Case of Lies

same reason. It’s about the Hanna case, it has to be.”

“What does your client want to do? He’s the girl’s uncle, right?”

“I don’t know what my client wants to do.”

“You haven’t-”

“He was arrested for his third DUI on the road last night, after the funeral. He had gone to a bar and got drunk. He’s in the Placerville jail. He’s an alcoholic. He’s going to have a public defender on that charge, and in the meantime he doesn’t call me and I’m not going to call him. Because he hasn’t got the guts to fight.”

“Better hurry up with your case, then.”

“What about your case?” Nina said. “What forensic evidence has turned up in Chelsi’s death? Even on a drive-by, somebody must have seen something.”

“We’re working on it.”

“No sign of the gun?”

“All we have are the two bullets,” Cheney said. “Because the killer couldn’t go in and dig them out of that poor little girl’s body. And they’re valuable bullets. Preliminary tests on them show they are not from the same gun that killed Sarah Hanna.”

“It has to be the same person!”

“We’ll ask him why he needed two guns, when we find him,” Cheney said. “Maybe he threw away the gun he used to kill Sarah Hanna two years ago, and bought another one recently. We’ll look into that.”

Sandy said, “Sorry to interrupt. Your eight o’clock is here. And your eight-thirty is, too.”

“I’ll be right out.”

“Good luck,” Cheney said, nodding a couple of times and then hauling himself up. “Keep in touch.”

Lunch hour. Nina closeted herself in the conference room with the computer and the law books. How could she force the witnesses to come to California to testify at a trial?

She started with Out-of-State Witnesses, Civil Subpoenas.

The Code of Civil Procedure was clear. Witnesses in a civil case can’t be subpoenaed to appear at a trial from outside the jurisdiction.

Material Witnesses. Nothing in the books that would help anyone but the police, and the police weren’t ready to use that power yet.

Flight from Jurisdiction. Those precedents only applied to defendants. Apparently witnesses can flee as far as they want. No problem, she thought angrily, just split and leave all that chaos behind.

She could go take their depositions in their states, but it would require a court commission. And that wouldn’t bring them to California for trial.

If only the witnesses were defendants. She leaned back, put her arms behind her head, thought of the Ace High Lodge, a defendant because of the long reach of the legal concept of negligence.

Negligence means you owe somebody a duty of care, even if it only amounts to a duty to act like a reasonable person around them. Negligence means that your act or omission results in unintended harm to that somebody. In the case of Ace High, the creative interpretation of negligence said you had a duty to keep your premises secure, and if you omitted to do that, and somebody got hurt, you were negligent.

What if the witnesses had been negligent in some sense? No, they had been victims. But what if-

Now she was thinking furiously, flipping through Witkin and looking for-

Yes. A robbery. The victim, defending himself. The assailant, shooting an innocent bystander during the struggle. What if the victim used unnecessary force on the assailant, or did something so rash in the course of self-defense that the victim could legally be said to have acted negligently when a bystander got hurt?

There were California cases, rare. A case in which the victim wrested the gun from the assailant and accidentally shot a bystander. That hadn’t happened here.

Though how did she know it hadn’t happened here? She went into her office, came back with her copy of the tape of Silke and Raj, and played it.

Wakefield had rushed the guy. Silke said so. There were shots, and Silke and Raj ran. The gun was missing, so who would know who actually shot Sarah Hanna?

“Could have been Wakefield,” she thought aloud. She listened to the tape again. Even if Wakefield hadn’t shot Sarah Hanna himself, had he been negligent in rushing an assailant with a gun?

You could allege that he was negligent. You could allege a lot of things, and at this stage of Dave Hanna’s decrepit case, at this time when a beautiful young woman had been killed for some obscure gratification, you might as well get creative.

What about Silke and Raj? How could she allege that they were negligent, too? That was tougher-they hadn’t done anything but get robbed, and run.

On the other hand, you can allege anything. Let the other side come in and defend, in a California court.

I’m going to force the issue, she thought, bring them back. Excitement lodged next to the sorrow and rage in her heart. Force the law to behave the way she needed it to behave. Stretch the negligence idea like the biggest piece of chewing gum ever, all the way to Boston and Washington State. Bring the kids back kicking and screaming, and find the shooter through them.

Sandy knocked.

“Coming.”

