The Proving Ground, page 10
“It’s her last communication to the company. Sent the day she got fired. She says, ‘Jerry, one last time, I can’t stress enough the liability the company will encounter should Clair say the wrong thing or encourage the wrong behavior or action by a child user. I am glad I won’t be part of the company when that happens.’”
I whistled. “Wow,” I said.
“It’s the smoking gun!” Jack said.
“Now we just have to figure out how to get it to the jury.”
“You’ll find a way, Mick.”
I appreciated McEvoy’s confidence, but I was worried. As I drove, I started thinking of alternative ways of recruiting Naomi Kitchens as a witness.
17
MONDAY MORNING I was in my office writing out questions for voir dire. In federal court, the judge evaluated potential jurors using questions submitted by the attorneys for both sides. Lorna entered without knocking, holding the cordless office phone to her chest so the caller couldn’t hear her.
“Cassandra Snow?” Lorna asked. “With the sexy voice? She said you’d know the name.”
I did. But it had been at least twenty years since I’d put Cassandra Snow out of my thoughts. And back then she didn’t have a sexy voice. She was only three years old.
Lorna read the look of apprehension on my face.
“You want me to tell her you’re not here?” she asked.
“Uh, no,” I said. “I’ll take it.”
I picked up the extension on my desk phone, lifted the receiver, and waited for Lorna to leave. She didn’t. I nodded toward the door and she got the message.
“Please close the door,” I added.
Lorna threw a suspicious look at me as she backed out and pulled the door closed.
“Cassandra?” I said.
“Mr. Haller,” she said. “Do you remember me?”
“Of course I do. How are you?”
“Um, I’m doing the best I can.”
“And your father?”
“Uh, not so good.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. What can I do for you, Cassandra?”
“Well, I want to hire you.”
I would not call her voice sexy but it had a deep smoky tone. It was incongruous with my memories of her as a toddler.
“Are you in trouble?” I asked. “I’m not doing criminal law anymore but I can refer — ”
“No, I’m not in trouble,” she said. “I want to make an appointment to come talk to you about something.”
“I’m happy to. But I’m going to be starting a trial in a few days — a civil trial — and that will keep me very busy. Could it wait till after? The trial’s going to last a couple weeks.”
“No, it’s sort of urgent.”
I could hear anxiety in her tone.
“Well, can we just talk now on the phone?”
“No, I need to show you something. In person.”
I was intrigued but knew I couldn’t blow up my schedule for another case at the moment. And I didn’t like bringing potential clients to the warehouse. It might make them question my skills — even more than people did when I worked out of a Lincoln.
“Okay, then we can meet,” I said. “But my office is a complete mess because we’re getting ready for trial. Files and paperwork, exhibits all over the place. Are you free for lunch? I could meet you if you’re here in L.A.”
“Yes, I go to USC. Law school.”
“Law school — cool. My daughter went there. Have you been to Fixins over on Olympic? It’s not far from USC.”
“I haven’t.”
“Good fried chicken and gumbo and other stuff. How about I meet you there at noon?”
“Okay. Thank you.”
“See you soon, Cassandra.”
I put the phone in the cradle and didn’t have to wait long before Lorna came back into the office with her concerns and questions. Lorna was my gatekeeper, and as such she adopted a suspicious pose when anyone managed to gain access to me without proper vetting from her.
“Cassandra Snow,” she said. “Is that even a real name?”
“It actually is,” I said. “I saw it on her birth certificate. A long time ago.”
“Well, who is she?”
“The daughter of a former client. A client … I totally failed.”
“Oh, no. Not one of those.”
But it was true. David Snow was one of those black balloons that hovered above me. Lorna started asking questions about his case but I quickly put her off. I said I wanted to see what the daughter wanted to show me and find out why she wanted to hire me before I opened up that painful chapter. Lorna finally left and I went back to my juror questions until it was almost noon.
Fixins was probably the only soul-food kitchen in the city that took reservations for lunch, but it was a popular spot. I arrived for my reservation on time and was seated near the bar, where a large flat-screen showed highlights from the weekend’s football games. I watched but wasn’t really watching. I was thinking about the David Snow trial.
By 12:15 I assumed Cassandra wasn’t coming. I was about to flag down the waiter and order a bowl of gumbo when a woman in an electric wheelchair approached my table.
“I’m so sorry I’m late,” she said. “All the parking spots for people like me were taken. Probably by people who don’t need them.”
I jumped up and pulled a chair away from the table so she could maneuver into the spot. She had reddish-brown hair and sharp brown eyes with a pretty face. The mixed races of her heritage were evident. She looked very small in her chair, like a child. It wasn’t what I expected. I knew that her childhood injuries had left her paraplegic, but I was somehow surprised to see that her physical growth had been stunted. I came back around and sat across from her. I noticed her fingernails, long red press-ons that tapered to a point.
“Good to see you, Cassandra,” I said. “It’s been a while.”
She smiled like I had said something funny.
“I go by Cassie now,” she said.
“Cassie — I like it,” I said. “So, you live near campus?”
“Not too far. West Adams.”
