that I’m hurt, but I motion for them to go in. Corvallis then comes running to me with two agents and Laurie, and I gasp what has happened.
Laurie stays with me as everyone else goes inside. I’m still on the ground, gasping, trying to keep the remainder of my last twelve meals down. It is not my finest moment, but right now I can’t worry about that. I just have to get control and figure out how not to be haunted the rest of my life by what I’ve just seen.
Within fifteen minutes, there are so many vehicles at the Robinson house you’d think the Yankees were playing the Red Sox in the backyard. I’m sure every FBI agent in the tristate area has been summoned, and I can see a bunch of people with forensics equipment.
Corvallis comes out and greets one of the arriving men as “Doctor,” and he brings him into the house. If this guy can do anything for Robinson, I am going to make him my personal physician for life.
Crime scenes take forever, and as the closest thing to a witness, I know that I am going to have to wait around to be questioned. Two hours go by, during which Laurie and I stroll around the grounds. I tell her in detail what I saw, and the act of walking in the fresh air and being with her makes me feel considerably better.
Finally, Corvallis comes over to talk to me. “We need a statement,” he says.
I just nod my understanding.
“You okay?” he asks, showing more concern than I expected. “It is pretty rough in there.”
“What happened to him?” I ask.
“Let’s do the statement first, okay?”
“Okay.” This is the correct procedure; if he were to tell me anything that they learned, it could be viewed as prejudicing my statement.
I basically have little to say about the actual scene; all I did was walk in and discover the body. Everyone who followed saw exactly the same thing as I did, and I’m sure by now it has been memorialized by hundreds of pictures. But I do insist on including in the statement the reason that I was there in the first place; it will serve me well if I can ever get evidence of all this into the trial.
The statement is verbal and taped, and I promise to sign a transcript of it when they have it ready. I request that I see it before court tomorrow, and Corvallis says that will not be a problem. Then I renew my question to Corvallis. “What happened to Robinson?”
“It looks like iridium.”
That’s a little cryptic for me, so I ask him to elaborate.
“It’s a poison, a favorite in international circles. The KGB had a particular preference for it, but others have used it as well. You don’t want to know the details of what it does; you’ve gotten a firsthand look.”
“How long was he dead?”
“We don’t have a firm time on that yet. He was eating a meal, I assume the poison was in the food. The amount that would fit on the head of a pin would kill someone in forty-five seconds.”
“Not a pleasant forty-five seconds,” I say.
“Yeah. You guys okay getting home?” he says.
“Yes. You know I’m going to try to use all this at trial.”
He smiles. “And the relevance?” He is pointing out that I’m going to have a tough time connecting Robinson’s death to Steven’s trial in a way to get Hatchet to admit it.
“I’m working on it, but it’ll come in.”
“We may be on different pages on that,” he says, and then walks off.
He’s probably right, but I’d know better if I knew what the hell page I was on.
ON THE WAY HOME I call Kevin and ask him to come over. That way, he, Laurie, and I can discuss at length the impact of tonight’s events on our case, and the strategy we should employ to make the most of it.
The potential benefits are obvious. Walter Timmerman’s work involved him with very rough people, so rough that the person he was in a form of partnership with was poisoned to death. This couldn’t help but create the credible thought in a jury’s mind that the perpetrator might have killed Walter as well.
Diana’s death is more problematic, in that we have no evidence she was involved with Walter’s work. However, the manner in which she died helps us. It also blew up Walter’s lab, and could easily have killed Waggy, both of which fit into our theory.
Unfortunately, while this all makes sense to us, it is unlikely to impress the jury, because the jury is very unlikely to ever hear about it. We have no real way to connect Robinson to Walter’s DNA work except our theory. We can’t even factually prove that Walter was working in the weeks before his death, no less on something momentous.
We are going to have to try to get Corvallis to testify. He’ll refuse; he already as much as said so tonight. But Hatchet can compel his testimony, albeit with assurances that he does not have to reveal classified, national security information. It’s by no means definite that we can get Hatchet to go along, since we have little to advance as an offer of proof.
But we’ll certainly try, and Kevin goes off to prepare a legal brief to present. Kevin is far better at this aspect of the law than I am, which is damning him with faint praise. The truth is, he’s pretty much the best at it of anyone I’ve ever been around.
Among the things about this that bother me, and one that has bothered me from the beginning, is why such a great effort was made to frame Steven. These were murders that seem to have been committed from a distance by powerful entities, and it’s hard to picture them as having been solved. For example, I would strongly doubt that an arrest will be made in the Robinson murder; nor do I believe that anyone will be framed for it. Why pick on Steven?
I also can’t quite pin down Robinson’s role in all this. It seems logical that he was Timmerman’s way to connect to the type of people who would pay huge dollars for the right to use the synthetic DNA, probably to make biofuels. But Robinson would have made a fortune as well, so it seems unlikely he would have killed Walter.
More to the point, why would anybody have murdered Walter? If his work was the golden goose, why kill it? The only thing that comes to mind is an entity that was threatened by that work, perhaps someone who did not want the energy status quo threatened. But we are light-years away from making that connection in the real world, and the trial is winding down.
I call Richard and inform him of what happened at Robinson’s house, and of my intention to try to get Corvallis to testify. The call is a courtesy similar to those he’s extended to me in the past, but it in no way has a negative impact on our position. If I sprang the issue on him in court, he would just ask for a delay to prepare a response, and Hatchet would undoubtedly give it to him.
“Have you decided what to do about Waggy?” Kevin asks.
“Nothing for the time being,” I say. “With Robinson gone the pressure is off, but if Waggy ‘shows up’ again, Hatchet could get on my back.”
Once Kevin leaves I sit down in the den and do what I frequently do during a trial. I take the discovery documents and reread them. There are often things that I find that I’ve missed in previous readings, but that’s not the main reason I do it. It keeps my mind alert to the details, so that if something comes up during court, I can remember it instantly and react.
I usually do it in segments; each night I’ll read everything related to one particular area of evidence. Tonight I pore through everything about the night of Walter Timmerman’s murder, including the forensics on the scene, the phone call Walter made to Steven, the location of Steven’s car, et cetera.
Almost every time I do this I am bothered by the sensation that I am missing something, but in fact I rarely am. Tonight I have the same feeling, though the information is fairly dry and straightforward.
The Mets are playing the Dodgers on the West Coast tonight, and I turn on the game while I continue to read. The next thing I know Laurie is waking me, and a glance at the TV shows it to be the eighth inning. I slept through the first seven, and since fourteen runs have been scored, those seven innings couldn’t have been very quickly played. Unfortunately, the Dodgers scored eleven of the runs.
Laurie leads me into the bedroom, and within five minutes we’re both back asleep. She hasn’t even decided what to do, and already we’re an old married couple.
I get to court early and bring Steven up to date on everything that has transpired. Since he doesn’t have
