Depraved Indifference

Depraved Indifference Joseph Teller Forced off the road by a speeding sports car, a van carrying nine passengers bursts into flamesAll nine occupants of the van – eight of them children – are killed .Criminal defence attorney Harrison J. Walker, aka Jaywalker, has been trying to keep his nose clean while serving a three-year suspension. But when a woman seduces him into representing the driver – a man who also happens to be her husband – things get messy.Jaywalker tries to stay focused on his goal: limiting the damage to his client. But when he rounds a blind corner in the case, he collides with a truth that could change everything.A must-read for fans of John Grisham and Mark Gimenez Depraved Indifference Joseph Teller www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk) About the Author JOSEPH TELLER was born and raised in New York City. After graduating from law school, he spent three years working undercover for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. For the next thirty-five years he was a criminal defence lawyer. Not too long ago he decided to “run from the law” and began writing fiction. Depraved Indifference is his second novel for MIRA Books. Also Available THE TENTH CASE To Darcy, Katie, Amy and Rachel, with all my love. And lest you think that makes me a terrible womanizer, think again. They are my granddaughters. Acknowledgments Once again I find myself deeply indebted to my literary agent Bob Diforio, who claims he’s deluged with other writers but continues to treat me as though I’m his only one, and to my fabulous editor Leslie Wainger and the rest of the gang at MIRA, who do pretty much the same. I would be totally lost without either one of them. For some reason, I always seem to have great difficulty persuading my wonderful but terribly overcommitted wife, Sandy, to find time to read my latest manuscript. But eventually the sheer force of my nagging prevails. Warning me in advance that she’s going to absolutely hate it, she disappears into the den for the better part of the day. Sometime that evening, she emerges and tracks me down, a broad smile on her face, to pronounce the work my very best yet. That’s the moment when I know it’s okay to send it off. Chapter One A Very Bad D.W.I. “So,” she said, raising herself onto one elbow, just high enough off the bed to reveal a single nipple, still visibly hard. “What do you do for a living, when you’re not busy knocking people down?” She was Amanda. At least that was as much of a name as he’d gotten out of her over the hour and twenty minutes since he’d literally knocked her to the ground by being overly aggressive with a sticking revolving door at the Forty-second Street Public Library. Not that all of their time together since that moment had been devoted to small talk, or any other kind of talk, for that matter. Certainly not the last twenty minutes, anyway. “I’m a lawyer,” said Jaywalker. “Sort of.” “Sort of?” “I’m not practicing these days,” he explained. “What happened?” she asked. “You get burned out?” “No,” he said, “more like thrown out. I’m serving a three-year suspension.” “What for?” “Oh, various things. Cutting corners. Breaking silly rules. Taking risks. Pissing off stupid judges. The usual stuff.” “They suspend you for those things?” “It seems so.” He left it at that. He didn’t feel any particular need to tell her about the juiciest charge of all, that he’d managed to get caught by a security camera in one of the stairwells of the courthouse, accepting—or at least not exactly fending off—an impromptu expression of heartfelt thanks from an accused prostitute for whom he’d just won a hard-fought acquittal. “What did you say your name was?” she asked. “I didn’t. But it’s Jaywalker.” It wasn’t just a case of tit for tat, his withholding part of his name because she had. The single name was all he had, actually. Harrison J. Walker had years ago elided into Harrison Jaywalker, and not too long after that, the Harrison part had disappeared altogether. So for years now, he’d been known to just about everyone simply as Jaywalker. “You’re that guy!” exclaimed Amanda, suddenly and self-consciously covering up her wayward nipple with a pillow. “I knew you looked familiar. I saw you on Page Six. You were dating that…that billionaire heiress murderer!” Jaywalker winced painfully. Three years ago, had someone asked him to describe his own personal vision of what hell might be like, he might well have replied, “Showing up on the Entertainment Channel,” or “Landing on Page Six of the New York Post.” And thanks to a brief, torrid and not-so-discreet romance with a client named Samara Tannenbaum, he’d managed to accomplish not one but both of those distinctions, and in the short space of a single week. “Yup,” he acknowledged meekly now, “that would be me.” Amanda laughed out loud and threw her head back, her stylishly short blond hair framing her face, in what could easily have been a fashion model’s pose. In the process, both of her breasts came completely free of the sheets, causing a decided swelling in Jaywalker’s appreciation of her. “So tell me, mister famous lawyer man,” she said. “How much do you charge for a drunk-driving case?” “I don’t,” said Jaywalker. “I’m suspended, remember?” “Right, but for how much longer?” Jaywalker shrugged. “I don’t know, seven months, maybe eight.” The fact was, he hadn’t exactly been counting the days. If anything, he’d lately been giving some serious consideration to “re-upping” for another three years. Although even as he’d been enjoying his estrangement from the legal profession, his checking account balance was rapidly approaching zero, making such a choice problematic. “And if you weren’t suspended?” He shrugged again. “I don’t know. I used to get twenty-five hundred, thirty-five hundred, something like that.” And in spite of everything, he found himself already contemplating the variables, just as he used to do. First of all, it would depend on whether they were talking about a plea or a trial. After that, where the case was. A D.W.I. in Manhattan, the Bronx or Brooklyn was no big deal. If there’d been a blood-alcohol test and Amanda’s reading hadn’t been too high, there was a good chance he could get her a plea to driving while impaired, maybe even a reckless. A couple of appearances, and the case would be done. Queens and Staten Island tended to be a bit tougher. And as you worked your way out into the neighboring counties—Westchester, Nassau and Suffolk, where there was a lower volume of cases—the D.A.s got noticeably more hard-assed and could afford to insist upon a plea to the full charge. Not that it mattered all that much, though. What they were talking about here was a fine, a license suspension, or at very worst a revocation, a court-ordered one-day safe-driving course and a substantial increase in her insurance premiums. In other words, a slap on the wrist and a smack on the wallet. “Where were you arrested?” he asked her. “And did you take a test?” He couldn’t help himself. “Oh, no,” said Amanda, shaking her head from side to side, with the inevitable ripple effect it caused to the, uh, rest of her. “It’s not me.” “Oh?” said Jaywalker. “So who are we talking about?” “My husband.” Jaywalker sat up, reflexively reaching around for his pants. His level of appreciation had suddenly shrunk dramatically. Funny how that happened. “Don’t worry,” said Amanda. “It’s not like he’s about to walk in on us or anything.” “How do you know?” “Because he’s in jail, on five million dollars’ bail. That’s how.” Jaywalker relaxed ever so slightly. “Five million dollars,” he echoed. “It must have been a very bad D.W.I.” “It was,” said Amanda. “Nine people died.” Chapter Two Jaywalker, P.I. Which, of course, immediately changed everything. A drunk-driving case is only a drunk-driving case. Until someone dies. When that happens, it blossoms into a vehicular homicide. When nine someones die, it can become a full-blown murder case, especially when the victims are incinerated after the van in which they’re riding gets forced off the road, flips three times and explodes. Jaywalker knew the case. Who didn’t? It had led off the evening news, even made the front page of his beloved New York Times, about three weeks ago. The driver of a passenger van had been literally run off the road and down a steep embankment by an oncoming Audi sports car speeding in the wrong lane. It had happened just north of Congers, New York, right before Route 303 ended and joined up with Route 9W. A witness in a pickup truck had seen the whole thing. He’d thought briefly about giving chase to the Audi as it sped off, before deciding instead to stop to see what he could do for the victims. The answer was nothing. Within minutes, the van had burned so badly that the newspaper photographs of it revealed only a portion of the lettering painted onto its side. All that remained visible was—MAZ—ESHI—, a fact that quickly gave birth to a rumor that the occupants had been Muslim terrorists who’d accidentally blown themselves up before reaching their intended target. That rumor was soon replaced by another one, that the van had been overcrowded because it had been carrying migrant Mexican farmworkers, who were no doubt illegal aliens. The right-wing radio talk-show hosts lost no time in picking up the story. To them and their call-in listeners, it didn’t seem to matter too much whether the dead were terrorists or illegals; whichever turned out to be the case, the consensus was that they’d pretty much deserved their fate. “Good for that Audi guy!” said one caller. “Maybe that’ll teach them criminal alien bombers a lesson!” Before the hour was up, one host was referring to the driver of the car as the “Audi Avenger.” It was only after emergency responders had succeeded in putting out the fire and extricating the bodies that the grim truth was discovered. Eight of the nine dead, the van’s driver being the sole exception, were young children whose ages would eventually be determined to range from six to eleven. All had been students at the Ramaz Yeshiva, a Jewish school located fifteen miles from the site of the impact. They’d been heading to a groundbreaking ceremony for a new synagogue over in Haverstraw. Just like that, the Audi Avenger became the Audi Assassin. If the driver of the pickup truck had been unable to help the occupants of the van, at least he’d accomplished something that day. Turning to watch the fleeing Audi, he’d managed to not only note the model but read its license plate, and although he’d forget the complete registration before being interviewed by state troopers, he’d distinctly remembered that it ended with the numbers 724. That happened to be his wife’s birth date, July 24. The following day, even as computers were busy searching data files for all Audis and Audi look-alikes in the tristate area with registrations ending in 724—there were only six, it would turn out—a man by the name of Carter Drake III, accompanied by his business attorney, turned himself in to the New York State Police in Nyack. Drake was forty-four and had no prior arrests. That said, he’d allowed his driver’s license to lapse over parking tickets he’d accumulated several years ago, along with the insurance on the Audi. Congers is a one-stoplight village in Rockland County, a half an hour north of the George Washington Bridge, on the Jersey side. The county seat is New City, which means that all felonies end up there for trial. But New City has another distinction. It happens to be home to one of the largest concentrations of Orthodox-Jewish populations in the western hemisphere. Like his wife, Amanda, Carter Drake happened to be blond, good-looking and decidedly not Jewish, let alone orthodox. Not exactly the best fit for New City. “So,” said Amanda, “will you represent my husband? I’m pretty sure we can afford your fee.” Jaywalker was pretty sure that was an understatement. “You’re forgetting my suspension,” he reminded her. “No, I’m not,” Amanda assured him. “You told me yourself you like to cut corners, break silly rules, take risks. What’s a little suspension between friends? Besides which, doesn’t it take months and months for a case to go to trial? By that time, you’ll be relawyerized.” “Reinstated,” Jaywalker corrected her. “Whatever. And Carter’s no dummy. He can always get sick or something, if the case needs to be slowed down. If you know what I mean.” Jaywalker nodded. Of course he knew what she meant. It was the kind of delaying tactic he himself had resorted to more than once. A bit devious, to be sure. But deviousness had its place in Jaywalker’s bag of tricks. So it certainly wasn’t Amanda’s suggestion that was bothering Jaywalker at the moment. Still, something was. And he decided it was the nagging feeling that he was being set up. Because the thing was, long before their revolving-door encounter, Jaywalker had noticed that he was being followed. Not by a car; his ancient beat-up Mercury, the one he’d bought himself for six hundred dollars several years back as a reward for winning a brief but serious bout with the bottle, was rusting away in a parking lot over on Twelfth Avenue. No, on foot. Someone had been tailing him, lingering back in the shadows, walking when he walked, stopping when he stopped, crossing the street when he crossed. Had it not been for his days as a DEA agent, it’s likely Jaywalker never would have picked it up. But so many of his colleagues had been doing something wrong back then, whether that meant something as minor as a little bit of creative writing on the hours entered on their Daily Activity Logs, all the way up to outright stealing or selling the very narcotics they were paid to keep off the streets. Whatever it was, they were constantly checking for a tail, as they used to call it. Over time, Jaywalker had found himself gradually adopting their paranoia as his own, almost unconsciously looking over his shoulder as he walked and glancing in the rearview mirror as he drove. Even after he’d left the job, the habit had proved a hard one to kick, and now, years later, it still stayed with him to a certain extent. So yesterday afternoon, when he thought he’d spotted someone eyeing him through sunglasses from outside the plate-glass window of the Korean grocery where he was buying pretzels, cheese and other essentials, he’d decided to conduct a little experiment. He’d proceeded to walk two full avenues out of his way, all the way from West End to Amsterdam, before abruptly stopping in the middle of the intersection, slapping his head in an exaggerated fashion as though he’d forgotten something and suddenly doubling back toward Broadway. And he’d been right. Somewhat to his surprise, it had turned out to be a woman, a thirty something blonde almost as tall as he was. Though it was an overcast day, she was wearing sunglasses. And as soon as he looked her way, she averted her glance, turned away and crossed the street, disappearing into the midafternoon crowd. He’d looked for her again this morning and had actually been disappointed when he’d failed to spot her. But soon enough, there she was again. More careful this time, wearing a large hat pulled down over her forehead, hanging back a little farther, even following him from across the street at one point. But Jaywalker had tricks of his own. In order to get a better look at her, he’d stopped in front of a stationery