“No.”

  “No one from Standout?”

  “I haven’t spoken to anyone over there since I was fired. Seven-point-three million they had to cough up because they wouldn’t listen to me. Clowns.”

  “What about Minnesota River State Bank?”

  “I’ve never had any dealings with the people over there.”

  “Have you ever met anyone from the Guernsey family?”

  “No. Why would I? It’s not like we travel—no, wait. I did meet … What was her name? The daughter?”

  I took a chance.

  “Melissa?” I said.

  “Yes. At the Xcel Energy Center last … I want to say February, a full month before I was fired. I have a friend who has season tickets to watch the Minnesota Wild play hockey. He took me to a game. We were wandering the concourse in between periods, and we met a friend of his who was dating Melissa, at least she was at the game with him, and I was introduced. But the conversation, we didn’t talk about Standout or the bank or anything like that. It was all about whether or not the Wild had a chance to make the playoffs this year, and it only lasted five minutes.”

  “She wasn’t the girl at the jazz festival?”

  “Oh, no. Melissa was older and not very pretty. The girl, though, was young and pretty but trying hard not to be pretty, you know?”

  Siegle didn’t have much more to say that was interesting after that, so I gave him my card and asked him to contact me should anyone else come knocking on his door to ask about the memo.

  “Is someone going to knock on my door?” Siegle asked.

  “You never know.”

  * * *

  My Camry was parked on the street. I climbed into it and wrote a few notes in fractured shorthand in a hardcover notebook I always carried that I would later transcribe onto my computer. Clients love detailed reports. Especially lawyers. Freddie keeps telling me to use a smartphone or tablet and save myself the extra work, yet I continue to resist. Not because I’m some kind of Luddite afraid of computers, but rather because I never learned to type with my thumbs.

  After I finished, I drove off. I covered at least four miles before I realized I was being followed. It caused me to do something I disliked immensely. I used my cell phone while I was driving.

  Freddie answered with the words “My man.”

  “Where are you?” I asked.

  ‘The office. I just served a couple of subpoenas, why?”

  “I’m being tailed.”

  “That a fact? You need some backup?”

  “I don’t think so, but listen.” I recited the license plate number of the car behind me. “Think you can get an ID in the next couple of minutes?”

  “Whatshisname, Franklin in the MPD’s gang unit, he’s always up for a quick twenty. I’ll get back t’ ya.”

  I didn’t want to lead the tail to my next appointment. Yet neither did I want him to know he had been made, so I deliberately steered him into the traffic slowdown that always occurred around the I-94–Highway 280 interchange at about that time of day. It bought enough time for Freddie to call back.

  “You’re not going to believe it,” he said.

  “I believe everything you tell me.”

  “Walter O’Neill.”

  “No way.”

  “I knew you wouldn’t believe it. Sure you don’t need backup? Man’s an ex-cop.”

  “Most of us are.”

  “Most of us don’t get retired because we’re loose with our hands.”

  “That’s true. I’m guessing O’Neill picked me up when I was interviewing Clinton Siegle.”

  “Who’s Clinton Siegle?”

  “I’ll tell you all about it later. In the meantime, where’s Sara?”

  “Probably in her man cave. Why?”

  “Ask her to come in first chance she gets and sweep the place for bugs.”

  “Our place?” Freddie said.

  “Just in case someone’s listening in. We’ve been on the case for less than a day and all of a sudden we’re being followed? Also, when I say we, it wouldn’t hurt for you to watch your back, either.”

  “Who do you think hired O’Neill? The hacker? Agents of NIMN?”

  “A little closer to home, I think.”

  “Our clients? Man, you’d think they didn’t trust us.”

  “Just a guess.”

  “I have a thought,” Freddie said.

  “Oh? Is it lonely in there?”

  “You’ve been carrying that line with you all day, haven’t you?”

  “What thought?” I said.

  “Ask O’Neill.”

  * * *

  There was an empty space directly in front of my apartment building, a rare occurrence. I parked there, exited the Camry, and walked up the concrete steps to the front door. O’Neill drove past me. I knew without looking that he would flip a U-turn at the corner and come back up the other side of the street.

  I entered the apartment building, negotiated the first-floor corridor, and went out the back into the small parking lot that opened onto an asphalt alley. I followed the alley to its end. Along the way, my hand moved to the spot where I would have been carrying my gun if I had thought to bring it. Most private investigators rarely carry, if ever, the idea being that you shouldn’t arm yourself unless, one, you’re sure you might need a gun and, two, that you’re completely and absolutely sure you’re willing to use it. Freddie and I have both squeezed the trigger. So has O’Neill. It did not make us virtuous. It did not make us superior to our colleagues. On the contrary.

  I circled the block. O’Neill had parked on the far side of the street about eight car lengths down, with a clear view of both my Camry and the front door of the apartment building. I came up on his blind side, moving carefully. The worst cops are the ones who choose anger as the first response to a bad situation, and Walter had been their poster child. I doubted that getting bounced from the Minneapolis Police Department a few years ago improved his disposition.

