Vinnie, who had just run the emotional gamut from joy to misery in a matter of minutes, was being led away by the two U.S. marshals.
Blackstone’s last words to her in the courtroom were, “I’ll file your passport with the court clerk, and you’ll be out of here in twelve hours, tops.” Then he packed up his file, stuffed it in his brown-leather satchel, and turned to walk to the courtroom doors in the back.
In the second-to-last row there was a man still seated in a courtroom bench, waiting for Blackstone.
“Tully,” Blackstone said with a smile as he approached the man. “Great to see you. You got my message, I see?”
“Yeah,” the man replied. “Looks like you’ve got a troublesome tail you now want me to tail.”
“Tully” Tullinger had been J.D. Blackstone’s private investigator for several years, ever since his retirement from the federal government. Sixty-three years old with iron gray hair and a pencil moustache, Tully was dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and was holding a white straw Panama hat in his lap, the kind with a big black band. He looked more like a bookie at a horse-racing track than a man who had previously worked at the National Security Agency.
“This guy who’s been following me drives a tan Ford Taurus,” Blackstone said. “He’s not very suave. I picked up that he was tailing me right away.”
“Any ideas about why he’s following you?”
“I’ve got some guesses. But I would rather have you operate on a blank slate. Just track him long enough to find out who he is and who he is working for.”
Tully nodded, gave Blackstone a warm handshake, and after popping his Panama hat on his head he headed out of the courtroom.
When Blackstone got back to his office he sequestered himself in the law library with the Vinnie Archmont file spread out in front of him.
Julia, his junior partner, walked in.
“How’d it go?” she asked.
“Got her released on bail,” Blackstone said.
“On a capital murder charge? Nice work.”
“Henry Hartz was on the other side. I expected more from him. You know, Genghis Khan stuff—slaughtering the livestock, burning the crops.”
“Don’t underestimate him,” Julia said. “I’ve heard that you never, ever want to turn your back on the guy. He’ll kick you in the kidneys—with steel-tipped shoes.”
“Yeah, but I can easily outmaneuver him,” Blackstone said, with that twisted smile that signaled a cynical attack of dark humor. “He walks with a cane.”
Julia shook her head at that one and added, “I know. Some kind of health issue. But he paints a very sympathetic picture to a jury.”
“I’m trying to formulate our discovery demands,” Blackstone snapped, changing the subject, “now that I’ve reviewed these,” Blackstone said, pointing to the pile of FBI reports that he had already received from the prosecution. “I would appreciate your thoughts on this.”
Julia sat down and scanned the FBI “302” reports on the federal investigation into the Smithsonian crime. When she was done, one thing had caught her eye.
“The physical evidence documented at the scene of the murder is interesting,” she said.
“You’re getting warmer,” Blackstone said, always the law professor.
“The drinking glass on the desk left on Langley’s desk? I notice it’s mentioned in the 302 report—though I don’t see a lab report on it anywhere.”
“That’s one thing, right. For some reason they didn’t finish the fingerprint analysis on the glass, I guess. Anything else?”
“Oh, no, now you’re getting colder,” Blackstone said, with a mocking tone. “The pen was analyzed, right here,” he said, pointing to a lab report, “and it was found to have only Langley’s fingerprints on it.”
Julia tossed her hair a little anxiously, took her dark-rimmed glasses off, and wiped her eyes. Then she kept them off, twirling them and resting her chin on her hand.
“Okay,” she muttered out loud. “We’re talking about physical evidence.” Then a light went on.
“The notepad on his desk.”
“Excellent thought!” Blackstone shouted. “Of course, on the other hand, it was a blank pad.”
“Langley could have written something down,” she replied, “and the shooter could have removed those notes, along with the Booth diary pages?”
“I’m pretty certain that’s what happened.”
“How do you know?”
“It’s logical,” Blackstone replied. “Langley was the head of America’s most prestigious national institution of science and history. He is a scholar himself. He had custody of the missing diary pages from the hand of John Wilkes Booth, arguably the most notorious political assassin in American history. Do you think Langley wasn’t poring over those pages? And wouldn’t an academic like Horace Langley have taken notes? No, the real question is not about his missing notepad pages. The real question is this: Does the government have evidence of exactly what it was that he was writing, just moments before somebody put two bullets into his chest?”
Then Blackstone leaned back, with his hands folded behind his head and answered his own question.
“I am betting they do. And now I am going to force them to share it with me too.”