Читать книгу Deadly Lessons - David Russell W. - Страница 14

In recent years, the Vancouver Police Department had moved the bulk of its operations to a swanky new building just below the Cambie Street Bridge that leads into the downtown core of the city and the business sector. As the city’s population and volume of crime had grown, the police force had grown with it, making their previous digs on Main Street, at the entrance to the city’s renowned Chinatown district, too small to house the accoutrements of modern crime fighting. Parts of the police department still operated out of the old Main Street offices, which were conveniently located adjacent to one of the two downtown criminal courts.

The detective division of the VPD was in the new glass and brick building on 3rd Avenue. Even police officers had marvelled at their new headquarters when they’d first moved in. The new building had also received the requisite howls of protest from citizens and taxpayer watchdog groups, convinced that Vancouver’s finest were not in need of such luxury facilities.

Personally, I liked the new headquarters. The offices actually had windows, in addition to the obnoxious fluorescent lighting always found in government buildings. If you were in the right office, you even had a view of False Creek’s harbour, with its funky, upscale condominiums and townhouses, marinas and markets, and beyond to the Concorde Pacific residential towers at the foot of gentrified Yaletown. I suppose an argument could be made that the police station isn’t really supposed to be a pleasant place: we certainly don’t want to encourage people to be there, after all. On the flip side, for the hundreds of police officers and civilian personnel who had to make their living there, I could understand the desire to increase productivity by not making the place a hell hole to work in. What did taxpayer groups know anyway? Of course, the planners could have been a bit smarter and not had the state of the art gym easily visible through the floor to ceiling windows overlooking busy Second Avenue below. Experience tells me taxpayers hate to see their employees working out.

When Carl told me where he was, I was relieved. Being taken to the new police headquarters likely meant he had not, in fact, been formally charged with anything just yet. In that case, he would likely be booked and headed for pre-trial detention, a nice, comfortable way of describing the jails where prisoners are held until the system figures out what should happen to them next. Indeed, if charges had been formally sworn against Carl, we would likely have already been preparing for arraignment proceedings. Since I had not heard from Crown Counsel and likely wouldn’t at this time of night, it was more likely the police had picked him up for further questioning. That they had done so without first notifying me irritated me immensely. The detectives of record on the case knew full well that Carl had retained me as his counsel, and as such they ought to have made efforts to contact me. At least Carl had it together enough to call me before they could launch into further interrogations.

It was clear to me that the altercation earlier in the day had made a lasting impact on Detective Furlo. Generally, legal counsel has little difficulty accessing the building. In fact, I had been there so many times, I was on a first name basis with the desk officer who hovered at the entrance to the building to keep out the unauthorized riff-raff. Police preferred to have only authorized riff-raff in the building.

When I arrived at headquarters, there somehow was no longer any record of me as regular defence counsel. True, I had not been in the building in that capacity for over a year. I had, however, been in the building a month before meeting my cop friend Andrea Pearson for lunch. No doubt Detective Furlo wanted to make sure I knew I was on his turf, and he would be calling the shots. Oooh. Big man keeps lawyer waiting, filling out forms at the front counter.

Finally, my identity and legal credentials verified and visitor’s pass securely affixed to the lapel of my Adidas jacket, I headed towards the elevator, assuring the nighttime desk clerk that, yes, I knew my way. I entered the detective division on the fourth floor and immediately spotted Detective Smythe working away at her laptop at her work station. It was still amazing to me how little workspace was allotted to individual officers. I had spent most of my legal days doing Legal Aid work, and I’d had a bigger office. She looked up when I came in as though she had been waiting for me. Judging by the late hour, I guessed she couldn’t really do much more until I arrived.

“No rest for the underpaid,” I offered by way of greeting.

“Not that you would know. I thought taxpayer money flowed directly into the pockets of defence lawyers,” she replied. I could grow to like her.

“There must be a hole in mine. Somehow whatever gets there still seems to get spent by my ex-wife.”

“Ouch. Residual bitterness, thy name is Winston Patrick.” Smythe paused to smile at me.

An obnoxious voice interrupted our peaceful moment. “Mr. Patrick. So glad you could make it. I hope you didn’t having difficulty getting in to see us.” I could hear Furlo’s smug smile without even having to turn to see it. To her credit, his much more mature partner gave me the same roll of the eyeballs performance she had demonstrated at our last meeting. Clearly, she was a detective of a different calibre.

“Let me guess,” she said to me. “Clerk had no idea who you were and insisted on checking all the credentials before he let you in. This despite the fact he was informed we would be waiting for you. Christ, Mike,” she complained to her partner, “I have kids at home I wouldn’t mind seeing eventually.”

