We exchange pleasantries, including pictures of our dogs. Cindy has a two-year-old golden named Sierra that I rescued and gave to her. She thinks Sierra is the best dog in North America, an impossibility unless Tara and New Jersey have relocated below the equator without my knowing it. But I tolerate this nonsense because I’m here on a mission.
“Thanks for seeing me on such short notice,” I say.
She frowns. “Yeah, right. You reeled me in like a fish.”
I called Cindy yesterday and left a message saying that I needed to talk to her about Tommy Lassiter. I knew she wouldn’t be able to resist that, and I further knew that she’d learn everything about Lassiter that she could before we met.
“So what do you know about Lassiter?” I ask.
She smiles the smile of someone barely tolerating an idiot. “To save time, I decided on the rules for this conversation on the way over here,” she says. “Here’s how it’s going to work. You tell me why you’re asking and what you already know, and then I’ll decide if I’ll say anything or just leave you with the check.”
I grin. “Sounds fair to me,” I say, and lay out the particulars of Daniel’s case and what I know about Lassiter’s involvement in it. She listens intently and doesn’t ask any questions until I’ve finished.
“How do you know Lassiter is involved?”
“Marcus got one of the prisoners involved in Randy’s murder to talk.”
She frowns, mainly because she knows Marcus. “Marcus reasoned with him?” she asks.
“Yes. He can be very reasonable when he wants to be. I believe it’s your turn to speak.”
She considers this for a moment, then nods. “Tommy Lassiter is an extraordinarily talented and cold-blooded murderer. He is also a maniac. The Bureau wants him very badly.”
“Does the Bureau have any information connecting him to my case?”
She shakes her head. “Not that I’m aware of.”
“There are a lot of murderers in this country; what makes him special enough to be on your radar?”
She hesitates before answering, as if deciding whether or not she should confide in me. I’m sure she thought this out before coming here, so it must be significant enough that she’s having second thoughts. “Because he’s added a new wrinkle to the process. His fee is twice as high as anyone else’s because he does more than just murder.”
“How’s that?” I ask.
She looks at me intently. “This is just between you and me. That’s it. Agreed?”
I nod. “I’ll tell only Laurie and Kevin.”
She continues, since she knows they can be trusted. “He also provides a guilty party, to throw suspicion away from himself and the people who hire him. He frames someone; it’s part of his full-service operation. And he’s good at it.”
This piece of news hits me right between the eyes. For the first time I truly believe, I truly know, that Daniel is innocent of these murders. It is simultaneously a huge weight lifted from my shoulders and an incredible pressure added to those same shoulders. It is now far more important that I get him off.
“Will you testify to this?” I ask.
She laughs a short laugh. “Are you out of your mind? Of course not.”
“An innocent man is on trial for his life.”
“Maybe, or maybe Lassiter had nothing to do with it. And with no other evidence, you couldn’t even get my testimony admitted if I were willing to give it, which I’m not.”
“Let me worry about getting it admitted,” I say.
“Andy, think this through. If word of this got out, every murderer in every prison in the country would be filing appeals saying that Lassiter was the real murderer and that he planted all the conclusive evidence their prosecutors used.”
I understand her point, and I don’t try to refute it, at least for now. The fact is that her testimony would not be admissible at this stage anyhow. I would first need to independently tie Lassiter into Daniel’s case, and neither Marcus’s informant nor Dominic Petrone is about to raise his right hand and tell it to the jury.
She adds, “Be careful with this, Andy. Lassiter is more than a tad insane.”
I nod, change the subject, and we have a thoroughly pleasant dinner, absent talk of serial killers and severed hands. She waits until we’re having coffee to smile and make her announcement. “Todd and I are getting married.”
“Congratulations. Who the hell is Todd?”
“I told you about him. He’s a Boston cop. A captain.”
“How long have you known him?”
“Three months,” she says. “But I would have said yes after three weeks. When you know, you know.”
I nod, silently wondering why, if Todd and Cindy and I all seem to “know,” Laurie remains in the dark.
“Things still well with you and Laurie?” Cindy asks.
She seems to have read my mind, so I get a little defensive. “Yes, well . . . very well . . . totally well . . .”
She smiles. “Sounds like you’ve reached new levels of wellness.”
“We have.”
“So when are you getting married?” she asks.
“Married? Me? No, thank you. I’m a free spirit . . . an eagle. No woman can clip my wings. I’ve got women all over the world. Paterson, Passaic, Trenton . . . you name it.”
“So Laurie doesn’t want to get married?”
I shrug. “Not so far.”
On the flight home I try to figure out what I’ve learned and what I still have to learn. I now completely believe that Tommy Lassiter killed Linda Padilla, though demonstrating that to a jury is very much another matter. What I don’t know is who, if anyone, hired him, or why he needed to kill three other women in the process.
Also puzzling to me is why he chose Daniel to frame. There are much less visible people, with far fewer resources, that he could have more easily pinned it on. He chose Daniel in such a way that the entire series of murders played out as a public spectacle, yet Lassiter’s previous history was always to lurk in the shadows.
He could have planted the incriminating evidence on virtually anyone, yet he chose Daniel. Daniel must have made himself an inviting target, or perhaps he had a previous connection to Lassiter that he hasn’t shared with me.
It’s time to talk to my client.
• • • • •
“HE TOLD ME HE KILLED my wife.” Daniel says this after considerable prodding, actually berating, on my part. He says it after I told him that he was going to lose this case unless I knew all the facts, every single one of them. And he says it with a shaky voice, the emotion of that night and the night his wife died coming back to him in torrents.