Justice Denied - A Harper Ross Legal Thriller Page 11

  She shrugged. “Yes, I agree with that, but here we are. I don’t want to try this, either. The media has been all over it. We’ve been contacted by every news organization there is, even some of the national ones. There’s even talk of allowing cameras in the courtroom. I hate it when the media gets involved, and they’re very much involved in this one. It’s not every day that a federal judge is murdered, after all.”

  “I haven’t been too inundated with media requests,” I said. “Actually, I haven’t been at all.”

  “Just wait,” she said. “You just entered your appearance on this case. The media hasn’t had the chance to harass you. You better run for cover on this one, especially if it goes south for us. You’re going to be blamed for it.”

  I knew that to be true. It was true in the John Robinson case, and it was bound to be true in this case as well.

  “What discovery do you anticipate you’re going to be giving me?” she asked.

  “Depositions. I don’t anticipate doing much more.” Usually, I would get experts to go through the crime scene in cases like this, to show that my client wasn’t present in the room when the person was killed. They had ways of showing this by estimating when the footsteps of the client hit the hardwood floor. I would usually have some kind of forensic analysis done on the gun and bullet in the gun, to show the glove prints that were on the gun. A well-paid expert can trace the glove prints to a certain pair of gloves, for the glove prints were really similar to fingerprints.

  Not that I wasn’t going to introduce an expert to testify to the glove prints. I would only do that if the glove prints at the scene of the crime could not be matched with any pair of gloves that Michael owned. If they did match a pair of Michael owned, then I might go ahead and bring in the expert to testify. That was one way that I could make sure Michael went down. I could feign innocence pretty easily if the expert testified that the glove print matched Michael’s glove. I could simply tell Michael that I thought that the expert would have testified the other way.

  “Only depositions? You aren’t going to be doing forensic analysis or anything like that?”

  “I don’t anticipate doing that.”

  “Okay then. We plan on bringing in the cops on the scene. We’re also going to be bringing in the testimony of Christina Sanders.”

  “Christina Sanders. What is she going to be testifying to?”

  “The relationship between your client and Judge Sanders. She doesn’t want to testify, so I’m probably going to have to treat her as hostile, but I think that she has a lot to say about how Michael Reynolds and Robert Sanders got along. Which wasn’t well, to say the very least.”

  I nodded my head. “Anybody else? Who else are you going to call?”

  “We’re still doing our investigation, and, to tell you the truth, who we call is going to depend on how this autopsy goes. Obviously, if it turns out that the judge had been poisoned for a matter of months, there’s going to be more investigation into how that fits into the overall scheme of things. I’ll definitely let you know, however, who we’re going to call and what evidence we plan to present.”

  The Medical Examiner came out and the two of us stood up. “Our preliminary examination does indicate that there were signs of poisoning in the system of the judge at the time of death. That is only the preliminary finding. We are going to have to send tissue samples for further analysis, but I’m reasonably confident that the judge was, in all likelihood, poisoned.”

  I nodded my head. I knew that this was coming.

  I left the office and called Michael. He was going to have to know what was going on, and I wondered if he would be able to supply me with some kind of explanation on who he thought poisoned the judge and why.

  Speaking with him made me sick, but I knew that I had to do it. I still needed to make sure that I did my job.

  I only hoped that “my job” would end up in a conviction for the scumbag.

  Fourteen

  “Dad was poisoned?” Michael asked me when he arrived in my office. “Seriously?”

  “Seriously,” I said. “He was poisoned.” I narrowed my eyes. I was going to have to figure out, from Michael, if there was any alternative explanation for the poisoning. I hoped that he did it, but I needed to rule out other people. “Do you have any explanation for this, Michael? From where I sit, you and Christina had the best access to the judge. The two of you would have been able to administer the poison to him. Nobody outside your circle would have been able to do that for such a long period of time. The only other person who might have been able to do that would have been your mother-in-law, Ava.”

  Michael’s eyes got wide and he shook his head. “It wasn’t me, of course. As for Christina, I don’t know if was her or not. I can’t imagine that my mother-in-law would do it, either. I don’t see why she would do something like that.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “I see that you answered that question very different for your wife and for your mother-in-law. You said that you didn’t see why Ava would poison your father-in-law, but you just said that you don’t know if Christina would do it or not. There’s a very subtle difference in those two answers.”

  He leaned back and appeared to think about my words. “I don’t know who else would have done it. I mean, dad had a domestic servant. Her name is Anita Gonzalez. She lived with my dad. Maybe she was the one who did it.”

  I sighed. “Why would this Anita Gonzalez kill your father? Did she have any motive at all?”

  He shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe dad was diddling with her. That could be. You never know what goes on behind closed doors.”

  That made me sick. It sounded like Michael was trying to toss poor Anita under the bus. It made me twice as suspicious that Michael was responsible for poisoning the judge. “I guess I’m going to have to look into that. I need Anita’s phone number, because I’m going to have to interview her. I’m also going to have to interview Christina.” I thought back about how she reacted when I petitioned the court to have Judge Sanders’ body exhumed. She was near hysteria. That made me suspect her right away.