“By yourself?”
“Yes. I’ve been on my own for a long time.”
Besides the whispery tone of her voice, she spoke with an unusual cadence. She spaced her words out as if guarding them, even with sentences that required little thought or hesitation.
“So, law school — how did that come about?” I asked.
“I think it was inevitable,” she said. “Considering what happened with my father.”
I understood. I was trying to keep the conversation light, but I knew there was something dark coming. This wasn’t a social visit.
“What year?” I asked. “What year law, I mean.”
“Second,” she said. “I’m about halfway through.”
“You on a scholarship?”
My interior thought came out as an awkward question. The last I knew, she had been taken into the foster-care system after the trial left her without a parent. I didn’t track her after that, probably fearing that what I’d find would put me into a deeper tailspin of guilt. But I knew there weren’t many foster parents out there who could afford tuition at USC Law.
“No,” Cassie said. “I support myself.”
“Are you interning at a firm?” I asked.
“No, not yet. I support myself as an ASMRtist. I have my own channel and I’m on Patreon. I do pretty well. I can even afford to hire you. I think.”
She smiled. I nodded, not knowing what most of that meant.
“That’s great,” I said. “Any decision yet on what kind of law you want to practice?”
“Definitely criminal defense,” she said.
“Ah, a lawyer after my own heart.” I put my hand on my chest.
“My goal was to get the degree and someday get my father out,” she said.
I nodded. It was an uncomfortable moment. I took my hand away from my heart.
“But I’m running out of time,” Cassie said. “He’s dying, and I want to bring him home.”
I nodded again. It seemed like all I could do. I knew I could not offer encouragement. Her father was probably only halfway through his sentence, and parole boards didn’t show much sympathy for abusers of children.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “What’s going on with your father?”
“He’s got terminal cancer,” Cassie said. “Esophageal.”
“I’m so sorry, Cassie. Where is he?”
“In Stockton. The medical prison. They said he has nine months. Maybe less.”
I hadn’t thought about David Snow’s case for years. I had handled the trial, which ended with guilty verdicts on all charges. Another lawyer handled the appeals that followed. I thought I knew which way this conversation was going.
“And you want to try to get him out on a medical hardship? That’s going to be a — ”
“No, not a medical hardship,” Cassie said. “A habeas. I heard about that case you handled last year. I think you can get my father out. He’s innocent.”
“Cassie, that was actually almost two years ago. And after that I stopped doing criminal. I’ve been in civil court since then.”
“I still think you can get him out.”
“There is nothing I would like better than to help your father. I never thought he deserved what he got. I believed him and never thought he was guilty. But … have you taken habeas yet at USC? I don’t think it’s required at most law schools.”
She nodded.
“I took it last semester at an innocence clinic at the law school,” she said. “At one point we even talked about your case. That’s how I heard about it.”
“Well, then you know,” I said. “I’m assuming by now your father’s appeals have run their course. Habeas corpus may be his only shot, but it’s a long shot, Cassandra — uh, Cassie. To get a habeas in front of a court, you need new evidence — ”
“That was unavailable at the time of conviction. Yes, I know.”
“Okay, then what is our new evidence?”
She stared me down with those dark eyes.
“The new evidence is me,” she said.
18
I GATHERED THE troops after I got back to the warehouse. The only place with enough chairs was the cage. McEvoy was in there, working through the material Naomi Kitchens had turned over. I told him he could step out because this wasn’t about the Tidalwaiv case, but he asked to stay because he thought that anything that came up in the days before trial might be material for the book he’d write. I said that was fine and started telling them my news.
“Okay, I just took on a new habeas case,” I said. “And I know what you’re thinking, that I don’t do criminal law anymore. That is true, but this was one I felt I owed the client.”
“No, I’m thinking that you don’t have time for another case,” Lorna said. “You start picking a jury in three days, Mickey. You can’t add another case right now.”
“I think if we get things started on this one in the next day or two, it will hold till after the trial,” I said. “And like I said, I have to do this one.”
“Who’s the client, Mick?” Cisco asked.
“Her name is Cassandra Snow,” I said. “She was the alleged victim in a case I handled twenty years ago. A case I lost.”
“Let me guess, she’s changed her mind about pointing the finger at your guy?” Cisco said. “Those cases never work.”
“No, no, it’s not like that,” I said. “My client was her father. He was accused of breaking her back — she’s in a wheelchair — and twelve other counts of abuse. He said he didn’t do it and I believed him, but it was a circumstantial case and the jury bought what the prosecutor was selling. David Snow is Black and it was a mostly white jury. Then the judge just lit him up, gave him five years for every broken bone — sixty-five years total.”
“And she’s saying now he didn’t do it?” Lorna asked.
“She said it all along,” I said. “But back then, at trial, she was three years old. Her mother was gone and her father was her only parent. What she said in police interviews as a toddler didn’t really matter. She wasn’t close to the age of competence.”
“Well, why did she wait twenty years to come to you?” McEvoy asked.
I pointed at him. That was the question.
