The Local, page 23
The process for censuring an attorney in the state of Texas is arduous. After an initial grievance is filed against the lawyer in question, there are several steps by which judges and panels of people from the Chief Disciplinary Counsel’s office review and rule on the validity of the claim. Samuel Earl had lost at every turn. He was found to have violated Rule 8.04 of the Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct, which broadly covered a wide range of misconduct. There was one final hearing for the matter, and it was at the Dallas regional office. Its purpose was to determine his punishment.
“So this could be Sam’s last day as a licensed attorney?” Layla asked.
“From your lips to God’s ears,” I replied.
“Deep down, he must know he’s not terribly bright,” she said. “It can’t be easy carrying that around.”
“You’re not going to make me feel bad for the guy.”
Layla snatched the cigarette from me and took the final drag. She rolled her window down. “You had a good run, Samuel,” she said as she flicked the butt onto the highway.
I held the steering wheel with my left hand so that, with my right, I could hold hers. We drove like that for miles.
We pulled into the parking lot of a commercial office building on the north end of Dallas. It was a large, glass structure that was home to several businesses and law firms, including the one hosting us that day. As I searched for a parking spot, I noticed a matte black Mercedes-AMG GT with a yellow racing stripe at the very edge of the lot. It had been backed in, with the passenger side against the curb so no one could park on that side of it. The spot next to it, on the driver’s side, was vacant. Sam probably figured no one else in their right mind would want to park that far away from the building.
“Why don’t you step out?” I said to Layla. I don’t think she knew why I was making the suggestion, but she complied. I drove my truck just past Sam’s Mercedes and then backed into the space next to his, putting my passenger side within three inches of his car, my right mirror hanging over his driver’s-side door. I was careful not to touch his car but made sure I was close enough that he wouldn’t be able to get in.
“You don’t feel that’s a bit juvenile?” Layla asked me as I stepped out.
“He’s bound to do something in there that’s going to piss me off. Call it a preemptive strike.”
* * *
—
I left Layla in the firm’s reception area. An assistant escorted me to a conference room with a shiny table and a dozen chairs. I could see Samuel Earl through the glass wall before I entered. He was seated on the far end of one of the long sides of the table. I was shown to my seat at the near end of the same side. The assistant offered me water, but I declined. She said the committee would be right with us, and she left. Samuel Earl and I didn’t say one word to each other.
The members were led in by Walter Quigley, a partner at the firm and the chairman of the State Bar’s District 1 Grievance Committee. Quigley’s once-black head of hair was graying on the sides, revealing the salt-and-pepper direction the rest was sure to go. His background was in mergers and acquisitions, so neither Sam nor I had encountered him in court. He introduced his fellow members of the committee and got down to business.
“The purpose of today’s hearing is to review our findings in the case of Mr. Samuel Earl Whelan and to determine the proper sanction in this matter. Mr. Euchre, the committee thanks you for taking the time to join us today. We understand you were the victim in this case. You should know that the account of the incident, as described in the original claim, was not disputed by Mr. Whelan. That being said, in the interest of painting as full a portrait as possible, we want to afford you the opportunity to weigh in.”
“Thank you to the committee,” I replied, not knowing what else to say.
“Were you furnished with a copy of the complaint made by the late Judge Gerald Gardner?” Quigley asked.
“No, I never saw it,” I said.
Quigley thumbed through a file and found the document in question. He began reading aloud. “ ‘On September twenty-third, Samuel Earl Whelan, an attorney in the Eastern District, admitted by the State Bar of Texas, physically assaulted a fellow attorney, James Euchre, during the course of a patent trial in which I was the presiding judge.’ ” Quigley continued to read the summary of the event, a summary that defined the attack on me as “violent” and “unprovoked.” As Gardner’s words moved from describing the altercation to describing the people therein, I glanced in Sam’s direction. “ ‘This is not the first time Mr. Whelan’s behavior has been unbecoming of an attorney, nor is it the first time I have had to reprimand him in my courtroom. However, due to the nature of this incident and the fact that his actions threatened the safety of another attorney, I am compelled to issue this formal complaint. As far as I am concerned, there is no place in the Texas State Bar for a lawyer like Mr. Whelan.’ ”
As I listened to the scathing indictment of Sam’s character, I glimpsed him sitting quietly, staring down at the table. As the son of a lawyer who was more respected than his offspring ever would be, I supposed I sympathized with him. I still felt that he was a miserable attorney, but he hadn’t been gifted any special skills or intellect at birth, and I’m sure a part of him knew that.