“So should we cut him loose now,” I said, “and avoid all the needless wrangling, at the end of which I will end up taking my client home anyway, or do you have a masochistic notion of dragging this out all night? I do have classes in the morning that I would rather be preparing for.”

“Absolutely,” Smythe assured me. She had a smooth quality in her voice that made me think she could probably sing jazz. I’d bet she sang a lot to her kids when they were little. She maybe even still did.

“Oh?” Furlo feigned surprise. “Was your client under the impression that he was being held? We just wanted to ask him a few more questions is all.”

“This despite the fact you were fully aware he had retained counsel. Did you read him his rights, or did you not bother with the police academy at all?” My insomnia was catching up to me, and I was getting testy.

“And in case you’ve forgotten, your client was given the chance to call you, which brought you here. I don’t think that we’ve done anything wrong here, counsellor, so can the sanctimonious bullshit.” Furlo may also be an insomniac.

“Sanctimonious? Someone got a thesaurus for his birthday?”

“God,” Smythe complained. “Why couldn’t he have had a woman lawyer? Like I don’t have to wade through enough testosterone during the day around here? Can you two little boys behave, and let’s get through what we have to do so we can all go home?” Her exasperation was completely unfeigned, and I thought we might really be in trouble.

Furlo and I looked at each other like two sons caught quarrelling in church. For the moment, I thought it was best to behave. “Okay,” I conceded. “Do you have something new that we didn’t cover earlier today, or is this exploratory drilling?”

“We have something new, Counsellor,” Furlo explained calmly, apparently also agreeing to a temporary cease fire.

“Winston,” Smythe faced me, “how well do you know your client?”

“You know I can’t go into the specifics of our relationship. He’s my client and colleague.”

“I know you’re focusing more on a teaching career than a legal one now,” she continued. “I just thought you might want to reconsider working with Mr. Turbot, since you’re planning to spend more time in schools.”

“What are you telling me, Detective Smythe? What did you find?”

“Fingerprints,” Furlo announced with no small amount of pleasure, “on the body.”

“Take me to my client,” I said calmly, masking the emotions that were tugging beneath the surface.

Detective Smythe rose from her desk and headed down a hallway at the end of the room. Furlo gestured grandly, even bowing slightly at the waist, for me to follow Smythe down the hall. He was enjoying his perceived advantage. It wasn’t unusual for the police to pick up a suspect for further questioning with evidence as strong as fingerprints. That at least placed Carl in close contact with Tricia. It certainly wouldn’t be enough to lay criminal charges, but it did call into question the veracity of Carl’s insistence that no physical relationship had taken place between him and Tricia Bellamy. If he was physically involved with her—and his fingerprints on her body certainly lent credence to her accusations—it provided the police with a motive in her killing. What’s worse, from a personal perspective, it made me question the client and my desire to represent him. I was now wishing that I hadn’t been in my classroom when Carl had come to see me.

We found Carl sitting in a desolate room, at a particle board-and-veneer table with a half-empty cup of cold coffee in front of him. Despite the fancy new police headquarters, it was well known among employees and regular visitors to the police station that one area the new facilities had failed to address was the abysmal quality of the coffee provided. It was even worse than the brew found in teacher faculty lounges in public schools. Carl had wisely given up drinking the police department standard issue swill.

“Winston!” Carl jumped to his feet, suddenly reinvigorated when I entered the room.

“Hi, Carl,” I responded. “How are you doing?”

“I’m okay, I guess,” he replied. He seemed happy to see me, which was understandable. Somehow my students haven’t yet begun to feel quite the same way.

“Good.” I turned to face the two detectives. “So what’s the story, Detectives? Are you going to lay a charge, or do we go home?”

“We still have nearly twenty-three hours, you know that,” Smythe gently reminded me. Under Canadian law, Furlo and Smythe could detain Carl for twenty-four hours without laying a charge. At that point, he would need to be charged with a crime or released.

“If you think you have enough evidence to charge him, what are you waiting for? I have class in the morning.” Sometimes being brash and up front was the best defence.

“Why don’t you ask your client how his fingerprints got onto Tricia Bellamy?” Furlo challenged.

“I told you,” Carl began.

“Carl! Just wait a moment,” I admonished him. “Exactly where were the fingerprints found?”

“Where?” Furlo asked.

“Yes, where. Where on the body were my client’s prints allegedly found?” Carl visibly flinched as I began referring to Tricia as “the body.” It couldn’t be helped. It was important to distance myself from the victim if I was going to mount a decent defence to what was looking like a stronger case.

“Your client’s prints were found on the victim’s watch and a partial print that looks very close to your client’s was also found on both of the victim’s hands,” Smythe responded to my question.

“That’s it?” I tried to sound confident. Homicide wasn’t my specialty.

