19

At the beginning of the Caleb Tate investigation, I had asked Bill Masterson to use his influence to get a couple of senior homicide detectives I knew from the major felony squad assigned to the case. But Masterson reminded me that he didn’t let the cops run the DA’s office, and they didn’t let him run theirs.

So instead, the case got assigned to Tyler Finnegan, a young detective who had moved from Los Angeles to Atlanta just three years ago and had consequently been tagged with the unimaginative nickname “LA.” He was only in his early thirties and had none of the hard-edged demeanor I thought we needed in dealing with a slimeball like Caleb Tate.

LA was more surfer than cop, with an unruly shock of blond hair and bright-blue eyes. He sometimes came across as clueless or disinterested, but according to a few ADAs who had worked with him in the past, he had an uncanny way of making suspects open up. He also noticed things that nobody else caught. Sometimes it was a gesture of discomfort, sometimes a microexpression of anger, sometimes a change in vocabulary. Many times, according to my sources, LA couldn’t even explain it himself. But he had been one of fifteen thousand people tested by California researchers in a project concerning social intelligence for law enforcement officers. Among the candidates, only fifty had been able to score at least 80 percent on two separate lie-detecting exercises. LA was one of them and had been ostentatiously labeled a “truth wizard.”

He had also worked a few celebrity crimes in Hollywood and supposedly knew how to deal with the press. And after a few weeks of working with the man, I began to appreciate the fact that he had a blue-collar work ethic, even if he tried to disguise it with a laid-back attitude.

But most important, he was a fellow believer in the guilt of Caleb Tate. For both of us, it wasn’t a matter of if; it was only whether we could prove it. All in all, by the third week of the investigation, I had pretty much concluded that LA was the right guy for the job, even if we did tend to rub each other the wrong way.

I admired LA’s ability to keep the press churning out pro-prosecution stories on an almost-daily basis. He made very few comments on the record, but on the side he would feed juicy tidbits to favored reporters, and the stories then cited “unnamed sources familiar with the investigation.” The Tate story had legs because it hit all the hot-button issues. There was the Pretty Woman angle of a girl working for an escort service and then marrying a rich guy. There was marital strife with rumors of affairs. There was a high-profile conversion to Christianity and a disapproving husband. And there was the creep factor. An “anonymous source” leaked information that Caleb Tate habitually recorded his wife’s phone calls and made her get his approval anytime she spent more than fifty dollars. Not only that, but Caleb Tate had publicly disagreed with his wife’s decision to file suit against the websites that displayed topless pictures of her.

If the good folks in my county who attended church on Sunday could have rendered a verdict based solely on the press reports, they would have viewed lethal injection as too merciful.

I didn’t normally like to try my cases in the press, but on this one, I was willing to make an exception. Besides, when I confronted LA about the leaks, he just smiled and agreed that it was a terrible thing for the press to have so many moles inside the police department. Then he would turn around and leak another story.

The downside of LA’s tactics was that he had the public howling for an arrest, but we still had a big evidentiary problem. We couldn’t prove Caleb Tate’s access to the drugs. Nor did we have a solid motive. As our case stood, I doubted that we could get an indictment, much less a conviction.

I received Rikki Tate’s subpoenaed psychiatric records on the first Thursday in April. I took the records home and immediately began going through them. I went to bed at midnight and stared at the ceiling for an hour, thinking about my father. The emotions would come like a flash flood, unpredictable and overwhelming, receding to leave behind the muck of despondency. For some reason, the house pulsed with loneliness that night, and I found myself reminiscing about my childhood, tears dampening my pillow.

After a good cry, I turned on the light and decided to get up and do some work. Two hours later, I was still poring over the documents in the war room, wearing my pajama bottoms, a sweatshirt, and a pair of running socks. Justice had moved from the bedroom to the war room with me, but not until he had given me one of those How long are we going to be acting crazy like this? looks.

Reading through Rikki’s counseling records on an emotional night like this only exacerbated my melancholy and depression. Identifying with the victim came at an emotional price.

Rikki was a sporadic patient who seemed to show up for counseling only when she was in the middle of one crisis or another. Her appointments had been much more frequent in the six months prior to her death. The counseling notes tended to ramble and jump around, and I did my best to integrate the information into the timeline of Rikki’s life I had already established.

Hers was the all-too-familiar story of childhood abuse destroying a beautiful young woman’s sense of self-worth and identity. Rikki’s father left the family when she was in elementary school. During her early teenage years, she was abused by her stepfather. She ran away two months after she turned sixteen. Her sad home life made me ache even more for one of my father’s hugs.

