“You don’t have evidence to hold her, much less charge her,” said Erick Barnett, the same attorney who’d addressed the crowd at the candlelight vigil, giving us a too-casual wave of the hand. “A few snippets of conversation that you can barely make out over the sound of the television. You can’t even tell what they’re talking about. This is ridiculous. Come on, Sylvia. Get real here. This isn’t an arrest warrant. It’s fiction.”
“Putting all the pieces together, the evidence forms a damning picture. You’re not looking at this as a jury will.” Chief prosecutor in one of the county’s felony courts, Sylvia Vogel shook her head, as if Barnett weren’t to be believed. Assigned to the case by the luck of the draw, manning intake when the warrant was drawn up, Vogel was stick-figure thin, an image not eased by her habit of having one eyebrow poised higher than the other. “Agent Garrity and the detectives presented their evidence, and what you have to be worried about, Erick, is that the judge disagreed with you. In fact, he didn’t ask a single question before signing the arrest warrant. There’s a lot of smoke here, so I’m not anticipating that it’ll be hard to convince a jury that your client set the fire.”
With that, Vogel lowered both eyebrows, squinting at the defense attorney. “So it’s you who needs to get real.”
“There’s just not enough here, Sylvia,” Barnett scoffed, sizing her up through cloudy blue-gray eyes. A stocky man in a too-small pinstripe suit, one I doubted he could button across his round belly, he pulled forward in his chair and then leaned toward her, as if physical closeness could sway her. “Take an objective look at this case. All you’ve got is a gut full of suspicion.”
A pen stuck above her ear, protruding from a thick mass of premature gray, Vogel surveyed Barnett with open skepticism. “You know, Erick,” she said, her voice noticeably perturbed, “you’ve personally said that to me on multiple cases in the past, and every one of those clients you were so sure we had no evidence against, well, correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that they’re all now spending long stretches in Texas prisons.”
Miffed, Barnett sat back and shifted uncomfortably in his chair, while Crystal, who’d spent most of the time staring down at her hands, shot her attorney a questioning glance. Standing off to the side, David and I confined our involvement to listening and letting the attorneys hammer out the situation.
“I’m telling you that Mrs. Warner is not involved in her son’s disappearance, and no matter what you think you’ve got on that audiotape, it’s not her saying she knows the boy is dead or that she knows where the kid is,” the attorney said. At the word dead, he pounded his fist on the table for emphasis. I figured he was pretty good in a trial, slapping legal pads and tapping pencils to make sure the jury paid attention to him and not the opposition. A lot of attorneys had their methods. I once saw a defense attorney in a murder trial go so far as to attempt to stand pencils on their erasers, luring the jurors’ eyes away from the prosecutor questioning the state’s star witness.
“Okay, Erick. Let’s not get hung up on the audio. Don’t forget that we’ve got the guy she cuddled up with on Saturday night saying she wanted the kid to disappear,” Vogel pointed out, counting off bits of evidence on fingers. “And there’s that computer search two weeks before Joey disappeared, the one on how to beat a polygraph.”
“So what? The lie detector test isn’t admissible in a courtroom,” Barnett charged, his voice rising. “You know you’ll never get that in.”
“About that, you’re right. The jury won’t hear that she failed the lie detector,” Vogel said with a shrug. “But we will get in that Mrs. Warner searched the Internet for information on how to get away with lying to investigators, two weeks before her son disappeared.”
Barnett squirmed in his seat. “Yeah, well—”
Vogel didn’t wait for him to finish, instead clicking off another point on yet another extended finger: “And there’s that other little matter, the thirty grand little loving mom here had deposited into her savings account the morning after her kid was kidnapped. What are the odds of that not being related?”
At that, Crystal sat straight up and immediately went into attack mode. “You didn’t tell me about thirty grand,” she said, glaring at Barnett. “You didn’t say a thing about money. Where’d I get thirty grand?”
“Mrs. Warner, shut up,” her attorney ordered, lowering his voice and covering her hand on the table with his. “You shouldn’t say anything. They’re baiting you.”
Adjusting in the chair to sit core straight, she brushed off his instructions. It seemed apparent that she wasn’t any better at being a client than she was at being a mom. “I don’t care. This is some kind of a frame, or there’s some kind of a mistake. That’s not my money. I don’t have any thirty grand. They’re lying,” she said, eyes wide, looking frantically about the room. “I haven’t got a clue what you’re talking about. What thirty grand?”
“Come on, Mrs. Warner. You know what money. The thirty grand in your savings account, the money somebody paid you the morning after you arranged to hand over Joey,” Vogel said.
“I love my son. I didn’t sell Joey,” Crystal insisted, emphasizing each word. She’d been fish-eyed unemotional throughout the meeting, but now she began to weep, wiping away tears that tracked slowly down her cheeks. “If someone put money in my account, they’re trying to frame me!”
Barnett held up his hand to shush his client, but Crystal continued to sob, hands over her face. I had to admit that she appeared convincing. If it was a performance, Crystal Warner wasn’t a bad actress. “Listen, you’ve got the wrong account, screwed up the numbers or something,” she said, shaking her head emphatically and looking directly at David and me. “I’ve got two hundred in my account, maybe. Money I was keeping for an emergency, like a doctor bill if Joey got sick. That’s it. No kidding.”