  I had the feeling that Michael was putting up Anita as a smoke-screen.

  “Here,” he said, writing down a phone number on a piece of paper. “Call her. Talk to her. I doubt that you will get straight answers, though. Not when mom is still alive and employing her. She has reason to lie. And you might try to bring a translator, too. She knows very little English.” He chuckled.

  That was okay that she didn’t know much English, because I spoke fluent Spanish. I lived in Mexico for several years in my youth, so I knew that I could communicate with her.

  “I would like to speak with your wife at the same time,” I said. “I would like to arrange a time when Anita is going to be there at the same time that Christina is. What day and time would be good for that to happen?”

  He shrugged. “My wife goes and visits mom twice a week. Wednesday evening and Sunday evening. She goes over there and has dinner and watches movies with her. That’s especially important now, because mom has had a hard time accepting dad’s death. She’s very lonely these days. If you go over there either of those evenings, you should catch my wife there and you can also talk to my mom. My mom had nothing to do with the poisoning, that much I can tell you.”

  His answers still made me suspicious. He kept reassuring me that his mother couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the poisoning, but he didn’t seem to want to give me that same reassurance about his wife. Why?

  “I will make an appointment with Anita,” I said. “For Wednesday evening. Hopefully I can talk to everyone that I need to talk to when I go and visit that evening.”

  “I hope so too. You need to get to the bottom of this.” He shook his head. “Poisoned. Wow. I never would have thought that would be the case.”

  “You never did? Seriously? The thought never crossed your mind? A healthy man who biked and golfed and ate fruits and vegetables gets deathly ill, and you never even considered why
?”

  “Not my job,” he said. “It was the job of the doctors who gave him his physicals. Why didn’t they find out that my dad was being poisoned? Seriously. They were the ones who dropped the ball.”

  Why indeed? I was going to have to find out more about that. Either the doctors who examined him were incompetent, or there was something much more nefarious going on.

  “Well, I hope to get to the bottom of all of it.”

  Later on that day, I summoned Anna to come over and do some hacking for me. I had a hunch, and I was going to go with it.

  She appeared at my office in all her tattooed gloriousness. Her hair was growing out, little by little, and she had taken to dying parts of a shade of bright purple that looked like it took hours to get right. Nevertheless, the purple in her hair made her look even more kick-ass sexy. I often thought that, if I ever decided to swing that way, Anna would be the woman who I would “swing” with.

  “What do you need for me to do?”

  “I need you to find out if you can find any kind of medical records on Christina Sanders,” I said. “She’s the daughter of Judge Sanders, so hopefully you can find the trail on her. I don’t have much more information on her, though.”

  She nodded her head. “It’s helpful that her father was a federal judge,” she said. “I should be able to find her records. What are you looking for in particular?”

  “Psychiatric records,” I said. “I need to know if she has had any kind of mental disorders.”

  “On it.”

  I loved that Anna never questioned me on why I made the requests that I made to her. I had a hunch that maybe Christina Sanders had a reason to have her father killed. That maybe Christina herself did it.

  While she did that in the other room, I examined some of the cases that Pearl had culled for me. These were the cases that Pearl thought would be most likely to bear fruit. These were all cases where corporations had a lot to lose by being in front of Judge Sanders, as well as some criminal cases. My hunch, however, was that the corporations would be the most likely culprits in doing this.

  One company was a prominent pharmaceutical company. They were involved in a patent dispute and were being sued for $50 million. I shook my head. That one sounded promising, but I was really looking for a case where there was a chance for punitive damages. One of Judge Sanders’ case that I had looked at involved punitive damages, and he awarded them to the tune of $1 billion. In the case of a patent dispute, the only possibility was for regular damages, not punitive ones, so that company wasn’t all that likely, in my eyes, to do something drastic like bumping off the judge.

  Another company was involved in a class-action wage dispute. That one was more promising, because the suit called for $500 million in compensatory damages and over $1 billion in punitive damages. I put that one to the side. I was going to have to examine that one much more closely.

  For the rest of the afternoon, I pored over pending lawsuits, looking for clues on who might have the motive to murder the judge. Besides the wage dispute lawsuit, there was a lawsuit against a power company whose warehouse exploded, killing 18 people. That company was being sued because it had 150 safety violations that they hadn’t corrected, so the punitive damages were going to be exorbitant in that one. That was a guarantee. Any judge would award punitive damages in that case, but Judge Sanders probably would have awarded more punitives than usual.

  Around 3, Anna came into my office. “Knock knock,” she said with a smile. “I have the information that you’re looking for.”

  “Come on in,” I said. “Hit me with what you got.”

  She cleared her throat. “Christina Sanders appears to be somebody who has a lot of mental problems. To say the least.” She handed me some medical records. “Here’s where she was hospitalized for anorexia. Five times she was hospitalized for that. She also has a long record of psychiatric care. She has been in and out of psychiatric facilities since she was 15 years old.” She shook her head. “Poor girl.”