store and pretended to study the items on display. In fact, he was able to angle himself so that in the reflection of the glass he could see her slow down and then stop on the opposite sidewalk, pretending to be looking into a shop herself. But it was unlikely: the shop she was staring into bore the name, at least in Jaywalker’s mirrored view, In unmirrored English, that would be PAYCHECKS CASHED, and she definitely didn’t look like the type who needed her paycheck cashed. He could have lost her right then, had he wanted to. But by that time he was curious. For starters, unlike his old DEA cronies, Jaywalker knew he wasn’t doing anything wrong. He’d faithfully abided by the terms of his suspension. He’d given up his law office, which had never been more than a desk, a phone, an answering machine and a computer in a tenth-floor suite. He’d stayed away from 100 Centre Street, Foley Square and all the other courthouses of the city. He’d stopped giving out business cards, refrained from offering legal advice to the few friends and family members he had, and quickly corrected anyone who addressed him or referred to him as a lawyer, attorney, counselor-at-law, or anything else that suggested he was still practicing. Beyond taking those precautions, he lived a life that was almost boring in its adherence to the law. With his car in dry dock, he accumulated no speeding or parking tickets. Without an income, he had no taxes to cheat on. If he broke the law at all, he excused his transgressions as the inevitable by-product of his name: as a pedestrian he continued to pay little heed to hatched crosswalks, traffic lights, and WALK and DON’T WALK signs. But those offenses were hardly the stuff that called for the authorities to go out and recruit Mata Hari types to conduct clandestine surveillance on him. So who was this blonde who was following him, if rather amateurishly? Jaywalker had been determined to find out. So he’d gradually led her, looking back only surreptitiously, and only often enough to make certain she was still there, all the way to the main branch of the public library. There he’d mounted the outer flight of steps and entered through one of the revolving doors. From the darkened interior, he’d watched as she’d climbed the steps in pursuit. Then, as soon as she’d stepped inside one of the four sections of the door, he’d gotten in opposite her and jammed the thing with his foot. Only after he’d gotten a good look at her from up close—and liked what he saw—had he given the door a good shove to get it going again. Unfortunately, she must have been pushing at the same time, and their combined efforts, as he released his foot, had literally knocked her to the ground. Which meant that, being a gentleman, Jaywalker had had no choice but to come around to her side and help her to her feet. Her hat had somehow stayed in place, but the force of her fall had knocked the sunglasses from her face. He picked them up and held them up to his eyes for inspection. “No damage,” he assured her. What he’d really been doing, of course, was checking to see if they were prescription and therefore necessary on a day that was, if anything, even more overcast than the previous one. They weren’t, meaning they were nothing but a prop. Still, Jaywalker hesitated a bit longer before returning them to her, getting an even better look at her. That had been an hour and a half ago. The chat on the library steps, the cup of coffee in a nearby luncheonette and the cab ride to her place had taken less than an hour. The rest, as they say, was history. Yet at no point had Jaywalker confronted her about having followed him. Instead, he’d allowed her the fiction that they’d met only because he’d happened to knock her down. He decided she must have known who he was all along. Her “You’re that guy!” epiphany had been nothing but an act, meant to convince him that it had been pure serendipity that she’d ended up in bed with just the man she wanted to defend her husband. Why had she gone to such elaborate lengths to meet him? If the answer to that question still went begging, Jaywalker could come up with a pretty plausible explanation. Immediately following his suspension, he’d vacated his office, disconnected his phone, canceled his e-mail account and all but ignored whatever showed up in his post office box. His home phone number, as it always had been, remained unlisted. In other words, he’d become a phantom, a very difficult man to find. Had Amanda Drake—now that he knew her real name—used more traditional means to try to meet with him and hire him, she no doubt would have failed. So she’d somehow hunted him down and then resorted to the old follow-him-until-he-catches-me trick. Then she’d lured him into her bed and, coming up for air, innocently asked him what he did for a living. So while Jaywalker was forced to deduct one point for her having been less than forthright, he gave it back to her for sheer cleverness. A woman after his own heart. Even though he was pretty much satisfied with his explanation of why Amanda had been following him, he was tempted to come right out and ask her. Not so much to test his hypothesis as to show off his own superior instinct and skill at having spotted her. But he resisted the urge. Some cards are better played early on in the game; others are best held on to. Who knew if an opportune moment might arise when confronting Amanda would pay a dividend? So he’d settle for having made the tail, in more ways than one. He kept quiet, therefore, and turned his thoughts to the notion of getting back into the business of defending criminals—okay, accused criminals. And the love-hate relationship he’d long carried on with the way he’d been making his living for the past twenty-some years. As much as he’d been enjoying his extended sabbatical from the law, Jaywalker could feel the pull of getting back into the trenches. He missed the courthouse, that filthy place of long lines, broken elevators and peculiar smells. He missed the people, the camaraderie—defense lawyers and prosecutors he’d grown middle-aged with; judges who itched to hold him in contempt every time he stepped across some foolish line they’d drawn, but would have hired him in a New York minute if they themselves had gotten into trouble; court officers, corrections officers, clerks, court reporters and translators he’d come to feel he’d known forever. He missed even the defendants, often initially surly or even hostile, invariably self-destructive, but almost always deeply appreciative by the time he parted ways with them. He missed the battle, that matching of wits, that take-no-prisoners struggle they called a trial but might just as well have called a war. He missed opening statements, cross-examination, summing up. He missed sitting on the edge of his seat and feeling his heart pounding in his chest as the jurors filed into the courtroom one last time to deliver their verdict. He missed the incredible high that lifted him into the stratosphere with each acquittal. He even missed, in some strange way, the depths of despair into which he plunged following a conviction. What’s more, Jaywalker found himself intrigued by the case against Carter Drake. Should the act of driving, no matter how poorly or even recklessly, ever be a sufficient predicate for a murder charge and the mandatory sentence of life imprisonment it carried? Was Jaywalker being old-fashioned by thinking that before accusing a man of murder, the state ought to first be required to demonstrate that he’d set out to harm somebody? Was that asking too much? But beyond Jaywalker’s interest in that legal issue, there was a much more mundane reason for wanting to get involved. And that was the worst invention Homo sapiens had ever managed to come up with. Money. A murder case, even one predicated upon the faulty operation of a motor vehicle, meant a five-figure fee. God knew he could use the money, which would be his first income in more than two years. And since Carter Drake was apparently willing to do whatever it would take to drag the case out until Jaywalker’s suspension was over, things might actually work out. He’d have to be careful, of course. He’d have to steer clear of the New City courthouse, refrain from saying anything about the case that might find its way into the newspapers and avoid any conduct that might arguably constitute practicing law. And if he were to accept any money, he’d have to do it in such a way as to make it look like something other than a legal fee. But that could be done, he was pretty sure. Then there were the secondary drawbacks and benefits of getting involved. On the negative side was the sheer notoriety of the case. Taking on Carter Drake as his comeback act would mean that Jaywalker would be returning to the scene of his past transgressions with a considerable bang. Right off the bat, he’d be representing a high-profile murder defendant in what was sure to be a media-circus trial. The prospect of that kind of free publicity would no doubt have delighted every one of Jaywalker’s colleagues, but in that respect he stood apart from them. In fact, the thought of it brought him dangerously close to gagging. Finally, there was the chance that one of the benefits of representing Carter Drake might be Amanda Drake. Then again, what a conflict of interest that would be! Jaywalker allowed himself a chuckle as he imagined a slew of new charges from the disciplinary committee. He could picture the presiding justice snarling down at him with righteous indignation. “So, Mr. Jaywalker, we conclude that you deliberately made certain that your client would remain locked up for as long as possible, just so you could continue to have an affair with his wife.” Well, that was one benefit that might just have to be curtailed. But what a shame. That night, in the privacy of his own place, Jaywalker thought things over. Unlike Amanda Carter’s four-bedroom triplex just off Fifth Avenue, Jaywalker’s apartment wasn’t much more than a furnished room. What it was, was a fourth-floor walk-up studio in what real estate agents tend to write off as a developing neighborhood, much the same way economists might refer to a developing nation. Implicit in both terms is the suggestion that the entity being described still has a long way to go before qualifying for actually being developed. So as he pondered the advisability of getting involved in Carter Drake’s case, Jaywalker stretched out on his sofa, which doubled as his bed, and also served from time to time as his laundry sorter, work surface and exercise mat. A criminal case begins, as Jaywalker well knew, with an investigation, followed by an arrest. Or sometimes it’s the other way around, an arrest followed by an investigation. By the time a defense lawyer gets contacted, selected, and either hired by the family or appointed by the court, that lawyer already finds himself playing catch-up. It had already been three weeks since Carter Drake’s arrest, and based upon the little that Jaywalker remembered from the newspaper accounts, the only representation Drake had had in that time was from the business lawyer who’d surrendered him, followed by some local guy who’d stood up for him when he got to court. It would be another seven or eight months before Jaywalker would be allowed to practice again. That would mean an eight-month head start for the prosecution, an all but insurmountable advantage. So what was Jaywalker to do in the meantime? He couldn’t contact the D.A.’s office or the state police, or risk calling either of the lawyers who’d been representing Drake; any one of them could turn him in for doing so. Yet he couldn’t just sit on his hands and watch his future client languish in the hands of a couple of incompetents while the prosecution perfected its case, could he? He found a half-smoked joint, fired it up and inhaled deeply. Ever since he’d given up drinking, Jaywalker had resorted to the old devil weed for occasional inspiration. It soothed him, relaxed him, helped him see things a bit more clearly, and brought on a moderate case of the “munchies”—an indispensable aid to a man who, to the envy of most men and every woman he knew, had serious trouble keeping his weight up. With no known adverse side effects and no possibility of a lethal overdose, it was, as Martha Stewart might have put it, a good thing. Little wonder, thought Jaywalker, that the government had criminalized it, or that the last administration had chosen to make it the primary target of its war against drugs. It didn’t take long for Jaywalker to hatch a plan. What he’d do would be to have Amanda hire him as a private investigator for her husband. That would allow Jaywalker to go into jail and talk with Drake, gather police reports and other documents, locate and interview witnesses, and generally snoop around. His DEA background more than prepared him for the job, and his law degree qualified him, much the same way it permitted lawyers to act as real estate brokers and notary publics without having to undergo additional training or licensing. It was all part of the genius behind the scheme of having laws that are written by lawyers, enforced by lawyers who’ve become judges, for the benefit and protection of lawyers. Now, did the little matter of Jaywalker’s suspension disqualify him from availing himself of those benefits and protections? No, he decided; that would be overthinking it. He was still a lawyer, albeit one who was temporarily incapacitated. Kind of like how a baseball player who was on the disabled list was still a baseball player, no? A perfect analogy. So as long as Jaywalker were to stick to investigating, he wouldn’t really be practicing law, would he be? He allowed himself another hit of the joint. Yeah, investigating would be just fine. He broke the news to Amanda two days later. They met at the same luncheonette they’d gone to from the library. She looked every bit as stunning as he’d remembered her, and he found himself powerless to keep his eyes off her. He managed somewhat better when it came to his hands, but it was hard. Keeping his hands off her, that is. This time they had lunch instead of just coffee, she a fancy wrap of some sort, he a tuna-fish sandwich. As they ate, he outlined his plan, and Amanda was quick to approve it. And that was pretty much it. Unlike the events of two days earlier, they didn’t follow things up with a cab ride to Amanda’s apartment. And if Jaywalker was disappointed in that nonde-velopment, and surely he was, he was at least consoled by the fact that he came away from the meeting with a check in the pocket of his jeans in the amount of five thousand dollars, exactly twice what he’d asked Amanda for. He’d instructed her to make it out to “Harrison Jay Walker, Private Investigator,” and had made her fill in the Memo blank with the words “Not for legal services.” You could never be too careful. But even if he was only an investigator for the time being, Jaywalker knew better. He was back in the game. Chapter Three Five Tiny Fingers The very first thing Jaywalker did the following morning was to pay a visit to his bank. There he endorsed and deposited the five-thousand-dollar check Amanda Drake had given him. As soon as the teller had completed the transaction, he asked her for his current balance. She tapped some keys on her computer and handed him a slip of paper. There were a bunch of