'Right. If Jon didn't know that Hayes was going to be his lawyer until he met him in the visiting room, why would he bring a shiv with him?'
'He may have had it for protection from other inmates.'
'Jon wouldn't have had it on him when he went to see Hayes. He'd never risk having it found during a frisk.'
'Maybe Dupre planned to kill any lawyer who showed up so he could plead insanity.'
'Then why isn't Jon acting crazy or suggesting that he is?'
'And he's got those cuts,' Frank muttered to himself.
'What do you know about Wendell Hayes?'
'Not a lot. We socialized at Oregon Criminal Defense Lawyers Association meetings, Bar Association meetings, stuff like that. I've been on panels with him and we've had drinks together.'
'Did you ever hear anything that would suggest he was dirty?'
'There are always rumors when a lawyer handles a lot of drug cases.'
'Such as?'
'Money-laundering, that type of thing. But how would that explain Hayes attacking your client?'
'I don't know, but it makes it more likely that he'd try to kill someone if he was bent.'
'Wendell's career did start with a bang. There was the Blanton case and that one with the hit man--I can't remember the case name. Things really broke his way in those cases.'
'What do you mean?'
'The DA had a slam dunk in Blanton until his eyewitness recanted, and the key evidence disappeared from the police property room in the other case. Most people thought he was lucky, but there were a few DAs I know who suggested that the breaks weren't just luck.'
'Hayes didn't do much criminal stuff anymore, did he?'
'Wendell still took on a few high-profile criminal cases but, mostly, he was handling business problems for people with money.'
'What type of problems?'
'He secured a very lucrative federal construction contract for Burton Rommel's firm and he's maneuvered a few land-use planning rulings for developers that were worth millions. That type of thing.'
'Deals that require political clout.'
Frank nodded. 'Wendell had plenty of that. He was part of the Westmont crowd, old Portland money. He grew up on intimate terms with the people who make this state run.'
Amanda talked to her father a little longer. Since they were both working late, they decided to have a quick dinner downtown in an hour. Amanda went to her office and spent the time reviewing everything she knew about Dupre's case. One thing that she thought about was the picture Ally Bennett had painted of Harold Travis. It was far different from the picture the press was presenting. Unfortunately, the only evidence that Ally could offer about Travis's character was Lori Andrews's hearsay statements, which were inadmissible in court. And proving that Travis was a degenerate didn't disprove the state's allegation that Dupre had murdered the senator. Ally's information actually hurt Jon's case. If Travis beat up one of Dupre's escorts after Jon warned the senator about hurting her, it would provide Jon with a motive to kill Travis.
On the other hand, if Tim Kerrigan tried to introduce evidence about Lori Andrews's murder at Jon's trial, evidence that the senator had beaten Andrews would be useful. Amanda was thinking about ways to get Ally's hearsay into evidence when she remembered that cocaine had been found in the senator's house. She wondered if the lab had recovered Travis's prints from the baggie, so she checked the police reports and found that the prints on the baggie were too smudged for comparison. Amanda was disappointed, but she thought of another way to prove that the senator had used cocaine. She found the autopsy report. The tox screen had not found cocaine, but it had picked up something else. According to the report, there were traces of alprazolam in the senator's blood. Amanda wondered what that was. She was about to do some research when her father buzzed her on the intercom to tell her that he was ready to go. Amanda was exhausted and starving. She made a note to find out about alprazolam, grabbed her coat, and left her office.
Chapter Twenty-Three.
Oscar Baron was ready to pack it in. Sitting in an abandoned gas station at two in the morning in the fucking cold was definitely not his idea of a good time. He was a lawyer, for God's sake. People waited for him, not the other way around. If Jon Dupre hadn't agreed to the outrageous fee Baron was charging him, he'd have been long gone. Even at the rates that he had gouged out of Dupre, Baron was starting to wonder if it was worth it.
First he'd had to deal with that stuck-up bitch, Bennett. She'd brought his money and Jon's bargaining chip to Baron's office about an hour after Baron had taken Dupre's call. Baron had suggested a friendly blow job to celebrate his being back on the case, and she'd had the temerity to turn him down, like she was too good for him.
Then, Oscar had had to put up with Dupre's ravings at the jail. Jesus, could he go on and on. But Baron was pretty good at tuning out clients, and he could put up with the most unmitigated bullshit for what Dupre was paying him.
Finally, there was this ridiculous meeting in the middle of nowhere. Dupre had insisted that Baron deal with an FBI agent named Hunter. Baron had called the local office and left his number. Hunter had called him at home and told him they had to meet immediately behind this abandoned gas station on a deserted stretch of the highway to the coast. When Oscar pointed out that it was one in the morning and he was in bed, the agent had insisted that the clandestine rendezvous was necessary for security reasons. Oscar would have told the agent to go fuck himself if Dupre hadn't promised a sizeable bonus for a good deal.
