The second Melanie walked into the ceremonial courtroom, she heard a sound like the wailing of a cat coming from the direction of the holding cell out back. But the screams were not by any means the most frightening thing in the room. Magistrate Judge Wilton Warner had taken the bench. On a good day, Judge Warner made Melanie quake in her high heels. And today wasn’t a good day.
“Ah, Miss Vargas, so kind of you to join us,” he cried sarcastically, his voice cutting like a knife across the football-field-size courtroom. Then he leaned forward until the light bouncing off his half-glasses made him look like some vacant-eyed madman. “Get up here this minute.”
Melanie strode down the center aisle, her cheeks burning with indignation. She knew what was coming. Warner routinely took the view that all problems with cases were the result of intentional wrongdoing by the prosecution. One of these days, she feared, she would lose her temper and give it back to him good, which of course would only result in heavy sanctions against her and possible disbarment.
She banged through the low wooden gate that bounded the spectator gallery and took her place at the government’s podium. Her shoulders were square and her eyes determined. Out of nowhere, Mark Sonschein and Detective Julian Hay materialized to stand beside her. She glanced at them gratefully.
“Steady as she goes,” Mark whispered.
“I’m cool,” she said softly.
But Warner hadn’t gotten started yet.
“Miss Vargas, I am holding you personally responsible for the fact that a man is bleeding in my bull pen. What kind of slack, shiftless custody are you maintaining over these prisoners that allows them to get hold of razors and try to kill themselves?”
Melanie had zero to do with housing or transporting prisoners, and Judge Warner knew that.
“Your Honor, the government just learned of this situation, as did the court, and we are shocked and dismayed,” she said, her voice firm and her shoulders unbowed. Which, of course, only annoyed him more.
“Don’t…give…me…that…nonsense! Are you claiming you didn’t know this prisoner had a drug problem?” Warner shouted, his face bright red.
All the things she wished she could say came pouring into Melanie’s head with such force that she worried they would spill out of her mouth. Who has a substance-abuse problem in this courtroom, red face? When they say “sober as a judge,” they don’t mean you! Luckily, Julian kept her grounded.
“I told the guards at MCC last night he had dependency,” he said to Melanie under his breath.
“Your Honor, the Bureau of Prisons was made aware of the defendant’s drug use. Many defendants have drug problems—”
“And meth usually ain’t this bad,” Julian whispered.
“—and I’m informed that methamphetamine withdrawal is not normally expected to lead to such severe—”
“No excuses!” the judge shouted. “I don’t care what you knew or what you thought. You obviously didn’t do anything! And you call yourselves public servants. If it were up to me, I’d fire every last one of you. Now either you fix this situation immediately, or I’m ordering this prisoner released without a hearing.”
“Judge, you can’t do that! He’s potentially responsible for three homicides—”
“I can do whatever I damn well please.”
“Judge, we respectfully request—”
“If you want him remanded, Miss Vargas, you get back in that bull pen and fix this problem. Now! Do I make myself clear?”
Her eyes went wide. “Yes, Judge.”
Did he expect her to save Welch’s life? Melanie wasn’t squeamish, but neither did she have any medical expertise. She gave Mark a baffled look.
“I’m coming with you,” he said, and turned to follow her. Judge Warner didn’t stop him.
“What does he think I can do?” Melanie whispered.
“He’s just grandstanding.”
The “bull pen” was the holding cell adjacent to the courtroom where incarcerated prisoners awaited their court appearances. Melanie had rarely been inside one. She knew them primarily by sound: the clanging doors that meant a prisoner had been brought up in the secure elevator, the flushing toilet that meant he was ready to come out and face the music. What unnerved her now was not the sight of the bull pen, but the sight of Benedict Welch—or Cory Nash, as she now knew him to be—writhing on the floor, whimpering and sweating, his yellow hair matted and his blue prison jumpsuit stained with several coin-size droplets of blood. Suddenly he let out an inhuman howl, a sound so terrible that Melanie shrank back, fearing that he’d been mortally wounded. She didn’t want him to die. At least, not before she convicted him at trial.
The cell door was wide open, and a number of uniformed men crowded around the prone figure. To Melanie’s great relief, she saw that at least two of them were EMTs, not guards. She angled her way in and grabbed the arm of the nearest EMT, an enormously tall guy with red hair in a ponytail, who was holding a roll of bandages and watching his colleague attend to Welch.
“I’m the prosecutor. Will he make it?” she asked.
“Oh yeah, sure. This ain’t nothin’. Shallow cuts on both wrists. Didn’t go deep enough to even nick a vein.”
“Does he need to go to the hospital?”
“Not for his hands. Carlos is taping the cuts now. He’ll be fine to do his court appearance—physically, I mean. Only thing is, with meth withdrawal cases, we normally take ’em over to Bellevue for a psych eval, unless you’d prefer to have the prison shrink do that.”
“I have to ask the judge what he wants to do. Do you know how the prisoner got the knife?”
“Oh, it wasn’t a knife. It was just a little bitty nail he picked up off the street when he pretended to trip while being transported. He hid it in his shoe. Hold on, I’ll show you.”
He passed her a plastic bag containing a small nail encrusted with both rust and blood. “Small” was too generous a word—it was minuscule.
“Suicide by tetanus is about all that’ll do for you. He knew it, too,” the EMT said.
“So you don’t believe this was a serious attempt?” she asked.
“He’s a drama queen. We see a lot of this when people get arrested. He wants a bed in a nice rehab program instead of at Otisville.”
“Not gonna happen if I have anything to say about it,” Melanie said.