numbers on it, showing which funds were available, which weren’t, and when they would be. But he chose to ignore the qualifiers, and went right to the bottom line, which included Amanda’s check: $5,176.24 It had been that close. After that, Jaywalker the Investigator got to work. He started off by making a visit to the scene. Not the scene of the crime—or accident, as he preferred to call it—where the van had been run off the road. That would come, but for now it could wait. Instead, he returned to the scene of his first meeting with Amanda, the Forty-second Street branch of the New York Public Library. There he went to the newspaper archives room and pulled up on a microfiche screen all the articles he could find on the crash, the surrender and arrest of Carter Drake, and the developments that had occurred since. Had he been a better navigator of the Internet, he probably could have found them on his computer. But he was stubbornly old-fashioned at times, Jaywalker was, and besides, he loved the archives room. He figured it was as good a place as any to get an overview of things, a starting point before he began to dig for details and tried to get first-person accounts. As overviews go, it turned out to be pretty devastating stuff for the home team. The photos of the burned van, and of the immediate area where it had come to rest, were hard to look at. Jaywalker could only guess at the ones that had been kept out of the papers, that the editors had deemed too graphic to print. He’d see those later, no doubt, with the police reports. There’d be charred bodies, charred tiny bodies. He shuddered at the thought, shuddered again at the jurors’ reactions to the carnage. Several of the papers had run with the early rumors of a terrorist cell and the premature detonation of an explosive device, or of a van overcrowded with undocumented migrant apple pickers. Only with the following day’s editions had the truth come out, that eight of the nine dead were young children enrolled at one of New City’s several yeshivas, or Jewish religious schools. There were interviews with the driver of the pickup truck who’d stopped to offer assistance, including his account of the car that had run the van off the road. Looking for the public’s help, the police had released the partial license plate ending in 724 and were imploring other witnesses to come forward. Then, in the next day’s accounts, there was the surrender of Carter Drake and his arrest, as well as some brief comments by his “business attorney.” Jaywalker paused to smile at the phrase. There were business attorneys, patent attorneys, corporate attorneys, trust and estate attorneys, even admiralty attorneys. But when things got truly nasty, you were well advised to go out and get yourself a criminal lawyer. All of a sudden, it was a lawyer you needed. Down in the trenches, there was no room for attorneys. “Mr. Drake is guilty of absolutely nothing,” the business attorney had said. “He hadn’t been drinking, and he wasn’t speeding. He momentarily lost control of his vehicle. As unfortunate and tragic as the results were—and our hearts go out to the victims and their families—it was an accident, pure and simple. An accident.” The judge who’d set Carter Drake’s bail at five million dollars had apparently begged to differ. The newspaper stories had continued for almost a week. There were interviews with grieving parents and outraged school officials. There were calls for tighter seat-belt laws and looser seat-belt laws, the proponents of the latter camp arguing that some of the children might have escaped the fire had they not been restrained, though a look at the extent of the damage shown in the photos strongly suggested otherwise. And there were the funerals, the terrible funerals, accompanied by snapshots of tiny faces smiling out at the camera in happier times. After that, the coverage dwindled and all but stopped. The exception was the Rockland County Register, which ran editorials daily for nearly three weeks, demanding restoration of the death penalty, “complete with excruciating suffering” for the “cold-blooded killer” of the community’s “most treasured and vulnerable citizens.” It was midafternoon by the time Jaywalker emerged from the library. He found himself startled by the sudden brightness of the sunshine, and it took his eyes a few moments to make the adjustment. It reminded him of coming out of the movies after a matinee, something he hadn’t done since his wife’s death, a dozen years ago. He found a phone booth, no mean feat in the Age of the Cell Phone. But Jaywalker had long resisted the ads that promised a powerful network, five bars, and unlimited nighttime and weekend minutes with family and friends. He figured that if he lived long enough, he might just be the last holdout on the planet. Sure, going phoneless meant being inconvenienced from time to time, but that was a small price to pay for the retention of his privacy. Besides, now was no time to get connected, or whatever it was they called it, not while he was still suspended and trying to fly beneath the radar. Jaywalker had gotten the name of Carter Drake’s business attorney from his newspaper research and found a phone number for him on the Internet. Now he dropped a Samoan penny into the coin slot—they just happened to be the same size as U.S. quarters, so he’d ordered a hundred of them through a Times Square coin dealer for three dollars—and dialed the number. “PetersonKellnerWhiteandTayler,” said a woman’s voice, as if it were all one name. “How may I direct your call?” “I’m trying to reach Chester Ludlow,” said Jaywalker. “Please hold for his administrative aide.” Jaywalker held, wondering where he’d been while secretaries had turned into administrative aides. “Mr. Ludlow’s office,” said another female voice. Jaywalker identified himself and stated his business. If he’d thought doing so might open doors, he was in for a surprise. Over the next fifteen minutes, he sparred first with the administrative aide, and then with a young man who described himself as Ludlow’s executive assistant. Yes, Mr. Ludlow would be more than happy to take a meeting with him, but he billed out at seven hundred and fifty dollars an hour, payable in advance. “How about six minutes?” Jaywalker asked. He’d neglected to discuss expenses with Amanda, and wasn’t about to spend seven hundred and fifty dollars of his own money, or hers, either—at least not without checking with her first. On the other hand, he figured shelling out seventy-five bucks for a tenth of an hour… The executive assistant was evidently not amused. Eventually they settled on a five-minute phone conference, pro bono. Jaywalker was instructed to call Chet back the following day, at 10:15 a.m. “Not any earlier, not any later.” Fuck you! Jaywalker wanted to say. And fuck Chet, too. Instead he said, “Thank you very much,” and hung up. Maybe it wasn’t going to be such a picnic after all, this investigator gig. Next he called Carter Drake’s current lawyer up in New City, a man named Judah Mermelstein. The Samoan pennies were too cumbersome for the job, not to mention too precious, so he used a calling card. Mermelstein answered his own phone, a sure sign that he was user-friendly and a good indication that he worked on a shoestring budget. Both were attributes that Jaywalker was quite familiar with. As he had with Chester Ludlow’s staff, he explained his business and said he’d like to meet with Mermelstein. “Sure, sure. C’mon up.” They agreed on one o’clock the following day. Jaywalker didn’t want to jeopardize his five-minute phone conference with Chet, after all. The following morning’s five-minute phone conference with Chester Ludlow went pretty much as Jaywalker had expected. Ludlow was brusque, dismissive and completely uninformative. Carter Drake, for whom he’d been doing some complicated mergers-and-acquisi-tions work—the implication being that it was well beyond Jaywalker’s understanding—had phoned the office and said he was the “Audi Assassin,” and that he wanted to turn himself in before the police figured out he was the one they were looking for and came to arrest him. Ludlow had agreed and had accompanied him to state police headquarters. He’d had no idea where it was, he added, “So I set the GPS on my car. We got there, and they took him into custody. And that was pretty much it. Now,” he said, clearing his throat loudly, “if you’ll excuse me, I have a meeting—” “I still have nineteen seconds,” Jaywalker pointed out. Actually, he had no idea how long they’d been talking, but he doubted that Ludlow did, either. “What was the basis of your comment to the press,” he asked, “that Drake hadn’t been drinking or speeding prior to the accident?” “I’m not sure what you mean.” “I mean,” said Jaywalker, “did Drake actually tell you those things?” “Drake? No, of course not. As a matter of fact, I never discussed that with him. I had our media department draw up a statement. They’re real pros at that sort of stuff. It’s what they do.” Great, thought Jaywalker, trial by sound bite. He wanted to ask Ludlow if he had any idea of the damage such a remark could do to Drake’s chances down the line. But he knew he was already into overtime. “Thanks for your time,” he said, and hung up. The good news was that Ludlow had given him the five minutes pro bono. The bad news was that Jaywalker had pretty much gotten his money’s worth. The meeting with Judah Mermelstein went somewhat better. It had taken Jaywalker only forty-five minutes to get to Mermelstein’s office, if you didn’t count the two hours spent locating his ancient Mercury in its parking lot, finding a set of booster cables ($14.95), getting a jump start from an obliging cabbie ($10), and coaxing the relic out onto the West Side Highway (priceless). The first thing Jaywalker noticed about Mermelstein wasn’t his boyish good looks, his black suit, white shirt and conservative tie, or even his firm handshake. It was his yarmulke. “Do they let you wear that?” Jaywalker asked. “I mean, in court? At trial?” He’d once known a legal aid lawyer in Brooklyn who was also a Catholic priest, and they’d let him wear his clerical collar in court. But all the guy ever did was arraignments; he never went to trial. “Absolutely,” said Mermelstein. “U.S. Supreme Court, First and Fourteenth Amendments. Freedom of religion, freedom of speech, expression, association, wardrobe, warmth. Not to mention the little-known but all-important freedom to cover one’s bald spot.” “Cool,” was all Jaywalker could come up with. It was something his daughter might have said, back when she was, oh, seven or so. But it was cool, and he couldn’t help picturing himself delivering a summation before a home-crowd New City jury, two rows of black-dressed orthodox Jews. Jaywalker was half-Jewish himself, after all, even if he hadn’t seen the inside of a synagogue in a good twenty years. But that gave him the right, didn’t it? And if he were to dig through the side pockets of his suit jackets, chances were pretty good he’d find a yarmulke or two, left over from a long-ago funeral, or a bar mitzvah he hadn’t been able to get out of. “I understand Mrs. Drake has hired you as a private investigator in her husband’s case,” said Mermelstein, once the two of them had taken seats facing each other across his desk. That experience itself had been momentarily unsettling for Jaywalker, who’d spent twenty-some years sitting in the lawyer’s chair, not the client’s. “Yes, she has,” said Jaywalker. “But I think you also ought to know that it’s her hope that if the case has to be tried, I should be the one to try it. If the court doesn’t force it to trial before my, uh, suspension is up, that is.” “Thank you for being up front about that,” said Mermelstein. Jaywalker shrugged, his way of saying, Hey, it was the right thing to do. “Actually,” said Mermelstein, “Mrs. Drake told me herself. And I have no problem with it. Not that I couldn’t use the publicity. But the truth is, I’ve never tried a murder case. Or even a felony, for that matter. So not only will I bow out gracefully when the time comes, but in the meantime I’ll appreciate all the help you can give me, until you’re—” “Kosher?” “I couldn’t have said it better.” “Don’t plan on bowing out,” said Jaywalker. “I’m an outsider here, in more ways than one. You’re local, and you seem to have your head on straight. I’m pretty sure Amanda can be convinced of the virtues of a co-counsel arrangement.” Mermelstein didn’t respond one way or the other, and they talked about the case for the next forty minutes. Jaywalker learned that the Drakes had found Mermelstein through an ad in the local Yellow Pages that touted him as an expert in criminal law, divorce, real estate, immigration matters, slip-and-fall cases, product liability, medical malpractice and dog-bite injuries. He’d tried and failed to get Carter’s bail reduced from the five million set at arraignment. The Rockland County D.A., a tough-on-crime Republican named Abraham Firestone, intended to make an example of Drake, hoping that sending him away for life would deter others from killing vanloads of children. And according to Mermelstein, Firestone intended to try the case himself, if there had to be a trial, rather than assigning it to one of his assistants, as was the customary practice. “I notice Drake’s charged with drunk driving,” said Jaywalker, “in addition to murder.” He didn’t mention the leaving-the-scene charge, or the unlicensed operator, or the uninsured vehicle. Those charges ranged from the mundane to the serious. Leaving the scene of an accident resulting in death, for example, was itself a separate felony. But all of those acts or omissions were either after the fact or merely incidental to the murder charge. Drunk driving, on the other hand, especially when combined with indications of recklessness, could be used to show a depraved indifference to human life, a necessary statutory element of proving murder in a vehicular homicide case in New York State. “That’s right,” said Mermelstein. “But Drake didn’t surrender until sometime the following day, did he?” “Right again,” said Mermelstein. “And his big-shot business lawyer issued a press release announcing to the world that his client hadn’t had anything to drink before the accident.” “So help me out here,” said Jaywalker. Early on in his career, he’d had occasion to wonder why anyone would leave the scene of an accident, when doing so was a crime and sticking around to face the music wasn’t. The answer, he soon learned, was pretty simple. The ones who fled did so because they were drunk, unlicensed or uninsured, or because they’d just robbed the bank around the corner and had the money on the front passenger seat and a loaded gun on the floor. Getting away, even for a limited period of time, gave them an opportunity to hide the evidence. And part of that evidence was the alcohol in their blood. Ted Kennedy may or may not have been testing his swimming ability that night long ago at Chappaquiddick, but by the time he turned himself in the following day it was too late for the police to draw a meaningful, or admissible, blood sample from him. And even if it hadn’t been, he could have claimed that the incident had so upset him that he’d poured himself a couple of stiff drinks as soon as he got home. Exactly as the captain of the Exxon Valdez had maintained after his little mishap up in