With that, Vogel motioned for David, who handed over an envelope. Vogel took her time squeezing the prongs together, lifting the flap, and pulling out a copy of Crystal’s savings account statement, building the suspense. The entire time, the prosecutor stared down Crystal with as much contempt as if she were sizing up a two-inch roach scurrying across her kitchen counter. Once the prosecutor unsheathed it, she handed the information from the bank to Barnett and his client. I’d already reviewed the paperwork and knew that it read that Crystal’s savings account balance jumped from $192 the morning of Joey’s disappearance to $30,192 the next morning. For a few moments, neither Crystal nor her attorney said anything; then Barnett whispered in Crystal’s ear.
“No, it’s not mine!” she shrieked, appearing furious. “You think I’d beg that deadbeat husband of mine for three hundred bucks on the day Evan was kidnapped if I had thirty grand coming in?”
Shooting Crystal a glance that ordered her to shut up, Barnett said, “I’d like to talk to my client alone.”
“That actually sounds like a good idea. We’ll be outside. Pound on the door when you’re ready for us to come in,” Vogel said. She rose and then bent over the table to be at just the right level to glower head-on at Crystal. “Think it over, Mrs. Warner. Right now, you’ve got leverage to cut a deal. We haven’t found the kid yet, so if you can help us recover Joey, you’ve got something we want. Once we fill in all the blanks on our own, we won’t need your help. Then, no deals. You’re out of options.” Vogel frowned at Crystal, a long, contemptuous accusation. “A jury would love to come down hard on a mother who sold her kid, and I promise you that I’ll go for blood.”
We walked out the door, closing it behind us, and then slipped around the corner into the adjoining room, to watch through a one-way mirror. We didn’t turn on the sound. Crystal and her attorney were entitled to talk without us eavesdropping; that’s the law. The conversation was protected. But there was no statute that said we couldn’t watch. At first, Barnett listened and Crystal talked, throwing her arms up in the air as if exasperated. She kept picking up the bank statement and staring at it as if it weren’t to be trusted. Then she threw it down on the table as Barnett moved closer to her, putting his hand on her shoulder, attempting to convince her of something, perhaps that the evidence against her was too much to fight, that she was better off thinking about other alternatives, like authorizing him to negotiate a deal.
“You know, I’m not sure about this,” I said to Vogel and David as we watched the drama unfolding in the interview room. “That apartment didn’t look to me like she sold the boy. It didn’t look like she’d given up on him coming home.”
“We don’t have the forensics in yet,” Vogel said, watching as in the next room Crystal grew angrier with each passing moment. “What’re you talking about? How can you tell there isn’t something there until they process the place?”
“Sarah’s talking about Joey’s toys,” David said, shooting me a knowing glance. “I noticed them, too.”
The prosecutor continued to watch through the window, but I saw her lift her left eyebrow even higher than usual, peeved.
“Crystal didn’t dispose of anything. She didn’t put anything away,” I explained, going through the laundry list of what I’d seen, from the SpongeBob bubble bath to the picnic table with the dinosaur place mat. “If Crystal sold Joey, she wouldn’t expect him to return. On some level, she would most likely feel guilt, and seeing all of his things in the apartment, being forced to look at his toys in the living room and his clothing in the closet day in and day out, would be too much for her. If she’s a true sociopath and has no guilt, she still would have either gotten rid of the stuff or put it away. Then it would have been an unemotional, logical decision, as in why keep Joey’s things cluttering up the apartment if the boy’s not coming back.”
Vogel thought about that for a few minutes. “You agree?” she asked David.
“I’m not sure,” he said, eyeing me. “But on one level, yeah, it makes sense. It’s certainly an indication that we need to bear in mind that we could be wrong about Crystal Warner.”
“Lord, save me from the profilers,” the prosecutor said with a perturbed frown, undoubtedly annoyed that we had brought the case to her when we now had doubts. “What do you want me to do? What are we hoping for here?”
David took a deep breath and said, “This arrest could be wrong, but we could be right, too. We don’t know for sure yet what happened to Joey. What we do know is that there’s more than ample reason to be suspicious that this woman is involved, because she isn’t cooperating.”
“None of us will argue with you about that,” the prosecutor said. “But what’s your point?”
“A couple of days in the county jail could do wonders for Crystal Warner’s attitude, maybe convince her to help the investigation instead of hindering it,” David pointed out. “I don’t know if Sarah agrees, but my take on how to proceed is that we go ahead and run Crystal through the system. Try to keep her behind bars for the time being. We keep pushing her and see if she’ll talk.”
Vogel looked at me, questioning. “We decide to do this, we all need to agree, and we need to keep our mouths shut. No one hears that we’re not sure we’re arresting the right person. That information doesn’t leave the room.”
“I’m okay with that,” David said, looking at me.
I’d never been much for using an arrest warrant as a strategy in a case unless I figured the person behind bars was the right one. But in law enforcement, as in life, there are always exceptions. “Yeah, David’s right. We need that woman to talk to us. A few days in jail could help. After all, what’s important here is finding the boy.” I looked at the young woman in the next room, crying and protesting. “Everything else is negotiable.”
“Then we’re on,” Vogel said, watching Barnett get up and knock on the door. “Let’s get back in that room.”