“Like I said, she’s been in a wheelchair since then,” I said. “So that sort of protected her, physically, over the years. But she was in a car wreck a month ago. She has this van she showed me. She goes up a ramp to get in through the back and then she can just park her chair in front of the steering wheel and drive it. Anyway, she got rear-ended and thrown into the steering wheel, and she broke five ribs. When she was treated in the ER, they took X-rays, and one of the doctors saw something. Long story short, she’s been diagnosed with something called osteogenesis imperfecta, which is rare and congenital — she could have been born with it.”
“Okay,” Lorna said. “And what’s it got to do with getting her father out?”
“Good question,” I said. “OI, as they call it, hinders collagen production, which leads to brittle bones that break easily. It can go undiagnosed in children or be misdiagnosed as abuse. Cassie says the orthopedic doctors who looked at her X-rays in the ER suspected from the condition of her bones that she had OI. They sent her to a geneticist, and it turns out she has a rare form of the disease, a genetic mutation that’s only recently been discovered. She is our new evidence. She gets her father a new trial.”
I realized I had spoken to them the way I would speak to a jury, with a fervor that cannot be faked. They sat there silently for a long moment until they were sure I had finished my closing argument.
“What do you want us to do, Mick?” Cisco finally asked.
“I have the names of the doctors who treated her,” I said. “We need to get statements from all the medical people, including the geneticist, to include in a habeas motion for a new trial. We also need to pull whatever we can find on the original trial. Transcripts, presentencing reports, anything and everything. Her father is in Stockton. We have to pull his prison records as well as anything from his parole hearings. Cassie said he’s had two and was turned down both times because he wouldn’t admit that he hurt his baby daughter. He wouldn’t admit to what he didn’t do.”
That brought a pause. We all knew that the best way to get by the parole board was to admit to your crimes, say you’d found Jesus, and pledge that you would dedicate the rest of your life to serving Him. A refusal of any part of that formula almost guaranteed rejection.
“Mick, you said your guy’s in Stockton,” Cisco said. “That’s a medical facility. What’s he there for?”
“He’s dying,” I said. “Cancer. He’s got nine months to live, and we are going to get him out so he’s with his daughter and his last breath is of free air.”
That not only brought another pause but several eyes looked away from mine. Lorna, always the skeptic in case matters, broke the quiet.
“Mickey, is this OI stuff something you could have known about at the first trial?” she asked. “Because if it was … ”
“Then not only was I a bad lawyer then, but I’m dead in the water now,” I said. “You’re right, Lorna. It’s the big question. We need evidence not available then.”
“Did you have a medical expert testify at the trial?” Lorna asked.
“Yes and no,” I said. “I hired a pediatric orthopedic surgeon to review Cassandra’s X-rays and injuries. But ultimately I decided not to put him on the witness stand.”
“Why not?” Lorna asked.
“Because I couldn’t trust him not to say the injuries might have been caused by abuse,” I said. “The fact is, OI was never mentioned by him or the state’s experts or in any reports. What was mentioned at trial was that my client had a prior arrest involving violence. That was a bar fight, and the judge shouldn’t have allowed it, but he did. Add to that, David Snow being the one custodial parent in the home and a victim too young to say how she got hurt, and the jury took less than an hour to bury him with thirteen counts of GBI — end of story.”
Great bodily injury — the top of the child-abuse pyramid.
There was another pause, this one ended by McEvoy.
“I’ll look into OI,” he said. “Maybe nobody knew about it twenty years ago. A lot of shaken-baby cases have been overturned across the country because of new science and new ways of looking at injuries in children. Maybe it’s the same here.”
I nodded.
“That would be good,” I said.
I was impressed by McEvoy’s thinking and willingness to pitch in as part of the team.
“Just don’t let it get in the way of Tidalwaiv,” I said. “That’s the priority this week and into trial. And speaking of which, any news on Challenger?”
It was the code name we were now using for Naomi Kitchens. It was good legal practice to keep her name out of conversations, emails, and documents.
“Nothing yet,” McEvoy said. “I was going to give it the day, then call tomorrow with a final pitch.”
“Okay,” I said. “Have you finished going through the thumb drive?”
“I have,” McEvoy said. “There are some things I want to show you when you have a few minutes.”
I nodded. “Okay,” I said. “Thanks, everybody.”
It was a signal that I wanted to talk to McEvoy alone. Lorna and Cisco got the message and got up. After they went through the copper curtain, I moved over to McEvoy’s workspace.
“What do you have for me?” I asked.
“Nothing as strong as that farewell email,” McEvoy said. “But there is an exchange that followed an early testing of Clair that didn’t go well.”
“They probably did follow-up tests after making corrections, right?”
“Yes, that’s right. But if I’m reading Challenger’s response correctly, it looks like they used a kid to conduct the initial test.”
“You mean they put a kid into a test with Clair and it went sideways?”
“I think so. The emails are between two people who witnessed the test, so they leave out shared knowledge of it. It’s shorthand, so you have to sort of read between the lines. Even if Challenger doesn’t agree to testify, I was planning to ask her to clarify some of the things we’ve found in the documents she provided. Hopefully, she’ll tell me about this test.”
