CHAPTER 7

“They don’t think I did it,” Omphrey said, “they think I hired someone to do it.”

Jake had asked the governor whether the feds were going to find his fingerprints all over Oksana Sutin’s apartment.

“We understand that,” I said. “But in order to establish motive, they are going to have to produce evidence of the affair. And that evidence can’t be hearsay; in other words, it can’t be based in rumor and conjecture.”

“I know what hearsay is, Counselor. I was a lawyer and a judge for twelve years.”

A traffic court judge, I wanted to remind him, but I held my tongue. He knew that I knew that he was being evasive, avoiding the inevitable, but he wanted me to know that he had no reservations about wasting my time, just as I had wasted his this morning.

We were seated in the conference room, Jake to the left of me, the governor and Jason Yi across from us. It was just after lunch and the three cans of Red Bull I’d drunk were beginning to kick in.

“Yes or no, Governor?” I said. “Were you ever in Oksana Sutin’s Diamond Head home?”

“Yes,” he said with a slow bob of the head.

“How many times?”

“I don’t know.”

“How frequently then?”

“I don’t know.”

“Es-ti-mate.” Part of me wanted the governor to stand up and call this meeting to an end, to spit in my face and walk out the door never to return.

But he didn’t. He kept his cool just as he did in debates. “A few times. Maybe once a month over the past few months.”

Assuming his pudgy fingers had left at least one full usable print, the issue of whether the governor had had an extramarital affair with the victim would be resolved by reasonable inference. This simple truth now saved me and my staff the time, energy, and pure hassle of investigating whether evidence existed that Wade Omphrey knew Oksana Sutin. It was that simple. The bad news, of course, was that this fact most likely established motive.

“So you were having an affair with Ms. Sutin,” I said. “Did Mrs. Omphrey know about the affair?”

The governor’s wife, Pamela, was an outspoken and well-known, well-loved first lady, a fierce advocate for the environment and for the native Hawaiian people—a vast departure from the governor himself, who was often accused of not giving a shit for either. Wade and Pamela Omphrey weren’t quite the Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver of the Hawaiian Islands, but from what I knew of the pair, they were pretty damn close.

“No,” Omphrey said, “she did not. At least not to my knowledge.”

“Let’s talk about Oksana herself,” I said. “Did she ever express any fears to you? Was she concerned that someone was going to try to harm her?”

“No, never,” the governor said without hesitation. “I know of no enemies, no one who might … have done this.”

It was the first bit of raw emotion I’d seen from the governor, but I didn’t trust it; I never did. More often than not tears and trembling voices at the mention of the victim’s name were the result of the clients’ own fears, a recognition that this was serious, not some game, a realization that their trial could bring about an abrupt end to their own lives as they knew them.

I followed by asking the governor about Oksana Sutin’s life outside their relationship, and he could tell me little. Or at least he did tell me little. He didn’t know much of her history, how she’d earned money, who owned or paid for her expensive Diamond Head apartment, how long she’d been in the islands. Didn’t know whether she had family here or anywhere else for that matter, only that she was a Russian national.

“How did you meet her?” I said.

“At some function,” Omphrey said, looking to Jason Yi for help.

“A fundraiser at the Blaisdell Center,” Yi said. “There was a production of Phantom in the concert hall. They met during the intermission between acts one and two.”

“Who was she in attendance with?” I asked. “Who made the introductions?”

Yi shook his head. “That I do not recall.”

As he spoke, Yi’s BlackBerry began rumbling on the conference table. He picked it up, made a few moves with his thumb, then looked glumly at the governor.

“It’s Dias from the Herald,” Yi said to his boss. “Somehow the media has already made the connection.”

Both men looked soberly up at me.

“They’re looking for comment,” Yi said.