Several of the guards helped Welch to his feet. He caught sight of Melanie. His eyes without his contact lenses in were dark brown instead of violet, with a crazy glint that hadn’t been there yesterday. He looked…unhinged. The transformation from suave Upper East Side society doctor to strung-out junkie was startling.
“Are you happy, you bitch? Is this what you wanted?” Welch cried.
Two guards instantly grabbed him by the arms. He screwed up his lips and sent a gob of spit hurling in Melanie’s direction. It splattered on the floor a foot short of her. Mark Sonschein grabbed her arm and pulled her forcibly from the bull pen as the guards wrestled Welch to a sitting position on the floor.
“You think we can arraign him like this?” she asked Mark. Melanie was shaking but her voice was steady. She was damned if this lowlife would make her flinch.
One of the EMTs was now administering a sedative.
“Frankly,” Mark said, “I think you ought to go out there and ask to have the prisoner sent to Bellevue for evaluation. At least then he’ll be on a locked ward. With Warner on the bench, you never know, he might release the guy otherwise. Especially given the Brady material.”
Melanie looked at Mark sharply. Brady material was exculpatory evidence that prosecutors were required to hand over to the defense prior to court proceedings.
“What Brady material?” she asked suspiciously.
Mark gaped at her. “You know.”
“No. I don’t.”
“The fact that your one eyewitness states that your suspect doesn’t look like the killer. And you don’t have DNA results back yet, so there’s nothing to contradict that.”
“Nothing except the victim’s missing driver’s license in his desk!” Melanie exclaimed.
“I agree that’s good evidence. But you know Warner. He’ll want Welch’s fingerprints on it before it’s worth anything to him.”
“The killer wore gloves.”
“Nothing we can do about that. We’re still required to disclose Harris’s failure to identify Welch from the photograph.”
“Mark, what kind of stickler are you? Harris only saw the Butcher from behind.”
“What kind of aggressive hothead are you?”
“One with a psychotic killer stalking her. If you tell Warner that, we’ll lose. He’ll cut Welch loose.”
“That’s exactly what makes it Brady material. Maybe you should recuse yourself from prosecuting this case, Melanie. Because I know my ethical obligations, and if you don’t disclose this information, I will.”
“Ahem.”
Melanie and Mark both whirled. Judge Warner’s deputy clerk, Gabriel Colón, who was a good courthouse buddy of Melanie’s, stood in the doorway, having cleared his throat theatrically to get their attention. Or to get them to stop blabbing their secrets in front of him.
“Defense counsel just showed up,” Gabriel said. “Judge wants you front and center.”
“Thanks, Gabe,” Melanie said.
As she passed by him on her way back to the courtroom, Gabriel winked at her. “My lips are sealed, mami,” he whispered.
The fact was, it was very important to Melanie to be an ethical prosecutor. She honestly thought Mark Sonschein was being overly legalistic in his interpretation of the evidence. Surely, if a witness hadn’t gotten a good look at a suspect, his failure to recognize him in a photograph was not exculpatory Brady material. If she’d had time to do legal research, Melanie was confident she could have found dozens of cases supporting her view. But she didn’t have time.
She waited in front of the bench. All the stars had lined up against Melanie this morning, because Donald Kerr, the prominent and respected defense attorney representing Welch, was good friends with Judge Warner. Melanie stood in silence while the judge and the defense lawyer gossiped about some charitable board they served on together.
After a few minutes, Welch was brought out from the bull pen. The sedative had been quick acting. He looked meek and glazed and pathetic in his bloodstained prison blues. Welch’s wife, Gloria, sat in the front row of the spectator benches clad in a demure black suit. Mrs. Welch gasped when she saw him, and began weeping copiously and loudly.
Gabriel Colón called the case, and the judge began by demanding a report on the defendant’s suicide attempt. Melanie repeated exactly what the EMS technician had told her about the self-inflicted and minor nature of the injury. When Judge Warner wasn’t satisfied, Melanie got the tall, red-haired guy to come out and testify about it in person. Any other judge would have recognized the suicide attempt as the blatant ploy it was, but with Warner, it was an error on the prosecution’s part, and it put Melanie on the defensive. Donald Kerr saw that and exploited it for everything it was worth.
“Your Honor, Mrs. Welch is seated in the front row,” Kerr said in his impressive baritone. “She is distraught at her husband’s condition, as you can imagine. She has called in the best professionals in the field to address this extremely regrettable case of a man of medicine falling victim to addiction. We see it more and more. The stresses of the medical profession—”
Melanie just couldn’t stomach that pretentious garbage given what she knew about the defendant.
“Your Honor, this man isn’t even a doctor, and his name isn’t Benedict Welch,” she interrupted.
All hell broke loose. Melanie did her best to present the evidence concerning Welch’s false identity, but somehow she just ended up getting accused of sandbagging the defense by not disclosing her argument ahead of time. She trotted out Detective Hay to testify about the methamphetamine bust, and Donald Kerr turned that into a case of a hardened drug dealer—Miles Ortiz—entrapping a reputable man by taking advantage of his substance-abuse problem. Finally, Melanie pulled out her ace in the hole: the very real possibility, the likelihood even, that Welch was the killer that the press was calling the Butcher. The bloody driver’s license found in Welch’s desk. The e-mail sent from his office. The fact that he’d ordered the burglary of Suzanne Shepard’s apartment. But standing up before the judge, with the deputy chief of the Criminal Division looking over her shoulder and a court reporter taking down her every word, Melanie couldn’t allow herself to put her own safety before her sworn duty. She disclosed David Harris’s statement that, from behind, Welch didn’t resemble the man who’d kidnapped him.
And she lost.