“Mr. Euchre,” Quigley said as he put Gardner’s letter away, “is there anything you would like to add?”
“There is,” I said, straightening up. “Judge Gardner and I were very close. At times, you could say he was my guardian angel. He was also, and I mean this with love, a tough old bastard. The case I’m involved in at this very moment has repeatedly referenced Judge Gardner’s rigid adherence to protocol. He built the Eastern District by revamping the rules and then demanding that we all abide by them. He was never known for leniency.” I paused and considered my next move, but in reality, I had already decided what to do. “The thing is, though, I knew him for his leniency. For some reason, it was a quality he reserved only for me, and he displayed it again and again. He bailed me out of trouble, he provided me with second and third chances, and he forgave me my sins. I don’t dispute his account of what occurred nor would I question his intentions in drafting that complaint. However, I would like to add to it, as you said, to paint a fuller picture. Mr. Whelan and I go way back. We grew up together, and our rivalry extends well beyond the courthouse doors. While I certainly didn’t appreciate being blindsided on the day in question, to characterize it as an unprovoked attack might be a bridge too far. I’d been needling him throughout that entire trial. It wasn’t the first time one of us wanted to take a swing at the other. It was simply the first time one of us did so in a courtroom. I have put this minor scuffle behind me, and in the spirit of the same forgiveness that Gerald Gardner always afforded me, I ask that the same be done here for Samuel Earl. He ought to be allowed to continue the practice of law.”
I never once looked over at Sam, though I suspected he was taking a peek or two at me. I felt a weight had been lifted.
* * *
—
Layla and I rode the elevator down. “How’d it go in there?” Layla asked.
“I’m glad to put it to rest.”
We exited the building and headed toward the truck. I heard Sam call my name. We turned to find him jogging toward us. We stopped and waited for him to catch up. I could see Layla bracing for the worst.
“Thanks for what you said, Euchre.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I’ll probably get to keep my license.”
“Good, then I can keep kicking your ass in court,” I said. He smiled, knowing damn well that I meant it.
“Are you serious with this?” Sam asked as he walked toward our two vehicles parked side by side.
“Oh, is this your matte black Mercedes?” I said. He knew he had to suck it up and take it. He’d made out far better than he could have hoped for.
I climbed into the truck as Sam and Layla moved out of the way so I could pull out. I rolled the windows down and started to inch my Dodge forward.
“Be careful, please,” Sam said with concern.
I cleared my truck away from the Mercedes, and Sam got into his car. “See you around, Euchre.” I gave him a two-fingered wave as he drove away.
Layla’s phone rang. She answered it and said, “He’s right here,” handing it through the window to me. “It’s Lisa.”
“What’s up, Leg?”
“I’ve been trying to call you.”
“I was in the hearing. My phone’s off.”
“You need to get back to Marshall.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“I found a cell phone last night. It was dead and hidden in the Compound.”
“Whose is it?”
“I think it’s Amir’s.”
“The police took his phone,” I said.
“They didn’t take this one. I spent the day looking into it. There’s a lot I need to tell you.”
“James?” Layla was still standing outside the truck when she called to me. I looked over at her, sensing it must be important since she obviously knew I was on a call with Lisa.
“Euchre, you’ve got to come home. There is a shit-ton of intel we need to sift through,” the Leg said.
“James,” Layla called out again. She was staring at something.
I put the truck in park and stepped out. “We’ll be back in a couple hours,” I said to the Leg.
“Run the reds, Euchre. If I’m right about this, I think Amir might be innocent,” she said.
The Leg’s words hit me right as I passed the front of the truck and joined Layla on the other side. I could see what had caught her eye. She was looking at the spot where Samuel Earl’s Mercedes had been. There, on the asphalt, dead in the center of the parking space, were three small circles, one on top of the other. They were fresh oil stains that formed an eerily familiar shape: the silhouette of Frosty the Snowman, minus the corncob pipe and silk hat.
