“Myers’s alma mater,” Max explained. Ellie didn’t need the reminder. Even seemingly irrelevant details about suspects were cataloged in her memory. She still remembered the date of birth of the first person she ever arrested.
“Five years ago, when Myers was a junior in college, it seems he had a little too much to drink at a party and tried to rape a girl after offering to walk her home,” Knight said. “The girl didn’t file a complaint, but we’ve got two of her friends who say she reported it to them the next morning.”
“You can use that at trial?” Ellie asked. A decade had passed since her on-and-off pre-law classes at Wichita State University, but she recalled serious evidentiary restrictions on using a defendant’s prior acts against him.
Knight nodded. “We’ll argue it forms a pattern. Alcohol. A little flirting. It helps that the previous girl was the same age, also a blonde. She says he was very rough with her and grabbed her neck. He ran out of her dorm room when she grabbed a bottle of hair spray and shot him in the eye with it. We’ll argue that this time he didn’t give up so easily.”
Knight’s argument sounded like a stretch to Ellie, but she kept her thoughts to herself.
“As the two of you know, grand jury will be a breeze. Just us and twenty-three regular New Yorkers. And, no, that’s not an oxymoron.” The joke was obviously one of Knight’s old chestnuts, but Ellie smiled politely anyway. “Any questions?”
Ellie and Rogan shook their heads.
“Very well, then. It’s time for the dream team to show ’em what we’ve got. No surprises, right?”
That was twice this morning that Ellie had heard the phrase. Both times, she had felt a sinking in the pit of her stomach as she thought about Lucy Feeney, Robbie Harrington, and Alice Butler. Even as Ellie took her seat in the front of the twenty-three sets of watchful eyes in the grand jury room, she had not yet decided for herself what to do about the doubts she was carrying about Jake Myers’s guilt.
The grand jury room, as Simon Knight had pointed out, contained only the prosecutors, their witnesses, and twenty-three regular New Yorkers. The grand jury foreman, a barrel-chested man in a plaid shirt and glasses with thick lenses, asked Ellie if she swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
No defendant. No judge. No defense attorney. No cross-examination. No difficult questions. There’s always an easy way and a hard way. What in fact was the whole truth?
Ellie took her oath and, like a dream witness, spelled out the state’s case against Jake Myers-every bit of it truthful. As it turned out, the surprises that day would not be of her making.
THE FIRST CURVEBALL was the attractive redhead waiting outside the grand jury room when Ellie had finished with her testimony. She wore a fitted black suit with patent leather high heels and carried an alligator attaché that must have cost more than Ellie took home in a month. She couldn’t have been any older than Ellie, but, from all appearances, carried no insecurities about either her age or her corresponding lack of experience.
“Hey, Max. I was starting to wonder whether you were leaving us out of the party.” She gave Donovan the kind of smile women tend to give men who looked like Donovan.
Donovan cleared his throat. “Everyone, this is Susan Parker. She’s Nick Warden’s lawyer.”
Simon Knight popped his head out of the grand jury room. “What’s going on? They’re ready to hear from Warden.”
“Mr. Knight, you obviously need no introduction,” Parker said, extending her hand for a shake before introducing herself to Rogan and Ellie.
Ellie recalled Donovan mentioning that Warden’s lawyer was a young attorney at an aggressive securities firm. The fact that criminal courts weren’t her usual gig no doubt explained why she was considerably better dressed than the defense lawyers Ellie was used to.
“Where’s your client?” Knight asked.
“He went to find the little boy’s room. The problem is, he brought a friend with him.”
“The only friend of his we care about is at Rikers Island on a no-bail hold,” Knight said.
Then Parker dropped the second surprise. “I’m talking about Jaime Rodriguez.”
“That’s the bouncer?” Knight asked, looking to Donovan for clarification. Donovan nodded. “I would have thought your client would be scared enough to just say no these days. I don’t need him taking another pop before Myers’s trial.”
“We have a problem,” Parker said, any playfulness in her tone gone now. “Much to my considerable consternation, there is apparently still contact between Rodriguez and my client. And that’s how I’ve come to learn that Rodriguez has a story to tell that you might find interesting.”
“Enough with the teasing,” Knight said. “Get to the part where we have a problem.”
“According to Rodriguez, another employee at Pulse knows a little too much about the murder of Chelsea Hart.”
“What’s there not to know?” Knight asked. “The press has been all over this from the second that girl’s body was found.”
“So you’re saying everything’s out there? There’s nothing left that only the real killer would know?”
“Jake Myers is the real killer,” Donovan said.
Parker held up her hands. “Not my job to figure this out. Apparently someone at Pulse says the killer took something that belonged to the victim. I for one had not read that in the paper, so I thought I was doing a good deed by persuading Rodriguez to come here and talk to you. If you don’t care about that, send the guy home.”
“Rodriguez doesn’t even work at Pulse anymore,” Rogan said.
“No, but he still has friends who do. And one of those friends talked to this janitor who seems to think he knows something.”
“It’s a janitor who said this?” Ellie asked. Besides Rodriguez, the only other employee at Pulse who had a conviction was the janitor, Leon Symanski.
“That’s right. Why? That means something to you?”
Ellie didn’t have a chance to respond, because apparently Simon Knight had heard enough. “I think we need to have a little chat with Mr. Rodriguez before we ask for our indictment.”
CHAPTER 29
AN HOUR LATER, without a word to the other three people in the room, Simon Knight picked up the telephone in a conference room in the District Attorney’s Office and dialed an extension.
“Call the clerk to give the grand jurors their lunch break. We won’t be presenting any further evidence this afternoon in the Myers case.”
Knight had just closed the door behind Jaime Rodriguez, Nick Warden, and Susan Parker, and apparently had heard enough.
Rogan was the first to speak up. “We came down here because the case was ready for grand jury.”
“And that was before Rodriguez told us that a janitor with a past sex offense somehow knows more about Chelsea Hart than what’s been reported by the media. So far, of course. I’m told the Daily Post is onto the fact that the victim’s hair was cut. And that’s why the two of you need to go see this Symanski while we still have some control over that information.”
“As far as the NYPD is concerned, the case has been cleared.”
“You’re telling me you want me to call your lieutenant and notify him that you’re refusing to investigate your own case?” Knight asked.
“I was giving you my opinion that the case has been fully investigated. We’re a team, right?”
Ellie could see where Rogan was going. There had been cases in which the department had pressured the DA’s office to pursue charges by threatening-implicitly or explicitly-to portray prosecutors as obstructionist if they delayed. But Rogan wasn’t necessarily packing the heat he’d need to win this fight.
Knight turned to Ellie. “What do you think, Detective Hatcher?”