  I looked at the records. They were only records of hospitalization and the basic reasons why Christina was admitted to the hospital each time. Which meant that I didn’t access to the reasons why she was admitted to psychiatric facilities, just that she was. I was intensely curious about this, and I made a mental note to scrutinize Christina much more when I went to see her. I needed to rule her out, as I needed to rule out those companies. I still wanted Michael Reynolds to be guilty, but I knew that, for my own psyche, I needed to do the necessary investigation to feel satisfied that he most likely did it.

  I also thought that there was the possibility that Christina and Michael might have been in cahoots in killing the judge. Christina might have wanted him dead for personal reasons, while Michael might have wanted him dead for reasons of his own.

  “I’m going to speak with Christina tomorrow,” I said. “And I’m also going to speak with Anita Gonzalez, who is the domestic servant for the Sanders’ household. I’m slightly suspicious that Michael is trying to throw Anita under the bus for this.”

  “Only slightly suspicious?” Anna asked. “Didn’t you say that the judge had been poisoned? Who would do that? Who would have been able to do that?”

  “Michael, Christina and Anita. Of the three, I admit, Anita seems to have had the best access to the judge and would have been able to monitor the poison consumption the best. That’s because she lived with them.” I sighed. “It makes sense that she might have done it, because she was in the best position to know what Judge Sanders ate or drank exclusively. That’s important – there had to have been something in Judge Sanders’ house that nobody else ate or drank but him, and Anita would have been able to figure that out.”

  I also knew that there were things in his office that only he consumed. I couldn’t discount that. I would have to figure out who in his office had constant access to the judge and had the motive to kill him.

  Fifteen

  The next day, I went to see Christina and Anita at Judge Sanders’ home. Anita was a pretty Mexican woman, dark-skinned and raven-haired, with a quick smile and slightly curvy figure. She wore a typical maid’s uniform – a grey dress with a white apron, with comfortable white shoes. She spoke perfect English in a thick accent. If I had to guess, I would imagine that she was in her late 20s.

  “Hello,” she said, “Ms. Ross. Come on in.” She waved her arms into the living room, and I walked in. The house was elegant and beautiful, located in the Mission Hills area, which was a ritzy suburb of Kansas City. The houses on the block were mansions, and this house was no different. It was an enormous Tudor-style home, with pitched roofs and white walls, located on acres of land. The house was easily worth $1.5 million. I knew these homes and what they went for, and that was what I estimated this house’s worth.

  “Thank you,” I said, walking into the enormous living room area with the vaulted ceilings that rose some fifty feet above my head. The judge and Mrs. Sanders apparently had traditional taste with regard to furnishings, as the living room was marked by Queen Ann antique furniture and oil paintings that appeared to be extremely good Degas and Renoir knockoffs. Degas was actually one of my favorite painters – I loved his portraits of ballerinas. I also loved Renoirs, especially his portraits of garden parties.

  “You wanted to speak with me?” She asked, a smile on her beautiful face. “About Mr. Sanders?”

  “I did.” I looked around. “Is Christina around? Or Mrs. Sanders?”

  Anita shook her head. “No. They’re out tonight. Out to dinner. I wanted to speak with you with them not around. They will be back around 9 tonight, though, so you can speak with them then.”

  “Are they expecting me?”

  She shook her head. “I’m terribly sorry, Ms. Ross, but I didn’t tell them that you were coming.”

  I raised my eyebrows, wondering what was going on. She wanted to speak with me in private and she didn’t tell Christina and Mrs. Sanders that I was coming. Somehow none of that sat right with me.


  “Would you like some tea?” she asked.

  “Please.”

  She left and came back in ten minutes, a tray in her hand. On the tray was a tiny tea kettle with matching tea cups. The cups and kettle both had flowers embossed on them, with gold trim around the edges. It was as traditional as the rest of the surroundings.

  I took a sip and Anita sat down next to me.

  “Thanks,” I said, and then I brought out my pad of paper and pen. “I wanted to speak with you, because, well, the preliminary results are back from the autopsy of the judge and it showed that the judge tested positive for arsenic poisoning. The final results won’t be in for several weeks, but those were the preliminary findings. I would imagine that the final findings will be similar.”

  She nodded her head. “That doesn’t surprise me.” She ducked her head and a single tear ran down her cheek. She shook her head. “Mr. Sanders was very sick, very sick. No doctor was able to find out what was wrong with him.” She took a sip of her tea. “No doctor could find out anything wrong with him. Nobody spoke with me about it, of course. They never really think about me being around. They don’t hardly notice me. I guess that they believe that I don’t listen to what they are saying, but I do. I never show it, of course, but I hear everything they say.”

  I furrowed my brows and leaned back in the chair. I suddenly remembered that Michael had warned me that Anita didn’t speak very good English. However, here she was, speaking perfect English to me. I wondered if the Sanders family didn’t know how much English she really could speak and understand. If they truly thought that she didn’t know what they were saying, then Anita could be a very excellent asset to tell me what I needed to know.

  And what I really needed to know, more than anything else, was something, anything, that could hang my client.