“We’re on our way,” I said to the Leg. I hung up the phone and handed it back to Layla, who started taking photos of the parking spot.
· Twenty-Eight ·
My truck never dropped below ninety miles per hour. Layla and I spent the entire drive home putting a mental puzzle together. The more we thought about it, the more the pieces fit together perfectly. By the time we pulled up to the Compound, the puzzle’s image had taken form.
The Leg was waiting for us at the dining room table. The house still looked like it’d been hit by a tornado thanks to her all-night search for the knife, but the table was spotless except for a single cell phone lying on it.
“I found it late last night,” she said.
“Where was it hiding?” Layla asked.
“Inside the air-conditioning vent, below the stairs, in the back.”
“Did you have to unscrew anything to remove it?” I asked.
“No. I just pulled off the grate.”
“So if Amir had broken the rear window, opened the door, set off the alarm—”
“He still would have had enough time to stash this phone inside the vent,” the Leg said.
“How’d you think to look in there?” Layla asked.
“I got cold. It was freezing last night, and for some reason, the A/C turned on. I was trying to find the thermostat, and as I walked past this vent, it blew cold air on me. Something told me to look inside.”
“Searching for a knife, but you find a phone,” I said.
“It’s even better than a knife,” Lisa said. “There’s a lot on this little phone.”
The phone was dead when she found it. While waiting for it to charge, she emailed a contact of hers who was, as she described him, a tech wizard. She asked if they could meet up. It was the middle of the night, but when he woke, they set a time. She fast-forwarded to lunch, when she met her tech friend, Max, who blew past the phone’s passcode.
“There’s one email account set up, and it’s encrypted. There’s messaging on here, but that’s also encrypted. And there are only a handful of apps,” the Leg reported. “I looked back at the police report, and it says the officers found a cell phone in this house and took it with them when they arrested Amir.”
“This was his secondary phone,” Layla said.
“His secret phone,” the Leg added.
“Were you able to get past the encryptions?” I asked.
“No. Maybe with more time, but the whole point of this phone is to protect secrets, so it’s pretty fortified.”
“How do you even know it’s his?” I asked.
“Max was able to pull up all of the geotracking data from the location app. We have the time and coordinates of every movement this phone ever made. It flew from the Bay Area to Dallas on the morning of the murder, averaged eighty miles per hour along Interstate 20 into Marshall, and spent several hours in the parking lot near the Eastern District, presumably because Amir left the phone inside his bag in the car.”
“Abe told us not to bring our phones into the courtroom,” Layla said.
“So it remains in the vehicle through your lunch and the eligibility hearing in Gardner’s court. Then, and here’s how I knew it was Amir’s phone, it traveled to Texarkana—”
“Where Amir was being held for contempt,” Layla said.
“Right,” the Leg said, looking at Layla. “You took the phone with you when you went to bail him out. Then it travels back to Marshall, to this location at the Compound.”
“It must have been in his luggage the whole day,” I said.
“And does it stay here, in this house, until you found it this morning?” Layla asked.
“No,” the Leg said, “it makes one more journey.”
Layla and I followed the Leg outside as she continued to narrate the secret phone’s travel history.
“The phone leaves the house at 11:25 p.m.”
“Which lines up with the last time the alarm system showed the front door opening and closing,” I added.
“Right. Then it waits out here for six minutes and must get into a vehicle because it travels for ten minutes at upwards of forty-five miles per hour.”
“Where does it go?” I asked
“Let’s take a ride,” said the Leg.
* * *
—
The three of us got into my truck, and I took East Houston Street away from the town square, with no idea where we were headed. The Leg gave me turn-by-turn directions but wanted to hold off on the big reveal. As I made a left onto East Travis Street, we passed Amir’s current place of residence: the Harrison County Jail. I tried to imagine my client taking this same ride in the middle of the night. I tried to envision where he might have been going and what he would have been doing once he got there.
The road was four lanes, two going in either direction. As we reached the outskirts of town, we passed a couple schools and half a dozen churches. It seemed the only entities interested in this dreary land were the government and God.
