‘Yes.’
‘Before that night, did you ever have occasion to talk with George or Kathy Merlow for any reason?’
Dana has beautiful eyes even when they are darting in discomfort as they are now. Her tongue searches for saliva.
‘I might have,’ she says.
I nod slowly. I am not enjoying this, and I think she knows it, so she embellishes a little to get me away from the nub of it.
‘We lived in the same neighborhood, you see a lot of people,’ she says. ‘I might have seen them someplace or other.’ She makes this sound like some social accident, a rubbing of shoulders that cannot be recalled with precision.
‘I see. Might one of these places where you met George and Kathy Merlow have been your office downtown at the justice department?’
Finally we arrive at the point, like a prime number, an issue that cannot be divided by half-truths.
She looks up at the judge. ‘Your honor, if we could have a moment in chambers,’ she says. ‘There are matters of critical importance, life and death,’ she says.
Woodruff has heard a lot of things from the bench, but never a witness asking for a private conference in the middle of her testimony.
‘Is there something wrong with you physically?’ he says. ‘Are you ill?’
‘No, your honor.’
‘Then you should answer the question,’ he says. Dana’s moment of truth.
‘I might have. I can’t remember.’ Truth turns to evasion.
‘Surely that is something you would remember, a meeting in your office?’ I say. I try to bring her to it gently, as little pain as possible, like a cyanide capsule cracked between the molars.
‘I meet with a lot of people,’ she says. ‘I cannot remember them all.’ She writhes and squirms, a futile and agonizing effort to put off the inevitable.
All the while I can see Laurel pumping Harry, a series of heated one-liners in his ear. She wants to know what I am doing. What Dana has to do with all of this.
‘Isn’t it a fact, Ms. Colby, that the night you met the Merlows outside in front of their house, the night Melanie Vega was murdered, that you were there not as some itinerant passerby but on business?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she says.
‘Isn’t it a fact that you went to meet George and Kathy Merlow as a representative of the United States Department of Justice to assure them that they would be all right, that everything would be taken care of?’
She looks at me like I’m smoking some bad weed.
‘Who called you?’ I say. ‘Was it your boss, because you lived closer than anyone else? Or did you have some special relationship with them, something like a caseworker?’ I say.
‘Your honor, I think counsel is confused,’ she says. ‘Someone has clearly given him misinformation. Misled him,’ she says, ‘for whatever reason.’
In all of this there is a lot of protest, but it is not lost on Woodruff that there is neither a denial nor a reply to my question.
‘I’m waiting for an answer,’ I say.
‘Your honor.’ She is still looking up at him, a plaintive appeal falling on deaf ears.
He tells her to answer the question.
She takes it to a level of higher appeal. She turns to me.
‘Can’t we talk? I thought you cared.’ She mouths these words in a whisper so low that the court reporter asks her to repeat them. She has missed them for the record.
Dana ignores this.
‘At the moment,’ I say, ‘what I care about is your answer to the question.’
‘Fine,’ she says. There is a transformation that takes place in this instant. It is measured in her eyes, a recognition that anything that might have been between us is gone, vaporized by deceptions now being dragged by the painful process of the law into the naked sunlight.
‘You want to know about Kathy Merlow?’ she says.
‘Yes.’
‘Fine. I’ll tell you. Kathy Merlow was part of what is known as the federal witness relocation program.’
‘She was a federally protected witness?’ I say.
‘Yes.’
‘What was her real name?’
‘Carla Leopold,’ she says.
‘How did she come to live in Capital City?’
‘She had testified in cases on the east coast, against certain organized crime figures. As a consequence there was a contract out on her life. She was given a new identity along with her husband, and moved to this city in order to protect their lives. It was part of a plea-bargain.’
With this there is the low rumble of voices through the courtroom, a stirring in the press rows as a dozen heads come up. Pencils stop their little squiggles. A lot of wondering as to where this fits in our case.
‘Your honor, what is the relevance of this?’ Cassidy is out of her chair, watching all of this from the railing in front of the jury box. She probably believes Dana and I have concocted this story to provide a defense in a faltering case. What she senses is that the jury is listening. The objection is designed to break my stride.
‘Your honor, if I could make an offer of proof. I think it will become abundantly clear that the information from this witness is highly relevant.’
‘Make it quickly,’ says Woodruff.
‘Ms. Colby. Are the couple known as George and Kathy Merlow dead or alive?’
Dana’s face at this moment is drained of all emotion, though this question seems to take her by surprise, that I of all people would ask it.
‘They no longer go by the name of Merlow,’ she says.
‘So they have a new identity?’
‘Yes.’ She admonishes that if I ask she will not tell me what it is. I don’t ask.
‘But they are alive?’
‘Yes.’
It is what I’d suspected, ever since my conversation with Harry. His cynicism that the government can do only two things welclass="underline" print money and provide new identities. It was the spark that fired all the little pieces that didn’t fit; Clem Olsen’s information about the fingerprint on the paint tube and the woman named Carla Leopold, the accountant employed by the Regal International Trading Consortium, a front for organized crime; her ‘death’ nearly two years ago in a fiery auto accident on an east coast highway; and her seeming resurrection on a grassy churchyard knoll in Hana two months ago. It had worked once before, death and resurrection with a new identity, so why not simply do it again? There had been no murder in Hana, only the illusion, to stop me from looking.
But there had been a killer. For this Dana apologizes openly on the stand.
‘We knew that he was still active because of the postal bombing,’ she says. ‘It was his MO,’ she says.
Marcie Reed was murdered for a simple reason, to keep her from telling me what she knew — that her friend Kathy Merlow was a relocated witness. Merlow had confided in the one friend she had found in Capital City, and it had cost that friend her life. The people who had come to see Marcie before Harry and I were not Lama and his troops as we had suspected, but contract killers, on the track of Merlow. When they discovered that I was dogging her as a witness in Laurel’s case they decided to follow along. What better than a lawyer armed with judicial process to force a witness to ground? One word from Marcie and I would have stopped looking. I would have had a defense much more stout than a mere eyewitness to the crime. I would have known what I now know.
‘We knew that he’d been commissioned to do the hit.’ Dana’s talking about the contract killer, and that he was looking for the Merlows. ‘You were just a little too convenient,’ she says.
‘So you used me as bait?’ I say.
‘I never thought you would be in any real danger. We tried to get him on the way out at the airport, at Maui. We missed,’ she says.
Much of this is going past the jury, so I regroup for their benefit.
‘Let’s go back to the night of the murder. Who asked you to go and meet with the Merlows?’
‘My boss,’ she says.
This would be the United State’s Attorney for the Eastern District. A Presidential appointee. I am beginning to sense that this thing reaches much higher than I thought. Dana has been burning up the air between here and D.C. I had assumed these were related solely to her judicial aspirations. Now I suspect that even that has some more sinister origins.