Rikki eventually landed in Las Vegas and moved in with one boyfriend after another. She got her first break when she put pictures of herself on a modeling website and before long started getting offers for modeling, some of it topless. When she turned twenty-one, she began working the Vegas shows—first as a crowd plant for a comedy hypnotist, then as an assistant to a well-known magician, and finally as a showgirl in one of the biggest musicals on the Strip.

Unfortunately, as her career continued its upward trajectory, her relationships spiraled downward. She was arrested twice for drugs. A boyfriend beat her up, and she pressed charges. The casino fired her for missing work, and she got blacklisted on the Strip.

At twenty-six, Rikki moved to Atlanta to start over.

She landed with a high-end escort service and promptly got busted for prostitution and possession. When she retained Caleb Tate as her defense attorney, her life took a dramatic turn.

Tate cut two deals, one of which he claimed was the best deal of his life. The first was a plea agreement with Masterson. Rikki had a high-profile client list and agreed to testify against her pimps and her johns. In exchange, the DA dropped all charges against Rikki.

The second deal was one proposed by Caleb, who was twelve years older than his ravishing client. After the smoke of the investigation had cleared, Caleb and Rikki took a trip together to Vegas, where Rikki enjoyed her old stomping grounds on the arm of a man who had lots of money. They returned to Atlanta as Mr. and Mrs. Tate. According to Gillespie’s notes, Rikki claimed that Caleb Tate was the first man who had ever treated her like a lady. He loved her for who she was, not for what she could do for him. It was Caleb’s third marriage and Rikki’s first.

The honeymoon lasted two years.

After that, Rikki felt out of place in the circles that Tate inhabited. Only in the movies could a Vegas showgirl fit in with the debutantes of Atlanta. She turned back to drugs for a year or two and then, when Caleb seemed to be more interested in work than paying attention to her, she began a series of affairs with at least three different men. She only used first names in her counseling sessions, and it was hard to tell if those names were real or fictitious. Gillespie never pressed for details about their identities.

According to Gillespie’s notes, Caleb Tate found out about two of the affairs, and both times Rikki promised that it would be the last. About nineteen months before her death, just after Caleb had uncovered the second affair he learned about, Rikki began attending a neighborhood Bible study. She eventually went to a charismatic church service with one of the women in the study and, in the sort of high drama that characterized Rikki’s life, went through a radical salvation experience. From what she told Dr. Gillespie, she thought her new faith would solve the marital strife, but it only made things worse.

In the year prior to her death, she had fights with Caleb about how vocal she should be about her faith. When she decided to sue the owners of Internet sites still displaying her topless pictures, Caleb advised against it.

The one entry that I found the most disconcerting from a prosecutor’s perspective was a note from about three months prior to Rikki’s death. It reflected a phone call from Caleb Tate to Dr. Gillespie, expressing a concern that Rikki was back into her drug habit. She seemed, according to Caleb Tate, to be out of it all the time and more lethargic than ever. Gillespie confronted Rikki about it, and though she denied any drug use, he suspected she might have been lying.

As I read the notes, I was surprised at Caleb Tate’s response to Rikki’s affairs. He had forgiven her not once but twice. And I had a hard time reconciling Caleb’s phone call with my theory of the case. Maybe he had already started drugging his wife and was setting up a sophisticated alibi, but that seemed a bit reckless for a man who planned as meticulously as Caleb. If nothing else, it would make Gillespie more sensitive to signs of drug abuse. And what if Gillespie talked Rikki into rehab?

On the plus side, there were no suicidal thoughts by Rikki reflected in the notes. And Rikki’s affairs could cut both ways. Yes, they showed Caleb to be a forgiving husband. But they also helped establish motive. Rikki and Caleb had been sleeping in separate rooms for two years. Their marriage was one of convenience. Caleb liked having a trophy wife on his arm when he went to his high-society events. Rikki liked the creature comforts Caleb provided and enjoyed living the good life of an Atlanta housewife.

Maybe Rikki had become too expensive a trophy. Maybe Caleb had found somebody else and didn’t want to pay a fortune in alimony to a third ex-spouse. His second divorce had cost him a king’s ransom.

It was nearly four in the morning when I finished reviewing the records. Since I had given LA a copy of them, I sent him an e-mail reminding him that the records were confidential and to make sure the press didn’t get their hands on them. Frankly, they don’t help our case, and they paint Rikki in a bad light. She had a hard life, and I want to make sure we don’t tarnish her reputation any more than we have to.

I was surprised to get a reply before I had even shut down my computer.

I agree. Now get some sleep.

I fired back another e-mail. You should talk.

Three hours later, when I woke up and turned on my computer, the Atlanta Times already had the story prominently featured on its website: “Tate’s Psychiatric Records Reflect a Troubled Marriage.”