Prudhoe Bay. “It seems Abe Firestone has done his homework,” said Mermelstein. “He had the troopers trace Drake’s movements over the twelve hours preceding the crash. Apparently they can put him in a sports club over in Nyack. And the sport he and his buddies were engaged in seems to have consisted of seeing who could throw back the most shots of tequila before falling on the floor.” “Wonderful,” said Jaywalker. They talked for another twenty minutes, following which Mermelstein made Jaywalker copies of whatever documents he had in his file. There wasn’t much: the felony complaint, Drake’s rap sheet, a summary of an accident report prepared by the state police and a couple of other pieces of paper. “Firestone hasn’t exactly flooded you with discovery,” Jaywalker observed. “Abe?” said Mermelstein. “He’s so tight his ass squeaks when he walks.” They exchanged goodbyes and promised to share anything either of them found out. “And give my best to Amanda,” said Mermelstein. “I will,” said Jaywalker, noticing that she was suddenly no longer Mrs. Drake, and wondering if she’d followed Judah Mermelstein around for two days and then slept with him, too, before hiring him. Nah, he liked the Yellow Pages story better. From Judah Mermelstein’s office, Jaywalker headed west and then north, toward the site of the accident that had claimed nine lives. He drove carefully, not because he was afraid of becoming a tenth victim, but because his Mercury was pretty much on life support. Owning a car in the city was something of a double-edged sword. You didn’t need one to get around, and with parking impossible and garages charging a fortune, you were better off without one. Until you had to get somewhere else. So Jaywalker had compromised. He’d bought the cheapest car he could find, a ‘57 Mercury with no extras and, so far as he knew, the last remaining three-speed manual transmission in America. Then he’d found an open-air parking lot so far over on the West Side that you had to hike halfway to New Jersey just to get there. He’d bargained the manager down from the usual hundred and twenty-five a month to seventy-five dollars cash, no tax, explaining that since he almost never used the thing, they could bury it way in the back, where it would take about a week and a half to get it out. And because he started it up so rarely and drove it even less, it performed, well, about like a neglected ’57 Mercury with 185,000 miles under its belt. So when he did drive it, he tended to creep along. But even creeping, it took him less than twenty minutes to get from Judah Mer-melstein’s office to the spot marked with a black ? on the accident-report summary. It was nothing but a bend in the road, where the northbound lane had little room for a shoulder. About all that separated it from the drop-off was what remained of a low guardrail, its metal twisted grotesquely and torn away where the van had breached it. There were a handful of makeshift memorials marking the spot—flowers, candles, other stuff. Jaywalker found a place to pull over a hundred yards or so past it, and shut off the Merc’s engine. From there he walked back to the site. There were eight memorials. One, he guessed, for each child that had died there. He’d seen others like them often enough before—arrays of crosses, flowers and jars containing candles—but only from the cocoon of a car, as he sped by on the highway. Though he’d known what they signified, they hadn’t really touched him. Now, up close, they were something very different. There were Bibles—Old Testaments, no doubt. There were hand-written notes from classmates. There were framed color photographs of smiling children who would never smile again. There was a tiny pink party dress with matching shoes, possibly never worn. There were a couple of stuffed animals, a bear and something that looked like a cross between a small rabbit and a large mouse. There was a leather baseball glove, complete with five impossibly tiny fingers. The earth leading downhill from the torn-away guardrail was still scarred, and down the embankment there were a couple of trees with fresh damage visible. And then a large, circular charred area, where new grass was just beginning to sprout through the blackness. And there were boulders, big enough, jagged enough and numerous enough to insure that the tumbling van had never had a chance of finding a safe landing spot. There was a reason why they’d called it Rockland County. He’d brought a camera along, an old Nikon his daughter had given him years ago when she’d gone digital. As far as he knew, it was the last one left in the world that still took a roll of real film. He snapped a few photos of the scene. Not that there was much of a reason to do so. The police would have taken dozens, and the defense would get copies in due time. But Jaywalker was an investigator today, and it seemed like an investigator-like thing to do. Then he walked back to the Merc and headed south, to the city. That night Jaywalker went over his notes and took stock of his investigation. Over two days, he’d familiarized himself with the newspaper accounts of the case, conferred with both of the lawyers who’d represented Carter Drake so far, gotten hold of a few sheets of paper and visited the scene of the crime. Even if it was a good beginning, it had turned up nothing really useful. Still on his checklist were subpoenaing police reports, locating and interviewing witnesses, and researching the law on precisely what it took to elevate a motor vehicle accident into a murder case. But all of those things could wait a day or two. The next order of business would take Jaywalker back up to New City. Knowing that, and figuring he’d be using the Mercury on a more or less regular basis, he decided he might as well park it on the street. But that was a momentous decision, given that he lived in Manhattan. He spent the next forty-five minutes searching for a legal parking place. Every empty spot turned out to be a fire hydrant, a bus stop or the private driveway to some building. Twice he had to get out and squint at the fine print on the alternate-side-of-the-street parking signs, which were obviously intended to entrap the unwary motorist. Did NO PARKING 10AM TO 11:30 AM MON AND THURS mean you could park there at other times? Or was that sign subject to the one above it that said NO STANDING 4 PM TO 7 PM? And since both of them included the red-letter warning TOW-AWAY ZONE, it appeared to matter. Back up in his apartment, more or less legally parked, Jaywalker had made a dozen phone calls just to find out what credentials he’d need and what procedures he’d have to follow for what he was planning to do. Next, he’d gone onto his computer and, using a mix of type fonts, print sizes and images, and about two hours of unbillable trial-and-error labor, had managed to create a rather impressive-looking identification card. Private Investigator in the STATE OF NEW YORK… HARRISON J. WALKER In the lower right-hand corner, Jaywalker glued a photograph of himself. He looked younger in it, and a lot less gray. Then again, it had to be at least a dozen years old. He knew that because he’d clipped it out of a photograph of him and his wife, after silently begging her forgiveness. Now, as he admired the laminated and trimmed results of his handiwork, he thought of her again and decided she’d be understanding about it. Not that he believed in any of that afterlife stuff. He’d avoided the temptation to fill in the blank following “Sex” with “Yes” or “Hoping” or anything else stupid. He’d been equally careful to omit the modifier “licensed” right before “private investigator.” Other than the one that permitted him to drive, the only license Jaywalker had was currently suspended, so using the term could easily get him into trouble. Make that more trouble. Since he was already on probation of a sort, all he needed was to commit one more transgression. And this one would have been a whopper, a felony, in fact. Criminal Impersonation, they called it, and it carried four years. Not that they’d have given him all of that. But he certainly could have wound up in jail. Which struck him as just a bit ironic, since that was precisely where he intended to wind up next. Because tomorrow morning, at ten o’clock sharp, Jaywalker had an appointment at the Rockland County Jail to have a face-to-face with Carter Drake. Chapter Four Jimmy Chipmunk “What the fuck is this supposed to be?” For a moment there, it seemed that the corrections officer at the outer gate wasn’t nearly as impressed with Jaywalker’s identification card as Jaywalker himself had been the evening before. But after twenty minutes’ worth of calls to the man’s supervisor and his supervisor’s supervisor, as well as to Amanda Drake and Judah Mermelstein, Private Investigator Jaywalker was finally buzzed in, to begin another half hour of being searched, signing forms and waiting. When he was finally escorted through a long underground corridor and up a flight of steps to the visiting room, Jaywalker discovered that his meeting with Carter Drake would be a face-to-face one in only the most literal sense. In order to actually speak and be heard through the three-quarter-inch, wire-reinforced, bulletproof glass separating them, they’d have to use a pair of black phone receivers with frayed cords and exposed wires, things that had likely been around since the days of Alexander Graham Bell. “Hi,” said Jaywalker. “Hello,” said Drake over the static. He was an athletic-looking man with blond hair that was just beginning to turn gray. A good match for Amanda, thought Jaywalker. And he was seeing Drake outside his element. He tried picturing him propped up behind a big mahogany desk, or at the end of a long boardroom table, instead of inside a cubicle at the Rockland County Jail, but it wasn’t easy to do. Jail had a funny way of making you look like you belonged there. “My name is Jaywalker. I’m a private investigator at the moment. Seven or eight months from now I expect to be a lawyer again, and your wife would like me—” “My estranged wife,” said Drake. “Oh?” “We’ve been separated for five months now.” Jaywalker considered the implications of that for a moment. It might make Amanda a more credible witness if he were to put her on the stand. She could come off as hostile enough to Carter to have left him, but at the same time she could back him up on any factual or character matters. And for another thing— “So it’s okay if you’re sleeping with her.” “Who said I’m sleeping with her?” asked Jaywalker, doing his best to summon up an appropriate measure of righteous indignation at the idea. “Nobody,” said Drake. “All I said was, it’s okay if you are.” Jaywalker shifted his weight in his chair. “What I was about to tell you,” he said, “was that your wife, estranged or not, would like me to take over for Mr. Mermelstein at some point.” “So she told me.” “So how about we discuss your case?” Jaywalker suggested. “Here?” Jaywalker looked around. “I suppose we could reserve a table at the Oyster Bar,” he said. “That’s not what I meant,” said Drake. “Everyone says these phones are monitored.” Jaywalker was about to explain that while that was no doubt true, the guards knew enough not to record or listen in on lawyer-client conversations, which were privileged. Then he realized: he wasn’t Drake’s lawyer, or a lawyer at all, for that matter. So this wasn’t a lawyer-client conversation. And even though he was arguably there on behalf of Mermelstein, who was a lawyer, he could hardly count on the corrections officials who ran the place to grasp such nuances. “You’re right,” he agreed. “Can you get me out?” Drake asked. “I mean, five million dollars’ bail on a drunk-driving case? Not that I couldn’t have come up with it. But the lawyers for the families have gone into civil court and frozen all my assets.” “It’s not really a drunk-driving case,” said Jaywalker. “Nine people died.” “I know that,” said Drake. “But it was still an accident. I mean, I never meant to kill them. Everyone knows that.” He had a point there. Jaywalker had long marveled at the courts’ schizophrenic attitude toward drinking and driving. If you got pulled over at a checkpoint with six or seven drinks in your system, you paid a fine and got your license suspended for ninety days. The second time, the fine got a little bigger, the suspension a little longer. You got what, maybe four or five bites of the apple before they got serious and actually revoked your license, and one or two more before they slapped you in the local jail for thirty days. But God help you if you had those same six or seven drinks and got into the same car and drove at exactly the same speed, but were unlucky enough to broadside a school bus, or run a vanful of kids off a road and into a fireball. Then suddenly you were a murderer, front-page stuff, Public Enemy Number One. And you were looking at twenty-five years to life. Where had this institutional hypocrisy come from? Jaywalker—who, if asked, had a theory for most things—had a pretty good idea. Judges were lawyers, after all. They’d come from privileged-enough backgrounds to have been able to afford to go off first to college and then law school. They were financially able to have bankrolled their own campaigns, or to cough up enough political contributions to the campaigns of others who, once elected, had appointed them to the bench. In other words, they weren’t street people. They didn’t go around committing robberies, burglarizing apartments or selling drugs, and they had little natural empathy for those who did. But they drank, some of them, and they drove. And occasionally they even combined the two endeavors. That was something they could empathize with. So they were ready to look the other way or apply an understanding slap to the wrist of anyone who happened to get caught doing what they themselves had done more than once. But kill someone? Kill nine someones? Including eight innocent little Jewish kids? That was a different story altogether. For one thing, they’d never done that, had they? And sitting there in the glare of publicity, with the families of the victims, the media and the rest of the world screaming for blood, those very same judges all of a sudden became the toughest lock-’em-up-and-throw-away-the-key law-and-order types that ever lived. Murder? You bet! Five million dollars’ bail? Not a penny less! We’ll show those vicious drunk-driver menaces that we mean business! “No,” he told Drake, “I can’t get you out of here. But I’ll talk to Mr. Mermelstein, see if he can do anything about getting some of your assets untied. In the meantime, I’d like you to do something for me.” “What’s that?” “Get a hold of some paper and a pen, and write out, in as much detail as you possibly can, everything that happened over the twenty-four-hour period preceding the accident, the accident itself and everything afterward, up to the time you were brought to court. At the top of each page, write the words ‘Confidential, For My Lawyer Only.’ I’ll be back in a few days to pick it up. Can you do that for me?” “I guess so.” “Good,” said Jaywalker. “And remember, I want as much detail as you can possibly give me. Understand?” “I understand.” “I want a book.” Drake nodded. “Okay,” said Jaywalker. “I hate doing it this way, and I’m sorry to have to give you a homework assignment like this. But I’m afraid you’re probably right about these phones.” It was the truth. Not just the part about the phones being less than secure, but the part about being sorry, as well. It was what lazy lawyers did, had their clients write out statements instead of drawing the facts out of them in a cooperative process. Left to their own, people tended to summarize, Jaywalker had learned over the years. They omitted the myriad of tiny details that, when included and uttered from the witness stand, fleshed out a narrative and gave it the hallmark of truth. Having a witness testify that “it wasn’t quite dark out,” for example, wasn’t going to convince anyone. But were the same witness to add, “At one point I had to check my directions, and it turned out there was still just enough daylight for me to read them,” the jurors would come away with a concrete image burned in their minds. Not only would they remember what the witness said about the lighting, they’d also believe him. Why? Because his narrative had been so detailed and so specific, and so consistent with the jurors’ own everyday experiences. Still, despite the admonition to include as much detail as possible, Jaywalker knew that Carter Drake would summarize the facts to a certain extent. Everyone did. But it would be a start, at least, something to work with for the time being. That night, Jaywalker reported to Amanda what he’d done so far on the case. Which didn’t sound like much, once he heard himself run down the list out loud. But she seemed to think otherwise. “I’m impressed,” she said, sipping a martini. Both of her nipples were covered this time, but only because they were in a restaurant. An hour earlier that had decidedly not been the case. “Above all else,” the angel perched on Jaywalker’s left shoulder had whispered, “you must avoid conflicts of interest.” “Schmuck!” had shouted the devil on his right shoulder, who was not only louder and far more persuasive, but apparently Jewish. “They’re separated!” And so it had come to pass that once again Jaywalker had succumbed to human frailty, primal instinct and Amanda Drake. And had he been forced afterward to take the stand and defend himself under oath, the very best he could have come up with was that the devil had made him do it. “Seriously,” Amanda was saying, “I’m surprised Carter would speak to you at all.” Jaywalker managed to raise his eyebrows while sipping his Coke. His drinking days were behind him. He hoped. “I mean, he wouldn’t talk to the police, he wouldn’t talk to Chet Ludlow, and he barely says a word to Judah Mer-melstein. Except to keep asking him when he can get the bail reduced. And now he’s going to write the whole thing out for you, and in detail. That’s progress, isn’t it?” “Why the silent treatment?” Jaywalker asked. Amanda shrugged. “Guilt, I guess. I mean, it was a pretty bad accident. I think he’s horrified by it and wants to be punished.” Jaywalker was tempted to say, He’s going to get his wish. But he didn’t want to come across as too pessimistic. Not yet, anyway. There’d be plenty of time for that down the road, when Carter Drake would wake up one morning to the reality that they were aiming to give him twenty-five years to life in state prison. He wouldn’t feel he deserved that kind of punishment. They ordered dinner, Amanda a steak, medium-rare, Jaywalker a burger and another Coke. When the check came, he reached for his wallet, but she’d already picked it up. Instead of arguing the point, he thanked her. He figured if he tried hard enough, he could get used to being kept. Especially while he was on an investigator’s salary. Way back in his DEA days, Jaywalker had worked with a fellow agent named James Chippamunga, whom everyone referred to, naturally enough, as Jimmy Chipmunk. Law enforcement was similar to the military in that respect, or sports teams. Pretty much everyone got a nickname. It was at the DEA, in fact, that Harrison J. Walker had become Jaywalker. Jimmy Chipmunk was what they called a stand-up guy. That designation described somebody you could trust to watch your back and not rat you out. And Jaywalker had done both of those things for Jimmy one night in East New York, which at the time—along with Bed-Stuy, Brownsville and Red Hook—had made parts of Brooklyn more dangerous than Manhattan’s Harlem. These days, Red Hook was an up-and-coming yuppie neighborhood. Go figure. Jimmy had half stupidly and half drunkenly gotten himself into a shoot-out. Jaywalker had gotten him out of it, and together they’d made Jimmy come out like a hero on paper. Which meant Jimmy owed Jaywalker big-time, and always would. It was time to call in the acorns. Chippamunga had left the DEA not too long after Jaywalker did. But while Jaywalker was learning how to try a case at Legal Aid and then building a law practice of his own, Jimmy had moved over to the NYPD and risen through the ranks to his present assignment as a high-ranking Commander in the office of the Chief of Detectives. They met in a bar in midtown, shortly after Jimmy’s four-to-midnight shift was over. Over Jack Daniel’s and Cokes—the former Jimmy’s, the latter Jaywalker’s—they reminisced about old times. Old times always included the East New York adventure, now well past the five-year statute of limitations. It wasn’t until the fourth round of drinks, and the third round of men’s-room visits, that Jaywalker handed Jimmy the envelope. To the untrained eye, it might have looked as if Jimmy was a cop on the take, accepting a payoff of some sort from a civilian. But the untrained eye would have been fooled. There was no money inside the envelope. What was in it were half a dozen subpoenas duces tecum, demands for copies of all the police reports that had been generated in the case against Carter Drake III. They were attorney’s subpoenas, rather than court-ordered ones, which put them pretty much into the same category as Jaywalker’s Samoan pennies: they weren’t quite as good as the real thing, but they tended to get the job done. And that was especially true when placed in the hands of Jimmy Chipmunk. On the couple of times Jaywalker had asked the same favor of Cippamunga, Jimmy had returned a couple of days later, both times with copies of just about every document Jaywalker had requested. Of course, both of those cases had been in Manhattan. And on both occasions, Jimmy had explained afterward, it turned out he didn’t even have to actually serve the subpoena. “But,” he’d added, “it’s a good idea just the same. Keeps the both of us covered. Know what I mean?” Jaywalker had known exactly what he’d meant. Chippamunga polished off Jack Daniel’s Number 4 before opening the envelope. “Rockland County, huh? A little bit outta my bailiwick.” Only a veteran law-enforcement type would use a term like bailiwick, the same way he’d refer to a suspect’s girlfriend as his paramour, or say “I did proceed to exit my vehicle at that particular point in time,” instead of “Then I got out of my car.” Jaywalker, despite the severe handicap of being a lawyer, liked to keep things as brief as possible. Short words, simple sentences. Right now, he needed neither. He simply shrugged his shoulders. It was his vote of confidence, his silent but overt expression of complete faith that Jimmy would somehow work his magic and overcome all obstacles, bailiwick related or not. After all, they weren’t talking the niceties of jurisdiction here, or venue; they were talking clout. “I suppose…” Jimmy’s voice trailed off. “Gimme a coupla days, willya?” “You got it,” said Jaywalker, throwing back the last of his fourth large Cokes. God, they were huge. The bartender, a former NYPD lieutenant who’d worked under Cippamunga at one time, was either an extremely generous soul, or else he’d somehow mixed up the flower vases with the soda glasses. Jaywalker took a wet paper napkin off the bar and lifted it to his mouth, not so much to wipe anything, but to stifle what otherwise might have proved to be a belch of room-clearing proportions. All the while he kept his thighs tightly crossed, desperately trying to forestall a fourth trip to the men’s room for as long as possible, or at least another thirty seconds. That had been Friday night, or, technically, early Saturday morning. Until he had Carter Drake’s written account of his actions, or whatever Jimmy Chipmunk could turn up in the way of police reports, there wasn’t much more for Jaywalker to do on the case. So he slept late Saturday morning—the real Saturday morning—late being somewhere in the neighborhood of seven o’clock. Then he downed his usual breakfast, which consisted of a couple of pretzels and a glass of iced tea. The pretzels were the old-fashioned sourdough kind, big enough to choke a horse and hard enough to break a tooth on. The iced tea was a homemade concoction, with enough sugar to kill a diabetic, and a generous squeeze of fresh lemon juice that, to Jaywalker’s way of thinking, balanced the sugar by acting as a sort of natural insulin. And right there he had all of what he considered the four essential nutrition groups—salt, sugar, caffeine and crunchiness. With nothing else to do, Jaywalker spent the afternoon hitting the books. It wasn’t just a matter of needing a refresher course to shake off the accumulation of more than two years of rust. The fact was, in his twenty-plus years of defending criminals, Jaywalker had never handled, much less tried, a case even remotely similar to Carter Drake’s. Under New York law, 99.9 percent of murder cases fall into two categories. There are intentional murders, and there are felony murders, and Jaywalker had had his share of both. An intentional murder, simply put, is one where the defendant intended to kill someone. Gone are such archaic notions as premeditation or malice aforethought. Nowadays in New York, you kill someone while intending to kill someone, it’s murder. Jaywalker had tried dozens of intentional murders. He’d tried one where the defendant, intending to kill a suspected informer, had aimed poorly and mistakenly killed a man standing next to him. Murder nonetheless. He’d defended a serial murderer who’d killed six almost randomly selected victims over as many weeks, but when asked why, could offer no better rationale than “I found out it was something I could do.” Still, at the time he’d shot each of them, he’d intended to kill them. Felony murder was a bit different. There the legislature has decreed that under a certain specific combination of circumstances, there can be murder even in the absence of an intent to kill. How? If a defendant is engaged in the commission of any of several enumerated serious felonies—think robbery, kidnapping or arson, for good examples—and if he’s armed with a deadly weapon or knows that an accomplice is, he can be convicted of murder if someone dies in the process. Those crimes are deemed so dangerous, and so likely to lead to a death, that the lawmakers have substituted the defendant’s participation in them for his actual intent to kill anyone. Again, Jaywalker had tried his share of felony murders, though the number was far fewer. And there was an interesting reason for that. Caught after a robbery-gone-bad, perpetrators invariably rush to distance themselves from the resulting death. They’ll readily implicate an accomplice as the planner or the one who put the tape over the victim’s mouth, insisting that their own role was minor and in no way related to the fatality. “We were just after his money and his watch, was all. And I stayed in the car the whole time. I never meant for him to die or anything like that.” Felony murder. But the list of crimes that could trigger a felony murder didn’t include drunk driving or speeding or being in the wrong lane of a two-lane highway, or anything remotely like those offenses. How then, assuming that Carter Drake hadn’t run the van off the road in order to intentionally kill its occupants, could the prosecution possibly charge him with murder? Jaywalker knew the answer, but he still had to look it up in order to remind himself of the precise wording of the statute. And there it was, sandwiched in between intentional murder and felony murder, buried in paragraph 2 of section 125.25 of that perennial bestseller and summer-reading favorite, the New York State Penal Law. A person is guilty of murder when…under circumstances evincing a depraved indifference to human life, he recklessly engages in conduct which causes a grave risk of death to another person, and thereby causes the death of another person. From there, Jaywalker leafed back a few pages to section 125.10, entitled “Criminally Negligent Homicide.” A person is guilty of criminally negligent homicide when, with criminal negligence, he causes the death of another person. And down the page to sections 125.12 and 125.13, “Vehicular Manslaughter,” which was subdivided into two parts, each premised upon the degree of intoxication of the operator of a motor vehicle. If the driver was drunk, it was second-degree vehicular manslaughter; if he was really drunk, it was first degree. But the big difference wasn’t in the titles of the various sections. The big difference was in the penalties they carried. Criminally negligent homicide and vehicular manslaughter in the second degree were class E felonies, with maximum sentences of four years each and no mandatory minimum. For first-degree vehicular homicide, the maximum went up to seven years, but there was still no minimum. In other words, a defendant could be convicted of any of those crimes and still end up with a fine, or thirty days in jail, or probation. Murder was a different story. Murder sentences began at fifteen years to life, and went up to twenty-five to life. That meant a convicted defendant would have to serve the minimum—fifteen or twenty-five, or something in between the two extremes—before even being eligible to see the parole board. Which meant that the wording of the statute became crucial. What, for starters, did depraved indifference to human life mean? Jaywalker checked the two definition sections of the penal law, first the general one near the beginning of the volume, and then the specific one that related only to homicides. But neither section made any reference to depraved indifference to human life, or, for that matter, depraved indifference, depraved, indifference, or indifferent. Nowhere was there the vaguest of clues what any of those terms was supposed to mean. Yet even now, Jaywalker could see with absolute clarity that whether Carter Drake got his wrist slapped or his head handed to him it was eventually going to come down to whether twelve rather randomly selected citizens of Rockland County would believe that those five words, depraved indifference to human life, fairly described Drake’s state of mind the night of the incident. So Jaywalker couldn’t afford to sit around and congratulate himself on his clairvoyant powers. Well, perhaps the investigator Jaywalker could. But the once-and-future lawyer Jaywalker couldn’t; he had some work to do. The problem was that legal research had never been his favorite pastime, or even on his top-ten list, for that matter. He’d found that out as early as law school, marveling at how some of his classmates could spend hours—hell, days—holed up in the library, reading cases that dated back hundreds of years. Those same classmates invariably had all the answers when called upon in class the next day, while Jaywalker hid