Chief Assistant Prosecutor Peter Jones was in his office, not far from where Richard Callahan was being questioned by Simon Benet and Rita Rodriguez. After discussing with them the call from Wally Gruber’s defense attorney Joshua Schultz, he had gone to his boss, Prosecutor Sylvan Berger, and filled him in on what was developing. Berger decided that he should call Schultz back. “Tell him to give us the stolen plates and the E-ZPass tag information, and if it checks out, we’ll go to the next step with him,” Berger had said.
Schultz had agreed and the report had been quickly received. The plates had been stolen six months ago. The stolen E-ZPass that Gruber claimed to have used when he drove back from Mahwah after he burglarized the home of Lloyd Scott had been on a car that had been driven from New Jersey the night Jonathan Lyons died. The time that the car traveled city-bound over the George Washington Bridge coincided with the approximate time it would have taken Gruber to reach the GW Bridge from Mahwah if he had been in the Scott home and heard the shot that killed Lyons.
Now, at the direction of the prosecutor, Jones was calling Joshua Schultz back. When Schultz answered, Jones said, “Give us the name of the fence who has the Scott jewelry. If your client is telling the truth, and we get the jewelry back, this office will make a recommendation to the judge that Mr. Gruber’s cooperation be taken into consideration at his sentencing.”
“How much consideration?” Schultz demanded.
“We will make a significant recommendation to the judge in New Jersey who will be hearing the Scott burglary and to the judge in New York who hears the case of the burglary charges against Mr. Gruber there. But he absolutely has to do some prison time.”
“What does he get for giving you the face of the person who ran out of the house after that professor got shot?”
“Let’s make this a two-step process. If Gruber’s story checks out on the jewelry, we’ll talk more about what further consideration we can give him for the sketch. As you well know, Mr. Schultz, your client is remarkably clever at inventing ways to track wealthy people, break into their homes, and, in the Scott case, ransack their safes without setting off the alarms. So he may be clever enough to invent this story about the face he claims he saw, too.”
“Wally didn’t invent it,” Schultz snapped. “But I’ll talk to him. If you get the jewelry back, you’ll go to bat for him in New York and New Jersey?”
“Yes. And if he ends up doing a composite that leads to something, there’s no question that he’ll get more consideration.”
“Okay, that sounds all right for now.” Schultz laughed, a short gruff bark. “You know, Wally’s kind of vain. He’ll be flattered to hear you think he’s so clever.”
Now we wait and see, Peter Jones thought as he hung up the phone. He leaned back in the chair in his small office, thinking that for months, every time he had walked into the prosecutor’s roomy office, he had had the feeling that one day soon it would be his.
Now that feeling was fading.
And there was something else the prosecutor had told him to do. It was time to inform Lloyd Scott that the man who broke into his house claimed he saw someone fleeing from the Lyons home seconds after Jonathan Lyons was shot. And that someone wasn’t Kathleen Lyons.