“Amir didn’t have a car, so who drove him?” I asked. “Medallion isn’t running in Marshall.”
“Did he take an Uber?” Layla asked.
“There are no rideshare apps on this phone,” explained the Leg. “But he did make one call from this number a little before eleven o’clock.”
“And you’re able to see the number he called?” I asked.
“The phone function itself isn’t protected,” the Leg said. “Care to guess who he called?”
I thought about it for a moment and then the answer came to me. “A taxi service,” I said.
As we drove down Indian Springs Drive, the Leg told me to make a left up ahead. I knew exactly where we were going. Layla recognized it as well when she spotted the control tower in the distance.
We pulled into the parking lot of the Harrison County Airport, the same place Abe’s private jet had departed from earlier in the week. I put the truck in park, and we got out. An old single-engine Cessna 152 was executing a touch-and-go, landing on the runway and then immediately speeding up and taking off again.
“The phone gets here at 11:41,” the Leg began, “and it remains here for about two and a half hours.”
“Doing what?” I asked aloud.
“Don’t know. But just after 2:00 a.m., it travels by vehicle the reverse route we just took and doesn’t stop until it arrives back at the Compound.”
We approached the chain-link fence that separated the small airport from the forest around it. The sound of footsteps along gravel stirred on our right. Someone was walking along the fence, toward us. I saw her Wayfarers first.
Charlotte Mayhew sauntered up to us with a smile. “Hello,” she said, as if it were perfectly normal that the four of us would meet this way.
“What the hell are you doing here?” I demanded. “Did you follow us?”
“Please, I was already here when you arrived. Care to tell me what brings you to this part of town?” She was so calm and confident. She had this way of asking questions while giving the impression she already had the answers. If she hadn’t become a reporter, she would have made an excellent attorney.
“We were going to take my Gulfstream for a jaunt to Cancún, but the damn pilot is late,” the Leg said.
Mayhew smiled at her. “You don’t know why you’re here, do you?”
“Why are you here?” the Leg asked.
“If you want to trade secrets, give me a call,” Mayhew said as she removed a business card from her backpack. She scribbled something on it and handed it to the Leg.
“What’s this?” the Leg asked, looking at the handwritten note.
“Call it a gesture of goodwill,” the reporter said as she put her bag over her shoulder and walked away.
“What the fuck is going on?” I said to my team.
“So this could be Sam’s last day as a licensed attorney?” Layla asked.
“From your lips to God’s ears,” I replied.
“Deep down, he must know he’s not terribly bright,” she said. “It can’t be easy carrying that around.”
“You’re not going to make me feel bad for the guy.”
Layla snatched the cigarette from me and took the final drag. She rolled her window down. “You had a good run, Samuel,” she said as she flicked the butt onto the highway.
I held the steering wheel with my left hand so that, with my right, I could hold hers. We drove like that for miles.
We pulled into the parking lot of a commercial office building on the north end of Dallas. It was a large, glass structure that was home to several businesses and law firms, including the one hosting us that day. As I searched for a parking spot, I noticed a matte black Mercedes-AMG GT with a yellow racing stripe at the very edge of the lot. It had been backed in, with the passenger side against the curb so no one could park on that side of it. The spot next to it, on the driver’s side, was vacant. Sam probably figured no one else in their right mind would want to park that far away from the building.
“Why don’t you step out?” I said to Layla. I don’t think she knew why I was making the suggestion, but she complied. I drove my truck just past Sam’s Mercedes and then backed into the space next to his, putting my passenger side within three inches of his car, my right mirror hanging over his driver’s-side door. I was careful not to touch his car but made sure I was close enough that he wouldn’t be able to get in.
“You don’t feel that’s a bit juvenile?” Layla asked me as I stepped out.
“He’s bound to do something in there that’s going to piss me off. Call it a preemptive strike.”
* * *
—
I left Layla in the firm’s reception area. An assistant escorted me to a conference room with a shiny table and a dozen chairs. I could see Samuel Earl through the glass wall before I entered. He was seated on the far end of one of the long sides of the table. I was shown to my seat at the near end of the same side. The assistant offered me water, but I declined. She said the committee would be right with us, and she left. Samuel Earl and I didn’t say one word to each other.
