defense of post-traumatic stress disorder had been excluded by the court, she argued, Tom’s military biography had no relevance to whether he killed Kathy Rubinkowski.
She was right. But getting sympathy out of the jury for a war hero who lost everything when he returned home was one of the only arrows I had left in the quiver. So we had our work cut out for us to convince the judge to allow the evidence, and Bradley John’s first draft of the defense’s response, which was due Monday, wasn’t satisfactory, to my mind.
If Judge Nash was a normal human being, he’d feel like he owed me one at this point. That’s how most judges think-if they stick one side with an adverse ruling, they try to restore the equilibrium with a favorable ruling on something else. They want to finish a trial knowing that they screwed over each side about the same.
All told, Wendy had filed no less than sixteen motions in limine. It was a routine tactic to inundate the other side with these motions so they spent their last days before trial tied up in paper and legal research. It was a tactic of which I disapproved. I deplored it, in fact. The adversarial system wasn’t intended to be a game of one- upsmanship but, rather, a sincere search for the truth.
Which was why I filed only fifteen motions on our side.
Either way, it was going to be a long weekend.
My office phone rang, my direct line that almost nobody knows.
“Yeah, hello?”
“Yeah, hello,” Joel Lightner said. He was back at his office, doing his digging on Randall Manning and those other shady characters. Another investigator was helping him. He’d warned me that he’d have trouble getting to some information until Monday, when everyone returned from the long holiday weekend, so I hadn’t expected magic from him yet.
“You don’t answer your cell now?” he complained.
“Oh, sorry.” It was sitting on my desk, but somehow I’d missed the buzzing.
“So I got something.”
“On that one thing?”
“No, the other thing.”
I’d grown paranoid since someone tried to ice me last night, so I was assuming the worst-including that my phones were tapped. Thus, the code-speak.
“The new thing?” I said.
“Right,” he said.
The new thing. My heart did a flip.
“You free for lunch?” I asked.
He said, “Just what I was thinking.”
59
Patrick Cahill and his partner, Dwyer, had spent the better part of the last hour walking the block of Jason Kolarich’s townhouse. The lawyer lived on a relatively isolated residential street near the lake, and the sidewalks weren’t heavily traveled with the temperatures in the mid-thirties, all of which made the two of them conspicuous standing out here, not doing much of anything but studying the townhouse.
Cahill didn’t have a better idea. Kolarich had aborted his run this morning. Cahill didn’t know why. Maybe it was a one-off, an exception, and tomorrow he’d return to his routine. Maybe Cahill could wait that one more day.
But he needed a plan B. And he hadn’t come prepared with one. It wasn’t like he’d spent weeks planning this thing. It had all happened pretty fast: the guy was nosing around, he had to be eliminated, they knew he went for jogs along the lake-Patrick, get rid of him. Okay, well, now Patrick had to improvise.
He knew where Kolarich worked, but it was a downtown high-rise building, and it wasn’t the easiest or cleanest thing in the world to go after someone in a building like that. There were cameras and locked doors and security guards and people in relatively confined spaces. It would take lots of preparation and planning, and Cahill had time for neither.
But Kolarich had to come home at night. It was only noon right now, so that was hours away, especially for a lawyer getting ready for a trial in less than a week. Maybe he wouldn’t come home until two in the morning. But he’d come home. And they had to be ready.
“The garage,” said Cahill. Next to his brick townhome with white trim was a brick garage with white trim. It was a one-car job but presumably had some room built in for movement.
“Two possibilities,” he said. “We break into the garage and wait for him inside. But I’m not sure how we get in there. There isn’t a window. The door’s automatic, so it won’t lift manually. So the better idea is we wait for him outside. He pulls into the driveway, he opens the garage door, as he pulls the car into the garage, we slip in before he lowers the door.”
“So we’re doing it inside a closed garage. Good,” Dwyer agreed. “And where do we wait?”
The answer, Cahill thought, was blindingly obvious. Cahill pointed to a thin strip between Kolarich’s townhouse and the one next to it to the east. It was technically the neighbor’s property, a walkway that ran the length of the townhomes and dead-ended into a gate accessing the neighbor’s back patio. God, these city people didn’t have much real estate. Cahill was sure he could stand on that walkway, extend his arms, and touch both houses.
“We can squat down there,” he said. “We’ll pick a spot so we can see his car coming, but as he pulls in, the angle will be so he can’t see us. Not that he’d be looking.”
“Right.”
“Then we move forward and once he pulls his car in, we scoot inside. He hits the garage door button without thinking. It closes up and we make our move.”
“And this is still supposed to look like a robbery?”
“Forget that.” Cahill shook his head. “Mr. Manning said dead was the most important thing. I’m done screwing around with this guy. We should be back home getting ready, and instead we’re wasting another full day on this lawyer. I’m going to put more holes in that grunt than a pinata.”
“Good. Sounds good.”
Cahill checked his watch. “No sense sitting around now, freezing to death. He’s not coming home for a long time.”
Cahill and Dwyer walked down the block to where their car, a blue Ford Explorer, was parked. They got in and drove off. Aside from getting some food and whiling away a few hours, Cahill wanted some long underwear and extra layers of clothing and a thermos of hot coffee for what could be a long night of recon. It felt good to him, like old times, he thought, when he was in the military.
It was going to feel even better when he could tell Mr. Manning he’d solved the problem.
60
“Okay,” said Bradley John, reading over the last of our responses to the prosecution’s pretrial motions. “I see what I wasn’t giving you the first time around.”
“You did a good job structurally,” I said. “Really. You cited the cases, you gave good legal reasoning. But it didn’t have any heart.”
“Heart?”
“This is a murder trial, Bradley. Somebody died, and a second person’s life is on the line in this trial. The stakes are high. Emotions are high. Judges aren’t immune to that. Look, some of these motions are routine. But the one on the prior military history, that’s the whole ball game for us, right? So right there in our response, we need the judge to read about Tom’s military background. I think he’s going to feel bad excluding it. We start there, with the psychological aspect. Not too heavy or it feels like pandering but enough to gain his sympathy-hopefully.”