“What more do you need?” Furlo sneered.

“Well, for starters, I understand Tricia Bellamy was strangled. How about fingerprints around her neck? Find any of those?” Carl was visibly paling by the syllable.

“No,” Smythe admitted, “we did not.”

“Ever heard of gloves, Counsellor? I refer you to U.S. v. O.J. Simpson,” Furlo quipped.

“I’ve heard of it, yes. Though it was a state, not a federal case, which makes it State of California v. Simpson. Your point being that you found no prints whatsoever on the victim’s neck?”

“That’s correct,” Smythe returned. “At this point, no prints of any kind, even partials, have been found directly on the victim’s neck.”

I turned to face Furlo, since he was the more aggressive of the two. I couldn’t even get a rise out of Smythe, which meant the likelihood of flustering her into a mistake was much less than with Furlo. “I suppose you have a scientific theory about the prevalence of prints located anywhere except on the one part of the body where death would have been caused?”

“Yeah, smartass, he put the gloves on so he could strangle her without leaving prints.”

“And the victim stood there calmly watching her assailant putting gloves on so she could be strangled? This is what you’ve got?”

“Or maybe, he felt remorse after he offed her, and while weeping over her body, removed his gloves to wipe his eyes.”

“Then ran his fingerprints all over the hands and her wristwatch. This, after having the foresight to bring gloves to avoid the detection of prints in the first place.” I stood up from the table next to Carl. “I guess it really is time to go.”

“Doesn’t it bother you, Patrick, that your client’s prints could be found on the body at all?” Furlo demanded angrily.

“What bothers me is that you’ve failed to even consider the myriad means by which a teacher’s prints could be found on a student. Classrooms are not big places. People make inadvertent contact all the time. A caring hand laid on a student’s arm to offer encouragement. A touch on the elbow as you say ‘excuse me’ in the stairway.”

“And on her hands,” Smythe reminded me, suddenly rejoining the conversation.

“Mr. Turbot told you during your earlier questioning that Tricia Bellamy had expressed some difficulty with the subject matter and had come in for tutoring. They were in a biology lab conducting science experiments. That a ‘partial’ print could be left on her hands is hardly grounds for detaining my client.” I was bluffing.

“It is when you consider the fact they were sleeping together,” Furlo sneered.

“And that, Detective, is the last I want to hear of those unfounded allegations. This was a troubled student who for reasons unknown alleged an inappropriate relationship. Until such times as you have some kind of corroborating evidence of such a relationship, you would be well advised to refrain from making any statements in that regard, or you may find yourself and your department staring down the business end of a civil defamation suit.”

Furlo, for once, was quieted by my threat. Smythe did not come to his aid.

“And furthermore,” I continued, “just how in hell did you get my client’s fingerprints for comparison?”

“He offered them when we brought him in,” Smythe explained calmly.

I looked at Carl in disbelief. His eyes turned pleadingly to me. “I didn’t know what to do. They said they wanted my fingerprints, so I gave them to them.”

“You brought my client in here because you found ‘some’ prints on the body?”

“Prints that turned out to be his,” Furlo demanded.

“Talk to Crown Counsel. Even assuming you can gather enough evidence to build a credible charge, I’ll have those prints thrown out as being collected improperly, without the advice of counsel, without an arrest warrant being sworn out.” I practically pulled Carl from his chair. “Carl, it’s time to go home.” Smythe and Furlo made no effort to stop me. “Goodnight, Detectives.”

“Good night, Mr. Patrick,” Smythe offered. Despite my staged hostility and indignity, she still had class enough to offer polite, closing niceties.

“Hey, Patrick!” Furlo sneered. “Why doesn’t your client give us a DNA sample, and we’ll speed things up immensely?”

“Not going to happen. Not now. Not ever,” I replied, though I knew if any more damning evidence came our way, obtaining a court order for Carl’s DNA would be relatively routine.

Outside the room, I hurried Carl down the hallway, past the detectives’ work area to the elevator. While we waited for the car to take us down and into Vancouver’s drizzling night air, I turned to face him. “Let’s get this clear. Do not offer anything—anything—to the police unless I’m with you. Not fingerprints, not answers to questions, not DNA samples, nothing. They know you have defence counsel. They know better.”

“I’m sorry,” he responded. “I panicked. I don’t get picked up by the police very often.”

“And you won’t again. If they come to see you, if they phone you, if they so much as send you an invitation to the police ball, you call me first, okay?”

“Okay,” he said. “Is that true, what you said about getting my fingerprints thrown out?”

“Hell, I don’t know. I was making it up,” I confessed.

“Well, you sounded convincing to me.” He forced a smile.

“Terrific,” I said. “I should have been an actor.”