“About seven months.”
“Who did you replace?”
“What do you mean?”
“Who was the Timmerman’s head of security before you?”
“There wasn’t any.”
I feign surprise, though of course I knew what the answer was going to be. “So Mr. Timmerman had a sudden concern about security about seven months ago?”
“He said he would feel safer if people were watching the house.”
“How many people?”
“What do you mean?”
“How many people were employed, like yourself, to protect the Timmermans and their house?”
“Around ten.”
“And among them, these ten people protected the house twenty-four hours a day?”
He nods. “Yes.”
“How long did the Timmermans live in that house, if you know?”
“I believe six years.”
“But suddenly, seven months ago, he didn’t feel safe?”
Richard objects that Durant could not know how Timmerman felt, and Hatchet sustains. That’s okay; my point has been made.
“When I showed up that day, why did you let me go up to the house?”
“Your name was on a list,” he says. “You had been approved to enter.”
“Had I not been approved, you wouldn’t have let me in?”
“That’s correct.”
“So I wasn’t considered a threat to the Timmerman’s safety?”
“Right.”
“And I assume you were being extra vigilant because Walter Timmerman had recently been murdered?”
Durant won’t concede the point. “I was always careful; that was my job.”
I nod. “Right. Your job was to only let people in who were approved, and who were not considered a threat by you or by the Timmermans. Correct?”
He knows where I’m going, but he can’t stop me from getting there. “Yeah.”
“Which is why you let Steven Timmerman in as well? He was on an approved list?”
“Yes.”
“So for the seven months that Walter Timmerman was so concerned with his safety that he built guardhouses and hired ten security people like yourself, Steven Timmerman was always approved to enter?”
“As far as I know.”
“You know pretty far, don’t you, Mr. Durant?”
Richard objects that I’m being argumentative, and Hatchet sustains, so I rephrase. “Mr. Durant, is there a higher authority than you regarding who was allowed access to that house? Someone else we should talk to, who is more knowledgeable about it than you?”
Durant looks over at Richard, hoping he’ll object, but he doesn’t. “No,” he says.
“So you’re the guy?”
“Yeah. I’m the guy.”
I turn the witness back to Richard for redirect. He gets Durant to remind the jurors that no one other than the people he already mentioned had gotten through the guards into the house. No sinister mad bombers, no serial killers. The implication is clear: It had to be Steven.
EACH NIGHT DURING A TRIAL, I do two things.
I rehash with Kevin what went on in court that day, and then we prepare for the next day’s witnesses.
In this case, our rehashing consists of telling Laurie what transpired. She is still doing physical therapy during the day, and therefore cannot attend the court sessions. In this fashion we’ve inadvertently stumbled on a good way to reflect on the day’s events, since she probes us with questions that make us consider and pay extra attention to some things we might have glossed over.
I’m slowly dealing with my guilt about “losing” Childs in the manner that we did. I am doing this by thinking of Childs not as the murderer, but as the murder weapon. He was sent to kill the Timmermans by someone else, and therefore that someone else is the person who had the motive. Childs was just doing a job; the key player in all this is the one that hired him. That is who we have to find.
We have made very little progress in coming up with ways to attack the evidence against Steven. This is of course frustrating; since I know with certainty that Steven is innocent, the evidence had to have been fabricated and planted. But it is also puzzling. I don’t understand why the actual killers went to such pains to frame him.
My belief, especially after my meeting with the FBI, is that Walter Timmerman was murdered because of something having to do with his work. It was therefore, as Tom Hagen would say, business and not personal. But someone who could afford Jimmy Childs was not someone likely to fear they would be suspected of the murder. They were doing it from a distance, and that doesn’t seem to fit with an elaborate frame-up.
“Whoever hired Jimmy Childs had to know a lot about Walter Timmerman’s life, not just his work,” I say. “For instance, he had to know all about Steven, about his knowledge of explosives, about his being written out of the will.”
“If you have the resources to pay Childs half a million dollars, then you have ways of finding out those things,” Laurie points out.
I nod. “Maybe. But I’ve been thinking of some Middle Eastern jillionaire. Don’t forget, twenty million dollars was wired to Timmerman a few weeks before he died. Yet this feels more intimate than that.”
“Charles Robinson has that kind of money, and he knows so much about Timmerman’s life that Steven called him Uncle Charlie,” Kevin says. “And the FBI is interested in him.”
I nod. “But we’re not close to connecting the dots.”
Nothing Sam and Kevin have come up with on Robinson has moved our case forward. He originally earned his fortune as an energy trader, sort of a one-man Enron. His reputation has long been as sort of a shady operator, but if the authorities were ever close to catching him at anything, we can find no evidence of it.
He made worldwide contacts that enabled him to be a facilitator of many things, most of them energy- related. The trading of energy across countries obviously involved huge fortunes, and Robinson has usually put himself in position to get a piece of it.
In recent years he has entered other businesses as well, everything from magazines to a retail clothing chain. But these seem to be secondary to his real business, and showing dogs and racing horses are just hobbies for him.
Kevin and I spend the rest of the evening preparing for tomorrow’s witnesses. These are the toughest days in a case like this. One witness after another will lay a solid foundation of apparent proof that Steven is guilty. We’ll put a few dents in it, but if we’re going to win, it’s going to be on the strength of our own case in chief.
I only wish we had a case in chief.
Richard’s first witness today is Captain John Antonaccio, the chief of ordnance at Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina. Antonaccio is the person under whom Steven trained in explosives when he was in the service.
Richard takes Antonaccio through his qualifications as an explosives expert. I offer to stipulate as to his expertise, but Richard asks Hatchet to let him detail it for the jury, and Hatchet reluctantly agrees.
To hear Antonaccio tell it, pretty much the only bomb in the last twenty years that he was not responsible for was
Next Richard introduces a map of the Timmerman property, and a diagram of the house itself. He gets Antonaccio to show where the bomb went off, near the center of the house, and Antonaccio says that this is where an expert would have planted it, so as to cause maximum damage.
The demonstration is jarring to me, because it reminds me of something that I missed. I will not be able to bring it up on my cross-examination, because I haven’t learned enough about it to risk asking a question I don’t