The members were led in by Walter Quigley, a partner at the firm and the chairman of the State Bar’s District 1 Grievance Committee. Quigley’s once-black head of hair was graying on the sides, revealing the salt-and-pepper direction the rest was sure to go. His background was in mergers and acquisitions, so neither Sam nor I had encountered him in court. He introduced his fellow members of the committee and got down to business.
“The purpose of today’s hearing is to review our findings in the case of Mr. Samuel Earl Whelan and to determine the proper sanction in this matter. Mr. Euchre, the committee thanks you for taking the time to join us today. We understand you were the victim in this case. You should know that the account of the incident, as described in the original claim, was not disputed by Mr. Whelan. That being said, in the interest of painting as full a portrait as possible, we want to afford you the opportunity to weigh in.”
“Thank you to the committee,” I replied, not knowing what else to say.
“Were you furnished with a copy of the complaint made by the late Judge Gerald Gardner?” Quigley asked.
“No, I never saw it,” I said.
Quigley thumbed through a file and found the document in question. He began reading aloud. “ ‘On September twenty-third, Samuel Earl Whelan, an attorney in the Eastern District, admitted by the State Bar of Texas, physically assaulted a fellow attorney, James Euchre, during the course of a patent trial in which I was the presiding judge.’ ” Quigley continued to read the summary of the event, a summary that defined the attack on me as “violent” and “unprovoked.” As Gardner’s words moved from describing the altercation to describing the people therein, I glanced in Sam’s direction. “ ‘This is not the first time Mr. Whelan’s behavior has been unbecoming of an attorney, nor is it the first time I have had to reprimand him in my courtroom. However, due to the nature of this incident and the fact that his actions threatened the safety of another attorney, I am compelled to issue this formal complaint. As far as I am concerned, there is no place in the Texas State Bar for a lawyer like Mr. Whelan.’ ”
As I listened to the scathing indictment of Sam’s character, I glimpsed him sitting quietly, staring down at the table. As the son of a lawyer who was more respected than his offspring ever would be, I supposed I sympathized with him. I still felt that he was a miserable attorney, but he hadn’t been gifted any special skills or intellect at birth, and I’m sure a part of him knew that.
“Mr. Euchre,” Quigley said as he put Gardner’s letter away, “is there anything you would like to add?”
“There is,” I said, straightening up. “Judge Gardner and I were very close. At times, you could say he was my guardian angel. He was also, and I mean this with love, a tough old bastard. The case I’m involved in at this very moment has repeatedly referenced Judge Gardner’s rigid adherence to protocol. He built the Eastern District by revamping the rules and then demanding that we all abide by them. He was never known for leniency.” I paused and considered my next move, but in reality, I had already decided what to do. “The thing is, though, I knew him for his leniency. For some reason, it was a quality he reserved only for me, and he displayed it again and again. He bailed me out of trouble, he provided me with second and third chances, and he forgave me my sins. I don’t dispute his account of what occurred nor would I question his intentions in drafting that complaint. However, I would like to add to it, as you said, to paint a fuller picture. Mr. Whelan and I go way back. We grew up together, and our rivalry extends well beyond the courthouse doors. While I certainly didn’t appreciate being blindsided on the day in question, to characterize it as an unprovoked attack might be a bridge too far. I’d been needling him throughout that entire trial. It wasn’t the first time one of us wanted to take a swing at the other. It was simply the first time one of us did so in a courtroom. I have put this minor scuffle behind me, and in the spirit of the same forgiveness that Gerald Gardner always afforded me, I ask that the same be done here for Samuel Earl. He ought to be allowed to continue the practice of law.”
I never once looked over at Sam, though I suspected he was taking a peek or two at me. I felt a weight had been lifted.
* * *
—
Layla and I rode the elevator down. “How’d it go in there?” Layla asked.
“I’m glad to put it to rest.”
We exited the building and headed toward the truck. I heard Sam call my name. We turned to find him jogging toward us. We stopped and waited for him to catch up. I could see Layla bracing for the worst.
“Thanks for what you said, Euchre.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I’ll probably get to keep my license.”
“Good, then I can keep kicking your ass in court,” I said. He smiled, knowing damn well that I meant it.
