in public. Chip’s is a belt holster, and Dorsey has a shoulder holster with his jacket semi-intentionally pushed back, making the gun as inconspicuous as a panther in a petting zoo.

  It’s a huge advantage—finding the body the same day it was ditched, with the bad guys still thinking it’ll never turn up. We just have to figure out how to put our advantage to work.

  “Dollars to doughnuts,” Dorsey says, “we won’t find anything on the body. Zilch. Clean as a whistle. You’ll see.”

  I’m feeling on edge. I’m irritated by Dorsey and Chip, and I want to move over one table to where Cassandra and Lizzy sit with Kenny, all of them eating strawberry rhubarb pie. I want to be with them, not with the cops. I recognize how foolish it was to bring Lizzy on this excursion, a lapse of both parental and professional judgment. I’ve always tried to keep her far from the nitty-gritty of my job, because there are evils afoot in the world that fourteen-year-old girls don’t need to know about. It gnaws at me, the stupidity—I feel as though I’ve ushered her into a sphere of danger. And I know how it happened: I was beguiled by Cassandra. Maybe Lizzy isn’t the only one pretending to have a normal family life.

  “I don’t know,” Chip says, “I’m betting we find a calling card: ballistics, DNA, fibers. Something.” He has a cup pressed to his face, and I realize I’m doing the same, warming my cheek on willowware, though the room temperature is in the seventies. Dorsey and I have coffee. Chip has h
erbal tea of some kind that he picked from a wicker basket the waitress brought over. He had engaged her at length about the different qualities of the herbal blends before choosing from the assortment.

  “We could get her hypnotized, I suppose,” Dorsey says of Cassandra. “Like, maybe she saw their car parked out at the road. Something like that. You know?”

  Chip shakes his head and says, “I suppose.”

  I shrug. Dorsey shrugs. The hypnosis idea is dead. We know she didn’t see anything.

  At the other table, Cassandra and Lizzy are talking quietly. Kenny is silent.

  “. . . because she’s really no witness at all,” Chip says.

  “She doesn’t exist, evidence-wise. Investigation-wise,” Dorsey says.

  “Trial-wise,” Chip adds.

  “Just a bloodhound after it finds a body.”

  “Let’s send her home,” Dorsey says, and he’s up and at the door, beckoning someone in from the parking lot. A uniformed trooper enters. Dorsey thanks Cassandra for all her help and introduces the trooper, Officer Penhale, who will drive her back to town, where someone at headquarters will take a formal statement.

  “I can drive her,” I say.

  Dorsey’s steroidal mustache crinkles. “No, I want to talk this through with you gents. Strategize. How to catch the bad guys, eh? No time like the present, eh?”

  “Except that—” I say. And I stop. Everything about the morning has left me shaken, and I just want to hunker down with Lizzy and my new friend Cassandra. But before I figure out how to derail Dorsey’s plan, Cassandra is already on her way to the door with Penhale, and Lizzy is on her feet, fingers wrapped around Cassandra’s arm. “I’ll come, too,” Lizzy says, her only concern being that she rides with Cassandra. “Meet you at your office, Daddy.”

  Though I don’t want to let Lizzy out of my sight, I have no good reason to forbid her. “Guess I’ll go, too,” Kenny says.

  Then they’re gone, Penhale, Lizzy, Kenny, and the lovely Cassandra. I’m left behind with Dorsey and Chip, wondering how it all got away from me and how, with this turn of events, I can finagle a phone call or, better, a coffee date with Cassandra.

  • • •

  “Here’s what I’m thinking,” Dorsey says when we’re settled back around the table. “We’ll put all our manpower into surveillance. Watch the major players. Then we let word out that someone saw it all. See who starts making a move. Dollars to doughnuts, we snare somebody right off the bat.”

  “What about the witness?” I say, indicating Cassandra with a flick of my head toward the exit door. “Is it dangerous for her?”

  “Not dangerous,” Dorsey says. “The Bureau will protect her, and there’s no way for them to know who she is. Besides, like we said, all she did was find the scene. She didn’t actually witness anything.”

  Chip nods his agreement, eyes closed, breathing in the steam of his herbal tea.

  Dorsey starts to lay out a strategy for leaking the false info that a witness saw the perps in the woods.

  “Not so fast,” I say. “If you want to use Cassandra Randall as bait, we need her permission.”

  “Oh, for crip’s sake,” Dorsey snaps. “She’s not bait. She’s nothing. We’re making it all up. Ms. Randall doesn’t exist.”

  “I’ll talk to her,” I say.

  Chip raises eyebrows at Dorsey. Dorsey shrugs, opens his notepad, copies down Cassandra’s phone number and address, and hands it to me. I stuff it into my shirt pocket. Chip looks at me wide-eyed and laughs. “You sly bastard,” he says, eyeing the pocket.

  • • •

  On our way out of the café, Dorsey stops to study one of the old sepia photos on the wall: Workmen are digging in a graveyard; there are dozens of holes already dug, and a wagon is stacked with wooden caskets.

  “They dug up all the dead,” I tell him, “moved the cemetery to higher ground before closing the dam. Seventy-five hundred of them. Bones, jewelry, trinkets, grave markers. Lock, stock, and barrel.”

  “You know this because . . . ?”

  “Undergraduate history project,” I say. “Mom’s family had a homestead here, so I took an interest. Big beautiful farm right in the middle of the valley. It’s all lake bottom now.”

  “So this is kind of a tough place to stay buried,” Dorsey says, and we both laugh.