out in the back row, avoiding eye contact with the professor. They got A’s on midterm and final exams, while Jaywalker struggled to get B’s and C’s. They passed the bar exam with flying colors, while Jaywalker squeaked by on the second try. And they landed jobs with the top firms or clerkships with prominent judges, while Jaywalker strapped on a gun and went to work for the DEA. Now, almost thirty years later, he had no idea what his former classmates were up to. He didn’t bother checking the “Class Notes” section of his alumni bulletin and hadn’t heard that any of them had become president or attorney general yet. He assumed they were all making tons of money and was pretty sure that none of them was currently riding out a three-year suspension from practice. But he seriously doubted that any of them had tried more criminal cases than he had, or won a larger share, or had more fun along the way. Yet like it or not, Jaywalker knew the time had come to get down to some serious research. So he made himself a grilled-cheese sandwich, watched a few innings of a Yankee game and took a long walk by the river. Tomorrow, after all, was another day. Chapter Five Bad News Indeed When a statute uses a term without defining it—as the penal law had done in the case of depraved indifference to human life—there’s a rule of statutory construction that says the words are to be given their ordinary, everyday meaning. Which means you start with a dictionary. So sometime around nine o’clock Sunday morning, Jay-walker did just that. Not for the human life part; thanks to the fact that neither the driver of the van nor any of the children occupants in it had been pregnant, those words turned out to be pretty unambiguous. He looked up indifference first, figuring it would be the simpler of the two terms to pin down. And so it was. in·dif·fer·ence,n. lack of interest or concern, apathy, insensibility, lack of feeling. Not much help there. de·praved,adj. Corrupt, wicked, or perverted—Syn. Evil, sinful, iniquitous, debased, reprobate, degenerate, dissolute, profligate, licentious, lascivious, lewd. See immoral. Was Carter Drake any or all of those things? If you read the editorials in the Rockland County Register, or listened to the press releases issued by Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the answer was an unqualified yes. But none of the definitions seemed more than minimally helpful. Was Drake corrupt, wicked or perverted because his actions had led to the deaths of nine innocent people? Wasn’t that too facile, too much an after-the-fact analysis? Suppose for a moment that Drake had been equally drunk and momentarily had found himself on the wrong side of the road, but had managed to pull back over before encountering any other vehicles? Could his conduct nevertheless be said to have risen to the level of evil, sinful and debased? Would the state still want to empanel a jury of his peers and call upon them to decide whether or not he was immoral? It took you full circle back to the same old quandary, the double standard that had little to do with the act of drunk driving and everything to do with the outcome. But for the presence of the van, Drake would be looking at a stiff fine; because of the presence of the van, he was a debased reprobate degenerate, staring at life in prison. So much for the dictionary, with all of its ordinary, everyday meanings. On to the case law, just as Jaywalker had expected and feared, and procrastinated over since the day before in a futile attempt at avoidance. Case law is a term used to describe the enormous body of opinions written by judges whose job it is to interpret laws—be they as lofty as constitutional amendments or as mundane as parking regulations—and determine if those laws have been adhered to or broken. The average trial generates no written opinions at all. It is only the unusually erudite trial judge, or the politically ambitious one, who bothers to commit his rulings to paper. Far more typical at the trial level is the one-word oral pronouncement: “overruled” or “sustained,” “granted” or “denied,” “guilty” or “not guilty.” It is, for the most part, at the appellate level that the writing takes place. And it takes place only if there’s been a conviction after trial. If there’s been an acquittal, the prohibition against double jeopardy prevents the prosecution from appealing. What’s sauce for the goose isn’t always sauce for the gander. The defendant who’s been found guilty below is permitted as a matter of right to appeal his conviction to a higher court, and from there to a succession of even higher courts, all the way up to—in the words of one of Jaywalker’s phrase-making jailhouse lawyers—“the Supremes,” if the judges of those courts deem the issue or issues involved sufficiently worthy of their attention. And at each step of the appeals process, those judges spell out the reasons behind their decisions in black and white. A single case can therefore generate dozens of written opinions, including separate concurrences and dissents, as it works its way up the appellate ladder, occasionally sidestepping from state court to federal court and back again. And just about every one of those opinions is collected, published and preserved for all eternity between the covers of some reporter, those standard-size, handsomely bound books that fill the shelves and form the backdrop of every photograph taken of a lawyer since the invention of the camera. For the practitioner—or anyone else concerned enough or foolish enough to care—any one of those opinions can be found at a law library. All that’s needed is a citation, something that might be expressed as 6 NY3d 207, 211 (2005). Translate those hieroglyphics into English and you’d know to look for Volume Six of the New York Reporter, containing the decisions of the Court of Appeals, New York’s highest court, third series. You’d also know that while the opinion itself begins on page 207, the particular point you’re looking for is discussed four pages later, and that the case was decided in 2005. With the advent of the computer, the task has been rendered even easier. Gone are the days when a trip to a distant law library was required, not to mention the sheer strength to lug fifty or sixty pounds of books to a reading table. All that’s needed now is that little coded citation, or the name of a case or the number of a statute, or even a particularly vexing phrase lifted verbatim from the language of that statute. Depraved indifference to human life, for example. So Jaywalker could be an armchair researcher right in his own apartment, allowing himself snacks, bathroom breaks and even an occasional check of a ball-game score whenever he liked. It turned out that the phrase depraved indifference to human life was no newcomer to the language and hardly an invention of the legislators up in Albany. It had been around for centuries, in fact. One contributor to the Internet dated it as far back as 1762, tracing it to a court-martial judge’s condemnation of troops unnecessarily firing upon civilians, particularly women and children. In 1965 it found its way into New York’s penal law as a means to extend the reach of maximum punishment to offenders who caused the deaths of others, but whose actions fell outside the scope of the previous murder statute, which required either an intent to kill or the commission of an underlying felony during which a death occurred. An early example, from 1974, took up the case of a driver and passenger who picked up a severely intoxicated hitchhiker on a cold, snowy night. After robbing him and removing both his eyeglasses and boots, they forced him out of the car and onto the highway, where he sat helplessly for the next half hour, in temperatures near 32°F and near-zero visibility, until he was struck and killed by a speeding pickup truck. The New York Court of Appeals affirmed the robbers’ murder conviction under the depraved indifference theory. Next was a 1983 incident in which a man walked into a bar with a loaded gun. For a moment, Jaywalker thought that might be the beginning of a joke. But then the man announced that he was going to kill someone that night. And true to his word, he proceeded to fire his gun, killing another customer. He, too, was found guilty of depraved indifference murder. While the Court of Appeals affirmed his conviction, years later the same court, by then made up of different judges, would overrule the case, holding that it had misapplied the law. The defendant’s actions had either been intentional murder or not murder at all, said the later court; in no event had they constituted recklessness. Nor, said an intermediate appellate court, could the driver of a car be convicted of depraved indifference murder, even though he’d been racing another driver at speeds approaching a hundred miles per hour when he rear-ended a third car, killing two of its occupants and seriously injuring five others. Yet in 2003, the Court of Appeals affirmed the depraved indifference murder conviction of a defendant who’d pushed a twelve-year-old boy into the water and walked away, leaving the boy to drown. Most recently, and most relevantly, a twenty-five-year-old Valley Stream, Long Island, man had gotten behind the wheel of his pickup truck with what was later determined to be a .28 blood alcohol reading, more than three times the .08 legal limit. He somehow managed to get onto the highway, but in the wrong direction. Ignoring the beeping horns and flashing lights of oncoming cars, he continued for two full miles, before crashing into a limousine returning from a wedding, killing two people, one of them a seven-year-old girl, who was decapitated. After a hard-fought trial, the jury found him guilty of murder, concluding that his actions revealed a depraved indifference to human life. And although the appellate courts hadn’t yet begun to review the case, Jaywalker was pretty sure they’d find a way to affirm the conviction. There’s an old saying among lawyers that goes, “Bad cases make bad laws.” What that means is that when the facts are truly egregious, not only do juries tend to convict even in the absence of compelling legal evidence, but judges then strain to uphold those convictions. And it was Jaywalker’s guess that the Valley Stream case, and a few others like it, signaled a new trend in the law as it applied to drunk drivers. Over the decade preceding the Valley Stream conviction, Jaywalker had been able to find only a handful of New York cases in which depraved indifference murder had been used successfully in the context of motor vehicle accidents. And that was despite the fact that, according to MADD statistics, upward of sixteen thousand people die from drinking-related driving accidents nationally every year. But it seemed all that was about to change. Why? Because bad cases make bad laws. When a seven-year-old girl gets decapitated and the jurors are forced to hear a mother’s sobbing account of having held her daughter’s severed head in her hands, legal niceties have a way of yielding to raw emotions—not only in the jury box, but later on, as well, in the conference rooms of appellate judges. And once a verdict such as the Valley Stream one is upheld, it becomes precedent and gets applied to other cases that follow it, cases in which the facts aren’t nearly as extreme. But precedent is precedent, and subsequent defendants would invariably be more likely to be convicted of murder, and have their convictions affirmed, because of the Valley Stream driver and the young mother cradling her daughter’s head in her hands. Bad cases make bad laws. And to Jaywalker, there could be no doubt about the impact that clich? would have on the case of Carter Drake. Instead of causing merely two deaths, Drake had caused nine. Instead of having killed a single child, he’d killed eight of them. And in place of the image of a severed head was the specter of eight tiny bodies, charred almost beyond recognition. Whether the legislature had ever intended the depraved indifference section of the murder statute to apply to motor vehicle accidents no longer mattered. The Valley Stream verdict now served as an exclamation point following the handful of earlier cases that had expanded the application of the law in that direction, and short of a highly unlikely reversal by the appellate courts, there’d be no turning back. Which was good news for prosecutors, Mothers Against Drunk Driving and all the sober, law-abiding users of the state’s roads and sidewalks. But bad news indeed for Carter Drake. Chapter Six The Wasp on the Windshield On Monday, Jaywalker got a call from James Chippa-munga. Not that Jimmy would say much over the phone; he never did. In that respect, he exhibited all the paranoia of an international terrorist, a high-ranking member of organized crime, or a cop on the take—none of which he was. He simply didn’t trust phones—fuckin’ landlines, he called them—and preferred to do his talking in person. “We need a meet,” said Jimmy. Not a meeting, a meet. “Where?” asked Jaywalker. “The usual.” “When?” “Hour from now.” And that was it. The usual was as far west as you could go on 125th Street without getting wet, right by the banks of the Hudson River, if the Hudson River still had banks. What it had instead was a parking area, or at least a place where you could sit in your car and watch to see if anyone was watching you. It suited Jimmy Chipmunk just fine. As soon as Jaywalker had climbed out of his Mercury and into the passenger seat of Chippamunga’s Ford Crown Victoria, Jimmy handed him a large manila envelope. “Turned out I didn’t need the subpoena after all,” he said. “Soon as they saw it, they decided to make things easy.” Vintage Jimmy Chipmunk. Jaywalker had no real idea how he’d gotten the stuff, whether it had been through force, threats, bribery, extortion or what. Then again, he didn’t care. He’d done his part legally, by filling out the subpoenas. How Jimmy served them, or if he served them at all, was strictly Jimmy’s business. He peeked into the envelope. Inside were maybe twenty or thirty sheets of paper, some loose, some stapled or paper-clipped together. Just by thumbing the edges of them, Jaywalker could see that they were police reports, diagrams of the crash scene, photocopies of photographs, and other documents relating to Carter Drake’s case. “You’re the best,” he said. “Nuthin to it,” said Jimmy Chipmunk. Back in his apartment, Jaywalker spent a couple of hours reviewing the documents, organizing them into subject headings and making handwritten notes. But he was no more than five minutes into the process when it became readily apparent to him that District Attorney Abraham Firestone had done his homework. First, he’d had his investigators thoroughly go over the crash sight. They’d been able to backtrack the path of the van, beginning at the end, where it had come to rest and ended up in flames. As it had gone over the embankment, it had not only torn up the grass, but it had uprooted shrubs and even left marks on rocks and trees that it had bounced off of after leaving the highway. But perhaps most telling were the skid marks the van’s tires had left on the pavement. Skid marks, Jaywalker knew, could tell a story all by themselves. They were created by a driver hitting the brakes hard enough to lock up the vehicle’s wheels on a dry, or relatively dry, surface. From