  Among the things I carried was a tactical penlight with a pointed end. I pressed the point hard against O’Neill’s passenger-side window, and the safety glass shattered into a thousand shards. Most of them fell inside the car. O’Neill was startled. His head actually hit the roof.

  “Hi, Walter,” I said.

  “Sonuvabitch.” He massaged the top of his skull. “Trying to be fucking dramatic, are you?”

  “I wanted to announce my presence with authority.”

  “You gonna pay to replace my window?”

  “I think you could pass it off as a legitimate business expense. Why don’t you call your client and ask him?”

  “Client? What client?”

  “Let me guess. You weren’t following me.”

  “I was just in the neighborhood and decided to stop by and say hello. I haven’t been invited here for a long time.”

  “You’ve never been invited here.”

  I noticed O’Neill was careful with his hands, letting them rest on top of his steering wheel while we spoke. He was trying hard not to escalate the situation, which seemed unlike him.

  “Who are you working for, Walter?” I asked.

  “I can’t say.”

  “Can’t or won’t.”

  “You know the rules, Taylor. No license holder shall divulge to anyone other than the employer, or as the employer may direct, except as required by law, any information—”

  “Really, Walter? You’re quoting the statutes to me?” I waved the penlight at him. “Why don’t you step outside the car?”

  “You want to go, Taylor? With me? Whaddya think that’s gonna get you? Besides your ass kicked? Even if you got lucky, you and I both know you won’t do much more than make me uncomfortable for a few days. You certainly won’t kill me, so I have no incentive to talk.”

  “I won’t, but Freddie has a volatile personality.”

  “Frederick’s not here.”

  “I called him. He’s on his way.”

  “Gonna have your boy do your dirty work? That sounds like you.”

  I tried to open his car door to get at him, only it was locked.

  “I don’t have time for this shit,” O’Neill said. He started his car.

  “Don’t let me catch you again, Walter,” I said.

  “You won’t.”

  The way he smirked, though, gave me the impression that instead of quitting the job, he intended to be more careful in the future.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I didn’t go inside my apartment. The only reason I had stopped there in the first place was because I knew O’Neill already had the address. Instead, I drove to a sandwich shop on Grand Avenue and had a quick bite. Afterward, I carefully maneuvered the Camry into downtown St. Paul. John Kaushal had agreed to meet with me when I called earlier, but only after hours. To guarantee I wasn’t being followed, I parked at a meter near Mears Park and walked down streets and through buildings for six blocks until I reached his offices near the Ramsey County Courthouse.

  The sign read ASSOCIATES & KAUSHAL, ATTORNEYS AT LAW. The door next to it was unlocked, but there was no receptionist at the desk. I paused for a few beats and listened. I heard no noise whatsoever. I called Kaushal’s name. A moment later he appeared. His coat and tie had been removed, and his sleeves were rolled up. He was carrying a glass filed with a dusky-colored liquid.

  “Taylor,” he said. “Good of you to come.”

  Kaushal slipped past me and locked the door. He pointed his glass more or less at the corridor behind the receptionist’s desk.

  “Shall we?” he said.

  I followed him to his office at the far end of the corridor. All the offices we passed were empty, the lights off.

  “My people don’t usually keep such punctual hours,” Kaushal said, “but I told them it was a beautiful day and they should go out and enjoy what was left of it. I wanted us to be alone. None of them know what I did.”

  We stepped inside his office. He didn’t guide me to his desk but pointed toward a small sofa facing a low glass table in the corner. There was a bottle of Knob Creek Smoked Maple Bourbon and an empty glass on top of the table. I sat.

  “Have a drink with me?” Kaushal said.

  “I’m good.”

  “No, Taylor, you’re going to want to have a drink. Trust me.”

  He poured an inch and a half into the glass and slid it toward me. He added more liquor to his own glass and sat in the chair across from me. He took a long sip while I watched.

  “I’m going to tell you a story,” Kaushal said. “A true story. Most attorneys in the country probably know it, or at least they know one like it. I was told this story when I was in law school. It was presented as a central example in our development and understanding of what it means to be a lawyer. When I finish, I’ll tell you why it’s important. All right?”

  “Of course.”

  Kaushal drank more bourbon.

  “To begin at the beginning,” he said, “a man named Robert Garrow assaulted a group of campers in the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York and tied them all to trees. Three of the campers escaped, but the fourth, an eighteen-year-old boy named Philip Domblewski, was killed. This was in the summer of 1973. Garrow was finally arrested after a massive eleven-day manhunt and charged with murder. The court appointed a lawyer named Frank Armani to defend him. Armani turned to a second attorney, Francis Belge, for help.

  “Garrow was clearly guilty; the evidence was unassailable. It was also clear that he was one deeply disturbed individual. Together, Armani and Belge sought to defend him according to the insanity statutes, with the hope that he’d be sentenced to a mental institution instead of prison. Unfortunately, in the course of debriefing by his lawyers, Garrow not only confessed that he killed Domblewski, he also admitted to murdering a second camper, abducting, raping, and murdering the camper’s female companion, and then abducting, raping, and murdering a sixteen-year-old girl. Garrow even told the lawyers where he dumped the bodies of his female victims. The lawyers went to the locations Garrow had identified and confirmed that he was telling the truth.

