country, New York, Chicago, L.A., San Francisco… eleven calls to Washington, D.C., and fourteen to Vegas. He made four calls to Camby’s phone as well, including an hour before Camby died. And get this; he called Danny Butler three times.”
“But we still can’t identify him?”
“No chance; not from his phone records.”
“What about Camby’s motel room phone?”
“No calls went out; there’s no way to know if any came in.”
It’s a sign of how grim our situation is that this is our most promising lead. Someone who followed me, and who was subsequently murdered, called a cell phone. We now have the records of numbers called by that second cell phone.
Big deal.
“I’m trying to attach names to the numbers that he called,” Sam says. “It may take a day or so.”
“Thanks, Sam. You’re doing a great job.”
He leaves, and I tell Laurie that I want to go with her today. She’s been interviewing family and friends of the victims that Sam has been able to find. It’s obviously unpleasant, and has so far yielded no significant information. I basically want to sit in on today’s sessions because I have nothing else to do.
Our first stop is a small garden apartment on Garfield Avenue in Elmwood Park. It starts to snow as we pull up, not a blizzard but enough that it will stick if it continues like this. I love it when it snows, an emotional remnant of childhood days when snow meant the possibility of school being canceled.
When we get out of the car, I hear a voice calling out, “Ms. Collins! Ms. Collins!”
The door to one of the garden apartments is open, and an elderly woman is standing there, frantically motioning us in. We head for the door, and I realize that she had opened the door and come out because of the weather, not wanting us to stay out in the elements a moment more than necessary.
When we get there, she ushers us in, muttering about how terrible the weather is. Before we even have a chance to introduce ourselves, we have cups of hot tea in our hands. I don’t even like tea, but I drink it gratefully.
Laurie finally introduces me to Mrs. Martha Leavitt, who is probably pushing eighty. She lost her daughter, son- in-law, and grandson in the fire. I’m not sure how anyone gets through that, but she seems vibrant and alert, and has a warmth about her that makes her immediately likable.
“I’m sorry to have to talk to you about this,” I say. “I’m sure you’d rather think about anything else.”
She smiles sadly. “I think about it all day, every day, Mr. Carpenter. I even talk about it to myself, out loud. The only difference now is you’re here to listen to me.”
She goes on to talk about the family members that she lost, showing us pictures and telling stories that are painful to listen to, and absolutely of no use to our case. The truth is that she knows nothing at all about the fire that wasn’t in the papers.
Laurie says, “Mrs. Leavitt, one of the things we are trying to do is understand why that house was chosen by the arsonist. We believe that someone in that house was the target, but we don’t know who that might be.”
She seems surprised by this. “Oh my, I never thought about it in those terms.” She is silent for a few moments. “I guess it didn’t really matter; they were gone, and they weren’t coming back, no matter the reason.”
“Do you know of anyone who might have had a reason to hurt your family? Did any of them have any enemies?”
“Oh, no, that’s just not possible. Not possible at all.”
We ask her a bunch of questions to gently probe the matter, but there is no way she could ever entertain the thought that the people that she loved could have been the targets of such evil.
Our next stop is Morlot Avenue in Fair Lawn, where Jesse Briggs has agreed to meet us at a coffee shop. Laurie says that when she told him on the phone who we were representing, he was reluctant to meet at all. He finally consented to the coffee shop, and Laurie felt it was because he didn’t want people who were on Noah Galloway’s side in his house.
Briggs is in his early fifties, but looks older because his hair is completely white. He makes an effort to be polite to us, but it’s clear that he resents the intrusion.
“All this time nobody talks to me about this, and now twice this month. Where’s everyone been for the last six years?”
“Who else spoke to you?” I ask.
“A policeman.”
I’m surprised and annoyed to hear this. I’ve read the discovery documents cover to cover a few times, and there was no mention of Mr. Briggs being interviewed recently, or at all, for that matter. I make a mental note to torture Dylan for holding out on me.
Briggs lost his daughter, Natasha, and his infant grandson. He is clearly still embittered about it, as I would certainly be. If something like that happened to me, I would try and burn down Earth.
“What about your daughter’s husband?” I ask. “He wasn’t there?”
“She didn’t have a husband.”
“Was the baby’s father there?”
“Natasha never told me who the father was. But you can be sure he wasn’t there. If I knew who he was I’d have killed him myself.”
A few tears start to slip down his face, and he grabs a napkin from the dispenser on the table, quickly wiping them away.
“But it wasn’t the father’s fault that they died,” he says, softly. “It was mine. I’m the one who told her to move back here. I’m the one who said I would take care of her and my grandson.”
“It wasn’t your fault either, Mr. Briggs. It was the fault of the piece of garbage who set the fire.”
“The man you’re trying to let walk free,” he says.
“I don’t believe that to be the case, sir. I truly don’t.”
He looks at me for a few moments, then, “I’ve got cancer, Mr. Carpenter. It’s spread to places I didn’t even know I had. The doctors said I had about six months, and they said that eight months ago. The only thing I’ve wanted for the last six years was for them to catch and put away the man that did this. So I hope you’re wrong.”
Laurie and I tell him that we understand, that we wish him well, and that we appreciate his talking to us. Then we pay the check, and leave.
This was a miserable way to spend a day.
The cell phone call list from our mystery man is surprising, to say the least.
There are seven prominent businessmen in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco; two judges, in Delaware and Missouri; six members of Congress; officers of various governmental agencies including the SEC and FDA; a Washington, D.C., political consultant; a customs officer in Galveston, Texas; as well as a number of other people whose names aren’t so easily recognizable.
There are also a few numbers that Sam hasn’t been able to track down yet, which causes him to view them with great suspicion. The only way that they could be so hard to identify is if they took great pains to make it so, and Sam feels that the reasons for doing that must be nefarious.
He may well be right.
Sam presents this information to Laurie and me in my office, and while it is certainly intriguing, it is far from clear how we should proceed.
“Let’s confront these people, one at a time, and shake them down,” Sam says. “We can split the names up three ways.”
Laurie shakes her head. “Won’t work. We don’t even have an approach to use.”
“What do you mean?” Sam asks.
I know exactly what Laurie is saying, so I take over from here. “It does us no good to go to someone on that list, and tell them they got a phone call from someone we can’t identify, and then ask them what it was about. Even if they know what we’re talking about, they’ll laugh at us.”
We kick it around a while longer, and then Laurie says, “We need to make them think we know more than we do. If there’s any chance at all to get them to talk to us, it would be because they are afraid not to. Of course, the problem is that we’re not really in a position to instill fear in anyone.”