“Find anything?” she asked as Nina passed her.

“Could you find an order shortening time request, and model points and authorities? I’ll give you some facts and cases and you plug it in. I need to get it to Flaherty today for signing. And call Betty Jo Puckett. Say I’ll meet her at the courthouse at four-thirty. Tell her it’s an emergency motion relating to the witnesses in the Hanna case.”

“Can’t it wait until tomorrow?”

“What else do I have today?”

“Interrogatories to answer. Demurrer to a complaint. Four big phone messages.”

“How many of those can wait until morning?”

Sandy tugged at her lower lip and said, “If you don’t make two of those phone calls, you’re going to lose two cases.”

“It’s a deal. I’ll make those calls.” She went to her desk, sat down, made the calls and made them stick, and felt a hot rush of an emotion so foreign to her that at first she couldn’t give it a name.

Ah. Vengefulness!

So this was what it felt like to be vengeful. Hard, fevered, superhumanly focused, like the skull is grinning inside the head, anticipating what it’s about to do… how interesting that personal fear had no place.

It’s a matter of honor, and behind that is the fact of humiliation. You don’t kill a human being in front of me and not deal with me, you son of a bitch, she told the shooter in her mind.

Sandy buzzed. “Okay, I have the Petition for Order Shortening Time, and I have a draft order here, and I have model points and authorities. But what’s the motion going to be? I need a title.”

“It’s a Motion to Amend the Complaint,” Nina said. “I’m going to add three new defendants after Shooter Doe I.”

There was a pause while Sandy digested this.

“And pull out three subpoenas for deposing defendants. I’m going to ask Flaherty to personally sign them.”

Nina opened the file and looked at the complaint in the case of Hanna v. Ace High Lodge and Does I-X. Doe I would be changed to the shooter’s name, when they found the shooter. She considered once more what she was about to do, suing three people who were going to be rather perturbed about it. And they had Braun and Branson to object.

So what? They had dodged involvement too long. They had no right to complain that she was getting dodgy, too.

She wrote on her legal pad, “Plaintiff David Hanna hereby substitutes for John Does II, III, and IV in the complaint, the following-named defendants.”

“Silke Kilmer.” A Jane Doe, actually.

“Sumaraj Das.”

“Elliott Wakefield.”

She looked out her window, at the black and lowering sky. November now ruled in the mountains, harsh and cold.

They were in for it.

19

THE LEGAL SYSTEM HAD ALWAYS VEERED toward the person with the strongest conviction. If a lawyer believed in a case very strongly, the usual obstacles fell away. That made it a good system, so long as the lawyer’s purpose was honorable, and that quality of honor would shine through, or it wouldn’t. Nina’s conviction overrode both Betty Jo and Judge Flaherty.

“All we want is out,” Betty Jo told the judge. “We are willing to pay the price. We are bystanders as much as the lady who was shot. Your Honor, please, just approve our settlement agreement and let Ms. Reilly pursue the real malfeasors.”

Great word, malfeasors. Nina wouldn’t have thought Betty Jo was up to a word like that.

Flaherty was about fifty. Nina knew that he worried about his heart, and how long he could continue dealing with all the stressful bullshit he was exposed to all day, every day. He didn’t like dodgy legal moves. He flipped through the file, finding no solutions there, then looked out the window, where rain fell. The enclosed paneled courtroom felt cozy after the drive through the dark afternoon.

“This ought to be a criminal matter,” he told Nina. “This court, and you and Ms. Puckett, shouldn’t be the ones trying to pursue this.”

“But here we are, Your Honor.”

“Two murders,” Flaherty said, shaking his head. “A civil case. Wrongful-death cases aren’t meant for this sort of thing. A senior citizen develops septicemia in her nursing home from bad care, and dies. That’s a wrongful-death case.”

“But here we are.”

“I don’t understand why the police aren’t taking a more active role.”

“Me neither,” Nina said. “But they aren’t.”

“Maybe I should at least let the motel out.”

“Maybe the motel’s involved.”

“You haven’t presented any facts in that regard,” Betty Jo protested.

“But two people are dead. The plaintiff needs, and the plaintiff deserves, every latitude the law permits. Let this case proceed, Your Honor. Let the motel remain as defendant. Allow me to bring the witnesses back to California to be deposed.”