the rubber left on that surface, a trained observer could tell exactly where the vehicle had been when the wheels first locked, in what direction it had been heading and how it continued once the brakes were applied. Furthermore, from measuring the length of the marks and adjusting for the coefficient of friction—a fancy way of describing the stickiness of the road surface at the time—it was possible to compute the speed the vehicle had been traveling. And the results were telling. The van had been right where it was supposed to be when its brakes locked up, squarely in its northbound lane and a good two feet from the double yellow center line. Its brakes had engaged and begun to slow it without any noticeable “fishtailing” or “drift” to either the left or right. Then there’d come a point where, still standing on his brakes, the van’s driver had steered to his right, no doubt attempting to evade the southbound vehicle in his lane. Only when he’d left the pavement altogether and was on the narrow cinder shoulder of the road had the driver tried to correct back to the left. But it had been too late. A twelve-foot stretch with a complete absence of skid marks or tracks of any sort indicated that the van had taken off at that point, literally becoming airborne, before touching down again on the downslope of the embankment. The rest, as they say, was history. The posted speed limit on that stretch of highway was fifty miles per hour. Allowing for a margin of error of 5 mph either way, Firestone’s investigators had been able to conclude that at the time the driver hit the brakes and locked up the wheels, the van had been moving at approximately forty-seven miles an hour. As for the oncoming vehicle, there was no way to estimate its speed because it had left no skid marks at all. Which meant that its driver had never tried to stop—either before, during or after the incident. What Firestone had done next was to have his investigators—and he’d assigned at least four of them to the task, on a full-time basis—go even further back in time, in an attempt to track Carter Drake’s movements over the twelve hours that had preceded the crash. What they’d done was to interview witnesses, people who’d been with Drake the previous afternoon and evening. And although the names of those people had been blacked out in the copies of the documents Jimmy Chipmunk had dug up, a number of tantalizing clues emerged from the interview reports. There was, for example the “Sports Bar.” And there were “Bartender A” and “Bartender B,” along with the occasional un-redacted pronoun revealing that one was male and the other female. And there were “Customers 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.” Finally, there was a word that kept popping up in the investigators’ conversations with those bartenders and customers, a single pesky word that Jaywalker lost count of after the tenth repetition or so. And that word was tequila. Since Carter Drake hadn’t bothered to stop and stick around after running the van off the road, it followed that he’d gone home, or at least someplace else. He hadn’t turned himself in for another fourteen hours, no doubt figuring that any alcohol he’d consumed the night before would no longer be detectable in his system. And he’d been right about that. What he hadn’t counted on was that the authorities could nevertheless show that he’d been drunk, by proving it circumstantially. In other words, if the prosecution could reconstruct the previous evening and put, say, ten drinks into Drake, they wouldn’t need a blood test or a Breathalyzer; they could prove his intoxication through a combination of eyewitness accounts and expert testimony. It was an unusual way of doing it, but a creative one. And as far as Jaywalker was concerned, there was nothing legally objectionable about it. Which meant he had some interviewing of his own to do. That evening, Jaywalker got a call from Judah Mermel-stein. Drake had called him from jail, he said. “He told me he’s finished writing out some statement you asked him to do.” “Good,” said Jaywalker. “What kind of statement?” Mermelstein asked. “Facts,” said Jaywalker. “I want his account of everything he can remember, starting twenty-four hours before the accident and continuing all the way up to his arraignment.” “Aren’t you afraid it’ll get read on the way out?” “Of course I am,” Jaywalker admitted. “But I was also afraid to talk on their phones. I’m not exactly covered by lawyer-client privilege. And even if I was, I wouldn’t trust law-enforcement types to play by the rules.” “Really?” Over the phone, it was hard to tell if Mermelstein was truly shocked or was putting Jaywalker on. “Really,” said Jaywalker, deciding to play it safely down the middle. “I used to be one of them, in a previous life.” “How about I go in and visit Drake tomorrow?” Mermelstein suggested. “It’s a schlep for you, but it’s right around the corner from here. And it’ll probably be easier for me to get the papers from him. You’d probably have to sign your life away, wait two weeks for approval, and submit to a body-cavity search.” “Good idea,” said Jaywalker. “The body-cavity search?” “I think I’ll take a pass on that, thanks.” But the exchange brought a smile to Jaywalker’s face. Not only was Mermelstein offering to save him time and aggravation, but he’d demonstrated that he understood how dysfunctional bureaucracies operated, or failed to operate. And that he possessed a sense of humor, without which a lawyer was definitely in the wrong business. Or was Mermelstein’s offer his way of saying he wanted to see Carter Drake’s statement for himself? Perhaps Jaywalker’s little homework assignment for Drake had somehow ruffled Mermelstein’s feathers. Then again, he was Drake’s lawyer, at least for the next seven or eight months or so, which made the statement every bit as much his business as it was Jaywalker’s. No doubt Jaywalker was being paranoid in attributing an ulterior motive to Mer-melstein. But he couldn’t help it; paranoia was one of the occupational hazards of being a criminal defense lawyer. Sooner or later you learned to suspect absolutely everyone and everything. Giving fellow human beings the benefit of the doubt and presuming innocent motivation on the part of others were noble enough concepts, but they were concepts best left for juries. True to his word, Judah Mermelstein went in to see Carter Drake on Monday, and on Tuesday an Express Mail envelope arrived at Jaywalker’s apartment. In it was a second envelope, bearing the hand-printed words From Carter Drake III. Privileged Communication For My Lawyers Only. The gummed seal of the inner envelope was still intact; Mermelstein hadn’t even opened it before forwarding it to Jaywalker. One of the good things about being paranoid was how often you got to be pleasantly surprised by people. STATEMENT OF CARTER DRAKE III The day before the accident I had a meeting scheduled for 10:00 a.m. in Nyack, N.Y. The client I have there owns a bunch of real estate holdings, and he wanted to go over certain things with me. We worked straight through, and then we went to a nearby restaurant to get something to eat, since we had skipped lunch. From the restaurant, which was a sort of a sports bar with lots of TV sets tuned to ESPN and other sports channels, the client called his girlfriend and suggested she come over and meet us. About an hour later, she showed up with 2 of her girlfriends. By the time they got there, I had already had some appetizers and a couple of drinks. I was drinking martinis, but when the girls joined us they started drinking tequila, so I switched over. I never did get around to eating a real dinner. Instead I had maybe 3 shots of tequila, for a total of 5 drinks, no more. By the time I left it was just dark outside. I was able to drive okay, but somehow I missed the entrance for Route 9W heading south to NYC. When I reached Route 303, I decided to take it instead. I knew it would eventually take me to the Palisades Parkway and the G. Washington Bridge to the city. As I was heading south, I noticed that a wasp was flying around inside my car. That worried me, because I’m highly allergic to insect bites. My eyes close up, my mouth gets all swollen, and I have trouble breathing. I’ve ended up in emergency rooms a couple of times. I know I should have stopped the car and gotten out, but just when I was getting ready to, the wasp landed on the inside of my windshield, toward the middle but closer to the driver’s side. I took a folded newspaper and I reached over and tried to kill it. In the process I must have swerved over the center line, because when I looked up, a white van was right in front of me, coming at me. I cut back sharply into my lane, and I thought the van passed safely by me on my left, so I continued on my way. I made it all the way home without any other problems, getting there about 9:00. I was pretty exhausted, and I went right to bed. The next morning, listening to the news, I heard about the accident and that the police were looking to question the driver of an Audi with a partial license plate the same as mine. So I contacted my lawyer Chet Ludlow and turned myself in. I wanted to explain everything that happened, but Chet insisted that I remain silent, so I did. When I went before the judge, I thought he’d let me go. Instead he set 5 million dollars’ bail. And to make sure I couldn’t post it, they froze all my accounts and other assets. So here I am. And that’s all I know. Honest to God. Carter Drake III Jaywalker read it from start to finish, three times. As statements went, it wasn’t bad. Sure, there could have been more detail, but that was to be expected, and would come over time. But substantively, it was fine. Drake’s version of the events laid out the makings of a pretty good defense. Under federal law imposed upon the states, with the cost of noncompliance being the denial of billions of dollars in highway funding, there is now a nationwide limit on the amount of alcohol a driver of a motor vehicle can legally have in his blood. That limit is .08 percent, or eight hundredths of a percentage point, calculated by weight. A good rule of thumb is that for every drink consumed by the average adult male, there’s a corresponding blood alcohol elevation of .02 percent. Women, for some reason other than a lower average body weight, experience a slightly higher elevation per drink, closer to .03 percent. And it doesn’t seem to matter whether that drink is a twelve-ounce bottle of beer, a four-ounce glass of wine or a single shot of something far stronger. Nor does it depend upon whether that shot is served straight-up, over ice, or diluted with soda, juice, water or anything else, so long as the anything else is nonalcoholic. The math was easy enough. Five drinks would have put Drake at about. 10 percent over the limit, to be sure, but only by a bit. Hell, Jaywalker had seen readings in the .20s and .30s in his day. He’d even had a murder case where the deceased’s blood had read out at .45 percent on autopsy, or almost one part in fifty. Miraculously, the guy had still been standing, at least up to the point when his stepson had conked him on the head with a bottle. But that was an extreme case. Most people will pass out before they reach .30 percent, lapse into a coma around .35 percent, and die of acute alcohol poisoning around .40 percent. Compared to those numbers, Carter Drake had been a model of sobriety. And the business about the wasp was terrific. It explained how Drake had ended up in the wrong lane. Even the part about not realizing the van had gone off the road was good. Not only did it provide a defense for knowingly leaving the scene of an accident, it also negated the inference that Drake had fled because he knew how far over the limit he’d been. And it made him less of a villain for not stopping to help or turning himself in more quickly. Of course, all that depended upon whether Drake’s version of the events—regarding his drinking, the accident, and his failure to stop—was to be believed. If he was lying about any or all of those things, it was a different story. And that, Jaywalker knew, was one of the problems with the written statement. Writing his account at his leisure had given Drake time to ponder, to choose his words carefully, to sanitize things, emphasizing the good stuff and editing out things he thought might work against him. In short, to lie. Jaywalker would have much preferred hearing Drake describe the events orally and extemporaneously. He would have liked to be able to interrupt him, challenge him, even cross-examine him as to certain details. But that opportunity hadn’t been his. It was one of Jaywalker’s pet peeves about the legal system. The rich got out on bail and were free to meet with their lawyers behind closed doors in plush offices. The poor had to settle for whispered conversations over ancient telephones in communal visiting rooms, or for opaque written statements, totally devoid of the usual indicia of credibility. Not that Carter Drake was poor, by any standard. It was just that he’d been rendered poor, or the functional equivalent of it, by the combination of a five-million-dollar bail and an order freezing his assets. There had to be some poetic justice, Jaywalker decided, to that particular set of circumstances. Or at least some economic justice. The rich-and-powerful financier suddenly finding himself reduced to the status of an indigent defendant, no better than a pauper in the eyes of the law. The bleeding-heart liberal in Jaywalker found he kind of liked the idea. But the defense lawyer in him hated it, just as he’d always hated it on behalf of his truly indigent clients. For consolation, he knew that sooner or later he’d get a chance to sit down with Carter Drake in a secure setting, and have a face-to-face conversation with him, a conversation in which all of Drake’s little tells would become apparent to Jaywalker’s trained eye—the tiny tics, the involuntary traveling of the hand upward to the mouth, the sudden breaking off of eye contact, the unnecessary repetition of the question to buy time before composing an answer, the pregnant pauses at inappropriate moments, the almost comical pulling back at the first mention of the word polygraph. But all that would have to wait. For now, Jaywalker would have to settle for trying to locate a particular unnamed sports bar somewhere in the vicinity of Nyack, and seeing if Bartenders A and B, and Customers 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 would verify Carter Drake’s account or put the lie to him. Tomorrow. Chapter Seven The End Zone The sports bar, it turned out, was a place called the End Zone, located on the outskirts of Nyack, if one was willing to grant Nyack the benefit of doubt in terms of worthiness of outskirts. It struck Jaywalker as a sort of Hooters for not-quite-yet-beer-bellied ex-jock wannabes in their thirties and forties who’d happened upon the True Meaning of Life: since God had given each of them two eyes, He must’ve intended one for watching tits and the other for watching football on a screen the size of Connecticut. Though not necessarily in that order. He’d found the End Zone by going undercover—if you wanted to stretch things again. He’d dug out an old New York Giants jacket, pleased to discover it still fit him. He’d matched it up with an even older Yankees