Forty-Three

Joe Mascarenas wasn’t in court or his office. He was in room 416 at the Heart and Vascular Center of Christus St. Vincent Regional Hospital. His feet were elevated, pale white and delicate above plump brown ankles and calves. Aragon averted her eyes to avoid seeing up his surgery gown. He had a tube in his arm, monitors above his head, and work papers piled on his chest. Three boxes of files on a handcart had been rolled to his bedside.

The tubing from an oxygen tank on the wall lifted from his cheek as he smiled at her.

She took his hand, which was oddly small, like his feet. “You’re doomed, cuz.”

He raised reading glasses from his nose. “It’s a bad case. My co-counsel can’t handle qualifying the kid to testify. The girl keeps going off into another personality when we get to the rough stuff.”

“You’re the bad case. What happened to diet and exercise?”

He lifted his shoulders inside his hospital gown and let them sag.

“I hear you’ve been enjoying your time off. Take a seat and tell me about your staycation.”

“I need advice, Joe. I feel like I’m in a dead-end alley, walls falling on me from all sides. Are you up to talking?”

“I can use a break. Child-abuse cases,” he exhaled, but didn’t finish. “Sit. Tell me.”

She started with discoveries at Geronimo’s ranch.

“Are we okay with Fager being the source to trigger the search?” she asked.

“He’ll testify he acted on his own, an independent agent. Walt won’t open any doors he doesn’t want opened.”

“Fager.” She frowned. “Was I wrong in getting him involved? Maybe I should have been more sensitive to what he was going through. You know, I’m not sure I hate him anymore.”

“Both of us got him involved. And yeah, maybe we didn’t see the grieving man underneath. He is a mess. That stalking charge is not going away, and he’s making it easy to prove.”

“Could he be convicted?”

“In a bench trial, for sure. None of our judges tolerate victims taking matters into their own hands. That’s worse than the underlying crime, insinuating the system can’t be trusted to work, that citizens should not simply swallow what gets dished out. I don’t know any victim’s family that accepts a not-guilty verdict, that agrees with the defendant that justice was done because the prosecution couldn’t meet its burden of proof.”

“Fager can demand a jury, not leave it to a judge.”

“That’s a trial I would avoid,” Mascarenas said without hesitation. “Jurors aren’t protecting their power and privilege. They’d see it Fager’s way. He’s going to face disciplinary action whether he’s acquitted or the charges dropped. Easier standard of proof, and all the members of the Disciplinary Board are insiders, like judges, invested in the game the way it is.”

His mouth was dry. She handed him a cup of water. He sipped and inhaled deeply, out of breath just from talking.

“What else?” he asked.

“I’m back on the clock.”

“That’s good.”

“It’s not.” She filled him in on Nobles hijacking the Fremont case. “I can’t be part of the team out to put two guys in jail for life when I’m not sure they’re killers. I can’t be part of that police department. Joe, you know if I was convinced those guys did kill Fremont … ”

“You’d pull their ears off?”

“Funny.”

“Give me the facts.” He sank into his pillow and held his cup out. She poured water and walked him through everything she knew about how Cynthia Fremont came to be in the trunk of her Volvo.

“Is your report of the statement you got from Osborn in the file?”

“I’ve been told not to write it up.”

“We’ll come back to that. Thing is, this is a two-headed case. I hate them. Fager was a genius at it. When we had him nailed on facts, he would manufacture a completely different reality. He’d take what we had worked our asses off to put together and use it to build his own story. He turned into a prosecutor against an alternate defendant of his own creation. Took only one confused juror to make it work.”

Mascarenas paused for air then continued.

“The evidence doesn’t prove either theory, murder or suicide, conclusively. Every piece of evidence that might back those guys’ claim they didn’t kill Fremont can also be used to argue they did. Hanging over everything, could she mutilate herself like that? I say they go down. Unless the prosecution steps on dynamite.”

“What dynamite?”

“Back to you. Being ordered not to enter a defendant’s statement in the file. No matter what Osborn said, true or not, they gold-plated it by trying to keep it out of the case. The jury will hate them for it. A judge could drop the hammer, hard. Disbarment for the prosecutor, if he knew, and the end for Dewey. It could come to perjury if defense counsel asked the right questions.”

“Yeah, but, dynamite explodes, there’s nothing left nearby. That’s what I’m telling you. I’m done as a cop. I can’t be a traitor and I can’t be a team player. Detective Denise Aragon, blown to bits, shreds hanging off trees.”

“Let me think how to play this.” But his eyes said he was already done thinking.

“What?”

“Plant your own land mine. Get Dewey to step on it. Soon. The longer the case goes, the harder it is to kill. Down the road it becomes all about defending the decision to prosecute rather than the truth of what happened.”

“Land mine? Help me out here.”

“I have these anxiety dreams, cases blowing up on me, things lying hidden that took my head off, cut me below the knees. I don’t forget them when I wake up, sweaty, my heart going like crazy. Maybe I’ve been carrying those dreams in my head all these years for something like this.”