  “Armani and Belge told nobody about their client’s confession, although the lawyers did approach the prosecutor in secret and said that if a deal could be made that would put Garrow in a mental institution for life, they might be able to help him with a couple of high-profile missing persons cases. The prosecutor rejected the deal out of hand. Eventually the bodies of the women were discovered. Even then the lawyers kept Garrow’s secret.

  “It was during his trial about a year later that Garrow admitted on the witness stand to everything—killing Domblewski, the other male camper, and the two women who had been missing, as well as, God, I don’t know how many other abductions and rapes throughout upstate New York. It became apparent then that Armani and Belge had known all along about the other murders and the locations of the bodies. They publicly acknowledged that they had kept the information secret, withheld it even from the grieving families, because of their sworn duty to maintain client confidentiality.

  “You need to understand something, Taylor. In the legal profession, these men are widely regarded as heroes, lawyers who made the tough choices to protect a client. Frank Armani in particular has been compared to Atticus Finch, the noble small-town attorney who defended an unpopular client in To Kill a Mockingbird.”

  “Except,” I said, “the defendant in To Kill a Mockingbird was innocent.”

  “That’s pretty much the way the public looked at it, too. Armani and Belge were branded as the worst kind of immoral bastards. A grand jury investigated both men. Belge was indicted because he had moved one of the bodies. Parents of the victims filed an ethics complaint against them with the state bar association. Eventually the charges and ethics complaints were dismissed, but their law practices withered. They received hate mail and death threats. Colleagues abandoned them. Longtime friends refused to speak to them. They were forced to move out of their homes for their own protection. Belge eventually gave up practicing law altogether. Armani’s own mother told him he was insane for protecting confidences told to him by a serial killer.

  “You’ve been in this business a long time, Taylor, as a cop with the St. Paul Police Department and as a private investigator. You know how it works. Most people believe the criminal justice system is designed to favor the guilty. Defense lawyers are routinely blamed for helping bad and dangerous people go free.”

  “Sometimes you do help bad and dangerous people go free,” I said.

  “It’s the system that we live by,” Kaushal said. “When you become an attorney, you’re making a commitment to the values found in the Bill of Rights, the process the government must go through before it can punish any one of us—the right to counsel, the privilege against self-incrimination, the right to confront witnesses and to call witnesses. These are values that protect the dignity and the freedom of the individual. As a lawyer, you serve the public and you act as an officer of the court by upholding those values with all of your resources. It’s the only way that we can maintain a free society.”

  “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,” I said.

  “Most people think that means the world would be better off if we didn’t have lawyers. But when Shakespeare wrote that line in Henry VI, he was really saying that it was attorneys and judges who instill justice in society, and if you want to become a dictator the first thing you have to do is get rid of them.”

  The way he attacked his glass of bourbon, though, I wasn’t entirely sure he believed what he was telling me.

  “John, you’re leading up to something,” I said. “What is it?”

  “The Peterson murder case. Because Dawn Peterson was a wealthy woman, it became a media sensation. The supposition that a husband killed his wife for her money when she threatened to divorce him made for some lurid headlines and sound bites. Yet despite the overwhelming negative publicity, I managed to get the man acquitted. Mostly that was because the Ramsey County Attorney was unable to produce a body or any physical evidence to prove that a crime had actually taken place, much less that Clark Peterson had committed it. Marianne Haukass, you know her?”

  “We’ve had our moments.”

  “I don’t know what it is with some prosecutors. They stop being lawyers and become … They all think they’re going to become governor. Marianne had no case. It should never have gone to trial. She paraded witness after witness in front of the jury, each one claiming that the marriage was on the rocks and that Dawn had made an appointment with an attorney to discuss a possible divorce. She put Dawn’s mother on the stand. The woman testifying that Dawn had called her the evening before she disappeared to tell her that she knew Clark was sleeping with one of her friends. Only the mother couldn’t provide a name or any other specifics.”

  “Was Peterson sleeping with one of Dawn’s friends?” I asked.

  “Probably. The point is, though, Marianne couldn’t offer an iota of tangible evidence to prove that Peterson murdered his wife and disposed of her body. Which, of course, is exactly what he did.”

  I took a deep breath, leaned back against the sofa, and closed my eyes. When I opened them again, Kaushal was staring at his empty glass.

  “He told me,” he said. “Peterson told me that he murdered Dawn. He told me exactly where he hid her body. As far as I know, it’s still there. That’s what was in the notes that the hacker stole.”

  “Shit.”

  Kaushal had been correct. I suddenly wanted to drink the bourbon very much. I took a long pull of it. He refilled both of our glasses.

  “When I first spoke to Peterson, he was very evasive,” Kaushal said. “He refused to answer my questions directly. I explained that I was like a priest. Nothing he said to me would ever leave the confessional. A few days later, after he became more comfortable, he told me what he had done and where he had hidden the body.”

  “How did he manage it without leaving any physical evidence?” I asked.

  “I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to know. It wouldn’t have … Knowing the details wouldn’t have helped me defend him.”

  “Is this why you took Freddie and me off the case?”

 

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