cap, and had completed the outfit with dirty sneakers and a pair of faded jeans. Then he’d headed up to Nyack and started stopping total strangers and asking them if they happened to know where a guy could find a nice place to sit, have a beer or two, and maybe watch a ball game. A few folks seemed put off by the ancient Mercury, but one or two actually admired it. “Cool wheels,” said one young man. “Retro, huh?” And not only did Jaywalker receive near unanimity in advice to try the End Zone, but he even got company, a fellow who answered to the name Bubba, who’d been thinking of heading that way himself, and allowed that he’d be more than happy to climb in and navigate. Bubba had a baby face and an easy grin. He could have been twenty-five or forty-five, or just about anything in between. But either way, his best years were clearly behind him. To Jaywalker, he was a perfect case study in what happens when muscle meets malt and converts to marshmallow. Between the Giants jacket and Bubba’s first-name familiarity with the End Zone’s late-afternoon regulars, Jaywalker had little difficulty locating one bartender and two customers who’d been in the place nearly a month ago, when Carter Drake had been throwing back shots of tequila. “Might not’ a remembered him,” said the bartender, a large woman whom everyone referred to as Twiggy, irony apparently being no stranger at the End Zone. “But a few weeks back, a coupla detectives came in with a picksher of him, askin’ a lotta questions. But the guy you wanna talk to is Riley. He kept the tab on the table the guy was at, and they had him testify at the whatchacallit, the grand union.” “The grand jury?” Jaywalker asked. “Yeah, that’s it.” “Any idea where I might find him?” “Yeah,” said Twiggy. “Stay put. He comes on at eight.” So Jaywalker stayed right where he was, drinking Cokes, eating salted peanuts, and leaving a couple of twenties on the bar in front of him, the way he’d seen big tippers do it. And sure enough, just before eight o’clock, a second bartender materialized in front of him, a wiry Irishman who couldn’t have gone more than five foot four, but looked like he could take anyone in the place. “You Riley?” Jaywalker asked him after a bit. “Who wants to know?” Jaywalker slid one of the twenties a few inches toward the back edge of the bar. “I’m a P.I.,” he said, immediately regretting it. It made him sound like a bit player in a Raymond Chandler movie. Riley said nothing, but he didn’t turn away, either. Jaywalker had made sure that he’d noticed the bit with the twenty. Not that he’d had to; he was pretty sure this was a guy who didn’t miss much. “I understand the D.A.’s people talked with you,” said Jaywalker. “And I was hoping you could tell me what you told them.” Riley began drying glasses with a towel. “Who you workin’ for?” he asked. It was a fair question. “Guy’s wife,” he said. Riley kept drying glasses. He was good at it. “The thing is,” said Jaywalker, “they’re looking to throw the book at him. Want to give him twenty-five to life.” “Maybe he’s got it comin’.” “Maybe,” said Jaywalker. “I’m not saying he doesn’t. I’d just like to know, one way or the other. That’s all.” Riley glanced down at the bar. Jaywalker took it as a cue, and slid the second twenty toward the first one, until the two of them were touching. “He was drunk,” said Riley, “if that’s what you want to know.” “How drunk?” “I cut him off, made him call home.” This was news. Drake certainly had made no mention of it. Then again, maybe Riley was making it up, to cover his own butt. Jaywalker decided to call him on it. “Anyone show up to drive him home?” he asked. “Yeah,” said Riley, “as a matter of fact. A kid showed up, maybe eighteen or nineteen, young enough looking that I woulda carded him. But even before they was out the door, your guy was startin’ in with him, saying he was okay to drive hisself.” More news. “Tell me,” said Jaywalker, “before they took you into the grand jury, did they make you sign any papers?” “Papers. What kinda papers?” “Something called a Waiver of Immunity.” “Nah,” said Riley, “I didn’t sign no papers. I’da remembered if I did.” They talked for a little while longer. Drake and the other people at his table had not only been doing shots of tequila, they’d been downing a “designer brand” that went for fifteen bucks a shot. Riley reached behind him at that point and produced a bottle. Jaywalker paid little attention to the name, other than spotting the word oro, which he was pretty sure meant “gold” in Spanish. Instead he looked for, and found, the alcohol content. According the label, the stuff was 120 proof. As for the bar bill, the detectives had taken that, then had Riley decipher it during his grand jury appearance. There’d been no way for him to tell from it exactly how many of the shots had found their way into the man whose photo Riley recognized, but Riley had estimated the number at eight to ten. Walking through the End Zone’s parking lot, Jaywalker replayed the conversation in his mind. According to Riley, not only had Carter Drake had more to drink than he’d admitted to in his written statement, but the shots had been stronger. Ordinary tequila ranged from 86 proof to 100, with proof being the alcohol content doubled. Drinking 120-proof tequila changed the formula a bit, and pushed Drake’s blood alcohol content even higher, up around the .20 percent range. The other noteworthy piece of information to come out of the discussion was that the D.A. hadn’t asked Riley to waive his own immunity from prosecution before putting him into the grand jury. A bartender who continues to serve an intoxicated customer commits a crime, and if that customer drives off and kills somebody—as Drake had done—that crime becomes a very serious one. But by having Riley testify without a waiver, Abe Firestone was giving him a pass: he was now immune from prosecution for whatever law or laws he may have broken. Evidently Firestone had made a decision as to his priorities. He didn’t want some bartender minimizing how much he’d served a customer in order to protect his own ass. Firestone had apparently wanted truthful answers out of Riley, even if they came at the expense of never being able to charge him for his contribution to the nine deaths the tequila had led to. It was a reasonable trade-off, Jaywalker knew. After all, Riley might have been guilty of serving his customers too much and too long, but he hadn’t killed anyone. So, forced to choose, Firestone had decided he didn’t want Riley. He wanted Drake. Jaywalker found his Mercury, unlocked it and got in. He would have liked to revisit the scene of the crash—he figured it couldn’t be more than fifteen or twenty minutes away—but knew it would be too dark to make the detour worth it. He started the engine, put the car in Reverse, and had just backed out of the spot he’d been in, when the driver of another vehicle, off to his right, evidently decided he was taking too much time doing it. The headlights of the vehicle headed straight toward him, or at least straight toward the side of his car, and for an instant Jaywalker braced for a collision. Then, at the last possible moment, the other driver veered off sharply and, without ever braking, pulled out of the parking lot, noisily spraying gravel behind him. “Goddamn drunken idiot!” Jaywalker yelled, by that time to no one but himself. He waited a moment for the adrenaline rush to subside, then pulled the Merc carefully out onto the highway. It was a full two miles and five minutes later that the true significance of the event dawned on him. Back in the parking lot, Jaywalker had briefly thought about calling 9-1-1 and reporting the other driver before the jerk killed somebody. Then he’d realized that not only had he failed to get the guy’s license-plate number, he couldn’t even say what make or model the car had been—if indeed it had been a car, rather than a pickup truck or an SUV—or what color it was. All he’d seen had been headlights. Yet in his written statement, Carter Drake had recounted how he’d looked up from trying to swat a wasp, only to see an oncoming vehicle about to hit him head-on. Yet he’d been able to tell not only that it had been a van, but that it had been white. That, Jaywalker now knew for a fact, would have been totally impossible. In the dark, all Drake would have seen would have been a pair of headlights, coming straight at him and just about blinding him. He’d made up the rest. But why? Chapter Eight Out for Blood The following day was a court day, Carter Drake’s arraignment on murder charges in New City. That the charges would include murder—as well as a laundry list of lesser crimes—should have been a secret, known only to the grand jurors who’d voted to indict him and the prosecutor’s office that had presented the evidence to them. But nine people had died, and this was a big case. And the bigger the case, and the more media and public interest it generated, the more leaks it tended to spring. Not that Abe Firestone, the Rockland County district attorney, had held a press conference or called the editor of the New York Times or anything like that. What he’d done instead was to give Judah Mermelstein a “courtesy call,” designed to prepare him and his client for the worst. Or so the D.A. had phrased it. More likely, Firestone had had an ulterior motive in mind. While he was prohibited by law and ethics from divulging the specific charges contained in the indictment, no such prohibition extended to the defense. To Jaywalker’s cynical way of thinking, Firestone was counting on Mermelstein to go public, thereby doing Firestone’s work for him. It wasn’t a matter of the two adversaries working together, though. Firestone, Jaywalker guessed, wanted the added publicity a murder indictment would generate. He was an old-school politician, a law-and-order former sheriff up for reelection in November. The community had been outraged by the incident, and the sentiment on many lips was that, short of a slow and painful death, no sentence handed out to Carter Drake could possibly be enough. There’d been an early rumor, stoked by a column in the Rockland County Register and fanned by local radio talk-show hosts, that because Drake had turned himself in so long after the accident, after he’d likely sobered up, he might not be able to be charged with anything more serious than leaving the scene of an accident. Abe Firestone was eager to put that rumor to rest. Judah Mermelstein, on the other hand, was interested in defusing the drama from the situation. Short of coming right out and announcing that Firestone had told him there’d be a murder charge, Mermelstein could say pretty much whatever he wanted to. And he did. Constantly hounded by reporters intent on keeping the story on the front page and the evening news, he took advantage of every opportunity to tell them that he fully expected his client to be indicted for murder. “Yes, murder,” he’d add solemnly. “Nine counts of it.” Then he’d paused a moment for dramatic effect. “Now, is this really a murder case?” he’d ask them rhetorically. “Of course not. But given the very understandable anger of the good people of Rockland County, there’s been a tremendous amount of pressure brought to bear on the authorities. The D.A. happens to be a friend of mine, and a good man. But he’s also a politician. I can absolutely guarantee you he’s going to overreact and make a point of showing everyone how tough he is. If I were in his shoes, I might even do the same thing. I’d be dead wrong to do it, of course. But that’s our system for you.” If politics makes for strange bedfellows, so too does criminal law, at least occasionally. Amanda had phoned Jaywalker the night before and asked him if he was going to be present in court for the arraignment. “I’m not too confident in Mr. Mermelstein,” she’d confided. “And since eventually you’re going to take—” “I’ll be there,” Jaywalker had told her. “But I’ll be in the audience, just like you.” Being suspended meant he wasn’t permitted to pass the bar. The bar in this case was a literal one, a solid railing, waist high and usually fashioned out of dark wood. It had a break in the middle, where either a swinging gate or a chain, often wrapped with ceremonial red velvet, divided the spectator section from the well, the front area where the judge and other court officials sat, facing the lawyers and the defendant. “Do you need a ride?” Amanda had asked. “That’d be nice,” Jaywalker had said. No need to overtax the Mercury, which was in a legal parking spot for the next two days, nothing to sneeze at. “Do you need me to bring my son along?” Amanda asked. “Or can I leave him home?” “Your son,” echoed Jaywalker. That would be the kid described by Riley the bartender, the one who’d showed up at the End Zone after Drake had called home. “How old is he?” “Eric is seventeen,” she’d said, “going on twelve.” “Meaning?” “Meaning he’s in his rebellious stage. One day it’s blue hair, the next it might be a nose ring. He likes to keep us guessing.” “Why don’t we leave him home this trip,” Jaywalker had suggested. “Or in school.” “Fat chance of that.” After he’d hung up, Jaywalker hadn’t quite been able to decide if he’d excluded the son because he was afraid his appearance might work against Carter Drake, or because he wanted Amanda Drake for himself. Even before they reached the courthouse, it became clear to Jaywalker that they were heading into a circus of sorts. There were a dozen television vans, their telescoping antennae reaching skyward. Hundreds of people surrounded the building, spilling out into the streets and across the way. Many chanted and carried signs. A representative sampling of the ones Jaywalker could read from inside Amanda’s Lexus included “MURDERER!” “DEATH PENALTY FOR DRAKE,” “HOLOCAUST II,” “KILL THE KILLER,” and “IT WAS NO ACCIDENT, IT WAS A POGROM!” Cops were everywhere, many of them sporting riot helmets and plastic shields. Blue wooden barricades cordoned off the crowd and kept the courthouse steps clear. Jaywalker was able to count more than two dozen still cameras and almost as many video recorders, most bearing the logos or numbers of national networks or their local affiliates, or the cable news channels. Off to one side, MADD had set up a booth where volunteers were busily handing out flyers decrying the menace of drunk drivers. And some guy with a pushcart had set up shop, and was selling coffee and doughnuts. Jaywalker half expected to spot a lion tamer next, or a dozen clowns climbing out of a Volkswagen. So much for Judah Mermelstein’s efforts to defuse the drama from the situation. Once inside the building, Jaywalker stood in a long line with Amanda, waiting to go through the metal detectors and the briefcase searches that had become standard since September 11, 2001. Afraid to take a chance with his homemade ID card at the Court Personnel, Police Officers and Attorneys Only line, Jaywalker opted for the All Others line, which was about ten times longer. But he didn’t resent the delay. Although he was pretty confident that few Mideastern terrorists were listing the Rockland County courthouse as their next big target, he was less certain about the “Death-Penalty-for-Drake” crowd. Not to mention the Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/joseph-teller/depraved-indifference-39775189/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.