“Are you serious with this?” Sam asked as he walked toward our two vehicles parked side by side.
“Oh, is this your matte black Mercedes?” I said. He knew he had to suck it up and take it. He’d made out far better than he could have hoped for.
I climbed into the truck as Sam and Layla moved out of the way so I could pull out. I rolled the windows down and started to inch my Dodge forward.
“Be careful, please,” Sam said with concern.
I cleared my truck away from the Mercedes, and Sam got into his car. “See you around, Euchre.” I gave him a two-fingered wave as he drove away.
Layla’s phone rang. She answered it and said, “He’s right here,” handing it through the window to me. “It’s Lisa.”
“What’s up, Leg?”
“I’ve been trying to call you.”
“I was in the hearing. My phone’s off.”
“You need to get back to Marshall.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“I found a cell phone last night. It was dead and hidden in the Compound.”
“Whose is it?”
“I think it’s Amir’s.”
“The police took his phone,” I said.
“They didn’t take this one. I spent the day looking into it. There’s a lot I need to tell you.”
“James?” Layla was still standing outside the truck when she called to me. I looked over at her, sensing it must be important since she obviously knew I was on a call with Lisa.
“Euchre, you’ve got to come home. There is a shit-ton of intel we need to sift through,” the Leg said.
“James,” Layla called out again. She was staring at something.
I put the truck in park and stepped out. “We’ll be back in a couple hours,” I said to the Leg.
“Run the reds, Euchre. If I’m right about this, I think Amir might be innocent,” she said.
The Leg’s words hit me right as I passed the front of the truck and joined Layla on the other side. I could see what had caught her eye. She was looking at the spot where Samuel Earl’s Mercedes had been. There, on the asphalt, dead in the center of the parking space, were three small circles, one on top of the other. They were fresh oil stains that formed an eerily familiar shape: the silhouette of Frosty the Snowman, minus the corncob pipe and silk hat.
“We’re on our way,” I said to the Leg. I hung up the phone and handed it back to Layla, who started taking photos of the parking spot.
· Twenty-Eight ·
My truck never dropped below ninety miles per hour. Layla and I spent the entire drive home putting a mental puzzle together. The more we thought about it, the more the pieces fit together perfectly. By the time we pulled up to the Compound, the puzzle’s image had taken form.
The Leg was waiting for us at the dining room table. The house still looked like it’d been hit by a tornado thanks to her all-night search for the knife, but the table was spotless except for a single cell phone lying on it.
“I found it late last night,” she said.
“Where was it hiding?” Layla asked.
“Inside the air-conditioning vent, below the stairs, in the back.”
“Did you have to unscrew anything to remove it?” I asked.
“No. I just pulled off the grate.”
“So if Amir had broken the rear window, opened the door, set off the alarm—”
“He still would have had enough time to stash this phone inside the vent,” the Leg said.
“How’d you think to look in there?” Layla asked.
“I got cold. It was freezing last night, and for some reason, the A/C turned on. I was trying to find the thermostat, and as I walked past this vent, it blew cold air on me. Something told me to look inside.”
“Searching for a knife, but you find a phone,” I said.
“It’s even better than a knife,” Lisa said. “There’s a lot on this little phone.”
The phone was dead when she found it. While waiting for it to charge, she emailed a contact of hers who was, as she described him, a tech wizard. She asked if they could meet up. It was the middle of the night, but when he woke, they set a time. She fast-forwarded to lunch, when she met her tech friend, Max, who blew past the phone’s passcode.
“There’s one email account set up, and it’s encrypted. There’s messaging on here, but that’s also encrypted. And there are only a handful of apps,” the Leg reported. “I looked back at the police report, and it says the officers found a cell phone in this house and took it with them when they arrested Amir.”
“This was his secondary phone,” Layla said.
“His secret phone,” the Leg added.
“Were you able to get past the encryptions?” I asked.
“No. Maybe with more time, but the whole point of this phone is to protect secrets, so it’s pretty fortified.”
“How do you even know it’s his?” I asked.