  CHAPTER 6

  Lizzy’s breathing is a quiet ocean against the beach. Haaa . . . saaa . . . haaa . . . saaa . . .

  Through the window, I see pinpoints of light where the moon reflects on the Volvo’s chrome and glass.

  We’re at our cabin up north. After all of today’s traumatic events, Lizzy and I loaded the Volvo with beer and Gatorade and groceries and drove the two hours from the city. We arrived late at night, built a fire in the stove, made hot chocolate with marshmallows, and huddled together under a quilt while I read to Lizzy from Anna Karenina. When she fell asleep, I tucked the quilt around her and left her in the big bed while I climbed into the cold narrow bunk across the room that is supposed to be hers. This is our routine.

  I awaken in the night.The cabin is dark, but I can make out shapes. There is the big four-poster where Lizzy sleeps, and I see the couch and woodstove. I can see the grocery bags we left out on the table when we arrived. In darkness, the bags look solid and weathered, rising above the pine slab like the great stone heads of Easter Island rising from the grass. I see an eye, an ear, and the sad sloping nose. It is Zander Phippin, of course—not that he looked anything like those woebegone heads, but here in the darkness, it is he. His nose, his ears, his head poking up from the dirt with chunks of sod tumbling from his features.

  “My own little boy,” I whisper. I’m half asleep, and my thoughts are addled. I’m confusing poor dead Zander with another boy. In most matters, I’m a shameless and unimaginative realist, but not so with regard to my own departed son, Toby. I protect my memory of Toby from the weathering elements of logic. Zander is, or was, the same age my son would be now. Toby died in Flora’s arms a quarter century ago (in this very room, actually), but I still see him in babies who are around the age he was when he died—nine and a half months—and young men like Zander, who are the age he would be if he had lived.

  I snap on the light.

  • • •

  Morning now: It’s the sort of morning that makes you wish for nothing beyond the simple pleasure of sitting on the dock, bathed in the indigo and pink of sky and lake. In fact, I’m sitting in my Adirondack chair at the end of the dock with a cup of coffee.

  Lizzy comes outside for her run. She’s heavy-boned for a runner, but she has her mom’s good lung capacity. She stands in front of me, warming up, hopping like a springbuck. The jumping and the spin of her ponytail and the mesh of arms and legs are carefree and exuberant and judgmental and arrogant.

  Now she eyes me with a smile that is impish and aware. “She’s separated, you know,” she says with a sly smile.

  “Who is?”

  “Duh. Cassandra.”

  I shrug.

  “You like her,” Lizzy says.

  I wait.

  “ ’Cause she likes you.”

  “Tell me what you know, babe.”

  Lizzy stops jumping and jogs once around my Adirondack chair. “I can just tell,” she says, and then she is off around the lake. The pastels of morning are fading, loons are swimming, striders striding, fish finning, songbirds singing, and all of it coming together into a pretty convincing dawn-of-creation tableau with the first golden rays tickling the tops of the firs. I have the Adirondack chair oriented to give me the best view of where, in about forty-eight minutes, Lizzy will emerge again from the woods, sweaty and pink and happy.

  I dial my voice mail.

  Message: “Nickie, it’s Flora, I’ll see you Saturday afternoon. I’m just calling to say I might be a little late and that I’m bringing my friend Lloyd, I don’t think you’ve met him yet. Nicest man. I know you two will hit it off. We met last month when I had that symposium, you k
now? Maybe you don’t. Bye-bye.”

  From here on the dock, I can see Flora’s cabin through the trees. Our marriage broke up after Toby died, each of us deeming the other guilty of unforgivable acts. But neither of us wanted to give up this cabin on the lake, so we didn’t. We swapped the partnership in matrimony for a simple partnership in real estate, satisfying our need to be unmarried without completely letting go.

  Our friendly arrangement got too friendly a few times, and Lizzy was born eight years after our divorce. Eventually, we divided the land and built the second cabin for Flora.

  Message: “Nick, it’s Kendall Vance. Listen, I’ve got this Tamika . . . um . . . um . . . Curtis, Tamika Curtis case. We have to talk. I can’t believe for a frigging minute you’re serious about this. Call me.”

  I am chagrined to hear that Kendall has been assigned to the Tamika Curtis case. He is an arrogant defense lawyer who sometimes takes pro bono cases for the federal-defender program. The Curtis case is one of them, because Tamika Curtis’s only pot to piss in is the one in her cell. It’s typical of Kendall Vance to call me directly instead of talking to whichever assistant is handling the case, because Kendall doesn’t want to discuss procedural issues. He wants to harp about the unfairness of the law, the courts, the government, and life in general. He’s a Sixth Amendment nutcase (that’s the one guaranteeing the defendant’s right to counsel) who strains his shoulder patting himself on the back every time he puts a murderer or drug peddler back out on the street. He no doubt wants to make me the great Satan of poor Tamika’s miserable existence. Don’t argue with me, I’ll tell him, your beef is with Congress.

  Which is one of the things I like about my job: There’s no room for moral anguish. Somebody else makes the tough choices. I just enforce.

  I delete his message.

  Message: “Nick, it’s Chip. Call me.” Chip d’Villafranca, my FBI buddy. I’d like to call Cassandra first, but it’s too early to be jingling at the bedside of an almost stranger, so I call Chip. He answers in a laconic Saturday-morning voice, but after a few seconds of small talk, he switches to his badass FBI-agent voice. “I have news,” he says. “A person of interest passed through a toll station off the eastbound lane of the pike on the morning in question.”