22

The intern’s name was Sarah. She was a tiny thing—maybe five foot one on tiptoes—had a mop of short, unruly black hair, and wore big black-framed glasses perched on a nose that seemed too short to support them. DeMarco figured she had to be in her twenties, though she looked about sixteen.

She had a cubicle in the bowels of the Criminal Courthouse in a room she shared with about twenty other low-ranking paralegals and clerks. She said the place was so noisy, with people yelling, the phones constantly ringing, that she did most of her work at a Starbucks three blocks from the courthouse. She suggested that DeMarco meet her there.

When DeMarco arrived, Sarah waved at him as soon as he walked through the door, which made him wonder how she knew what he looked like. Then he remembered Porter saying the girl had done some research on him. He wondered what she’d found. Most of the things he did for Mahoney you wouldn’t find online. He hoped.

He sat down at her table and she pushed a two-inch-thick three-ring binder over to him and said, “That contains the research I did on the six cases Justine told you about. Also contact information for the prosecutors involved. I’d suggest you flip through that and we can go from there. While you’re doing that, I’m going back to the courthouse; there’s a trial in progress I want to see. Just call me when you’re ready to talk and I’ll come back here.”

“Yeah, okay,” DeMarco said, and opened the binder.

In Seattle, in 2004, a former Microsoft executive, not worth as much as Bill Gates or Paul Allen but still loaded, was accused of rape. There was a single witness who could corroborate the victim’s story, but the witness changed her testimony during the trial. Case dismissed.

In Phoenix, in 2006, it was a road-rage case, the one that Porter had heard about at the conference in Miami. A multi-multi-multimillionaire developer killed a Mexican driving the pickup he used for his lawn-mowing business. In spite of three witnesses, the developer walked.

In Minneapolis, in 2008, the wife of a billionaire supposedly committed suicide by hermetically sealing the garage with masking tape, then taking a seat in her Jaguar and running the engine until the gas tank was empty. The case was mostly circumstantial—the absence of the wife’s fingerprints on the tape, the husband’s shaky alibi, and the discovery of the husband’s hot young mistress—but there was enough there that the Minneapolis cops decided that maybe it wasn’t suicide. The one witness who could place the husband near the scene of the crime was killed in a hit-and-run a month before the trial. Case dismissed.

In Houston, in 2009, a former Miss Texas was arrested for hiring a man to kill her extraordinarily rich but abusive husband. The reason she was arrested was that the killer was arrested for another killing, and he gave up the not-so-grieving widow to avoid the death penalty in a state where they execute more people than anywhere else in the country. There was also a witness who could testify that he saw Miss Texas meeting with the killer. Then, lo and behold, the witness who saw the killer and Miss Texas together says he made a horrible mistake, and a man facing lethal injection changed his mind about testifying against the widow. Not guilty, twelve Texans said.

In San Diego, in 2011, a fifty-something heiress was accused of shooting her thirty-something playboy husband. The woman claimed she wasn’t home when a robber tried to break into her house and that it was the robber who shot her young hubby. The cops, however, found a teenage boy who could testify that the woman was home, as well as two witnesses who heard the woman threaten to kill her husband for cheating on her with a cocktail waitress. Then, voilà, the teenage witness takes off before the trial, another witness disappears, and the third witness changes her testimony.

In 2013, in Las Vegas, a man’s wife disappeared and her body was never found. The guy figured: no body, no evidence of murder, no conviction—just like that guy Powell in Utah. Unfortunately for him, a neighbor with insomnia saw him putting a shovel in his car around the time his wife disappeared—and the suspect couldn’t explain what happened to the shovel. Then a park ranger saw the guy’s Range Rover in the Lake Mead National Recreation Area. The ranger even got a partial license plate number. The man should have gone to jail for life. He didn’t.

As Porter had said, in all six cases the defendants were richer than God. The other thing the cases had in common was that the defense lawyers involved were all top-of-the-line and all had well-deserved reputations for being sneaky and underhanded. But this didn’t mean anything, DeMarco knew, as most high-priced defense attorneys were sneaky and underhanded. DeMarco also noted that in each case there was a lengthy period between the arrest and the trial. This also wasn’t unusual—the wheels of justice in the United States grind slowly—but the thought occurred to him that a lengthy period between arrest and trial worked to the advantage of someone whose job it was to get rid of witnesses.

DeMarco also noticed that there was generally a gap of about two years between the cases—but he didn’t know what that meant. If the same person had tampered with the witnesses in all six cases, maybe he—or she; or they—didn’t need to work more than every other year. The other possibility was that cases involving superrich criminals just didn’t come along very often.

He saw nothing in the summary, however, that showed that the cases were linked in any way. The defense lawyers were different. The cases occurred in different cities, although four of them had occurred in the Southwest. There was nothing that gave any indication of a wizard behind the curtain. Porter had said that she’d learned about the wizard after speaking to the prosecutors, but whatever came out of those discussions wasn’t documented in the intern’s file. Porter apparently wanted him to come to his own conclusions.

DeMarco closed the notebook, thought about the whole mess for a few minutes, then called Sarah. He gave the kid his credit card and driver’s license information and told her to book him a flight to Las Vegas.

Next he called Porter, got her voice mail, and left a message saying: “I need you to call the prosecutors involved in these cases and let them know I’m working for you; I don’t want them to blow me off when I try to meet with them. I also want a letter or credentials saying I’m an authorized investigator for the Manhattan DA. Something that makes me sound like a cop. I need that today. I’m flying to Las Vegas tomorrow.”