“Max was able to pull up all of the geotracking data from the location app. We have the time and coordinates of every movement this phone ever made. It flew from the Bay Area to Dallas on the morning of the murder, averaged eighty miles per hour along Interstate 20 into Marshall, and spent several hours in the parking lot near the Eastern District, presumably because Amir left the phone inside his bag in the car.”
“Abe told us not to bring our phones into the courtroom,” Layla said.
“So it remains in the vehicle through your lunch and the eligibility hearing in Gardner’s court. Then, and here’s how I knew it was Amir’s phone, it traveled to Texarkana—”
“Where Amir was being held for contempt,” Layla said.
“Right,” the Leg said, looking at Layla. “You took the phone with you when you went to bail him out. Then it travels back to Marshall, to this location at the Compound.”
“It must have been in his luggage the whole day,” I said.
“And does it stay here, in this house, until you found it this morning?” Layla asked.
“No,” the Leg said, “it makes one more journey.”
Layla and I followed the Leg outside as she continued to narrate the secret phone’s travel history.
“The phone leaves the house at 11:25 p.m.”
“Which lines up with the last time the alarm system showed the front door opening and closing,” I added.
“Right. Then it waits out here for six minutes and must get into a vehicle because it travels for ten minutes at upwards of forty-five miles per hour.”
“Where does it go?” I asked
“Let’s take a ride,” said the Leg.
* * *
—
The three of us got into my truck, and I took East Houston Street away from the town square, with no idea where we were headed. The Leg gave me turn-by-turn directions but wanted to hold off on the big reveal. As I made a left onto East Travis Street, we passed Amir’s current place of residence: the Harrison County Jail. I tried to imagine my client taking this same ride in the middle of the night. I tried to envision where he might have been going and what he would have been doing once he got there.
The road was four lanes, two going in either direction. As we reached the outskirts of town, we passed a couple schools and half a dozen churches. It seemed the only entities interested in this dreary land were the government and God.
“Amir didn’t have a car, so who drove him?” I asked. “Medallion isn’t running in Marshall.”
“Did he take an Uber?” Layla asked.
“There are no rideshare apps on this phone,” explained the Leg. “But he did make one call from this number a little before eleven o’clock.”
“And you’re able to see the number he called?” I asked.
“The phone function itself isn’t protected,” the Leg said. “Care to guess who he called?”
I thought about it for a moment and then the answer came to me. “A taxi service,” I said.
As we drove down Indian Springs Drive, the Leg told me to make a left up ahead. I knew exactly where we were going. Layla recognized it as well when she spotted the control tower in the distance.
We pulled into the parking lot of the Harrison County Airport, the same place Abe’s private jet had departed from earlier in the week. I put the truck in park, and we got out. An old single-engine Cessna 152 was executing a touch-and-go, landing on the runway and then immediately speeding up and taking off again.
“The phone gets here at 11:41,” the Leg began, “and it remains here for about two and a half hours.”
“Doing what?” I asked aloud.
“Don’t know. But just after 2:00 a.m., it travels by vehicle the reverse route we just took and doesn’t stop until it arrives back at the Compound.”
We approached the chain-link fence that separated the small airport from the forest around it. The sound of footsteps along gravel stirred on our right. Someone was walking along the fence, toward us. I saw her Wayfarers first.
Charlotte Mayhew sauntered up to us with a smile. “Hello,” she said, as if it were perfectly normal that the four of us would meet this way.
“What the hell are you doing here?” I demanded. “Did you follow us?”
“Please, I was already here when you arrived. Care to tell me what brings you to this part of town?” She was so calm and confident. She had this way of asking questions while giving the impression she already had the answers. If she hadn’t become a reporter, she would have made an excellent attorney.
“We were going to take my Gulfstream for a jaunt to Cancún, but the damn pilot is late,” the Leg said.
Mayhew smiled at her. “You don’t know why you’re here, do you?”
“Why are you here?” the Leg asked.
“If you want to trade secrets, give me a call,” Mayhew said as she removed a business card from her backpack. She scribbled something on it and handed it to the Leg.
“What’s this?” the Leg asked, looking at the handwritten note.
“Call it a gesture of goodwill,” the reporter said as she put her bag over her shoulder and walked away.
“What the fuck is going on?” I said to my team.
